Playing for Time (24 page)

Most of the girls found the interlude agreeable. It reminded them of old times, when they used to knit sweaters, a bright scarf, or thick socks for “him,” or for the children. Some knitted in the evening around the symbolic presence of the burnt-out stove.

On Sunday, collective anguish rose a few notches. No concert. This negative fact would be remarked on and observed by other SS, by Graf Bobby, though we still weren’t sure how powerful this upstart was. And what could one expect from Dr. Mengele, who was the only other music lover in Birkenau? Probably nothing. Why should he, who exterminated them every day in the name of racial purity, under cover of science, now defend a handful of Jews who had had enough of a good time as it was?

This evening, everyone addressed their own gods to pray for the return of Kramer and Mandel! No one seemed to note the extraordinary paradox, the bizarre humour of the thing: the victims clamouring for their executioners.

In our block overt religious practices were usually badly received, with jibes or snarled invective. Apart from these moments of stormy piety, the most powerful manifestation of religion here was a degree of intolerance which would certainly have made a thoroughgoing atheist of me if I hadn’t been one already. The Aryans had not the slightest hint of Christian charity and the blinkered Jews rejected everything which was not Jewish. For the Zionists, there was no salvation outside Israel. German or Polish, their claims were identical, their statements peremptory: “The Jews are the greatest people on earth. There can’t be any Jewish murderers, because Jews do not shed blood. Nor can there be any Jewish whores, parricides, or infanticides.” They always ended with the complacent aphorism that the Jews were the salt of the earth, the chosen people, to which Florette was always quick to answer bitingly that they were indeed, chosen for the gas chambers!

What exasperated me about these fanatics was their sectarianism. Never, even at Birkenau, was I lured into the murky excesses of blaming a whole people for the faults of a few of its representatives, and yet how tempting it was! Provided one could ignore the existence of those Aryan German internees—Communists, Resistance fighters, opponents of the Nazi regime—who had been shifted from camp to camp since Hitler’s coming to power, one could indeed state with impunity that all Germans were murderers. Could one claim that all Poles were universally infamous, just because of the existence of a Tchaikowska or Zocha? Admittedly I didn’t always show such equity; I often consigned them mentally to torments beyond belief.

This evening there were no jibes, and believers were left to pray, whatever their religion, as if obscurely the nonbelievers were thinking that perhaps there might be something in it after all. Only Florette, always vehement, and Jenny, always aggressive, declared roundly that the supplicants made them sick and that we had enough problems as it was without being forced to listen to all that jabber.

“I understand how you feel,” said Big Irene, ever conciliatory, “but it clearly does them good. We must be tolerant.”

There they were, narrow and sectarian in their own ways, and I understood them. In Birkenau, they were paying the price so that others might have the right to be Jewish openly. In that sense, they didn’t like me not to be wholly Jewish, wholly on their side; they wanted me to be like them, particularly now, this evening, when concern was growing. Anny, her knitting abandoned on her knee, shook her head. “This lack of interest on the part of the SS can’t last; they’ll wake up with a jolt one day.”

For a week, instead of the raspings and wailings of strings, the reedy whine of pipes and the thunderous banging of percussion, we’d heard nothing except the diligent click of needles, interspersed with classic exclamations: “I’ve gone wrong with my decreasing!”

“Damn, I’ve dropped a stitch!” From outside, worrying noises reached us. It was quite clear that our current SS didn’t like music, and what if they didn’t like knitting either? We hardly talked anymore; no more arguments, jealous scenes, dramas, love affairs, nothing. We were so tolerant now that believers were left in peace. We scarcely dared to breathe. We had gone to ground, in terror.

The joyful and breathless child who opened our door was barely fifteen.

“Girls, they’ve come back!”

We were seized with something like delirium, we hugged each other, yelled, danced, clapped, we were happy,
happy!
Our beloved SS were back!

That was the state we were reduced to on learning that tenderhearted figures like Kramer and Mandel were back. When I grasped what had happened I was deeply alarmed. It required incidents like this for me to realize that, gradually, my judgement was deteriorating. I was beginning to accept the perpetual presence of horror, of death, the incoherence of the camp; my rebelliousness was weakening, it needed the whiplash to stir it to life. What kind of state would I be in when I got out of here? If only it didn’t last too much longer, if only I didn’t have to leave too many more bits of myself on this barbed wire! Never, not once, not even in the worst moments, did I doubt that we would be liberated.

When Mandel came to see her cherished orchestra and found it knitting, her surprise was evident.

“What’s all this?”

Alma explained.

Mandel reacted instantly. “Drop all that, I’ll have it taken away. Get back to playing at once. I want to hear music all day.”

She took Alma aside and addressed her vehemently; clearly Frau Mandel’s cool behaviour was a thing of the past. We were delighted, and even more so when Alma, in excellent humour, informed us, “She was incredibly angry when I told her that we’d been ordered to stop rehearsing. Really livid. She won’t have anyone interfering with her proteges as long as she’s alive!”

Alma, who had not been unaware of our “pious” evenings and was not totally lacking in humour, added: “I think perhaps we ought to pray for her!”

Music for the Keichsfilhrer Heinrich Himmler

Summer had come. For a few days now it had been really warm, though the heavy cloud of smoke from the crematoria was hanging motionless in the warm air. The camp was seething like an ant heap disturbed by a giant’s foot. The SS were nervous, though for once they didn’t take it out on us but among themselves: officers barked at noncommissioned officers, who, as was only fair, passed it on to the soldiers. The civilian staff, interned or not, were all on edge; everyone, whatever his rank, was rushing about. This incomprehensible excitement affected the orchestra, too. Particularly tense, Alma rehearsed us frantically. We plucked and scraped and banged, making more noise than music, a screeching festival of wrong notes. My head was splitting. I no longer knew what I was writing, and when I sang it was mechanical, without any heart. Our only escape from this madhouse was when we went “shopping.”

There was a sort of illicit market up against the side of one of the blocks, provisioned by the girls from Canada with merchandise filched from the consignments and by the women of the work detachments who managed to pull up an odd carrot or turnip and sneak it through the routine search. Fresh vegetables were real treasures, both for us and for them. We were all short of vitamins, and these vegetables were more essential than meat. There was a throng just like at an ordinary market, with some women seated on the ground, others standing, and there was often lengthy discussion; but the actual physical transaction took place in the twinkling of an eye—the bit of bread, the soil-covered carrot flew from hand to hand. Runners kept guard; as soon as they saw an SS cap they would give the alert and the women would scatter like a flight of starlings. In a second everything would vanish, sellers, buyers, and above all merchandise-under skirts, in bodices. The SS were certainly not fooled, but for some reason, provided the evidence was not spread out before their eyes, they agreed to see nothing.

Trading activity was equally intensive around the kitchens. This bustle was normal, part of our everyday life, just as much as the trucks with their cargoes of dead, of half dead, of condemned. What wasn’t normal, though, was the particular tension we were feeling, stirred up by the unusual activity of our masters. We came upon detachments of workmen running in all directions pursued by the barked orders of their group leaders. Huts which had never seen water were sluiced now with torrents, fellows in striped garb repaired roofs, unblocked pipes, laid new ones, checked electric circuits. The appearance of unknown SS aroused unfavorable comments: “They’re not going to give us different ones,” the girls grumbled. “There’s precious little chance of improvement, they’ll just be worse than ever.” Even more worrying than the arrival of new SS was that of the black shirts of the Gestapo, the security police, who prowled around inspecting.

A rumour spread around the market, the Canadas, and the lavatories: we were going to be visited by a top SS man. “A supershit,” commented Florette. It was worrying news, and we chewed on it with the same care we devoted to our piece of bread before the evening rehearsal; for three days now Alma had added three extra hours of music to our daily seventeen.

“Flora probably knows something about it,” remarked Big Irene.

“We haven’t seen her for some time; since she’s become Kramer’s maid, she’s very choosy,” observed Jenny. Oddly enough, that same day she turned up in our block, “as nicely turned out as an English nanny,” as Jenny put it.

Since her French was abysmal, the niceties of Jenny’s remarks escaped Flora. All she could grasp was the admiration; flattered, she explained that she hadn’t forgotten us, but that she was so busy, she had such a lot of work to do!

We were glad to hear that the commandant’s villa was impeccably clean; apparently Frau Kramer had a lot of time on her hands. There being few amusements in these parts, she did some very lovely crocheting. She had embroidered
Gute Nacht
on the pillowcases, for instance. The children were very well brought up, and the youngest was a beautiful baby. She also gave them music lessons. The girls hooted with laughter.

“He’ll be a happy man if his brats play like you do!”

Ignoring Jenny’s comment—she never could grasp sarcasm-Flora sailed on: “There’s a front garden with flowers—it’s nice for the children. We aren’t in the camp; it’s so much pleasanter not being inside the barbed wire—”

“One of the roads leading to the crematoria runs right in front of the house, doesn’t it?” interrupted Little Irene.

“Yes,” she answered blankly.

“Well, so you can always see an endless procession of dead bodies?”

Flora was scandalized. “But I’m working, I haven’t the time to stand and stare!”

What a marvellous answer! We listened to her in astonishment. She simply wasn’t aware of what she was saying. “Particularly not just now,” she went on. “We’re expecting a visit from someone very important. The commandant is very busy; there’s going to be a reception at the Auschwitz headquarters and perhaps at our place too. Frau Kramer is in a great state. You see, here it’s not like Berlin, she can’t
get
hold of anything.”

No indeed.

“But who is coming?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t mentioned a name.”

Volubly, she resumed the panegyric of her esteemed master: “You’d never think, to look at him, that Commandant Kramer was such a good father and husband, and so thoughtful!”

Jenny told her to shut up if she didn’t want us all weeping with emotion.

Flora blundered on complacently: “For her wedding anniversary he gave his wife such a pretty handbag, so original, with a rose stamped in it. I commented on what lovely leather it was, and she said it was human skin, tattooed, which is very rare.”

My disgust rose to my lips. Elsa stared at Flora in horror; her parents, who had managed to escape to Belgium, were dealers in leather goods and she had been learning the trade herself. She burst out: “How could any leather workers have agreed to do such a thing?”

Well she might wonder, but obedience was all. To make a handbag out of a comrade’s skin was anodyne compared with the work of the “volunteers” who led the selected to the gas chambers; of Jup, Edek’s friend, to whom Edek had given his and Mala’s locks of hair, Jup who had removed the stool from beneath Edek’s feet, who had hanged his friend in order to preserve the great hope: to get out alive. To survive, what could one do but obey?

Our souls were weary and our bodies likewise. We were hungry: the soup was less and less solid and anything might turn up in it, bits of paper, cardboard, string. It was so revolting that we could hardly keep it down. The very smell of it turned the stomach. Without much enthusiasm we were preparing for the last rehearsal of the day. The days seemed endless, the evenings were longer now, and our memories served us impossible dreams: heads raised to starry skies, strolls down deep flower-edged lanes—inaccessible things, things which perhaps some of us would never know or feel again.

“Rube!”

Authoritarian, harsh, Alma’s voice made me jump. Exhausted, instruments in hand, the girls raised their heads.

“I want your full attention, please. I have something very important to say.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

“A very important SS leader is coming to visit the camp. I want a really conscientious performance. He is one of the most important men in Germany. He’s very interested in us; the orchestra is known about even in Berlin. It must be faultless. I will not stand for even the slightest mistake.”

The orchestra, her orchestra! There was hatred in the sidelong looks the girls exchanged, exhausted as they were by this enforced music.

Who was this great man? we wondered—hardly Hitler himself, surely?

It wasn’t Hitler’s name which was finally pronounced, but one even more terrible for us: that of Heinrich Himmler. Alma expressed her amazement: “Do you realize the implications— Himmler, an absolutely top-rank man!”

She said that as though suddenly all vestiges of power had fallen from Goering, Goebbels, and all the rest.

Heinrich Himmler the arch-enemy, the inventor of the camps. Horror, hatred, and a sense of powerless rebellion seized me. The mastermind of death, of our death, was coming here. The executioner was coming to gloat over his victims. Words failed me then and they fail me now; as with love, one needed new words for hatred, freshly minted, never used before by others for other loathing!