Playing for Time (30 page)

The long, slow sweep of the sporadic searchlights made the silks and satins glimmer fleetingly, bringing their colours to life. It was a surprisingly pretty scene; the Germans waltzed very well and I admit to having taken a certain pleasure in the sight, its imperfections papered over by the half-light, its weirdness adding a touch of magic. Between dances, they drank. There was no shortage of alcohol; its smell floated increasingly strongly through the air, heavy with musky, peppery scents, the aroma of the food, and the stale reek of sweat.

The couples intertwined more closely during the slow numbers, their bodies rocking lasciviously as though welded to one another; heads drooped, hands slipped down from waist to buttocks, there was overloud laughter, and mouths sought out mouths.

“Well, I must say”—Jenny giggled vulgarly—“it’s no holds barred. Our whores wouldn’t go around like that, I can tell you, they’re more decent. And they don’t go with one another, come to think of it, that’s not their thing at all.”

Imperturbable, her gaze elsewhere, Marta played on as though nothing of this concerned her.

“Still, it’s not really a place for kids; we oughtn’t to have brought Sylvia.”

Sylvia was playing her pipes with such concentration that she seemed to be totally oblivious of the scene.

Alcohol and mounting desire enflamed faces, ruddy in the brief light of a cigarette. It was very warm; one woman had pushed down her shoulder straps to reveal good, slightly heavy breasts, which she crushed lovingly against the disguised curves of a pyjamaed “boy”; head thrown back, she laughed as she danced. In the middle of the chaos, Georgette’s eunuch-like voice ordered silence.

We stopped playing; it was bizarre to see the couples immobilized by the silence, mouths held agape, limbs frozen in mid-movement.

“Could you play less loudly?” She spoke to us first. “As for you, have as much fun as you like, but do it quietly. Otherwise you’ll be ending your evening in the jail.”

Feet were shuffled more cautiously; the orchestra concentrated on the languid, the muted. The women drooped, wallowed, drinking the while. Under the influence of alcohol, the evening was rapidly turning into an orgy.

We’d been playing for almost three hours, with only brief pauses. We were beginning to be exhausted, but more important, we wanted to get our hands, or rather mouths, on our wages.

On the dance floor, couples were swaying cheek to cheek; a variety of garments had been abandoned or torn off. Many were drunk; their makeup was running, their rouge was smudged, their faces were shiny. A woman dragged another towards a bed, the
cojas
were filled with couples, sometimes trios. Mouths were riveted to nipples, to mouths, hands scratched a back, a thigh, a cry rolled strangled in a throat, then escaped upwards into freedom. A slap rang out on a cheek, on a buttock. Exhausted and exhausting pantings accompanied the couplings.

Only a few women were left on the floor, dragging their feet like the finalists in a marathon and positively dovetailed together, on the borderline between the dance and other, more secret pleasures. Everywhere women were hugging, kissing, and caressing, lying flat out on tables, sliding to the floor. In the shadow of the
cojas,
clinging bodies rolled over in their frantic, almost pitiful search for pleasure. Darkness swathed whole portions of the bodies, veiling precise gestures. There was a whole range of kisses, from lovebird pecks to octopuslike exchanges, wet, sucking, gurgling. It was uncharted territory.

At last, Georgette, who was still in possession of her senses, came and advised us to eat. We threw ourselves at the sauerkraut and still tepid sausages like locusts onto a laden fig tree in the desert. Then we took our places again, weary and heavy with the unaccustomed food; we played quietly on, but the women didn’t hear us now, occupied as they were in extracting the last ounce of pleasure. The mixture of smells was heavier than ever. Helga, clearly exhausted, tapped feebly on her drums and Jenny, wrist aching, still had the strength to say to her banteringly that she ought to speed up the rhythm so that it would all be over more quickly!

It was about midnight when a runner opened the door.

“Quick, the SS!”

The couples unlatched themselves, leapt up, separated the tables, pulled back the
cojas,
and carried the drunken girls to their beds. While Georgette, the
kapo,
and the blockowa rushed about and hastened the proceedings with baton blows, we profited from the stampede to take our wages, filling our buckets to the brim with the remains of the sauerkraut, sausage, and bacon, despite the high-pitched efforts of the three women to get us out of there. I don’t think anything could have separated us from our booty.

By the time we left, the block had almost resumed its normal appearance, which was just as well: if the SS had burst in during this revelry, the punishment would have been devastating.

Two minutes later, amid the whistle blasts that announced a
Blocksperre,
with buckets in hand, we made a grand entrance into our own block—the celebrities come home. From behind our table we distributed our sauerkraut to the women as if this were a soup kitchen and we were the ladies bountiful. Everyone had some, even the Polish girls, whose minds could not encompass such generosity but just profited from it. Florette christened this the night of the great share-out.

Hardly had we come back than we heard trucks driving through the rain. No train had arrived, so we had no idea who they were looking for.

In the morning we learned that it had been the Gypsies from Hungary. They had been camping some distance away, on the other side of the men’s camp. One morning, surrounded by SS, they had arrived with their wagons, their luggage, their old people, their women, children, and animals. They had set up their caravans, organized their camps, and they’d been living there for months, years perhaps. It was said that through the agency of a neutral country, the Americans had come to an agreement about the Gypsies, that they were paying for them to be kept alive. They used to sing and play the guitar; some evenings the air carried the sounds right to us, or so we thought. It was said that the SS killed them because their “allowance” hadn’t arrived on time. The only certain thing was that they were gassed on the night of the black triangles’ party. Probably the SS said nothing about it and continued to receive money for them until the camp was liberated.

Mandel and the Child

Were we going to have to live through another winter, a spring, a summer? Or indeed, were we going to live at all? We were already so thin. Still, we didn’t do manual labour and thus burned fewer calories than the others in the work groups; so our ration of barely twelve hundred calories a day was sufficient for survival—we were not yet moslems. In fact, most of us weren’t as badly off as all that. Everyone had very set ideas about her own physical appearance: Big Irene found herself admirably thin, although she was in fact bloated; Anny thought she was pleasingly rounded, though she was frighteningly thin. Jenny, fleshless as a nail, was certain she looked great. As for Clara, the acclaim won by her fat buttocks spoke to her unequivocally of her beauty.

It seemed to us that, Paris once liberated, the Allied advance ought to surge ahead, carrying all before it. What were the partisans doing in the Carpathians, the mountains that we could actually see on the rare days when the weather was clear? In vain we scanned the faces of the SS. Sometimes they seemed more nervous. Graf Bobby had disappeared, but that meant nothing— their comings and goings were incessant. Sometimes we thought they were vaguer, or more vicious, or less so…

“Recently,” said a girl from another block, “presumably because they suddenly felt that your orchestra wasn’t sufficient to ensure our entertainment and wanted to do something else for us apart from gas us, the SS decided to treat the internees to a picture show. It wasn’t compulsory and indeed most people didn’t go. Well, an SS asked me why. I told him that it was because we were ill.
”Ach,“
he said, ”you don’t know what you want. It’s pointless to make any effort for you. Your comrades prefer to stay locked up chatting. What have they got against motion pictures? You’re never satisfied.“

Someone from a work detachment had told a similar tale: “I was exhausted, my hands were in ribbons, legs trembling. I thought I’d collapse at every stone I carried, when an SS, a young, fair chap, said: ”Don’t always keep your head down like that, look up and see how blue the sky is.“ It made me so livid that I couldn’t help answering that I didn’t want to look at the Birkenau sky. He stared at me as if I were a monster and said: You Jews, you have no feeling for nature.”

The SS needed space: selection followed selection. They were expecting more convoys. This news and the autumn rain depressed us utterly. The whole block was gloomy. Warsaw had been taken, lost, retaken, lost again. This morning the camp was buzzing with Aryan Poles, women and children of all ages, camping mainly between camps A and B near the railway line; but there were so many of them that some overflowed and could be seen from our blocks. Seated amid their luggage, they spread out blankets, cooked soup, warmed up milk on stoves and improvised fires, and breast-fed their children. We had to pick our way over recumbent grandmothers clad in innumerable petticoats. Some were crying and all seemed worried and lost, and with good reason.

The heavy smoke above the crematoria indicated that they were full to capacity, so the Polish women would be left there, with their children, to wait their turn. In all the blocks, the deportees were alarmed: these Polish women and children-there were thousands of them—were Aryans, so perhaps the Germans would spare them; and to house them, they were going to have to create some space. It was the topic of the day, on everyone’s lips. There were some who “knew” and claimed that we were all going to be gassed. In our block a Polish girl, Masha, revealing her little shark’s teeth, squawked out with the voice of fear that they were going to be put in our block. Ewa pointed out that there were forty-seven of us and thousands of them and suggested that she was exaggerating, but Masha repeated herself with hysterical certainty. A ripple of anguish ran through the company. Anything was possible.

The weather was fine, and the camp teemed with children who ran about, playing and chasing after each other despite their mothers’ worried duckings; this gave the place the unusual atmosphere of an improvised summer camp site, a pilgrimage, a sort of country fete. They looked up in astonishment when we sat on our platform for the Sunday concert. Sonia hated the Poles, who today were our only audience, and her baton movements were more perfunctory than ever. The SS were distracted; they came and went, furious to see their impeccably aligned camp invaded by this rabble. The women might well pray to their holy icons, for Kramer wouldn’t tolerate this disorder for long. Our presence seemed to reassure the Polish women; perhaps they thought it was a sort of welcome, a way of helping them to pass this endless Sunday before the authorities got down to business.

The place wasn’t very cheerful, but what else could one expect from one’s enemies? And now they were being given a concert; some smiled at us, little boys clapped their hands, a little girl danced. How I would have liked to pray to God to spare them, but what could one ask of a god who had allowed this?

Our most faithful supporter, Frau Maria Mandel, so spruce in her uniform, came towards us, marched among those scattered bodies, those crouching women, as one would walk through a snake pit: furious and disgusted. In the sun her hair looked as if it were spun out of the gold of wheat. Arms outstretched, a marvellous little child toddled towards her, a ringleted angel of two or three. He ran up to her, clutched her boots, pulled at her skirt. My heart dropped; she’d surely send him flying with an almighty kick. But no, she bent down, took him in her arms, and covered him with kisses. The scene was so sensational that for a moment we stopped playing; Mandel, her blue eyes hard, went off carrying the child in her arms. The women watched her pass. Some way off a Polish woman, the mother presumably, called out desperately, but a mass of humanity separated her from her child. Mandel turned her back and the distance between them grew.

All night the trucks were on the move. Screeching whistle blasts seered into our brains. It was a hellish night. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Poles. I saw them abandoning their parcels and getting into the trucks, trusting as ever as they were led away to their deaths. They thought that they were going to be settled at last… they believed… they trusted… Damn the lot of them, I wanted to sleep. I wanted the tears to dry on my face at last.

In the morning, we all had red eyes. Outside, there was no longer a single woman, a single parcel; the camp was as neat as ever. We were confined to quarters; the
Blocksperre
was still on, it was to last for the whole day. The total capacity of the crematoria for a day was twenty-four thousand bodies.

Even the girls in Canada, whose sensitivity was pretty calloused, showed traces of emotion before the incredible pile of children’s clothes they had to sort, pack up, and send to Berlin.

And the children? What had they done with the children? the girls asked.

I tried to reassure them: “They were Aryans. Mala told me that when they had all the characteristics of the Nordic races, they’d be sent to Germany.”

“What for?”

“They give them to families who’ve lost their children. Perhaps they’ll be sent to special institutions. Well, I really don’t know, but I think they’re still alive.”

Big Irene gazed mistily into the distance and asked worriedly. “What did Mandel do with the little boy?”

“Presumably she gave him back.”

But apparently not; during our rehearsal a visit from Mandel was announced. She came in with the baby in her arms; she’d dressed him up in the most expensive clothes, a little blue sailor suit, and he looked adorable. He lifted his hyacinth gaze trustingly towards her. In his chubby fists he clutched a bar of chocolate, which he offered her, prattling. “No, no,” she said mincingly, but he insisted with a bell-like laugh. The old game between mothers and children: she pretended to eat some, shook her head… What fun they were both having.