Playing for Time (32 page)

The door opened onto utter darkness. Under the searchlights the rain wove a thick bright curtain through which we walked. The dogs’ paws splashed, the noise of boots was softened by mud. The SS smelt of wet cloth, dogs, and leather. This was undoubtedly the moment to pray. We were taken out of camp B and driven towards the platform where the convoys arrived. There a train awaited us; we were driven into a sort of wooden tumbril open to the skies with neither roof nor tarpaulin. Once again the orchestra was separated from the rest; we were alone. In the middle, surprisingly, there was a stove, and seated beside it, two old soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Swathed in their capes, they were almost hidden under the steel bells of their helmets. It was almost as if they had no heads. Perhaps they were scarecrows; one held a gun in one hand and stuffed wood into the stove with the other. Standing up, crushed together, we felt the floor tremble under our feet and the train jolted into motion; slowly, Birkenau moved into the distance. Since the air-raid warnings, the lights had been dimmed, only the reddish sky indicated where the camp was. It was over; we were travelling through the night, and the rain had stopped.

Planes passed high overhead, bomb explosions rumbled through the clouds like distant thunder.

We were so tightly packed that if anyone had fainted she would have remained upright. We tried to sing, but it didn’t take.

“I left the lovely navy blue cushion I was making for Florette’s birthday behind,” murmured Anny. “What can I give her?”

“I left the cards. How will we manage without them?”

Courage? Heedlessness?

Someone said: “Time has run out.”

Under the Jackboot

From time to time the train stopped. Its shuntings jolted us mercilessly. They put us on a siding and long convoys of munitions, troops, and wounded passed… That was war. Behind the dirty windows of the compartments we saw the usual indifferent, gloomy grey hordes. They were as passive as we, like animals going to their doom.

The night wore on, the train moved off again. We went into a tunnel and someone shrieked that they were going to electrocute us there, that it was the “death tunnel”! Sometimes, in a cattle truck, a cow lows out its pain, its boredom, its terror, and provokes a chain reaction. It was the same thing with us; one person’s panic led to total chaos. The train went into the darkness. At the other end of the tunnel we hadn’t been electrocuted. Sighs. But we discovered a heart-breaking cemetery in the grey light of dawn. Crosses of all sizes, a lot of flowers, piles of wreaths with the same sense of dead glory as the laurel wreaths of the Olympic games. Heroes’ wreaths. There was a lot of dying being done at that time. Lotte, who towered over us and had a perfect view, cried out pathetically. “Oh, all those fresh flowers,” and her voice, thick with tears, groaned for the dead. “How sad it is. The poor soldiers, the poor families!”

Florette, crushed against her, lashed out as best she could: “Fool! Idiot! You’re mad to weep over their cemetery. What about us,
us?”

We had been travelling for two days. We peed on the spot and tried to hold back the rest; we hadn’t had a drop of water or a crust of bread.

On November 4, 1944, our train stopped in the middle of a forest. The Wehrmacht soldiers ordered us out—where were our SS? The absence of those experts in selection reassured us. Our new warders neither shrieked nor hit, they were old and resigned, but when they did look at us, there was a hard little glint in the blue-grey of their tired eyes which there was no mistaking: like the others, they would strike us down, with a bullet if they were still good shots, with several if they were out of practice. Only they didn’t have dogs.

Haggard, a troop of a thousand women tottered forward, As always, all honour to music: we were at the head. Well-shod, well-dressed, we found walking less painful than the rest. But the others, those who followed, were they picked up when they fell? They weren’t killed, it seemed, because we heard no gunshots. But I was haunted by the long line which dragged out behind us, which we seemed to pull. We’d been walking for about two hours when Marta pointed out some barbed wire, a wooden sign at the entrance to a wood: “Shooting Range.”

“I think we’ve arrived,” she murmured.

The girls didn’t notice. We entered a little wood. When we came out of it, we saw a fairly large rise, onto which we climbed. Below, we heard the regular noise of machine-gun fire rattling through the empty air or, at worst, an earlier convoy.

“Halt! Achtung!”

Marta hadn’t let go of Little Irene’s hand throughout the journey; sometimes I got the feeling that she was the stronger of that surprising couple, that it was she who supported Little Irene.

“We’re right in the middle of a shooting range,” Marta said to me.

The soldiers, under the instructions of their sergeant, arranged us in a semicircle; I no longer dared look at Marta. Were they going to advance with their machine guns pointing in front of them, phalluses of death trained upon us, and then, when they’d got to the right distance, fire… fire… ?

The rain was now coming down in torrents; several women were weeping with fear and exhaustion, others collapsed howling. It might seem incredible, but the mere act of opening one’s mouth allowed the water to pour in so brutally, so violently, that it prevented us from breathing; it went straight to the lungs and suffocated us; that evening, on that plateau, women died drowned by the rain.

For the first time, our little group was divided. Most of the Germans were some way from us, and I could no longer see the Greeks or Hungarians. I begged the remaining group to keep together. Anny, the two Irenes, Marta, Clara, Florette, Jenny, Marie, Lotte, and Elsa formed a little hard core; we wanted to stick together.

Near us, an unknown deportee was proclaiming melodramatically if understandably that we were the unluckiest beings in the world.

I reassured her: “Not at all. The fellow who’s sitting in the warmth of a cafe on the Champs Elysees and who’s waiting for the girl he loves and can’t see her coming also thinks he’s the unluckiest person in the world.”

Obviously this was cold comfort because there was a chorus of exclamations: “What an idiot. A madwoman! Who does she think she is? She
must
have suffered a lot to come out with that nonsense.”

Anny reprimanded me severely: “Unhappiness can’t be compared any more than happiness.”

I tried to reason with them: “But surely it’s the intensity of the unhappiness that counts, not the conditions.”

Only Marta seemed to understand. What an odd girl. I felt like shouting to them that I’d won, since they were now thinking about something else.

We had been there nine hours, arm in arm, rocking so as not to fall asleep, not to let ourselves go with exhaustion; we hadn’t sat down for forty-six hours. When a woman fell, we tried to pick her up but we didn’t always succeed and so she remained where she was, in a streaming heap, half dead or worse, in the rain. It was still daylight but the approach of night scored the forest with sinister shadows. At last two officers came up and grouped us together above the enormous crater near which we were standing and which was being used as a firing range by the young recruits. The rain had eased off a little. A colonel spoke:

“You have arrived in your camp.”

We looked in all directions—what camp? A desert, there was nothing, not a hut in sight.

“Nothing has yet been built, it is you who will build it. We shall put the necessary material at your disposal. So, when you have rediscovered the salutory sense of work, you will be able to gain just satisfaction from it.”

And so, brazenly, he continued to treat this huge crowd of tottering, half-dead women to a sermon on the regenerating virtues practised by the great German Reich.

I listened to this admirable speech attentively. It wasn’t the speech of an SS, but of a Nazi German, a fine specimen of insolent hypocrisy. After a few injunctions concerning discipline, cleanliness, and obedience, we were warned that all attempts at escape, until the camp had been built, would be repressed by shooting on sight. As far as we could judge, they lacked neither weapons nor munitions. We were also told that we would be given some soup.

Bowls were distributed and we queued up to receive two ladlefuls of passable soup. However, in the total disorder that reigned, some managed to get served twice while others didn’t even get one portion. We were terribly thirsty. Our future camp was served with water by a horizontal pipe placed about three feet from the ground. This pipe, which must have been a few yards long, had holes at regular intervals forming so many fountains. It was worked by a tap guarded by a soldier. Women rushed forward, they wanted to drink at any price. The German refused, they went berserk, began to run, and we heard firing, followed by cries. Anny looked at me, her lovely dark eyes calm.

“I’d like to be the first to die!”

The rifle fire stopped and we never knew what havoc it had wreaked.

Soldiers began to improvise a sort of gigantic tent, almost at ground level; despite my mere four feet eleven, I had to duck to get inside it. Big Irene was forced to crawl. We lay down, drenched to the skin, shivering, but we were in such a state of exhaustion that we fell asleep. Happy sleep, imperious as death, for those women lying in several inches of water.

I was later to learn that, a few yards from me, Anne Frank was lying under this same canvas.

Enormous pockets of rain formed on top of the tent, which finally collapsed under the weight. Like birds caught in nets, the women shrieked and struggled, half crushed by the weight of the fabric heavy with water; they stumbled through the folds of the canvas, knocked into one another, moaned with terror and cold. Plunging through this tangle of limbs, I found myself in the open air. Above me towered an enormous hulk, that of a German officer who incredibly said to me in very correct French: “You could ask your friend St. Peter to let up on the rain front!”

“Up.
Raus. Schnell
.”

In the struggling daybreak they drove our dripping, streaming troops towards another part of the camp. This was already built: grey barracks beneath a grey sky. Sky, ground, soldiers were a symphony of dingy grey. It wasn’t exactly a military camp, because in the distance we saw two familiar crematoria chimneys, barbed wire, and searchlights. We wouldn’t feel too lost, that was certain. However, what was missing from this all too familiar picture was the squat tomblike mass of the gas chambers.

(Later, I was to learn that we were at Bergen-Belsen; that this hastily built camp beside a firing range had been occupied, until our arrival, by women, and that it needed no gas chambers because death came by another route, that of phenol injections into the heart.)

Driven doggedly but without excessive brutality, our group poured into a long cellar, a sort of army depot or storehouse. We were put in a corner crammed with those leather boots so dear to the Wehrmacht. They were lined up in military fashion, stacked on sort of racks from floor to ceiling, carefully oiled and smelling of old rancid tallow. There was a narrow pathway between the rows. The soldiers piled us up like their boots and left us together. We flopped down amid the encroaching footwear and slept.

I don’t remember much about the days that followed. Indeed, for me, the whole period of Bergen-Belsen which was just beginning is chronologically obscure and patchy. It took me to the gates of death and perhaps that is why the images I have of it are both so vivid and so confused. Towards the end, they are very fragmentary indeed, a perfectly legible puzzle but missing some pieces.

Clearly, the flock of women which had descended on their camp was more than the men of the Wehrmacht could cope with. I don’t know how we spent the first five days that followed the collapse of the tent and our entrance into the cellar. I emerged from my exhaustion only on the morning of November 9, Florette’s birthday; she was nineteen. Perhaps she had made some clumsy movement as she awoke, because a whole pile of boots collapsed on her and buried her, and as she swore and raged we shouted out birthday greetings with maddening cheeriness. This redoubled her fury; buried beneath a pile of stinking footwear Florette continued to howl, and it took at least five minutes to disengage her. Then, since we had only our empty hands to offer her, we described to her the presents she would have had at Birkenau. It was Anny’s navy blue cushion that carried the day: “I’d embroidered playing cards on it.”

“How did you manage to organize all that—material, embroidery silk?” asked Florette, her green eyes moist with gratitude. She couldn’t hear enough about that marvel, that inconceivable luxury: a cushion. “I could have slept on it,” she murmured, enraptured.

We could come and go freely in and out of our cellar. We found ourselves in the middle of a monstrous muddle which suddenly alarmed us; the strict order in which we were used to living, paradoxically, had given us a feeling of security. Accustomed as we were to being kept within limits which made any initiative impossible, we were upset by this illusion of freedom; we didn’t know what to do with it, where to go. The women came and went freely. Barbed wire had been hastily put up around the new camp, but our limits were unclear; we didn’t know how far we were allowed to go. As soon as a woman wandered off, our guards would panic and shoot. There was no organization; one might get a bit of bread, of sausage, at any time, then go for a day without anything at all. And to complete this feeling of insecurity, there was constant machine-gun fire.

Within a few days, everything changed. New transports of deportees arrived from Birkenau, with them the SS, Kramer at their head. The most ridiculous rumours circulated among the musicians: “He’s going to start the orchestra again; we’re going to get everything back, instruments, uniforms, the lot.” The news of the presence in the camp of Irma Grese reinforced us in our mad ideas. It was definite: Mandel was joining her, and perhaps Drexler, though we’d gladly have done without her.

The plateau on which the camp stood was transformed. Improvised wooden barracks were built, holding up to a thousand women; no tables, no stove, just three-tier
cojas.
Electrified wire was put up, and searchlights. With the SS, the dogs were back.