Playing for Time (34 page)

“Well, all you need to do is doze off,” said Jenny, coming back to earth, “and you can dream your dinner.”

Later, remembering this Christmas, Marie was to say to me: “I looked at you, crouching on your mattresses—you, Fania, already so thin and so tense; Big Irene with her kind smile, her tousled mop of hair; Little Irene, who looked as if she was going camping even there; Florette, the great mocker; that gangling urchin Jenny; Marta, distant but so vulnerable; even the sexpot, Lotte— I looked at you and I could clearly see the clinical signs of exhaustion under the camouflage of your cheerfulness. But how comforting you were, you orchestra girls. When I left you it was snowing outside, and I walked slowly through the sleeping camp. The news was bad, the Germans were mounting a counteroffensive. Here, without any medication, the death rate was rising. The women were hungry. The end of the tunnel seemed a long way off, and indeed it was.”

The End of the Apocalypse

The snow and ice had begun to melt. For us there might not be another spring or summer, I thought to myself when I was alone. I put a good face on it in front of the others, but I felt myself becoming strangely light. In the evening, when the girls asked me to tell them a story, I found that the words came less easily. I could no longer recite the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, the fabric was wearing thin; so I just told them simple stories, ones I’d told them dozens of times already. They themselves were becoming less and less capable of noticing my losses of memory, my failings. But it didn’t matter—at least they were transported elsewhere.

Food supplies were held up, trains were bombed, railway lines blown up, and roads blocked. There was not much to eat. They no longer needed to kill us, they could just let us die and throw us into the crematoria. The end was approaching, but would we see it? I’d always believed that we would, and I wasn’t going to give up now. It was here, in Bergen-Belsen, that I was able to gauge the extraordinary tenacity of life.

It seemed that a transport had come from Poland, or perhaps it had been simply a transfer of Polish women, because our blocks, already overpopulated, were now overrun with them. The SS had put straw on the earth floors and the new arrivals collapsed onto it. The stench was stifling, particularly at night. They hadn’t installed anything approaching latrines; those who had the strength went out, the others just let themselves go on the spot. We were becoming animals and it was dreadfully degrading.

I went out to take a breather and to see Marie. She looked drawn, but the dark rings around her eyes didn’t diminish her beauty.

I asked her if a convoy had arrived from Poland.

“Probably, there’s a Polish woman who asked to come here— look at her.”

She was a strong peasant, wrapped up in skirts, shawls, and a cloak. When she stood up, she looked like a big bell placed on the floor.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t examined her yet.”

The woman stared at us balefully; she had a square, angular face with high cheekbones and her expression was desperate. Her face puckered, her pursed lips couldn’t prevent a groan. Marie rushed forward, for she recognized the face of a woman in childbirth.

“This woman is having a baby.”

Marie showed her the table. Without a word, the woman removed her shoes, lifted her dress, took off her drawers but kept her kerchief on her head, and lay down on the table. She opened her legs and prepared herself. They were natural, simple gestures. She had strong, muscular white thighs and a dark pubis, whose large distended lips were gripping something oval—the child’s head. I felt a sort of exaltation at the sight.

“Help me,” Marie said.

She took the emerging head in her hands, and I pushed gently but firmly; I’d never done it before, but I had the extraordinary feeling that my hands knew what to do more than I did, that they’d known these movements forever. The woman, teeth clenched, uttered not a moan. She cannot have been unaware of the fate reserved for children by the SS. Then I saw the little head emerge with its crumpled face, eyes closed on their foetal night. Then the shoulders appeared. I forgot the immense weariness that was making me so indifferent, which cut me off from the effort of living. I was super-alive, super-excited, and I wanted to shout: “That’s it, he’s born.”

We had nothing to wrap the baby in. Marie took it by the feet, smacked its buttocks, and it cried. I took off my cloak and tore out the lining. I’d been living in that cloak day and night for months now, and it was this bit of cloth, rotten with sweat, grimy with dirt, covered with stains, in which we wrapped the baby, a solid, marvellous child. The woman, still without saying a word, put on her drawers again, lowered her skirts, put on her shoes, and took her child in her arms in an admirable gesture of possession and protection. Then Marie helped her up onto a
coja
so that the SS wouldn’t notice her; had they done so, of course, there would have been no point in having attempted to save them at all. (And in fact they did survive, to leave the camp when it was liberated.)

The same day, going back into my block, I witnessed something which would have profoundly disgusted me if it had happened any other time, but after this birth it seemed to me that this gesture, in all its coarse bestiality, had a significance: Lotte was having intercourse with her
kapo
in the middle of a thousand women. There she was, leaning against a wall, stomach thrust forward, and the man, trousers down, was proceeding, quite indifferent to the presence of all those women around him. Sowing life when all around us death was piling up corpses-was it really such a mad thing to do? It was true that, gradually, we were sinking into madness; while these two beings were coupling, I could hear women praying around me. I wondered whether fear had made believers of them. It was hard to know what might become of faith in this catastrophe we were experiencing, or what meaning life and death might have for the Jews, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Orthodox. Yes, I thought, gradually madness was winning out. That night, a girl began to shriek that her jewels had been stolen; she climbed down, went from one
coja
to another, from one mattress to another, shaking people: “Give me back my jewels.” Sobbing, shrieking, she lashed out at those who were sleeping on the ground, then, mercifully, collapsed in tears.

The stench had become intolerable; wrapped in my cloak, a priceless possession, I went out in search of air, to stretch out, to sleep in the open. The ground was muddy and cold, so I kept walking. In front of me, a pile of corpses balanced carefully on one another, rose geometrically like a haystack. There was no more room in the crematoria so they piled up the corpses out here. I climbed up them as one would a slope; at the top I stretched out and fell asleep. Sometimes an arm or leg slackened to take its final position. I slept on; in the morning, when I woke up, I thought that I too must be losing my reason. Hounded, I ran to the infirmary, but Marie’s assistant told me that Marie had typhus.

I stood there dumbfounded and suddenly began to cry: for her, for us, for me. Each day, several times, I went back for news; she wasn’t dead yet and every hour she could live was a triumph. It lasted three weeks and at the end they told me she had “recovered.” She was in a terrible state and summed up the situation as follows: she couldn’t move—paraplegia probably; her body was grey in colour; she had three enormous sores near her left knee and three on her right leg, which rubbed one another at the slightest movement. Her left arm was all blue and stiff, and she had difficulty in opening her mouth. One half of her face was painful and swollen, and she was deaf. But it was marvellous to have her again. Once more it seemed to us that nothing serious could happen if she was alive.

The time when Kramer used to come and see us was once and for all past. We didn’t even know whether he was still there. Some people had seen Grese, whip in hand, as though she still hadn’t understood. The SS went about their own business in our midst; they didn’t even seem to see us, except to avoid us. Dirty, ragged, covered with vermin, we were contagious; dysentery and above all typhus were wreaking havoc among us. Were they awaiting orders? When they remembered, they gave us something approximating soup, liquid with no solids. They hastened the process of contamination by cutting off the water, depriving us of it more and more frequently and for longer periods. Hastily built to last a few months, our temporary barracks were half collapsing; the planks were coming apart. Looking at the damage, a scornful SS man said, speaking of us, the Jews: “They rot everything, even wood.”

It was true, we were rotting, but it was hardly our fault—their presence alone would taint the healthiest beings.

A few days later, I too had typhus. My last vision as a healthy person was of the women of the camp, us like everyone else, outside naked, lining up to wash our dresses and underclothes in the thin trickle of water from the pierced pipe. On the other side of the barbed wire, the men were doing the same; we were like two troops of cattle at the half-empty trough of an abattoir.

Now the illness took me over entirely; my head was bursting, my body trembling, my intestines and stomach were agony, and I had the most abominable dysentery. I was just a sick animal lying in its own excrement. From April 8 everything around me became nightmarish. I existed merely as a bursting head, an intestine, a perpetually active anus. One tier above, there was a French girl I didn’t know; in my moments of lucidity, I heard her saying in a clear, calm, even pleasant voice: “I must shit, but I must shit on your head, it’s more hygienic!” She had gone mad; others equally unhinged guffawed interminably or fought. No one came to see us anymore, not even the SS. They’d turned off the water; I was at the end of my third week. In a clear moment, I remembered that Marie had recovered after just such a period. Around me, girls whom I didn’t know or didn’t recognize were dying. I personally didn’t want to die without pissing on the head of a Polish girl, and this made me want to laugh. I found it very funny; I called Florette, Anny, and Big Irene and told them to get me a Polish girl so I could piss on her. And they laughed. No, they didn’t laugh, they were afraid for me; but I imagined once again that I was making them laugh.

I don’t know if I managed to satisfy that incongruous desire, but I often imagined it, and so intensely that I really felt better for it.

There are no words to describe those last five days; they were truly a high point in horror.

And then Grese, so clean, smelling so good, leant over me; it was the last time I ever heard myself called
eine kleine Sangerin,
that last time I felt myself part of the orchestra:
meine kleine Sangerin.

The SS had given the order to destroy us and burn the camp. April 15, 1945: we were to be shot at 3 P.M.; the British arrived at 11 A.M.

Our joy was still intense, but the tumult had subsided. A new life breathed in the camp. Jeeps, command cars, and half tracks drove around among the barracks. Khaki uniforms abounded, the marvellously substantial material of their battle dress mingling with the rags of the deportees. Our liberators were well fed and bursting with health, and they moved among our skeletal, tenuous silhouettes like a surge of life. We felt an absurd desire to finger them, to let our hands trail in their eddies as in the Fountain of Youth. They called to one another, whistled cheerfully, then suddenly fell silent, faced with eyes too large, or too intense a gaze. How alive they were; they walked quickly, they ran, they leapt. All these movements were so easy for them, while a single one of them would have taken away our last breath of life! These men seemed not to know that one could live in slow motion, that energy was something you saved.

Anny, the two Irenes, Marta, Florette, Jenny, and I were coming out of the SS building where I’d just sung for the BBC. It was an astonishing moment, but suddenly it fell away from me; I had had it, now I wanted another, though I didn’t know what. Intensely we fixed our eyes on the surrounding movement, the intoxicating bustle.

Then there was a change in pace—either a silence or a trampling sound. Something must have happened, something that my senses, sharpened to the verge of painfulness by illness, had perceived—I had a dog’s sense of smell, a cat’s sight. I raised my head and looked beyond the immediate chaos at something coming towards us: something was moving at the entrance to the camp, heads were turning towards a singular procession. At the head of his officers, of his sergeants, of his whole SS clique, was Kramer, in a uniform shirt, but unarmed, bareheaded, surrounded by British soldiers, rifles and machine guns levelled. He looked at them blankly. We had lived for this moment; we’d imagined it hundreds of times, polished and repolished it, added a thousand details of sated vengeance, and now, seeing a procession crossing the camp, we failed to understand that what we had waited for so long had arrived. The newly conquered advanced; Kramer’s head was sunk between his broad shoulders. That bulllike strength, those square fists with which he’d stunned women and children were no use to him now.

He looked around him: those infinitely vulnerable ghosts were now his enemies. His expression became cunning when he caught sight of us, his orchestra; he’d done us nothing but good, surely. Motionless, silent, we stared at him in relish. Dark forces moved within us, rooted in the remotest distance of our subconscious; it was time for them to establish their link with the conscious, and that was why we were silent.

British soldiers were loading prisoners onto a truck. That was the end for them, a mere matter of prison. How simple it was. Too simple. They stood on the open back of the truck, side by side, with plenty of space. They would travel like prisoners, not like animals… We looked at them—they looked like fairground targets behind the railings, derisory puppets awaiting the bullets that would knock them down. Slowly, we took a few steps forward. There was an expanse of ground between us and them and, without really registering it, my eyes took in a bit of green; it must be grass.