Playing for Time (35 page)

We went a step nearer. Then we stopped. Behind, there were other women; slowly growing groups had formed to right and left, swelling with controlled hatred. It was as if they expected a sign from us, as if we had a special debt to settle with Kramer, as if they were granting us the privilege of this first confrontation.

I wondered if they still felt superior, alone on the tops of their trucks, whether they knew they were at our mercy? They looked grey; suddenly their uniforms and shirts looked tired, as if they’d slept in them, or perhaps as if saturated and softened with the sweat of terror. Without their leather belts, without weapons, their uniforms looked sloppy. Now I grasped this moment completely. With every fibre of my body, every cell in my brain, I wanted to control myself, to look at them coldly, to scrutinize their stubbly faces and see, in their eyes, the fear that they used to arouse in our own. I wanted to prolong this unique instant; but already it was slipping away. I had failed at the feat of splitting myself in two, being both actor and spectator. Passion swept me away. The silence that had been established between those conquered, still unscathed, and us, was fragile; the first shout would rend it, transform it into an immense cry liberating the sum of hatred we’d amassed… What were the English doing? Why didn’t they take them away? A nearby soldier kept his machine gun levelled at them. Suddenly the SS struck me as vulnerable, unprotected as they were from our revenge. Now I was certain of it: they were being abandoned to our mercy. They were ours! The floodgates opened to violence. I don’t know whether it was coincidence, but a sergeant walked calmly away from the truck, hands behind his back. This Pontius Pilate was not dissociating himself from innocents; after he had gone, the first stone would not be that of vengeance, but of justice. I don’t know who it was who picked up that stone and threw it, but it was a signal to the others; and those missiles were well aimed. The soldier kept his weapon trained on them; he couldn’t fail to see what was going on, but he stood there, impassive.

Now there would be an onslaught, ferocious and irresistible. Like warrior ants, the deportees came running up from all sides. It was then that a detachment of soldiers came up to interpose themselves between us and them. We dropped our missiles, we were dispossessed. The British applied the orders to treat the SS as prisoners of war. The truck moved off, we saw Kramer and the others, grey with fear and rage, disappearing from our horizon.

That same evening, our group slept in the place the SS had been using, in their clean camp beds, six to a room. What luxury. A table and chairs, a clean floor and water—all you needed to do was turn on a tap. We washed as though we wanted to scrub down to the bone; we saw the water as something purifying. Everything we had been made to suffer seemed to have sullied us. Lying in the SS sheets, we cried with happiness:

“There you are, you see, it’s happened. We’ve been liberated!”

“For us, there will be an ”after.“ ”

In the night, some deportees succumbed to this “after” and died, as a result of overeating. Not knowing the effects of dysentery and of the state of hunger we’d been kept in, the soldiers gave us everything they had: rations, cigarettes, sweets, food too rich for us to take. We had to accustom our stomachs gradually to normal functioning.

The camp was in a constant state of flux: our liberators left it to continue their advance and others replaced them. While waiting to be repatriated, which naturally required paperwork, we stayed there in transit, which didn’t worry us. Oddly enough, we were no longer in such a rush to get back. Normal life worried us; we no longer had the words or gestures for it. Worse still, who would be waiting for us at the station? Were those for whom we had kept ourselves alive themselves still alive? We didn’t want to talk about these things, we just savoured the hiatus we were experiencing between two forms of life. It was a present which reassured us.

Serbs and Croats passed through our camp, tall, dark men with flashing white teeth. But we weren’t interested. At last, I understood that nothing interested us apart from what we regarded as the miracle of being alive. It still amazed us. We watched over it, shielding it from all the shock, all upset. In reality, we were still very weak. Our physical balance was precarious and frequently racked by headaches, colic, incomprehensible bouts of fever. It was true that life worried us, that we were apathetic at its prospect, because we were afraid.

It was a fine sunny May morning.

“Hey, what about going out?”

Seated or lying stretched out on their camp beds were Anny, the two Irenes, Florette, and Jenny. The German girls had been sent off somewhere else. Florette was the first to flare up:

“Verboten!
You know that. They’re afraid we may cause upheavals in the countryside or the villages. The Russian at the entrance won’t let us out.”

I expressed astonishment: “A Russian, here? He wasn’t there yesterday.”

In his long overcoat, with his funny little cap with the red star, a gigantic Red Army soldier guarded the camp gate; whether he was a liberated POW who’d been given an easy task or whether a Soviet detachment was encamped nearby, we’d never know. He was the only Soviet soldier we were to see.

“You speak Russian, go and ask him to let us out.”

“Wait for me.”

I went up to him: “Greetings,
tovarishch…”

A real Kalmuck with a comical face, snub nose, high cheekbones, quicksilver eyes like little black marbles. I barely came up to his waist. As high as a tower, he bent his head down to me and we launched into a dialogue that delighted both of us:

“Please, little father, would you care to look over there?” and I pointed away from the hills and where the girls were.

“Why,
Doutchka
?”

“Because we want to go out for a walk and we aren’t allowed to. So if you turn away you won’t see us, and since you haven’t seen us, they can’t say you’ve done anything wrong.”

He laughed, his whole long cloak shook. Then slowly, like a big bear, he pivoted round and we rushed down the slope like a flight of escaped schoolgirls. Kids on holiday. Breathless, we stopped at the edge of a wood, in a field of wild flowers. We could feel them on our legs like a cool, soft tide. Locked up in our room we had been dreading our confrontation with life; we hadn’t realized that spring had come.

It was so marvellous that we stood there, in the middle of the flowers, speechless. Our hearts beating, we flopped down on the spot, in the grass. Lying on our backs, we stared up at the sky, so blue, so near, and silently listened in amazement to the birds. I hadn’t heard any for two years.

To lie in a meadow, in the sun, near a little wood of fir and birch, face to the light, seems so simple. But we knew the price of this simplicity, and tears came to our eyes. Where were our other comrades from Birkenau, the dear and the less dear? Where were those we’d loved and left and who, we were now sure of it, were waiting for us? It was time to go towards them, to find the world again. We sat up firmly and began to look life in the eye. For some of us, it was like a rebirth.

We stayed there for some time; then, when the sun was less hot, we got up and calmly, hand in hand, we took the path back.

On this path, coming towards us, was a group of Serbs, brown curls, dark eyes, white teeth chewing grass, a flower, shirts open on sunburnt skin, warm skin one wanted to touch…

We felt ourselves becoming light—and young, so young. The young men laughed like conquerors. We wanted to flirt, to go off with them arm in arm for an hour, a day, a lifetime…

We were saved.

What Became of Us

Life was out there waiting for us; we threw ourselves into it and it carried us along, some of us farther than others. The fate which joined us, by its very fragility, inevitably put us asunder.

Only a very few of the original orchestra were together in Belsen. There we learned of the death of Frau Kroner, who, at the age of fifty or so, was too old to go through those sufferings and survive. It is probable that other deportees from the music block died there too, but we were too self-absorbed to know; we jealously protected our breath of life from all possible forms of aggression and interested ourselves in nothing but ourselves.

Elsa, patient, calm, and self-effacing, wasn’t able to bear the joy of return; she died shortly after our liberation.

Little Irene did have the time to marry—not her Paul, but someone else. Actually, there were very few who came back to the men who, so much in their thoughts, had often prevented them from dying. Little Irene, so intelligent and courageous and so sure she’d have a long life, died of cancer.

Clara too did not have long to live. Her behaviour as
kapo
closed the doors of the Federation of Deportees to her. She achieved nothing of her dreams of fame; she married and had a child, who died a terrible death by suffocation. She had a brief moment of glory as a producer of a TV programme, then she died.

In the Auschwitz camp museum there are two intermingled locks of hair: those of Mala Zimellbaum and Edek Kalinski. All that remains of them.

Others were luckier. Ewa the Polish girl, my great friend, returned to her son and husband. And when I saw her again in 1960, she had become director of a theatre in Krakow, just as she’d hoped.

Big Irene married on her return to Belgium. She has two children and lives in Brussels, not far from Anny, who is an active business woman, also married and the mother of two children.

Florette had a number of difficulties which she faced with courage, and finally married too. She has two children and a business somewhere in the south of France.

Marie has managed her life perfectly; married to the man she always loved—and who was one of the rare men to wait—she has an important post in the Prefecture de la Seine.

I learned by chance in 1958 that Ewa the Hungarian had married and was living in Switzerland, and that her compatriot Lili was living in London with an English husband.

I don’t know anything about Jenny, or about the Greeks, Yvette and her sister Lili, or the sweet little Ukrainians, the other Russians, Poles or Germans, or about Margot the Czech or Flora the Dutch girl; or Marta.

After, after, we used to say; some of us had grandiose dreams and some more modest ones.

I think I have achieved more or less what I wanted for myself. I wanted to sing, to express the joys and sorrows of the world. For nearly twenty-five years, from town to town, from concert hall to concert hall, I’ve experienced this happiness, and it was as deep as I’d imagined. The only difference is that I couldn’t conceive of this success anywhere except in France, and it is in East Germany that I’ve found it.

I wanted a great and marvellous love: I’ve had it! It has occupied twenty-five years of my life as a woman.

I had placed friendship above all else, and my friends are ever faithful.