The Butterfly and the Violin (13 page)

March 12, 1943

S
urely the snow held memories.

Adele didn’t question it anymore. Not after she’d been loaded on the train to the work camp—she knew it to be truth now.

She stood huddled against the inside of the cattle car, the wood agonizingly rough and splintered even through the thick wool of her coat. But leaning against it was the only way she could endure standing for so long. All of the people were packed in so tight around her. One couldn’t have thought to sit. Or think. Or even breathe in the stagnating stench of the car. They’d been herded in like animals with no food or water and no heat to protect them against the elements.

That was an agonizing two days ago.

Adele’s old reality was gone. The scratching pain of the wood and the falling snow outside were the only remaining links to the former world she’d known. Everything else was a terrifying dream. A frightening new reality that had been whisked in around her.

The Germans had assigned her to the labor detail, though she didn’t know exactly what that meant. They’d been benevolent enough to give her a trial, one not attended by her parents or anyone else she knew. She knew in her heart the conviction
was certain before it had begun—a mere formality. A courtesy, perhaps, because of her family name and father’s military rank. Although she’d forever shamed her family, the name still held some value. The assignment of reeducation in a work camp, however, was a foregone conclusion. Adele’s offense had been serious enough to carry a death sentence and she knew it.

Her sentence had been eight weeks of labor in one of the Germans’ camps. Eight weeks and she’d be released back to her parents. But it seemed odd that she’d been ushered so far from Austria to Poland for only two months of work. Why would they take the trouble to ship her so far, with the obvious cost associated with transport, when she could have been made to work not far from her home?

Around her, some people cried. Others were strangely quiet. A child would occasionally ask, “Where are we going, Papa?” or “When will we get there?” Some spoke in languages she didn’t understand. She heard praying, mumbling, muffled sobbing on the long journey that the bumpy train took through Poland’s bitter landscape.

Adele was close to a window, if it could even be called one, and at least she could feel the air. The iron bars marring the view did little to give comfort. They revealed nothing but an endless sea of frozen fields and the occasional tree, always looking like a predictor of death with its bony trunk, stark, leafless limbs, and backdrop of gray sky. It was as haunting outside the train as it was inside, and for that, the nearness of the window made her feel unlucky.

Adele’s hands shook as she gripped the bars. For though she kept a tight hold on the window, she’d not be able to grasp the night outside. She could no longer feel freedom, and that, combined with the deathly, frozen silence, terrified her all the more.

Silence.

That was the ever-present companion for them all—a stony
silence that was pierced only by the occasional wail of someone on the other side of the car. Buried in sorrows, one couldn’t have thought ill of the person for crying out, but it was too much to endure. Some of the others silenced the wailing man, whether through coaxing or threat, and the rest of the journey once again became a path void of any sound.

God?

The word left her lips on a shuddering, frozen breath. And then a muffled sob. Adele summoned courage from somewhere deep inside. Then the cycle began again. Each time she tried to pray, the same cycle of terrified breathing started, over and over again, until all she could do was say His name and nothing else. She muttered the words, whispered them . . .

“Abba . . .”

“Where is my son?” A stuttering old woman with no teeth and frightened eyes had asked her the same question over and over for the past day. She was pitiful. Terrified. Shocked and unable to cope with reality. “My son. Do you know where he is?”

Adele shook her head for what felt like the hundredth time.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t know your son.”

She’d mumbled his name too many times for Adele to have forgotten it now. But she said it again anyway, tears rolling from her eyes as the last flicker of hope faded from them.

“Viktor. That is his name.”

“I’m sorry.”

The whispered response was all she could offer.

She’d tried holding the woman’s hand earlier in the night and had patted it so as to offer comfort, but it only served to further the woman’s regression into mania. She was soon clinging so that Adele thought she would suffocate. She’d peeled the woman’s hands from her own some time ago and had shrugged her side up against the painfully rough wood of the cattle car wall instead, trying not to cry out of guilt.

Mothers. Lost sons. Violinists who had no concept of the real world before that moment. Daughters. Frightened families. So many strangers. They were all packed in together, young and old, never having met but oddly connected by their crossed paths on this terrible, frightening journey.

All starving. Craving water. Or the awakening from a dream.

“I see something,” someone yelled.

The strange turning of all heads in unison precipitated the electric jolting of her heart. Adele saw smoke through the bars on the tiny window. It was off in the distance—nowhere near the tracks on which the car rode. Someone screamed when they saw it. Another wailed. Adele heard a man crying next to her, his wretched sobbing more terrifying to her than the open shrieks of women and children.

The car slowed. She gripped the iron bars for support and, with her other hand, hugged the violin case ever so tightly to her chest.

A high-pitched whistle of the brakes predicated the slowing of the train wheels upon the tracks. Dogs barking? She hadn’t expected that. And the smell of sulfur on fire, cutting through the air with a sickening ferocity, filling every crack in the frozen walls of the car with a putrid stench that turned her stomach. One or two coughs. Someone was weeping again and others told them to hush. A baby cried out—from hunger? Its cries fought with the dogs’ barks, both demanding nervous attention from the captives packed in all around her.

And they finally came to a stop.

The smothering existence in the cattle car was over and they’d soon find a new reality.

The doors flew open and on the gust of air that came with it, all she sensed was a maddening flurry of activity. More dogs. Yelling. Someone shoving her from behind. Guards with guns. Another wail from the person in the back of the car. Dawn having
passed some time ago. The puttering woman in front of her asking the guards where her son was.

“Out!”
The order was shouted. Faithless and cold were the voices that offered their greeting.
“Out! Out!”

Adele was yanked from the car. She nearly turned her ankle as it twisted down on the cold mud by the tracks. She was shoved from behind again. She turned to find a sea of ruddy brown or gray wool coats with yellow stars and miserably pale faces looking back at her. Weak, empty faces, emotionless as fate called them to march forward, moving with an anguished ebb and flow that was faster than she’d have imagined for the swarming masses of people all around her.

Through terror, she mumbled, “Heavenly Father . . . what is happening?”

Adele’s heart began reciting His name over and over again with each beat, like a mournful dance, like the haunting sound of the violin crying in her ear. It was her one comfort. The only sure thing she knew in that moment. God. Was He there? If she called out to Him, would He follow her anxious steps through the mud? Would He sustain her through what her eyes were seeing?

She turned back around, not knowing which way to walk, following the crowd of women who were being parted from the men and boys.

“Women and children—left!” It was shouted. Barked. “
Recht! Recht!
Men to the
recht
!”

She heard wretched crying, saw the anguish as mothers’ hands were torn from their children’s and they were pushed to the left, the tears of anguish and the cry of their souls upon each face. Everything was happening so fast, yet it seemed as if the world turned round her in painfully slow motion. It felt like she was stuck in some terrible film. Or a frightful dream.

A sea of people walked to and fro as they discarded bags and suitcases marked up with scrawled names and former street
addresses, tossed in mountainous piles upon the platform. And there were men with striped uniforms, almost like pajamas, herding the crowds past long lines of barbed wire fencing. Were these men prisoners too? Why so many fences? What in the world was going on?

What she was seeing—it couldn’t be happening. Would it do any good to pinch herself now?

Oh God. Do You see?

More families fractured. Sobbing. Others had agonized faces. Stunned. Painted with disbelief.

Adele shuddered and wrapped her arms tighter around the violin case in her arms. It was almost too cold to breathe, even for a spring morning in March. She could barely think. She no longer had hunger or thirst . . . all she could do was see. Her eyes still worked. They tore through the mist, looking ahead to the tall brick beast of a building that loomed up beyond the tracks. Though her other senses were numb, she could and did see what was happening, as the greeting of the camp was menacingly dark. And she had a feeling she’d remember it always, as if her soul would be burned with the memory.

“Women—this way!”

She was pulled into a line. Closer, closer they came to the beast.

A little girl walked by, head down, fighting against the cold, never looking or laughing or skipping along as all children do. She was holding her mother’s hand. That darling little girl with the kerchief tucked over her hair and tied in a knot under her delicate, porcelain chin. A baby she was. Tiny. Taking two steps to her mama’s one, her legs far too little to keep up with the quick pace of the barking guards’ instructions.

What would happen to her?

Adele had never felt so alone in her life. Was this what her Vladimir was seeing? Was he being ushered forth too? Did lines form for him in some cold, lifeless camp?

Oh heavenly Father, is he one of the strong men who crumbled to weeping in his own cattle car?

She stepped forward, looking at the mouth of the great brick beast. The wide doors welcomed their prey as an eerie snow fell down, the memories of each flake the only witness to the scene except for her. And was it snow? Something else? Why wasn’t it cold like an early March snow should have been when it drifted down and melted upon her exposed skin?

It fluttered on the breeze like paper-thin cinders from the fireplace at home.

Ash falling down?

Adele breathed out in terror.
God . . . what is this place?

Auschwitz.

They allowed Adele to keep her violin.

This she hadn’t expected.

The Germans had rushed her through registration—the horror of which she was still numb to. She’d been taken through a line with the other women from the car. But most of them, especially the ones with children clinging to them, had been ushered through a wall of buildings and barbed wire and she’d been left behind.

Adele wasn’t sure where they were headed, but she wanted to go with them. At least she could have asked what was happening, could have felt a connection to some earthly being who had taken the long train journey with her. But it wasn’t to be. They were led away and she was pushed and pulled in another direction.

The SS guards spotted her—did they recognize her as Austria’s Sweetheart? Adele had always hated that name, the product of careful marketing by her parents. But it hardly mattered now. No one appeared to have been able to pick her out of the group she’d arrived with. She was just as starved and dirty,
just as despondent as all the rest. They appeared to be interested in the violin, however. The black case she clung to had been the subject of immediate conversation when she made it to the front of the line. The other women and children slowly trudged away through the early-morning mist as she looked on, wishing she wasn’t alone.

They demanded answers to question after question, all in German, of course, and she was expected to give quick answers. Did she speak German? Yes. Once that was surmised, they continued at a feverish pace. Was she a Jew? No. Good. And what was her name? Nationality? Why did she have an instrument? So it was hers? Interesting. How long had she played? Was she a professional or an amateur?

Why wouldn’t her brain work?

Adele squeezed her fingernails into her palms, hoping to wake herself from the dream. Or shock her mouth into action.

She answered that she was Adele Von Bron, she was Austrian, and she did in fact play the violin. She’d had experience playing with the Vienna Philharmonic. They seemed to doubt this, likely because she was so young and because the Viennese orchestra did not take women as members, but she persisted through their skeptical glances. Yes. Formal training. No. Not a professional. She played with the Vienna Philharmonic on invitation. She’d been a student at the university in Vienna. How long? For three years. She was in the music performance program.