Violins of Hope (13 page)

When the band reached the stage, Kopka would cut off the music and bring the formation to a halt. The musicians would scamper to their places on the stage, spread out the music on their stands, and await their next command. Instead of launching immediately into another march, Kopka would often indulge himself by calling for a tango. This would allow him to emulate what he thought a great conductor should look like, waving the first two fingers of each hand in the air while contorting his entire body in ridiculous gestures. The musicians would simply play on, ignoring the antics of their pretentious conductor. Sometimes, the SS guards would interrupt Kopka's selection to make a request of their own, with which Kopka would readily comply.

“Come on! Music!” the guards would shout once the detachments were in formation and once their requests had been performed.
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Both sides of the gate would swing open while the orchestra performed “Old Comrades.” The detachments would march out of the camp for their work details while a functionary counted each row of five to make sure every prisoner was accounted for. The process of marching all the detainees out of the camp could last two or more hours, during which time the orchestra would play without interruption.

After the last detachments had passed through the gate, the orchestra would reassemble in its parade formation and march back to the music barracks. The performers would stow away their instruments and begin their daily work. Privileged musicians like Szymon Laks would remain behind every day to arrange and copy out music for the orchestra to perform. Everyone else would line up again and march out of the gate. Although they were not exempt from forced labor, they did have the advantage of working slightly less, since they were the last ones to leave camp every morning. They were also the first to return in the evening, at which time they would perform marches for the exhausted workers hobbling back into the camp.

While the woodwind, brass, and percussion players would form a marching band during the procession to and from the stage, the violinists would follow behind them with their instruments still in their cases. It did not take long for the SS guards to notice that Henry Meyer and the other violinists did not have anything to do during those parades. “Why don't you play?” they would ask. “What are you needed for?”
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Knowing that being seen as “useless” would result in a transfer to a more difficult work command or in a trip to the gas chambers, Henry decided to give himself a task. When the cymbal player fell ill and disappeared, Henry convinced Kopka that he was a virtuoso cymbalist, even though he had never held a pair of cymbals before in his life. The first time he crashed the cymbals, he slammed them together with such force that he almost broke his wrists. Nevertheless, he quickly mastered the proper technique and became the marching band's permanent cymbal player. From that point on, instead of being an object of derision for the SS guards, Henry was a source of entertainment. The guards made a game out of throwing pebbles in Henry's direction. He would deflect the pebbles with his cymbals, often to the beat of the music.

By October 1942, Szymon Laks had become the chief arranger for the Birkenau Men's Camp Orchestra. Since commander Schwarzhuber insisted that his orchestra continually expand its repertoire, Szymon would re-create existing marches from memory and compose new marches in the German style. From time to time, Schwarzhuber and his subordinates would pass along the melodies of popular marches such as “Fatherland, Your Stars,” a march that served as the leitmotiv for a popular propaganda film. Szymon would harmonize these songs and orchestrate them for the ensemble.

As Schwarzhuber and his subordinates continued to request more and more music, the orchestra members struggled to learn so many pieces. At Szymon's suggestion, Kopka successfully petitioned Schwarzhuber to excuse the entire orchestra from their labor details for two rehearsals per week. This gave all of the musicians brief reprieves from the grueling work detachments, if only for three hours at a time twice a week.

One day, the orchestra received an order from Schwarzhuber to start performing the popular march “Berlin Air” as soon as possible. Szymon completed the arrangement and the creation of the parts in a matter of days. When the orchestra played the arrangement for the first time, it just so happened that the Sonderkommando (special detachment) was marching by. Because the Sonderkommando was in charge of carrying decomposing corpses to the crematorium, the unit gave off a terrible odor that took several minutes to dissipate. The members of the orchestra were accustomed to the smell and did not think twice about it. The SS guards, on the other hand, immediately noticed the concurrence of the stench of death and the performance of “Berlin Air.” A shrill whistle and a shout from the watchtower brought an abrupt end to the performance. Kopka was summoned to the guardhouse, where he received twenty-five blows to his backside for mocking the German capital.

Szymon's arranging responsibilities were complicated by the fact that the ensemble kept changing. Its members continued to fall victim to disease or grow so weak from exhaustion and starvation that they were sent to the gas chambers. Others committed suicide.

Among those who decided to take his own life was Leon Bloorman, a former violin professor at the Jewish Conservatory of Music in Rotterdam. Just a few days after arriving in Birkenau, Bloorman approached his old violin student Louis Bannet, who had since become a virtuoso trumpeter.

“Louis, do you know what they made me do today?” he asked. “They made me play my violin while they hanged a man. He was a Frenchman. Other than being a Jew, I don't know what crime he committed.

“They pulled him on a cart to the gallows. I had to stand behind him and play
La Marseillaise
,” Bloorman continued, referring to the French national anthem that he was forced to perform to mock the executed Frenchman. “Can you explain such a thing to me?”

“I don't have an answer,” Louis simply responded. “There are no answers here.”

“Louis, you are stronger than me,” the elder violinist tearfully admitted. “I don't think I can go on like this much longer.”

“Try to think of this,” Louis suggested. “The man they hanged today, the last sound he heard was your beautiful playing.”

This was not enough to console the violinist. A few nights later, Bloorman tried to kill himself by running into the electric fence. Before he got that far, he was gunned down by SS guards who were sparing themselves the trouble of scraping his body off the fence. The next morning, when the orchestral musicians took their seats, they found Bloorman's dead body tied to his chair. Around his neck hung a sign that explained why he had been shot and why his body had been positioned there as an example. The sign read, “I tried to escape.”
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Szymon Laks eventually succeeded Kopka as the capo of the orchestra. In his new position, he was able to offer more protection to the orchestra members. He convinced the camp administration to assign them the easiest work details, arguing that they would be able to perform better if the nimbleness of their hands and fingers were not compromised by difficult manual labor. During a snowstorm, Szymon successfully argued that the camp instruments would be damaged if they were not taken inside immediately. From that point on, the orchestra was exempt from playing during bad weather.

As the orchestra grew in size, quality, and repertoire, its responsibilities expanded beyond just performing at the gate to playing at various camp functions. On Sunday afternoons, the orchestra would perform concerts of light classical music for SS officers and guards. The orchestra would occasionally perform as transports arrived. Seeing an orchestra playing in front of a manicured lawn landscaped with flowers tricked the new arrivals into believing that Auschwitz was a welcoming place. In perhaps its most gruesome performance, the orchestra once played next to a building in which women prisoners were being gassed, to drown out their screams.

From time to time, small groups of musicians would cheer up their sick comrades in the infirmary by playing classical music for them on Sunday afternoons. One patient was so grateful for Jacques Stroumsa's performance of a Mozart violin concerto that he wept openly when he bumped into Jacques thirty-six years later at a café in Israel. “Jacques, it is really you!” he exclaimed. “Jacques Stroumsa, the violinist from Auschwitz who came to us on Sundays in the hospital to play Mozart!”
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Various ensembles also played at birthdays and other holidays celebrated by camp functionaries and SS men. Three or four musicians would rise early to wake up the celebrant with a serenade or triumphant march. After the honored party feigned surprise and thanked his serenaders with gifts, the musicians would perform a sentimental tune and convey their best wishes in whatever language was appropriate to the celebrant. That evening, a larger ensemble would perform a private concert, while the hero of the day ate and drank himself silly.

On the evening of March 16, 1943, Louis Bannet was rousted out of his bed along with a clarinetist, a drummer, and a violinist. They were loaded into a car and told that they would be providing entertainment for a birthday party. They were driven to a large country house, dropped off in the back, and taken to a second-floor loft. The balcony overlooking the first floor was screened off with large plants so the prisoners would be heard but not seen. After a German soldier told them to begin playing, Louis snuck a peek at the guest of honor as he jubilantly entered the room. The birthday boy was none other than Josef Mengele.

The celebration of Schwarzhuber's birthday on August 29, 1943, was an even bigger affair. The musicians were released from work detail for the three days prior to the celebration to prepare. To honor the camp commander, four trumpets played a regal fanfare that had been composed specifically for the occasion, just as Schwarzhuber stepped out of his car with his wife and two small children. The commander saluted smartly as the orchestra launched into “Fatherland, Your Stars.” Szymon later recalled that Schwarzhuber and his family barely noticed the procession of thousands of recent camp arrivals marching to the gas chambers.

Through their performances, the musicians of the orchestra were able to curry favor with camp functionaries. Albert Haemmerle, an otherwise particularly monstrous block elder, called on the orchestra to relieve his heartbreak after a charming young Polish boy broke up with him in favor of another camp functionary. Haemmerle would take every opportunity to visit the orchestra and ask them to play romances and sentimental melodies for him while he drowned his sorrows in alcohol. In return, he spared the musicians from his fury and even brought them gifts.

More important to the orchestra members than their relationships with camp functionaries was the way in which music forged personal connections with their SS captors, whom they called “esmen.” “When an esman listened to music, especially of the kind he really liked, he somehow became strangely similar to a human being. His voice lost its typical harshness, he suddenly acquired an easy manner, and one could talk with him almost as an equal to another,” Szymon wrote in his memoirs. “Sometimes one got the impression that some melody stirred in him the memory of his dear ones, a girlfriend whom he had not seen for a long time, and then his eyes got misty with something that gave the illusion of human tears. At such moments the hope stirred in us that maybe everything was not lost after all.” The irony of such barbarians having so much appreciation for beauty was not lost on Szymon: “Could people who love music to this extent, people who can cry when they hear it, be at the same time capable of committing so many atrocities on the rest of humanity?”
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The orchestra continued to comply with demands for specific repertoire, including medleys of tunes from popular German operettas, a medley of Schubert songs, and a medley of Russian Gypsy music titled after the famous tune “Dark Eyes.” In creating the latter, Szymon was assisted by Leon Weintraub, a Russian Jew from France and a brilliant violinist who specialized in both Russian folk music and Gypsy romances. The collaboration was a big hit. It was said that whenever the orchestra played the “Dark Eyes” medley, Schwarzhuber would stop whatever he was doing and walk over to his office window to lose himself in the music.

Some of the pieces that the Germans requested ended up being poor choices from a political standpoint. One music-loving officer brought the orchestra two military marches to which he was sentimentally attached. The first, “Argonne Forest,” commemorated the Battle of the Argonne Forest, in which the officer had fought in World War I. The second, “Greetings to Upper Salzburg,” referred to the region in which the officer had grown up. Szymon worked late into the night to finish the orchestrations for the next day, but the orchestra never played either arrangement in its entirety. Schwarzhuber, who apparently paid great attention to the orchestra's daily repertoire, had “Argonne Forest” stopped halfway through because he objected to celebrating a battle that was part of a lost war. The commander also interrupted the performance of “Greetings to Upper Salzburg” because he felt it was inappropriate for an ensemble of mostly Jewish prisoners to salute the region that was home to one of Hitler's most famous residences.

Despite its status as a forbidden genre, jazz music was popular among the SS officers and guards in the Birkenau Men's Camp, just as it was in the Auschwitz Main Camp. SS section leader Pery Broad regularly visited the music barracks to jam with a jazz combo that included virtuoso trumpeter Louis Bannet. A world-class accordionist, Broad knew many jazz standards by heart and could hold his own with the orchestra's most skilled improvisers. Broad would even smuggle into the camp the sheet music to popular tunes written by Jewish-American songwriters like Irving Berlin.