Playing for the Commandant
Read Playing for the Commandant Online
Authors: Suzy Zail
They came at midnight, splintering the silence with their fists, pounding at our door until Father let them in. I tiptoed to my sister’s bed, threw back the covers, and slid in beside her. She was already awake.
“I hate them,” I whispered. Mother didn’t like us using the word
hate,
but there was no getting around it; I hated them. I hated their perfectly pressed uniforms and the way they pushed past Father, dragging the mud from their boots across Mother’s Persian rug. I hated them for nailing the synagogue doors shut and for burning our books. But mostly I hated them for how they made me feel: scared and small.
Erika pressed a finger to her lips. They were in the next room. I crept out of bed and peered into the living room. There were two of them: one was short, the other tall. Both were ugly. I hadn’t seen them in the ghetto before, but there had been others with the same helmets and heavy black boots. The last pair who’d visited came for the radio.
Jews aren’t allowed to have radios
, they’d said, wrenching the cord from the wall.
My father lit a candle. Mother stood behind him in slippered feet, her hair still in pins. The smaller of the two officers — a young man with a pockmarked face — was rifling through drawers, plucking silver spoons and napkin rings from their velvet sleeves and slipping them into his pocket. I couldn’t hear what the taller officer was saying, but after he finished talking, Father reached into the pocket of his dressing gown and pulled out the keys to our apartment.
The officer took the keys. He drew two sheets of paper from his satchel, thrust one at Father, and read the other out loud.
“By order of the Royal Hungarian Government, made this day, Tuesday the twentieth day of June, 1944, all persons of Jewish descent . . .”
We were to assemble outside the synagogue at eight o’clock the following morning. We were allowed one bag each and enough food for three days.
“You’re being resettled,” the officer said. “We’re closing the ghetto.”
He didn’t say where we were going or how we would get there. He read the brutal words without pausing for breath, then he pulled another sheet from his bag and shone his flashlight on it.
“Samuel Mendel,” he said, looking down at my father. “According to this list, you have two daughters. Get them.”
Erika didn’t wait for Father to call her. She stepped out of the shadows and stood in the doorway in her bare feet, her flimsy nightdress caught in the glare of the flashlight.
“Erika Mendel?” The officer aimed his beam through her thin cotton gown. His face was cold, his eyes hard. My sister nodded.
“Hanna Mendel?”
I stepped into the hallway. The officer shoved me aside and stepped into the bedroom. I watched him fling open cupboards and empty the drawers. It didn’t make any sense. They couldn’t be kicking us out of the ghetto. It was their idea to create it, their idea to cram us inside its claustrophobic walls. We’d done everything they’d asked of us. We’d painted yellow stars on our apartment buildings, we’d obeyed curfew, we didn’t take buses or use the telephone. I wasn’t a troublemaker. I was a straight-A student. I’d won a scholarship to the Budapest Conservatorium of Music. I was smart. I was talented.
Erika had told me that none of that mattered, but I’d refused to listen.
When they look at you, they don’t see a girl who hands her homework in on time
, she’d said.
They don’t care that you wake at six every morning to practice piano. They don’t see a concert pianist when they look at you — they see a Jew
.
The officer crouched down on one knee and looked under my bed. I pressed my mouth to my sister’s ear.
“Where are we going?”
Erika looked at our father’s face, etched with fear, and at our mother, standing next to him, wringing her hands.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, “but anywhere has to be better than here.”
We’d been living in the ghetto for six weeks. It had only taken a few days for the walls to go up around us, hemming us in. Erika hated the ghetto. She hated curfew, and the guards at the gates. She hated that her friends couldn’t visit her, or telephone, once the line was disconnected. She missed going to the cinema and eating Sacher torte at Café Gerbeaud. She missed the admiring glances of young men and the way they fought for her attention. One by one, they had all donned uniforms and stopped talking to her. She hated Hitler.
I just thought he was crazy. Before our radio was confiscated, I’d heard him rant about Jews on the BBC. We were a threat to the nation, he said. We stole people’s jobs, we ate too much, and we spread disease. I didn’t think anyone in Hungary would take him seriously — but then the German tanks rolled into Budapest in March 1944, and the government started passing these crazy laws. Father’s business was shut down and his bank account was frozen. We couldn’t ride in trains or go to university.
Having blue eyes and blond hair, I didn’t attract the attention of the black-booted SS soldiers who patrolled the streets. Not until April, when, in keeping with the führer’s orders, Mother sewed a yellow star on all of my clothes — a six-pointed Star of David as big as my palm, inscribed with the German word for Jew:
Jude
.
I wished I could wear my star proudly, as Erika did. We weren’t a strictly religious family, but the way Erika saw it, if she had to be stamped a Jew, she’d make her own labels. She found a length of bright-yellow silk at Zimmerman’s haberdashery on Utvar Street and fashioned her own glimmering stars that she wore proudly on her left breast. I hid mine when I could, under scarves, my hair, my schoolbag strap.
There were others at school branded like me, and it made me feel a little less alone. But I hated that star. It changed everything. The girls I spent every lunchtime with told me that they would understand if I felt more comfortable eating with my Jewish classmates. My best friend stopped inviting me over.
At least I still had Bach and Beethoven for company.
The officers had moved into our living room. The young one with the bulging pockets was seated at the piano, running his sweaty fingers over the keys. He hit middle C.
“Nice piano. An August Förster,” he said, turning to look at his colleague. “I’ve always wanted an August Förster.”
“Take it,” the older officer said. “Come back for it tomorrow with the truck.”
Erika pulled away from me. “Don’t!” I pleaded. I grabbed her arm and held it tight. “Don’t go in there. You’ll get us in trouble. He won’t let us keep it, and even if he did,” I whispered, “I can’t take it with me.”
Erika froze at the sound of our mother’s voice.
“Please, sir.” My mother stepped toward the officer, tears streaking her face. “Not the piano —”
“Shut up!” The older officer swung his flashlight at my mother, and she leaped back in fright.
He turned to my father. “The synagogue. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock.” He opened the front door and stepped into the corridor. The young officer smiled and followed him out.
“They can’t do this. We won’t let them.” Erika ran to the piano.
Father locked the front door. “We need to start packing. We have a lot to do.” He took my sister by the shoulders and steered her back to the bedroom. My mother sat slumped at the piano, her head bowed. I sat beside her.
“I’m so sorry, Hanna, so sorry,” she repeated, as though it were all her doing. Tears stained her collar, and when she pulled me to her, I felt her body shuddering beneath the soft fabric of her dressing gown. I pulled away. I didn’t want to see her despair; I wanted her to be brave.
“I should go and pack,” I said. Mother rose from the stool and shuffled into the kitchen. I retreated to the bedroom.