Playing for the Commandant (18 page)

“Please,” he said, opening the door wide.

“You’ll leave, too?” I asked, searching his face. “Before they get here?”

He nodded and closed the door.

I walked back to camp alone, but Karl was still with me, the warm, woolen scarf he had given me snug around my neck, his tender touch, the warmth of his skin. It seemed that before Karl, I’d known nothing of life.

“Who cleared you to leave camp?” A guard stood at the sentry gate. The sky exploded in oranges and reds.

He pointed his rifle at me.

“The commandant sent for me.” The lie came easy. “I’m his pianist.” He checked my number against the list on his clipboard and waved me through.

I opened the door to the barrack. A group of women stood huddled around a window. An armored truck rumbled past. The block leader’s face was pressed against the glass.

“They’re going to put up a fight,” she whispered to the women circling the window. “They still have guns.” She pulled a wilted cabbage leaf from her pocket and stuffed it into her mouth. I walked outside, snapped an icicle from the barrack’s sloping roof, and sucked on it.

“Please, hurry,” I whispered to the winter sky. I was talking to the Russians. I was talking to Karl.

I walked inside and lay down and waited for the room to grow dark. I listened to the tanks rumble by and the women whimper in their beds.

I tried to sleep, but my dreams were filled with Erika. Erika being beaten by a guard, Erika bent over a rusted washbasin, Erika marching through the snow — dreams in black and white and gray. Gunfire perforated the silence. I rose from the bunk in the half dark and shuffled to the window. The sky was doused in pink. Flashes of light exploded in the distance, clouds of smoke rising up after them.

I lay there that night and all the next day, waiting for the Russians to come, waiting for someone to return from the march and tell us that our mothers and sisters were still alive. No one came. The women around me died in their beds. Outside, the guards blew up buildings.

At nightfall, I snuck into my old barrack. I found a turnip tucked under the block leader’s mattress and a potato in her nightstand, and I ate them raw. I went to my old bunk and ran my hands along the planks, across the empty gray space where Erika used to sleep. I closed my eyes and tried to recall her face, her dark brown eyes, grown pouchy and deep, the thin skin and sunken cheeks, her shaved head, her brave smile. She’d smiled when I’d told her I was staying behind. Did she know, then, that she wasn’t coming back?

At sunrise, I watched my old barrack burn. I was returning from the latrine hut when I saw three guards run from the barrack as it went up in smoke. I should’ve felt lucky. If I hadn’t needed the toilet . . . I stared at the flames. I didn’t feel lucky. I felt empty and alone. I hid behind a wall and watched my jail collapse. I’d dreamed so many times of setting the barrack alight, of razing the camp and clawing down the barbed wire and walking out of Birkenau. In my dreams, Erika lit the match and I flung it under a bunk and we escaped the flames — and Birkenau — together. I watched the blue plumes engulf the hut and wondered which barrack would be next.

There was no way to escape. There were still a handful of guards, with grenades and guns, and maybe others in the forest beyond the gates. And even if I made it to the forest, with the fog and swirling snow, I wouldn’t know which way was north. I wouldn’t have any food.

I drew my blanket around me and crept down the snow-blanketed path to the main square, my thoughts swirling. They’re burning the empty barracks. Hiding the evidence. The Russians must be close. In twenty-four hours, the war might be over and my new life begun. I could search for Anyu and Papa. I could leave Birkenau and look for Erika. I’d be free.

I edged closer to the main gate, sheltering behind a barrack so I wouldn’t be seen. I peered around the building. There were two guards at the gate and another three standing with their guns cocked. A row of prisoners was lined up against a wall. There was a volley of gunfire. I held my breath and watched them fall: two women with black triangles on their shirts, six with yellow stars, and a child no more than seven with scabs on her knees. I threw up on my boots.

I had to hide. If the guards were looking to kill the rest of us, I had to find a place where no one would look. Flames licked at the roof of the shower block. I ran to the latrine hut and threw the door open. The smell made me retch, but I scrambled over the boggy ground to the back of the hut and climbed into the pit. I pinched my nose between my fingers, curled my knees to my chest, and waited for a soldier with a red star on his cap to pull me out.

I sat listening to the bombs fall, too frightened to venture out. I left the safety of the latrine hut only once, at midday, to spoon a handful of snow into my cup, but returned to spend the next twenty-four hours in the pit with my arms wrapped around my head to shut out the noise. I played concertos in my head to mask the dull thud of walls collapsing and the sound of my own shallow breathing. I played pieces I’d composed for my mother and father, pieces Erika loved, pieces I’d played a thousand times without ever really understanding them — Rimsky-Korsakov’s
The Young Prince and Princess
, Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet
.

Shit clung to my coat and got under my fingernails. The smell hung on my hair and stuck to my skin. I cried myself to sleep. The sun was already high in the sky when I woke the next day. When the spray of machine gunfire thinned and stopped, I climbed from the pit and dragged myself to the door. I heard muffled footsteps and whispered words. I pushed the door open. Two women shuffled past carrying a body between them.

My voice was hoarse. “Where are the guards? Have the Russians come?” They didn’t hear me. I stepped outside, dizzy with hunger, and followed them. They tramped through the snow to the far end of a field and swung the limp body between them — once, then twice — before letting go. The body arced into the air, then plummeted, its fall cushioned by another body. The women stepped away, and others took their place, tossing their dead sisters onto the pile.

Prisoners wandered the camp, searching for food. I slipped between the women’s barracks, searching for my mother. Most of the huts were empty, their roofs caved in, their walls blackened by fire. The few that still stood were peopled by women and girls too weak to rise from their bunks. They lay on the planks and waited for death.

I walked past a group of women huddled in a burned-out barrack, hacking at a block of gray bread.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, my voice sharper than I’d intended. The women swung around; their eyes traveled down my face to my throat and the scarf looped around my neck. The skinniest of the three closed her fingers around the loaf.

“Tell me where you got that scarf and I’ll tell you where I got the bread.” She dropped the bread into her lap, pulled a knife from her pocket, and chipped at the frozen crust.

“I haven’t eaten in two days.” I ignored her question. She sawed through the loaf and divided it among the group.

“So you’re hungry.” She gnawed on the stump of bread. “My neck is cold. Looks like we’re even.”

Gunfire erupted in the distance. Up ahead, a truck idled at the main gate, its engine spewing gray smoke onto the snow. A guard clutching a striped shirt to his chest ran past as I lurked in the shadows. He leaped into the waiting truck and pulled the door closed. The gate opened, and the truck sped out. I stepped from behind the hut and watched the truck’s taillights recede into the fog. The gate closed.

“Where are you, Anyu?” I whispered into the gloom.

Behind me a knot of women were arguing beside a barbed-wire fence.

“I’m going to find food. You want to join me, then shut up and follow. You want to stay here and starve, that’s up to you.” A girl stepped away from the group and bent down to survey the fence. She wrapped her hands around a breach in the wire and pulled at the weakened fibers until the hole was large enough to crawl through.

“Don’t be foolish, Klara,” the women hissed. “Wait till the Russians arrive. You don’t know who’s out there.”

I approached the girl.

“I’ll come.” I bent down and pulled the wire apart. She crawled through, and I crawled after her, wincing as the barbed wire caught my head scarf. I let it slip from my head and left it shivering in the breeze.

“The guards have deserted.” She put a finger to her lips and crouched down. “But it only takes one. . . .” I crouched down and followed her.

“SS quarters,” she whispered, pointing to a stand of huts splayed along the fence.

We crept behind the first of the huts, rising onto tiptoe to peer through the window. The guards had left in a hurry. A chessboard sat on a table in the middle of the room, knights poised in battle. Two bowls of soup sat either side of the board, their spoons sticking out. We scrambled through the door, pitched the spoons from their bowls, and slurped down the broth. The guards had fled before draining the tea from their mugs, so we emptied those, too, sucking at the sugar that dribbled down the sides of the cup. Klara found an empty sack on the floor and we swept through the hut, filling the bag with whatever we could find: custard powder, lard, whiskey, potatoes. She pulled an eiderdown from a bed and wrapped it around her body, securing it at the waist with a guard’s leather belt. I wrapped a white cotton pillowcase around my head.

We snuck back along the fence, dragging the sack between us, till we saw my silk scarf flapping in the wind. Klara squeezed through the hole first. I pushed the sack through after her and climbed back into camp.

She handed me a bruised potato. I took it and bit into its soft green flesh.

“My mother used to buy potatoes from the market, but they weren’t as bitter as this.” I forced myself to take another bite. “She bought the baby potatoes, the ones with the white skin. She said they were the secret to her silky mash.” I pictured my mother leaning over a bowl of steaming potatoes, peeling each in turn, adding milk and butter, and whisking the mash until it stood in peaks.

I thanked Klara and walked back to the women’s camp, past the electrified fences that had separated me from my father for all these months. The gate was open. Papa! I ran through the gate, thinking of all the boys and men locked away from their sisters and mothers and lovers and wives, until today. Papa! My heart quickened.

An old man stood outside a dilapidated hut, his Adam’s apple pushing through his thin skin.

“Esther.” He reached out a bony hand and grabbed my coat. “Esther, you’re alive!” He pulled me into his shuddering body. I didn’t pull away. I wrapped my arms around his brittle body and returned to him — if just for a moment — his long-lost daughter or sister or wife.

I slipped from the old man’s embrace and continued down the path to look for my father. There were no guards patrolling the grounds, so I swung open doors and peered into storage sheds. I knocked on windows, crawled under bunks, and yelled out Papa’s name. I must have called for him a thousand times, until my voice grew faint and I began to lose hope. There were so few men alive and so many dead. They lay collapsed into each other in the shadows of buildings, hidden behind the latrines, and collected in carts. I wanted to look away, but what if Papa was among them and too weak to call out? I scanned their faces for my father’s gray eyes, for his dimpled chin and strong, square jaw. I didn’t see him.

An airplane screamed low over the camp and the sky filled with flames. I ran back to the barrack, panting. I swung the door open and dived under the bunk, and for the first time in a year, I prayed. I prayed that the angry airplanes that roared over Poland had red stars on them. And that Mama, Papa, Erika, and Karl were somewhere in Poland waiting for the Germans to wave the white flag.

I lay facedown on the concrete floor under my bunk. My legs were cramping; my fingers were frozen. I was hungry and I needed the toilet. It reminded me of the cramped cattle train. Locked in the slatted box with nothing to eat and no way out, I’d thought that whatever our destination, it had to be better than that stinking carriage. I was wrong.