Playing for Time

Playing for Time

Fania Fenelon

Preface

THIRTY YEARS LATER

Rain is glistening on the gilded buildings of the Grand Place in Brussels this mild October evening. I can hear it streaming down the dark hotel windows behind me. In the cloistered semidark-ness, three women are sitting around a polished oak table. They last saw one another thirty years ago when they were aged seventeen, nineteen, and twenty-five and had just come out of the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Death had passed them by and they left in search of life.

All three of them are elegantly middle class, though in subtly different ways. Two of them, Anny and Irene, sip their drinks abstractedly; the third, Fania, drains her glass with the same passion she had put into remaining alive.

They move towards their shared memories with commonplace, cautious little sentences. Forgetfulness has helped them in various ways; the dimming of memory has enabled them to survive and, like night birds, they feel painfully nervous of the glare of day. They have come to this gathering enthusiastic at heart but with some trepidation; it is impossible for each to guess which part of life in the camp the others might have decided to forget. Furthermore, one of them is Fania, a central figure in the music block, a catalyst, a person of merciless recall; the other two know that she has forgotten almost nothing, and yet they have willingly responded to her invitation.

Fania Fenelon is the smallest of the three women, less than five feet, with strikingly blue eyes and a vitality that her friends acknowledge gratefully.

“You pulled us through; if it hadn’t been for you…”

Their sentences trail off; so much can be left unsaid.

“You made us laugh…”

They turn to me, an outsider, and confess solemnly: “We did laugh, like mad things.”

Anny narrows down the observation: “Yes, we could still laugh—in the orchestra!”

This life-saving laughter now provokes some thought: today they wonder whether it was justified. Irene appeals to me: “We laughed, and we played music. An orchestra in a concentration camp—that must seem incredible to you?”

“I did know that they existed in several camps. The men’s orchestra in Auschwitz was famous.”

Fania corrects me sharply. “There weren’t any in the women’s camps, though. Ours was the only female orchestra.”

Thoughtfully, Irene observes, “That orchestra saved our lives, didn’t it?”

Their eyes see a world elsewhere; they have a knowledge of fate, of its whims and miracles, which is granted only to those who have been at its mercy. They talk of themselves warily, in small doses, their tentative approach to their past giving their recollections a distinctive tone. One can almost see Anny summoning up the image of the old Fania: “You know, if you hadn’t been there, we would never have held out against the madness of those months. You were so sure we were going to get out all right, Fania. You were so alive that we had to follow you.”

“You told us that you were going to write this book about our orchestra and we believed you; you were the only one who could.” Irene moves back a little into the shadows before admitting, “I’ve forgotten too much.”

She doesn’t say “fortunately,” but the word hangs there, resonant in Anny’s firm, definitive “Me too.”

“Well, I haven’t forgotten anything. Nothing.”

There is a note of provocation in Fania’s assurance. The others look at her with a mixture of pity and admiration. “Do you know when the book was begun? On April 15, thirty years to the day after our liberation.”

Knowing what that day meant to her, I asked her how she felt on its anniversary, and she answered without a moment’s thought: “Sometimes it all comes back so clearly that you really feel you’re there.”

“Why do you say ”you‘?“

“Because it’s not me, it’s us—I’m never alone in these memories.”

“Do you think about it often?”

“Apart from a day like today, it’s not me who’s doing the thinking, ”it“ thinks
for
me.” She went on vehemently, almost painfully: “It’s not that I want to. But particularly at night, I can’t help it, I find myself back in the block at Birkenau, and it all happens, without any help from me. It never starts the same way: a woman shouts—Florette or Irene; someone is crying— Anny perhaps; there’s a shower of insults, blows; there’s Tchaikowska… I spend every night there—every night!”

“So in effect, you have never left?”

Stated so blankly this was almost too distressing; she joins her small, supple pianist’s hands and repeats with unexpected resignation: “I’ve never left the camp; I’m still there, I’ve spent every night of my life there, for thirty years.”

It is as though Anny is reading my mind, for she says thoughtfully, “Yet you waited thirty years?”

Fania’s answer is simple:

“First, like you, I’ve had to live, to have the youth we never had; we looked like old women and we were in our twenties. I needed to bask in other people’s warmth, to eat, to make love, to love… to recover. I had to get over the camps. That took years. After thirty years of silence during which I tried to forget the unforgettable, I saw that it was impossible. What I had to do was exorcise the orchestra.”

Marcelle Routier

“Don’t Die!”

“STIRB NICHT! ” Don’t die.

The German voice made no sense; it had no power to pull me up out of the black gulf into which I was sinking more deeply every second. For days now, I had no longer possessed the strength to keep my eyes open. I wasn’t sure whether it was my urine or the fever which alternately warmed and chilled me. Typhus was emptying me of life. I was going to die.

My head felt terrible. The girls’ wailing and sobbing and groanings shattered it into needle-sharp fragments, little scraps of broken mirror which sank razorlike into my brain. I ordered my hand to pull them out, but my hand was a skeleton’s claw that didn’t obey. The bones must have broken through the skin. Or had the hand actually come off? Impossible. I must keep my hands to play the piano. Play the piano… those knucklebones at the end of my arm might just manage
Danse macabre.
The idea actually made me laugh.

I was horribly thirsty. The SS had cut off the water. It was days since we’d had anything to eat; but even longer since I’d been hungry. I had become weightless, I was floating on a cloud, I was devoured by quicksand… no, flying in cotton wool. Odd…

A trick I’d found to cool myself was to wash in my urine. Keeping myself clean was essential to me, and there is nothing unclean about urine. I could drink it if I was thirsty—and I had done so.

I didn’t know the time but I did know the date—the girls kept track of that. It was April 15. What did that matter? It was just a day like any other. But where was I exactly? I wasn’t at Birkenau anymore. There, there were forty-seven of us, the “orchestra girls.” Here in this windowless shed, there were a thousand of us—burgeoning corpses. What a stench. Now I remembered: Bergen-Belsen. We had arrived here on November 3, 1944.

My head was in such chaos that I was no longer sure whether it was day or night. I gave up, it was too painful… I foundered.

Above me, over my face, I felt a breath of air, a vague smell, a delicious scent. A voice cut through the layers of fog, stilled the buzzing in my ears:
“Meine kleine Sangerin.”

“Little singer,” that was what the SS called me.

“Stirb nicht.”

That was an order, and a hard one to obey. Anyhow, I was past caring. I opened my eyes a fraction and saw Aufseherin Irma Grese, the SS warden known as
Engel,
the Angel, because of her looks. The glorious fair plaits which surrounded her head like a halo, her blue eyes and dazzling complexion were floating in a fog. She shook me.

“Stirb nicht! Deine englischen Freunde sind da!”

Could it possibly be? The Valkyrie had an amused glint in her eye as though the whole thing were a mild joke. I closed my eyes again; she was a wearying creature.

“What did she say?” asked Anny and Big Irene.

I repeated the German sentence. Irritated, they insisted: “Tell us in French, translate it.”

“I forget…”

“But you just said it in German.”

More exhausting people; I retired from the fray, defeated.

“Come on.” They were pleading. “Don’t die.”

That triggered it off; I repeated automatically: “Don’t die. Your friends the English are here.”

They were disappointed.

“Is that all?” muttered Little Irene.

Florette joined in. “The usual rubbish! We’ve had that with the Russians, the English, and the Yanks. They fed us that dozens of times in Auschwitz.”

I heard Big Irene’s calm voice: “What if it’s true?”

Anny spoke dreamily: “If only one could believe it and it could all end, now, just like that…”

I wafted off, and most of Florette’s colourful rejoinder was lost on me. God, how hot I was. My tongue was a hunk of cardboard. I felt myself drifting. Then familiar voices reached me, as if from the end of a funnel: “Look, Irene, you can see there’s no hope. She’s stopped breathing, there’s no mist on my bit of glass. This really works, they even do it in hospitals.”

“Try again, you never know.”

I wondered who was under discussion. Me? How infuriating they were. Admittedly, I had a pretty bad case of typhus, but I hadn’t yet given up the ghost. I had to know the end of the story. I would bear witness.

There were bellowings and whistle blasts around the block; a sudden surge of panic swept through the shed. By way of a full-blooded background to the tramp of boots, the sound of machine guns cut steadily through the silence of the firing range. Their rattle ate into our brains, day and night. Some of these gunners were mere children of fifteen or so.

“They surely can’t be going to have us picked off by those kids?”

“They’re not noted for their delicacy of feeling,” sneered Florette.

“But they’re just children!”

All morning the rumour had been going around that they were going to do away with us. But unlike the rumour about the liberation of the camp, this one rang true. Lunatic laughter burst from all over the shed, from the various tiers of the
cojas,
the name the Polish girls gave our cagelike bunks. A crazed voice asked, “What time is it? I want to know the time.”

“What the hell does it matter?”

“Because they’re going to shoot us at three o’clock,” the voice informed us confidentially.

Outside, superficially, all seemed normal; but if one concentrated closely, one could hear new sounds: running and calling. I was completely baffled. My head was swelling until it seemed to fill the whole barracks, to hold all the din within it like a reservoir. I had no more thoughts, I was sinking into the noise, it absorbed me and digested me. I was an echo chamber, I dreamed of silence.

No, I wasn’t dreaming; the silence was real. The machine guns had stopped. It was like a great calm lake, and I let myself drift upon its waters.

I must have fallen asleep again; suddenly, behind me, I heard the familiar sound of the door opening. From the remotest distance a man was speaking; what was he saying? No one was answering him. That was odd. What was going on? Strange words reached my ears—it was a language I knew. It was
English!

Tumult all around, women clambering down from the
cojas.
It couldn’t be true, I must be delirious.

The girls, those girls of whom I’d grown so fond, threw themselves at me, shaking me.

“Fania, wake up! Do you hear, the English are here. You must speak to them.”

An arm was slipped under my shoulders and lifted me up: “Say something.”

I was only too eager, but how could I with that leather spatula in my mouth? I opened my eyes and saw dim figures through a fog. Then suddenly one came into focus: he was wearing a funny little flat cap on his head, he was kneeling down and thumping his fist on his chest, rocking to and fro repeating: “My God, my God!” He was like a Jew at the Wailing Wall. He had blue eyes, but it wasn’t a German blue. He took off his cap, revealing enchanting red hair. His face was dusted with freckles and big childlike tears rolled down his cheeks. It was both awful and funny. “Can you hear me?”

I murmured, “Yes.”

The girls shrieked, “It’s all right! She heard, she answered!”

Madness was unleashed around me. They were dancing, lifting their thin legs as high as they could. Some threw themselves down and kissed the ground, rolling in the filth, laughing and crying. Some were vomiting; the scene was incredible, a mixture of heaven and hell.

There was a flurry of questions: “Where have they come from?”

“How did they get this far, to this hellhole?”

“Did they know we were here? Ask him.”

“We found you quite by luck,” he answered. “We didn’t know there was a concentration camp here. Coming out of Hanover, we chased the Germans through these woods and we saw
some
SS coming towards us with a white flag.”

“Did you slaughter them?” someone chipped in.

He looked uncomprehending. I translated.