Playing for Time (17 page)

She posed the question but expected no reply; her notion of duty was a bastion against any sentimental weakness. So why did she glare at me so violently, as if she needed to justify herself?

“They shall have nothing! And they’d better pay more attention on Sunday. It’s their interests I’m protecting, we have to please our superiors.”

There was a silence; perhaps she was vaguely disconcerted by my own.

“I have to act like this, Fania—don’t I?”

On with the Music

“No! ”“ shouted Florette. ”I won’t play, I hate music, it’ll drive us all mad.“

The girls had just come back from their evening session outside; I wondered whether something specific had happened, or whether it was a typical Florette explosion. Generally, comings and goings took place amid indifference and silence. This was the last chore of the day, and they usually returned more relaxed. This evening they came in dragging their feet, grey in the face. Without a glance, Alma went to shut herself in her room. Whiter than ever, Frau Kroner put her flute away in the music room, followed by several of the others, who were looking unusually vacant. Little Irene was gazing into the distance, Jenny was so pale that her freckles dotted her face with brown. Big Irene was looking positively pinched and staring worriedly at Florette.

“No! I can’t, I won’t go anymore. They can kill me, I don’t care. It’ll happen anyhow, it’ll happen to all of us.”

There was an almost tangible feeling of fear. Most of the girls were glaring darkly at Florette, hands itching.

“I can’t bear to look at them, I can’t bear their eyes… Fania, the dogs ate two of them today. They were going to piss or get a bit of ice to suck… The SS set their dogs on them. They tore them into little bits… and those bastards forced their comrades to go and pick them up and put them on the pile of dead bodies, and I saw them, I saw them. Pieces of women’s flesh turned into dogs’ meat… They carried them as best they could, on their backs… and we went on playing, belting out that rubbish. Butchers with lumps of meat on their shoulders, they could hardly carry it, they were exhausted, and we were forcing them to march in step… There was such hatred in the eyes of those women… I can’t bear it anymore. I won’t go…”

In sudden solidarity, Hilde and Helga took her by the shoulders and pulled her away with the help of Little Irene.

“Come outside, it’ll do you good.”

Ferocious, oozing hatred, Hilde assured her: “We’ll throw them to their own dogs, they’ll tear them limb from limb in front of our eyes, we’ll trample on their remains. They’ll pay for this.”

As they led the hiccuping Florette away, I asked Little Irene whether it was true that the SS set their dogs on people all the time.

“One or two prisoners die like that every day. We knew it, but we’d never actually seen it.”

Never had I so appreciated being spared that particular duty; at that time the perverse SS mind had not yet been inspired to add a singer to the pseudo-fanfare.

Lying there on my bunk, I tried to rid myself of this incident, to detach myself from it, but the images persisted. That night the searchlights seemed nervous, sweeping over the camp and crossing our dormitory more frequently than usual. Physically and emotionally drained, Florette was sleeping in her favorite position. It seemed to me that our nights were becoming increasingly agitated; only the snoring of Pani Founia remained unchanged.

The ice and snow were melting slowly; here, April meant rain and mud that was continually whipped up by the wind. We were endlessly spattered, endlessly obliged to clean ourselves up with nothing, which was exhausting and irritating. The whole camp was in a ferment, as if spring were sending us scuttling about like edgy, frustrated animals. Rumours reached us of problems for Germany in Russia and Italy; there was even talk of a landing in France. Our block became a sort of turntable. Winter had sheltered us to some degree, kept us in hibernation; we had felt protected, segregated. Now once again there was incessant movement through the camp. We received visits from the women in Canada, the kitchen staff, the Revier staff, interpreters, clerks— our block was a general meeting place. People poured in from the outside, rumours buzzed. There was always something to alarm us. From our music room, nauseated, we watched the convoys arriving. The rate of selections had speeded up, the death factory was working at full blast; greasy soot stuck to our skin; women told us that corpses were piling up near the blocks because the ovens could no longer cope. Priority was given to new arrivals because they were alive, while those already here, dead or half dazed, could wait. They said that you could see an arm or a leg move among the corpses. We would have liked to block our ears, and yet we listened with morbid curiosity.

We had never played so much: there were two or three concerts every Sunday. Every day, and often several nights on end, the SS came to our block to demand endless musical desserts. Hell has many faces, and for us this was one of them. Yet I was grateful to this musical activity for granting me a respite and also for allowing me to oxygenate my brain by working on scores and orchestrations—it was like a few hours of mountain air. I was even able to enjoy myself, as I’d just done with an arrangement of
Cavalleria Rusticana,
whose first bars reminded me of our favorite song:
j‘
attendrai. Written for those absent in 1939-40, it symbolized all returns for us, theirs and ours. Every time we played the arrangement we were secretly jubilant. It was amusing to be able to sing a song of hope under their noses. Guile is the revenge of the weak. I had organized other pleasures for myself. I had arranged
Josef, Josef
(a well-known fox trot, the work of a Jewish composer) as a march; in this way I’d seen to it that the women in the work groups marched off to the rhythm of Jewish music, and some of them clearly recognized it. Not a single SS ever noticed. They listened to it with evident satisfaction, beating time. Sweeter still to my eyes was the sight of them thoroughly relishing the first movement of the E minor violin concerto by Mendelssohn, a composer banned in Germany and the occupied countries. I had written it out from memory, and when Alma found it on her desk she turned to me: “Do you think that’s possible?”

“Certainly. None of them is bright enough to notice.”

“Jawohl.
On the programme, just put ”Violin concerto.“

And each time she played and conducted it, we exchanged a smile of complicity. We were running a real risk; but it afforded us such intense delight to see them beaming as they listened to that forbidden music. Such moments were all too short.

“On with the music!” Jenny jeered at every possible opportunity.

This had become our catch phrase. At Birkenau, music was indeed the best and worst of things. The best because it filled in time and brought us oblivion, like a drug; we emerged from it deadened, exhausted. The worst, because our public consisted of the assassins and the victims; and in the hands of the assassins, it was almost as though we too were made executioners.

The Sunday concerts were not always held in the Sauna; we moved around as ordered. One Sunday recently we had played in the block for the insane, which housed women who were mentally ill when they were interned, women who hadn’t been able to stand up to the horrors of the camp or who had been driven mad by the experiments they’d been subjected to. I don’t know whether our concert in this block was experimental, whether their reactions were to be studied by the doctors of Birkenau and Auschwitz, but a large number of them attended.

We played at the entrance to the block, in the central aisle. The women sprawled on their
cojas
in an amazing range of positions. Half-naked, some of them clung to the uprights throughout the whole concert like skeletal monkeys. They stared at us, holding out their hands, perhaps begging for the crust of bread we couldn’t give them. Others seemed too dazed to see us, still less hear us, so much so that I thought they must actually have been deaf; some jumped up and down in a semblance of dancing, lifting their tatters lewdly.

Alma was lucky enough to have her back to them, but we had a chance to observe, particularly I, who had only two songs to sing. At the end of a piece some clapped frenetically, which in those surroundings was a gesture of madness indeed. Throughout our whole stay in the camp we were never applauded except by them. And how Alma must have missed the applause; I could so clearly imagine her bowing in her own way, haughty yet exceedingly polite.

One of the poor creatures came forward grimacing compulsively in a grotesque imitation of Alma at her stand, then of Helga at the percussion. It was so funny that I wondered whether she was indeed mad, or only faking. The caricature was so unexpected that our nerves gave and we laughed—like mad things.

I tried to reason with myself, to tell myself that after all, our average age was only about twenty, that laughter was the antidote to horror. It was laughter that kept us sane, I knew, but I still felt that there was something unhealthy about it. This laughter acted upon us like an anaesthetic, and I was afraid that it might hasten the gradual decline in respect for human life which was at work within us.

A few weeks earlier, Alma had asked me to compose a cadenza for the first movement of the Mozart A major concerto for Big Irene, our first violin. When Irene read it, she pulled a face and frowned. “It’s too difficult, I’d never be able to play that.”

“Don’t worry, Alma hasn’t seen it yet. I’ll say I couldn’t manage it.”

Jenny butted in venomously. “It may be too difficult for her, but not for me.” Her jangling Paris tones became a positive hiss: “Who do you both think you are? I played the violin before she did, at the Rialto theatre, every night, and my public was pretty choosy!”

Contrary to all expectation, Alma absently agreed that Jenny should play the cadenza. So for days she tortured us and exhausted herself with the piece; it was painfully bad. Alma seethed and raged, but Jenny persisted, repeating: “I’ve practised it and I’ll play it.”

On Sunday morning, turning her pointed little rodent’s face ostentatiously towards me, she assured me that she knew her piece by heart, that it was extremely easy, that all she needed was a bit more time to touch up her interpretation, but that this afternoon we’d see all right. I didn’t even shrug my shoulders; I was past caring. The only thing that interested me was to know where we would be playing. I feared another experience like the one in the block for the insane, and was relieved when I learnt that we would be playing only for the sick people in the Revier and in the afternoon in our own room for the SS.

Since I’d been in the orchestra—almost four months—this was the first time we’d given a concert in the infirmary. I was pleased really: to play for sick people seemed to me a perfect justification of our existence. I had an idyllic view of the thing. My imagination took wing and pious cliches crowded my thoughts: we would be bringing a moment’s respite to the sick, making them forget their suffering, and so on. It took me a moment to realize that I was the only one smiling. Alma, in an abysmal mood, did not seem to be touched by the slight exaltation which usually enlivened her before a concert. Furthermore, apart from Jenny, the girls seemed gloomy. Ewa sighed: “I wish it were over. I hate singing in the Revier.”

“Why? After all, perhaps we can do something for them— make them forget their state for a bit.”

“We play in the morning,” Florette interrupted brutally, “and they’ll be gassed in the afternoon.”

Unable to swallow, I stammered, “Do they know?”

“No, but Alma does, and so do we.”

Cowardly, I too would have preferred not to know. In my imagination, I had seen the Revier as a sort of hospital, with beds, not really luxurious of course, rudimentary but at least clean. I found myself in a stinking, unheated shed, whose floor had, however, been newly washed for our arrival. In the blocks of bunks whose tops were lost in gloom, ghostly women, half naked, shivering on sheetless straw mattresses, some without covers, watched us with eyes bright with fever.

Calmly, carefully, in the central gangway near the open door, we installed our stands, arranged our scores, then tuned up. Since on this occasion I was to sing one song only, I would have given a lot to have an instrument in my hands, some absorbing task which would have allowed me not to look at those women, not to see them. Some of the less seriously ill came up to us, stared at us. I wondered what we were contributing and which ones knew that they were condemned. Suddenly with a feeling of horror I wondered if we were fulfilling their last request.

Alma signalled to her players and the orchestra launched into the “Blue Danube.” Some women started to hum, others shrieked like suffering animals, some laughed, blocked their ears, rocked in time. Some, oblivious to our presence, were praying, hands clasped. Very few were following the concert in the normal fashion.

The girls played arias from operettas, fox trots, waltzes, as if all this were none of their business. Near the open door there was a bustle of doctors and SS. An officer whom I’d never seen before caught my attention. He was very tall and thin, with a flat skull and tow-coloured hair. His glassy, expressionless eyes lay in deep, hollow orbits, like those of a corpse. He was examining us closely and I felt uneasy at his mirthless laugh. I asked Ewa who he was.

“Tauber, the adjutant general, the worst of all. He doesn’t like music.”

That much was evident; his cruel little eyes bored into us while his thin mouth curled briefly into a moue of superior disgust.

“What’s he doing here then?”

“Just seeking a bit of distraction.”

I was hypnotized by that vicious face, though I knew it was forbidden to look at an SS man. Near him there now appeared a superior officer, a tall, monocled SS colonel, greying at the temples and extremely elegant—you’d almost think he was corsetted inside his uniform. His crop tucked under his arm, he tapped his gilded cigarette holder against his gold cigarette case. Where had he sprung from and did he like music? Ewa didn’t know. Apparently there had been some new SS arrivals and he was probably one of them. Fortunately, as it was now my turn to sing, this diversion had unfrozen my heart and throat a little and I sang the second aria from
Land of Smiles:
“Taking tea
a deux…
it’s wonderful…”