Playing for Time (21 page)

“Yes, it’s possible.”

Now for the first time I caught a glimpse of concern in her eyes, which darkened with something that began to look like anguish.

“You know, I’m really afraid I may be wrong, it’s all so new and unexpected. Unreciprocated love wouldn’t be at all right for me. I’m amazed at what’s happening to me, Fania: I love her and… I desire her. I want to caress her boyish body, to be caressed by her… I want…”

“To make love. And so?”

She fell silent, a Puritan deflated and vaguely shocked by my realism. Was she going to talk to me about good and evil like a little bourgeoise?

“Do I have a right to embark on anything? I’m older than she is.”

“Four years older. Don’t be ridiculous, don’t have absurd scruples. Father always used to say to me: ”If you are square with your conscience, there’s nothing you can’t do.“ If she’s sincere, if you are—”

“Fania, can you doubt it?”

“Well, what are you waiting for? If you can seize some moments of happiness in the midst of all this horror, I don’t see that anything should stop you.”

“But, Fania, what if I’m wrong, if she doesn’t want me?”

Death’s Bookkeeper

A RUNNER burst through our door and collapsed on our bench, breathless, brandishing a shred of packing paper. A parcel? Between gasps the girl managed to utter the name of Big Irene. It was an important event. All that remained of the original packaging was a bit of stained, greasy, sticky wrapping paper. Judging by its size, it must have been a big parcel. Big Irene took it doubtfully, looked at the writing and began to cry, kissed it, put her cheek against it—it was the writing of her Jean-Louis.

Like an animal scenting quarry, Jenny pounced: “Well, I must say, your bit of parcel isn’t very brilliant. Look what they’ve left you. It stinks!”

Irene’s trembling hands picked ineffectively at a remaining bit of string.

“Let me do it,” said Anny, always a watchful friend. She quickly removed the paper; inside, an utterly rotten herring lay on an envelope stiff with oil. Unable to believe her eyes, Irene murmured: “A letter!” Seized with respectful wonder, we gazed awestruck at the letter; her tears fell faster. “It’s from him, from my darling.”

Typically, Jenny commented, “The scent of your love letters isn’t exactly aphrodisiac. My man uses Evening in Paris, it works better.”

The girls surrounded Big Irene, full of envious respect for the object of this miracle. Bending her pretty, childish head to read, she escaped from the circle and took refuge near the window. Fascinated, we kept our distance, not daring to go nearer; but none of us assumed the various activities interrupted by this incredible event.

Her face silhouetted against the sooty sky, she read it through once, twice, then gazed dreamily into nothingness, a big tear rolling down her cheek.

Jenny was our spokeswoman: “Well, what’s the verdict?”

Irene turned to us a face which spelled love and resolution. “It’s marvellous. He tells me he loves me, he says ”Live for me, I’ll wait for you.“ I’ll hold out till the end, for him.”

Then her expression changed to one of anguish, and she asked pathetically: “I will come back, won’t I?”

Her look had the entreaty, the desperate intensity of a child asking: “I will get better, won’t I?” Ewa and I assured her that she would.

She sighed. “At night, to get myself to sleep, I imagine this return. Time’s going by, but luckily I trust him. This letter is already six months old, and so many things can happen in six months! Do you think I’ll
get
another?”

“Deliveries aren’t exactly regular, you may have noticed,” jeered Jenny. Eager hands stretched out towards the letter. “Let us touch it. It will bring us good luck.”

Now the inevitable commentaries started to flow: How had he got the address? Why had the SS responsible for parcels let this one through? Could we start to hope? Then each of us began to rave about her own case: why not me, too?

As she left, the runner was still expressing amazement at having been the bearer of such an extraordinary thing. “I never take parcels with letters anywhere—you’re certainly privileged!”

Privileged! The adjective provoked chain reactions which temporarily obliterated interest aroused by the letter. We couldn’t fail to know that there were a number of unflattering stories circulating about us.

“Privileged—what does that mean?” Jenny objected acidly.

Her mouth pinched, Lili answered: “They say we’re Kramer and Mandel’s pets.”

Florette saw red. “It’s those idiots from Canada who’ve spread the rumour that we get parcels. In fact we had the last one, which was also the first, three months ago.”

Calmly, Marta relayed the Revier rumours: “They say that the ”orchestra girls’ get food supplements every day.“

The girls choked with indignation when Anny revealed that the work groups claimed we got half a loaf of bread after each concert. The statement sounded so fantastic that silence fell, and the general outrage fed, for a moment, on that improbable dream: half a loaf!

“If I had half a loaf a day…” Clara murmured through her tears.

Once again the floodgates were opened, and bitter recriminating phrases flowed. Jenny said to Clara, who went scarlet: “You wouldn’t need to go with your
kapos
anymore!” Then, viciously: “Oh, I see! Look, fatty, it’s not by any chance because of your farm horse behind that they think all this stuff about us? When the ”others’ see it, they can hardly think we’re living on air!“

No one went to Clara’s assistance, and she went off, swinging her huge behind, to take refuge in the music room, followed by the hostile stares of the girls.

Ewa changed the subject. “Let’s be fair, we do have privileges.”

Disapproving attention focussed on her.

“Yes, we have showers every day with lukewarm water, while the ”others’ have to go to all manner of lengths and risk being beaten just to wash in ice-cold water. We’re decently dressed, we’re not cold. Our room is heated, we have a blanket and a sheet while they have quite inadequate rags. We can go out when we want to go to the lavatory. But they… you remember the lavatories in the quarantine block!“

I preferred not to.

“With these very real advantages, some of which are actually visible, how do you expect the other women not to think that our soup is different too—that there’s more of it, and better? They’re wrong; not only is it the same, but we’re actually rather unlucky in this respect. As we never go out of the camp, we can’t steal an odd carrot or some other vegetable from the fields and we’ve nothing to barter while every time they go out, they manage to bring something back!”

“I think you’re right,” agreed Little Irene. “But I’m sure that this difference is intended by the SS: divide and degrade! Only ”they’ll‘ stick to that idea, and they’ll still feel resentment even when we’re back.“

I lost interest. Little Irene’s arguments were becoming political again; she was laying before us for the nth time a future blazing with social justice from which Fascists and Nazis were excluded. Four words filled my mind:
them,
the
others, us,
and
after.
Would the gulf that existed between us and them be spanned, or would it widen? Would there be enough survivors from the orchestra for the truth to emerge, or would all that would be known come from some few survivors of the camp who had cast a shocked glance in our direction and retained, in all good faith, only a subjective vision reflecting their feeling of the moment: envy, jealousy, anger, bitterness, or black humour?

Here at Birkenau no two five minutes were alike, and in that sense life in the camp world was more intense than in any city open to the world outside. And the world made itself felt here in so many ways: Paris was liberated; the Russians had won the war; Moscow was occupied; like Carthage, London had been destroyed! For a moment anything could be true, anything false. These pieces of news, whether true or false, had one point in common: they were always punctuated by selections. Thus the information which promptly followed the arrival of the letter that morning was staggering: “Girls, no more selections for us!”

It was so marvellous that it took us a few minutes to react. “What do you mean?”

“That they’re only gassing the new arrivals, the ones in the convoys.”

“Who said so?”

“A doctor, Dr. Mengele.”

“Where’s he breezed in from all of a sudden?”

“From the camp at Auschwitz.”

“Do we know anything about him?”

We didn’t yet, but the news wasn’t to be long in coming.

Mistrustful, like a fox sniffing poisoned bait, I turned this news over in my mind: of course, it had been specified that this statement concerned only selections made within the camp, and more especially those among the sick. That it should have been a doctor who said it didn’t strike me as an absolute guarantee. After all, it had been in the name of science that the Nazis had embarked upon the most abominable experiments on Jewish deportees; we were members of an inferior race, along with the Gypsies, just about good enough to act as guinea pigs. But there were some among the Germans who were not absolute monsters, and this one might be German rather than Nazi.

While my mind teased at this information the better to give itself over to enjoyment of it, the others had already abandoned themselves to joy unconfined.

The following days the news, retailed by the runners and Renate, Marta’s sister, was very good: Dr. Mengele had thoroughly cleaned, disinfected, and repainted a barracks and equipped it with real beds with sheets for the convalescents!

I might have still had my doubts had not Marie confirmed it all: Marie, whom I hadn’t known long, was a French Jewess, a young doctor of twenty-seven or so. I had met her at the end of a concert given in the infirmary, and we immediately took to one another. She was small, slight, with long chestnut hair and marvellous eyes a la Michele Morgan; her patients adored her.

For three days, happiness reigned; one piece of good news followed another: all the convalescents were going to be transported, were being transported, had been transported into the new Revier. You should have seen them, washed and clean, in their gleaming white beds. You should indeed: because at the end of the transport, on the third day, Mengele, the marvellous Mengele, had all four hundred of them gassed!

Hardly had we had time to react than we received news of the arrival of the SS, in full force: Kramer, followed by two lieutenants whose names we didn’t know, then Mandel and her two acolytes Drexler and Irma Grese, plus the astounding SS colonel I had first spotted at the Revier concert whom I now immediately felt inspired to call Graf Bobby. This was the name of a well-known character in Germany, the creation of a cartoonist of the kaiser’s time; corseted, monocled, he was elegance and snobbism personified. Beside my Graf Bobby, supremely elegant and indeed wearing a monocle, Kramer, squat and red-faced, looked like a butcher.

Accompanying them but standing apart was a tall, beautiful girl who must once have been marvellously slender but was now, naturally, too thin. I sensed that she was Jewish: she reminded me of the biblical Judith, with the addition of the tender gaze of the bride in the Song of Songs. Reasonably dressed, she wore neither triangle nor star, but an arm band saying “Chief Interpreter.” She looked very pale. Perhaps it was she who had ticked off the four hundred names of the women who’d just been gassed. In the camp, the chief interpreter acted as death’s bookkeeper, helping the officer in charge and crossing out the names of the condemned.

Faithful to their policy of disunion, the SS forced some prisoners to work against their comrades. Camp or block chiefs and work organizers, block overseers and administrators, food servers —these were all positions you could retain only by demonstrating great conscientiousness in the execution of orders, and exemplary zeal generally. Not to meet SS standards was to risk returning to your original position or being gassed. There was also a staff of prisoners, generally Polish and fifty in number, who shepherded people into the gas chambers. Their presence reassured the new arrivals, who reasoned as follows: “They’re not soldiers, they’re prisoners like ourselves leading us to the showers, so we can trust them.” For these people, the hands that took their garments, that helped their children and their old relatives to undress and handed them towels and soap, were brotherly hands. It was they too who loaded up the dead and threw their bodies into the ovens. Prisoners who refused these jobs were immediately gassed.

To recruit them the SS promised them an easier life. Their barracks was clean, the food better and more plentiful, their clothing adequate. All contact with the others, who despised them, was forbidden. On Sundays, weather permitting, they could be seen playing football.

One day a Pole belonging to this specialist group saw his wife, his son and daughter go into the gas chamber. Like a madman he galloped over to Kramer, managed to speak to him, and those present had the privilege of witnessing the amazing spectacle of Kramer tearing across the camp followed by the Pole, going with him into the gas chambers, and bringing out wife and children just in time. This was just one of innumerable incomprehensible gestures; it didn’t prevent the Pole from being gassed in his turn. Those who accepted this position to save their lives were in effect condemned—they knew too much and their reprieve lasted two months.

Observing the unbending stance of this interpreter, I wondered how much her task weighed upon her. How could she accompany someone like Tauber? We’d just learned one of his recent exploits: a couple of months previous he had brought a thousand women out into the snow, lined them up, entirely naked, in the freezing air, then, moving along their ranks, lifted their breasts with the tip of his whip. Those whose breasts sagged went to the left, those whose breasts remained firm went to the right and were spared a little longer, except of course for those who perished from the cold.

Learning about this form of selection, we compared the relevant portions of our anatomy. Apart from Little Irene, whose breasts were ravishing, with nipples like rosebuds, and Clara, whose breasts were full but still firm, the rest of us were flat as the palm of a hand. It was a fleeting form of security; Tauber might easily decree that this evident lack of femininity was a blemish.