Playing for Time (31 page)

I didn’t know why she had come to us. Perhaps she wanted to hear
Madame Butterfly,
I thought; but no, she’d come to show us the orphan whose mother had been gassed. She didn’t make the connection; her brain, like all German brains, was compartmentalized like a submarine, made of watertight sections. The execution of the Polish women had nothing to do with her.

Seated on a chair in our music room, the child on her knee, she was delighted when we clustered round her, as proud as a mother: “He’s pretty, isn’t he?” Standing on her knee, the baby trampled her cheerfully; she didn’t care that his little shoes were dirtying her uniform. He put an arm round her neck and kissed her with a round mouth daubed with chocolate, and we saw, we heard Mandel
laugh.
Then she went off, holding the child by the hand; he trotted along at her side, and I noted that she slowed down her military gait to his teetering walk.

For about a week she paraded the child proudly through the camp.

“Well,” said Big Irene to me, “perhaps she’s not as bad as all that.”

Anny was more cautious. “With her, it’s best to reserve judgment.”

Each day the baby had different clothes; apparently she was driving the Canada girls mad, asking them to undo all their parcels—she wanted only blue clothes. The child was a positive passion with her. Then quite late one night, when the wind was driving the rain viciously against our windows and most of us were in bed, Mandel was announced. She came in wearing a big black cape. Abnormally pale, eyes ringed, she asked for the duet from
Butterfly.
Lips pursed, her face impassive, she seemed very remote. I saw inexplicable anguish in her eyes. When the duet was over she got up and went out, without a sign or word of satisfaction.

The next day Renate, Marta’s sister, told us that Mandel herself had taken the child to the gas chamber. There was violent reaction.

“How awful. How could she do such a thing? Why?” asked Ewa.

Marta was silent, but I knew what she was thinking: “Mandel is German, like me, and she dared to do that.”

Some of us simply wept over this incomprehensible drama, over this child. And without knowing it, over this woman. The Hungarians expressed it in their own way by saying that she had trampled over her own heart. But why? Many of them avoided the question by saying that she was mad, purely and simply. I protested that she wasn’t, that it was too easy to deny her responsibility. Big Irene turned eyes gleaming with tears in my direction.

“Do you know why?”

“I can think of an explanation. Mandel is a convinced Nazi, a fanatic. She has no right to give her heart or mind to anything other than National Socialism, no right to let a feeling take precedence over doctrine. No right to keep a human being from the gas chambers, even a child. It’s not she who knows what’s good for the party, for the Reich, it’s her bosses. She couldn’t continue to disobey.”

“Perhaps,” said Sylvia dreamily. “In my opinion that innocent child has gone straight to heaven, and he’ll protect us.”

I wondered whether this rigour had come from Mandel’s past. She was an Austrian, born in Upper Austria, and people said that she had had a Jewish lover and had been punishing herself ever since. But before coming to Birkenau she had been warden at Ravensbruck, and so well thought of that she had been raised to the position of head of our camp.

People said… people said… But a little child had given her his trust, had slipped his fist in her big hand like a bird slipping into the hollow of a nest, and she had dared to lead him to his death.

Time Runs Out

OUR SS seemed uneasy, their morale was crumbling. They came and went and were even more unpredictable than usual. They selected madly, but their hearts weren’t in it; it wasn’t that joyful work we’d witnessed in the past. Still, Tauber had just hit on an excellent idea: naked—there didn’t seem to be any alternative to this costume, though of course you don’t clothe cattle—and at attention, the women had to stretch out their arms in front of them, and those whose arms trembled were sent to Block 25. What astounded me was that there were any which didn’t.

Mengele was more subtle, as befitted his superior class. The description Marie gave us of selections in the Revier poisoned my thoughts for days. He asked one girl who screamed incessantly what she was afraid of. Was her conscience bothering her? he wanted to know.

For nights now we’d been hearing waves of planes; they weren’t Messerschmitts either, no mistake about it, they were the Allies. I had been awoken by dull sounds like those of bombs falling. Our great fear was that while waiting, in order to efface all signs of their camps, the SS could still kill us all, down to the last one; I fell asleep with this phrase in my head: all, down to the last one. I must have been asleep for a couple of hours when an SS man came into the music room shouting and demanding the orchestra. Sonia came running, Maria fell upon us. It was so dark that we couldn’t see him and didn’t recognize his voice, which was so slurred that Jenny commented nervously: “This is our first drunken SS; let’s hope he isn’t a mean drunk.”

Anny hazarded a glance in his direction. “It’s Florette’s SS man.”

The German and Polish girls quaked; he had a terrible reputation with them. A few days before, a monstrous SS had come into our block—we’d never seen anything so frightful; any monkey would have been better-looking than that creature. He had come through our two rooms, growled something incomprehensible, then gone away again without anyone’s knowing why he’d come. Florette, in an inventive mood, had burst out: “Careful now. We’ll have to play well for him. No wrong notes.”

“Why?” they all asked.

“He’s the new head of the crematoria.”

Our group immediately realized that this was nonsense, but Florette, animated by her own joke, went on. Determined that Sonia should understand, she asked me to explain to her, which I gladly did, further embroidering the matter with some skill: “If we manage to charm him with our scrapings, he may give us an extra whiff of gas, and it’ll be over that much more quickly.” Then, shockingly, we laughed.

This night there was no more laughter. Head of the crematoria or not, this drunken German meant business.

He bellowed: “Out!
Raus! Kommt! Schnell!”
He wanted hit tunes and Gypsy songs. Jenny nudged Ewa the Hungarian: “It’s up to you—keep the brute sweet.” Shivering—the nights were now cold—the complete orchestra played in front of our entirely empty barracks. He had insisted that everyone should be present at the concert given in his honour. Thoroughly drunk, facing us, he beat time with his arm. At once stiff and swaying, he looked like a badly regulated automaton, beating time out of time. We certainly had our share of grotesque sights.

Luckily for us his drunkenness was not the vicious sort, but sentimental and tearful. Lili played her violin right into his ear, Gypsy style, causing him to weep copiously. The comedy lasted perhaps an hour and then we went back in, not without having noticed strange lights flickering in the sky, followed by more distant rumblings. We told ourselves that the fighting was getting closer.

The next day we learned that our SS had been having a farewell soiree before his departure for the front.

“If things go on like last night, he won’t need to walk far to meet a soldier’s death,” remarked Jenny.

The SS man got drunk because he was leaving the safety of the camp, where he was one of the masters of death; both master and servant, he was paying death his tribute with the lives of others, so what did he fear from her? Precious little, nothing more than in ordinary life: an accident, an illness. He wasn’t going right up to her, he wasn’t provoking her; but the front was something quite different. Heroes are softened if they’re made into executioners! But why were his comrades drinking? Before selections, to give themselves courage? Afterwards, to forget?

“Why?” I asked Marie.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Like all the rest, out of fear.”

The approaching moment of judgement demoralized them.

We relished their agitation, their unrest. It amused us to see them straining to hear the noise of the aeroplane engines and rumblings that shook the night quiet. We suddenly thought we heard cannonfire as well, the dull thud of bombs; I even convinced myself I heard rifle fire. As far as I was concerned, it was the Russians who were coming to our aid; the Cossacks had become my dream knights, my liberators. There again I might have been moving rather too quickly, certainly more quickly than they!

Meanwhile, the mood was tense. Florette had just been caught for stealing three potatoes. Like a child, confused, she repeated: “It was for Little Irene. I wanted to make her those potato cakes she likes so much.” This recipe was her triumph. She had pierced a number of holes in a jam-tin lid, and with it she scraped the potatoes, then mixed them with a bit of margarine, and made them into cakes which she threw into boiling water; when they were cooked, she added a sauce of simmered onions, a real treat. But this wasn’t the time for recipes. Faced with the scandal aroused by Florette’s action, Maria slapped and insulted her.

Sonia, informed of these matters by her dear friend, decided to take the thief to Mandel to ask for an exemplary punishment. The farce had become a drama and the drama could yet become tragedy: Florette could well be sent to a work detachment or to Block 25. Sonia, furious, grabbed her by the scruff of her neck like a kitten and dragged her outside.

“Where’s she going?” asked Big Irene, worried.

I didn’t answer, but I pushed past the sniggering Maria and ran after them. I caught up with them in the main thoroughfare. At arm’s length, held firmly in Sonia’s hard peasant’s grip, Florette, snivelling, looked a real little urchin. In Russian, in my coldest, most contemptuous voice, I warned Sonia:

“If you go to Mandel, if you touch her, tonight we’ll suffocate you in your bed; we’ll put you under the mattress and sit on you until you die.”

She took stock of me with her cunning little eyes, assessing the seriousness of the threat. She had to believe me. She did. She let Florette go and back we went.

It was evening and we rehearsed mechanically; we were like those automata you see at fairs. There were whistles, shouts, mad galloping, then the air-raid warning. This was something new. Heavily, with a thud of boots and clink of arms, the valorous members of the SS ran to shelter. What a heartwarming, comforting sight. Powerful, a lid of sound, the engines of the bombers outdid all else. The women were driven back into the blocks with shouts and rifle blows. Crowded at our windows and at two open doors, we watched them, shouting that we were here! There was no antiaircraft defence; the Allies ruled the skies. Crouching in their shelters, the SS were powerless. The bombs began to fall, aimed at the crematoria, the gas chambers. It made me weep with joy. Ecstatically I shouted: “Look at the gentleness, the precision, it’s as though they were laying them down by hand.”

In our enthusiasm we had opened the door and were standing on the threshold. The searchlights on the watchtowers and all other lights were out, darkness was complete. Suddenly, brutally, a violent light tore through the darkness, a deafening noise shattered it. I shrieked with terror, prey to a real fit of hysterics. It was so unexpected that the girls thought I was wounded; no one could believe that I was quite simply frightened silly.

“Hey, girls, today we’ve got something to celebrate!” We looked at Jenny blankly.

“First of November, eve of All Souls, the day of the dead!” Her humour escaped us.

Tomorrow there was to be a concert in the infirmary and we’d have to play well: Mengele might be there. I was worried; gradually Alma’s teaching was fading. As Florette said of Sonia: “What is good is that we can play a different piece from the one she thinks she’s conducting without her noticing.” There was also a very definite dissatisfaction on the part of the SS, who no doubt had other things to think about than frequenting our music room; the day we interested them not a whit—that was something not to think about.

“Shower, girls!”

It was a marvellous moment we never ceased to cherish; for us, this shower was life. Towels under our arms, soap in hand or pocket, collars up against the cold, we marched off. In the grey sky, the usual smoke with its smell of death lay still and heavy.

It had rained, and we paddled through mud. We would have to clean our shoes when we got back. We could have done with some new stockings, but this certainly wasn’t the moment to ask.

When we got back, in the fading light, we all felt rather heavy-hearted; the rain penetrated our clothes and we dreaded the approaching winter. Soon there’d be snow; in the meantime the rain was icy.

“Halt! Achtung!”

Before us, helmeted SS men, weapons on their hips, legs apart, were blocking our route. This was the end. It had to happen; my heart beat only slightly faster. I had expected to be more frightened.

It was raining harder now; we were cold. We put our towels on our heads. What ought we to do with the soap? I slid mine into my pocket and touched my little notebook. I swore that that book should burn with me.

“Jews to the left, Aryans to the right!”

A well-known refrain. The SS let our Aryan comrades go by, one by one; Bronia, Alia, and Olga gave us a discreet wave of the hand and Haline a smile; Ewa, once through the barrage, turned and caught my eye. I could see her standing outside our block looking at us fixedly as one might look at a condemned man. I smiled at her.

The SS surrounded us, whistles blew. Five by five. The order to march was given. We turned our backs on the crematoria but it was still too soon to rejoice at that, because with them it meant nothing. We went towards the Sauna. Often, when things got crowded, the selected were sent there. As a variant for us, we were taken into the basement. We didn’t talk, we didn’t dare. Each knew what the other had to say and didn’t want to hear it. I don’t know how long we stood locked in that basement. Our brains, wound up like music boxes, reeled off the endless refrain: “The orchestra is over. Will we go straight to the gas chamber or through Block Twenty-five? The orchestra is over. Will we go straight…”