Playing for Time (33 page)

“As you see,” Jenny commented, “they bring the good life right along with them.”

Arbeit! Arbeit!
They were probably just a few weeks, a few months, from defeat, and they behaved as if the war were never to end, or to end with their victory. No useless mouths in the great German Reich.
Arbeit, Arbeit!
Near the camp there was a factory that made cellophane, and we were ideal free labour, as the men at Auschwitz had been for I. G. Farbenindustrie. And let no one tell me that the bosses, the directors, the foremen, the workers who saw those pitiful gangs enter their workshops every morning didn’t know of the existence of the camps and the way the deportees were treated.

Each morning, the SS went into the barracks and demanded their contingent of workers, several hundred in all. The women who had shoes, like Lotte, Big Irene, Clara, Jenny, Marta, and Florette, went to work in the factory; the others, the barefooted ones, were sent to clear trees in the wood. It was only reasonable: one couldn’t decently send women to work in a factory barefoot! It didn’t matter for the work in the woods; if they caught cold or got hurt, they’d die more quickly. We soon learnt that in Bergen-Belsen that was how selections were made; drudgery would be the dealer of death.

And that was why, when I put myself forward for the work detachment, Florette pushed me back and presented herself in my place, and why Marta did the same for Little Irene. They were protecting us because we were the two smallest and frailest of our group.

Then we received a stupefying bit of news: Florette and Clara were appointed
kapos.
These appointments were a new and worrying development, and clearly provocative. At Birkenau, the
kapos
were recruited from among the Polish girls, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Germans. Not a single French girl; the SS didn’t trust them. Thus we had always been convinced that we were safe from the horror of becoming a
kapo.
Why had they chosen two musicians from the orchestra?

Physically one could understand the appointment better for Clara than for Florette. Big Clara must have struck them as sufficiently strong and imposing to play the role: shouting, punishing, beating. But Florette? Little Irene had a theory: Florette was quite big and not too thin, but more important, when she was angry she had a strength which couldn’t but please the SS, and they decided that they could use this power to their advantage. Irene could well have been right.

We knew what to expect from Florette by way of reaction: verbal abuse which would allow her to make use of her whole repertoire, but she would not use the hefty truncheon they would receive along with their
kapo’s
arm bands. We were equally convinced that she would help us in her own way, vociferous but fair, that she wouldn’t victimize anyone or abuse her rights. But what could one expect from Clara? This “honour” might be the last straw, might unleash the bad instincts I now feared she had, or it might allow her to be superbly generous, to prove that she had true control. Too often the “arm band” made the man; given half a chance, even worms turned. We were soon to know the answer.

Clara rose up before us, arm band in place, club in hand. Her very posture was significant; now she had lost even such humanity as had remained to her. Everything that was left of the timid, bashful young girl had just disappeared, destroyed once and for all by the environment of the camp. It was weeks now since I’d spoken to her. I thought I’d become indifferent to her, but at that moment I realized she still had the power to horrify me. She stood stolidly in front of our little group, like an evil power, thrusting her club challengingly under our noses:

“From now on, I’m the boss. It’ll be me who’s in charge. You’ll do whatever I say, and if you don’t, I’ll hit!”

“Whore,” Florette positively spat at her.

Clara lifted her stick. We all rose up together; as a group we felt invincible. She knew it and turned her back. But ours was clearly a brittle victory. We stared at one another in horror, conscious that we were going to have to fight against her. All my goodwill for Clara had evaporated, yet I still wanted to save her from herself. I went to look for her; cudgel in hand, legs firmly apart in the favourite pose of the
kapo
which she copied with evident relish, she watched me coming.

“Clara, look at yourself! You’ve become a monster. If you lash out at our friends, you’ll never dare to go back home. Remember your childhood, your girlhood, your parents… Clara, look at yourself!”

Her eyes shone with a positively mineral brightness, like coals. “Be quiet and listen to me. I’m through with your superior airs, your moralizing. Here, it’s me who’s the stronger, it’s me who’s in charge. I’ve heard enough, now get away!”

How sure she was of herself now that she had the right of life and death over a thousand women. She now had in her turn the right that others had had over her, and perhaps that explained everything. Clara was moved to a block next to ours. She was drunk with noise and violence, lashing out at unfortunate and already exhausted women. Indeed, to make extra sure of her power, she didn’t hesitate to choose the weakest. She strutted about, claiming with the conceit of an SS that her block was the most efficient.

I’d hardened my heart against her, and would have liked to forget her but she wouldn’t let me. One morning, while we were lining up in the cold near the water pipe, I saw her walking a few paces from me—she’d lost the ducklike waddle that had so moved me. With great victorious strides, her club tied to her wrist by a leather thong, she crossed our compound. The camp was divided in two by barbed wire, men on one side and women on the other. A little French girl whom we didn’t know had gone up to the wire.
Verboten!
She was so small that she had to stand on tiptoe, hands gripping the wire, and we could hear her calling anxiously: “My father! I’m sure he’s there!”

She turned to us, she was only a few steps away. “Do you think I could ask one of those men to get my father for me?”

We didn’t have time to warn her to come away; she was already shouting to a Frenchman: “Would you ask if Mr. Baum, Victor Baum, is there?”

Achtung!
Clara had seen her, Clara was upon her! With a vigorous slap she threw her to the ground, then seized her by the hair and dragged her through the mud and pebbles. How powerful and strong she felt, Madame
la kapo.
She hit this girl, this child, with a sort of sexual frenzy which verged on the obscene.

We were sickened, but that wasn’t all. Clara got her second wind and ordered the girl to pick up some large pebbles, which she had her bring in front of the block. The next day we found out why. She made the girl kneel on this layer of pointed stones, hands on her head. Her torture lasted all night. In the morning she was unconscious, half dead. The SS were satisfied, indeed pleased by this form of punishment. Clara had rounded the last bend.

In Bergen, as in Birkenau, the crematoria smoked, but what we didn’t know was who fed them. There were few transports, no
Blocksperres.
It was probable that new arrivals were given injections, but we didn’t know where, or by whom. There was no apparent selection. The girls who left the block in the morning came back in the evening; people didn’t disappear. The food was hideous, the Birkenau soups which Florette had described as “vomitatory” now seemed nourishing gastronomic miracles. Water was rationed and we couldn’t wash ourselves. Florette, who, as
kapo,
had access once a week to a sort of wash house, came to get me.

“I’m going to have a bath in a tub; you can use my water.”

It was a unique, privileged moment. But thanks to Marie, I profited from another, even more miraculous one.

Marie was our sole doctor. Kramer had given her two nurses and had set up a sort of infirmary in a small hut: several
cojas
on either side of a big table, no medical equipment, no medicaments.

Marie treated everything—dysentery, throat infections, tuberculosis, abscesses, gangrene—with placebos: little balls of bread crumbs which she had somehow managed to colour pink or green, and which she distributed parsimoniously because bread was virtually unavailable. But she accompanied these miracle pills with marvellous words, assuring her patients that they’d soon be better, and their conditions sometimes improved. Her only privilege was that she and her aides received a ration of SS soup, and every day she put aside half of her share for me. Without that, I would already have been dead of hunger: margarine was poison to me and I vomited our soup. I don’t know how I had the heart to swallow it, to deprive her of it. Marie too was hungry. One day I realized the greatness of her sacrifice when I noticed her gaze fixed on me as I ate it: her eyes were hypnotized by the movement of my spoon, and I understood just how much she coveted the portion she gave to me. But I ate it voraciously all the same. I hadn’t the strength of mind to refuse it. Here there was no Canada and the kitchens were inaccessible. There was no “organizing.” We just had to starve.

We dreaded the approach of Christmas. Already the memories of other Christmases were poisoning us, particularly the last, probably because it was the nearest. I had been at Drancy. Drancy was nice! I sang there. Thanks to our parcels, we had enough to eat. We dreaded talking about that date and yet we did nothing else.

Big Irene murmured: “I’d like to have a violin in my hands for Christmas!”

She did; Kramer, who gave an evening do for SS officers far from their beloved families, bethought himself of our existence and asked for musicians. Anny, Marta, Big Irene, Jenny, and Elsa were summoned. Anny complained that she didn’t want to play for them, that she’d rather be with us. The others felt the same and we promised to wait for them.

It might be a long wait. I had so hoped to spend Christmas “44 in France. The war was dragging on. Why didn’t our friends the English, Americans, and Russians sweep aside this vermin, since they had the strength and right on their side? With flame throwers, for instance? The image pleased me, and that Christmas night, usually characterized by the charitable phrase ”peace on earth, goodwill to men,“ would have seemed really miraculous only if men with flame throwers had roasted one another like ants, for mile after mile!

Like the other women in our block Little Irene and I were nervous. We’d been there for two months and were almost at the end of our tether. Once again, I examined our preparations for the celebration: with our bare hands we’d cleaned our corner as best we could. In a bowl, we’d arranged several branches of fir garlanded with a few bits of cellophane brought back by the girls who worked in the factory. I checked that I’d still got the bit of paper where I’d written Arvers’ famous sonnet from memory. That would be my present for Marie, who was often amazed that my memory was still so good. Here memories were weakening, and I’d narrate to them whole books,
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Racine, Moliere, Perrault’s fairy tales. We were going to give Marie the sonnet in a basket of woven cellophane made by Little Irene. Impatiently we awaited the girls who were playing for the commandant, and Marie, who was to join us after helping her patients get through the night, that night that was so marvellous in the world of the living!

We must have fallen asleep, because suddenly the others were back with us; for some reason I’d imagined that they would be carrying their instruments, but their hands were empty. How pathetic they looked, thin and grubby despite the effort they’d made to make themselves look presentable.

We hugged them, though we didn’t dare say “Merry Christmas.” That would have been going too far.

I asked how it had gone, and they answered laconically that it had gone well. I’d been imagining the reception at Kramer’s, food, champagne, tree, children, candles, lights—everything that made up Christmas and that we so cruelly lacked. Now I was silent, preferring not to hear or know anything about the evening they’d spent.

Anny gave me an odd enigmatic smile. “Do you know, Fania, they applauded us.”

We were struck dumb. Incredulous, Lotte repeated: “Applauded you?
Mein Gott!”

Florette burst out laughing. “They certainly must be feeling lousy to do that!”

Christmas began for us with the entry of Marie; she looked around, and her warm, all-inclusive gaze brought us a marvellous feeling of peace, of tranquillity. She had a way of smiling which gave you the right to happiness. And we began to sing softly, almost religiously:
Compagnons, dormez-vous?, Plaine, ma plaine,
Nicolacha’s song. In the other
cojas,
silence had fallen. Heads were raised, voices called for more. It was a miraculous moment. We sang and sang; and for the first time since we’d been “the orchestra girls,” since we’d played and sung for our comrades, we were applauded by them.

It was the best present we could have had. In the ensuing calm, Lotte’s raucous, sensuous, and still very lovely voice rose upwards from where she was lying, stretched out full length on her bunk, calmly embroidering some underpants with the initials of the
kapo
she was in love with.

Already our high spirits were giving way to a veiled tension. Florette left us and went to stretch out on her stomach on her mattress, where she burst out into great heaving sobs. Big Irene and I rushed forward and shook her: “No, darling, don’t. Control yourself, or we’ll all start.” Anny took her by the hand, pulled her up, and declared firmly: “Let us dine.” The magical elegance of the words enchanted us. Proudly, Big Irene announced that she’d “organized” something for dessert. Another magical word. She plunged her hand under her mattress and produced a large root, round and earthy.

“What is it?”

“A turnip. I stole it. You’ll see, cut into slices it tastes just like pineapple.”

Slices of bread, a soupgon of margarine, our midday soup we’d kept specially, plus the turnip. A feast!

It seemed to me that we were almost happy. Now we launched into endless descriptions of other feasts, the real mingling with the false. We must have been talking rather loudly, because people shouted at us from all sides: “That’s enough about your grub. We can hardly bear it, we’re so hungry.”