Playing for the Commandant (21 page)

Papa?

I turned and ran to my old school. I don’t know why I ended up there, outside the music-room window. I guess I hoped Papa might be there, waiting for me. He’d often stop by the music room. He liked to watch me play. I wiped an arc across the frosted windowpane and saw the violins, flutes, and cymbals stacked on their shelves; the trumpets on the floor, the trombones next to them, and in the middle of the room, my piano. I’d spent more time at that piano than in the lunchroom with my classmates.

I stumbled on until I reached the synagogue on Pásti Street. I wasn’t looking for God, just somewhere to sleep for the night. Rabbi Myerson sat hunched on a wooden chair by the pulpit. His gray suit was creased and worn, his eyes dull. He looked up from his prayer book.

“Hannale, you’re alive! When I came out of hiding . . .” He shook his head. “The synagogue’s empty. I’d hoped there were others who had hidden, like me, others with brave neighbors.” He paused. “Birkenau?”

I nodded.

“How did you escape the march?”

I didn’t answer for a long time. I was thinking about Karl. He’d chosen me at the audition. He’d offered up the name of his fifth-grade geography teacher when I was caught playing Mendelssohn, and warned me about the infirmary. He’d lied to his father to keep me from being evacuated, and followed me into a snowstorm to keep me safe. He was the reason I was still here.

“A brave boy helped me.”

“And your parents? Your sister?”

I shrugged. “I was hoping you would know.”

The rabbi put his hand on mine. “You’ll find a bed and a warm meal at the Jewish Community Center on Radnor Street, and a notice board on the first floor.” He shifted in his seat. “If your parents are alive, their names will be on it.” He looked down at the yellowing pages of Hebrew script. “I pray they were spared. They were good people.”

The community center on Radnor Street had been converted into a home for refugees. It was a shelter for those who had been turned away from their homes. I found the notice board the rabbi had spoken of. I ran my finger down the list of survivors until I reached the letter
M.
There was only one name under Mendel:
Hanna Mendel, discharged from Auschwitz, 14th February, 1945
. I sank to the floor.

“Just because their names aren’t there doesn’t mean they didn’t survive.”

I looked up at the sound of a familiar voice. A young man with a thin face and a thick red beard hovered over me.

“Not all the camps have been emptied. I’m waiting for my mother. We were separated in Auschwitz.” He looked down at me. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

I shook my head.

“It’s me, Michael Wollner.” He held out his hand and helped me to my feet.

“You’ve changed,” I said.

We all had.

Michael showed me where to collect my blanket and bowl and how to register for my weekly allowance of 22 pengö. We sat in the school hall, ate dinner together, and talked until they turned the lights out. We talked about Auschwitz and our lives before the war and what we planned to do next. He had so many plans. Mostly he wanted to start over. He’d heard of Jews being smuggled into Palestine. He planned to join them and help build the Jewish state. He was learning to fight. He was training to get strong.

“Dachau, Bergen-Belsen — there are dozens of camps the Russians haven’t reached. When they do, that list downstairs will run to ten pages. Maybe our parents’ names will be on it.”

I hoped he was right.

“You’re not the boy I remember from school.” A moment passed before he answered.

“I guess I’ve grown up. You’re exactly the same as I remember.”

He smiled and I smiled back. It felt good to be Hanna Mendel from before the war. A girl who had parents. A girl who had plans. A girl with a scholarship. I wanted to be that girl again. Maybe with Michael I could be. My smile wasn’t as wide as his, but it was a start and it felt good. It was easy with Michael, uncomplicated. We were both caught halfway between the past and the future. I didn’t tell him about Karl.

We agreed to meet up again in the morning. Michael went upstairs to the men’s wing, but I couldn’t sleep. I wandered the corridors, looking for a music room, somewhere I could find myself and lose myself at the same time. I found a door on the third floor marked
ORCHESTRA.
I pushed it open, fumbled around for a switch, and turned on the light. The instruments had all been packed away, but in the center of the room was a shiny black piano. Butted up against it was a mattress. And curled up on the mattress, like a question mark, was my sister.

“Erika! Erika, it’s me!” I shook her awake.

She blinked at the light, then she blinked at me.

“Hanna!” she shrieked as she leaped from her bed. “Hanna!” she cried, and she wrapped me in her arms. “Hanna!” she whispered, and tears rolled down her cheeks.

We clung to each other like limpets, repeating each other’s names, stroking each other’s hair, kissing each other’s cheeks. I didn’t tire of hearing her say my name. I planted a kiss on her nose. She was alive. My sister was alive. I grabbed Erika’s hands and spun her around, once, twice, three times, till we were both dizzy with happiness.

Erika pulled me onto the mattress. “When you didn’t see my name on the list of survivors, you must’ve thought I was dead. My name’s not there because I wasn’t liberated from a camp,” she said. “I escaped. I made it to Debrecen very late last night, found this place, and snuck up here, and when I saw the music room, well, it seemed like the perfect place to wait for you.”

“You escaped?”

Erika’s smile disappeared. “You waved me good-bye at the main gate, remember? It was snowing. We’d been told we were going to work in a factory. I knew they were lying. I wanted to say good-bye. I wanted to tell you I wasn’t coming back, but I knew you’d come with me or make a scene, and I couldn’t let that happen.” Erika shook her head. “We walked for hours. People collapsed in the snow. The guards shot anyone who couldn’t keep up. I was so tired and cold, but I kept going. I had to keep going — I knew you’d be waiting for me.”

“And you did. . . .” I kissed her cheek.

“But if Piri hadn’t been there . . .”

“Piri?” I stared at her.

“Piri was on the same march. She dragged me through the snow. I never would’ve made it without her.” She stood up and walked to the window. She looked shrunken, diluted. “We walked for two days, maybe more. A Polish prisoner told us we were headed for a train station. Piri said we weren’t getting on any train. She knew I wouldn’t survive another day without food, so she came up with a plan. The next time someone stumbled and the guards took aim, we’d collapse and pretend we were dead.”

“The guards could’ve shot you.” My stomach clenched.

“It was a chance we had to take.”

I rose from the bed and walked to the window. I held Erika’s small hands in mine and waited for her to continue.

“At the next round of gunfire, we both fell to the snow. The prisoners marched past. When we finally raised our heads, there were no prisoners or guards, just a few Polish peasants with a cart. They were collecting bodies, clearing them from the road for the SS. When they went to pull Piri from the roadside, she told them the Red Army was closing in and that if they spared us, we’d speak well of them if they were charged as collaborators.”

“So the plan worked?”

Erika nodded. “They helped us onto the cart and drove us to their farm. They let us sleep in the stable and share the scraps they fed their pigs. We hid there till the Russians arrived. Then I came looking for you.”

“And Piri?” I held my breath. I imagined my teacher renting an apartment near the Karlsplatz and playing piano with the Vienna Philharmonic, or living near the Parc de la Villette and teaching piano at the Paris Conservatory.

“She’s headed for Italy and, from there, to Australia.”

“Australia?”

Erika nodded. “It’s as far away from Europe as you can get.” She turned toward me, her eyebrows raised. “We could join her. Or we could go somewhere else. New York. London. We can start again. I’ll go to university; you can play piano.”

I shook my head.

“Erika, we’ll need to get jobs. The money Papa left us . . . I dug up the ground. It’s . . .”

Erika’s face split into a smile. She lifted the mattress from the floor.

“Here?”

Under the mattress was Father’s cookie tin. Erika tossed it to me. I pried open the lid and pulled out father’s pocket watch — 11:46 p.m. It was still keeping time.

“Paris and New York sound wonderful.” I wrapped my arms around my sister’s narrow waist. “But we’re not going anywhere. Not till we’ve heard about Anyu and Papa.”

I dragged a mattress into the music room, and we set up a makeshift home. We slept together, between the piano and the wind instruments. We ate in the hall and showered on the third floor, in the women’s gymnasium. I wanted to return to Hatvan Street and demand our apartment back, but Erika was against it. The military police wouldn’t help us, and Erika had heard of too many Jews being chased from their homes. When Mr. Faranc, our neighbor, forced his way back into apartment 12A, I begged Erika to reconsider. But when Mr. Faranc’s body was found floating facedown in Lake Bekas two days later, I dropped the subject.

The days snaked past slowly. Daylight lengthened, melting the last of the snow. We agreed not to mourn for our parents, not till we knew. We looked for their names on the first-floor notice board every morning before breakfast and every evening before bed. We looked for them at the synagogue and at the doughnut shop in Hatvan Street. We put up posters at the train station. We celebrated Passover in March at the Community Center and left two empty chairs at the Seder table, just in case. We set aside a bowl of chicken soup for Anyu and saved a slice of gefilte fish for Papa, but we celebrated the end of slavery under Pharoah — and our own liberation — alone.

I told Erika about Karl and our last days together. I didn’t tell her that remembering him hurt, or that I thought of him almost as often as I thought of Anyu and Papa.

“Karl did the right thing,” Erika told me, “and so have you. You had to let him go, for both your sakes.”

I tried to let him go. I tried to fill the emptiness with music. I practiced piano every day. I played every composer Hitler banned and every piece of music the commandant detested. I practiced till my fingers hurt. With my weekly allowance from the relief fund, I didn’t have to work, so I filled my days reading books and hiking in the hills. I did all the things I’d dreamed of doing in the camp. I picnicked in the park with friends. I went to the circus, and I taught myself to ride a bike. I went to my first wedding.

There were so many weddings in Debrecen, so many people looking to replace lost loves and lost children. I wasn’t looking to replace a lost love. I was looking for the old Hanna Mendel, the girl I used to be — the woman I was meant to become. So I let Michael trail after me as I wandered Debrecen’s roadways, and I let him accompany me to the park when I fed the ducks. I let him sit in the music room and watch me practice. It felt good being with someone who understood how I ached. It felt good being among my own people. After everything that had happened, I was still a Jew. Not because I’d been locked in a cattle train or branded with a tattoo. Baking challah with my mother, lighting the Sabbath candles, eating latkes on Hanukkah — that’s what being a Jew meant.

I couldn’t run from it. And I didn’t want to.

The number of concentration camp survivors grew, but my parents’ names didn’t appear on the list. In April, three camps in Germany — Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau — were liberated, and the list on the first-floor pin-board ran to six sheets. On the eighth of May 1945, Germany surrendered and the war was over. On the tenth of May, the printed list of survivors was taken down.

Erika and I sat shiva that day. We mourned for our parents as Jewish custom demanded. We tore our clothes and sat on low stools and prayed to God to protect their souls. I didn’t play the piano. We didn’t go out. We clung to each other and the memories we shared: Father at his workbench, smiling over his spectacles; Mother in the kitchen, humming to Bartok as she baked. We didn’t have photos to pore over. I couldn’t run to my mother’s dresser and inhale her perfume or fling Father’s drawers open and find a scarf to put on. There were no mementos of their life with which we could comfort ourselves, no bits left behind, so we told each other stories and helped each other remember.

We hid in our cocoon, but we had to emerge eventually. After seven days of mourning, we bathed and dressed. We lit a memorial candle and placed it on top of the piano beside Papa’s pocket watch. I played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody for my mother, and Erika sang my father’s favorite Yiddish lullaby, the same one he’d sung to us every night when we were young. We kept the pocket watch to remember Father, and Mother’s wedding band to remember her, and buried the skullcap and prayer book by the lake in the Puszta forest.

I stood over the sad mound of dirt and tried not to cry.

“A gold watch and a wedding band,” I said. “That’s all we have left of them.” I looked at Erika. “Papa would have wanted a Jewish burial, like Opapa’s.”