Playing for the Commandant (6 page)

I looked at the women fighting to stand over the rusted basins. Stripped naked, they bent over the cracked porcelain, struggling to scour the dirt from their bodies without soap.

I turned to leave.

“You’re not washing?” Erika asked.

My skin felt itchy, my scalp, too, but it all seemed like a waste of energy, washing our faces with festering water, drying ourselves with our dirty dresses.

“I can’t see the point.”

“The point is to stay human.” Erika bent over a bowl of brown water and splashed her face. “We mustn’t become animals, Hanna. That’s what they want.”

I walked back to the barrack with the Markovits twins. At school I’d always been able to tell them apart. Lili wore her hair swept up in a ponytail. Her ribbons were blue. Agi preferred pink and always wore braids. Now they were bald. I looked from one to the other.

“I’m Lili. That’s Agi,” Lili said, pointing to her sister. “Don’t feel bad; even we get confused.”

“Did you lie to get in here, too?” I whispered, looking over my shoulder to see whether the block leader had followed us out.

“Lie? About what?” The twins looked confused.

“The man with the stick — he was sending children to the left and adults to the right. I said I was sixteen so I could stay with Erika.”

“He didn’t ask us our age,” Lili answered for both of them.

“But he asked lots of questions about us being identical twins,” Agi butted in. “He was so excited, you’d think he’d never seen a pair of twins.”

We stopped talking when the block leader returned from the washroom. I lined up with my tin cup behind Lili and Agi and waited for breakfast. I got a splash of cold black water and gulped it down. The block leader called it coffee, but it tasted like dishwater. A thin woman with peeling lips was bent over her cup, crying. The block leader put down her ladle.

“She doesn’t eat, so no one eats.” The block leader grabbed the pot of black water, kicked open the door, and hurled it outside. The woman looked up from her rusted cup.

“You want something to cry about?” The block leader glowered. “Outside! Now!”

The woman stood up and walked to the door. Her skirt was wet, but I couldn’t tell if it was coffee or fear that stained the fabric. The block leader followed her out, and the door slammed shut behind them. I looked about frantically. We weren’t allowed to cry? What else weren’t we allowed to do? No one met my gaze. The few women who had coffee tipped their cups up and drank hurriedly before the block leader returned. A girl was bent over in the middle of the room, her nose to the floor, sucking at the black drops that had dripped from the pot. Those without breakfast stared angrily at the door.

“Bitch,” someone whispered, but they weren’t talking about the block leader. They were talking about the woman who’d cried into her cup.

We lined up again, bookended by two women with green triangles and truncheons. My stomach grumbled.

“Work detail!” the block leader announced when she returned to the room, red-faced and panting. The woman with the peeling lips wasn’t behind her. “You’re here to work. Work and you’ll be fed.”

“What work will we be doing?” Erika asked, nervously eyeing the block leader’s whip. Her fingers fluttered to her face. Her cheek was still swollen. Her skin raw.

“Ditch digging, carting rocks, whatever you’re told. If you can sew or cook or do anything else useful with your hands, let me know and I’ll get you a job.”

Erika and I looked at Mother, then at each other. Mother could sew and cook, but we couldn’t let her out of our sight. She no longer knew what she was saying or where she was. If she stayed with us, we could protect her.

“There are easier jobs I can recommend you for.” The block leader lowered her voice. “All I expect in return is a small token of your appreciation.” She pulled a cigarette from her pocket and slipped it between her yellowing teeth.

We walked through the main gate, joined by other groups of weary women and a dozen armed guards. I thought I heard a violin amid the clatter of wooden shoes, and then the clash of symbols and the beat of a drum, but when I looked around, there was nothing but mud, and the farther we marched, the fainter the noise grew. We walked for an hour along dirt roads and through fields until we reached a quarry. The guards formed a sentry around a huge pit and ordered prisoners with whips to stand at the lip of the hole.

“
Los! Schnell!
Into the pit!” The guards raised their guns and fired into the air. I scratched my knee, scrambling down the rock face, but I didn’t cry — a prisoner with a whip was watching me, a smile on her lips. I wondered what they’d done to her to make her change sides.

“They’ve dug our graves,” the woman next to me cried out. “We’re all going to die!”

“Nonsense,” said Mother quickly. “We’re here to work.”

Erika was paired with Mother, and I helped a Polish girl with blistered ears.

“I’ve carted rocks for two years, and I’m still stronger than you,” she complained when, for the second time, I dropped a load of rocks. “You won’t last a week.”

You think I want to be here?
I wanted to yell.

Just beyond the quarry there was a forest of fir trees. Less than five minutes by foot, but it might as well have been ten miles. There was no escaping the quarry. There were a dozen guards with guns, and dogs circling the pit. If we tried to run, the block leader had warned, we’d be hunted down, and when we were found, ten of our bunk mates would be shot for our crime.

We stopped for lunch when the sun was overhead. The cabbage soup was gritty, but I licked the bowl clean. We dragged ourselves back to camp at nightfall. My scalp was burned, my feet were blistered, and my arms felt like lead. When we neared the main gate, I noticed the group quicken its pace. And then I heard music — the muffled beat of a drum and the clanging of cymbals, and that violin that had sung in my head. The sounds grew louder and more insistent as we approached the gate.

“A band!” Mother was wide-eyed as we marched past the watchtower. Just inside the main gate stood a welcoming committee — a band of prisoners in white collars and blue skirts, with violins tucked under their chins. They had sheet music and accordions, drums and cymbals. They were belting out a march. The prisoners forced their tired legs up and down in time to the hypnotic 4/4 beat. I missed my piano more than my bed, but this wasn’t music. This was grotesque.

As the summer months passed, I learned to block out the music and a lot else besides. I learned to keep very quiet and still when all I wanted to do was cry and scream and run. I learned that to care was weak and brutality a virtue in this upside-down world. I learned to hold a hand under my chin while eating bread so I didn’t waste the crumbs and to sleep holding my shoes and my cup so they wouldn’t be stolen. I learned to hang back in the food line because vegetables settled at the bottom of the pot. I learned that the fat get fed and the hungry stay hungry. I learned that political prisoners wore red triangles, homosexuals wore pink, and murderers boasted green — and the green triangles were the women you didn’t cross.

I got used to the smell of the latrines and the hard beds and the endless roll calls, but the gnawing hunger never eased. When the block leader was out of earshot, Erika and I would play games to trick our stomachs into thinking they were full. We’d plan sumptuous dinner parties and describe every dish in intricate detail, clutching our bellies and complaining because we were too full.

The days were difficult, but the nights were worse. In Debrecen, I’d dreamed of performing in Paris. In Birkenau, I dreamed of Papa. I knew my father would be okay. He’d been the finest watchmaker in Debrecen, and our block leader said there was work for those who were skilled with their hands. It was just that I missed him. I missed my mother, too — the mother I knew before the war. The one who sang me to sleep at night and never tired of watching me practice. The mother who washed my tangled hair every Saturday night and helped me with my algebra. The Mira Mendel who spoke four languages and sewed all my concert gowns by hand.

I thought of Piri often. I wondered whether she’d looked for me after the ghetto had been emptied. Piri had taught piano at my school for fifteen years, quitting when the principal stopped music classes for Jews. She taught me privately after that, cycling into the ghetto once a week with her satchel of sheet music. She brought Liszt and Chopin, but she also smuggled in Goldschmidt and Krenek and jazz music, even though it was banned. Piri couldn’t stand bigots.

I was thinking about my teacher when we were forced to congregate in the main square of Birkenau. I’d thought it strange that our barrack was invited to attend a concert, perverse even, given that the audience was composed of prisoners who had no choice but to attend. The conductor smiled at the guards seated in the front row and introduced her ensemble as the Birkenau Women’s Orchestra. Most of them wore yellow stars; all had scarves on their heads, white blouses, and pleated skirts. I recognized the violinist from the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. The woman sitting next to her was a famous flautist from France. Then Piri stepped into the spotlight.

What was my teacher doing here? She wasn’t Jewish. And why was she playing for the guards? She despised the SS. The conductor raised her baton, and Piri hunched over the piano. The conductor tapped at the lectern, and Piri’s fingers flew to the keys. She played Schubert, then Strauss, her performance flawless but cold.

The conductor took her final bow, and we were ordered back to the barrack. When the block leader stopped to congratulate the conductor, I slunk to Piri’s side.

“Piri, what are you doing here?” I pulled her behind a group of inmates.

“Hanna! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. When I didn’t see you, I worried that you’d been —”

I didn’t let her finish her sentence, I had too many questions.

“Why are you here, Piri?”

“Because I’m ‘sympathetic to the cause.’” She pointed to the red triangle on her striped shirt and rolled her eyes. “I teach Jews to play piano, so I’m politically dangerous.”

“How can you do it?” I asked, pulling away from her. “Play for them? Entertain them? I want to scratch their eyes out.”

Piri looked at me sadly.

“I want to survive. Orchestra members get extra rations. We don’t have to work.”

“Neither do the girls in barrack 24 who part their legs for the guards.”

“I want to get out of here alive, and I won’t apologize for it, Hanna.”

The block leader called our barrack to attention.

“I can get you into the orchestra. There’s room for another pianist. Think about it,” Piri said, slipping back into line. “We’re in barrack 14.”

“It’s the only way to beat them,” Erika said when I told her about my conversation with Piri. “Survive, and when you do, tell everyone what you saw —”

“And what they did to us,” I said, remembering Father’s parting words. “I just don’t know if I could live with myself.” I thought of the girls in barrack 24, their hair grown out, their lips painted red. I’d seen the guards go in there at night and come out again, buttoning their flies and straightening their shirts.

“Do it for Anyu, then. You could give her your extra rations. She barely escaped the last selection. If she gets any frailer, they’ll take her away.”

I watched my mother drag her feet through the mud. In two days, the guards would force us to hop up and down at the next selection so they could pick off the weakest among us. Last week a woman had tripped; another had collapsed. They were taken by the guards and hadn’t come back.

I slipped away the next morning, after the block leader left for the washroom. I ran to Piri’s barrack and knocked on the door. No one answered, so I swung the door open and stepped inside. A stove was burning in the corner of the room, a pot of coffee bubbling on the flame. I closed my eyes for a moment and inhaled, the smell tugging me back to our kitchen in Debrecen.

There were beds with straw pallets, blankets, and sheets, and at the foot of each bed, there was a small washbasin and soap. Farther along the wall was a podium cluttered with music stands and a wooden table buried under sheet music. I didn’t stop to look at the music; I walked straight to the piano.

I’d never played a Bechstein before. I ran my fingers over the keys, and the music reached out to me like an old friend. I flirted with Schubert and waltzed with Chopin. By the time I was halfway through Clara Schumann’s Second Scherzo, I was lost to the music. It seeped into the corners of the barrack and slipped under the sheets. The bunks blurred at the edges and the bars on the windows disappeared as the melody wrapped its arms around me and carried me away.

I didn’t hear the door open. I didn’t know I had an audience until a cymbal skimmed past the piano and clattered to the floor. I looked up from the keys. The conductor of the women’s orchestra was standing at the door. Behind her was Piri.

“Who the hell are you?” The conductor reached for a bar of soap and flung it at my head. I ducked for cover behind the piano’s sloping lid. “Get away from that piano!”

I slid from the seat and crouched on the floor.

“Frau Schroeder, if I may.” Piri stepped forward and faced the conductor. “This is Hanna Mendel, one of my students from Debrecen.”

I stood up and faced the conductor. My hands were shaking.

“She’s a talented pianist and —” Piri was pale.

“I don’t recall asking you to find me a musician.” The conductor took a step toward Piri. “Did I?”

“No, Frau Schroeder, but I thought —”

The conductor slammed the piano lid shut.

“I have no need for her.” She brought her face close to Piri’s. “And if she isn’t out of here by the time I sit down, I’ll call for the guards.”

I got back to the barrack just as the women were leaving for the quarry. I slipped into line behind my mother.

“I’m joining the Birkenau Women’s Orchestra,” I whispered in her ear. I needed to see her smile.

“That’s wonderful, darling. You’ll get to practice. You must keep practicing.” My mother smiled, but her eyes were sad.