Playing for Time (13 page)

The violins seized the tune; it rose soft and distant, then broadened and expanded its elusive melancholy. The commandant had closed his eyes, letting the music wash over him. From the table behind which I was writing I could observe him without danger. What a delight to see him relax, leave all thoughts of his arduous work behind him. Big Irene bent her cheek, hollow but still pleasing in outline, to her violin and attacked her solo with talent. This was the supreme moment: the melancholy attained a melting sweetness which must have wreaked havoc with Kramer’s tender heart. A few beats before the piece died away, slowly, as if regretfully, Herr Kramer raised his darkened eyelids; I noted in wonder that his codlike gaze was moist with tears. He had delivered himself up to his emotions and was allowing tears as precious as pearls to roll down his carefully shaven cheeks. What would the friends of the woman with the shattered head have thought?

Satisfied, he had relieved himself of his “selection” by listening to music as others might do by masturbating. Relaxed, the Lagerfuhrer shook his head and expressed his pleasure to Alma: “How beautiful, how moving!”

Then his expression changed, his eyes dulled: he saw us. Lice exist only to be exterminated. He pointed to me: “What does she do?”

Alma explained to him that I sang.

“What?”

“Madame Butterfly.”

I reflected that when I came back I wouldn’t be able to listen to a single bar of Puccini’s work.

He nodded. “Let her sing it.”

I was going to sing; it was a simple, normal action. It was also simple and normal that I should cast an eye over my audience. I saw Kramer and my heart began to beat violently; my hands, normally perfectly dry, were damp now. It wasn’t stage fright, the stakes were no higher than usual: it was quite as dangerous to comport oneself in such a way as to displease a warden as to embark on the great aria from
Butterfly
before the camp commandant. It wasn’t that. For me, singing was a free act, and I was not free; it was above all a way of giving pleasure, giving love, and I felt a frantic desire to see those three SS men stuck like pigs, right here, at my feet.

Standing in front of those men with their buttocks spread out over their chairs, with that parody of an orchestra behind me, I felt as though I were living through one of those nightmares in which you want to cry out and can’t. That cry would save your life, enable you to escape from the attendant horrors, and yet you lie there open-mouthed with no life-saving sound emerging. The kitchen lamp hanging at the end of its piece of wire had little in common with the warmth of a spotlight; and the grey walls with their ill-joined planks bore no relation to the soft gloom of a theatre with its suggestion of gold and velvet. Suddenly I had a vision of the nightclubs where I used to sing. Admittedly they were crammed with Germans, a positive mass of grey-green, but I was there of my own accord, willingly; singing was a cover, I was there only to deceive the better.

But that was in another country. Now our orchestra set to, and I began the countdown: three, two, one… Stage habits are stronger than anguish, and I sang, simultaneously freed and vanquished. No one would ever know how I struggled during those seconds. Certainly not Kramer, in whom I produced neither tears nor smiles. Turning towards Alma, he simply said,
“Ja, gut.”
Then, with the same delicacy he’d shown me, he pointed to Clara: “And her?”

“She sings too, Herr Kommandant.”

Relieved, sweating, I returned to my place behind the table, and Clara went forward; everything in her attitude proclaimed her pride, her joy at singing in front of the commandant. Was she to be envied or pitied? She sang “The Nightingale” by Alabieff in Italian; it was perfectly suited to her voice.

After having talked to Alma, who seemed satisfied, Kramer pointed to Flora, our Dutch accordionist, a large lumpy girl who carried her erstwhile fat in rolls of quaking flesh. His verdict, which Florette translated to me between her teeth, was alarming: “She’s not a very good musician, she shouldn’t be here.”

Living with fear hooked into our deepest being, we thought we were prepared for a sentence like that. We were wrong: we reeled.

“She can come and work for us; my wife needs a nurse for our daughter.”

Then he left his chair and padded towards my table like a mechanical bear; the whole room froze. Alma and her girls were standing, Tchaikowska, Marila, and Pani Founia were in the doorway at attention. I waited, seated in front of my scores, remaining seated; I put the right granted to our table to maximum use. They all held their breath. Beside me, Kramer examined my work. His thigh almost touched my shoulder; I could feel its warmth. He seemed immense; he leant over me, almost crushing me with the sheer volume of his flesh. I felt a violent desire to push him away so that I could breathe. His voice was loud and resonant.
“Was fehlt euch?”

I understood but didn’t answer. He repeated his question and Ewa translated: “He’s asking you if there’s anything you need.”

“
Ja
, Herr Kommandant, this…”

I handed him a pencil: not just any pencil but the one marked Made in England. I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. He took it and looked at it, his sea-green eyes impassive. Then he gave it back and turned away, as Ewa translated his reply: “He says you’ll get your pencils.”

Now he was talking briefly with Alma, who was smiling at him. I was beginning to find her obsequiousness with this most monstrous of SS chiefs quite unbearable. At last she escorted the revered visitor to the door and he went out, followed by the two faceless officers who had remained silent throughout.

There was a general sigh of relief. The girls swarmed round me. When I informed them of my pencil gesture, Florette burst out: “Are you quite mad?”

The usual insults followed. “That’s provocation,” growled Clara. One of the Poles seized the scandalous object and held it aloft: “Look what she dared to give the commandant.”

“You’re completely mad!” Florette shrieked. “I hope you realize that he’ll shove us in the gas chambers.”

They were verging on the hysterical; there was hatred in their eyes. “You have no right to risk our lives.”

They were really too stupid.

“Look, that’ll do!” I burst out. “We’ll end up there sooner or later in any case, and at least we’ll have done it in style! Personally I find it very amusing to have put ”Made in England‘ under his nose. If we’re going to be gassed, we might as well go smiling.“

Only Ewa was amused, and she wisely pointed out: “Luckily for you he hasn’t the wit to understand.”

“It’s Sunday, we’re on concert duty. We’ll have to get all tarted up,” Jenny explained to me. “They don’t let up, even on Sundays.”

Everyone had a childhood Sunday in her memory to moisten her eyes. There was irony in Ewa’s soft voice: “And on the seventh day, God rested…”

“While we’re going to have to act the fool for the SS,” groaned Florette. My stockings were torn; I sat there worriedly, a finger stuck in a hole in mid-calf. The possibility of mending it seemed remote. Wool, cotton, needle? Everything had to be bought, and I hadn’t any bread. You could borrow a needleful of thread, but you had to wait your turn. I’d hardly thanked Anny, who’d just helped me out with one problem, when another arose. The washing I’d done yesterday in our little basin—I’d been waiting my turn for three days—wasn’t dry yet. I wasn’t the only one; at least a dozen of us were in the same situation, and we were resigned. “We’ll play with nothing on under our dresses,” concluded Little Irene. Mercifully the concert wasn’t in the open air.

Our shoes needed cleaning and we rubbed them vigorously as best we could, with paper or a bit of rag. Some girls actually stole bits of my music paper despite my shrieks. They were willing to put up with any number of inconveniences to have clean shoes. The first thing Alma scrutinized was not our faces or our clothes, but our shoes:
Schuhe putzen—Cl
ean your shoes—was a well-known refrain, and the rule was that your shoes had to be cleaned and polished every day. With what? For our masters too, the most important item in our dress was the state of our shoes. I don’t know whether this concern for appearance was part of Nazi ideology, but it certainly occupied a key position in their lives. Furthermore, their shoes and boots always shone and smelled: I shall never forget the smell of German leather. Despite its unpleasant odour, I would have liked to get my hands on some of their shoe polish. People must have brought it with them; it was a precious substance. There was no iron either, yet there must have been irons in the luggage. Perhaps there was a dearth of irons in Berlin. For the moment we smoothed our dresses with our hands, pulled at our skirts, and flattened the pleats with our nails. Part of this Sunday was spent getting ourselves clean and presentable; we mustn’t shock the gentlemen, we had to be an agreeable sight rather than the reverse, and “correct” above all. In Paris, propaganda vaunted their “K”orrectness.

These little chores became miserably trying due to the shortage, or absence, of everything. If Alma chose, she could have said a word to Mandel and our life would have changed, but for some reason she wouldn’t.

The other evening, on one of her rare visits to our dormitory, she had seen me massaging the nape of Clara’s neck and called me over. “Do you know how to massage?”

“No, not really, but I can soothe headaches.”

With a romantic gesture she drew her long, sensitive fingers over her forehead. “I too have terrible pains; in French you call it…”

“
Migraine
, madame.”

My reply was no longer of any interest to her: “Are you happy here, you and your friend Clara?”

I was amazed by the question, and even more amazed that she could ask me it. Had her life ever held anything other than music and German discipline? The rights of the conductor, the respect and obedience due to him? Did it enter her head that we might be something other than a sort of musical infantry, to be slapped and driven as the will took her?

It was a little before four in the afternoon when, Alma at our head, we made our entrance into the Sauna, where our concerts were held in the winter and when it was raining. My role as singer enabled me to be a spectator too.

The interior of the immense building known as the Sauna was odd and unpleasant. Its precise function remained unclear: showers, disinfection centre, a sorting centre when numbers rose too high. It had a concrete floor and its walls, also of concrete, were rough, a dingy greyish shade. The whole thing was about as attractive and cheering as a dungeon. It was lit by bare, swinging bulbs. There were no windows, only long narrow skylights lost in the upper gloom.

Up there on our platform, I had an aerial view of things, and this gave me a feeling of detachment. It was a strange sight: I’d thought I was dead and entering paradise when I entered the music block; here, I might be in the antechamber of hell. It was grey, colourless, sinister.

I closed my eyes and for a few moments enjoyed the familiar sounds of a concert hall: the shuffling of feet, the scraping of instruments tuning up, coughing, mumbling, a few discreet laughs, someone blowing his nose; safe ground for me, a brief pause but so soothing. I opened my eyes again and examined our audience. I might have been in the Philarmonie Konzertsaal in Berlin or the auditorium of the Paris Opera. Seated on perfectly aligned chairs, there they were, the officers and gentlemen of the SS, wrapped stiffly in their heavy greatcoats, some with an enviable fur collar. The long leather topcoat of the lovely Frau Mandel opened elegantly to reveal her silk-clad legs.

It was very cold; we were shivering, naked beneath our dresses. A slip may not be much, but its absence is certainly noticeable.

A little farther back, on roughly made steps, were seated the aristocrats of the camp, marked with the black triangle of the asocial; those delicate beings had unshaven hair and sat at ease in comfortable clothes. Regarded as regenerate, they were being punished and not exterminated.

Set apart, another group: the nurses, doctors and, with them, a few sick people whose eyes, too large for their monkeylike faces, betrayed obscure alarm at being there. An SS officer had turned round and his gaze fell on the group from the Revier. He said something to his neighbour, who looked at them in his turn; then they both nodded their heads, clearly satisfied. It was indeed satisfying that sick people should be present at these Sunday concerts. And tomorrow, with the same striking logic, they would consider these wrecks as superfluous and would gas them.

Farther back still, isolated and penned in like cattle, at the obligatory position of attention, the grey troupe of deportees was half-sunk in shadow. I could see only the first few rows. I couldn’t bear to look at them.

Stirring, lively, blaring, the Sousa march was belted out briskly and conscientiously by Alma. Whatever the artistic quality of the piece played, it still had to be played with scrupulous correctness.

For me, the real public was the teetering hordes of deportees. This morning, in their block, the door had opened and the blockowa had shouted:
“Achtung!
A hundred women for the concert!” Some had gone voluntarily, those who still had the strength to remember that they’d once found pleasure in listening to music. The others had been ordered here.

Lotte sang, Clara keeping a jealous and worried eye on her. Some Germans got up and went out. Lotte noticed and began kneading her handkerchief furiously till it was a wet ball in her damp hand. She sat down, angry and alarmed. The inevitable “Blue Danube” uncoiled its romantic curlicues. Like refractory children, the “black triangles” began to rock discreetly. How charming the music was, what pleasure it gave. How lovely it would be to waltz…

Then suddenly something amazing happened: in the deportees’ group, some women began humming. It was so inconceivable that the girls in the orchestra craned their necks to look; some officers, stiff-necked, chins lifted, turned too, presumably scandalized that they dared sing. But no! They had deigned this slightest of gestures not to punish the grey mass that had dared to hum, but to reward them with a glance. Not able to pick out any one in particular, they bestowed this proof of their satisfaction on all: approvingly, the SS smiled at the deportees.