Playing for Time (26 page)

She exaggerated when she brought up the possibility of being thrown out of the orchestra; she didn’t really believe it. It was a way of insisting on first place: she needed to shine. In the evenings, since she couldn’t make any headway in our circle, Clara sat apart learning new songs which would enable her to supplant the others. She refused to admit that there was no longer any hope of that: her voice, which had been very lovely, had been affected by the conditions we’d been living in and it was losing its strength and subtlety. She would have to give up her ambition to be a singer at the Opera, which was a shame because she might well have succeeded, everything being in her favour: she was very gifted, very beautiful, and so absolutely self-centred that she would have been able to cast aside anything that might have hindered her progress. In normal life, all this could have remained quite
comme il faut,
but the camp, exacerbating all needs and all desires, had thrown a cruel light upon her. So many people who would normally have been pleasantly unremarkable became monsters in Birkenau.

Clara’s latest lover was an enormous flat-skulled brute of a German with a frightful reputation; he was said to be a sadist of a calibre that aroused envy even among the SS. When he had come to the block, his little grey eyes sunk between two folds of flesh and his enormous hamlike hands had made me feel positively unwell. Apart from his duties as
kapo,
he also lent a voluntary if professional hand in the exemplary executions that took place in the camp. I had asked Clara whether she realized exactly what sort of a man he was and what his profession had been before he’d been interned: “He was an executioner,” I said, “an assassin, and here he doesn’t even kill for money, but for pleasure. Clara, don’t do it, don’t go with him. When you go back home, you won’t be able to face yourself, your friends, your fiance, your family. The memory of that brute will poison your life. Stop—there’s still time. It’s better to die of hunger than be a prostitute!”

Her eyes became cold. “Leave me be. He brought me a bra, do you hear, a bra! And anyway, there have to be executioners. If it wasn’t he it would be somebody else.”

There was nothing surprising about delight at that particular present. Bras were rare, forbidden objects, and Clara set store by them, particularly as she knew the way Tauber had made one of his recent selections. The said treasure had already suffered one indignity: poor Yvette, who had dysentery, had organized herself a chamber pot for the night, and very early in the morning she would empty it discreetly in the lavatory. She slept on the third tier. One morning Clara, who slept on the lowest tier of the same
coja,
began howling insults in her direction. In the night, the pot had fallen on the bra. The girls laughed heartily while Clara railed on. “It’s nothing, just wash it,” I kept repeating, but Jenny added insult to injury by saying that ill-gotten gains never did anyone any good.

Two hours after Mandel’s departure, an SS wearing the distinctive arm band of the music block came up to Alma and announced that he was the drum teacher; we were certainly witnessing some strange happenings. An SS as teacher—I savoured it in advance, but my pleasure was short-lived. Firstly, there was nothing of the Siegfried about him; he was faceless, neutral, uniform grey from head to foot, with expressionless pale blue eyes. Only his hands were alive, blessed it seemed with a life of their own: rapid, efficient, incisive, they flew from the big drum to the small and from the small to the cymbals.

I didn’t know what instructions he’d been given, but not once during the course of my training did he utter a word, not even a yes or no. If I hadn’t heard him talking with Alma, I’d have been convinced they’d chosen a mute. He took my hands almost squeamishly to correct a position, or else sat in my place and demonstrated.

The first movement was the alternate beating of two drumsticks, which was easy; this then became more complicated with a two-one, one-two system. But even that was a mere nothing until the foot came into it; tapping hands and feet at the same time and to the same rhythm but with different movements required a whole period of apprenticeship. I had no time for that. Mandel would never have accepted that I, her little wonder, couldn’t play the drums. Every night at six thirty my percussionist would arrive, automaton-like, to give me my lesson; I drummed as if I were mad, day and night, but more particularly as if I were deaf—unluckily for the others, who weren’t. Founia, apoplectic, choked with impotent fury; all the girls were on the verge of hysterics and talked of killing me. I didn’t even hear them. My head was a big drum; I beat away like a machine and when I tried to grab some sleep, to everyone’s relief, I heard a beating in my skull. Then I would leap up and go to drum some more. I realized desperately that though I’d grasped the principle of a drum roll, I still couldn’t do it, and drum rolls were crucial, the basis of all percussion playing.

When Sunday arrived everyone had dark circles around their eyes as though our entire block had been on a real binge.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” was on the programme. It was marvellous weather and the concert was to be held outside, on the square at a sort of crossroads, a wide corridor between the barbed wire of camps A and B. Chairs were grouped around our platform. There was a holiday bustle; the SS were looking particularly dapper, whips tucked under their arms, boots gleaming. The first impression was of a concert in the bandstand of a small garrison town surrounded by electrified wire. But today I hadn’t time to observe the spectacle—I was too busy drumming, performing a positive dance between the drums; hands and feet flying, I leapt around sweating heavily, which was most unusual for me. Luckily I had a sense of rhythm and it was that that saved me, because the rest was random. I left my instruments to go and take my place among the singers, then went back to drum as best I could, but at least in time. Then it was the duet from
Butterfly—
what a fiendish idea to have put
that
on the programme—and off I went to sing again. My performance must have been fairly exceptional, a positive marathon, and my small size did nothing to lessen the comic aspect. The girls had difficulty keeping straight faces. The SS smiled, Graf Bobby cheerily tapped his boot with his whip, adjusted his monocle. Mandel beamed; she was right, her
Sangerin
could do anything, even act the clown. Mengele, who had apparently dropped in, also seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. Kramer was frankly amused; I suspected that I’d be applauded at the end. Only here, in the camp, one could never know in advance how things were going to turn out in the end.

Alma was playing the violin; it was a big concert with a solo performance, and I had a moment’s respite before the last piece. There were a lot of SS women, Drexler, Grese, even Frau Schmidt, whom we rarely saw at our concerts, nurses und secretaries of all kinds, presumably brought out by the fine weather, the summer air. Alma really was a virtuoso; I seized the opportunity for enjoyment and relaxed.

Behind the barbed wire, at a decent distance, were the deportees, in considerable numbers. Under the brutal light they looked thinner, more pathetic than ever, though the summer sun ought to have dealt more mercifully with them than the winter frosts, which had given some of them frostbite. We were fairly near the electrified fence and suddenly I saw one woman run up to it and grip the metal. Violently shaken by the current, her body twisted and she hung there, her limbs twitching convulsively; against the light she looked like a monstrous spider dancing in its web. A friend rushed forward to detach her, seized her, and was welded to her arms by the current, writhing spasmodically from head to foot. No one moved, the music played on; the SS listened and talked among themselves. Another girl ran forward and tried to pick off the two twitching bodies with the legs of a stool. No one helped her; we continued playing. The SS laughed and patted one another on the back; Graf Bobby shook his head, adjusted his monocle, and stared through it at the women, faintly disapproving. Silhouetted against the brightness, the crooked bodies formed grotesque swastikas. At last the girl managed to detach them from the deadly current and they fell to the ground motionless, rigid; we didn’t know if they were dead. The SS turned away with a final laugh, a last amused comment; the show was over. Ours too was almost ended. I drummed furiously. The women dragged off the tortured creatures by their arms and legs, like ants bearing off a corpse of one of their own—a funeral to the strains of
The Merry Widow.

As Jenny said, “That sort of thing gives you a turn.” None of us was shocked by this reflection, we found it natural.

Heads lowered, we went in. With a broad grin which did nothing to restore the balance of her twisted face, Pani Founia handed me—an egg. Ewa translated her accompanying message: this present wasn’t just for me, but for everyone! It was to thank us for our lovely concert.

An egg for the whole orchestra—and furthermore, as I cracked it, Jenny observed that it was “as suspect as the rest of us.” I would have liked to laugh, but I couldn’t.

The two hours that had just passed seemed to me a sort of synthesis of life in the camp: the grotesque comedy of the drums, a concert in a barbed wire enclosure for sinister uniformed puppets, the woman’s suicide, the other woman’s heroic solidarity, and to cap it all, Pani Founia’s reward: a rotten egg.

It was enough to make one laugh till one burst.

Luckily, a few days later, since she hadn’t had typhus after all, Helga came back; I vacated my place at the drums with some relief.

In Memoriam

Following Himmler’s visit, as if in chain reaction, there was a further marked increase of activity in the camp. Enormous numbers of transports arrived from Hungary, gas chambers and crematoria were at the saturation point. We were enshrined in a thick smoke which hid the sun and half-choked us with its awful smell of burning flesh. We stifled, we could hardly eat. To try and get a little air in the evenings, we would sit at the door. One evening at dusk Florette commented on the magnificent sunset.

But the distant red glow wasn’t the sun.

Night had fallen now and there was no coolness in the air; the sky was still red at the horizon and the smoke hung over us like a huge lid. Ewa sighed: “We’re in the devil’s cauldron.”

Later we learnt that the cause of those flames had been a ditch filled with the corpses of gassed Hungarians, which had been sprinkled with gasoline and set alight. In the morning the sky was still glimmering; they had burned all night.

The convoys continued to pour in, stopping in front of our door, just fifty yards away from us. We could see the selected walk up the ramp from the platform and disappear from our horizon to the gas chambers. It was a haunting sight. We were separated from the new arrivals only by barbed wire. We could see every detail, we could have talked to them. It was appalling to see those calm people, mostly dazed with exhaustion, neatly lined up awaiting death without knowing it. Florette couldn’t stop staring at the endless rows; she had been born in Hungary in a little village now part of Romania.

“Do you think we ought to tell them where they’re going?” she murmured.

“Why? What good would that do? They don’t know, they’re still happy.”

The Hungarians had brought plenty of food and clothing with them. The girls in Canada were swamped with possessions of all sorts; the harvest had never been richer. Overwhelmed by the avalanche, they allowed their friends to benefit: on this unprecedented occasion they “gave things away.” Through Renate we all received nightshirts, so that in the evening we looked like girls at a boarding school. A few hours earlier we had been sobbing desperately; now we were padding around in pink nightshirts and pomponned satin slippers.

What an inconsistent, paradoxical situation we were in, with abundance and luxury at one extreme and unparalleled wretchedness at the other.

There had been a
Blocksperre
since dawn. For five hours the camp had been confined to quarters. The door of our dormitory had been locked, and only the door of the music room left open. I wondered whether the strains of our orchestra reached the deportees in the convoys. It seemed possible; they sometimes turned their heads in our direction. They must have thought that they were in a place with some semblance of humanity since there was music. We tried not to look in their direction, telling ourselves we mustn’t and doing so all the same. It was hard to know whether this compulsion was morbid curiosity or worry that one might see someone one knew.

The
Blocksperre
was over. Graf Bobby, without prior announcement, sauntered through the open door as was his custom. The girls leapt up. He smiled. “No, no, sit down, girls!”

He sat down too and gracefully gestured to us to carry on.
“Weitermachen!”
He corrected himself: “Or rather: do continue.” He spoke impeccable, even mannered French. He asked Alma whether we couldn’t learn some Mozart, a great favorite of his, and added that only Wolfgang Amadeus could bring him the calm of spirit required by his work. His work: left, right, life, death! It must indeed have been a weighty task to choose and kill in the place of fate. Still, he was resigned to Alma’s answer; he would listen to our orchestra another time, today his nerves were too fragile for anything other than the divine master.

Coolly he stood up and came towards me, leant over my work, took my score, peered through his monocle: “Curious! Excellent! Amusing! Your orchestrations are very good, but so funny.” And he began to laugh. Alma was following this disturbing scene from her stand; it was hard to know what the laughter of an SS colonel presaged.

“You actually manage to make music with such an orchestra,” he went on, “to produce musically possible orchestrations. Congratulations!”

Now it was Little Irene’s turn.

“You have a nice touch, were you a professional?” (in civilian life, he almost seemed to say).

He can’t have noticed her expression because his worldly air remained unchanged. Then he turned back to me: “It’s odd, today I asked if there were any musicians in the transport from Hungary, and no one came forward; such a talented people, it’s curious, don’t you think?”