Playing for Time (28 page)

She wasn’t listening.

“Alma, I can understand that you’re happy to be leaving the camp, but you haven’t been released, you still belong to them, you’re at their mercy like a slave. They’re sending you to entertain their men. Those men are your enemies. Wherever they go, they take war, tragedy, and death with them. They are the instruments of Nazism, racism. And you’re delighted to be entertaining them!”

She looked at me uncomprehending, and then beyond me— the symbol of the reality of the camp—to see rapt audiences: She was on a stage, her violin tucked lovingly under her chin, its precious wood warmed by the contact of her cheek. Her vision was stronger than mine, and she wasn’t convinced by my point of view; she barely heard me.

“They’ve got you in their power; they can still kill you whenever they feel the time is right, because you’re Jewish. No talent in the world can remove that defect.”

She smiled at me vaguely. “Don’t worry, death isn’t important—it’s making music that matters, real music, and freely…”

“But you won’t be free.”

Alma’s gaze became reproachful. “You don’t understand me. You’re not pleased for me about what’s happened—I shall no longer be playing inside a prison.” Suddenly vehement, she added: “I’m German and I’ll be playing for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Do you think they’re all Nazis?”

It was true, there were good Germans, but they’d almost all been shut up in prisons and camps. The others, the ones who were raising their arms in unison, were probably just cowards. Could one anathematize a whole race just because part of it was rotten? In Birkenau everything within me rose up and drove me to total hatred of everything German.

Alma was beginning to get impatient. “It’s playing here, for the SS, under this sky, which is degrading; it won’t be degrading to play for men who may be going to their deaths. Why try to spoil my happiness?”

Already she was gone from here, she had reached another world—the world she had come from in the first place, a world where people issued invitations and entertained.

“When I told her the news, Frau Schmidt asked me to dinner. She’s pleased for me, she’s a real friend!”

A friend, Frau Schmidt? The führer of Canada, who reigned over the murderers’ treasure, who had the power of life and death over her girls and wielded over them the authority of a brothel keeper (her former profession, so it was said)? Interned since “33, apparently she had entirely created and organized her particular department. A tall woman, all her elegance lay in her spareness; fat, she would have been vulgar, but thin as she was, she could deceive. Her pale grey eyes had a birdlike fixity, her carefully drawn back white hair, tucked into a small dingy bun, bore witness to past blondness. No one knew why she had been arrested; rumours varied between criminality, Communism, and procuring, and any one of these suppositions could have been correct. She might have been attracted to Alma, possibly rather flattered that she who probably came from a fairly ordinary background should be the only friend of this virtuoso. Sometimes she came to listen to us, and none of us liked that; she was much hated. Jenny said she ”looked about as sincere as a snake getting ready to give you a mortal bite.“

Alma was unconvincing. “Yes, a real friend. Do you know that since she’s been here, she’s sent petitions to the successive commandants of the camp asking for her release, because they’ve got absolutely no reason for keeping her here; furthermore, she’s the oldest woman in Birkenau. They don’t answer her, yet they release me. She could feel that it was unfair, but instead of resenting it, she asks me to dinner.”

For some reason the charitable feelings of the head of Canada left me cold.

That evening, shortly after Alma left for her “friend’s” house, a
Blocksperre
was announced.

“What’s up?”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing, they liked her concert.”

“Do you mean she was strutting around like a loon just for that, the poor idiot?”

I don’t know why I didn’t answer their questions; I didn’t want to let them feed their imaginations on this rich piece of information yet.

It was a very long
Blocksperre.
Alma came back late after her dinner. I heard her crossing the music room and shutting her door just before I fell asleep.

Regina’s voice woke me: “Fania, Fania, Alma is asking for you.”

What a cretin! She wanted to expatiate on the glories of her dinner, damn her.

I found her astonishingly pale, her nostrils pinched, her forehead clammy with sweat, complaining of frightful headache and nausea, pains in her limbs and stomach. Her hand was hot and moist, and she clearly had a high temperature. I massaged her temples, which were covered with cold, slimy sweat. She was seized by bouts of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea. She was clearly very ill.

“Go and wake up Tchaikowska.”

Regina ran to get her. Her face swollen by sleep, looking catatonic, the blockowa stood in the doorway and assessed the situation. “I’m going to get Frau Mandel.”

A long quarter of an hour went by. Between two bouts of vomiting Alma looked at me like a frightened child and murmured with difficulty: “Fania, will I not get out of here after all?”

“Of course you will, it’s just some temporary upset. It’ll all be better tomorrow. They’re coming to see to you.”

I heard Mandel’s rapid step, and she glided into the foul-smelling little room accompanied by an SS doctor. He took her pulse, felt her over rapidly, covered her up, and told Mandel she must immediately be taken to the infirmary for a stomach pumping. A few minutes later our
kapo
was taken off on a stretcher—the stretcher used for the dead, because in the camp, as long as you were alive, you walked. They took her out of the music room door.

The girls didn’t seem to have noticed anything, so I told them in the morning, “Alma is ill, you’ll rehearse with me.”

“What about the morning and evening marches?”

“Big Irene will conduct them.”

They said, “Oh, all right,” and didn’t ask any questions. Alma ill meant a bit of respite in the regime of “forced music” she imposed. No shouts, slaps, baton raps. A feeling of half-day holiday floated through the block.

The next day, the mood had changed. Little Irene asked me reproachfully why I hadn’t told them that Alma was seriously ill.

“I thought it was nothing much.”

Marta intervened coolly: “Which made them take her to the Revier, to a separate room. Renate says the SS doctors have been to examine her. They’re doing all they can to save her!”

“Perhaps it’s typhus?”

“No, they don’t know what it is.”

It was very hard to get them to rehearse. Their minds were elsewhere and they kept wandering off and walking about looking gloomy and lost.

“Alma’s no malingerer,” remarked Florette. “It must be serious.”

“If she croaks, what’ll happen to us?” wailed Jenny.

That evening, Renate informed us that Alma had been unconscious since the morning. The next day, before roll call, a runner shouted from the doorway:

“Girls, Alma’s dead!”

Never before had the block known a silence like that one. Then the lamentations began: “What will become of us? What will they do with us?” Generally the girls were somewhat indifferent to death. It no longer surprised them, it was the inevitable outcome of one’s stay here, the end of the road. But Alma’s death seemed incomprehensible. Florette summed up the general view: “I can’t believe it, she seemed invulnerable. The orchestra
was
her.”

Word quickly spread that her death hadn’t been normal, that the SS had ordered an autopsy. Jenny harboured no illusions: “Whether they open her up or not, they’ll throw her in the crematorium without any further ceremony. They’re not too gentle with corpses around these parts!”

Wrong. In the afternoon, Frau Mandel came into the music room to tell us the news officially: “Your conductor, Alma Rose, is dead. You may go to the Revier and pay her your last respects.”

We dressed in silence, carefully, very clean shoes well polished, and all went off together. It was a fine day outside.

We expected to see Alma’s body stretched out on a mattress in the infirmary. But a positive mise-en-scene awaited us: in a sort of recess next to the medical room the SS had put up a catafalque covered with white flowers—a profusion, an avalanche of flowers, mainly lilies, and giving off an amazingly strong scent. To get those flowers the SS must have had to get into vehicles and go into town, to florists—there were such things in Auschwitz; it was incredible. We stood there, immobilized with amazement and emotion. With the German sense of the dramatic, Mandel had separated us into two groups and we framed the bed of state: the conductor and her musicians. We stood there, herded together, unable to think, lumps in our throats, looking at Alma. Her face, very calm, very relaxed, looked refreshed. She was very beautiful; her long hands, crossed on her breast, held a flower. I wondered who had had that delicate thought.

I don’t know who started it, but there was a sudden sob, and we all began to cry. Some SS came in, removed their hats, and filed past the foot of her bed. All were visibly moved and many were crying. They included officers whom we’d never seen. Mandel’s eyes were full of tears; in honour of Alma, we mingled our tears with hers—we were in complete communion! An unforgettable scene.

While this moving march past was taking place, transports were arriving at the camp, people were being gassed, burnt, exterminated. Here, tears in their eyes, the SS bowed down before the corpse of a Jewess they’d covered with white flowers.

Depressed, we went back to our block; without Alma, we were lost.

“What I wouldn’t give to hear her bellow,” sniffed Florette, who goodness knows had never liked her.

“Alma was lucky, she died of an illness just like in ordinary life,” Big Irene remarked gently.

“Still, it wasn’t a very ordinary sort of illness.”

There was no exact answer to the question of what she’d died of; after the autopsy, the SS doctors diagnosed poisoning. At midday, she had had the same soup we had. That evening, she had dined alone with Frau Schmidt. We never heard another word about the latter. The day after Alma’s death Frau Schmidt disappeared from Canada and was never seen there again. She disappeared from the face of Birkenau. In my opinion Frau Schmidt was responsible. Different versions circulated, but they all had one thing in common: Alma had been poisoned. Some thought that Frau Drexler had bribed Frau Schmidt to invite Alma to dinner and poison her, had even obtained the poison. According to this theory, Mandel had intrigued to obtain Alma’s release, an action which, even if it had succeeded, could have blown up in her face, because you don’t get a Jew set free. Drexler would therefore have acted in the interests of Mandel. I didn’t believe this Macchiavellian hypothesis: Mandel would never have done anything that might lead to Alma’s leaving the orchestra of which she, Mandel, was so proud. Alma was vital to it. While the men’s orchestra in Auschwitz was a real symphony orchestra with excellent players and even soloists, all we had to represent the real musical world was Alma. It was unlikely that Mandel would have despatched Alma of her own accord. On the other hand it didn’t surprise me that that monstrous virago Frau Drexler should have been involved in the affair, that she should have provided the poison.

The women in the work detachments thought that Alma had been poisoned by some sort of tinned food. That seemed unlikely to me. Frau Schmidt would have died too, and it was hard to imagine her serving and eating any old food when she could have the pick of the lot. In my view Frau Schmidt, that “dear friend,” could only hate the Jewess who was to be freed and who had come to taunt her with her happiness; and she had her revenge.

Alma was dead, and we were still alive. Would they do away with the orchestra? Surrounding me, the girls were insistent: “You’re well in with Mandel, you’re the only one who could conduct—you must become our
kapo.”

For once they were all in agreement, even the Polish girls. Tchaikowska and Founia actually went as far as to send me a hideous smile. The appointment seemed logical to them, they believed in it. It was true that I’d often helped Alma. Already Ewa the Hungarian was taking me aside and humming me a Hungarian tune: “Couldn’t you orchestrate it? The Germans will love it.” Lotte and Clara besieged me with a barrage of requests for a broadening of their repertoire and repeatedly assured me they would learn anything I wanted.

So when Kramer’s arrival was announced, hearts beat more rapidly; nothing of the orchestra’s future could be read on his brutal face as he ordered us to attention. Without any trace of his recent emotion, he announced, icy and definitive: “Sonia will take the place of Alma Rose; she is appointed conductor of your orchestra.”

Sonia was a good pianist, it seemed, though I’d never had a chance to judge the truth of the matter because our piano had long since been taken from us. Could she conduct? She was one of those Ukrainians who kept to themselves, but with whom I sometimes exchanged an odd word. Why this unexpected appointment? Because she was a special-status prisoner? Unremarkable, taciturn, she had never stood out in any way at all. How she must have intrigued to get that post, and yet we had never noticed anything at all.

Reserved, modest, she stood before us. With bated breath we waited to see what the future offered. She took her place on the platform: she was small and solid, her face with its short little nose and prominent cheekbones wasn’t very impressive. She cast a somewhat uncertain eye over the score, and without even bothering to give the ritual advance tap of the baton on the edge of her stand, raised her arm and began to beat time—her own time, like an automaton. She beat in empty air, without bringing in any of the instruments, her blue eyes glued to the score which it was all too obvious she was incapable of reading. Despite the efforts of Big Irene, who, as first violinist, tried to bring in the others, the result was appalling. Sonia shrugged her shoulders, put down her baton, and beckoned to me. I tried to inculcate into her the few rudiments indispensable to the conducting of an orchestra. But it couldn’t be learnt in five minutes, and since she very soon stopped listening, I went back to my place. Aghast, disbelieving, the girls played any old how. My copyists continued their work without much conviction; you needed to be stupider than they were, listening to that cacophony, to think that Sonia was going to be able to arrange and set up concert programmes. For the moment this lack of discipline enchanted the girls; it was a welcome relief from Alma’s tyranny. But soon, like me, they asked themselves what would become of the concerts? Our worry intensified brutally when a visit from Dr. Mengele was announced. He was a music lover, and this racket wouldn’t take him in for a moment.