Playing for Time (3 page)

I fell silent, slightly ashamed; it had been very good business. How would Clara have judged the proprietress of Melody’s, who looked like a madam—indeed, perhaps she was—but who protected us? How she would have despised those tarts who hung from the necks of German officers and gave us papers, photographs, and information.

“Did they find out your real name?”

“No. In the end I gave it to them. I was tired of being beaten —it’s oddly monotonous. And they insisted that I was a Communist; it would have been difficult to prove, but they might have managed it. Then I could have been shot. If I was going to die, I preferred to die under my father’s name, Goldstein. As soon as they knew I was Jewish, that settled everything. I was sent to Drancy, which seemed to me an acceptable way of staying alive.”

Intrigued, Clara asked, “How did they beat you?”

“With an iron bar, on my back.”

She clasped her chubby little hands. “Good Lord! And you didn’t talk?”

“I hadn’t much to say.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done in your position.”

Despite her huge body, Clara seemed to me so weak, so vulnerable, that I was overcome by a wave of pity; she was like a child, to be taken under one’s wing. She asked me a few more questions, which I evaded. I didn’t want to relive the period that led up to the present. The little girls began to hum
Malbrough’s‘en-va-t-en guerre
and we joined in the chorus. Clara had a pretty voice, a light airy soprano. Other people joined in, euphoria reigned. But my rendering of “Lying in the Hay” spoiled everything; my sense of humour wasn’t theirs.

“That’ll do,” they burst out.

“We’re trying to sleep.”

“You wouldn’t sing if you knew what you were in for,” one woman commented prophetically.

Another brightly volunteered a juicy piece of inside information: “I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but I happen to know that we’re going to be murdered in the train! They’re going to machine gun us right here, all of us!”

“They’re going to electrocute us.”

I imagined our freight train with its sealed openings, doors bolted from the outside, crossing tracts of eastern France. At the level crossings, people would be saying: “There goes our food, off to Germany.”

We’d been travelling for over fifty hours. The smell was frightful, the door hadn’t been opened once. At first, under the supervision of the SS, the men in each carriage had taken out the buckets to empty them. Since then, our bucket had emptied itself by overturning.

We were desperately thirsty; all the bottles—water, coffee, wine, spirits—were empty. The stinking air was unbreathable, the ventilation nil; we were beginning to suffocate.

My watch was at twelve when the train stopped—midnight. Our door was opened. “Quick, fresh air,” and everyone rushed for the door.

“Get out. Leave all luggage in the train.” The orders were in French.

The younger ones jumped out, others managed as best they could. Searchlights lit the platforms, their blinding glare making the night seem darker still. There was a dizzying succession of images. Clara was beside me; there were cries and shrieks, and orders barked in a guttural German:

“Raus! Los! Los! Schneller!”
Out! Out! Fast!

Shouts in the dark: “Mama, where are you?”

“Francoise, Jeannette, where are you?”

“Here,” called a child’s voice. “Mama, we’re here.”

“Where’s here?”

SS soldiers climbed into the carriages and threw the ill, the stiff, and the exhausted out onto the platform with kicks and rifle blows; last of all went a corpse.

Living skeletons in striped uniforms, their skulls shaven, moved among us like silent shadows, climbing onto the train; these strange “porters” took out our luggage, piled it onto trolleys, and took it away. The snow was thick and dirty, but Clara and I tried to melt some in our hands to drink.

There was a rumble of vehicles, military trucks, but with enormous red crosses set in white circles.

“The Red Cross is here,” exclaimed Clara. “We’re not in any danger.”

The SS thrust the crowd towards the vehicles. Old people and children moving too slowly for the SS stumbled and picked themselves up, clung to one another and were hustled brutally.

Caught up in an eddy, I was about to climb up in my turn. A sergeant stopped me. “How old are you?”

I told him and he pushed me back. “You can walk.”

The mother and little girls called to me from the back of the truck. I too could have climbed up there and joined them, under cover of darkness, but Clara stopped me.

“Don’t get in there, we’ve been cooped up for days in that terrible atmosphere; it’ll do us good to walk, even in the snow.”

Two columns had formed, fifty men and fifty women; everyone else from the train had got into the trucks with the red crosses. The convoy moved off, skidding over the snow, sending up violent flurries of slush. From the back of the last truck the little girls waved good-bye to me; the older one fluttered her handkerchief. I smiled at them until they were out of sight.

At a barked command our column moved off, flanked by soldiers and guard dogs. We walked at a brisk rate, Clara and I arm in arm, almost cheerful. It was very cold and snowing heavily, but I had my fur coat and was comfortably shod in fur-lined boots.

“I wouldn’t actually come here for a Christmas holiday, of course,” I said jokingly. “The staff haven’t quite been licked into shape yet; they’re not what you’d call considerate.”

Clara wasn’t willing to follow in this vein; she was worried. “Those men at the station!”

“They must have been prisoners.”

“Convicts, more like. Dead ones, at that.”

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with us,” I said reassuringly. “You saw the red crosses on the trucks.”

“It’s odd, you can’t see the sky; it’s as if there weren’t one. I feel that there’s a sort of great screen of smoke between us and it. Look at the horizon. It’s red—you can see the flames.”

“There must be factories; that’s where we’ll be working.”

A soldier was walking next to Clara. He had a totally unremarkable face, something between animal and mineral. Suddenly he addressed her in French, in a voice as devoid of expression as he was himself: “I’ll get you some coffee if you’ll let me make love to you.”

Coffee? Either a woman wasn’t worth much around here, or else coffee was priceless. She said nothing and he let it drop.

“Are we going to a work camp?”

He observed me at length with his small pale eyes. “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right.”

I was hardly convinced.

After half an hour’s walk, we arrived at the entrance to Birkenau, the extermination camp of the Auschwitz prison complex. A sort of porch let into a brick building, “briefly lit by the searchlights on the watchtowers which burst through the darkness sporadically to scour the roadways of the camp. They caught on the barbed wire, scanning the night in a dreadful, disquieting dance. Above the main entrance was a sign: ”Work Camp.“ It was almost reassuring.

We were driven towards a brick building marked “Reception Block.” The burst of warm air filled us with pleasure. The light was dim but adequate. Sitting round a big table, comfortably dressed girls were chatting in Polish. They seemed well-pleased with their life of luxury.

I had the temerity to ask one of them: “Is it you who are going to give us back our things?”

The heftily built girl stared at me in bovine astonishment and replied by bellowing her worst obscenity in my face:
“Pja kref!”

“I’m not
pja kref,
I’m French.”

One of them must have understood my rejoinder, because she virtually wept with laughter. Irritated, the other continued to spit out a vengeful litany.

My
pja kref
grabbed my bag from me; I grasped the point and handed her my fur coat, feeling a dreadful pang at seeing that silky fur, the apple of my eye, pawed over by her stubby little fingers. My last contact with my past. Despoiled, naked like Clara and everyone else, I stood there with my clothes around me on the ground like the skin of a moulting snake. Meanwhile furtive shadows with shaven heads picked up these piles and took them away. On the table, handbags and jewels piled up.

SS women sauntered nonchalantly amid this extravagant jumble. Under their chilly, sneering glances I felt considerably less than human: a peculiar, grubby object upsetting the natural order.

Poor Clara! Pitiable with her enormous breasts flopping down on her fat stomach, she looked like an apple balanced on two matchsticks. We were taken in charge by a young Polish woman. Her ineffectual scissors hacked desperately at my magnificent hair, two thick jet-black plaits wound round my head. The girl persevered and at last they fell to the ground, lovely smooth shining snakes. The girl attacked my head, armpits, and pubic hair with a rusty, nicked blade and no soap or water; she clawed, scraped, rasped. It should have hurt dreadfully but I could scarcely feel a thing. My eyes were fixed on another brick-faced Pole who had picked up my plaits and was playing with them, whirling them through the air, taunting me and laughing hysterically. I felt a swell of anger rising within me, a violent desire to pursue, to destroy: “If I ever
get
out of here, I’ll kill a Polish woman. And I’ll see to it that all the rest die; that shall be my aim in life.”

I always had to have an aim in life, and at Auschwitz that would be as good as any. But at the same time I loathed myself quite as much for having conceived of this ignoble plan.

Tattooing came next. Indifferently I watched the number 74862 appearing on my forearm. Apparently an SS had suggested tattooing us on the forehead, but Berlin hadn’t approved. I still hadn’t got round to laughing about that then.

The branding demoralized Clara. Dazed, still incredulous, she gazed at her round white arm: “Why are they treating us like this? They don’t do that to their workers, do they?”

Innocent Clara, her soul as white as her skin. For me, everything was over, I’d understood. I’d asked an Alsatian girl to translate the various inscriptions on the walls: “The block is your home,” “A flea means your death,” “Work is your freedom,” “You’re not in a rest home.”

I took them full in the face like a slap. I was no longer anything, not even a slave. For me there was no longer either code or law; I was alone, abandoned, consigned to the executioner. We had arrived at the journey’s end: hell.

I see us now, under the icy shower, arms pressed to our sides, then back in the room again, demoralized, shivering, tattooed, and hairless. It was odd, but that was the real humiliation: having no hair. Shadows swept up and spirited off the different kinds of hair like so many treasures.

After the shower we were thrown men’s boots, a handkerchief for our shorn skulls, something approaching a slip and a dress. I got a flowered summer dress with a yellow triangle sewn on the front. I didn’t need to ask what that meant; its colour spoke volumes. Yellow was the Jewish colour.

We were herded towards a sort of amphitheatre and settled in groups over its wooden steps. It was very cold. Next to me a girl, head lowered, hands round her knees, mumbled in Russian: “The monsters, the monsters, they’ll pay… they’ll all pay…”

“Where are you from?” I asked her, also in Russian.

She lifted her bumpy head, recently shorn, covered with crimson scratches. My head too must have looked like that. It wouldn’t have been difficult to study my bumps, and it was devoutly to be hoped that I had the bump of luck. That was the only one that mattered now.

She muttered an answer: “Ukraine. Are you Russian?”

“No, French.”

She stared at me in amazement, then continued with her monologue. I whispered, because we weren’t allowed to talk, “Where are we going to work? When do we eat? I’ve not had even a glass of water for two days.”

Presumably my questions weren’t worthy of an answer, because she went on with her pious intonings, feeding her fantasies in a monotone. “They’ll pay for this, every one of them…”

We stayed there, exhausted, for about two hours. Clara, squeezed against me, renewed her vow in a low voice: “We’ll never leave one another. We’ll share everything. For life.”

The flat phrases echoed strangely in that icy amphitheatre. At regular intervals the searchlights on the watchtowers burst through the transoms, revealing snatches of the scene, wrenching details of hunched, shivering women from the shadows. From time to time, on the floor of the amphitheatre, the beam of a torch would range slowly, incomprehensibly, over the tiers. There was no sound from outside; inside, the occasional groan, a sob, a cry that was a prayer.
“Ruhe! Kein Wort mehr!”
barked an invisible woman guard and once again there was absolute, total silence, the silence of a graveyard, a graveyard peopled with the living.

If I wanted to stay that way, I would have to put up some kind of resistance, but how? I would learn that later, day by day.

A light went on. Below, on the floor, hefty creatures were coming in with a tub filled with soup, which was slopped out into our bowls. I had no spoon and felt sick at the thought of swallowing this viscous liquid in which nameless lumps were floating.

“Eat it, you must, it’ll warm you up.” The little Russian girl was firm.

Noisily, we lapped up this repellent stinking brew. Below, in the small yellow circle of light, the serving had finished and went unapplauded. The light went out again, the beam from the torch of one of our usherettes wandered over the tiers for a moment, then darkness and silence reigned. The show was over.

The winter day broke through, bleak and grimy. The waiting continued. At last the door opened and a volley of orders rained down. We were driven out with whistle blasts and blows, gasping in the icy air. My bare feet shrank in my odd men’s shoes: one yellow, one black, one boot, one laceless oxford—size ten, and I took a size four. How could I march in line or keep in step with such things on my feet? A new terror seized me: to walk was to live; to fall behind, to fall down, was to die. I looked with loathing at the Auschwitz mud into which I was sinking, a clay soil which never dried out, even in the height of summer. Dark grey, deep red in places, it was like a flood of molten lava, it never stopped moving: rain, wind, and snow sent it sliding over its own base. It sucked me in treacherously. I was aware that my life depended on the length of this journey; luckily it was short. We stopped in front of an enormous light brick building, long and squat. “It’s the quarantine block,” the rumour ran. “You don’t come out of here alive.”