Playing for Time (6 page)

“Why?”

It was Little Irene who answered. “Well, it’s a bit complicated. As long as we played marches, the quality and variety didn’t matter; I think people actually found our little circus quite funny. But now everything is different, we’ve become an orchestra. Kramer and Mandel know about music, and if they don’t like our playing, they can disband our group. We were a product of caprice and we could vanish in the same way! We have to vary the repertoire, renew it, and how can we do that without new orchestrations?”

Big Irene had come to join us. Linking her long fingers, she explained in a quiet, careful voice with a slight Belgian accent: “Furthermore, they couldn’t even send scores for us from Berlin; no composer in the world has written music for an orchestra with our combination of instruments!” Her gaze lingered on me. “You don’t know how to orchestrate, by any chance?”

“I could.”

Pandemonium broke out; amid the laughing and clapping, Irene said to Regina, Alma’s orderly: “Go quickly and tell Alma we want to talk to her.” Regina rushed off.

What had I said? It was true that I’d studied harmony and the art of fugue and counterpoint, that I knew how the instruments were placed in a score, but to say that I was an expert, that I knew how to orchestrate, would be rather too strong. Our
kapo
emerged from her bedroom, forgetting protocol; the girls flocked round her and told her the news.

Alma smiled. “You know how to orchestrate?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me.”

She asked me a string of questions, juggled with titles of pieces, composers, opus numbers, movements. Not once did I answer no. Well, ambition was no crime. Since the orchestra’s life depended on it, I claimed I could orchestrate anything, do anything, anything!

“Very good,” she commented, “excellent. The SS will appreciate this.”

Her attitude astounded me. She wasn’t servile, she was just happy to please her bosses. Could she have forgotten that it was they, the SS, who had deported her, shut her up in here?

The news spread through the room: “The little new girl knows how to orchestrate!” The girls drew round. Seeing their shining eyes, their delight, Alma’s satisfaction, I understood that they were all living in a state of uncertainty, of fear, from which my supposed knowledge had suddenly released them. My arrival required celebration and Alma let us go “off duty”; there was to be no rehearsing. It was a strange holiday, with joy verging on tears, laughter mingling with irritation. But it was a holiday.

Clara never left my side, but I couldn’t decipher what she was thinking. Her hairline, which was low on her forehead, gave her the stubborn look of an intractable child. When she grabbed my arm and almost shrieked, “Come on, they’re bringing dinner,” I realized what had been absorbing her.

“Dinner?” Florette said flatteningly. “Where do you think you are, at the court of the queen of England? It’s Pani Founia— grubby-hands—who’s going to throw you your crust.”

Pani Founia, head of our kitchen, must have been about fifty, with piercing little black eyes like two glinting gems of anthracite set in a block of lard; she was shapeless and gelatinous. Her white hair was twisted into a dingy little bun. One side of her face was all twisted as a result of an attack of typhus caught in the camp. She shrieked something in Polish, a medley of orders and insults, and then, with the help of her acolyte Marila, a girl of about twenty, distributed to each of us a piece of bread which I estimated weighed six ounces and a half pat of margarine.

Jenny, a red-haired Parisienne with bright little mouse’s eyes, observed that it wasn’t overmuch for twenty-four hours.

Clara turned to me. “What have you done with your margarine? You haven’t eaten it already?”

“No, I can’t eat the stuff, it’s like poison to me.”

She became suspicious. “Have you put it in our box?”

The expression “our” box annoyed me and I asked: “Why do you have boxes for two? It’s absolutely inconceivable. While there’s anything at all, it’s everyone’s, everyone ought to be able to eat it, and when there’s nothing, we all eat nothing.”

They looked at me dumbfounded. Clearly, in their view, I was raving. Clara was the first to object, violently. “Oh no! I understand why perfectly. There’s no reason to deprive oneself.”

She fell silent, a little embarrassed, then continued: “I mean if I’ve got something, I’d certainly not be keen to distribute it—except in exceptional circumstances. With you it’s different, because you’re my friend. You share with people you get on with, after all.”

I was staggered by her reaction, which the others seemed to find completely normal. For me, my father’s was the example to follow. My mother used to tell the following story:

“When we were first married, we lived in one room, with a lavatory on the landing. We didn’t have much, but still, your father did have two shirts. One evening, coming in, I somehow noticed that he had only one.

“Where’s your other shirt gone?”

“I gave it away.”

“So you really are mad: you only have two shirts and you give one away.”

“That’s true, but
he
didn’t have one at all; now we’ve each got one.”

I stared at them; they ate in silence, chewing slowly like people on the verge of famine. Their eyes were glued to their neighbours’ portions, like mangy dogs surveying each other’s rotten meat while devouring their own. They couldn’t understand my story; all, to some degree, had acquired the camp mentality.

“Well, as far as I’m concerned,” I stated rebelliously, “I’ll share everything I’ve got with everyone.”

Anny, generous by nature, objected. “Surely not with the Polish girls; just look at them!”

Leaning on their elbows at the table set apart for Aryans, they were taking shifty looks at Ewa, who had come to sit beside me. Their bestiality had something stereotyped about it which made them particularly disturbing.

“Why should I make distinctions?” I persisted.

“Because they’re monsters, pigs,” Florette burst out, “and they’re all anti-Semitic.”

Here, in this camp where crematoria burned day and night, where these girls were daily present at our massacre, how could they still be against the Jews?

“Ewa, you’re not anti-Semitic too?” I asked firmly.

“No, no, I’m not.”

“I’ll say not,” Florette sniggered. “She, the grande dame of the camp, not an anti-Semite, my eye! She’s like all anti-Semites, she’s got ”her‘ pet Jew, but all the others are just about good enough for the gas ovens.“

“No, that’s not true, I’m not like that,” Ewa protested gently. She pointed to her seated compatriots. “Unlike them, I didn’t learn to like or dislike people according to their race or religion.”

“But isn’t the attitude of your compatriots justified by a total lack of communication?” I insisted. “They don’t understand our language, and that cuts them off.”

“Rubbish,” interrupted Rachel, a Polish Jewess. “We talk their language and they keep to themselves, simply because we’re Jewish.”

“There’s something else,” Irene added. “They know that the non-Jews aren’t gassed unless they’re Communists, and of course these girls aren’t—they’re anti-Russian as well. So since they’re in no great danger, they feel themselves superior. When the war is over, they know for certain they’ll be going home. Add to that the fact that some of them have been shut in here for a long time and are seething with resentment: they’ve stored up hatred, it’s their treasure. Lastly, whatever their age, they’ve always learned that if they’re poor and oppressed, it’s the Yids’ fault. How can you expect them suddenly to admit that being anti-Semitic is ignorant and stupid? They don’t know that, they haven’t learned it!”

Incorrigible, I answered haughtily: “Then we must teach them!”

The general laughter shattered my eardrums but not my blind idealism. Ewa sighed. “There isn’t even any point in trying; you’ll never make yourself understood. All they understand is force.”

Jenny, all angles, her pointed face covered with freckles, changed the subject. “That’s enough of all this fancy stuff! Tell us about the old place—when did you leave the gay city? Are the Jerries still making everyone ill? Can you still get grub on the black market? What are the fashions like? Whereabouts are you from?”

Questions poured in from all sides: What were people saying in Paris? Did they think the war would end soon? Was it true that the Germans had cut up the Eiffel Tower because they needed the iron?

“No, no,” I reassured them. “They’ve just melted down a few bronze statues instead.”

Jenny was seized with momentary horror. “I’m no art lover, but they were part of history!”

In their passion for information, they mingled the important with the trivial: What was the makeup like? Had dresses gone up or down? And hairstyles? Did people still dance swing? And Laval and Petain? Had I been to the Unoccupied Zone? Were there really places in the middle of nowhere where food was just like it used to be?

My answers were equally jumbled: shoulder bags, food supplies by bike, the Krauts as Sunday painters on the Place du Tertre, curls on the top of the head…

“Well”—Jenny sighed, stroking her shaven head—“if that’s still the fashion when we get back, we’d better think about getting this to grow!”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be us who’ll be setting the trend. What are people wearing?”

“Last summer, very full skirts down to the knee, all kinds of colours and patterns. The girls looked like flowers; it was lovely on the Champs Elysees.”

Dreamily they absorbed all this while I continued. “Since the Occupation, it’s been forbidden to put up flags on July 14, so the women dressed in the French colours: a red top, a white skirt, a blue handkerchief. Individually it wasn’t noticeable, but when they came together in groups, arm in arm from Concorde to Etoile, from Republique to the Bastille, Paris was tricoloured—it was beautiful!”

There were tears in their eyes.

“How did the Krauts take it?”

“They were green!”

Everyone laughed.

“Heels are this high… the girls look as if they’re walking on stilts. Since there aren’t any stockings, people paint their legs.”

“Tell us the latest joke.”

“It’s about an SS man who buys his paper at the kiosk every morning and, every morning, the paperman says to him: ”Here you are, clot.“ So one day the Kraut asks him: ‘What
is
a clot?” “It means ”boss.“ ” Delighted, the German says: “So, me little clot, Hitler, big one.”

I was never to know another moment of glory like that one. They laughed so much they cried, and so did I.

I gave them all a feeling of the irreverence and banter of the Parisians. For them, France was a breath of fresh air, so strong that it went to their heads. They were moved; they laughed, cried, and sang, everyone slightly unhinged.

“And the latest songs?”

Clara and I gave a positive recital. They didn’t want us to stop. It was wild; no one thought of going to bed. Even the Poles stayed up; Pani Founia and Marila her slave sat quietly in their corner, even going as far as to laugh when we did so as to seem to be joining in. They probably thought that would raise them in our esteem. We knew they couldn’t know what
Compagnons, dormez-vous
meant to us. At the last line—
“Compagnons, la France est devant vous!”—
the girls hugged one another and cried. It was a unique moment. Welded to one another by an exultant rush of fellow feeling, we lived that exceptional night intensely. We forgot the lights of the camp, the watchtowers, the electrified barbed wire, the smoky sky. We didn’t notice the dawn approaching.

At seven o’clock a runner announced the arrival of the SS wardens. Alma emerged from her room while Tchaikowska bellowed:
Achtung! Zum Appell! Funf zu funf!
It was roll call. We stood there at attention, in the middle of our dormitory-dayroom, for what seemed like hours. But however long it might seem I appreciated our luck: At the same time in our camp, thousands of internees—men and women, half-naked and half-dead, petrified into immobility—stood, sometimes for hours, in the snow, rain, and ice.

The SS immediately noticed Clara and me. Rigid with respect, Alma informed them of our status. Our costume seemed to annoy them, and one commented acidly: “And they’re already dressed?”

“On Frau Lagerfuhrerin Mandel’s orders.”

The roll call over, part of the orchestra prepared to go out, wearing something approaching a uniform of navy blue skirt, black woollen stockings, striped jacket, and a triangle of white cloth on their heads reminiscent of the headdress of German nurses. Thus dressed, they looked more like a troupe of ill-nourished orphans than an orchestra, and now I noticed how thin they were. The makeup of the band was as unusual as that of the orchestra: several violinists and guitarists, pipes, an accordion and, of course, the indispensable percussion. The SS probably thought that the stirring power of those booming drums, backed by the jangle of the cymbals, would have made the very dead march in time. Meanwhile it was we, in rows of five by five, who would walk in step: Alma first, me last beside Danka, the cymbal player—another whale of a creature. I had asked to go with them; I wanted to see, to understand, if I could, why we existed.

Our parody of a band went on parade, playing a march of the cheeriest Tyrolean type, evocative of picnics in the Black Forest washed down with cool beer. Our barracks was about three hundred yards from the place where we gave our strange concerts morning and evening. The road was bordered with other barracks, and in front of each of them the deportees awaited the order of departure, which would not be given until we were in our place. The double hedge of wretched creatures between which our parade passed was the reverse of reassuring. I couldn’t see if these women were looking at us—I didn’t dare look at them—but I felt their eyes boring into me like a thousand needles.

Our platform, at the intersection of camps A and B, had four steps and lines of chairs: a bandstand! We took our places. Alma turned her head towards her audience as though sizing it up, turned back to her players, raised her baton and, while officers and
kapos
bellowed assorted
Achtungs
that echoed along the roads of the camp, an
Arbeitsmarsch
burst out, martial, exhilarating, almost joyful.