It went on for some time. Alma had already marched past her and another ghastly heap that was now thankfully left behind. Then, suddenly, there was panting and the unmistakable sound of dog claws digging into the ground when the animal charged full speed. Alma swung round. It was Drexler’s Alsatian, slamming its mass of pure muscle into the defenseless woman and burying her under its weight. There was nothing human in the scream that pierced the eerie silence. The dog’s sharp teeth glistened white in the fog for one short instant, then tore once again into the soft human flesh.
Alma realized that she had stopped, but for the life of her, she couldn’t force her legs to move just then. Only Sofia’s rough shove snapped her out of her stunned state.
“What is there to goggle at? Keep marching. Do you wish to be next? Drexler will see to it fast enough!”
A blood-curdling death rattle replaced the screams. Like an automaton, Alma was putting one leg in front of the other, her knuckles bone-white as they clenched her conductor’s baton.
“This is what happens to the dawdling Jewish vermin who are wasting my time,” Drexler’s voice threatened.
The sound of the claws again, this time trotting leisurely. Drexler’s Alsatian caught up with the orchestra troop and was jogging on Alma’s left, panting heavily as though after an exhausting play. Once again, the dog’s nose dug into Alma’s free palm. Frozen with terror, she forced herself to keep calm, at least outwardly. Drexler whistled. The dog took off. Alma turned her palm upward. It was wet with blood.
She didn’t remember how they reached the gate. Maybe it was Sofia who helped her onto the small platform on which the stools and music stands had been arranged in a semicircle or maybe it was Zippy. She didn’t remember what they played while the outside gangs were being marched out of the gates—some brassy German tune—but what had branded itself into her memory was a curse hissed just loudly enough for the orchestra to hear and not the SS:
“Dirty collaborating bitches!”
“Is it always like that?”
In Alma’s room, a table lamp was lit. In its dim light, Alma and Zippy sat, heads diligently lowered over the lined sheets of paper supplied by the Schreibstube on Maria Mandl’s orders. While the rest of the girls were taking their afternoon nap—another recently bestowed privilege—Alma was writing the sheet music from her memory as Zippy copied it after her.
“What? The hatred?” Zippy moved her shoulder indifferently. “Not always. Sometimes. Today was a bad day. They have no one to take it out on, so they take it out on us. They march to grueling work that will kill at least a few of them by the end of the day and we play cheerful tunes as they go. I can see how it’s upsetting for them.”
“Surely they understand that we aren’t playing at the gates of our own free will. The SS invented that practice, didn’t they?”
“Naturally. The SS love inventing things of that sort to amuse themselves with. The service here is boring and particularly for the young SS folk. So, from time to time they tie the wrists behind the inmates’ backs and string them up near the gallows in the main camp. While the prisoners are screaming in pain, they order other inmates to bring chairs and tables and install themselves there nicely for the afternoon, drink beer, eat sausage, and bet money on whose shoulder joints will pop out of their sockets the last or who shall faint the first. That sort of thing.” Zippy made a disgusted noise. “Or take ‘bodily exercise,’ for instance. Sometimes, after the work shift is over and the SS man has conducted his roll call, he orders the inmates to do ‘gymnastics.’ Leap-frog over each other’s heads—‘to stay fit and healthy.’ Those who fall, get beaten by a Kapo with a baton, either until they get up or until they die. That sort of amusement makes days more interesting for the SS. Just like our playing for the gangs that go to the twelve-hour shift that some of them won’t survive. The SS think it’s funny, but we’re the ones who get blamed.” Zippy smiled. It was a melancholy, crooked smile. “I was here even before Birkenau was constructed. The very first women’s transport from Slovakia, March 1942. I’ve seen it all.”
“How did you survive?” After what she had witnessed that day, to Alma it seemed almost a miracle. People rarely lasted longer than a couple of months here.
“I made myself indispensable in the camp office.” Zippy’s eyes had a faraway look in them. “I invented a file system for them. Organized schedules, sorted their mail, typed their reports… You would be amazed how many of those SS women are next to illiterate.”
“No,” Alma said, “I wouldn’t.”
For some time, they worked in agreeable silence. It was Alma who broke it first.
“What did you do prior to the deportation?”
“I was a commercial artist in Bratislava. That’s another way I made myself indispensable—I have beautiful handwriting that Mandl admires.” She snorted softly. “Do you want to hear a funny story? I was typing something at the Schreibstube when the runner came from Mandl, summoning me to her office. Now, mind you, I had just returned from the infirmary—someone I knew had a friend there who had dysentery and was asking for some charred bread. I thought, This is it for you, Zipporah. Someone must have ratted. Get your behind ready, Mandl shall lash you personally in front of the entire camp just to freshen up your principles. But what do you know? I knock on her door, trembling like a dog expecting a thrashing, and she welcomes me inside with a smile on her face and pushes a book into my hands. ‘Helen, could you letter a dedication to my good comrade SS Hauptsturmführer Kramer in your special calligraphy? It’s his birthday today, November 10.’ Without thinking, I blurted, ‘What a coincidence! It’s my birthday also…’ And then she smiled even wider and said, ‘Go to Block 5, where they keep all the packages and select one for yourself for your birthday.’” For some time, Zippy stared at something in the distance. “The book was called The River Pirates. I still remember it clear as day. I ate sardines that day, from the Red Cross. And she didn’t beat me.” Zippy looked at Alma. “As long as you’re indispensable to Mandl, you’ll survive here.” She pulled closer and lowered her voice confidentially, “She has changed your classification in the registration book. A punishable offense if her superiors find out, but she still risked it.”
After Alma scowled uncomprehendingly, Zippy grinned wider.
“She changed it from a Jew to a Mischling, a mix-blood. Now, as a mix-blood and a Kapo, it automatically excludes you from regular selections.”
“How do you know?”
“I work in the camp office besides playing my little mandolin, don’t I?” The sly look was back on Zippy’s face. “We need to stick it out for the next couple of years only. The Germans are losing to the Soviets and, with the Western Allies, the things aren’t peachy for them either. We have clandestine radios here. We know what’s going on. Only a couple of years or even less, Alma! With our kosher detail, we’ll pull through and that’s that. You only need to teach us how to play well.”
At first, Alma made no reply. It appeared that she didn’t even hear Zippy. Her face an unreadable mask of distant memories, she sat silently for quite a while with her hands folded atop the papers.
“My family also thought that their playing would save them. And then came March 1938,” she spoke at last, her voice soft yet thick with emotion.
“The Anschluss?” Zippy regarded her with sympathy.
“Yes.” Pensively, Alma’s fingers rubbed the stub of the pencil as her eyes stared, unseeing, into the space. “I, myself, had few illusions concerning the Nazis. My father, on the other hand… They had me late, Vati and Mutti. Vati was forty-three when I was born. But he played, played until the very day when Hitler arrived in Vienna with his troops. I’ll never forget the day when my father and other Jewish musicians were pensioned off—with due courtesy though. Most of the Aryan musicians had been playing under Vati’s charge for years; they had tremendous respect for him and were truly regretful to see him go. But there was that one young Nazi violinist in the Philharmonic… He was the onl
y one who openly gloated. A snooty-nosed sod, who couldn’t shine my father’s shoes on his best day, strutted into Vati’s dressing room, from which he was collecting his personal belongings and declared, ‘Herr Hofrat, your days here are numbered.’ Herr Burghauser, who occasionally played chamber music with Vati as a guest of Vati’s Rosé Quartet, stopped by our apartment later and told me about the entire rotten affair. Said how ashamed they all were when they heard that Nazi insult Vati in such a manner.”
Alma paused, her lips pressed tightly together.
“My father was humiliated as it was; he had just lost his position of a concertmaster and, not only that, he was excluded from playing at the gala they had prepared for the Germans that evening. Eugen d’Albert’s opera, Tiefland. Strange, how I remember precisely what it was… Perhaps, it’s because my father kept repeating the same thing ceaselessly after he arrived home that day—‘Why can’t I play with them? I belong. I am the concertmaster!’ Poor old man… He had always had such a dignified, noble look about him and that day, oh how he had suddenly aged. You should have seen him, Zippy. His shoulders stooped at once, but the eyes… It was the look in his eyes that I couldn’t bear! Such profound hurt, such childish misunderstanding. The great Professor Rosé, the venerable Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster, the founder of the Rosé Quartet, reduced to nothing in one day, on some madman’s orders. A Jew. A stateless person. A drain on the Aryan society.”
“Is he…?” Zippy searched her face, afraid to finish the question.
“On no, he’s alive.” Alma permitted herself a brief smile. “He’s presently in England, a friendly alien with a full right to perform. Émigré artists in Britain and the United Stated established a special Rosé Fund for him, in addition to the money my brother and I were sending to support him financially. He insisted that he wished to perform, no matter the bombs raining on the capital, but a family friend whisked him away into the countryside, for which I’ll be eternally grateful. It’s nice, knowing that he’s safe there.” Alma paused and finished, as though not fully believing her own words, “Perhaps, one day I shall come back to him.”
Chapter 6
Attired in a thin slip supplied by Kitty from the Kanada, Alma was brushing her teeth with the small amount of the precious white powder smelling faintly of mint. It came in a round box that featured a blond woman with a dazzling smile and some unreadable words in Polish or Czech, but, apparently, Kitty was well-versed in all languages to know to give it to Alma, along with a toothbrush, a bar of soap and even some scented facial cream. In the Experimental Block, she had to make do with a piece of cloth wrapped around her little finger; what a pure bliss it was to brush one’s teeth like a regular human being again.
After spitting into the rusty sink, Alma lifted her gaze to the cracked mirror Sofia had installed here a few days ago and discovered that she was smiling. Indeed, how little was needed to make a person happy, it suddenly occurred to her.
“Alma!” Zippy’s voice echoed around the dingy latrine. She stopped in the door and jerked her thumb in the direction of the camp. “Today is the infirmary day. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we play for the sick in the Revier, the women’s hospital. Sofia was asking if you wish to join the orchestra or stay here and work… on whatever it is you want to occupy yourself with. Mandl said it’s not mandatory for you or me to make our appearances there, if we don’t want to.”
Alma regarded her incredulously. “Of course, I shall go. Why wouldn’t I want to play for the sick?”
For some time, Zippy was silent.
“You’ve never been to the infirmary before, have you?” she asked softly at last.
“It’s just a camp hospital, isn’t it?” Alma shrugged and reached for her kerchief. She had washed it the night before, in cold water but with scented French soap, and left it to dry on one of the water pipes on which rust was growing like mushrooms. The entire latrine still smelled like lilacs. “Just how bad can it be?”
Zippy regarded her for an uncomfortably long time. Then she finally asked, in a voice that was oddly toneless: “You don’t know much about camp hospitals, do you?”
Alma turned to her, one sarcastic remark or another ready to fly off her lips—Do you truly suppose your camp hospital can compare to the Experimental Block?—but the expression in Zippy’s eyes was so profoundly forlorn, the words got stuck in Alma’s throat. Despite the mounting sense of unease, she reached for Zippy’s hand and forced a smile before repeating, with certainty that she no longer felt, “I shall go.”
On their way to the Birkenau Women’s Infirmary, Zippy noted quietly that one could always recognize Block 25 by its smell. At first, Alma dismissed it as an exaggeration. She’d been inhaling a nauseating stench of the crematorium for days; it had been inconceivable to imagine something more atrocious than that concoction of burnt flesh and singed hair. However, as the overpowering smell reached them—well before they reached the block itself—Alma realized that Zippy wasn’t joking. It was a revolting mixture of decaying flesh and putrefying excrement, next to which the permanent stench of the Experimental Block was a child’s joke.
Halting in her tracks, Alma brought the collar of her dress to her face to cover her nose and mouth and, all at once, felt guilty for doing so.
Next to her, Zippy clutched at her mandolin, her face sickly green. Only after Sofia prodded Alma gently in the back—“Don’t loiter in the middle of the street, the SS are staring”—did she force herself to pull her Kapo’s armband up along her arm and proceed forward, straight into the bowels of hell, it seemed.
Inside the infirmary block, it was worse still. A truly frightful sight presented itself to Alma’s eyes. Along the long corridor, right on the stone floor, rows and rows of emaciated bodies lay, some still making an effort to move; some eerily still. A mass of bones and gray scabby skin hanging off their limbs like cloth. Sunken eyes that stared without seeing. Rags of some unidentifiable color stiff with grease and dried excrement. Sparse patches of hair sticking out of skulls covered with sores and recently received wounds that no one had tended to.
Swallowing with great difficulty, Alma continued through this purgatory, breathing through her mouth and still tasting that premature rotting on the back of her throat. Putting on her bravest face, she marshalled on through what remained of humanity in this place, next to which Dante’s Inferno had lost all its colors.
Women. It was appalling to think that these were all women—someone’s mothers, sisters, daughters, wives. Beautiful brides that smiled out from the photos that she had a chance to glimpse in the Kanada, all piled, along with birth certificates, passports, certificates of military awards, and bank accounts, into one big heap of useless paper later to be burned by a former Rabbi just behind the warehouse. Kitty had said he recited Kaddish whenever he fulfilled his duty. Only now did Alma understand why—effectively, they were all walking dead, these Revier women. Doomed, condemned to death, regardless of the exact diagnosis. It was only suitable for the Rabbi to mourn them while they were still alive.
As Alma carefully made her way forward through this human mass, bony hands reached for the hem of her skirt and brushed the bare skin on her ankles. As though revived by the sight of healthy, relatively well-dressed women, the poor wretches reached for them out of their last powers. In their delusion, anyone who walked upright must have appeared as a doctor to them; a miracle worker who had adhesive plaster, sulfa drugs, iodine and, perhaps, even a piece of bread.
Distraught and mortified, Alma turned to Sofia and searched the former Kapo’s face in desperation.
Sofia only prodded her slightly again. “Keep going; we play for the ones who can actually walk out of here.”
“What about…” Alma couldn’t finish, just looked around helplessly, her hand clasping at the violin case with force.
“These shall all be taken away with the transport any time now. Keep going. Half of them are sick with typhus and dysentery; do you wish to catch it too?” Sofia’s nudges grew mo
re urgent. She, too, was mortified to be stuck here, with the condemned women whose pleas and moans were growing gradually louder, tearing at the Music Block girls’ very souls.
With great reluctance, Alma forced herself to move forward until they reached a ward of sorts, where at least a semblance of an infirmary still remained. Bunk beds were still overflowing with emaciated bodies, but at least these bodies lay on straw pellets with dubious-looking bedding on them, but that was already quite a change from what Alma had just witnessed in that hell’s antechamber. Some inmates even had rough blankets covering their legs and double straw-stuffed pillows under their heads.
“Why the preferential treatment?” Catching Zippy’s sleeve, Alma motioned her head toward one of the sick women, who was presently munching on a piece of a biscuit of sorts.
“Some inmates receive packages from outside the camp. Nurses here aren’t stupid and know where their bread is buttered. They get aspirin for these inmates, clean clothes; fluff up their pillows and take them off selection lists and, in exchange, get their share of the package’s contents. Not a bad barter, if you think of it.” She went on to explain, her voice becoming confidential, “Some women here aren’t sick at all. If they have enough food to bribe the doctors or nurses, they’ll get a couple of weeks of vacation. The enterprise isn’t without its risks, though—the SS doctors sometimes show their faces and then it’s to the gas with such holidaymakers. But people still take their chances. It’s understandable, too; they aren’t like us. They work outside for twelve hours, hard labor, six days a week. Their roll call is three or four hours. And they get beaten on the slightest of provocations—again, unlike us, the cultured lot. One can’t quite blame them in good conscience,” she concluded.
Briefly greeted by the medical personnel that mostly rushed about ignoring them altogether—one inspection or other must have been indeed coming, Alma concluded from all that frantic commotion—the orchestra girls crammed themselves into a corner and began tuning their instruments.
The Violinist of Auschwitz: Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel Page 6