“Be a famous mezzo, of course,” I say.
But at the shop, if I let my guard down for a minute, I’ll turn around to find all the clothes I’ve just folded knocked to the floor.
We’ve been in this prison-town for almost a year, but something is changing. All week, there’s been a film crew here, and we’re reassigned from our normal jobs to spruce things up, planting flowers, painting buildings, clearing out beds. For some reason, trains are leaving more frequently, resettling people farther east. It’s nice to have some more space, but it means a lot of tearful goodbyes.
Children are taught new songs to sing together. We teenagers are given extra camp money to spend in the store on makeup and clean, if threadbare, dresses. Of course, we have to ruin them with the yellow star. Even after a year of living in Theresienstadt, I’m not used to it. We are instructed in new protocols and shown the consequences of not playing along.
“The Red Cross is coming to pay us a visit,” says the commandant in a tone dripping with innuendo. “Let’s show them the best face of our little town, shall we?”
Roza, naturally, has to have a lead role. She’s still strutting, even though the circles under her eyes are getting darker. The film crew can’t get enough of her playing her little piano pieces, as though she were some prodigy. If only they’d get a close-up, they’d see her hair crawling with lice, just like the rest of ours.
But I, too, have friends here now. And it’s a good week for us. There’s more to eat. We’re giving concerts and plays several times a day. There are soccer games, and the mothers are allowed to bring out all the babies for us to play with.
The film crew packs up and leaves Theresienstadt to put their movie together for God knows what. No sooner does the exhaust from their trucks clear the air than the commandant starts shouting. A roll is called, and the block guards rush us to the town square. Some of the girls in my block are here, but not Roza. I suppose they want to keep her around to show off to the Red Cross.
Papa comes running out from the café building, pulling on his suit jacket, when a very young guard, for fun, sticks his foot out and sends him sprawling toward the edge of a brick half wall. I hear the bone in his leg crack against it. The guard is red-faced with laughter. Somehow Papa manages to get himself in line. To stay on the ground would be unthinkable here.
“The camp is getting overcrowded,” the commandant begins with a sharp look at the laughing guard, “and we need to give the Red Cross a good impression. Some of you will be moved farther east and resettled on farms.” He begins this selection by sneeringly calling my father out to head the line. A few more people get into their ranks, and Papa motions to me to join him once it seems safe to do so. And so we have five minutes in which to pack our bags and board the train for these farms in the east.
Albert tells Papa that he’ll pack his bag for him, and I run back to my barracks to grab my things. We meet near the square and help Papa to the train platform down the street. Albert has a stash of pain pills and a bottle of tea for Papa. Papa is sweating, tears running down his face, but he is completely silent. There’s something in his eyes that I’ve never seen before: terror. On the transport here to Theresienstadt, there had been urgency, even some fear, but not like this. My strong papa. My gentle father—an artist, so uncompromised in his own peace—looks like a terrified, wounded animal now.
And he will not say a word to me.
I see three sunrises and sunsets on the train from Theresienstadt. The May weather is still cool outside, but inside this train car it is stifling. Most of us carry little or nothing, but I have Papa’s viola. I won’t let it be lost or trampled. As long as we have this music between us, we are a family.
Papa is delirious with pain. He is unable to bear the standing and squeezing. Mercifully, we are able to maneuver to the car wall, and he sinks down, passing out instantly.
The train screeches, slows, whines. The clacking tempo decreases until we stop. A rush of wind blows through the two small windows. It smells of a sweetish smoke. It is not wood smoke.
I help Papa to his feet and let him lean on my shoulder. The car doors are flung open, and we are herded out, with brown dogs barking at us. Papa falls to the ground, and a dog gets right in his face, red-gummed and yellow-toothed. I put Papa’s arm around my neck and hoist him to standing again.
“Are you all right, Papa? Just hold on to me.”
“Gerta—Gerta—” This is all he can manage through the pain, and he is holding me so tight, it hurts; he is stroking my face and hair, not tenderly, but rather as though trying to imprint me on his own skin.
“Papa, what’s happening? Where are we?”
At the far end of the train is a man with a baton, a conductor. To the side, behind the barbed wire, a small group of women plays in some kind of orchestra. They are playing Mozart, but with a weird, dissonant arrangement of mandolins, accordions and a snare drum.
He is not conducting them, but us.
We are pushed forward into a mass, which he is dividing into two lines.
Clutching the viola case, I arrive at the conductor. His eyes are dark. He is smiling, whistling through a gap in his teeth. He stops his conducting and taps my case with his baton. The dogs are still barking.
“Ah!” he says. “A musician! Violin? No, of course, viola. Yes, you, go over there, and the Kapo will take your information. You’ll be an asset. Viola. Not so common.”
“But it’s not my—” I start to say.
“Next!” says the conductor. “To the right. To the left. Da da dee, da dee dum…”
As I am hurried on, I turn to look for my father. He is in the other line. He is limping on his broken leg, staring desperately at me, openmouthed, like he needs to tell me something. The others in the line with him are mostly women with babies, little children, old men—and cripples. Like a stream running down into the ocean, the line veers toward a distant fog, out of which rises a tall, smoking chimney.
I am led to a room with countless other women. None of them are the ones with children. We are told to give our occupations or skills to the registrar.
“Chemist.”
“Nurse.”
“Musician,” I say, holding up the viola case. I wonder what questions they are asking Papa right now, and I wish there were a way to get his instrument back to him.
“I see,” says the registrar. “And were you sent here because of that?”
“Yes, the conductor told me to come here.”
She chuckles. “The ‘conductor.’ Ah. I see. He must have liked the look of you.” She finishes filling out my card. “Take this to the next room. Tell them ‘Women’s Orchestra.’ ”
I try to be cheerful, hoping a good demeanor will make it go well for me.
“Thank you very much, ma’am,” I say compliantly. I go into the next room and stop short in the doorway. Women sit on benches as men walk down the rows. Some have huge scissors; some have electric clippers. They are shaving the heads of the women, who cry hot tears. Another man follows the barbers, carrying a small, battered toolbox full of needles and metal attachments.
I am shoved onto a bench, and I quickly slide the viola case between my feet. The man with the clippers grabs my thick chestnut hair, twists it into a clump, pulls a pair of scissors out of his pocket and cuts the whole of it off.
“Lice,” he says dully. “It’s bad here.” The next man follows with the clippers and shaves my head clean in five quick passes. I can’t even process what’s happening to me.
The other man comes with his tool kit. He presses a needle into the soft, thin skin inside my left forearm and sloppily tattoos a number: A28865. I feel every nerve in my arm connect to some other part of my body, and electricity is shooting through all of me, making me sweat instantly. He writes the number on my card and tells me to show it to the guard. I almost forget the viola. I grab it just in time, before someone else takes my place on the bench.
A fat woman, chewing on her cheek and twirling a la
nyard of keys, gives me a striped uniform and tells me to strip and to leave my old clothes on the stool. I take off my Theresienstadt dress, and it rubs against the raw wound of the tattoo, shooting a twinge to the top of my head. I know what this change of uniform means; every so often I had been told in the other camp that my clothes would be laundered, disinfected and returned to me. I never saw them after that. For months, I’ve worn that threadbare dress, and part of me is glad to be rid of it. But these blue-and-gray-striped pants and shirt take from me the last distinction.
I am genderless—a shaved, numbered and striped inmate.
The guard looks at my card and directs me to the entrance to the women’s camp. In the distance, near the massive brick gateway, I can see that the train has been emptied. The musicians are hastily packing up their instruments. Something feels different: I hear none of the usual post-performance chatter, nothing about botched notes or particularly sublime passages. That congratulatory conversation is occurring instead among the laughing guards while their dogs lie on the ground, finally quieted, chewing bones.
Blood coagulates on the ground, and to the side I see about eight or ten inmates hauling bodies into the back of a truck. Some of the dead wear striped uniforms like mine. Some are still in street clothes. There are children among them. Babies. Little boys in knee socks. Their hats fall off their heads as they are picked up and hurled roughly into the truck bed. I want my papa.
Someone shouts at me. “You! With the instrument! Get back over to the musicians. There’s nothing to look at here.” I feel an arm around me. I hadn’t known anyone was near.
“Come with me,” the woman says softly, pragmatically. “You’ve been sent to the orchestra, yes? Well. Join your very lucky sisters. Music has saved your life today.”
“Where’s my papa?” I plead with her. “I want my papa!”
She sighs and points ahead. “See that chimney?” she says, still softly, but so that I will clearly understand. “See that smoke? There’s your papa.”
Maybe it’s July. Maybe August; I’ve stopped keeping track. The air is suffocating. There are no trees to give shelter overhead, only the forest hedging the camp. Cicadas mercilessly rattle in the branches of that faraway shade.
Our director lifts her baton. From the first note—relief. I can’t hear the insects. I can’t smell the smoke. I pour myself down the horsehair of the bow.
My hands have become my father’s hands.
I know what happened to him now. His broken leg made the decision for him. I’ve watched his death daily, as the Women’s Orchestra provides an artifice of calm and succor to the passengers being unloaded and sorted. They become two rivers: one flowing right, to the shave-tattoo-uniform; one flowing left, to the chimney, evaporating into the air we breathe, raining into the mud we walk in. And the conductor, Mengele, stands at the fork of these two rivers, keeping time to the music we provide him.
We can say nothing, do nothing. In the beginning, I would try to send messages with my eyes to the people in the line, pleading with that grandmother to throw aside her cane and straighten her spine at all costs, to that skinny boy to put on the strongest, most robust persona he could muster. “Arbeit macht frei,” I would will, if only for a few months. Just live a few more months.
After a while, my understanding changed. Now I lower my eyes. Every one of us who comes through that gate is damned to the same fate, ultimately. We can’t escape; we can’t change a thing. But, I think, we can provide peace to the mothers and the babies on that long walk in the last few minutes of their lives. That has to be some kind of mercy. I have to believe that, because plenty of prisoners spit at us as traitors. They hate us because, like the Jews of the Sonderkommando, who shove the dead into the ovens, we earn our extra bread by being part of the machine that kills their children. How do I answer this charge? I play, as sweetly as I can. I play like Papa did.
* * *
—
I will always see the snow falling thick on a mother marching toward the chimney with a baby on her breast. She is unfazed by the cold on her skin, unapologetic for soothing her infant and herself. Two laughing officers snatch the baby from her nipple and dash it, still swallowing milk, against the train wheel. They push her against the car, ripping and tearing not just her clothes. She crumples next to her child, both writhing in the snow until two bullets join them in death.
* * *
—
As I lie on the hard wood and dirty straw of my bunk, I think about the night the angel came to me, giving me my new voice. That was the first time I thought about God. As my body rounded and my voice deepened, I was struck by this mysterious question of why. Why is music? And why do girls have to stumble across these invisible lines to become women?
I began to sing to the questions, and they sang back not answers, but more questions. There was a rhythm that started coursing through my body like an electric current, and I developed a habit of doing everything to a count of eight so I could make music out of these new, confusing feelings.
The music, the rhythm, the vibration of light in my joints and marrow somehow continue, even here in Auschwitz. I learn to stay just under the surface, doing everything to the eight-count. I blend like dust into dust, complying, a brick in the architecture.
As exhausted, hungry families disembark from the trains, I silence the why of my complicity. I think, If I fold into a small ball of patience, surely things can’t get any worse.
The first of November comes to Auschwitz with early rushes of snow and wind. The block guard turns on the weak light and bangs her club on the bunks to wake us. We spring up and dress, throwing our blankets over our bald heads and shoving our feet into the wrong shoes. We grab our instruments, thinking it’s time to play for a late transport or a midnight work detail. She hurries us out into the night air, which instantly freezes the tears in our tired eyes. We run toward the tracks, but instead of gathering on the sidelines, we are shoved into the waiting cattle car ourselves. The fifty of us fill a car. Not again, I think.
We’re not packed as tightly as we were upon our arrival, but it’s ironic—now I wish for that closeness to insulate me from the icy air blowing in. We huddle together in a corner. The straw is filthy and has obviously not been changed for many transports. Even after the Sonderkommando revolted a few weeks ago and destroyed one of the crematoria, three of the chimneys visible through the open train door are still glowing red, the smoke pluming pale against the dark sky.
The guard tosses in a few loaves of stale bread and a bucket of water and slides the door shut, its steel pin dropping into place. A minute later, we are moving. We are so resigned to the nearness of our deaths that the question simply becomes, Is it today? There’s no crying, no panic. There is only silence, and cold.
* * *
—
This song begins softly from the lips of a cellist:
Az ir vet, kinderlekh, elter vern, vet ir aleyn farshteyn—
When, dear children, you grow older, you will understand for yourselves—
I can see the notes hanging on her frozen breath. Some others know the melody, a few words, and add harmonies. We feel a bit warmer, enough to take out our instruments and join in. We play to the rhythm of the clacking wheels on the tracks—ba-dumm ba-dumm, two three, ba-dumm ba-dumm, two three. We do some pieces from our repertoire and, now that we’re alone, some forbidden composers, too. I swear I can smell Maria’s gardenia perfume.
There are endless mornings and evenings. We arrive at Bergen-Belsen.
I didn’t know until Lev told me: there are four words in Hebrew that mean “world,” and one of them means “hidden world.” He says that in each of us is a hidden world. Each of us is a world. Each baby born, a world created, a possibility. Each one who dies, a red star smoldering out. And in all of this, the hidden places within another person are concealed from us.
Lev and I have become fast friends. It’s amazing that after so long here, we all seem new to each other. Just a f
ew months ago, when the British came, everyone was dying. No one really spoke then. Who would bother striking up a conversation you might not live to finish? And what would you say? Everyone had seen the same things. After you’ve witnessed your twentieth, hundredth, thousandth person perish, words are meaningless. Your life becomes bread. Rainwater. Numbers. Keeping your feet clean. Any obsessive ritual to keep your own heart beating.
But Lev broke the silence.
We walk from lunch every day to this little copse of birch, where we can get away from the camp noise and talk. He tells me about God; I tell him about music—the mysteries of each other’s worlds.
Lev sits on the ground, I on a tree stump. He’s managed to pull together donated clothes that are more appropriate to his upbringing. The white threads of his tzitzit entwine with the tiny shoots springing up from the base of a tree.
“Lev, before the war, did you just study and pray all the time? I mean, what did you do?”
He looks up at me and smiles. “I was an apprentice. At a newspaper.”
“Really!”
“Are you surprised?”
“I am. You seem like such a scholar.”
“No, not a scholar,” he laughs. “There’s a newspaper starting here, you know. They just brought in a press. I’m going to join. Know what it’s called?”
“What?” I lean in closer, eager to hear.
“Unzer Sztyme—Our Voice. Great name, don’t you think?”
“Our Voice. Yes, it’s perfect,” I say, meditating for a moment. “That’s kind of a commitment, though, isn’t it, Lev? Staying to start a newspaper?”
“I know,” he says. “I thought we’d have been released by now. I think the British are in over their heads.”
We get up and start back to the main square. There’s a group of little kids standing in the sunshine, doing hand motions as they sing the Hebrew aleph-bet. Their voices are like chimes in the warming breeze.
What the Night Sings Page 5