“It’s as if I’ve always known you,” she said.
He ran his eyes over the violin, held it gently. Of course it was his friend’s violin that now “sang” in the woman’s hands. He furrowed his brow.
“Daughter? He spoke of a niece.”
The others stepped back so the two of them could speak, and he noticed Ingrid leading them into the study.
“I wanted to forget about it all,” he told Regina, “but I haven’t been able to.” Then he abruptly threw out the question he had anguished over so often:
“Did Daniel survive?”
Without giving it a thought, the two of them broke into Polish—not Yiddish, which the woman had never learned. The luthier had survived the concentration camp, Regina revealed gently, but had died relatively young, when she was only seventeen. After Daniel was released from the hospital, he and Eva had legally adopted her. She became his true daughter; she was his daughter. By that time she had already begun to play the violin, she added. Her relative Rudi was a musician, and he started teaching her when she was five.
Bronislaw was elated to meet Daniel’s adopted daughter, even if Regina was no longer young. Their encounter was so implausible: she had never before left Poland; he had never wished to return. He had severed all the links to that troubled past, the few that remained from the camp experience.
“I understand,” Regina said. “Eva never wanted to talk about it either. To stanch the anguish and memories she keeps herself occupied doing a thousand things, drinks a bit too much. She never mentioned it to me, but when I was twelve, Father told me that while she was interned at Auschwitz she had been sterilized in a terribly brutal way. She still suffers from pains in her lower abdomen.”
Daniel, by contrast, had frequently talked to Regina about his experiences, perhaps because he carried with him the knowledge, the glimmer of light among all that misery, of having been able to finish the violin.
All the old shadows seemed to vanish with the woman’s voice. When the lager was liberated—Daniel had told her—and they were taking him to the hospital, the doctors couldn’t understand how he had survived. He spent many months in the hospital, wavering between life and death. The two musicians who had played with Bronislaw died, however, during the first winter after his departure on the “Swedish bus.” One day, however, after an unexpected visit from his old friend Freund, Daniel had an abrupt improvement, and he was able to fight his way back to life. Her father had given Regina such a detailed account of the visit that she felt she had been present herself.
“Freund suddenly showed up at the hospital and sat down next to Father’s bed and with a great flourish exhibited the violin. ‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘I bought it for you.’”
It was no mere coincidence, no black-market deal pulled off by Freund, who was on the verge of embarking for the United States. He had actually been able to buy it when they auctioned all the ex-Commander’s belongings, shortly after he had been tried and hanged. Rascher, the sadistic doctor-executioner, had committed suicide just before he was going to be hanged. Daniel knew it was his violin. It could be no other. There had been no need to read the letters on it; he carried its exact shape in his mind with the same clarity as that first day, when amid the terror and misery, he had begun to choose the material with which to craft it. Through all the days of hunger, his body often beaten, consumed by rage and grief, in his deepest soul—he told his daughter—he had always hoped that the violin wouldn’t be destroyed by Sauckel, that someone, at some point in the future, would save the violin and it would survive, even if he did not.
“You know what?” he had told Regina. “When Freund brought it to me, it was almost as if I could again hear the question: Occupation? This time my answer would have been: Violin maker.”
No embers remained, only ashes and a lingering warmth from the fireplace. Who knew if he would see Regina again? Bronislaw mused. When she finished the concert tour in Holland, she was going back to her own country. She had returned Daniel to him, and with him a sense of peace. Although Bronislaw had been helpless to do otherwise, it had been tremendously painful to leave Daniel behind in the lager, to see him waving good-bye. The memory had tortured him for years.
Climent had presented Bronislaw with the score for the Mytilene Trio. Tomorrow he would play the violin part, but if he wanted, he could play it by heart this very moment. That night the old nightmare would not revisit him, the one that always led him back to the Three Rivers Camp.
It isn’t true, is it, Daniel, that music can tame the beasts? Yet, in the end, a song lives.
To the victims
In memoriam
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to express her gratitude to the luthier Ramon Pinto i Comas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIA ÀNGELS ANGLADA (1930–99) is one of the most important figures of Catalan twentieth-century literature. Her success as an author was confirmed in 1978 when she was awarded the Josep Pla Prize for her first novel, Les Closes. She subsequently became one of the most respected and widely read of all Catalan authors, with works such as No em dic Laura, L’agent del Rei, and El violí d’Auschwitz.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
MARTHA TENNENT, a translator from Catalan and Spanish, was born in the United States, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona, receiving her B.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Barcelona. She recently edited Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translation and Interpreting and has translated the novels Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda and The Invisible City by Emili Rosales. Her translations have appeared in Two Lines, Words Without Borders, PEN America, and Review of Contemporary Fiction.
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The Violin of Auschwitz Page 8