She would play for him tonight. Not for this motley crew of elegant, gray uniforms of the SS and civilian attires of the Kapos, but for him. She’d play as beautifully as she could, not to please these lowly creatures she despised with great passion, but to make him proud.
She played all of his favorite pieces that night. All of them, from her memory, loudly and defiantly, and also braved the Jewish composers as well. For the dessert, she served them Tchaikovsky, “The Seasons. December; Christmas,” just to mock them with the reminder of the nation to which they were presently losing the war. Almost to her disappointment, the SS wardens didn’t recognize the joke and broke into tumultuous applause instead.
For the first time in her entire career, Alma didn’t bow to her audience.
After the performance, there was indeed extra bread and a piece of moldy sausage. Alma gave hers away to the other girls.
Inside the Lagerführerin’s quarters, to which Alma had been summoned by one of the wardens a few days after the concert, the faint aroma of lilacs lingered. As Alma sat across the desk from Maria Mandl, the head of the Birkenau women’s camp, an inmate was arranging the fresh flowers in a vase under Mandl’s annoyed look. It appeared to Alma that if it weren’t for her presence in the room, Mandl would long ago have shouted at the woman. However, the Lagerführerin just sat and stared pointedly at the scrawny figure instead. Only after the inmate had left did she shift her gaze to Alma.
Alma guessed her to be in her early thirties, just a couple of years younger than her; though, it was difficult to correctly identify the wardens’ ages here, just as it was difficult to identify the inmates’ ages. But whereas the inmates aged much too quickly due to starvation, exhaustion, and disease, the wardens’ otherwise beautiful faces were marred by the harsh, premature lines from their constant shouting that distorted their mouths and left severe creases between their neatly plucked brows. Hatred aged them just as fast as suffering aged their victims. Alma thought it to be a form of poetic justice.
“My wardens won’t stop talking about your performance,” Mandl broke the silence first. “Your father was the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic.” It wasn’t a question; a statement rather, with a measure of thinly veiled respect in it.
Alma recognized a familiar accent. A fellow Austrian, then, Lagerführerin Mandl.
“I’m not from Vienna, myself,” Mandl continued, shifting in her seat, “but from the Upper parts.”
A town—or village—so small she was ashamed to name it. Alma grinned. Just as she’d said: pig farmers, the uniformed lot of them.
“I heard both you and your father play, just before the Anschluss.”
Naturally, before the Anschluss. After the annexation of Austria, every single Jewish musician was dismissed from their position by the Propaganda Ministry’s thugs, to be replaced by an Aryan counterpart. An Aryan, who couldn’t play to save his life, but that mattered not, as long as his blood was pure.
Alma kept staring at the camp leader without uttering a word. She would lie if she said that Mandl’s somewhat uncomfortable squirming from that silence of hers didn’t give her a certain pleasure.
“What luck to have you here with us now, don’t you agree?” Mandl even smiled at her. It was the smile of a woman who didn’t do it often, uncertain and lopsided.
Alma’s brow arched. Was this some sort of a tasteless joke?
“I meant to say, Herr Kommandant himself will be most pleased to hear you play for him and his distinguished guests. I’m a great music lover myself, you see. We share that in common.”
That’s about all we share in common, Alma wanted to say.
“You would most oblige me if you make something suitable out of those women that I’m currently trying to pass off as an orchestra.” Mandl uttered a brisk embarrassed chuckle. “You’ve heard them play. Such so-called music must insult your ears much more than it insults mine.”
“It’s difficult to play well when all one thinks about is getting some food in one’s stomach,” Alma countered.
For a few moments, Mandl sat and blinked at her, caught off guard. It was obvious that the first words out of the famous violinist’s mouth were not what she had expected to hear.
“I certainly can teach them how to play Viennese-quality music, but I simply can’t live or work in such conditions,” Alma went on, her voice full of ice. “I saw where they live now, Lagerführerin, and, with all due respect—” she could only hope it didn’t come out too sarcastic, “the conditions are atrocious. If you want me to lead your orchestra, I’ll need new quarters, assigned specifically to my girls, where we can have a music room to rehearse, storage for the instruments, and access to showers, so we can look presentable for each performance… We’ll need new uniforms, not those striped rags they presently wear. And start feeding them well, for heaven’s sake! Regular meals, substantial ones, and not those measly portions you throw at them after each performance, like bones to the dogs. It’s degrading! How can one create music when one is constantly humiliated to such an extent? Even I won’t be able to play in such conditions if you make me live in such a manner even for a few weeks.” Alma motioned her head toward the vase with flowers. “You wouldn’t leave those lilacs of yours without water and sunlight and expect them to please your senses with their beauty and scent. Can you really, in good conscience, expect us to please you and your comrades with our music if you deny us our water and our sunlight?”
Her head tilted slightly to one side, Alma waited for Mandl’s reaction, annoyed with the fact that she had to explain the obvious to her compatriot.
For a few moments, the leader of the women’s camp sat frozen, unsure of how to proceed. Her authority had just been challenged, by a Jew no less and an inmate, and she wasn’t called the Beast by her charges for nothing. Birkenau was her kingdom, where she, alone, gave the orders. Here, she was not just a rightful ruler, but the Führer’s appointed God, with the right to decide who was to live and who was to die. A gun sat snuggly in its holster on her hip, for that very purpose. She had killed for less before, and still…
…and still, Mandl dared not even raise her voice at this woman in front of her, for she would lose her position of superiority at once with a shout, no matter how contradictory that may have sounded. Shouts and curses were daily occurrences in her own family house, coming mostly from her drunkard father and met with just as crude a torrent of insults from her mother, aimed at him: the good-for-nothing, the useless hog, let him rot in that gutter from which he crawled.
No one had shouted in the Rosé house; Mandl would have bet money on that. In the Rosé house, they played music, ate from porcelain plates with silver forks, and kissed the ladies’ hands gallantly. No, the crude shouting and—worse still—the demonstrations of the whip would only reveal the differences in their upbringing and that Mandl simply couldn’t have. In front of the others, she would remain the Beast. In front of Alma Rosé, she’d remain the civil lover of everything refined.
“I suppose that sounds reasonable enough,” she finally allowed, contemplatively. “You shall have a new barrack. And new uniforms. The showers, though, you will have to share with the Kanada inmates for now.”
“That’s perfectly fine, Lagerführerin. And I thank you for your kindness and understanding.”
They shook hands at the door—the very first time that Mandl had shaken hands with an inmate. But Alma Rosé didn’t act like any regular inmate; rather, a distinguished guest, who graced their godforsaken quarters with her presence. Long after the famous violinist had gone, Mandl stood and stared at her palm with a stupid smile plastered on her face. She had just shaken hands with Alma Rosé herself.
Chapter 3
The Birkenau Music Block had a number on it—12. A gray wooden barrack, it stood on the very edge of the women’s camp, tucked neatly away into the relative safety of the outskirts. Here, the grass wasn’t eaten by the starved inmates, and pine trees provided a relief of the shadow in the sweltering after
noon; yet, Alma wasn’t easily deceived. A fresh, thin film of soot colored the lawn ashen-gray. The pines concealed the wall of barbed wire, at least four meters tall. And, the most sinister of all, the long body of a building with a tall chimney rising from it lay just beside that wall, like a predator in wait. It was slumbering just then—the chimney wasn’t belching greasy, foul-smelling smoke into the bright azure sky, but Alma knew precisely what she was looking at. The crematorium.
“Your new block,” Maria Mandl announced in a bright tone of a hostess from some Austrian inn. One of the wardens who accompanied Mandl cleared her throat, indicating that favors bestowed by the camp leader upon them, undeserving inmates, ought to be acknowledged.
“Lovely,” Alma muttered, her eyes still fixed on the chimney.
“The girls have been transferred here just yesterday but as you can hear, they’re already rehearsing.” Mandl smiled wider. “Come, I’ll introduce you properly.”
“Achtung!” the second warden bellowed, stepping inside the barrack.
Wiping her free palm discreetly on her blue dress—the Birkenau women’s orchestra’s new uniform—Alma followed Mandl and her SS entourage inside, holding her violin firmly in her other hand.
At the sight of the SS and the leader of the women’s camp herself, the band members instantly leapt to their feet and froze to attention. Mandl waved them back to their chairs that stood in a semicircle around the conductor’s stand in the middle of the practice area. She turned to Alma, looking immensely pleased with herself.
In ordinary circumstances, Alma would have thought it to be a tasteless joke. But then it occurred to her that for Birkenau, which was an even more overpopulated and vermin-riddled version of the main camp Auschwitz, it must have been one of the decent barracks indeed. Alma had never set foot inside regular women’s camp’s barracks, but she had heard plenty about them. Birkenau women’s camp was one of Magda’s favorite threats for the new arrivals and not once did its ghastly descriptions supplied by the Hungarian block elder fail to frighten them into submission:
“Keep testing my patience and I’ll make it my business to put your name on the transfer list. You think it’s bad here, in Auschwitz? Let’s see how you’ll like sleeping on a wooden bunk in Birkenau with seven or eight women packed next to you like sardines in a tin, instead of having your own bed with a mattress and a pillow. If there’s no place for you on the wooden bunks, you’ll have to sleep on the lowest level. Do you know what the lowest level means? A wet brick floor. It’s so narrow in there, you’ll have to crawl inside as though it’s a doghouse. If you’re fortunate to squeeze in along with seven other women into one of the middle-level bunks, prepare to have human waste to drip on your face while you sleep—dysentery is a regular occurrence there and once the door to the block is locked for the night, there are no latrine trips for you, my gentle lambs. Everyone does their business right where they lie. To be sure, there’s a top bunk, which looks rather good to those who have to sleep below, but it also comes with a caveat: when it rains, it pours directly onto your silly mugs, right through the planks. And in summer, the heat that gathers under the roof will have you suffocated sooner than any gas chamber. At night, rats come to gnaw on your tender pink heels, and they love the fresh arrivals.”
By now, Alma was aware that Blockälteste Hellinger only used such fear-instilling stories to keep her charges in check and had never gone through with her threats to transfer any of them to the hell of Birkenau, but the image was convincing. Even Mandl’s reassurances that Alma would get her new accommodation for the orchestra hadn’t been enough to ease Alma’s apprehension. It was still Birkenau. It was still the anteroom to the gas chamber.
Slowly, she looked around, taking in the premises. There were typical Birkenau three-tier bunk beds, but those had bedding on them, Alma noted with relief. Actual blankets and pillows, one per each bunk. The floor was wooden and not dirt and stone; there was no ceiling, just the roof, but from it, exposed electric bulbs hung on wires and that was already a luxury unheard of by other inmates, who had to trade their bread rations for candle stubs to provide at least some sort of illumination for their barnlike quarters. It was still a mere pitiful shed, but it was a livable pitiful shed and that was all that mattered for now.
Alma offered Mandl a tight-lipped smile. “I don’t know how to thank you, Lagerführerin, for your generosity.” It took Alma great effort to keep sarcasm out of her voice.
Mandl grinned broadly. “No need to thank me. Contrary to the rumors, I’m open to rational discussion and you brought up certain arguments that I found to be convincing. I only did what was right in this case.”
A regular philanthropist with a horsewhip, Alma thought to herself and forced another smile.
“Oh, and this will be your private quarters.” Mandl pushed open the door to the room next to the entrance.
It was a closet; not a room and certainly not “quarters.” Just four white walls into which a bed, a table with two chairs, and a small cupboard had been squeezed by some magic. But that was Birkenau for you and beggars couldn’t quite be choosers, could they now? Alma mused darkly. She ought to be grateful she would have a room to call her own, which afforded at least some privacy.
And yet, her sense of justice was outraged. Why should she thank this woman for this doghouse when she wouldn’t have been here in the first place had it not been for that demented Führer of theirs and his proclamation that belonging to the Jewish race was suddenly a crime against humanity punishable by death? Why should she be grateful for at least some human decency afforded to her and her new charges when none of them should be here at all; when this entire extermination factory shouldn’t exist?
Just shut your trap if you know what’s good for you, Highness, Magda’s voice sounded in her mind, much too real and knowing. You hear the gunshots daily by the Wall. You know how revolts end here.
“Thank you, Lagerführerin,” Alma squeezed the words out of herself through gritted teeth. “It is much appreciated.”
Just then, she noticed someone’s shawl hanging off the back of the chair.
“It looks like someone lives here.” Alma gestured toward it.
“Not anymore.” Without ceremony, Mandl pulled it from the chair and threw it into the corridor.
It was a sudden and chilling realization, witnessing firsthand how quickly privileges were snatched away from the inmates.
With the same languid, thoroughly rehearsed grace, Mandl motioned Alma after herself as she moved to the center of the practice room. She stopped at the conductor’s stand and clasped her hands behind her back. Flanking the orchestra on both sides, her wardens mirrored her pose like two uniformed, demented reflections.
“Meet your new Kapo and conductor, Alma Rosé,” Mandl announced to the orchestra.
Next to her, a blond woman with a conductor’s baton stood in a stiff position, clutching at the useless stick with desperation. With some sadistic relish, Mandl motioned to her to surrender it to the new authority.
“Czajkowska, from now on your role is reduced to the block elder’s duty. Your room will be occupied by the new Kapo. You will vacate it as soon as I’m gone and will occupy the room next to it. You are to listen and obey your new Kapo and conductor in everything she says.” Slowly, the camp leader roved her heavy gaze around the orchestra as though to drive her point across. “If you work hard enough, Frau Rosé will make something suitable out of you.”
Frau Rosé. Alma was aware of stunned gazes directed at her. She wondered if they recognized the name or were astonished that Mandl addressed her with the respectful Frau. She stole a glance in the camp leader’s direction; saw how the girls shrank away from her—a frightened school of fish before a great white shark. It must have appeared inconceivable to them that the great white shark had respect for anyone who was not a fellow, gray-clad predator.
“However, if she reports to me that you’re sabotaging her work, you’ll find yourselves in one of the Aussenkomma
ndos turning ground outside the camp for twelve hours straight instead of making music. Am I making myself clear?”
A loud and slightly terrified, “Jawohl, Lagerführerin” reverberated around the vast block.
Satisfied with the effect her words produced, Mandl turned to Alma. “I have delegated all of your requests to my wardens. I assume everything should have been taken care of by now. But if you find something not to your satisfaction, delegate your concerns to me through my Rapportführerin Singer or through Spitzer from the Schreibstube.” Mandl jerked her chin toward a young woman she had addressed as Spitzer from the camp administration office, who held a mandolin and had a somewhat sly look about her. “Spitzer reports both to Singer and to me personally, so either way, your concerns will be delivered to me in a timely fashion.”
“Thank you, Lagerführerin.” Alma slightly inclined her head in the pause that followed.
For some reason, instead of leaving them to their devices, Mandl appeared to hesitate.
“Does Lagerführerin have any special requests for me perhaps?” Alma inquired, summoning another well-bred smile to her face.
As though encouraged by the violinist’s words, Mandl brightened, visibly pleased. “Could you perhaps play something for them? So they can understand at last what sort of music I’ve been trying to extract from them this entire time.”
The Violinist of Auschwitz: Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel Page 3
