The Violinist of Auschwitz: Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel

by Ellie Midwood

  “All of your clothes—off, now.”

  An anxious murmur passed through their ranks. The veterans of the camp, they knew they were inside the safety of a real Sauna and not a gas chamber; yet, the fear of something quite different was written plainly on their faces. A clothes-off order, and particularly coming from one whom they rightfully called the Angel of Death, meant only one thing—a selection.

  As though propelled by some communal, animalistic instinct, all heads turned to Alma at once—imploring, begging for protection. She remained perfectly calm, not just for the girls’ sake—fear was just as contagious here as any other deathly illness—but because she was aware that Dr. Mengele was watching her closely, grinning, with his eyes narrowed. They betrayed sheer curiosity, a mental bet with himself as to what she was about to do. He was fond of these psychological games; Alma had learned it far too well by now.

  What she had also learned was that his reactions were impossible to predict. Sometimes, he listened to the inmate doctors’ pleas and permitted them to treat almost hopeless cases; sometimes, he remained unmoved even when the inmate doctors promised him that their patients would be able to return to work a few days later and sent the entire ward to gas instead.

  “Herr Doktor, is it really necessary?”

  Dr. Mengele looked almost bored. “Lice are known to transmit typhus,” he began explaining in a tone of a lecturer. “If one of you is sick with it, there’s a big chance lice could get into the seams of all of your clothes. They ought to be disinfected. Just like your entire block. Just like your musical instruments. Just like you are. But before that, I need to see if any of you are also sick with it. My experience has shown that inmates can be very sly when it comes to concealing such things. That’s the reason for outbreaks all over the camp, that very slyness of yours.”

  Slyness? There wouldn’t be any slyness if certain medical SS personnel didn’t send all the infected cases to the gas, Alma wanted to say.

  “You are correct, as always, Herr Doktor.” Without another word, she began unbuttoning her cardigan, annoyed with her fingers that were trembling slightly—from indignation, not fear.

  The girls followed her example, somewhat reassured by her composure. It took Alma great effort to appear perfectly unmoved in front of them when she was seething inside.

  In the last attempt to preserve at least some of their dignity, not really hoping for a positive answer, Alma inquired if the girls could leave their undergarments on.

  “Everything needs to be disinfected,” Dr. Mengele countered without emotion.

  “I understand that, Herr Doktor. We will take everything off after.”

  “After what?” It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or playing one of his mental games again.

  After you leave, Alma didn’t say anything, but her expressive gaze did. “You will still be able to see the typhus spots on their chests and stomachs even if they have their underwear on,” she said in the pause that followed.

  “I’m a medical doctor. I’m not interested in your breasts or private parts.”

  “Even more reason to keep them covered.”

  Dr. Mengele burst into chuckles. “When did you make a sport out of arguing with me, Frau Alma?”

  When she didn’t reply, he simply shook his head in resignation and began walking along the line of girls, inspecting the skin on their chests and only asking them to pull the waistbands of their undergarments down whenever he saw a suspicious rash.

  Three more girls, including Flora, the orchestra’s only pianist, were separated from the rest in this manner. They stood, huddling next to each other and staring at Alma instead of the SS man, with the mortified, unblinking eyes of wild rabbits.

  “Are they also going to the sickbay?” Alma didn’t conceal her alarm.

  “Yes, yes, to the sickbay.”

  She didn’t trust a word that came out of his mouth.

  “Will I be able to visit them?” Alma followed their small procession to the door.

  “Absolutely out of the question.”

  “What about our schedule? We ought to play in the sickbay every Tuesday and Thursday.”

  “Not during the outbreak.”

  “We can play outside!” She stopped short of catching his sleeve. “We can set our instruments outside and play for them. Music therapy is important for recovery.”

  “I heard low temperatures are harmful for your instruments. Wasn’t that the reason for the stove in your quarters?” He arched an amused brow at her.

  Alma only looked at him with faint reproach.

  Whatever prompted him to do it, he waved his gloves at her in a dismissive gesture before heading out. “Have it your way, if it’s so important to you. Tuesday and Thursday, but only outside the block and for thirty minutes only. If I catch one of you inside, there won’t be any more talking.”

  “You won’t, Herr Doktor,” Alma promised to his retreating back. “Thank you.”

  Alma watched him stroll in his warm gray overcoat in front of three of her girls, who had to half-trot after him, barefoot and almost naked against the howling wind and gusts of snow, and felt tears gathering in her throat from an incomprehensive mixture of gratitude and savage, violent hatred for him that nearly suffocated her with its power. The camp did strange things to one’s psyche. After constant abuse inflicted upon them by the SS, such a miserable gesture as permitting the inmates to remain partially clothed, somewhat fed, not quite killed and only slightly beaten, was seen as something impressive. Everything in them had been reduced to dog-like instincts and they gladly licked the hand that occasionally threw them one metaphorical bone or other and feared the boot that could kick them under the ribs at the same time…

  Collecting herself once again, Alma turned to her orchestra, reduced by a few irreplaceable members, and smiled encouragingly at them. Two female inmates with cans of strongly smelling disinfectant were already waiting for them near the Sauna entrance itself.

  “Well, ladies, you know the drill,” Alma spoke to her frightened charges in her brightest voice. “Keep your eyes shut at all times and rub the stuff into your hair until your scalp feels as though it’s on fire. I’m not losing more of you to the sickbay, so better suffer through it now than later. Undress and off you go inside. Make it snappy—no need for you to catch cold either.”

  Only Sofia lingered behind. She waited for the girls to be admitted inside before she approached Alma and whispered into her ear, “Do you truly believe he took them into the sickbay?”

  “I don’t know,” Alma admitted honestly. “But the first thing I’m going to do as soon as we get our clothes back is find out.”

  Her inflamed eyes still stinging from the disinfectant, Alma crept toward the sickbay, watching for the familiar gray overcoat closely. Once inside, she breathed with relief, for she knew that Dr. Mengele wouldn’t go into the block that had been turned into an infectious ward if he could help it. The Angel of Death didn’t mind dissecting them when they were already dead, but living patients he mostly left to the inmate doctors’ care.

  Alma knew he had been transferred to Auschwitz after getting injured on the Eastern front and deemed unfit for further frontline service. He wore quite a few awards for bravery, two highly coveted Iron Crosses among them. He must have treated actual patients, in the most dangerous conditions, at some point, risking his own life for their sake. So, when did he turn from a brave frontline medic into a sadist and a murderer with complete disregard for his victims’—precisely victims, they certainly weren’t his patients—fate? And how could he possibly come to her block after sending a fresh batch of human beings into the gas and listen to her violin with the look of tender melancholy on his face? Alma failed to comprehend many things in this place, but him she failed to understand most of all.

  As she moved further along the corridor, Alma had to cover her mouth and nose with her headscarf. The sickbay was overrun by the recent influx of typhus patients. As it often was in the camp
during outbreaks, when there weren’t enough beds, half of them lay right on the dirty, cold floor. As carefully as possible, Alma stepped over the bodies, wondering how many of them were already dead. Not that the living patients looked any better. Delirious with fever and plagued with severe stomach pains, they moaned and pleaded with no one in particular in different languages in that hellish Babylon, where God himself abandoned them for reasons no one could quite comprehend.

  Rats crawled freely over the bony frames covered by threadbare, soiled clothes. Some women kicked them off indifferently; some didn’t budge even when a particularly insolent rodent would start gnawing on their flesh.

  That’s how the nurses must have recognized the corpses.

  “This one also,” one of them called to two inmates under her charge, kicking the rat off the woman’s chest.

  Flattening herself against the wall as much as the space between the sleeping women allowed, Alma let them pass with their human cargo. Outside, over the loudspeakers, some cheerful march was playing and the corpse’s arm, dangling in the air, moved in perfect synchrony with it as though the dead woman conducted the march herself. Alma felt a shudder run through her at the grotesque image.

  In the corner, a woman was wailing; her bunkmate had just torn a husk of dry bread out of her fingers.

  “I heard what the doctor was saying about you. You won’t recover!” the bunkmate was saying, stuffing the bread into her mouth. “You’re a useless eater. I ought to eat. I shall come out of here and serve the Reich! The SS need me! Quit your sniveling. I’m entitled to your portion because I’m stronger. The strongest survive; it’s perfect applied Nietzsche. You’re too dumb to comprehend the greatness of his ideas…”

  Alma stared at her in horror and disgust. What have they done to us? she thought, contemplating the yellow star sewn onto the bunkmate’s chest. The Jew, wearing a striped robe in which countless Jews must have died before her and quoting Nietzsche to her former friend, from whom she had just stolen her last piece of bread. Reduced to animals and taught to act like ones…

  “Typhus doesn’t inspire charity.”

  It took Alma some time to turn to the voice. An inmate doctor stood before her with a clipboard pressed against her chest. She had a harassed look about her, but her face was noble and calm.

  “When they recover, they get tormented with the worst hunger any of them have ever experienced, even by the camp standards,” the doctor went on to explain. “It literally drives them wild. One time, they combined forces and attacked the inmates who were on soup distribution duty that evening. Nothing came out of it, of course. They simply spilled the entire cauldron on the floor and ended up leaving the whole block hungry. We reported it. They got gassed. Since then, it’s just this, minor-scale stealing among themselves. Dog eat dog. A sad state of affairs.” She was looking at the woman who was finishing off the bread. “She used to be a professor of literature in Prague.” She turned to Alma, unmoved, as though such scenes were nothing new and didn’t impress her any longer. “What can I help you with?”

  “I’m looking for Dr. Švalbová.”

  “You’re speaking to her.”

  “Alma Rosé, the Music Block.” At once, Alma extended her hand.

  Dr. Švalbová looked at it but didn’t take it. “I’d rather not. Don’t take offense—for your protection, not mine. You don’t want to know what I’m touching all day and we can only use soap in the morning and in the evening. Rationing.”

  “Yes. Of course. Forgive me please.” Alma hid her hand, suddenly embarrassed with her clean hands and the good coat that still smelled reassuringly of disinfectant. They were the elite block because the SS frequented it; the medical block the same SS didn’t deem as essential as they didn’t get any profit from it, only disease. “Dr. Mengele promised to bring my girls here—”

  “He did. Made me free a separate room for them we usually reserve for the Kapos.” She didn’t sound pleased. “In the absence of any Kapos, I was using it for my other patients, but they had to be moved here, into the corridor, because we don’t have enough beds for them inside the ward. Your girls are very comfortable though. There are only four of them, each in her own bed.”

  “I didn’t ask him to do it,” Alma muttered in self-defense, even though, technically speaking, she had nothing to be guilty of. It was the administration’s fault that the sickbay was in such a pitiful state. Was it wrong of her to worry about her girls’ wellbeing? Still, she softened her voice even more as she addressed the doctor, “I came to ask if you need anything for them. Medicine, food, blankets—”

  “All of my patients need all of those things,” Dr. Švalbová interrupted her once again. “As for your girls, they already have their blankets, a stove in their ward, and double rations. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  She brushed Alma’s shoulder as she passed her by. Alma took no offense. It wasn’t the first time the inmates expressed their disdain at the fact that hers was a privileged detail and the “Music Block tarts strutted around in their silk stockings with curled hair under their lavender kerchiefs and played their songs for the SS’s entertainment,” when others had to suffer through their days with only a crumb of sawdust bread and a smear of margarine on their palm to look forward to. The camp was full of such sentiments. It was nothing new. Alma had learned to ignore it.

  She should have returned to the Sauna and lounged about with her girls, who, after having recovered from their recent ordeal, were openly enjoying their unexpected day off. Instead, Alma made her way to the pathologist’s quarters and stood outside for quite some time, too terrified to knock out of fear of discovering Dr. Mengele inside. Finally, she braced herself for the worst and rapped on the door.

  Dr. Ránki opened it and pulled her inside at once, slamming the door behind him.

  “Is he here?” Alma asked by way of greeting.

  “Of course not. Would I invite you in if he were?”

  “I need medicaments.” Alma decided to skip small talk.

  “I figured that much. Typhus?”

  “Do you have any medication for it?”

  “Nothing that wouldn’t go unnoticed. Though, I suppose, I can give you something that he wouldn’t think to suspect.” Dr. Ránki went to open the glass cupboard and began rummaging through it. Soon, small vials and bigger medicine bottles of all shapes and colors began making their way into Alma’s pockets. “This should reduce fever. This isn’t what they typically administer to typhus patients, but it will help with stomach pains… I don’t think he’ll notice if we sneak this one out as well… And this little fellow; this ought to be given as an injection to a particularly difficult case. I’ll write it off as broken. I can give you some morphine; to trade for an extra ration or a different medicine, if not to use it directly on the patient. Do you have a doctor you can trust?”

  “Dr. Švalbová,” Alma replied without hesitation. She’d only met the inmate physician once, but she had already seen that Dr. Švalbová put the well-being of her patients—all of them, without preference—above anything else.

  She wasn’t surprised when Dr. Ránki smiled in acknowledgement. “Ah, Dr. Mancy, as her patients call her. Manca Švalbová; she’s a very good doctor. Her only concern is her patients. It’s rare in a place like this. Most lose their humanity altogether…”

  Weighed down with her contraband, Alma stole along the barracks until she reached the safety of the Kanada. Kitty was in her usual station, sorting through the mountains of clothes with a look of disgust about her. The new transport must have arrived from the ghetto.

  “Look at this!” With two fingers, Kitty lifted and held a threadbare male shirt with wide yellow circles staining its armpits as one would a dead rat. “If we send this to Germany, they shall gas us on principle only and shall be right! Wherever are they sending them from? Just a few months ago, we were getting such coats—ermine collars, black fox, silk lining—all business as it should be. Rice facial powder, French lipstick in golden tube
s—I still have some left—hand creams infused with Egyptian oils. And now? They don’t even have suitcases anymore. They bring all this garbage here in pillowcases!”

  Alma shifted from one foot to the other impatiently. “I need soap. Could you spare a few bars?”

  Kitty only snorted in disdain and shook the shirt in the air. “I am telling her we’re getting all sorts of garbage lately that all but crawls with vermin and she wants soap…”

  Alma moved closer to the girl. “I have morphine.”

  As though by magic, Kitty’s expression changed. Morphine was the equivalent of liquid gold in camp terms. Quite a few SS men were addicted to it and would hold the inmate, who could get their hands on it, in the highest esteem.

  “Wait here.”

  Kitty disappeared into the depth of the warehouse and soon returned with two sturdy brown bars in her hands.

  “Five for a vial or no deal.” Alma wasn’t stupid either.

  “That’s midday robbery!” Kitty protested.

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “Are you a violinist or a stock-market speculator?”

  “I can be both when the occasion calls for it,” Alma replied, unmoved.

  “You’re extorting a fellow Jew!”

  Alma regarded her with great skepticism. “The right SS man will give you his kidney for that vial and you know it. That’s hardly extortion.”

  “Kidney is not something I can use,” Kitty grumbled but finally gave in and brought Alma three more pieces.

  When Dr. Švalbová saw the soap bars, two of them French lavender, lined up neatly on her desk, she appeared to lose all faculty of speech for a few moments.

  “I also brought you rubbing alcohol, bandages, iodine and medicine, but the medicine must go to my girls first,” Alma said. “Whatever is left, feel free to divide between the others as you deem fit. I’ll try to bring you more supplies when I can.”

  Without saying a word, Dr. Švalbová rose from her chair, took one of the soap bars to the rusty sink attached to the wall and began lathering her hands with it. After a thorough wash, she carefully deposited the soap next to the miserable sliver of the previous bar and walked up to Alma. “Thank you, Frau Rosé,” she said in a tone very different from before, and offered Alma her hand. “Dr. Manca Švalbová. You can call me Dr. Mancy.”