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

by Ellie Midwood

  “How beautiful.”

  Alma was the first one to turn to the unfamiliar voice. Her entire orchestra was huddled around the piano, enchanted by Miklós’ playing. Now, they quickly scrambled to their instruments at the sight of Lagerführerin Mandl, Obersturmführer Hössler, Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmführer Kramer, and the inconspicuous officer who stood in front of them, his leather gloves in hand.

  “I’ve never heard it before,” he spoke again, in a soft voice and with the same accent as Mandl. If it wasn’t for the uniform and the high rank Alma had recognized from his shoulder boards, she would never have classed him with the SS crowd. With his slim build, small stature, hooked nose and glasses, he resembled a typical Jewish lawyer Der Stürmer mocked in their periodicals with envious regularity. “Who composed it?”

  “I did, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” Miklós admitted.

  “Name?”

  “Miklós Steinberg, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”

  “Are you a composer?”

  “A pianist, mostly. I have only composed a few things in my life.”

  “What is it called?”

  “For Alma.”

  “Who’s Alma?”

  “My dead wife,” Miklós lied without blinking an eye.

  Next to the newcomer, Mandl seemed to breathe out in relief. “Herr Obersturmbannführer, the women’s orchestra prepared something special for your visit, with your permission,” she began to speak with deference, signing to one of the girls to pull up a chair for their distinguished guest after he showed no visible inclination to take a seat himself.

  Could that man, the Jewish lawyer, truly be the dreaded Eichmann who had arrived early? Alma couldn’t quite believe it when she raised her baton. On Mandl’s recommendation, they had gone through the pains of preparing a Wagner piece for Herr Obersturmbannführer’s visit, a pompous, thoroughly German affair that cut Alma’s ear with its militaristic grandiosity, but which, she was well aware, the SS considered to be the national anthem of sorts.

  Eichmann, if it was indeed him, stood and listened for a few minutes, then nodded curtly, and motioned for her to stop. “Thank you. I’ve heard enough.”

  With that, he was gone, the rest of the local SS administration filing after him. Deathly silence descended on the Music Block.

  “He hated it,” Sofia announced the verdict after that silence had grown unbearable and just about anything would be better than it. “He hated it. We’re all licked.”

  They remained in the same state of petrified stupor for the rest of the day, hardly exchanging two words and awaiting their official death sentence.

  Still dazed and much too mentally exhausted to utter a single word of useless encouragement no one would believe at any rate, Alma sat among her girls without movement, staring into nothing, oddly content at the thought that at least they would all die together now—the Family Camp and her Music Block.

  Only Miklós displayed the strangest serenity as he brushed the keys of the piano softly and pensively in the corner—a man whose affairs had been settled, who could die in peace now. The eerie, haunting melody he played suited the occasion frighteningly well. As though under a spell, they were coming to terms with the inevitable. It was a ghostly and funereal song that he played, but for some reason, oddly pacifying. Coming from under his marble-white hands, the song of death no longer appeared to frighten. The dark beauty of its eternal peace had dawned on them, settled over the block like a cloud, and granted a few precious moments of longed-for comfort. Miklós played their funeral song, and Alma couldn’t be more grateful that he did. Only he could turn mortal dread of the upcoming slaughter into something so utterly beautiful.

  As the evening closed in on them, Mandl marched into the barrack. Her face was nearly shining with joy. “Your block is granted one day’s leave. One day’s leave, in the field, outside the camp. Obersturmbannführer Eichmann thought it suitable to reward you for your performance.”

  “But he hardly heard us perform,” Alma heard herself say, still unable to grasp the reality of what Mandl had said.

  Mandl only motioned toward Miklós, grinned knowingly—he had heard him, though—and walked out.

  All at once, the girls threw themselves onto Miklós, hugging him and kissing him in communal, unrestrained madness. But he had eyes only for Alma. He was smiling in embarrassment and looking at her with such profound love and devotion, she felt perfectly at peace once again. He was here, with her, and everything was as it was supposed to be.

  Chapter 27

  March 1944

  Their promised “leave” kept being postponed due to the weather. It snowed something unmerciful the entire week, but then, in the first week of March, the sun suddenly burst through the clouds and began obliterating enemy positions with the determination of the Soviets on the Eastern front. Before long, the knee-deep snowdrifts were gone. Blades of grass shoved through the muddy, wet soil, bright-green and stronger than ever. It was a punishable offense, but the inmates still broke the protocol as they were being led to work through the gates and plucked dandelions just to stare at them in amazement—were there indeed still flowers in this world then?—and scarcely felt the blows of the Kapo’s baton for breaking the ranks.

  An SS man stood in the doors of the Music Block; next to him, Miklós and von Volkmann, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Get dressed and line up in front of the barrack for the roll call,” the guard commanded. “Leave day. Camp administration orders.”

  Before they set off, still not quite believing their luck, the kitchen Kommando showed up with a cauldron of camp coffee—though, “coffee” was a rather ambitious name for that disgusting brew—and dealt the orchestra girls a double portion instead of the usual ration.

  “Double rations? Whoever did you please so much?” the kitchen inmates asked.

  “Someone named Eichmann,” Alma replied and brought the cup to her lips with a hand that wasn’t too steady, as though to wash the taste of that name from her mouth.

  He was long gone, yet something ominous remained. It still hung in the air, along with the noise of the hammers from the ramp under construction.

  Now, the Sonderkommando was also digging something in the field not too far from the two former gas chambers—Alma saw them each time she visited Kitty in the Kanada. “Not mass graves again?” Alma had regarded Kitty incredulously. Surely, the fiasco with the former mass graves that all had to be dug up had taught the SS something. But even the always chatty Kitty had clammed up and positively refused to say a thing as to what those pits were. As if to put a stop to such unhealthy curiosity, the SS soon erected tall solid screens that obscured the Sonderkommando and their ghastly work from the rest of the camp population.

  Mind your own affairs, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing to see here. Something a sleek-talking Hössler would say. Alma had already known how such assurances ended with him.

  It took Alma great effort to stop herself from contemplating those sites on that fine spring day. Counted and assembled into the usual five-abreast manner, the orchestra girls marched along the main Lagerstraße, accompanied only by their own Kapo and a single SS man. At first, no one paid them any heed, but the closer they came near the main gates, the more inmates flocked to the electrified fence, stopping just within inches of it. Shaved-headed, gray-faced apparitions in their tattered robes, they stared at the troop and their lavender kerchiefs in utter disbelief.

  No one ever left camp grounds on such strolls. It was something unthinkable, much too un-Auschwitz-like. But here they were, heading out of the gates and to temporary freedom and, all at once, the inmates that were left behind broke into hoarse cheers, pumping their bony fists in the air. It must have cost them considerable effort to exert themselves in such a manner, but they cheered all the same, because finally someone had come out of this place, so it was possible after all. The field behind the barbed wire, the grass, the cows, the farmers, the houses, the cities and the countries; the planet still rotated and the
y weren’t caught forever in this limbo for the sins they didn’t know they committed until the Nazis came and read out the list of their nonexistent offenses.

  “Shut your beer traps, filthy carcasses,” the SS man barked over his shoulder at the inmates half-heartedly but didn’t follow through with a general shot in their direction when they didn’t quiet down. The sun was warm on his face and the rifle hung much too snugly on his shoulder to bother with.

  The ground on the field wasn’t turned yet, and the guard inquired of the local farmer as to why not.

  “Too early, Herr Kommandant.” Every SS man must have been Herr Kommandant to them. It appeared that this particular one didn’t mind the promotion.

  The farmer was a German, from Saxony, judging by the accent. All of the local Poles had long been removed, to where—no one quite knew. Some speculated that Auschwitz was precisely where they ended up.

  “This is a trick the spring is playing on us all,” the farmer followed up his explanation and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “It’s a safe bet that all this will be covered with snow in a week or so. Only a complete blockhead would believe that this weather has come to stay. The winter will be back before all these buds and flowers know what hit them. It’ll bury them all yet; you’ll see how fast it will, Herr Kommandant.”

  “I believe you,” the SS man obliged him with a grin.

  Alma stood very still beside him. Yes, it would bury them all yet. Just a trick, all of it…

  They sat where the SS man had indicated, on a patch of grass that had already worked its way through the ground—a weather anomaly, to be sure. It wasn’t a typical Polish spring by any stretch of imagination; that much the farmer was right about. The anomaly, just like them, the camp inmates lounging in the sun with their faces turned toward it—a little troop of sunflowers who soaked it in and pretended not to care one way or the other about what tomorrow would bring.

  The farmer’s wife soon appeared with a basket that she deposited before the guard. He made a half-hearted show of refusing it, but then accepted it after all and even threw a smoked sausage and a whole homemade bread into Alma’s hands. There was a bottle of something peeking from under the linen napkin; catching the SS man’s eyes on her, Alma quickly averted hers, pretending not to notice it.

  The bread was still warm and smelled like heaven itself. It was far from the type that they were used to consuming. No, this was real bread, kneaded by the woman’s hands, baked in an oven until the golden crust had appeared. How deliciously it broke in Alma’s hands as she divided it between the girls. They chewed it with purposeful slowness, eyes closed, savoring its delectable, rich taste. The gentlemen that they were, both Miklós and von Volkmann refused theirs.

  At least an hour must have passed. The guard had finished the bottle and was snoring evenly, with his hands folded under the back of his head. His rifle lay next to him; in that blinding sunshine, it had lost its menacing look and appeared to be a mere stage prop, just like the SS man himself. Alma looked at him and it occurred to her that he didn’t belong here. There was no place for guns and uniforms amid this emerald grass. Nature would reclaim her rightful territory soon enough—by peaceful means, which always won over guns and bombs and heavy artillery in the end. The Germans blasted the earth with their charges; they trampled these dandelions with their hobnailed boots, and yet, every spring without fail, the grass tore through the gunpowder-poisoned ground, the flowers sprung back where bones of the fallen still lay.

  It was the world order that the SS man didn’t comprehend. Beauty was indestructible. It was the most powerful force on earth and would always be. As he lay there, unsuspecting, those weeds and dandelions weaved around his body; they were half-concealing it already and Alma suddenly realized just how mortal and fragile the guard actually was.

  “The end is near,” Miklós whispered in her ear, as though reading her thoughts. He sat with his legs framing hers and pulled her close, so she would rest her back against his chest. “Their end.”

  They both kept studying the sleeping guard in front of them as though he was already a relic of the past. Wishful thinking, to be sure, but that was all they had.

  “He is already dead; he’s just too thickheaded to realize it. All of them are.”

  “And what about us?”

  “What about us? We shall live forever. Through our music. Every time someone plays a record with your violin concerto, you shall be reborn. Every time the radio plays my piano concerto, I shall live again. We have created something that can’t be killed, Almschi. And they, they shall all perish and the very trace of them will be wiped off the face of the earth.”

  “Do you still believe we shall get out of here?”

  “We already have.” He laughed softly somewhere in her hair.

  “No. You know what I mean.”

  For some time, he didn’t answer. Only when he felt her stiffening against his chest did he kiss her tenderly on her shoulder and said the words he didn’t quite believe but which she desperately needed to hear: “We will. Of course, we will. And then we shall tour the whole of Europe with just one suitcase.”

  “And my violin case.”

  “And your violin case. I’ll buy you a Stradivari as soon as we get paid.”

  “Just how much do you expect to be paid?” She regarded him with mock-skepticism.

  “Millions. We shall become a curiosity, you take my word for it. The Auschwitz musicians. Returning from a place like this is like returning from hell itself. They will come to look at us like someone who had returned from the grave. We’ll be very rich and very famous; you’ll see.”

  “Good.” She didn’t argue with him, only smiled and nestled against his chest. He was a fabulist, to be sure, but he was a brilliant one. She believed him every time he spun such impossible scenarios.

  Just then, von Volkmann walked up to them, shielding his face from the sun with the hand that was still in a cast. His nose and cheeks had already acquired a rosy blush from the sun exposure. He must have been dreadfully bored doing nothing at all, loitering about Laks’s Music Block for days on end and visiting other privileged details from time to time, so it was only natural that the SS had sent him along with Alma’s girls on a little outing of sorts, likely hoping that he’d mention it in his letter to his influential parent. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Not at all,” they replied together.

  He caught on to that and grinned knowingly.

  “So, what’s the plan, children?” He motioned his golden head toward the sleeping SS man. “Shall we kill him and run toward the Soviet Army? I hear, they’re not too far away from here. Approaching Lublin as we speak. The local Armia Krajowa is an option too, if you don’t fancy the Bolshevists.” He laughed before they could come up with a suitable response. “I’m joking. Though, it is my profound conviction that they wouldn’t execute me even if I went through with the enterprise.” Once again, he contemplated the sleeping man as though sizing him up and the distance to his rifle. “I’m almost tempted to put that theory to the test.”

  “A splendid idea. You’ll get a slap on the wrist and we’ll all get shot,” Miklós announced.

  “There were people who escaped from here, you know.”

  “We know,” Miklós replied tonelessly, his blank face betraying nothing.

  The camp Resistance had been in splendid luck lately: the escaped fellow had never been caught and they had got away with murder on Christmas Eve. The waiting staff Kapo had made a big show of bursting into the SS infirmary quarters that night, screaming something frightful about the poor Herr Rottenführer choking to his death, God damn that French brandy, didn’t he warn him not to drink too much of the blasted stuff, could they please fetch a doctor right this instant and some other utterly convincing lies to that extent. Alma remembered very well the look of delight on Miklós’ face when he recounted the entire affair: “Can you believe it, they hardly interrogated us at all when they came to the canteen! Dr. Mengele refuse
d to even touch the body, let alone bother with an autopsy. Called the dead SS man a drunken pig who had it coming, signed a document declaring it an accident, and marched off as though nothing had transpired.”

  Perhaps, it was splendid luck indeed. Perhaps, the freedom fighters had simply grown more professional and therefore dangerous in their techniques.

  “They even gave detailed camp plans to the Allied commanders,” von Volkmann spoke again, obviously impressed. “I learned about it from my father, days before they arrested me. You should have seen the state they were all in! My father’s office was in wild uproar when they learned about the entire affair. Reichsführer Himmler himself gathered them all for an emergency meeting and screamed at them something frightful for permitting such damaging information to escape Auschwitz’ walls. Now, the Allies know what they’re up to…”

  “Fat lot of good it did, from where I’m sitting.” It was Sofia who gave her opinion this time.

  Von Volkmann went silent. He suddenly seemed upset. “You’re right. The Allies’ priority is winning the war. Not us.”

  “Why did you come back?” Miklós voiced the question that everyone must have asked themselves who knew of the von Volkmann family.

  At first, the SS General’s son made no reply. But then he looked at Miklós with his bright-blue eyes and suddenly announced in a firm voice that sounded both desperate and disgusted for some reason: “Because here, unlike in my family home, I feel free.”