“And you shall put her on that gurney alone. No other bodies next to her.”
“Jawohl.”
“If I find out that you disobeyed me…” Hössler’s voice descended into a barely audible, ominous whisper that didn’t promise anything good.
“Your instructions are perfectly clear, Herr Obersturmführer.”
In the end, Hössler decided to go to the crematorium himself and only left after he saw it with his own eyes that his orders had been followed precisely.
The procession of the inmates continued well into the following day, this time to the Music Block. The SS wardens and guards mixed with them—the oddest spectacle that would leave even Sofia, the camp veteran who had seen it all, speechless. Auschwitz didn’t hold memorial services for its inmates. It was simply unheard of and yet, here they were, filing in, silent and respectful, the victims and the executioners alike, pausing reverently before that chair draped in black. Somehow, during her very short stay in Auschwitz, she managed to touch them all, the one whom they addressed respectfully as Frau Alma. The violinist of Auschwitz. The woman who had left on her own terms, and they couldn’t help but admire her for it.
At last, when the night drew in, the Angel of Death himself made an appearance. The room hushed itself at once as he walked toward the chair wreathed in flowers and black drapes. In front of it, he took off his uniform cap, straightened, and clicked his heels in salute before bowing his head.
“In memoriam.”
It was long past curfew. The night hung, velvet and mild, over the Music Block. Inside the stove, the fire crackled softly, highlighting pale, pensive faces gathered around it. Only a few of the girls slept soundly in their beds. Most sat, against all regulations, in a semicircle around the fire, craving its warmth—children orphaned for the second time.
Zippy’s head rested on Sofia’s shoulder. In her hands, the former Kapo held Alma’s lavender kerchief.
“I still can’t believe that she’s gone,” Sofia spoke in a voice that seemed robbed of all its strength. She brought the kerchief to her face and inhaled deeply. “Lilacs.” A faint smile on her face wavered in the uncertain light of the stove. “There’s still a piece of her favorite soap left,” she told Zippy. “You should have it. She would love for you to have it.”
Zippy made no reply; only wiped her face subtly with the back of her hand.
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her.”
Sofia turned to the voice with a familiar French accent. Violette-from-Paris was biting her lips to stop them from quivering.
“I would have never survived if she didn’t give me a chance,” the French violinist repeated with a suppressed emotion.
“Forgive me, please, for rejecting you when you first came to the audition,” Sofia began to apologize, but Violette only waved a hand in front of her face as though to indicate that it mattered not, that she held no grudge against the former Kapo.
“You had good reason for it. I played atrociously.” Violette laughed through the tears.
Sofia tried to smile but felt her own face twisting into a painful grimace as well.
“Frau Alma only took me because she felt sorry for me. Hélène begged her to give me a chance.” Violette glanced at her freight-train friend, who was presently rubbing her back. Hélène’s face was wet with tears as well. “Frau Alma did; it was Kálmán, Countess Maritza, I still remember it as if it only happened yesterday. How did she manage not to cringe openly when I played it for her!” Another peal of strangled laughter; another round of suppressed sobs from the orchestra girls. “And still, she took me on a one-week trial. I had to walk every single morning from my block to the Music Block and practice with the orchestra. I remember, on the third day I think, someone from my block stole my galoshes and I had to walk barefoot, and it was so cold that morning! Cold and muddy and wet…”
“It was. And I didn’t allow you inside the block until you washed your feet at the door.” Sofia reached out for Violette’s hand and Violette took it in hers, squeezing it tightly. “Forgive me.”
Once again, the violinist shook her head. “You were only doing your block elder’s duty.”
“I remember how you began to cry.”
“I cried because my feet were so cold and because I was upset that someone stole my footwear, not because of you,” Violette assured her. “Without footwear, your days are numbered in a regular block. How was I to get a new pair? I knew no one in my own block; not a soul cared about my well-being. So I sat here and cried, and Frau Alma came out and asked what the matter was. After I told her, she said she’d take me on a permanent basis.” Violette released a ragged breath. “That was the first time she saved me.” It was still difficult to talk about it. She passed her hand over her forehead, forcing her emotions under control. “The second was when I got sick with typhus. Dr. Mengele would have sent all of us sick girls to the gas, if it weren’t for her.”
“He was ready to send us to the gas even after we recovered, just because we were so weak,” Flora spoke. Her voice was hoarse with tears. “If Frau Alma didn’t intervene on our behalf, he would have done just that.” For a few moments, she was silent. “She saved me too, from the Quarantine Block. I had all but given up on life. We were locked there for over a month, with almost no food or even water. I was so weak, I sincerely thought I had four or five days to live. And then Frau Alma came and asked if anyone played the accordion. I told her that I knew how to play the piano, but she still took me. I will never forget the day when an SS man unlocked the door and called out my name.” She nodded several times to herself and finished very quietly and gravely, “she saved my life.”
“She pulled me right out of the Sauna,” Anita said, her eyes big and mournful against the gathering shadows. “I stood there with a toothbrush in my hand—I have not the faintest idea who gave it to me or why—stood and waited for the gas to come out of those showerheads and kill us all. And then the doors suddenly opened, and she walked in, tall and elegant in her camel-hair coat and headscarf, like a movie star, and demanded if Anita Lasker, the cellist, was inside. When I first saw her, I thought she must be the SS or someone important. And she took me very gently by my hand and said, ‘It’s all over now, Anita. You shall come with me and play cello in my Music Block. All over now, don’t fret. I will protect you.’” She drew her eyes up to the ceiling and blinked rapidly a few times. “And she did,” she managed at last, but the tears still spilled down her cheeks, round and heavy like pearls.
“I could scarcely play at all, but instead of turning me away, she made me into a runner and saved my life,” another voice from the back joined in.
“I couldn’t play either, and she made me a copyist, even though she already had a dozen of them.”
“My fingers were crippled with arthritis and she managed to persuade Hössler that I was a violin virtuoso and would play marvelously once I recovered. He ordered me double rations, so I would recover faster.”
“She split her rations with me when I just arrived at the block and was so weak, I would faint each time I would rise from my chair too swiftly.”
“She organized a warm cardigan for me from the Kanada.”
“She allowed me to sleep in her room when I learned that my mother had died. She held me all night in her arms and sang me some lullabies. If I didn’t have her then, I think I would have gone to the wire. The only thing she asked of me was to be silent about it. She wanted to keep a stern face before the others at all times. She didn’t want to mother us too much, so it wouldn’t weaken us. Here, weakness kills. Frau Alma knew it. That’s why she was so demanding of us—to make sure that we would be able to survive if something happened to her.”
“She made Mandl, Mengele, and Hössler give her their word that the orchestra shall remain an essential detail for as long as they’re in charge,” Zippy supplied suddenly. “Made them swear that there will be no selections for us for as long as this blasted camp stands.”
“Do you
think they shall keep it?” Sofia turned to look at her.
“They will,” Zippy replied with conviction. “There are few sacred matters for the SS, but, fortunately for us, Alma was one such sacred matter for them. It will be the most swinish thing to do to break that promise to her. I can’t quite explain it, but… They will keep it. You all shall see. We’ll all come out of here alive, and when we walk through those gates, I want you all to remember the name of the woman who made it possible, for as long as you live. I want you to remember her name and I want you to tell your children and your grandchildren that it’s Alma Rosé, the Birkenau orchestra conductor, whom they owe their lives to as well. And, in turn, I promise that I—” her hand found the board that had been recently replaced by her own, Zippy’s hand, “will make sure that she lives forever. Through music, just as she would have wanted.” Her fingers stroked the wood almost with affection.
Under the board, in the aluminum box, wrapped in several layers of cellophane, Miklós Steinberg’s Für Alma was concealed—until liberation day, until it was safe to carry it out through those cursed gates of the Auschwitz hell and show the entire world that not even the SS’s hobnailed boots could trample human spirit; that love would always triumph over hatred; that music was stronger than death itself.
January 1945
The real, physical liberation was the furthest thing from the idealized affair Zippy used to dream of for years on end. There was no pomp, no flowers, no press, no overjoyed heads of states welcoming them back to freedom with open arms. The only camera crews were Soviet and even they weren’t really interested in ordinary inmates; they were too busy filming Mengele’s twins being led out through the gates by the Polish Red Cross nurses and Soviet doctors. Herr Doktor himself was, naturally, nowhere to be found.
Just like the rest of the SS, Dr. Mengele had fled as soon as the thunder of the Red Army’s artillery crept dangerously close to the camp’s borders. His colleagues followed suit soon enough, but only after they had burned all documentation that could have been found—first in the crematorium ovens and then, right in the open pyres in front of their headquarters. Zippy knew it firsthand; a former camp administration worker, she helped destroy the evidence. Choking with impotent fury, hiding whatever precious few papers she could, but she did as she was told. It was the last time they ordered her to do something.
Whatever she had managed to salvage, Zippy handed to a senior Soviet officer from a political department of sorts. SMERSH or whatever his section was called; Zippy didn’t remember and cared even less.
Comrade Kommissar perused the papers, nodded gravely, shook her hand, and told her not to worry. “We’ll string them all up soon enough,” he promised through an interpreter. “And now, go home, grazhdanochka. I bet you’ve seen enough of this place.”
Zippy smiled at the strange Soviet term of address, citizen. Smiled and felt her lips quivering in a sudden surge of gratitude and tears. A citizen. Not an inmate any longer. She threw her arms around the astounded commissar and gave him a resounding kiss right on his razor-sharp cheekbone.
“Ladno, ladno,” enough, enough, he was muttering, visibly embarrassed, wiping his cheek with the back of his palm, but grinning all the same, just like the interpreter in the corner, just like Zippy herself.
As soon as they stepped through the gates of Auschwitz, all rules were suddenly canceled for these stern-faced men. Before long, the battle-hardened warriors were crying along with inmates who hugged them, kissed their faces, hands, uniforms; crying and kissing the tops of children’s heads and distributing whatever rations they had on themselves and shouting for those bastards manning the field kitchen to hurry the hell up, people here are all starved to near death!
They had already liberated Majdanek, the Soviet soldiers explained in their hoarse, tear-stained voices. But they were not prepared to see the scale of annihilation that they encountered here, in Auschwitz.
The camera crew was finished with Mengele’s children. The gates were no longer occupied. Now, Zippy could finally walk through them. Alone. The rest of the orchestra had been evacuated to an unknown destination in October 1944, accompanied by their camp leader, Mandl—another camp, deep within German territory, as was Zippy’s suspicion. Only Zippy herself was allowed to stay and only due to her position at the camp administration.
She made the first uncertain step towards freedom. In a suitcase, she had recovered from the surviving Kanada barrack—the Nazis tried to burn even those, along with the crematoriums, along with everything that could testify to the extent of the atrocities committed—she carried generous Soviet-provided rations, a temporary paper stating her name and place of liberation, and a tight roll of sheet music still wrapped in cellophane.
Birkenau had virtually ceased to exist by January of 1945; most of the inmates, who hadn’t been evacuated, had all been transferred to the Stammlager—the main camp, Auschwitz. But Zippy made it her business to recover the piece she kept concealed under the floorboards of her old Birkenau block.
Für Alma, by Miklós Steinberg.
They both had perished, but the memory was immortal and Zippy carried it in her suitcase, back into the free world. She carried the memory of a true hero.
She was almost out of the gates when something prompted her to pause. Out of the corner of her eye, Zippy spotted two sparrows sitting atop the barbed wire and watching her from their perch. The wire was no longer deadly. The electrical current had long been cut off. Shielding her face from the sun, Zippy studied the birds, a grin growing slowly but surely on her face. It was idiotic, of course, to imagine that it was Alma and Miklós seeing her off, but in Auschwitz, one had long grown used to believing the most fantastic things. Lifting her battered suitcase with one hand, Zippy patted it affectionately in front of the sparrows.
“It’s safe with me, Miklós, don’t fret. And, Almschi? The world will learn your story yet; you have my word. The world will learn and we, the ones you saved, will ensure that it will never forget. You two, like no one else, deserve the right to immortality.”
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The Violinist of Auschwitz
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The Violinist of Auschwitz is a novel inspired by the true story of Alma Rosé, the famous Viennese violinist virtuoso and the conductor of the Birkenau women’s orchestra. She was in charge of the camp orchestra for less than a year, but it was thanks to her skillful interactions with high-ranking SS members of the camp administration that the girls under her charge were given more and more privileges and became such an essential part of the camp’s life that even after her death, they were spared the dreaded SS selections. Nearly all of them survived the incarceration and were liberated in 1945.
I first read about Alma Rosé and her orchestra in H. Langbein’s study, People in Auschwitz, but it was when I began researching her properly that I realized what a fascinating person she was and what an impact she made on the lives of those young women, whom, according to their own testimonies, she indeed saved from imminent death—and, in some cases, on a few occasions.
Some readers may be familiar with Alma Rosé from Fania Fénelon’s memoir Playing for Time, which was later made in
to a movie. In it, Fénelon portrays Alma as a harsh, cold, and arrogant woman, prone to violence and hysterical outbursts; however, according to other surviving members of the orchestra, Fénelon’s memoir was full of “fantasies” (Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the orchestra’s cellist and, later, a famous English musician) and inaccurate portrayals of not just Alma, but other orchestra members as well. “It is a pity that Fania created such a misleading impression about the camp orchestra when she wrote her memoirs which were subsequently made into the film. For reasons best known to herself, she indulged in the most preposterous distortions of the truth about practically everyone who took part in this ‘drama’” (Anita Lasker-Wallfisch).
As a matter of fact, some of those survivors even wrote to different newspapers and magazines in order to protest such fictionalizations of facts. According to Alma Rosé’s biographer R. Newman, Helen “Zippy” Spitzer (later Tichauer), also an orchestra survivor, wrote to Jewish Week and The American Examiner protesting Fénelon’s account.
Anita Lasker also expressed her protest to the London Sunday Times: “In the film, Fania Fénelon emerges as the moral force who bravely defied the Germans and held members of the orchestra together, while the conductor, Alma Rosé, is depicted as a weak woman who imposed a cruel discipline on the orchestra from fear of the Nazis and who was heavily dependent upon gaining Fénelon’s approval. It just wasn’t like that; Fania was pleasant and talented, but she was not as forceful as Alma, who helped us to survive. She was the key figure, a woman of immense strength and dignity who commanded the respect of everyone.”
For that reason, while writing this novel, I relied mostly on Alma’s official biography and other survivors’ accounts rather than Fania’s. Based on those sources, I tried to create as accurate and objective a portrait of Alma as a person and a musician as possible.
The Violinist of Auschwitz: Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel Page 31
