Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Alice was pleased to see Hans Krása. They had lots to talk about and he told Alice the story of the opera’s creation, which, in turn, she would use over the next few days for Stephan’s bedtime story. The main roles for the piece had already been cast.14 Rafael Schächter had chosen two experienced young singers who had sung in the production of The Bartered Bride for the roles of the brother and sister Pepiček and Aninka: Pinta Mühlstein and Greta Hofmeister. The roles of dog, cat and sparrow had also been filled. The dog was being sung by Zdeněk Orenstein, a thirteen-year-old boy, who later became an actor. The cat was sung by Ela Stein and the sparrow by Maria Mühlstein. But the undisputed child star of Theresienstadt was Honza Treichlinger, who could jiggle his stuck-on mustache so beautifully and stole the show as the hurdy-gurdy man.

  Both Freudenfeld and Krása needed more children for the choir, and particularly musical ones as understudies. Rudolf Freudenfeld, therefore, played some short tunes on the harmonium and the children had to sing them back to him. After Stephan’s turn, Freudenfeld and Krása were unanimous in their praise of his extraordinary musical gifts and agreed that his sweet voice would be ideal for the role of Sparrow.15 So, in many of the later performances, Stephan changed places with Maria Mühlstein.

  After the rehearsal Stephan was beside himself with joy and collapsed onto his mattress, demanding the plot of the opera for his bedtime story. Alice began to tell the tale that he had heard for the first time only a few days before: “Once upon a time, there was a brother and a sister called Pepiček and Aninka. They lived together with their mother; their father had been dead a long time…”

  “Why was the father dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice replied, “perhaps he had had a bad childhood. Whatever the reason it was bad for the mother and her two children to survive without a father. When their mother was ill in bed, Pepiček and Aninka worried a great deal. To get her strength back she needed milk, but the children couldn’t find a single coin in the house to buy milk with. When they saw that people threw coins to the hurdy-gurdy man Brundibár when he played music, the children had an idea: they would go out on to the street and sing pretty songs. Perhaps people would then give them money.

  “The voices of the two children, however, were too quiet; no one could hear them so they received not a farthing. When the hurdy-gurdy man saw them, he became very angry and chased them away. In the night the animals arrived—the dog, the cat and the sparrow—and told Pepiček and Aninka to get together as many children as they could find and to sing with them. Then their voices would be loud enough for people to hear, and they would be better equipped to protect themselves from Brundibár. The three kind animals helped summon the schoolchildren. Together they sang a beautiful lullaby, and the people stopped dead in their tracks in admiration and tossed penny after penny into the hats. Suddenly, however, the evil hurdy-gurdy man jumped up and stole the money. After an exciting chase the children managed to clinch a final victory over Brundibár and at last Pepiček and Aninka could buy their mother some milk. Their mother got better and everyone was happy ever after because they had all proved themselves more cunning than the wicked hurdy-gurdy man. And if they are not dead, then…”

  Stephan did not hear the last sentence: he was already happily sleeping at this mother’s side.

  * * *

  FROM THEN on the children rehearsed several times a week. The songs were simple and so catchy that after a few days Stephan knew them all by heart.

  On the evenings when there were no rehearsals Leopold visited his family in their quarters. Exhausted from his “hundreds” he usually sat in the corner of the attic listening to the children. He did not like to talk about his work, but Alice was aware that he must have been working like a slave in those first hundred days. Leopold was a small and delicate man, but tough, so the physical labor took less out of him than many of the others. He mentioned in passing that he had been moved on to agricultural work. Alice noticed, however, that in the evening he was more tired than ever.

  The couple had decided between them that they would celebrate Stephan’s sixth birthday after the next rehearsal. On the evening in question, Stephan sat waiting on the stairs when his father arrived punctually for his visit. Stephan was bubbling over with stories from the rehearsals that he wanted to tell his father. The two of them made their way past more than a hundred beds and heaps of luggage to Alice’s mattress, where Stephan declared that the final chorus—when they sing of their victory over the evil Brundibár—was particularly lovely. In his enthusiasm Stephan immediately sang the song to his father:

  You must rely on friendship

  And make your way together.

  Trust in strength and kinship

  And keep your ranks forever.

  Alice listened silently to her men. For a brief moment she was completely happy. Leopold took a cloth out of his pocket and carefully unfolded it: “Today we three are going to have little parties,” he told Stephan, and as if by magic produced two tins of sardines in oil from his shoulder bag. In Theresienstadt these were an enormous treat. To this he added bread that he had saved from his lunchtime ration. Next to that he took out two packets tied up with pretty ribbons.

  “What are we celebrating today?” asked Stephan.

  Alice hugged her son and said quietly: “Your birthday. We are celebrating your sixth birthday today.”

  “Is it my birthday today?” said Stephan incredulously.

  “It is not actually today,” said Leopold, “but when your birthday came round in June we were in the midst of preparing to come here and we both thought why not have a party here.”

  Alice was proud that Leopold had been able to smuggle the presents into the camp. Stephan was excited about pulling the ribbons. He carefully untied them and gave them to his mother, as he had been made well aware that every possession was of value in Theresienstadt. The bigger packet contained a volume of William Busch’s best children’s verses. Books that could be read aloud were absolute treasures. The second packet contained two bars of chocolate.

  “It’s not a party without music,” said Leopold to the contented but quiet Stephan.

  “How can we make music without instruments?” stuttered Stephan.

  “Perfectly simple,” his father said. “You sing the final chorus again from Brundibár and I’ll play second fiddle.”

  Stephan looked at his father doubtfully.

  “Just start and you will hear in due course.”

  The boy began to sing.

  You must rely on friendship

  And make your way together …

  Leopold winked at Stephan, and started to hum a second part. With a fine sense of comedy while he was doing so, he began to drag an imaginary bow over an imaginary violin so effectively that Alice began to clap her hands in rapture. The duet sounded so splendid that the neighbors applauded spontaneously and they had to repeat their performance, not once, not twice but three times. By the end many people were humming along and some of the children were clapping in time. From a secret little birthday party it had developed into a full-blown celebration with many guests. And because it made everyone so happy, Stephan also sang the lullaby from Brundibár. It might have sounded funny coming from the mouth of a six-year-old, but for the mothers of Theresienstadt, it was like a knife through the heart:

  Mother, how you may sigh,

  Childhood has now passed by.

  You ought to know

  How quickly all our bodies grow.

  * * *

  IT WAS weeks before Alice was able, at some level at least, to come to terms with the horrible conditions she was obliged to live in. From the first day, however, she wanted to find out what had happened to her mother. Since she had said goodbye at the assembly point in July 1942 she had had no word from her. Had she died here? Had she been moved on to one of the camps in the east soon after her arrival? People here spoke of such things in fear.

  Most of what she knew had come from Edith Kraus who had c
ome up to the attic a few days after her arrival to say hello. It was a great pleasure to see her again, but Edith had told her terrible things about what had been happening in the camp, and although she knew nothing concrete about Sofie Herz’s fate, what she did know gave little cause for hope. The present regime was almost paradise compared to what conditions in the ghetto had been like at the beginning.

  Now, for the first time, Alice learned something of the history of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.16 It had begun on 24 November 1941 with the first transport of Jewish prisoners: a total of 340 young Jewish artisans and workers had been given the job of turning the small garrison town into a camp. On 30 November and 2 December a further 2,000 prisoners—men, women, children and old people—had arrived. They were followed on 4 December by another 1,000 young workers, who were sent to bolster the construction team.17

  From then on life in the camp was regulated by a flood of commands and edicts: “men may not meet women”; “it is forbidden to send letters home”; “the smuggling in of letters is punishable by death”; “it is forbidden to speak to the non-Jewish population”; “smoking will be punished”; “all prisoners must have their hair cut off”; “no one is permitted to walk on the pavement”; “any one in uniform must be saluted.”18 Besides these, as one prisoner later recalled, it was forbidden to:

  whistle or sing in the streets, to pick up chestnuts, to pluck wild flowers or to shake a chimney sweep’s hand to bring luck. Prisoners had to hand in all money, stamps and writing paper, cigarettes, tobacco, preserves, medicines and much more. Small [mis]demeanors were punishable by ten to fifty strokes of the cane; major ones by several months in the dungeons. Corporal punishment was the norm, performed by other prisoners under the supervision of the SS-man Bergel, who was also more than happy to hit the prisoners himself. If the prisoner who was administering the punishment did not hit hard enough he received the same number of stripes as the man who had been sentenced.19

  The few ghetto inmates who had deluded themselves into believing they would survive the war in Theresienstadt in halfway decent conditions were shaken by the executions which took place in January and February 1942. For trifling infringements of the camp rules—for instance, a short private conversation between a wife and her own husband who she had visited in his quarters, or a prisoner sending a secret report to his mother—nine inmates were hanged on 10 January 1942. This macabre spectacle was repeated on 26 February 1942 when seven more prisoners suffered a similar fate. One of the guards had assured them they would not be punished if they told the truth.20

  Events on 9 January 1942 showed all too clearly that Theresienstadt was neither intended to be an old people’s home nor a show camp. It was then that the first transport of 1,000 prisoners left for an extermination camp in the east. From that day onward the thought of the next deportation hung over the prisoners like the sword of Damocles. Even though they were unaware that those who had been sent away would be gassed, they sensed the horror of what was happening. The final figures speak for themselves: of the over 89,000 people deported to Theresienstadt, at the most 3,500 survived.21

  EIGHT

  Happiness

  “Two spoonfuls of soup for a Bach partita…”

  LIKE ALL the others in the ghetto, the room on the ground floor of the Magdeburg Barracks was tiny and shabby. It looked more like a box room than a place to practice the piano. Plaster was coming off the walls and the only furniture in the room was a pair of chairs and an old piano which an expert had carefully tuned. The sole window was stuck and two nails in the door served as hooks. In spite of this, the pianists in Theresienstadt were grateful for the chance to be able to play undisturbed, if only for a very limited time. So many professional pianists had arrived in the camp that they could only be allotted half an hour each day to practice.1 Many of them were internationally known names:

  Alice’s friend Edith Kraus, a former child prodigy thought to have been one of Artur Schnabel’s most talented pupils.2

  Gideon Klein from Prague: a fantastically multi-faceted talent who was irresistible to everyone as a result of his good looks and his kindness. Klein was in charge of the music section in Theresienstadt together with the “Free Time Organization.” He was also heavily involved in “Youth Care” and the education of children.3

  Bernhard Kaff: the pianist and music teacher from Brno who gave lectures on Russian music in Theresienstadt. He played so sublimely that he had the reputation of bewitching his audiences even when he played on the worst instruments.4

  Renée Gärtner-Geiringer from Vienna: who gave a record thirty-two different concert programs in the ghetto.5

  The composer Viktor Ullmann: a pupil of Arnold Schönberg who in the two years before his deportation to Auschwitz wrote twenty new compositions, including the opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, which would later be world-famous.6

  In the third week of July 1943 Alice sat at the piano in Theresienstadt for the first time. Her daily practice time was fixed for 9 A.M. and, as ever, music provided great solace. She might, too, have been prey to the odd touch of self-deception; it made life more bearable. That morning, and on many future occasions, she kept returning to the remark she’d made to Leopold in the Exhibition Hall in Prague: “If you can perform concerts in Theresienstadt it can’t be all that bad.”

  The joy with which her son embraced the rehearsals for the children’s opera was like a ray of light, which also distracted her from her overwhelmingly somber existence and provided her with reserves of courage. Somehow, even in the camp, she clung on to her principles, always managing to be hopeful and see the positive side of things.

  A few days before, Stephan had started at the ghetto kindergarten where children of seven and below secretly learned the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.7 The SS had forbidden formal education, but the Autonomous Jewish Administration’s “Youth Care” organization catered to the needs of the more than 15,000 children in the camp, although they were officially only allowed to pursue artistic activities: singing, drawing and crafts. Stephan really enjoyed it, not least because on his first day he rediscovered his best friend there—Pavel Fuchs—who was the same age as him and who had been at the Jewish kindergarten in Prague. They both liked acting as class lookouts. Whenever the SS approached they issued a musical whistle and all teaching material was put away while the children broke into a song.

  * * *

  IN THE months before Alice, Leopold and Stephan arrived, much had changed at Theresienstadt. From the autumn of 1942, Theresienstadt was often referred to as a “ghetto paradise,” as the SS endeavored to mislead the increasingly disapproving outside world by presenting the camp as a normal town with contented citizens. Gone were the guards outside the barracks; now the prisoners were free to walk the streets without prior permission.8 The powers that be never tired of saying that in Theresienstadt senior citizens could live out their days in security and that distinguished people were granted additional privileges according to the services they had provided to society. It was an inspired move on the part of the SS not only to allow prisoners to organize their own cultural and musical activities, but also to positively encourage them. In March 1943, the clever and dynamic engineer Otto Zucker took over the directorship of the Free Time Organization (FZG) and became responsible for the most enriching aspect of cultural life at Theresienstadt: music was to be brought to the masses.9

  Alice had not expected to find that the Free Time Organization would organize the musical program so effectively and professionally. Otto Zucker had asked her to draw up a list of her repertoire. Alice put together a total of four concert programs from the extraordinary number of works she could play almost all by heart and handed the list to one of the women responsible for the weekly concerts. They advised her to come along to the Magdeburg Barracks on Monday morning. It was there that the programs were displayed so that people could see where and when they would take place. When she saw the lists for the first time Alice realized that in
some ways it was an ideal situation for a pianist. She was astonished by the variety of concerts offered. “No organization to do, just practice every day and give a concert at least once a week. What more can an artist actually desire?”

  Her first concert was to be given just over a week later and she had chosen three very different works for it: Beethoven’s Appassionata, Bach’s Partita in B flat major and a selection of Chopin Études. The Appassionata seemed particularly appropriate to Alice because there is scarcely any other composition for piano that is both so grippingly dramatic and has such fascinating tonal qualities.

  For Alice, the Bach Partita in B flat major was the ultimate expression of musical creativity and she especially loved its spirituality. Years before she had read in Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s famous 1802 biography of Bach, that anyone who plays the partitas well “can make their way in the world with it.”10

  She wanted to play the Chopin Études not only because they had been an anchor to her these past twelve months, capable of lifting her out of her depression, but also because—in some strange way—they were the musical representation of the highs and lows of human existence. Far more technically demanding than the other pieces, Alice began to practice the Études first.

  One day, while she was practicing with great concentration, the door opened without her noticing and Hans Krása came in. He sat down on one of the chairs and listened attentively. As one of the most important members of the Free Time Organization he played a pivotal role in the planning of the concerts.11 He also composed and accompanied many musicians on the piano. He had intentionally arranged his practice time to follow on immediately from Alice Herz-Sommer’s.

  Krása, knowing the concert was coming up, was well aware of what was on the program and, as he particularly liked Chopin, he was hoping that she would play some pieces for him. When Alice stopped playing he stood up and clapped. Startled, Alice turned round, but when she recognized Hans Krása she was delighted. He was considered one of the most talented composers of his time, but one who had made comparatively little of his tumultuous gifts. Alice distinguished herself by her limitless industry and a clear sense of duty. Krása was the opposite.12 He was only four years older than Alice and before the occupation of Prague he had lived the life of a prosperous bohemian.