Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  As the last notes of the “Revolutionary Study” died out and the exhausted, smiling pianist turned to face her enthusiastically clapping audience, they rose to give her a standing ovation. Although everybody needed time to recover from the intensity and passion of the music, neither the pianist nor the audience wanted the applause to end. It had been an exemplary performance. After the interval, Alice would perform the second cycle of the Études—Opus 25—another twelve studies.

  “I shall never, ever forget it!” Zdenka Fantlová wrote decades later about the concert. “I listened as if I was in a trance.”47 During the applause, Leo Baeck, who was sitting in the front row, rose and went over to Alice. He held her protectively in his arms and said, “Our great little artist.”

  TEN

  Inferno

  “Never of your own free will! It doesn’t matter what they promise!”

  ON THE evening of 20 August 1944, Stephan greeted his father with great excitement: “I played in a film today. There were spotlights and big cameras.”

  “And was the director happy with you?”

  “He was very strict,” Stephan answered, “but he said, the little sparrow is doing very well.”

  At 1 P.M. the Brundibár ensemble had gathered in the hall of the Sokolovna, the largest and most modern building in the ghetto. It had been constructed a long time before the occupation as a club house for the Sokol Gymnastics Club. It was now the cultural headquarters of the Free Time Organization. It was a splendid place, and not just by Theresienstadt standards. With its flower beds and birch trees in the front garden, broad steps leading up to the entrance and an elegant auditorium it might have been a theater in any major city in the world. It was here that the ensemble had to give its performance for a Czech film team. In the audience that day sat not only the prisoners but also—in the best seats in the gallery—SS officers’ wives and children.1

  For the young actors the performance was particularly exciting, if tiring, and it was the first time they had played on this stage. Most of the fifty plus performances to date had taken place in the Magdeburg Barracks—a considerably smaller space—and the new venue caused additional problems for the young performers. They had to repeat scenes for the cameras again and again, until the director expressed his satisfaction. “Paul,” Stephan burst out, “played the trumpet louder than ever. I had to put my hands over my ears.”

  For days the film had been the chief topic of conversation in Theresienstadt. It was a propaganda film, made to delude audiences around the world into thinking that Jews in Greater Germany were living a good life under the protection of the Third Reich; and that they were looking after their own affairs in their own town and away from the horrors of war while Europe’s civilian population were making ever greater sacrifices. This macabre confidence trick was commissioned by the SS. The film was made by the Czech production company Aktualita and filming started on 16 August and ended on 11 September.2

  The first thing to be filmed was the Jews apparently going about their banking business. A sign had been painted on the facade of the Bank of the Jewish Autonomous Administration bearing the legend “Savings Deposits, Paying In and Withdrawals”—a cruel mockery of the truth.

  Next was the Autonomous Jewish Administration’s post office. The prisoners were required to stand at the counter and take in parcels, parcels which had to be handed back straight after the filming. Film was shot of a meeting of the Council of Elders of the Autonomous Jewish Administration. For the purposes of the film the meeting was transferred from the gloom of the Magdeburg Barracks to a specially redecorated room in the Sokolovna.

  In order to convince the world that the ghetto had its own beach, a bathing establishment was quickly built on the banks of the Eger. Swings were put up on which the children could amuse themselves during the filming. The Czech high-diving champion had to demonstrate his ability together with a number of other sportsmen who had to perform in front of the camera. One female athlete was banned from performing, however, because she was blonde, and did not conform to National Socialist Jewish stereotypes.

  The film was also intended as a record of all the autonomous businesses: the locksmiths’ and the plumbers’ workshops, the carpenters, the laundry, the cobblers and the tailors. Above all an effort was made to aggravate the anti-Semitic feelings of the public by capturing how “idyllic was the life of the celebrities in the Jewish colony of Theresienstadt.” Inmates were shown under parasols, holding champagne glasses, wearing evening gowns, promenading in the garden or dancing on the terrace at the Sokolovna.

  The very height of cynicism came with the funding of the film. Not only were the prisoners expected to act in a film designed to distract the public from the mass-murder being committed elsewhere, but they had to finance it themselves. The production costs—amounting to some 350,000 crowns—were met by the sums appropriated from the Jews.3

  The services of Kurt Gerron, the director, were also free. Gerron, an actor, cabaret artist and director from Berlin had fled to France in 1933, then to Austria. At the end of 1935 he went to Holland, where he lived until the German army occupied the country. In the autumn of 1943 he was deported from the transit camp at Westerbork and in February 1944 he arrived at Theresienstadt. Soon he had put together “Carousel”: an attractive program of operetta arias, chansons and lieder from among others The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill,4 in which he had played Police Chief Brown in the original Berlin production. He had also had a successful career in films and had acted, among others, in The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich and with Heinz Rühmann in Die drei von der Tankstelle.

  The SS, and particularly the “Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia,” had forced Gerron to write the script for their propaganda film, to plan the various scenes, to hire the extras required and finally to produce daily progress reports. None of this did him any good in the long run: like most of those who labored at his side, he was executed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz three months later.

  The film caused strife among the prisoners. Members of the crew wore white armbands marked “film.” As soon as one of them appeared, the majority of the ghetto inmates vanished, fearing that they might be used as extras—their protest against this farce. Others, although they were a minority, were prepared to cooperate, chiefly because they saw the project as evidence of German weakness. The Allies had landed in Normandy at the beginning of June, giving new hope that Western Europe would soon be liberated from the Nazis.

  That afternoon Stephan had peered behind the scenes of the film for the first time. He saw a recording van and a lighting van, lighting engineers, cameramen and assistant directors. He liked the hustle and bustle. There was even a hairdresser to make the children look their best before they went on. When his father wanted to know precisely why this film was being made, the child naturally could find no answers to give him.

  Only a few short fragments of the film have survived. One of them shows the final scene of Brundibár. There are more than twenty-five children on stage, but one of them is particularly noticeable: it is Stephan Sommer, the smallest of them all, standing on a box. He looks proud and upright in his white shirt, his manner revealing the fun he had appearing in every one of the fifty-five performances. Stephan only realized much later that the SS used the opera to manipulate and mislead the public. For him and others like him, together with thousands of prisoners, the opera was a source of strength, and above all a symbol of resistance, resistance against his own downfall.5

  * * *

  ABOUT A week after the Brundibár performance Leopold came to call, only to find his wife alone. Just before he arrived, Stephan had been asked to turn the pages for a pianist performing in a chamber music concert. Normally Alice and Leopold used the rare hours they had together to talk about their son, about how they could protect him from unpleasant experiences and how they could arrange better schooling for him. This time, however, Leopold was so angry about what h
e had heard about the progress of the “film” that he wanted to talk to Alice about that.

  For some months Leopold had been friends with a former orchestral musician, whom the conductor Karel Ančerl wanted to recruit for his symphony orchestra, which had been founded with the approval of the SS. In a few weeks Ančerl had assembled twelve first violins, ten second violins, eight violas, eight cellos and a single double bass, all of them provided for by the repository of confiscated instruments.6 In order to balance the sound in the orchestra he strengthened the double bass with two cellos. It was pure accident that the orchestra was with one exception composed only of men. A professional female musician played the biggest instrument with the deepest voice—the double bass.

  The enthusiasm of the players encouraged all those concerned to put together a weighty program of rehearsals: Handel’s Concerto Grosso in F major, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Bach’s Violin Concerto in E minor. After a prolonged search in the ghetto library, scores were located, paper procured and the copying organized. Night after night members of the orchestra worked, drawing staves and writing out the parts. The first concert was a sensation. Leopold was in the audience and the hall was so full that many people had to sit on the floor in the aisles.7

  At the end of July and the beginning of August 1944 Ančerl and his orchestra began to rehearse a new program, which was to be exclusively dedicated to Czech music. They were to play Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings, Josef Suk’s St. Wenceslaus’ Chorale and a new study for strings written specially for the concert by Pavel Haas, the Brno-born composer and pupil of Janáček, who had been in the ghetto since the end of 1941.

  This evening Leopold, who attended rehearsals whenever he could, reported that the SS had suddenly given the order that the orchestra would have to play the concert that night for the SS guards in the so-called coffee house. Ančerl’s suspicions were justified when he arrived to find an almost empty concert hall, fastidiously decorated with flowers.8 The SS handed out black suits to the musicians. The conductor’s podium was arrayed with vases of flowers to hide Ančerl’s wooden clogs.

  The door opened and a high-ranking official visitor in SS uniform stepped in to inspect the hall, followed by the film crew. Ančerl was ordered to conduct to camera. Then, after the first performance of Pavel Haas’s work the conductor had to enthusiastically introduce the composer. The cheering audience was to be added to the film later.

  Leopold and Alice commiserated with Karel Ančerl, but when Stephan returned to the room bright eyed shortly after half past seven and told the story of the concert, Leopold’s pleasure at seeing his son’s enthusiasm for the music took precedence over his anger and distress. At seven, Stephan was the most popular page-turner among Theresienstadt’s musicians and Alice and Leopold were proud of the fact.

  “Did it go well?” he asked the boy.

  “He played two wrong notes, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  * * *

  THERE WERE hopes and false hopes. Every day fresh rumors about the Allied advance did the rounds. From September 1944 Allied aircraft frequently appeared in the skies above Theresienstadt. The Theresienstadt chronicler Eva Roubičková noted in her diary: “Events such as these have a monstrous effect on the ghetto: people are happy—you see joyful faces. Every day there is at least one if not two air-raid warnings.”9

  In addition there were euphoric accounts of a planned Czech uprising in the Bohemian and Moravian Protectorate. Because of this, when the Jewish elder Paul Eppstein made a speech to welcome in the Jewish New Year 5705 on 16 September 1944, he considered it necessary to warn the prisoners: “In the interests of us all you must maintain calm at this time, for it is a false form of heroism when irresponsible people believe that they must do something to liberate themselves. It is wholly false to believe, too, that every little thing is another nail in the coffin of Theresienstadt.”10 He likened Theresienstadt to a ship nearing harbor. “This harbor, however, is surrounded by mines, and the captain alone knows the way, it is a long way round but it will take us safely home. The crew can hear voices in the harbor that are calling out encouraging words to them and the crew is already impatient and can’t wait to reach port, but the only right and proper thing to do is to wait.”11

  Eppstein’s warning was right. Another rumor was circulating in the camp: after the film was finished 7,000 prisoners were to be deported—and only young men who were able to work.12 For three months there had been no such transport and cultural life had blossomed. It was an illusory peace. The majority of the prisoners responded to the many cultural offerings with gratitude but there were also those who saw such cultural activities as dancing on the edge of the volcano, believing that they only served to mask what the camp was really about.13

  The news of the forthcoming deportation had been brought by the civilian worker Ludwig August Bartels. Since November 1942 he had been head of the economic division of the SS Camp Command.14 If he was right, then Leopold would be deported too: he was young, strong and able to work. Suspicions quickly arose that in doing this the SS were planning to remove all the men who might be capable of staging an uprising against the heavily beleaguered German army. It was possible that the SS were frightened of the many former officers among the prisoners, who had been looking since the summer 1944 to organize themselves into groups. It was also possibly the case—as the camp leaders thought—that the authorities simply wanted all the labor they could find for the arms industry.

  When Leopold had worked for the Jewish Community in Prague, he learned how the SS thought and acted, and he was in close contact with various members of the Autonomous Authority. Even though he was in the locksmith’s workshop every day, he used every opportunity to collect information and evaluate it in order to see how much truth it contained.

  In the last two weeks of September 1944, the rumor became reality: the SS was planning to deport 5,000 or even 6,000 prisoners, all men under the age of fifty-five. Leopold heard that they were to be taken to the fortress of Königstein near Dresden to construct a work camp there. Some thought that talk of a work camp was a red herring, a smoke screen that would enable the SS to drag off all the men capable of bearing arms to an ominous camp in Poland without any resistance.

  In the end it was suggested that this deportation was just the first of a series that would include the women and the children in the wake of their men, possibly on a voluntary basis. Leopold was suspicious. Why wouldn’t they transfer the families to the newly created work camp at the same time? What ruse lay behind this apparently tempting offer to the women, that they might themselves decide where they wanted to live in the future? Leopold was now fully convinced it was all an evil trick on the part of the SS.

  * * *

  ON 23 September the leaders of the Autonomous Jewish Administration—Paul Eppstein, Otto Zucker and Benjamin Murmelstein—were summoned to appear at SS Command. SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Günther, SS-Hauptsturmführer Ernst Möhs (who had traveled up from Prague) and SS-Obersturmführer Karl Rahm now officially informed the leaders of the Administration that the war situation demanded new sacrifices and the Reich’s economic capacities had to be strengthened.15 A thorough inspection of the workshops in Theresienstadt had shown that the ghetto was not suitable for the required war production and for that reason they would shortly need to send 5,000 men away on labor duty.

  The next day, the “Autonomous Jewish Administration News” announced that a new transport was planned. Leopold read the announcement that evening in his barracks:

  With regard to the total use of all forces at our disposal and following discussions within the department on how to considerably expand current requirements for work possibilities within Theresienstadt. As a result of the technical problems and the shortage of space this has not proved possible to a satisfactory extent and it has been decreed thereby that men capable of work will have to perform their urgent functions outside Theresienstadt in the same manner as the hut-building work detail. To this end the
Department informs that on both Tuesday 26 September and Wednesday 27 September there will be work details formed consisting of two batches of men from the Reich settlement aged between sixteen and fifty-five. It has been decided that the engineer Otto Zucker will take over the leadership of the transport. As in the hut-building detail, the members of this new force will receive assurance that they are exempted from transport. For the time being postal connections are assured. For this transport all men born between 1889 and 1928 are liable. All these men are thereby required forthwith to prepare themselves immediately and assume that they will be called. There are no exemptions foreseen. Decisions relative to persons unfit for transport will be made in the lock on the basis of medical certificates. There will be no complaints or appeals; all but essential luggage is to be left behind in the settlement.16

  The deportations began in the early morning of 26 September 1944. There was a deathly silence as the house elder came into the dormitory where Leopold was lodged and read out the names of those affected in alphabetical order. Leopold was certain that as a fit man of not yet forty his number would come up. The letter S got nearer and nearer. One after the other, his fellow prisoners heard their names; then “Sommer, Leopold” fell from the lips of the elder like the blade of an axe.