Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Leopold mechanically collected his slip of paper. “We have to inform you,” he calmly read, “that you have been included in the transport. You will have to present yourself punctually according to the instructions of the building or house elder at the assembly point at Lange Strasse 5 (3).”17 All those affected had to pack at once. “Luggage can only be accepted appropriate to the work and then in as small a form as possible. It may only be composed of hand luggage containing working clothes, linen, blankets, etc. The luggage has to be brought by you personally to the lock. To avoid official measures you are required to appear punctually.”18 Leopold had just twenty-four hours left.

  The SS sought to dissipate the fury of the inmates by telling them that the assistant head of the Council of Elders and the head of the central secretariat, Otto Zucker, who was actually indispensable for the smooth running of Theresienstadt, would lead the new “construction staff.” On top of this, Schliesser, the head of the economic division, one of the most influential men in the Autonomous Jewish Administration, would “accompany” the transport. In the short term this move inspired trust and some people even reported for deportation voluntarily. Leopold, on the other hand, remained skeptical.

  Late that afternoon he learned that the elder Paul Eppstein had been arrested, which only strengthened his view that the SS was organizing a large-scale deception. Years after the war it transpired that Eppstein was taken to the Little Fortress in Theresienstadt on the same day as his arrest and shot.

  * * *

  ALICE HAD heard the news about the transport even before Leopold came for his daily visit. One after another the husbands of the other women in the block had brought the news to their wives: “We have to go, tomorrow morning.”

  When Leopold finally stepped into the room, he did not have to utter a word. Alice looked at him and realized the moment had come.

  Leopold embraced his son. Stephan had had an idea for some time of what was happening. He held himself close to his father.

  “Alice, this is just the beginning: transport will follow transport, and they will try to send the women and children, too.” Leopold spoke with an emphasis she had never heard him use before. “If they offer you and Stephan the chance to come to me, refuse. Do you hear?! Leave Theresienstadt under no circumstances, it doesn’t matter what they assure you! As long as you are at liberty to choose, you must never be tempted by the offers of the SS. Promise me that!”19

  Alice could not answer. She looked at her husband and nodded silently, choking back her tears. You cannot make it harder for him, went through her head.

  Without speaking another word the three sat silently next to one another, Stephan between Alice and Leopold. They paid no attention to the tumult around them. When Leopold rose, Stephan energetically grabbed his father’s hand with his own left hand, and then with his right hand he took his mother’s. He wanted to say that he was not going to let them go, neither of them. I need you both.

  In silence they walked to the blockhouse door. Leopold embraced his son and Alice at the same time. He said just one single word: “Promise?”

  It was a while before Alice’s reply: “Promise!”

  It happened just as Leopold predicted. The second transport had only just left Theresienstadt on 29 September when the SS let it be known that there was to be a third transport and 500 wives or fiancées would be allowed to follow their husbands. They were to assemble at the designated place to be reunited with their husbands.

  The take-up among the women was, as expected, greater than the number of available places. Within a few hours all the seats had been disposed of. One mother even gave her five-year-old son to someone else to care for in order to join her husband.20

  When Alice’s friend Edith Kraus saw the chance of being able to be with her husband again she ran to Moritz Henschel, the head of the Free Time Organization, whose kindness had earned him the name of “Papa Henschel.” He was over sixty and he was like a father to Edith. Henschel strongly advised against going with a single, unambiguous phrase: “You will not see him again.”21

  Otto Zucker’s wife also volunteered for the transport. As a privileged prisoner and the wife of the assistant chief of the elders, they allowed her to take eight suitcases with her. When she boarded the train the SS camp commandant Rahm told the German transport leader: “This is Frau Zucker. It is your responsibility that she lies in her husband’s arms tonight.”22 Rahm knew that Zucker had been sent to the gas chamber as soon as he had arrived in Auschwitz.

  The train left Theresienstadt with 1,000 men and 500 trusting women on 1 October 1944. Only the next day an announcement blasted round the ghetto: the families of all the 5,000 deportees could follow, as long as they had not passed the age of sixty-five.23

  In the meantime the wives had received postcards which testified to their men having arrived safely, telling them about their new work and above all of the better food.24 Those who wanted to go were overjoyed. It was not until years later that people learned that during the journey, even before the train had reached Dresden, the deportees had been forced to write to their wives of their successful arrival at the chosen place and to tell the women to join them as quickly as they could. Three of the six mothers in Alice’s billet received cards like this.

  * * *

  THE FOURTH transport followed on 5 October, then came the next and soon after that, the next.25 With every train that left Theresienstadt not only did mistrust grow among the remaining prisoners but greater interest was shown by the SS in keeping the daily cultural activities going strong. They did not want anyone to get the impression that the camp was about to be completely evacuated. The inmates needed to be distracted by music, theater and lectures.

  As before, officials from the Free Time Organization planned concerts and events a week in advance. There were more than 200 artists still in the camp. Some, like the conductor Carlo Taube, Harry Cohn, the second violinist of the legendary Theresienstadt Ledeč Quartet, or the singer Machiel Gobets, had already been deported.26 New rumors pointed to the officials of the Free Time Organization. It would be their turn next, but for the time being they had to keep up appearances.

  Alice continued to give concerts, this time returning to her fourth program, which included Beethoven’s Sonata in D major, Op. 10 No. 3. The famous second movement is an expression of despair. It begins darkly and the music builds until it seems to cry for help before ending with quiet resignation. Many of the listeners, by now only too aware of what the transports meant, began to weep.

  Alice often sat for a while in the town hall auditorium after the audience had gone, alone with her reflections. On this occasion she left the building about half past seven, but there was still time before the curfew and she headed slowly toward Seestrasse. An SS officer standing outside the concert hall suddenly came up to her. “Are you Alice Herz-Sommer?”

  Alice was terrified. “My God” she asked herself, “if he shoots me, what will happen to my son?”27

  She was struck by the man’s face, which did not seem to fit the uniform. Then he began to speak in a gentle, cultivated accent.28 For months he had listened to all her concerts from outside the building. He loved the music, and the way she played it. The adagio in the Beethoven Sonata moved him the most deeply. At such moments he could forget the lunacy of the war and the conditions in the ghetto.

  Alice listened silently, but fear surged through her. How would her fellow prisoners react if they saw her talking to an SS man? She abruptly tried to tell the man that she needed to get back to her billet quickly. It was nearby and her son was waiting for her.

  She had only walked a few paces when the officer called after her: “I wanted to add, you and your son will not be on the list for the transport.”

  Agitated, Alice hurried on, before what he had said caused her to lose control and break down altogether.

  “And who is going to take my place on the list?” she shouted back, as she ran home. Behind her she heard the voice of the SS man sa
ying: “Look after your little son.”29

  * * *

  ON SUNDAY, 15 October 1944, the officials of the Free Time Organization received their call-up papers. They were to be sent on a work detail and were to leave the very next morning.

  “Names and transport numbers had been written down on little strips of colored paper. It was very short, simple and final,” wrote Zdenka Fantlová, who was by then nineteen and an actress with the Free Time Organization.30 “Theresienstadt shook. All the actors, directors, musicians and conductors had been selected for deportation. To name but a few: Gustav Schorsch, František Zelenka, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Rafael Schächter and Karel Ančerl. The shipment was to be made up of 1,500 people…”31

  Alice’s friend Edith Kraus had also received a slip with her name and number on it. Her only hope was her friend Moritz Henschel, who was running the Free Time Organization. Through the intervention of an influential representative of the Autonomous Authority it was still possible to have someone’s name struck off the transport list. In 1942, Edith had been spared by just such intervention.32

  This time Henschel gave her no hope. The SS had decreed that only one pianist should be left in the camp, and as Alice Herz-Sommer had a seven-year-old son the decision had already been made in her favor.33 Edith accepted her fate, but miraculously her name was once again crossed off the transport list—she never discovered why or who had saved her.

  On 16 October 1944 276 artists and members of the Free Time Organization had to leave Theresienstadt. The benches provided proved insufficient and they were all squashed together on the floor of the small space. They were soon short of air, and people found it hard to breathe. “For their bodily needs every wagon was provided with buckets. No one could give any thought to prudery, manners or consideration toward the others. At these moments we were most painfully conscious of our condemnation as sub-humans … The little children cried from hunger and thirst. Many sought consolation from prayer, but most had already abandoned hope,”34 Zdenka Fantlová later wrote. She was one of the few on the transport to survive Auschwitz.

  * * *

  ALICE AND Stephan were now alone in the twelve-square-meter room, which until the October transport had housed ten others. It was quiet, as quiet as the grave. In this already depressing situation Alice received orders to report to the laundry at five the following morning. How would her son react when he woke up in the morning to find his mother already gone?

  Stephan sensed the menace in the air. He had never seen his mother so despairing and began to panic that his mother, like his father, would disappear forever. He cried bitterly and developed a high fever. Alice took her feverish child by the hand and went from door to door. Many of the neighboring houses were now empty; all the inhabitants had already been deported. Finally she found an old lady and asked her to look after Stephan the following morning.

  She was terribly worried when she left the house the next day at half past four and went to the laundry. Stephan had not accepted her assurances that she would be back again that evening. “Now I am all alone in this world,” he complained through his tears, his words digging deep into Alice’s soul where they remain to this day.35

  Alice had no problem with the exhausting work. Indeed she took on a lot from her friend Edith Kraus who was working in the laundry with her, as Edith was not as strong as her friend. But as she worked she thought of nothing else except how she could care for her son and, without Edith’s friendship, she would never have got through those anxious days. As they went over and over what to do, Alice suddenly thought of a solution: “Leo Baeck!”

  Ever since Alice’s first concert, Rabbi Leo Baeck had always sat in the front row to hear her play. After her performance of the Études he had invited her to his Friday discussion group, held every week for a small, select group to talk of things which distracted them from the daily grind of the ghetto. Alice had accepted gladly. Baeck’s voice counted for something in the Autonomous Administration and she hoped he would be able to help her now.

  When she finished work she went to see him straightaway to tell him of her worries. He immediately arranged for her to move in with another prisoner, Klara Hutter, coincidentally the mother of Alice’s friend, Trude.

  That night, by moonlight, Alice pushed a cart carrying all her worldly goods to her new billet. As well as their scanty possessions, she and Stephan were taking their mattresses and the remains of the wood that Alice had found in their old room; it was bitterly cold that autumn and the extra firewood might prove a life-saver. She passed the empty barracks and stinking heaps of rubbish that had not been cleared for days.36 It was a miserable sight. Stephan had tied a rope onto the cart and harnessed himself to it like a horse as Alice could not push it on her own. He had developed astonishing strength for his age; he had had to. But he knew Klara Hutter and he knew now that his mother would return the following evening and the next day and the next.

  * * *

  THE NEW house looked exactly like the old one. The room was the same size, but this time they shared it not with other mothers and their children, but with Klara Hutter and with three other women over seventy. All four women took Stephan to their hearts from the moment he arrived and Alice could go off to work in the laundry without anxiety, knowing that he would be very well looked after. But while she worked she could hear the transports rumbling ceaselessly by outside.

  Hitherto the Autonomous Jewish Administration had had to draw up the lists for the transports themselves. But increasingly the SS played a larger and larger role, sending word who was to be included and who was to be left out. The SS camp commandant Rahm himself took over the job of organizing the two final transports, planned for 23 and 28 October 1944. Benjamin Murmelstein, the new Jewish elder, was allowed only to assist him.37 When the names of the last remaining members of the Free Time Organization came up—Alice Herz-Sommer, Edith Kraus, Marion Podelier, Hedda Grab-Kernmeyer, Ada Schwarz-Klein, Hilde Aronson-Lindt, Anni Frey and Gisa Wurzel—Rahm apparently said: “You know, let’s leave it. They should carry on playing and singing.”38 Even so he ordered that the women should immediately start work in the mica-splitting workshop.

  * * *

  WITH THE advance of the Red Army the SS closed down the gas chambers at Auschwitz on 2 November 1944. For thousands of inhabitants of the Theresienstadt ghetto, it came too late. In just four weeks eleven “autumn transports” had dispatched more than 8,000 human beings to the Auschwitz gas chambers, among them 1,800 children under fifteen.39

  The last transport left as planned on 28 October 1944. Most of the members of the council of elders were on board, together with their families. A total of seventy people traveled to their deaths in two comfortable railway carriages.

  Shortly after the train left the station at Bohušovice twenty young men were taken off the train and ordered to dig up the remains of those people who had been executed and buried in the area and to destroy their remains. No trace was to remain of the massacre. After they had done this they were shot.

  “There were only a few hundred healthy men in the camp now, and all work was winding down, there was no one to clear up the rubbish, there was no one to look after the old people, no one to cook.” This is how the survivor Josef Polák remembered things later. “But the Nazis did not consider loosening their grip. As if nothing had happened they had a dining room, a kitchen and a cinema built. Everywhere women took over the men’s jobs. A group of women took over transport and carried heavy burdens. The camp began slowly to work again…”40

  Life in Theresienstadt carried on. On 31 October 1944 there were still 11,068 registered prisoners and new transports were due to arrive any day.41

  ELEVEN

  After the Inferno

  “We will laugh on the ruins of the ghetto…”

  THE MARCH from the ghetto to the mica-processing huts took three-quarters of an hour. There was only the most rudimentary form of heating in the workshops and the women froze
. For hours at a stretch they sat at a long table and split the mica in time with one another. It was considered important war work, especially for the aviation industry; the material the women chiseled out was used to insulate electrical appliances.1

  The artists of the Free Time Organization sat together at one table. Next to Alice and Edith Kraus were six German-speaking and two Danish women. Three days a week they had to perform the early shift, from 6 A.M. to 2 P.M., and for three days they did the late shift, from 2 P.M. to 10 P.M.

  At the beginning of the shift everyone received a packet of mica pieces. These had to be accurately weighed and then split with a special tool. This was a small and dangerously sharp knife with which the exhausted women often cut themselves badly. When they were ready, the transparent leaves were sorted out for size and strength, and at the end of the shift a minimum of fifty grams had to be returned to the packet. The SS overseer threatened the women all the time with the “transport” should they fail to reach their daily target. Many of them were so worried by this that they stole in order to have enough to hand in.

  Alice hated the work. The numbing monotony upset her more active nature. The cramped positions hurt her delicate fingers, there was far too much time to think and there was the constant threat that she might be consigned to a “transport.” Still, she had a roof over her head and could sit down while she worked; and after a few hours it even became a little warmer in the hut and the time could be used to talk quietly to her neighbors. Even so, Alice found the perpetual jabbering an additional trial. In desperation one day Alice suddenly dropped her tool, jumped up and ran out of the hut. Once outside she paced back and forth like a caged panther. There was no way out! In this moment of deepest despair, however, her iron discipline reimposed itself and an inner voice reminded her of her innate power: “Persevere!”