Playing for the Commandant

by Suzy Zail

  We were herded into another room, and I was pushed into a chair. My wrists were pinned down, and someone jabbed me with a needle, piercing the pale fleshy underside of my arm, over and over until, beneath the blood, I could make out a number in blue ink: A10573. Nothing belonged to me anymore — not my piano, my home, my name, or my hair. I was a number now.

  Someone wiped a bloodied rag across my arm and pointed to the door. I rose from the chair, careful not to drop my C-sharp. I looked down at the black key resting in my palm and at my long, slender fingers and the freckles on my arms.

  I’m still Hanna Mendel, I said to myself. I’m five foot seven. I have a birthmark on my left shoulder. I’m scared of spiders. I’m hopeless at sports. I like Clara Schumann, and one day I’m going to be famous.

  We walked past endless rows of identical gray buildings until we reached our barrack. A woman was waiting for us outside. She wore a scarf over her shaved head, and she carried a whip. She looked mean. She introduced herself as our block leader and ordered us into the wooden shed. The windowless room looked like a barn and smelled like a kennel. The walls were bare and the floor was grimy. A row of narrow bunks spread across two walls: wooden planks in three tiers, so close together that if you sat up, you’d scrape your head on the tier above. There were no mattresses on the planks, just thin gray blankets.

  “Welcome to your new home.” The block leader kicked the door closed. I looked at the splintering bunks and the crumbling walls. There was nothing of my home here, and with every minute that passed, there was less of me. I flopped onto a bunk.

  “Rule number one: no sitting.” The block leader cracked her whip, and I leaped off the bunk. There were no Nazi guards stalking the barrack, no SS watching from the door. I glanced at the block leader, her bony arms folded across her chest, her eyes stony. She was wearing a yellow star — she was one of us.

  “Rule number two,” she continued in her thick Polish accent. “If there’s anything hidden under your blankets: an apple core, a spoon, soap”— she pulled a blanket from a bunk, sending a family of bugs scuttling —“there will be consequences.”

  My mother pulled at my sleeve. “Hanna, where’s the kitchen?”

  The block leader glared at my mother. “Rule number three.” She stepped toward us and rammed a finger against my mother’s lips. “No talking.” She pressed her forefinger and thumb on either side of my mother’s trembling mouth and clamped her lips shut. “Understand?”

  My mother nodded, her eyes wide with fright. The block leader smiled, pulled her fingers from Anyu’s mouth, and wiped her hand across my mother’s skirt.

  “Next time you interrupt, I’ll knock your teeth out.” She paused for effect. “Rule number four: you’ll be fed three times a day. Coffee at five a.m., soup for lunch, and bread for dinner. If you’re lucky, you’ll get margarine.”

  The block leader pointed to a battered cardboard box on the floor.

  “Take a cup. Look after it. You lose the cup, you go hungry.”

  I pulled a rusted cup from the box and, copying the woman next to me, threaded the worn belt from my dress through the cup’s handle, so that my cup hung at my waist.

  The block leader ordered us outside and told us to form a single line. We marched in silence, past numbered buildings and nameless roads, until we reached a block marked LATRINES. A woman lunged for the door, clutching her stomach, but the block leader barred her way. “No one enters without a guard.” She scowled, shoving the door open to reveal a deep pit dug into the earth. She pointed to the woman. “You! Wait till last. The rest of you . . . time to shit.”

  We walked from the latrines to a dusty square, where we were made to wait for hours in the burning sun so the guards could count us. I looked at my mother, at her caved-in face and vacant eyes. She’d been pretty once. Now she looked worn. Next to her stood a woman with blistering skin, her pink face shiny with sweat, and beyond her, more pinched faces and frightened eyes.

  The sun collapsed, and the sky grew dark. We returned to our hut. Dinner was a slice of black bread and a square of margarine, which we smeared across the bread with our fingers. The bread tasted like mud, but I forced it down. I climbed into a bunk between Erika and Mother. Three women squeezed in after us. I was too tired for introductions. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. The bed was too hard and the room too quiet. I thought of the villages and homes we’d passed in the cattle train, and the people inside them sleeping on clean sheets under blankets. They had food and water and clean clothes. They went to school and played piano. It had been seven days since I’d sat at my piano. I hadn’t missed a day’s practice since I was seven. I slipped my C-sharp from the frayed elastic of my secondhand underwear and rubbed its soft, worn wood.

  Mother turned to look at me. “Play something for me, Hanna.” Angry voices shouted at Mother to shut up, but she kept talking. “What about Liszt? Piri will be here tomorrow, and you’ve hardly practiced.” A flashlight clicked on at the far end of the hut. Feet slid into shoes. I had to keep Mother quiet.

  “I’ll play, but be quiet, Anyu. Please.” I moved my trembling fingers up and down my mother’s back. I played Mozart and Bartok while horrible, hungry tears rolled down my face. I was tapping out Chopin’s Fifth Étude when the block leader walked past. I froze. If she passed the beam of her flashlight over us, we’d be hauled out of bed, but if I stopped drumming on my mother’s back, Anyu was sure to complain. I forced my fingers to continue. The block leader walked the length of the room three times, then went back to bed. I began my next piece.

  “I know this one. What is it, Hanna?” Mother asked excitedly.

  “It’s Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody,” I whispered, my heart splintering into a thousand pieces. “Your favorite.”

  “And beautifully played. Piri will be so pleased with your progress.” Mother yawned.

  I fell into a bitter sleep and woke to the sound of shouting. A bell was ringing, and girls were frantically jumping from their bunks and pulling on their shoes. I leaped from my bunk, smoothed my blanket over the rough wooden planks, and followed Erika to the washroom. Women ran past us. One woman urinated as she ran, a slow, wet trail dribbling down her inside thigh. No one wanted to miss breakfast.

  “You’ll be showered and shaved once a month.” The block leader stood at the door. “Until then, unless you want to smell like a sewer rat, I suggest you find yourselves a tap. You may want to wash your underwear, too.” She lifted a pair of underpants from the muddy floor and flung them at the woman who had discarded them. “You won’t get another clean pair for a month.” She addressed the room again. “And if you wash them, you better have them back on before breakfast. There’ll be no whores in my block parading around without underwear.”

  Her scarf came loose, and she pushed it away from her face with the back of her muddy hand, leaving a smear of brown dirt across her pink forehead. Erika and I looked at each other. We both opened our mouths. Pig. I mouthed the word first. It was a game Erika and I had played since we were children. Mr. Halasz, our principal, looked like a bear, and Mrs. Beck, from apartment 10C, resembled a mouse. Erika had names for all the children at school she disliked: bulging-eyed Max Szabo was the Goldfish and Ida Stern, the Piranha because of her teeth. The block leader looked like a pig: the angry pink face covered in mud, the broad nose like a snout, the black beady eyes. Pig was perfect.

  I looked at the women fighting to stand over the rusted basins. Stripped naked, they bent over the cracked porcelain, struggling to scour the dirt from their bodies without soap.

  I turned to leave.

  “You’re not washing?” Erika asked.

  My skin felt itchy, my scalp, too, but it all seemed like a waste of energy, washing our faces with festering water, drying ourselves with our dirty dresses.

  “I can’t see the point.”

  “The point is to stay human.” Erika bent over a bowl of brown water and splashed her face. “We mustn’t become animals, Hanna. That’s what they
want.”

  I walked back to the barrack with the Markovits twins. At school I’d always been able to tell them apart. Lili wore her hair swept up in a ponytail. Her ribbons were blue. Agi preferred pink and always wore braids. Now they were bald. I looked from one to the other.

  “I’m Lili. That’s Agi,” Lili said, pointing to her sister. “Don’t feel bad; even we get confused.”

  “Did you lie to get in here, too?” I whispered, looking over my shoulder to see whether the block leader had followed us out.

  “Lie? About what?” The twins looked confused.

  “The man with the stick — he was sending children to the left and adults to the right. I said I was sixteen so I could stay with Erika.”

  “He didn’t ask us our age,” Lili answered for both of them.

  “But he asked lots of questions about us being identical twins,” Agi butted in. “He was so excited, you’d think he’d never seen a pair of twins.”

  We stopped talking when the block leader returned from the washroom. I lined up with my tin cup behind Lili and Agi and waited for breakfast. I got a splash of cold black water and gulped it down. The block leader called it coffee, but it tasted like dishwater. A thin woman with peeling lips was bent over her cup, crying. The block leader put down her ladle.

  “She doesn’t eat, so no one eats.” The block leader grabbed the pot of black water, kicked open the door, and hurled it outside. The woman looked up from her rusted cup.

  “You want something to cry about?” The block leader glowered. “Outside! Now!”

  The woman stood up and walked to the door. Her skirt was wet, but I couldn’t tell if it was coffee or fear that stained the fabric. The block leader followed her out, and the door slammed shut behind them. I looked about frantically. We weren’t allowed to cry? What else weren’t we allowed to do? No one met my gaze. The few women who had coffee tipped their cups up and drank hurriedly before the block leader returned. A girl was bent over in the middle of the room, her nose to the floor, sucking at the black drops that had dripped from the pot. Those without breakfast stared angrily at the door.

  “Bitch,” someone whispered, but they weren’t talking about the block leader. They were talking about the woman who’d cried into her cup.

  We lined up again, bookended by two women with green triangles and truncheons. My stomach grumbled.

  “Work detail!” the block leader announced when she returned to the room, red-faced and panting. The woman with the peeling lips wasn’t behind her. “You’re here to work. Work and you’ll be fed.”

  “What work will we be doing?” Erika asked, nervously eyeing the block leader’s whip. Her fingers fluttered to her face. Her cheek was still swollen. Her skin raw.

  “Ditch digging, carting rocks, whatever you’re told. If you can sew or cook or do anything else useful with your hands, let me know and I’ll get you a job.”

  Erika and I looked at Mother, then at each other. Mother could sew and cook, but we couldn’t let her out of our sight. She no longer knew what she was saying or where she was. If she stayed with us, we could protect her.

  “There are easier jobs I can recommend you for.” The block leader lowered her voice. “All I expect in return is a small token of your appreciation.” She pulled a cigarette from her pocket and slipped it between her yellowing teeth.

  We walked through the main gate, joined by other groups of weary women and a dozen armed guards. I thought I heard a violin amid the clatter of wooden shoes, and then the clash of symbols and the beat of a drum, but when I looked around, there was nothing but mud, and the farther we marched, the fainter the noise grew. We walked for an hour along dirt roads and through fields until we reached a quarry. The guards formed a sentry around a huge pit and ordered prisoners with whips to stand at the lip of the hole.

  “Los! Schnell! Into the pit!” The guards raised their guns and fired into the air. I scratched my knee, scrambling down the rock face, but I didn’t cry — a prisoner with a whip was watching me, a smile on her lips. I wondered what they’d done to her to make her change sides.

  “They’ve dug our graves,” the woman next to me cried out. “We’re all going to die!”

  “Nonsense,” said Mother quickly. “We’re here to work.”

  Erika was paired with Mother, and I helped a Polish girl with blistered ears.

  “I’ve carted rocks for two years, and I’m still stronger than you,” she complained when, for the second time, I dropped a load of rocks. “You won’t last a week.”

  You think I want to be here? I wanted to yell.

  Just beyond the quarry there was a forest of fir trees. Less than five minutes by foot, but it might as well have been ten miles. There was no escaping the quarry. There were a dozen guards with guns, and dogs circling the pit. If we tried to run, the block leader had warned, we’d be hunted down, and when we were found, ten of our bunk mates would be shot for our crime.

  We stopped for lunch when the sun was overhead. The cabbage soup was gritty, but I licked the bowl clean. We dragged ourselves back to camp at nightfall. My scalp was burned, my feet were blistered, and my arms felt like lead. When we neared the main gate, I noticed the group quicken its pace. And then I heard music — the muffled beat of a drum and the clanging of cymbals, and that violin that had sung in my head. The sounds grew louder and more insistent as we approached the gate.

  “A band!” Mother was wide-eyed as we marched past the watchtower. Just inside the main gate stood a welcoming committee — a band of prisoners in white collars and blue skirts, with violins tucked under their chins. They had sheet music and accordions, drums and cymbals. They were belting out a march. The prisoners forced their tired legs up and down in time to the hypnotic 4/4 beat. I missed my piano more than my bed, but this wasn’t music. This was grotesque.

  As the summer months passed, I learned to block out the music and a lot else besides. I learned to keep very quiet and still when all I wanted to do was cry and scream and run. I learned that to care was weak and brutality a virtue in this upside-down world. I learned to hold a hand under my chin while eating bread so I didn’t waste the crumbs and to sleep holding my shoes and my cup so they wouldn’t be stolen. I learned to hang back in the food line because vegetables settled at the bottom of the pot. I learned that the fat get fed and the hungry stay hungry. I learned that political prisoners wore red triangles, homosexuals wore pink, and murderers boasted green — and the green triangles were the women you didn’t cross.

  I got used to the smell of the latrines and the hard beds and the endless roll calls, but the gnawing hunger never eased. When the block leader was out of earshot, Erika and I would play games to trick our stomachs into thinking they were full. We’d plan sumptuous dinner parties and describe every dish in intricate detail, clutching our bellies and complaining because we were too full.

  The days were difficult, but the nights were worse. In Debrecen, I’d dreamed of performing in Paris. In Birkenau, I dreamed of Papa. I knew my father would be okay. He’d been the finest watchmaker in Debrecen, and our block leader said there was work for those who were skilled with their hands. It was just that I missed him. I missed my mother, too — the mother I knew before the war. The one who sang me to sleep at night and never tired of watching me practice. The mother who washed my tangled hair every Saturday night and helped me with my algebra. The Mira Mendel who spoke four languages and sewed all my concert gowns by hand.

  I thought of Piri often. I wondered whether she’d looked for me after the ghetto had been emptied. Piri had taught piano at my school for fifteen years, quitting when the principal stopped music classes for Jews. She taught me privately after that, cycling into the ghetto once a week with her satchel of sheet music. She brought Liszt and Chopin, but she also smuggled in Goldschmidt and Krenek and jazz music, even though it was banned. Piri couldn’t stand bigots.

  I was thinking about my teacher when we were forced to congregate in the main square of Birkenau. I’d th
ought it strange that our barrack was invited to attend a concert, perverse even, given that the audience was composed of prisoners who had no choice but to attend. The conductor smiled at the guards seated in the front row and introduced her ensemble as the Birkenau Women’s Orchestra. Most of them wore yellow stars; all had scarves on their heads, white blouses, and pleated skirts. I recognized the violinist from the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. The woman sitting next to her was a famous flautist from France. Then Piri stepped into the spotlight.

  What was my teacher doing here? She wasn’t Jewish. And why was she playing for the guards? She despised the SS. The conductor raised her baton, and Piri hunched over the piano. The conductor tapped at the lectern, and Piri’s fingers flew to the keys. She played Schubert, then Strauss, her performance flawless but cold.

  The conductor took her final bow, and we were ordered back to the barrack. When the block leader stopped to congratulate the conductor, I slunk to Piri’s side.

  “Piri, what are you doing here?” I pulled her behind a group of inmates.

  “Hanna! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. When I didn’t see you, I worried that you’d been —”

  I didn’t let her finish her sentence, I had too many questions.

  “Why are you here, Piri?”

  “Because I’m ‘sympathetic to the cause.’” She pointed to the red triangle on her striped shirt and rolled her eyes. “I teach Jews to play piano, so I’m politically dangerous.”

  “How can you do it?” I asked, pulling away from her. “Play for them? Entertain them? I want to scratch their eyes out.”

  Piri looked at me sadly.

  “I want to survive. Orchestra members get extra rations. We don’t have to work.”

  “Neither do the girls in barrack 24 who part their legs for the guards.”

  “I want to get out of here alive, and I won’t apologize for it, Hanna.”