by Suzy Zail
I told Erika about Karl and our last days together. I didn’t tell her that remembering him hurt, or that I thought of him almost as often as I thought of Anyu and Papa.
“Karl did the right thing,” Erika told me, “and so have you. You had to let him go, for both your sakes.”
I tried to let him go. I tried to fill the emptiness with music. I practiced piano every day. I played every composer Hitler banned and every piece of music the commandant detested. I practiced till my fingers hurt. With my weekly allowance from the relief fund, I didn’t have to work, so I filled my days reading books and hiking in the hills. I did all the things I’d dreamed of doing in the camp. I picnicked in the park with friends. I went to the circus, and I taught myself to ride a bike. I went to my first wedding.
There were so many weddings in Debrecen, so many people looking to replace lost loves and lost children. I wasn’t looking to replace a lost love. I was looking for the old Hanna Mendel, the girl I used to be — the woman I was meant to become. So I let Michael trail after me as I wandered Debrecen’s roadways, and I let him accompany me to the park when I fed the ducks. I let him sit in the music room and watch me practice. It felt good being with someone who understood how I ached. It felt good being among my own people. After everything that had happened, I was still a Jew. Not because I’d been locked in a cattle train or branded with a tattoo. Baking challah with my mother, lighting the Sabbath candles, eating latkes on Hanukkah — that’s what being a Jew meant.
I couldn’t run from it. And I didn’t want to.
The number of concentration camp survivors grew, but my parents’ names didn’t appear on the list. In April, three camps in Germany — Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau — were liberated, and the list on the first-floor pin-board ran to six sheets. On the eighth of May 1945, Germany surrendered and the war was over. On the tenth of May, the printed list of survivors was taken down.
Erika and I sat shiva that day. We mourned for our parents as Jewish custom demanded. We tore our clothes and sat on low stools and prayed to God to protect their souls. I didn’t play the piano. We didn’t go out. We clung to each other and the memories we shared: Father at his workbench, smiling over his spectacles; Mother in the kitchen, humming to Bartok as she baked. We didn’t have photos to pore over. I couldn’t run to my mother’s dresser and inhale her perfume or fling Father’s drawers open and find a scarf to put on. There were no mementos of their life with which we could comfort ourselves, no bits left behind, so we told each other stories and helped each other remember.
We hid in our cocoon, but we had to emerge eventually. After seven days of mourning, we bathed and dressed. We lit a memorial candle and placed it on top of the piano beside Papa’s pocket watch. I played Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody for my mother, and Erika sang my father’s favorite Yiddish lullaby, the same one he’d sung to us every night when we were young. We kept the pocket watch to remember Father, and Mother’s wedding band to remember her, and buried the skullcap and prayer book by the lake in the Puszta forest.
I stood over the sad mound of dirt and tried not to cry.
“A gold watch and a wedding band,” I said. “That’s all we have left of them.” I looked at Erika. “Papa would have wanted a Jewish burial, like Opapa’s.”
“They were kept behind a brick wall in the ghetto and then locked in a barrack. I wouldn’t want them in a box in the ground,” Erika said.
I looked up at the sky and tried to imagine my parents hovering somewhere above the hunger and pain, stretching their legs and fanning out their arms on their way to the next life.
“They’re free,” I said.
Erika nodded.
I found a smooth, gray stone and placed it on the mound of dirt — a piece of Debrecen, a rock to last for all time.
“We’ll never forget you,” I whispered. “We’ll live the lives you wanted us to live. We’ll make you proud.”
When Michael asked me to accompany him to a moonlight concert three days later, I said yes, because my parents had always liked Michael and because it made sense. We’d lived through the same experience and been on the same side. I knew it was a date. I’d promised to live the life my parents wanted me to live, so I agreed.
“I’ll meet you at the park at six,” Michael said, his grin as wide as the Balaton River.
“It’s a date,” I said, trying to mirror his mood.
And then he looked me in the eye and said, “I know you’ve always dreamed of performing in Paris, and I’d never stop you from chasing your dreams.” His stare unglued me. “They have an orchestra in Palestine, a fully equipped symphony orchestra.” His cheeks turned apple-red. “And an opera company and a broadcasting station.”
I forced myself to concentrate. The mere mention of the word opera had me back at the villa, daydreaming of Karl. He was standing over me, singing Tristan and Isolde. We were alone. He was stroking the back of my neck. . . .
“You wouldn’t be the first concert pianist to settle in Palestine. Weissenberg is there; Kestenberg, too.”
I escaped to the music room when he paused for breath. Erika found me in front of a mirror, putting on lipstick.
“You can’t paint your smile on,” she said, taking the lipstick and sitting down. I sat down next to her. “You know Michael’s mad about you.”
I nodded.
“Is that what you want?”
“What I want?” I said, getting to my feet. I wanted to stop thinking about Karl. I wanted my old life back. I wanted to want Michael Wollner. “I want Anyu and Papa back.” I want Karl to walk through that door. I grabbed my jacket from a peg on the door and my bag from the bed. “It doesn’t matter what I want. Michael’s a decent person, Erika. A nice person. A Jew. I promised Anyu and Papa I’d do the right thing. . . .”
“You’re right,” Erika said, stepping in front of me. “You owe it to Anyu and Papa to do the right thing — to be happy. Don’t give in to fear now.”
I walked past Erika and swung the door open. It was ten minutes to six.
It was a short walk to the park. I arrived early and sat down on a bench. Michael would be here in five minutes. Michael. I was choosing Michael. I looked down at my watch and stared at the minute hand, inching slowly toward the twelve. In four minutes, my future would begin. I took a deep breath, stood up, and grabbed my bag.
I fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Mrs. Hermann closed the door to the office, whispering “Good luck” as she left. Her workday at the community center was done, and I could have the room until the next day. I reached into my bag, pulled out Karl’s scarf, and slipped it around my neck. Erika was right. My parents wanted me to be happy. My mother had told me never to give up. Choosing Michael would be a betrayal. I’d promised Anyu and Papa to do whatever it took to make it out of the camp, and I had. I’d promised to live a full and happy life, and keep playing piano, and I would. I’d promised to tell the world what Hitler had done.
I addressed my letter to General Kafelnikov, First Army of the Ukrainian Front, Birkenau, Poland. You have a prisoner, I typed. His name is Karl Jager and he saved my life.
I pulled my C-sharp from my pocket and felt the familiar soft grain under my fingers. I laid it down on the desk and returned to the keys. I started at the beginning, in the Debrecen ghetto, with a guard banging at my door. I wrote about my father handing over the keys to our apartment, and the rats at the Serly brickyards. I wrote about the dark, damp cattle train and my father’s wet, stubbled cheeks. I wrote about Mengele’s steel baton, and the chimneys belching smoke. I wrote about the razor blades and tattoos and our burned scalps and blistered hands. I wrote about the stale bread and black water, and playing piano on my mother’s back. I wrote about Erika and the twins.
It was almost midnight by the time I typed the commandant’s name. The pages filled with black ink and floated to the floor. I was hungry and tired, but the general had to know what the commandant had done to Stanislaw, what he would’ve done to me if I’d
played the wrong note. Mostly, I wrote about Karl. The general didn’t know Karl had called us by our names or smuggled food into Birkenau. He didn’t know that when the commandant was away, Karl brought me food. He didn’t know that he had the wrong boy.
The morning light filtered through the office shutters. I reached into my bag and took Erika’s film from its hiding place. I slid the typed sheets and the film into an envelope and addressed it to the general. I’d kept my promise to my father to tell the world what I’d seen. I hoped I’d done enough to secure Karl’s release.
I imagined him in the POW camp, alone and scared.
I fed another sheet of paper into the typewriter.
Dear Karl,
The black and white keys thrummed when I struck them. There was so much I wanted to say, I didn’t know where to begin.
I’m in Debrecen with Erika.
I stared at the keys, worrying over what to write next, wondering what Clara Wieck would have written to Robert Schumann.
I never told you the end of Clara and Robert’s story. They were separated for three years. They reunited in Paris and married against her father’s wishes.
I pulled an envelope from the drawer and put it on the desk, next to my C-sharp.
They can’t keep you forever. I’ll wait.
I addressed the envelope to Karl, scooped up the C-sharp, and looked down at my hand. The note gleamed against my pale skin, blistered and splintering at the edges but still whole. I slipped it into the envelope.
I want you to have my C-sharp. You can return it when we see each other.
Until then,
Hanna
Playing for the Commandant is a work of historical fiction. The characters in the novel are created from my imagination, but the Debrecen ghetto and the Serly brickyards; the cattle trains packed with innocent men, women, and children; and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where they were brought to die in the summer of 1944, existed. Dr. Mengele stood on the ramp and sent the startled people who stood before him to the right or to the left, to the labor force or to the gas chambers. There was a commandant of Birkenau, every bit as cruel and sadistic as Commandant Jager, and an orchestra that was forced to play marches at the camp’s main gate.
Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, over one million of them at the Birkenau death camp in Poland. The Nazis believed that Jews were racially inferior and a threat to their community. They also targeted the Roma people and the disabled, as well as those they considered political, ideological, or behavioral threats, such as communists, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals. Of the 1.1 million Jews murdered at Birkenau, nearly half were Hungarian.
I learned about the Holocaust from my father, who was thirteen years old when he was loaded onto a cattle train bound for Auschwitz. My father didn’t tell me his story until I was an adult and he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He was given six months to live, so we were running out of time. He hadn’t told me about his Holocaust experience earlier because he thought that the best way to move past the horror and build a new life in Australia was to put it behind him. I knew that the only way to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again was to keep talking about it.
And writing about it. So I wrote his story down. I started reading other stories and watching movies about the Holocaust and reading history books. Then I wrote this book. I don’t pretend to know how it felt to be imprisoned in Birkenau. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there can ever really understand. But it’s important to try. Reading history books and memoirs, talking about the Holocaust and writing about it are the best ways to stop it from happening again.
My heartfelt thanks to my friends and classmates in the professional writing and editing course at RMIT for their intelligence, support, and advice. To Clare Renner for her encouragement and Olga Lorenzo for her honesty. To my writing group — Brooke Maggs, Richard Holt, Carla Fedi, and Deryn Mansell — for their enthusiasm and their time, and to Ilka Tampke, especially, for inspiring me with her writing and never tiring of mine.
Thanks to Andrew Kelly for believing in this story, to Maryann Ballantyne for her sensitivity and intelligence in helping me shape it, to Mary Verney for her brilliant copyedit, and Suzanne O’Sullivan for her excellent proofreading.
Thanks also to Sue Hampel for allowing me to raid her library and to Dr. Bill Anderson for his expert advice, guidance, and generosity.
And finally, to my husband, Shaun, and our three beautiful children, Josh, Tanya, and Remy, for loving me.
The epigraph on page v is from Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela and is reproduced with the kind permission from his publishers, Little, Brown and Company.
The author and publisher thank Dr. Bill Anderson, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and consultant historian and lecturer at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, for his generosity and expertise in reading this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2012 by Suzy Zail
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First U.S. electronic edition 2014
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2013955694
ISBN 978-0-7636-6403-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6673-6 (electronic)
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
visit us at www.candlewick.com
