In the Claws of the Eagle

by Aubrey Flegg

  ‘You know, Erich; there is someone you’ve told me about who I’ve always liked the sound of … ’ she looked at Erich, her head to one side. Would he have the same idea?

  ‘Von Brugen! Of course!’ He thumped his knee. ‘He’s the one person I could ask. That very first time, after the Winkler affair, von Brugen asked me for Izaac’s name, almost as if he would try to do something for him. All I need is an order from him for the “release of Jew Izaac Abrahams into the custody of the bearer for the purpose of interrogation. Signed, General von Brugen.” No need to involve him in the details.’

  ‘Then what will you do with Izaac if you rescue him? Hide him in the salt mines?’

  ‘Not a bad idea. If I could find one of the old entrances that hasn’t been blocked off, but I have another idea. My mother moved to Altaussee when Father died. There is a loft there that could be made habitable. I will check it out.’

  Erich was too busy, and there were too many people around for any fond farewells when he finally brought Louise to the salt mines. However, Louise did manage to see the place where her picture was being stored, in an alcove behind the chapel altar. The altar was made of salt and it glowed with a honey light when the lights were on. Her portrait was packed exactly like all the other pictures: corrugated cardboard, brown paper, string, and a label. The only differences were that the number on the label was bogus, and that Erich had ‘accidentally’ spilled a blot of red ink on one corner. His last words to her were: ‘Don’t expect too much, Louise. You have no idea of the security surrounding the camps.’

  She heard his footsteps retreating, and a silence deeper than anything she had ever experienced closed about her. On every side were piled the priceless art treasures of Europe. From time to time there would be a hum from the pumps deep in the mine, otherwise nothing. Out of sight, out of mind – had they effectively died – these beautiful works that had given so much pleasure and love, fading from the memories of the people who had given them life or dying as those people died somewhere above? Gradually, however, Louise realised that there was life still within the cavern surrounding her. She thought of them as tiny candles of light around her, springing into life as they were remembered by former owners, families, servants, just as she felt herself flicker to life when Izaac played, or when Erich thought of her waiting in the mine. Ominously, as the weeks went by she realised, that these tiny lights were getting fewer and fewer around her.

  CHAPTER 28

  Auschwitz Concentration Camp

  Within hours Izaac had been sucked into the mad system that ran the enormous concentration camp, feeling like an insect crawling through some vast machine. There was no escape from the daily routine: identity parade, march to work, dig a drain, be yelled at, kicked or punched, fill in the drain, march back, queue for food, stand in line for the toilet, wash in an inch of water, and never, never leave property unguarded – another day over. Cogs – black-uniformed SS men, guard dogs, Kapos (collaborators) who were worse than the dogs, foul food, dysentery – waited to crush the unwary. Nobody knew or cared who or what Izaac was, nor did they want to know about music or orchestras. The man in the bunk above him died, probably of despair. Help carry the corpse to the mortuary, nearly full today.

  What looked like a well-oiled machine was, in fact, chaos, everything was out of sync. Buildings were built and never used; roads were laid that were never finished. When you arrived at work, exhausted, it was time to turn for home. Only by throwing the lives of people at a job was anything ever achieved, and all the time smoke poured from the chimney in the little wood. Don’t listen to the stories about the gas chambers and the crematoria. Don’t think about them! Stay alive! But Izaac was no good at not thinking about things; he couldn’t sleep, he got dysentery, his hands bled, raw from the unaccustomed work; he no longer cared; within a month he was on a downward spiral into despair.

  He nearly missed the shout when it came. ‘Izaac bloody Abrahams!’ Exhausted after a day carrying bricks, he struggled to the door where the kapo in charge of his barrack was standing. ‘I have a message for you. You can have it for one bread ration.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you or do you not want to hear the message?’ Izaac’s stomach was writhing with hunger, but he had no choice. Reluctantly he handed over his quarter loaf.

  ‘Report to barrack C28,’ the kapo instructed. ‘And go now, before I change my mind!’

  As Izaac sidled between the bunks in his new barracks, hands reached out to shake his. He swapped names and found himself talking to musicians he had heard of from all over Europe. Some he recognised joyfully from Terezín. The barracks was identical to the one he had left, except that this one was clean. The food was the same, but because the kapo – also a musician – was honest, there was no thieving. The morning bustle started even earlier here because the various bands and orchestras had to be ready to play at roll call. They would play stirring marches and gay waltzes as the work-parties marched out.

  The barracks, like all the others, were segregated, but he met his young friend Deborah in the rehearsal room; even with her shorn head she looked pretty. He thanked her profusely for rescuing him from the hell of the main camp. As he did so he was shocked to realise that the sense of purpose, the desire to entertain and to perfect his music that had driven him while in Terezín, had been subtly replaced by a more primitive urge – the urge to survive.

  ‘We must get you a violin, Maestro,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I will be allowed to take you.’

  It was a long walk past interminable barrack buildings to a place where groups of young women, working in the open, were separating vast piles of clothing into smaller piles. Suitcases were stacked in mountains. Inside one shed Izaac saw piles of shoes spilling towards the door.

  ‘Where does all this come from?’ he murmured in amazement.

  Deborah looked at him, and he followed her eyes to where a chimney belched black smoke into the hot summer air. Izaac winced. Despite grudging confirmation from his former workmates, he still could not take in the reality of the gas chambers, and the crematoria. Deborah took his arm briefly; she understood. They all had to go through this dreadful moment of realisation.

  She opened the door to a smaller store and they stood there, peering into the comparative darkness. First to come to sight were the brass instruments, gleaming like coiled snakes. Gradually Izaac realised that the four walls were literally piled high with musical instruments. Most of them were still in their cases, but others, gypsy fiddles for example, that had possibly never had a case in their life, were uncovered. Two double bases leaned together like drunks in conversation against the wall. He walked in. Where do you start, when faced with a six-foot pile of violins?

  They were as different and as uniform as the players in an orchestra. Izaac ran his eyes over the heap and realised he was counting not just violins, but the lives of violinists. All these lives … Suddenly he felt a chill that began at the back of his neck and seeped into the rest of his body. He closed his eyes: I don’t want to see this, he thought. It was just another violin case, battered, like so many of the others, but a case with a scarlet hotel-sticker, with a picture of a dancing clown on it. He went over, carefully eased it out from the pile and stood cradling it like a baby in his arms. Then he carried the case over to the light and knelt reverently, fumbling with the catches, hoping perhaps to find some battered old instrument, not hers. But no, nestling in one of Helena’s old silk scarves lay her Stradivarius. Tears ran down his cheeks.

  ‘But she wasn’t even a Jew!’ he exclaimed, looking at Deborah as if searching for an answer.

  ‘Who? Who do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘The owner of this violin was Helena Stronski, my teacher, my mentor. I remember this clown from when I was a child.’

  ‘Stronski,’ said Deborah, ‘it sounds Polish. That would be enough. The Poles are Untermenschen – subhuman, like the Jews. Perhaps she spoke out about what they were doing to her people?’

>   Izaac nodded. ‘Yes, Helena would have spoken out! It doesn’t say much for the many that held their tongues?’

  ‘Except that they are still alive,’ said Deborah.

  As he had not yet been assigned to an orchestra, Izaac had the rehearsal room to himself. He stood for a while looking at the Stradivarius in its case, and it seemed to glow with some internal energy. He had often played the ‘Strad’ when a student, but Helena had always stopped short of letting him perform on it. ‘I don’t trust you two together,’ she’d said. ‘You might shatter the chandeliers or something.’ It was over a month since he had played a note. He tightened the bow, remembering his childish delight at the pretty mother of pearl knob on the end of it, then he picked up the violin, and ran his fingers over the strings. It was still almost in tune. Perhaps it was only days since … he checked himself. He suddenly felt very much alone. He wanted Louise, he needed her, but he had managed to keep her out of his mind for the last month; this was no time to share his experiences with her.

  Perhaps if he just tuned Helena’s violin, Louise would pick this up and know that he was thinking of her. He put his bow on the strings. The notes swooped and settled as he turned the pegs, tuning the four strings closer to each other until they merged in perfect harmony. Then he drew his bow and played the brief scales and runs that he always played after tuning, finishing on the high delicate harmonics. Instantly he was back in the past, playing the Dvorak Violin Concerto and listening to the wild harmonies that Louise had accidentally released to him that day.

  He began to play, and out it came, like water breaching a dam, a trickle, then faster and faster as all the bottled up fears and misery of the last weeks flowed out of him: the transport, the camp, all the things he had carefully concealed from her. There was nothing he could do but let it go, as helpless as Pandora when she opened her box and accidentally released all its evils into the world until there was nothing left in her box but hope. Poor Louise, had he sent her all that misery without hope?

  To begin with, playing Helena’s violin was like riding a thoroughbred. Ramon, his conductor, would look down kindly at him, and Izaac would apologise.

  ‘Sorry, Ramon, did I cut loose a bit?’ But Ramon didn’t mind because since Izaac had come, he found himself looking down on forty alert and interested faces, all wondering what their new leader would do next. In order to discipline himself, Izaac disciplined them.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ Deborah told him in private. ‘We love it, it’s good for us.’ The players would now linger in the rehearsal room and listen while Izaac took the legendary Stradivarius for a gallop. He would imagine himself back in Vienna being wrestled with by Madame Helena as she tried to mould him into a proper playing position. Instead of Louise shouting at him to ‘go back. Get it right!’ he was doing just this with his orchestra.

  Members of the orchestra played in the mornings and evenings, for roll calls and while the working parties came and went. In between these times, many, like Deborah, had to do part-time work, but they also had to be available for two hours practice in the afternoons. There were camp concerts for inmates, and sometimes public concerts for the Nazi officers’ friends and guests. The orchestra even wore dress clothes on these occasions, suits salvaged from the piles of garments that Deborah had shown Izaac on his first day with the orchestra. Izaac’s health improved, his dysentery subsided. Of all their duties, the one they dreaded most was having to play during the selection process, when exhausted people from the transports were divided up, the ‘lucky’ ones sent to join work gangs, the others directed towards the grove of trees, and thence, as they all now knew, straight to the gas chambers. ‘Don’t look, don’t listen, just play; it’s the only thing you can do to help them,’ Ramon advised on each of these occasions. So far Izaac had been spared this ordeal.

  He now felt ‘secure in the saddle’ when playing the Strad, but that didn’t mean he had complete control over it. It was as if Helena’s rebelliousness was wrestling to get out and make some statement about the monster that was devouring them.

  In the deep silence of the salt mines, Louise Eeden was wide awake. She had felt Izaac drawing on her, working with her, fighting some technical battle with his violin, and had wondered at the memories of Helena Stronski that this had invoked. Could it be Helena who was playing? She listened for her characteristic style, but no, this was definitely Izaac.

  Louise would ‘return’ after these sessions, tired but triumphant. Perhaps there was a major concert coming up? Izaac was certainly playing at concert pitch. Then there were periods of silence when she was out of Izaac’s mind. It was during one of these that she began to think about Erich, or perhaps Erich was thinking about her? She wondered where he was, and to amuse herself began to picture in her mind the compass points from which Izaac’s and Erich’s messages were coming. She imagined them as two steady beacons in the blackness of the mine. Then, quite suddenly, she was alert. Surely one of the beacons had moved; they were no longer so far apart. They were converging. Erich had set out for Auschwitz.

  Ramon looked with deep misgivings at the order sheet that had come from SS headquarters. Not only did it demand an orchestra for a selection, it listed specific players, most of them from Terezín. Izaac Abrahams’s name had even been underlined! Ramon had survived the camp longer than most, and had come to understand the Nazi mind. They loved to spring surprises. It was as if, bored by the daily quota of death, they needed to spice it up with special events, ‘entertainments’, which were invariably at the expense of their victims. He wondered if he should share his misgivings with Izaac; after all he was the leader of the orchestra. Then he decided against it. Ramon hadn’t survived by taking risks.

  When he saw where they were to play, Ramon was even more suspicious. Though out of doors, it was like a stage set. The orchestra had been placed so that the players were on a slight rise facing the barbed wire that would separate them from the people arriving from the transport. It looked to him as though they had been placed there not so much to play, but to see. A transport had arrived earlier and the last of the people were filing past when they arrived to set up.

  ‘We are Hungarians!’ one of them had shouted up to them, but Ramon knew that his orchestra had not been called out to play for the Hungarians. Ramon looked to the right, to where the SS men in their black uniforms were standing, casually laughing and talking among themselves, boots and leather gleaming. What went on in their brains that they could laugh and look so normal, knowing where these starving, broken, people were going? As he watched, the SS men became alert; two trucks were backing up. Ramon got the impression that these were what the SS men had been waiting for. Several of them looked up towards the orchestra to see their reactions. Get the orchestra playing, quickly, was his solution. The busier they were, the less upsetting it would be. He tapped on his music stand to call the orchestra to attention.

  Izaac had been sitting in his place in the front row of the orchestra, trying to keep his hands warm enough to play. It was October and the air was sharp. He was trying not to think, fixing his gaze on a clump of thistles that grew a few metres away, their downy seed-heads sticking up like white shaving brushes. There was a whirr of small wings and the thistles sagged and bobbed under the weight of half a dozen goldfinches. Izaac smiled, but at that moment Ramon tapped on his music stand, and the birds were gone in a flash of colour and a puff of thistledown. Louise had always said she loved goldfinches; he wished she was here, and then almost immediately was glad she wasn’t.

  He looked up at Ramon, his thoughts still full of little red and gold birds, and raised his violin to lead the orchestra into ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz. While he played, his eyes settled on the two trucks that were now unloading their human cargo. I’m not looking, he persuaded himself as the tailgate of the first lorry dropped with a distant clang. At least the soldiers are offering the people inside a hand down. The trucks were high; too high for some of the smaller children to jump from. Some of the older chil
dren lifted down the little ones. Just keep playing, even though it’s still too far for them to hear us. There are boys in one lorry and girls in the other. They seem delighted to see each other again. Look, they are hugging; that’s nice. They must know each other. At that moment the impact of what he was watching hit Izaac like a fist below the belt, leaving him gasping for breath. Of course the children knew each other. Hadn’t they been singing together in the opera Brundibár for a year?

  This then was the ‘treat’ the Nazis had planned for him and for the other Terezín players: they were to play their own young friends into the gas chambers. There was Pepíček, one of the two children who had gone off to buy milk for their mother. Where was his sister, Aninka, Izaac wondered? But the ice cream man was there and the sparrow, and the cat. And there was Pafko – Brundibár himself. No clipboard or bucket could save him now. Izaac could feel himself rising in tribute to his young friend. Ramon shook his head, so Izaac sank down, recognising more faces from the two choirs, boys and girls mixing together for the last time.

  The orchestra played through ‘The Blue Danube’ again. The children were nearly below them now, looking more subdued. Their first greetings over, they were beginning to look about them, beginning to wonder. Izaac turned the page. What had they been told to play for them next: ‘The Trish Trash Polka’. The Trish Trash Polka! Sudden rage exploded behind Izaac’s eyes. He could control himself no longer, and neither, it seemed could he control his violin. They rose together. Ramon coughed, his eyes blazing a warning, willing Izaac to sit down and not to be a fool; they could all be shot. He saw that one of the officers had indeed detached himself from the group of smirking SS men, delighted at having got a reaction from the Terezín players.