“Read it with me?”
Adele looked to Vladimir, who shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Sophie. Not today. I’ve brought a friend with me and we’re unable to stay. Perhaps another time, yes?”
Sophie nodded, though her eyes registered immediate sadness.
Adele gave a light tap to the end of her pert nose. “Good girl.”
She ran a hand over the hair on Eitan’s brow, careful not to wake the sleeping boy, then turned to say good-bye to Elsa. She embraced her friend in a hug.
“I’m sorry, but you cannot come back.” Abram’s words were firm, but he extended a hand to Vladimir. “We do thank you for your help. May God bless you in the blackness of this war.”
Vladimir took the man’s hand in both of his own and gave a nod that was fraught with emotion. He released Abram’s hand, then looked from him over to Elsa.
“Please hear me. I know you’re both afraid, but there is greater risk if I don’t come back. You’re dangerously low on supplies. And if the children are sick, you’ll need medicine for them. I’ve brought you what I could find for now, but it’s not going to be enough to sustain you much longer. Surely you must see that?”
“Should we leave?” Elsa’s voice was a tragic whisper. She turned to look at her husband, still with Adele’s arm around her waist for support. “Is it time?”
Abram shook his head. “No, my dear. It’s not safe.”
Vladimir’s words were determined and hopeful as he continued. “There are no guarantees in war. We know this. Safety is a luxury no matter where we tread. But if you do change your mind about getting out, my contacts can help. I have a friend down at the docks. Julian. He loads the trucks for the dockside markets. When the time is right, he can help us arrange for your transport out of the city. Don’t answer now. Think it over. We can discuss it the next time I return.”
Elsa perked up, her eyes freezing on Adele’s face. “You’ll come back with him, Adele?”
“Of course.”
Vladimir cut in with a stern, “No,” at the same time. “Adele will not. But I assure you that I’ll look in on you.” When Abram looked ready to protest he added, “Only when necessary to see how you’re getting on.”
Abram gave a reluctant nod. “Thank you, for all you’ve done.” Vladimir pulled Adele away from Elsa, who latched onto her hand and kissed her palm. She finally let go as Vladimir pulled her into the stairwell.
“We won’t open the door to you unless it’s safe,” Abram said, closing the door with Elsa standing tearfully in the background. “Please seal the cupboard on your way out.”
He nodded. “I will.”
“But what about the children? You won’t even try to escape?” Adele threw herself against the door, even as it was bolted from the inside. “Abram, please! We can help you!”
Vladimir took her by the hand and dragged her up the stairs, her feet fumbling to find their footing on each uneven step.
“Let them go, Adele.”
She shook her head and turned to go back down the stairs.
“Did you hear me?” He grabbed onto her shoulders and shook her, trying to get her attention. “Let them be! God will watch over them until I can visit again.”
“Can’t you convince them to get out? Look at them. Look at how they’re living. Barely surviving? With no food? The children could be sick.” She shook her head, fighting against the tears that were streaming down her face.
“Adele, I won’t let you do this. You’re in way over your head. It’s far too dangerous for you to ever come back,” he said, and began pulling the cupboard back against the wall.
Adele tugged at his elbows, anything to get him to listen to her. She struggled against the strength of his arms, trying in a feeble attempt to bypass him back down the stairs. But when the cupboard met up against the wall with a gentle thud, she stopped and stared at him.
“Adele, I care about you too much to let you put yourself at risk.”
The finality of his words set in as the dust floated through the air.
“I must come back,” she said, unable to stop the quiver she felt overtaking her chin. “I have to do this. Don’t you understand? My life has to matter for something bigger than myself.”
Adele collapsed in his arms then. For the lost who were buried throughout the city, who had to scrape for food and hide like hunted animals, she sobbed against Vladimir’s shoulder. And he seemed to understand. With the cupboard closed behind them in the dark butler’s pantry, he held her. Without the necessity of words, Vladimir wrapped his strong arms around her and let her cry.
The world had gone dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
April 5, 1944
Spring came in on a cloud of bitter morning fog.
The sky had cried snow through February, then stayed frigid and unforgiving well into March. Adele wasn’t surprised. Between the monotonous cadence of death and the playing of requiems day in and day out, she couldn’t picture something as commonplace as the warmth of the sun ever making an appearance again. A cold April was the only fitting harbinger of another spring in Auschwitz.
Adele stood with the rest of the orchestra, lined up in the biting cold during morning counts, and stared back at a gaggle of squawking birds in the yard. They would fly overhead, gangly black things with horribly beady eyes and great wings that took them wherever they pleased. Adele hated them and everything they stood for; the freedom she couldn’t taste, the absence of anything normal, the void of basic human decency.
She thought of visiting the Haurbechs in their dank basement. She remembered how caged they looked. How they eventually traded everything for a chance at freedom. And lost.
She thought of the things she had once considered normal. Her parents’ Viennese castle of a house. Food. Water. A warm bed. Distant memories. Adele no longer hoped to find normalcy in the world again. Even the flock of birds seemed to flit about, boastful of their freedom.
No one needed to tell her what she already knew. Their hope was shattered the moment Omara relayed the news that Alma Rosé had died the day before.
“What does this mean for the orchestra?” Marta whispered when the guards looked away down the length of the row. “Now that our conductor is gone?”
A shiver ran down Adele’s spine at how normal it now seemed to talk of death. “How did she die?” Her breath froze on a fog.
“No one knows for sure,” Marta whispered. “She was taken to the hospital wing after being stricken with a fever and terrible pains to the stomach. She died not two days later.” Marta looked at the guards’ backs before continuing. “Some say it was an infection. Others claim she was poisoned.”
“Why would the SS kill a prisoner with poison?” Fränze’s tone was soft with a noticeable quiver, as if she’d just realized the SS had found a terrible new way to dispose of the lot of them. “Was it because she used to stop our playing if the SS guards didn’t listen? Maybe they found that action to be an impertinence.” Her vulnerability was heartbreaking.
“Not the SS!” Marta raised her voice, drawing wary glances from several prisoners. She lowered it after hearing a Shh! echo behind them. “They wouldn’t have cared enough to poison her for that. Anyone jealous of her position could have arranged to do it. But me? I don’t think it was another prisoner.” She shook her head. “I believe she drank that poison on her own.”
“Suicide?” Adele stared straight ahead, numb.
“She’s not the first one to do it in this godforsaken place, is she?”
“Poor Alma,” Fränze whispered. “God grant her peace.”
“Hush.” Omara gave the order a scant second before a piercing wind blew in over them. “Please, girls. They are pulling people out of line today.”
Adele straightened her spine.
Pulling people out of line. The female guards were at work, barking at the shivering women standing before them, sending the sick to the chambers. And the orchestra was lined up among them. Adele kn
ew what it meant; with their conductor now gone, they no longer had a distinction that might keep them alive.
The birds squawked again, drawing her eyes to their feathered turmoil in the yard.
“Adele!” Omara’s voice snapped her back to attention. From her left side the older woman whispered. “Face front and pinch your cheeks,” she said, her voice tinged with caution. “You need color.”
Adele pinched both sides of her cheeks so that her knuckles turned white with the action. She prayed that at the very least, it would give some life back to what she knew to be a pair of woefully sunken-in cheeks and a severely ashy complexion stretched out where soft porcelain skin had once glowed.
The guards came closer.
They saw something they didn’t like in a woman with pitiful coughs. She was wavering on her feet so that she could barely stand.
Adele turned away from the sight of the beating.
No more. I can’t stand to see any more.
Adele saw Omara’s shoulders stiffen as uniformed guards passed their row and looked at little Fränze first, then stopped to glare at the now slightly trembling Marta. None of them seemed to breathe for a moment. But the guards moved on and their fear could be abated for another morning.
“Back to the block, girls. Prepare to rehearse.” Omara’s voice sent Adele toward the path.
Adele began holding back coughs upon turning to the path that led back to the music block. She received sidelong glances from one or two of the other women walking near her and turned her head down to expel a cough in the sleeve of her coat. She felt a hand fasten to her elbow as she walked.
“Are you sick?” Omara’s voice was strong and steady next to her ear, yet hushed as she steered them with hurried steps down the path.
“No,” she replied, gritting her teeth at the burning cold and the pain in her achy legs caused by trying to keep pace with Omara’s swift footfalls. “I’m fine.”
“Do not lie to me, Adele,” she said, tossing glances around, tuned in to the carefully watching SS guards lining the barbed wire fenced path.
What good would it do to lie?
Adele’s chest had been tight with congestion for a few days, though she’d managed to keep it hidden. Her sickly complexion could be explained; everyone else had the same gauntness where rosy cheeks had once been. But the coughing? It was a dead giveaway. She was sickened with something. And whatever it was refused to yield.
“Why did you not tell me about this?” Omara asked, even as she whisked Adele into the block. The rest of the girls filtered in behind them. Omara pulled Adele to the back corner beyond the bunks and lowered her voice. “You’re shaking. Even I can see it.”
Adele ran her hands up and down her arms, trying to warm them.
The forced playing with the orchestra through the winter had taken its toll on Adele. Deterioration had been swift. She felt the immense sorrow when they were called to play each morning as the laborers left the camp. And when they returned in the evening, some with the body of a friend who was a victim of exhaustion or a gunshot to the head when they couldn’t work fast enough, Adele could scarcely keep her eyes open to the death marching. Often she’d play with her eyes closed, refusing to give the SS the satisfaction of searing any more gruesome memories upon her heart. But though she could keep her eyes closed through the body of a song, she always had to reopen them at the end.
The fear she’d experienced in the roll call that morning was too much. “I don’t think I can play today,” was all she could manage to say before collapsing down on the cot, her forehead pressed up against the coolness of the wooden bunk. A couple of the girls gave her sideways glances.
Omara stood over her, her stare darting about her face. “You are sick.”
Adele felt the emotion welling up in her throat. She gave a reluctant nod.
“Yes.”
They both knew that typhus was running rampant through the adjacent blocks. It had been all winter, along with dysentery, tuberculosis, and cholera. And now, Adele’s feverish nights and cough-filled days were becoming too pronounced to be hidden any longer. Regardless of the label put to the illness, it was a death sentence.
Omara should have stood miles away from her; it was the sensible thing to do. Instead, she took a seat next to her on the cot. Her hand came up to rest on Adele’s forehead, the knotted joints surprisingly gentle and warm to the touch. “You’re burning up, child.”
Adele shivered and pulled the thin coat up tighter round her collar. “I know.”
“Adele, I know you may not feel like it, but you must play. You know what they could do to you if you don’t. They’ll know you’re sick.”
They may as well call it what it was. “They’ll send me to the gas chamber, you mean.”
“Of course that’s what I mean.” Omara whispered as if it were some great secret, as if no one knew what was happening yards away from them. The notion made Adele want to laugh. Everyone knew, so what good was it to hide the truth on a whisper? If a prisoner was ill and couldn’t work, then they were dealt with in swift fashion. But if it was typhus, the entire block could be exterminated, either by firing squad against the brick wall outside or the death chambers that were pumped full of toxic gas.
Whispering changed nothing.
“Adele, you would risk us all by hiding this from me?”
Adele sat on the edge of her cot, her legs dangling over the side, swinging with as little energy as she’d ever had. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—” Adele stopped, closing her eyes against the fear, and squeezed her hands around the bunk’s wooden rail. “I didn’t know whether you’d turn me in. I wasn’t prepared to face it, didn’t know if I could—”
“Look at me.”
Omara’s order was stern, but Adele still resisted. When she didn’t look up, a tender caress tilted the underside of her chin. Adele’s eyes popped open and she found her friend, with as much compassion as she’d ever seen, offering a gentle hint of a smile to soothe every sliver of fear that had been plaguing her.
“Adele, you are our family. Do you understand me? This family is more than the music we play for the SS. Our bond is stronger than the sharing of wooden bunks and a wash bucket in the same block. This, child, is our worship. To live and survive and play to God from the depths of our souls. This is the call that binds us. When we worship in the good times, it brings God joy. But worship in the midst of agony?” Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth and she shook her head. It was an action befitting the wisdom of the words she’d chosen. “That is authentic adoration of our Creator. An orchestra will worship together, as one body. As one song. A family must do no less.”
“But I’m putting all of you at risk by being here.” Adele stopped to cough, then returned her glance to Omara. “You said it yourself. I could cause everyone’s deaths. If you don’t turn me in, one of the others will.”
“They will do no such thing or answer to me.”
Omara stood then. She marched to the center of the block and began arranging chairs for their morning practice. Adele watched her, shocked that there could be such compassion when so much was at risk.
“But why?”
“If you have to ask, then you’ve learned nothing in this place.”
She thought about it, hearing the scrape of the chairs against the ground and the indiscriminate drip of water from the corner of the leaky ceiling. “Tell me. Is that what I’m here for? To learn something about life? To dissect the most gruesome parts of humanity and find some philosophical meaning out of it all?”
Omara stopped short, her arms freezing with a chair still fused to her grip. “Have you not learned anything?”
Adele swallowed hard. “Tell me,” she asked, burying a cough in her sleeve once more. “What were you doing that day I came back to the barracks with the snapped violin string?”
Omara’s eyes shot up to meet hers. The room fell silent, as if nature too halted for an answer. The wind calmed outside. Voices along the pa
th were lost. Even the dripping in the corner halted, giving an eerie silence to the shadows that collected around them.
“We all have our secrets, Adele.”
“And I have shared mine with you,” she replied softly, but with deliberate intention. “If we are to survive, mustn’t we be able to trust one another?”
The elder woman said nothing for a moment. Instead, she weaved in between the other girls over to the stacks of instrument cases and retrieved Adele’s violin case from the mix. She opened it and, with gentle hands that would have held a newborn with no less care, cradled the instrument in her arms. She walked back to Adele’s side.
“Do you remember what I told you when you first arrived? If you want to live, then disappear,” Omara cautioned her. “Do not give them a reason to notice you. If you are a member of the orchestra, then you play. Play at the selections. Play for executions. Play down to your soul at the SS concerts and then forget every single note in them thereafter. That is how you survive. Painters. Poets. Musicians . . . like every other artist in this place, you make yourself invisible to their memory but you continue to create because you must.” She lifted an aged finger and pointed it to the center of her chest. “In here.”
Invisible to a memory; how Adele wished that were the case for her now. But that would only make her think on childhood dreams, and such things did not exist. Not anymore. Her memories were real, alive and breathing, and seared onto her heart like nothing else could be. It began with that first night down by the docks and had continued in every moment since.
Adele had shut her eyes to many things since her arrival; they burned with memories now.
“Did you hear me?”
Adele stifled a cough. “Invisible. Yes.”
“Your heart is still beautiful, child,” Omara declared, and lovingly placed the instrument in her hands. “We will play indoors today, to stay in out of the rain. And you must rest as much as possible. Understand?”
She nodded.
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