Except for when she was required to be somewhere, Adele had spent the better part of the last week isolated on her cot. Had stopped saying much of anything to the group. In fact, if she were honest with herself, she’d quit living. She’d not ventured outside except for the mandatory morning counts, and even then she drifted in and out of a sense of bemused consciousness. She still played each day, but her efforts were lifeless as a leaf floating on a gust of wind. Her chair was occupied and her violin still cried with the rest of the orchestra, but Adele felt herself slipping away, further and further from reality.
Her will was no longer shaken; it was dead.
“Get up, Adele.”
She turned slightly, her body too taxed to roll over on her side so she could look at her friend.
“Did you hear me?” Omara came over to the bunks and began tugging her shoulders up off the cot.
“What’s the matter?”
“Get up. You must come with me now.” Omara took a scratchy wool blanket from the overhead bunk and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Here. This will keep you from getting chilled.”
Adele shook her head. “I’m hot.”
Omara didn’t mean to argue, apparently. She tucked the blanket around her anyway. “You can wear it under your coat and they won’t even see it. Can you walk?”
“I think so.” She tottered like a baby learning to stand for the first time, but was steadied by Omara’s strong arms until her feet were firmly planted on the ground. “Where are we going?”
“To Canada.”
“The warehouses?” Adele glanced out their small block window in the direction of the warehouse section of the camp. “But why there? Why now?”
“I have something to show you, Adele. Will you come with me?” Adele noted something strange in Omara’s voice and though her gaze lingered beyond the last words, Adele felt compelled to obey.
She nodded and allowed her friend to lead her out into the broken, early morning light of dawn. Adele walked in a daze. They moved past the execution wall without a second glance. When had that sight become normal?
Omara ushered her to the back of the warehouse where she’d first stayed all those months ago. She remembered it now, that feeling of shock she’d had at seeing the overabundance of wares stacked ceiling high. Her ghostly pale hand ran over those piles now, the worn leather of the shoes in the pile feeling cold and withered against her skin.
They came to a door, small and insignificant as it was, tucked in the back corner behind a tall bin of clothing, its wood aged and shrouded in shadows.
“What is this?” Adele turned to look at Omara.
“Go inside.” The elder woman tilted her head, giving the direction with a stoic expression on her face. Adele trusted her. And because of this, she placed her palm around the aged metal knob and turned. The door creaked, groaning as it opened.
She squinted. There was natural light from a frosted glass window set high up on the brick wall. As her eyes adjusted, Adele saw a small brick-walled room, tucked away beneath the wooden stairwell overhead. It was sparsely equipped, with only a small desk and chair in the corner, a single desk lamp in the back.
“What is this place?”
She stood, arms pulled in tight around her middle to ward off the damp chill in the air.
“It is there,” Omara instructed, standing back in the doorway. She pointed toward the stairway. “Round the corner.”
Adele looked at her friend and found her expression oddly void of emotion. She stood as a fixture in the shadowed alcove beyond the door. Omara nodded her forward. She obeyed, turning and walking, the wooden floor creaking with each cautious step.
When she got around the corner, Adele’s mouth fell open, jaw dropping. Her heart rate quickened. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth.
There before her on the wall, seared with bright paint and hanging against the concrete background of the inner wall, was an image of her own face.
Adele approached it with caution, as if it were a mirage that would quickly vanish were she to even breathe. How could this vision of beauty exist in such an evil place? The painting was too stunning to have been rendered by an amateur. It was the face she’d seen in the mirror years before she came to Auschwitz—the ghostly image of a young woman who’d not been battered by the horrific truths of the real world. It was a woman who was young and strong and wide-eyed, confidently holding a violin.
Adele touched shaking fingertips over the image of herself, heart thumping, legs nearly unable to hold her upright. The only thing that didn’t fit was that the girl in the image had been shorn of her hair. Adele ran her hand over the tuft of dirty hair at her nape, then touched cautious fingers to her cheeks. What did she look like now? Did she have pale skin and woefully sunken eyes like the rest of the girls? It had been so long since she’d looked in a mirror. So long since she’d seen that girl. Would Vladimir recognize his butterfly now? She was so . . . wounded.
Adele crumpled to kneel on the floor. Omara came up behind her and wrapped supportive arms around her shoulders. Adele looked past the painting of herself, noticing for the first time that there were other paintings—small drawings of the trauma-stricken faces of prisoners working under the dark shadow of armed guards, of stone-faced children in striped uniforms, all with a cold, lifeless sky behind them. Some appeared to be painted on makeshift wooden canvases, others painted on the walls of the closet-sized room. There were words, beautiful, poetic words too, etched in the wooden stairway and scratched even in the ground at her feet.
“What . . .” She sobbed on the words, looking back to the masterfully rendered painting of herself. “What is this place?”
“My dear child. This painting is how I see you. It’s how we all see you. Do you understand? There is still beauty left in the world. It is here.”
They looked around the room in unison. She was still in shock. Humbled. Taken by the beauty born from ashes that fell from the sky.
“Who?”
Omara seemed to understand that she was asking about the many images. Who created them? Whose words were those?
“The artist can’t be killed, Adele. The men and women whose hearts have cried in this place—they couldn’t stay away. The artists came here in droves. At risk of death . . .” Omara sniffed. Was she crying too? “Some are gone now. But their legacy lives on. There is art like this hidden all over the camp.”
“And the painting?”
Omara tilted her head toward the door. “I found everything there, in that hellish warehouse out there. It wasn’t enough to paint on the brick. The emotion wouldn’t show like I’d hoped it would. I took wood slats from the bins for the canvas. Paints I found tossed in suitcases. A brush made from the piles of hair.”
“Please,” she mumbled. “Don’t tell me any more.”
Adele looked at the image of the beautiful violinist with the shaved head, wondering if she could ever be that beautiful again. She ran her fingers over the bottom of the painting, the paint somehow feeling alive as it grazed the scars on her palms.
“All this time, I thought you were a music professor. I just assumed . . .”
“That I could only play the cello.” Adele saw Omara’s face break into a smile next to her, the laugh lines creating deep creases at her mouth and eyes. Their cheeks rested together for the briefest of seconds. “Ah, and that is why God gives a variance of gifts. The cello may have kept air in my lungs here, but”—she pointed to the painting—“my heart has always belonged to the brush.”
Omara released her for a moment and turned her shoulders so that they faced each other. “Adele, I brought you here for a reason.”
She brushed a tear away from her cheek. “And what is that?”
“I must tell you that there is hope. Hope for tomorrow,” she whispered, leaning to cradle Adele’s face in her hand. “There is hope in God.”
Adele’s heart gave way then. In a rush, the vault she’d hidden deep within finally released the hold on the angui
sh she’d buried there. She crumpled against Omara, resting her cheek on her chest as the wounds she’d endured prompted fresh tears.
“I have prayed . . .” She sobbed, “I prayed the moment I stepped from the train. But this? This is a desert! You’ve shown me beauty. I see that it can exist in such a place. But why, after all of the agonizing prayers of His people—why is God silent?”
“Adele?”
Omara’s voice was soft. A caress. A place of respite in the midst of their seemingly never-ending nightmare.
“Look at me, child.” The woman’s voice held such a tender note that Adele felt they could be miles away from Auschwitz in that moment. “There is to be a concert in early October. High-ranking Third Reich officials will be present.”
Adele’s voice hitched in her throat. She looked up. “My parents—”
“Calm down,” she said, raising a hand to quiet her. “I know nothing of your parents’ presence at the concert. That is not why we are here.”
“Why then?”
“Now that Birkenau is joined by the first Auschwitz camp, they’ve asked that you play a solo in the orchestra concert. So you see, God is not silent. He has secured you another day. Now, you must get well so that you can practice. Alma is gone, God rest her soul, but it does not spell your end too.”
“But how can I play?” Adele pulled at the dirtied uniform she now wore. “Like this? Look at me . . . I’m a ghost.”
“I have asked the other girls for help. Marta has a friend in the kitchens and she will bring extra soup for you. They will smuggle potatoes into the block.”
“No. Even if they could find any potatoes, I can’t let them risk their lives for me. It’s a death sentence if they’re caught stealing food.”
“Then they won’t get caught.”
Adele shook her head. “But they’re starving. We all are. How can I ask them to bring me food?”
“They would do it for you, Adele, just as you would for them. The food will make you strong. Fränze and the others will watch over you as you walk to the gates each day, making sure you do not stumble or appear sick before the SS. Then we will all shield you from practice and allow you to rest in the block during the day. What I need you to do is to play the music in your mind. I need you to pray. Seek God. And above all, allow Him to heal you.”
Adele’s chin rose, pulling her eyes back to the images on the walls. She thought of the lost as her gaze traveled around the room. She heard the violin cry as scores of people walked the long road from the platform to the crematorium. Saw images of Dieter, and the Haurbechs, and her noble Vladimir, all flashing before her. She felt the coolness of the air in their secret garden, saw the butterfly tossing its kaleidoscope wings on a breeze as spring was renewed.
“You will agree to this?”
Adele decided then, with images of beauty cascading before her, that she must accept Omara’s kindness, knowing she was going to die in Auschwitz. This would be her last performance . . . Finally, her soul spent, Adele was ready to let go.
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
“And you understand why I have brought you here?”
Adele glanced up at the painting again, feeling the good-bye bleed over her insides.
This is it, God. Isn’t it? You want me to play once more.
Just once—for You.
“I understand, Omara. And yes.” She rose up from the floor with renewed strength, palms wiping the wetness from her face. “I will play.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
October 7, 1944
The explosions rang out in the afternoon.
Dust rained down from the ceiling with the force of the blasts and shook the walls around them. Adele’s attention was ripped from the rehearsal in the music block, as was everyone else’s, and was diverted to the sounds of screaming and popping gunfire that had erupted outside.
The orchestra froze into an eerie silence with instruments half raised, eyes and ears piqued with the awareness that something was very wrong.
Fränze breathed out into the silence, “What was that?” The tiny flute player’s whisper was barely audible above the roar of activity outside.
When the walls shook with another loud boom, everyone dropped their instruments and flew to the only window in the block. Adele instead ran to the door, thinking they could get a better understanding of what was happening if she looked outside.
She poked her head out the door only to be yanked back a second later.
“Get back, Adele!” Omara stood with hands on hips and nostrils flared as she bellowed the order. “I have not fought to keep you all alive just to lose you now.” She pointed to the back of the block and began ushering the group backward with forceful hands. “Everyone to the back wall. Don’t you think bullets can pierce wood? Can they not destroy flesh and bone?”
More pops of gunfire in rapid succession and agonized screams made the group jump in unison. Terrified squeals permeated the air as several of the younger girls cried out. Marta stood over them, burying the younger Fränze under the protection of her torso as she looked up to Adele. The terrified flash of fear Adele saw there sent a sickening chill up her spine.
They stared, knowing what the sound was.
“Machine-gun fire?” Marta mouthed the words. Adele nodded, to which the older girl squeezed her eyes shut and whispered, “God help us.”
The heart in Adele’s chest quaked at the very thought of defenseless prisoners running from a hail of machine-gun fire aimed to mow them down. But why? Why now? She couldn’t make sense of it. The Nazis had the gas chambers and their random executions. They had the harsh labor assignments, day in and day out. Even starvation and the rapidly spreading effects of disease worked in their favor. So why would they use up their artillery resources when they had so many other means of disposing of prisoners?
The orchestra was huddled together like sardines as each girl tried to burrow down against the girl squeezed up next to her. They were a terrified mass of muffled cries and trembling flesh, all lumped together as if the girl closest to the dirt on the floor would be safe.
Marta shouted over the noise, “Adele, what is happening?”
“I don’t know,” she said, patting a hand to little Fränze’s head. The poor girl had taken to covering balled fists over her ears with such force that her knuckles were white. “Stay here,” she instructed to the now silently crying Marta, and pecked a kiss to Fränze’s temple. “All of you stay here. I’ll find out what’s happening.”
Omara had moved to the door. Cautiously, she’d cracked it open and stared out at what Adele could only imagine as a new definition of Nazi horror. The woman must have heard her approach, as she turned with a dexterity that decried her advanced years and began shouting.
“Adele.” Omara shoved her back again toward the corner with the other girls, a bit more roughly this time. “Get back! Do you not hear the gunfire? It’s not safe!”
Adele righted her balance and took several cautious steps toward the door again. Something terrible had happened, that was clear to all. But unless she could find out whether it was safe to stay put, they could all be sitting ducks. Gunfire was frightening enough, but if their building was bombed and the walls burst into flames, their only hope might be to take their chances and make a run for it.
No one would survive if the wooden roof on the block turned into an inferno.
Omara had taken the scene quite badly. Adele could see the strain in a muscle that flexed in her jaw, as if she was grinding down her teeth with bottled emotion.
“Omara . . .” She reached a hand out to touch it to their block leader’s shoulder.
The woman didn’t respond to Adele’s fingertips as she’d expected. Instead, she opened the door a few inches wider so that they might both look out and said, “There. If you must see it. Have another look at death.”
The terror outside the block walls could only be described as a war zone. In seeing the carnage before her, Adele imagined somehow
that the front lines of battle had been redrawn and the Red Army, as had been rumored by the prisoner population for weeks, had broken through to challenge the Germans on their own turf.
Is this it, God? Are we saved?
Another explosion sent a tremor to the back walls. More dust floated down from the aged wood ceiling as the younger girls cried out.
Adele’s breath shuddered in her lungs. “Is it the Red Army?” She could scarcely speak with the hope of it all.
Omara shook her head.
“Then the British? Or the Americans? Please tell me they’re here to save us.”
The older woman scoffed. “Do you see? It is not someone who would save us! We are on our own here.” Omara threw the words back in Adele’s face, her usually controlled countenance now terse, her violently darting pupils looking almost manic as they searched her face.
“But this could be it—we could all be saved! Did you not hear it? Bombs exploding and machine-gun fire? What else could it be but that we are to be rescued!”
One of the girls shouted out in response to Adele’s declaration, “Oh, merciful God! We are saved!”
Adele felt a rush of energy, a blast of adrenaline that instantly coursed through her veins, sending a shock to jump-start her limbs. She felt like she could fight, if need be. Whether born of courage or pure stupidity, she couldn’t have deciphered. All she knew was that her legs wanted to run outside and her palms twitched, longing to be armed with a weapon that would allow her to fight back. “Surely God has sent—”
“Foolish girl! No one is coming.”
Adele could see nothing beyond what she wanted to. “Omara, what would you have me see? Our hell here is over! Oh God . . . it’s over!”
“It is a revolt, Adele!”
The words hit her like a fierce smack to the face.
“What . . . ?”
Her body froze, in panic or disbelief, and she stood numbed by the fact that the war zone in front of her could only have one winning side. She knew which side that would be.
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