Satisfied with the effect her words produced, Mandl turned to Alma. “I have delegated all of your requests to my wardens. I assume everything should have been taken care of by now. But if you find something not to your satisfaction, delegate your concerns to me through my Rapportführerin Singer or through Spitzer from the Schreibstube.” Mandl jerked her chin toward a young woman she had addressed as Spitzer from the camp administration office, who held a mandolin and had a somewhat sly look about her. “Spitzer reports both to Singer and to me personally, so either way, your concerns will be delivered to me in a timely fashion.”
“Thank you, Lagerführerin.” Alma slightly inclined her head in the pause that followed.
For some reason, instead of leaving them to their devices, Mandl appeared to hesitate.
“Does Lagerführerin have any special requests for me perhaps?” Alma inquired, summoning another well-bred smile to her face.
As though encouraged by the violinist’s words, Mandl brightened, visibly pleased. “Could you perhaps play something for them? So they can understand at last what sort of music I’ve been trying to extract from them this entire time.”
Alma saw through her—that wasn’t the camp leader’s main reason. She merely wished to hear Alma play for her own pleasure. The roles had finally reversed for the peasant girl from Upper Austria, who used to stand in the cheapest standing place in the Vienna Philharmonic and for the violin virtuoso, who had played on stage in her elegant silk gown. Now, the former peasant girl could have the virtuoso all for herself, and Alma understood it all too well.
“Would Lagerführerin mind my playing Monti’s ‘Czardas’?” asked Alma.
For an instant, Mandl froze under her SS wardens’ inquisitive gazes.
Alma barely restrained herself from grinning openly. Her thoroughly veiled jab had hit its aim with a wonderful precision: the self-proclaimed sophisticated lover of everything refined had not the faintest idea who Monti was and what that cursed ‘Czardas’ of his sounded like.
Though, Mandl recovered her poise quickly enough—Alma had to give the camp leader that. “Oh, I don’t care one way or the other. Whatever you wish to play is fine.”
Alma patiently waited for Mandl and her SS wardens to settle in the front row, tucked the violin under her chin and stroked the strings with her bow, plunging the entire block into depths of the folkloric piece which her father had made her practice when she was still a young girl, for hours on end, in some long-forgotten life of hers. Professor Rosé—her beloved Vati, ever the perfectionist, made her play it again and again until she had learned it by heart and could play it with her eyes closed and without any sheet music, much like she did now, to the SS women’s astonishment.
She obliterated them with that short and rather uncomplicated piece, just like she had obliterated the entire audience and music critics in the Vienna Philharmonic, rendering them all speechless and forcing them to drop at last their condescending tone whenever they wrote about her playing. Very good technique, but still much too stilted. Much too masculine; she doesn’t let herself be passionate with the instrument as she ought to… She had already made those self-important ravens in their tailcoats explode in the applause; making these SS women do the same was a child’s game. Here they were, clapping their hands off like children, looking at her with outright wonder—however did they manage to catch such a rare butterfly in their ghastly collection?
Regarding them closely and with a carefully concealed contempt, Alma wondered the same. Bowing to her gray-clad audience—but not too deeply—she inquired if they desired to hear anything else.
“Prepare something for tonight together with an orchestra, if you can,” Mandl asked, getting up to leave. “We’ll invite a few SS officers.”
As soon as the door closed after them, Alma found herself one on one with her new charges. There were about twenty of them, not counting the former conductor and two girls—Hilde and Karla—whom Alma already knew. All appeared to study Alma closely, impressed but visibly on their guard. After a quick inspection, Alma concluded that at least one of them, that very Spitzer from the Schreibstube, belonged to the so-called camp elite. As soon as the rumors about Alma’s transfer to Birkenau had begun to swell, Magda Hellinger had instructed her personally how to recognize such details—if she wished to survive it, that is.
The shorter the number on the prisoner’s breast, the more important their status. Short numbers were the early prisoners, the so-called camp VIPs. It was them who were made into the very first Kapos—inmate functionaries—and block elders. Most of the administrative positions in the camp belonged to their caste. Easily recognizable among the camp’s population, they strutted about in civilian suits and spit-shined boots, not unlike the ones worn only by their bosses in the SS. They wore their hair neatly parted to one side and checked their wristwatches lazily as they smoked imported cigarettes while supervising their underlings. Much like the SS, they had the right to take or save lives—a heavy baton hung attached to their hip as a sinister reminder of such power granted by their uniformed superiors.
“Everyone’s corrupted in the camp, to a bigger or lesser degree.” Magda had taught her the local ways just a few days ago. “It’s important to know whom to bribe. The SS will take anything—gold, foreign currency, jewelry—but procuring that very stuff is something only Kanada inmates can do. Have you seen their women? Hair done up like for some French fashion show, nail polish, perfume, earrings—Teufel,” she cursed—hell, “some of them fare better here than they did at home! So what that they have the crematorium working ceaselessly? Their fellow inmates are herded inside the facility to be gassed and burned and the Kanada night shift sunbathes and sings songs just behind the very wall that separates them from the gas chambers.”
Magda shook her head in apparent disbelief, before continuing.
“And Kanada men, those are veritable stock-market traders! When I went there to procure sheets and towels for our block on Dr. Wirths’ orders, I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. Every few minutes, a new transaction was being made. One has silk stockings, just pulled out of some poor soul’s suitcase that has most likely been gassed by then, and he offers them to a Kanada girl for ten dollars. The Kanada girl pulls the money out of her bra—they have underwear there, and what underwear, let me tell you!—and gives it to him like it’s nothing. It’s a good deal for her, considering, for she will sell it later to an SS warden for thirty and will have twenty for herself. Then another trader appears; he has French lavender soap, still unopened—a treasure! Someone trades a bottle of Hennessy they had just discovered for it. And so it goes between them the entire day as they sort through all those riches, and as long as they hand over part of their haul to the SS on duty—now, the SS only take foreign currency or jewelry because it’s easier to hide from their own superiors—it’s all safe for them to do so.”
Her gaze riveted to the Hungarian block elder, Alma had listened intently, taking it all in, purposely silent in order not to interrupt Magda with questions just yet. Such information could turn out to be life-saving in her nearest future. She could always ask for specifics later; now, it was a matter of paramount importance to acquire as many facts as possible, to memorize them the best she could, to sort them into suitable compartments—the SS, the prisoner hierarchy, the price of an inmate’s life in American dollars or dental gold.