“My family also thought that their playing would save them. And then came March 1938,” she spoke at last, her voice soft yet thick with emotion.
“The Anschluss?” Zippy regarded her with sympathy.
“Yes.” Pensively, Alma’s fingers rubbed the stub of the pencil as her eyes stared, unseeing, into the space. “I, myself, had few illusions concerning the Nazis. My father, on the other hand… They had me late, Vati and Mutti. Vati was forty-three when I was born. But he played, played until the very day when Hitler arrived in Vienna with his troops. I’ll never forget the day when my father and other Jewish musicians were pensioned off—with due courtesy though. Most of the Aryan musicians had been playing under Vati’s charge for years; they had tremendous respect for him and were truly regretful to see him go. But there was that one young Nazi violinist in the Philharmonic… He was the only one who openly gloated. A snooty-nosed sod, who couldn’t shine my father’s shoes on his best day, strutted into Vati’s dressing room, from which he was collecting his personal belongings and declared, ‘Herr Hofrat, your days here are numbered.’ Herr Burghauser, who occasionally played chamber music with Vati as a guest of Vati’s Rosé Quartet, stopped by our apartment later and told me about the entire rotten affair. Said how ashamed they all were when they heard that Nazi insult Vati in such a manner.”
Alma paused, her lips pressed tightly together.
“My father was humiliated as it was; he had just lost his position of a concertmaster and, not only that, he was excluded from playing at the gala they had prepared for the Germans that evening. Eugen d’Albert’s opera, Tiefland. Strange, how I remember precisely what it was… Perhaps, it’s because my father kept repeating the same thing ceaselessly after he arrived home that day—‘Why can’t I play with them? I belong. I am the concertmaster!’ Poor old man… He had always had such a dignified, noble look about him and that day, oh how he had suddenly aged. You should have seen him, Zippy. His shoulders stooped at once, but the eyes… It was the look in his eyes that I couldn’t bear! Such profound hurt, such childish misunderstanding. The great Professor Rosé, the venerable Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster, the founder of the Rosé Quartet, reduced to nothing in one day, on some madman’s orders. A Jew. A stateless person. A drain on the Aryan society.”
“Is he…?” Zippy searched her face, afraid to finish the question.
“On no, he’s alive.” Alma permitted herself a brief smile. “He’s presently in England, a friendly alien with a full right to perform. Émigré artists in Britain and the United Stated established a special Rosé Fund for him, in addition to the money my brother and I were sending to support him financially. He insisted that he wished to perform, no matter the bombs raining on the capital, but a family friend whisked him away into the countryside, for which I’ll be eternally grateful. It’s nice, knowing that he’s safe there.” Alma paused and finished, as though not fully believing her own words, “Perhaps, one day I shall come back to him.”
Chapter 6
Attired in a thin slip supplied by Kitty from the Kanada, Alma was brushing her teeth with the small amount of the precious white powder smelling faintly of mint. It came in a round box that featured a blond woman with a dazzling smile and some unreadable words in Polish or Czech, but, apparently, Kitty was well-versed in all languages to know to give it to Alma, along with a toothbrush, a bar of soap and even some scented facial cream. In the Experimental Block, she had to make do with a piece of cloth wrapped around her little finger; what a pure bliss it was to brush one’s teeth like a regular human being again.
After spitting into the rusty sink, Alma lifted her gaze to the cracked mirror Sofia had installed here a few days ago and discovered that she was smiling. Indeed, how little was needed to make a person happy, it suddenly occurred to her.
“Alma!” Zippy’s voice echoed around the dingy latrine. She stopped in the door and jerked her thumb in the direction of the camp. “Today is the infirmary day. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we play for the sick in the Revier, the women’s hospital. Sofia was asking if you wish to join the orchestra or stay here and work… on whatever it is you want to occupy yourself with. Mandl said it’s not mandatory for you or me to make our appearances there, if we don’t want to.”
Alma regarded her incredulously. “Of course, I shall go. Why wouldn’t I want to play for the sick?”
For some time, Zippy was silent.
“You’ve never been to the infirmary before, have you?” she asked softly at last.
“It’s just a camp hospital, isn’t it?” Alma shrugged and reached for her kerchief. She had washed it the night before, in cold water but with scented French soap, and left it to dry on one of the water pipes on which rust was growing like mushrooms. The entire latrine still smelled like lilacs. “Just how bad can it be?”
Zippy regarded her for an uncomfortably long time. Then she finally asked, in a voice that was oddly toneless: “You don’t know much about camp hospitals, do you?”
Alma turned to her, one sarcastic remark or another ready to fly off her lips—Do you truly suppose your camp hospital can compare to the Experimental Block?—but the expression in Zippy’s eyes was so profoundly forlorn, the words got stuck in Alma’s throat. Despite the mounting sense of unease, she reached for Zippy’s hand and forced a smile before repeating, with certainty that she no longer felt, “I shall go.”
On their way to the Birkenau Women’s Infirmary, Zippy noted quietly that one could always recognize Block 25 by its smell. At first, Alma dismissed it as an exaggeration. She’d been inhaling a nauseating stench of the crematorium for days; it had been inconceivable to imagine something more atrocious than that concoction of burnt flesh and singed hair. However, as the overpowering smell reached them—well before they reached the block itself—Alma realized that Zippy wasn’t joking. It was a revolting mixture of decaying flesh and putrefying excrement, next to which the permanent stench of the Experimental Block was a child’s joke.
Halting in her tracks, Alma brought the collar of her dress to her face to cover her nose and mouth and, all at once, felt guilty for doing so.
Next to her, Zippy clutched at her mandolin, her face sickly green. Only after Sofia prodded Alma gently in the back—“Don’t loiter in the middle of the street, the SS are staring”—did she force herself to pull her Kapo’s armband up along her arm and proceed forward, straight into the bowels of hell, it seemed.
Inside the infirmary block, it was worse still. A truly frightful sight presented itself to Alma’s eyes. Along the long corridor, right on the stone floor, rows and rows of emaciated bodies lay, some still making an effort to move; some eerily still. A mass of bones and gray scabby skin hanging off their limbs like cloth. Sunken eyes that stared without seeing. Rags of some unidentifiable color stiff with grease and dried excrement. Sparse patches of hair sticking out of skulls covered with sores and recently received wounds that no one had tended to.
Swallowing with great difficulty, Alma continued through this purgatory, breathing through her mouth and still tasting that premature rotting on the back of her throat. Putting on her bravest face, she marshalled on through what remained of humanity in this place, next to which Dante’s Inferno had lost all its colors.