Women. It was appalling to think that these were all women—someone’s mothers, sisters, daughters, wives. Beautiful brides that smiled out from the photos that she had a chance to glimpse in the Kanada, all piled, along with birth certificates, passports, certificates of military awards, and bank accounts, into one big heap of useless paper later to be burned by a former Rabbi just behind the warehouse. Kitty had said he recited Kaddish whenever he fulfilled his duty. Only now did Alma understand why—effectively, they were all walking dead, these Revier women. Doomed, condemned to death, regardless of the exact diagnosis. It was only suitable for the Rabbi to mourn them while they were still alive.
As Alma carefully made her way forward through this human mass, bony hands reached for the hem of her skirt and brushed the bare skin on her ankles. As though revived by the sight of healthy, relatively well-dressed women, the poor wretches reached for them out of their last powers. In their delusion, anyone who walked upright must have appeared as a doctor to them; a miracle worker who had adhesive plaster, sulfa drugs, iodine and, perhaps, even a piece of bread.
Distraught and mortified, Alma turned to Sofia and searched the former Kapo’s face in desperation.
Sofia only prodded her slightly again. “Keep going; we play for the ones who can actually walk out of here.”
“What about…” Alma couldn’t finish, just looked around helplessly, her hand clasping at the violin case with force.
“These shall all be taken away with the transport any time now. Keep going. Half of them are sick with typhus and dysentery; do you wish to catch it too?” Sofia’s nudges grew more urgent. She, too, was mortified to be stuck here, with the condemned women whose pleas and moans were growing gradually louder, tearing at the Music Block girls’ very souls.
With great reluctance, Alma forced herself to move forward until they reached a ward of sorts, where at least a semblance of an infirmary still remained. Bunk beds were still overflowing with emaciated bodies, but at least these bodies lay on straw pellets with dubious-looking bedding on them, but that was already quite a change from what Alma had just witnessed in that hell’s antechamber. Some inmates even had rough blankets covering their legs and double straw-stuffed pillows under their heads.
“Why the preferential treatment?” Catching Zippy’s sleeve, Alma motioned her head toward one of the sick women, who was presently munching on a piece of a biscuit of sorts.
“Some inmates receive packages from outside the camp. Nurses here aren’t stupid and know where their bread is buttered. They get aspirin for these inmates, clean clothes; fluff up their pillows and take them off selection lists and, in exchange, get their share of the package’s contents. Not a bad barter, if you think of it.” She went on to explain, her voice becoming confidential, “Some women here aren’t sick at all. If they have enough food to bribe the doctors or nurses, they’ll get a couple of weeks of vacation. The enterprise isn’t without its risks, though—the SS doctors sometimes show their faces and then it’s to the gas with such holidaymakers. But people still take their chances. It’s understandable, too; they aren’t like us. They work outside for twelve hours, hard labor, six days a week. Their roll call is three or four hours. And they get beaten on the slightest of provocations—again, unlike us, the cultured lot. One can’t quite blame them in good conscience,” she concluded.
Briefly greeted by the medical personnel that mostly rushed about ignoring them altogether—one inspection or other must have been indeed coming, Alma concluded from all that frantic commotion—the orchestra girls crammed themselves into a corner and began tuning their instruments.
“What do you usually play here?” Alma inquired in an undertone.
From Sofia, a shrug. “Anything cheerful. None of that sad classical business. Our official task is to lift their spirits, so any popular tunes should do.”
“Will Zara Leander’s ‘Blaue Husaren’ do?”
“Zara Leander will most certainly do.”
“You know, her grandparents were Jewish,” Alma said in a neutral voice. “Just like Margarete Slezak’s, the Berlin opera star and Hitler’s favorite.” Ignoring Sofia’s stunned look, Alma picked up her bow, her eyes gazing into the distance. “Margarete—Gretl as we all used to call her—was my childhood friend… She used to vacation with us every summer, at our summerhouse near the Black Forest. We used to be so inseparable, Vati liked to joke that we were attached at the hip. But when I tried contacting her again in 1938, right after my father was fired from his position at the Vienna Philharmonic, she refused to help us. Was afraid for her family’s fragile position, I suppose. She travels all over occupied Europe, entertaining the troops, from what I last heard.” As though suddenly awoken from a dream, Alma struck her bow on the wall in the absence of a music stand and commanded, “Ladies, ‘Blaue Husaren’!”
Within seconds, the very atmosphere in the ward changed. A merry tune swept over the infirmary inmates, waking them from their fitful daytime sleep.
Alma thought it to be a travesty to play such cheerful music in the barrack that stunk of death and where condemned women lay on the bare floor just outside this ward, ignored even by the medical staff. But the SS declared that the music raised morale and so they played—for the dying women in the sickbay and for the outside gangs heading out of the gates every single morning to their brassy marches as though on some grotesque parade.
Slaves themselves, they played for the enslaved people, in a world that must have gone completely mad if such concepts as music and unimaginable suffering could peacefully coexist in a hell like Auschwitz.
While they played, a few women dragged themselves off their bunks and shuffled, barefoot, just to stand against the wall near the orchestra girls, clutching their pitiful imitations of blankets next to their caved-in chests. From time to time, they reached out with their nearly transparent, blue-veined hands and touched the instruments, faint smiles full of tender melancholy lighting up their exhausted, ash-white faces.
A nurse appeared with a single roll of aspirins and distributed it among the patients that were ready to trade their rations for the little relief the pills could provide. Most of the medicaments came from the local black market, according to the all-knowing Zippy. Morphia was the most expensive, but even that could be organized from the SS hospital, where it could be had in abundance. One only had to know the right infirmary inmate to bribe.
An impatient honk from the outside and familiar German shouts sent the medical staff and the healthiest inmates that could still move about scrambling. The inmates who had been listening to the music, resting the weight of their bodies on one elbow, flattened themselves on their bunks and pulled the blankets up to their necks, their frightened gazes riveted to the corridor. In it, some sort of an Aktion—a typically German euphemism for an extermination operation—was happening, for the frantic screams soon replaced faint moans and desperate pleas, in all European languages imaginable. That still-invisible, Babylonian orgy of violence nearly drowned out Alma’s orchestra with the sheer volume of it. Stiff with fear, the girls picked up the tempo without any command, propelled by some animalistic instinct of sheer self-preservation.
From the corridor came an incensed shout in German. It was the voice of someone who was used to giving commands and having those commands obeyed. “The SS medical office gave you an order to put seventy inmates on today’s list. I’ve only counted forty-three. Where are the rest?!”