Playing for the Commandant (5 page)

It was my turn. I blotted the sweat from my face with my sleeve and stepped forward. The conductor took one of my braids in his gloved hand and smiled.

“Goldenes haar.”
He looked into my eyes. His voice was smooth, a honeyed baritone.
“Bist du Judin?”
I nodded. Yes, I was a Jew.

“Wie alt bist du?”

I opened my mouth. The conductor wanted to know how old I was.

I was directed to join the women on the other side of the podium. Erika frowned when she saw me. “You said you were sixteen?”

I nodded. “I couldn’t leave you to look after Mother alone,” I said. But I was lying. Erika didn’t need me. I needed her. I needed my big sister to keep looking out for me. Father couldn’t, Mother wouldn’t, and I didn’t know how to take care of myself. Not here.

Erika took my hand and I took Mother’s, and together we walked toward a sign that read
WORK CAMP
, and through a door marked
RECEPTION BLOCK
. A large grim woman with a green triangle on her dress took our names and told us to wait. Dozens of women waited beside us. The summer sun shone through the windows and seeped through the walls, and the room grew hot. The sound of a dripping tap echoed across the room. A note above the tap warned against drinking the water. A woman cupped her hands under the spout.

“Kannst du nicht lesen, du idiot!”
A girl with a green triangle on her dress and mud-colored eyes grabbed the woman by the back of her collar and yanked her from the sink. “Can’t you read?” she yelled, and then she punched her.
“Wer kann Deutsch?”
She swung around to address us, wiping her bloodied fist in the folds of her skirt. She wanted to know who among us spoke German. I’d studied the language at school, but I kept my head down. A woman in front of me put up her hand.

“
Gut
. You’ll interpret. Now tell these whores to undress.”

Undress?
I froze.
In front ofeach other?

Mother peeled off her stockings while the women around her fumbled with their buttons and slipped off their shoes. Erika stepped out of her dress and left it puddled on the floor. I closed my eyes.
When I open them, this will all be a bad dream
.

“Move it!” the interpreter yelled. I pulled my crumpled dress over my head, crossed my arms over my chest, and hoped no one would notice that I was still wearing my underwear. Ever since I’d gotten my period, I’d undressed behind locked doors. Mother hadn’t seen my changed body, and I was still getting used to it — to the curve of my hips and my rounded breasts and the soft blond hair between my legs.

A skinny girl wearing a sacklike dress and a yellow star walked between us, scooping up bras, stockings, underwear, and dresses. She pointed a bony finger at my groin. “I’ll get in trouble if you’re wearing those. Take them off or I’ll call the guards.”

“Don’t call them,” I begged. “I’ll take them off right now. See?” I pulled the C-sharp from my waistband, stepped out of my underpants, and let them fall to the floor.

We were herded into a hall. Five women with razors, soap brushes, and scissors stormed into the room. Mother had to be held down by three of them, but when it was my turn, I didn’t struggle. I leaned forward and closed my eyes and let them hack at my hair. And when my braids hit the floor, I let the women scrape at my scalp with a razor. They shaved my head, my legs, and my underarms. Then they shaved off my pubic hair.

“Don’t let them see you cry.” Erika blotted the tears from my face. “It’s only hair. It’ll grow back.”

I didn’t need a mirror to see what I looked like. A hundred mirror images stood in the room with me: hairless, wild-eyed, dirty, and shivering. We were the bald prisoners in rags I’d seen at the station. And the lingering smog that smelled so foul? The bluish clouds that rose from the giant chimney? They weren’t cooking breakfast. They were burning hair.

We marched, single file, from one hall to another, but the guards didn’t seem to notice our nakedness, or our tears. They looked through us — as if we were transparent — and somehow that was worse. We were in a cavernous room with showerheads in the ceiling. I balled my hand around my C-sharp.

“Your film will get wet,” I whispered to Erika.

“I slipped it under a step when we walked in,” she whispered back, and I remembered the step and her stumbling over it and the women behind us grumbling to pass.

They were grumbling now and looking up at the showerheads. Some were crying. The Markovits twins huddled in a corner of the room, holding hands. A woman with drooping breasts and veined legs sat naked on the concrete floor, reciting Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

“Aren’t they glad to get clean?” I asked, but Erika didn’t answer. When the water pelted down, she turned her face up to the ceiling and scrubbed the dirt from her body. I watched the brown rivers of dirt trickle down her legs and disappear down the drain and wished I could disappear, too. Mother stood quietly beside us, her eyes closed, her head tilted up to the water, massaging her hairless scalp with her fingertips, as if she were at home in her bathroom. I lifted my mouth to the showerhead. The water tasted like it came from a swamp, but I didn’t spit it out.

We were handed drab gray dresses with yellow triangles, worn underwear, and a pair of hard wooden clogs. We weren’t given a towel. I slipped the dress over my dripping body and slid my feet into the shoes.

Erika’s clogs didn’t fit, so she handed them to the guard and asked for another pair. The guard laughed and said, “Try this on for size.” The rest happened so quickly — the guard’s raised arm, the tip of her whip sailing toward my sister’s face, Erika recoiling, leather catching skin, my sister’s torn cheek, her small, thin cry. I stood there, mute.

We were herded into another room, and I was pushed into a chair. My wrists were pinned down, and someone jabbed me with a needle, piercing the pale fleshy underside of my arm, over and over until, beneath the blood, I could make out a number in blue ink: A10573. Nothing belonged to me anymore — not my piano, my home, my name, or my hair. I was a number now.

Someone wiped a bloodied rag across my arm and pointed to the door. I rose from the chair, careful not to drop my C-sharp. I looked down at the black key resting in my palm and at my long, slender fingers and the freckles on my arms.

I’m still Hanna Mendel
, I said to myself.
I’m five foot seven. I have a birthmark on my left shoulder. I’m scared of spiders. I’m hopeless at sports. I like Clara Schumann, and one day I’m going to be famous.

We walked past endless rows of identical gray buildings until we reached our barrack. A woman was waiting for us outside. She wore a scarf over her shaved head, and she carried a whip. She looked mean. She introduced herself as our block leader and ordered us into the wooden shed. The windowless room looked like a barn and smelled like a kennel. The walls were bare and the floor was grimy. A row of narrow bunks spread across two walls: wooden planks in three tiers, so close together that if you sat up, you’d scrape your head on the tier above. There were no mattresses on the planks, just thin gray blankets.

“Welcome to your new home.” The block leader kicked the door closed. I looked at the splintering bunks and the crumbling walls. There was nothing of my home here, and with every minute that passed, there was less of me. I flopped onto a bunk.

“Rule number one: no sitting.” The block leader cracked her whip, and I leaped off the bunk. There were no Nazi guards stalking the barrack, no SS watching from the door. I glanced at the block leader, her bony arms folded across her chest, her eyes stony. She was wearing a yellow star — she was one of us.

“Rule number two,” she continued in her thick Polish accent. “If there’s anything hidden under your blankets: an apple core, a spoon, soap”— she pulled a blanket from a bunk, sending a family of bugs scuttling —“there will be consequences.”

My mother pulled at my sleeve. “Hanna, where’s the kitchen?”

The block leader glared at my mother. “Rule number three.” She stepped toward us and rammed a finger against my mother’s lips. “No talking.” She pressed her forefinger and thumb on either side of my mother’s trembling mouth and clamped her lips shut. “Understand?”

My mother nodded, her eyes wide with fright. The block leader smiled, pulled her fingers from Anyu’s mouth, and wiped her hand across my mother’s skirt.

“Next time you interrupt, I’ll knock your teeth out.” She paused for effect. “Rule number four: you’ll be fed three times a day. Coffee at five a.m., soup for lunch, and bread for dinner. If you’re lucky, you’ll get margarine.”

The block leader pointed to a battered cardboard box on the floor.

“Take a cup. Look after it. You lose the cup, you go hungry.”

I pulled a rusted cup from the box and, copying the woman next to me, threaded the worn belt from my dress through the cup’s handle, so that my cup hung at my waist.

The block leader ordered us outside and told us to form a single line. We marched in silence, past numbered buildings and nameless roads, until we reached a block marked
LATRINES.
A woman lunged for the door, clutching her stomach, but the block leader barred her way. “No one enters without a guard.” She scowled, shoving the door open to reveal a deep pit dug into the earth. She pointed to the woman. “You! Wait till last. The rest of you . . . time to shit.”

We walked from the latrines to a dusty square, where we were made to wait for hours in the burning sun so the guards could count us. I looked at my mother, at her caved-in face and vacant eyes. She’d been pretty once. Now she looked worn. Next to her stood a woman with blistering skin, her pink face shiny with sweat, and beyond her, more pinched faces and frightened eyes.

The sun collapsed, and the sky grew dark. We returned to our hut. Dinner was a slice of black bread and a square of margarine, which we smeared across the bread with our fingers. The bread tasted like mud, but I forced it down. I climbed into a bunk between Erika and Mother. Three women squeezed in after us. I was too tired for introductions. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. The bed was too hard and the room too quiet. I thought of the villages and homes we’d passed in the cattle train, and the people inside them sleeping on clean sheets under blankets. They had food and water and clean clothes. They went to school and played piano. It had been seven days since I’d sat at my piano. I hadn’t missed a day’s practice since I was seven. I slipped my C-sharp from the frayed elastic of my secondhand underwear and rubbed its soft, worn wood.

Mother turned to look at me. “Play something for me, Hanna.” Angry voices shouted at Mother to shut up, but she kept talking. “What about Liszt? Piri will be here tomorrow, and you’ve hardly practiced.” A flashlight clicked on at the far end of the hut. Feet slid into shoes. I had to keep Mother quiet.

“I’ll play, but be quiet, Anyu. Please.” I moved my trembling fingers up and down my mother’s back. I played Mozart and Bartok while horrible, hungry tears rolled down my face. I was tapping out Chopin’s Fifth Étude when the block leader walked past. I froze. If she passed the beam of her flashlight over us, we’d be hauled out of bed, but if I stopped drumming on my mother’s back, Anyu was sure to complain. I forced my fingers to continue. The block leader walked the length of the room three times, then went back to bed. I began my next piece.

“I know this one. What is it, Hanna?” Mother asked excitedly.

“It’s Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody,” I whispered, my heart splintering into a thousand pieces. “Your favorite.”

“And beautifully played. Piri will be so pleased with your progress.” Mother yawned.

I fell into a bitter sleep and woke to the sound of shouting. A bell was ringing, and girls were frantically jumping from their bunks and pulling on their shoes. I leaped from my bunk, smoothed my blanket over the rough wooden planks, and followed Erika to the washroom. Women ran past us. One woman urinated as she ran, a slow, wet trail dribbling down her inside thigh. No one wanted to miss breakfast.

“You’ll be showered and shaved once a month.” The block leader stood at the door. “Until then, unless you want to smell like a sewer rat, I suggest you find yourselves a tap. You may want to wash your underwear, too.” She lifted a pair of underpants from the muddy floor and flung them at the woman who had discarded them. “You won’t get another clean pair for a month.” She addressed the room again. “And if you wash them, you better have them back on before breakfast. There’ll be no whores in my block parading around without underwear.”

Her scarf came loose, and she pushed it away from her face with the back of her muddy hand, leaving a smear of brown dirt across her pink forehead. Erika and I looked at each other. We both opened our mouths.
Pig
. I mouthed the word first. It was a game Erika and I had played since we were children. Mr. Halasz, our principal, looked like a bear, and Mrs. Beck, from apartment 10C, resembled a mouse. Erika had names for all the children at school she disliked: bulging-eyed Max Szabo was the Goldfish and Ida Stern, the Piranha because of her teeth. The block leader looked like a pig: the angry pink face covered in mud, the broad nose like a snout, the black beady eyes.
Pig
was perfect.