Playing for Time (2 page)

“I don’t know, I’m just one of the soldiers.”

Around us, the girls were clamouring. “You must kill them, you must kill them all. All.”

I was upset by this outburst of hatred, deeply though I felt it; I too wanted to shout, and tried to sit up, but flopped back, too weak. For the first time now I felt myself slipping. Everything became a haze. Yet I smiled, or at least I think I did. I would have been liberated after all. I let myself drift.

Irene noticed, and shouted: “No, no, not her, it’s too unfair.”

The “unfair” struck me as wonderfully comical.

“Sing, Fania, sing!” someone shrieked. The order galvanized me; I opened my mouth desperately. The soldier thought I was at my last gasp; he lifted me out of my filth, took me in his arms, showing no sign of disgust. How comfortable it was, how light I must feel (I weighed sixty-two pounds). Held firmly, head against his chest, drawing my strength from his, I started on the first verse of the
Marseillaise.
My voice had not died; I was alive.

The fellow was staggered. Carrying me in his arms, he rushed outside towards an officer, shouting, “She’s singing, she’s singing.”

The air hit me like a slap. I choked and was reborn. The girls ran out behind us. Technically no doubt I still had typhus, but the moment I found the strength to sing, I felt I’d recovered. The mists cleared; once more I could look around me and see what was happening. And it was well worth observing: Soldiers were arresting the SS and lining them up against the walls. We had savoured the thought of this moment so often and with such passion, and now it was a reality. Deportees were emerging from every shed. The men from whom we’d been separated for so long were coming towards us, desperately seeking out relatives and acquaintances.

Then I was in clean surroundings, in the SS block. I was bathing in a marvellous sea of khaki, and it smelled so good; their very sweat smelled sweet.

We had been liberated by the infantry, and now the motorized units were arriving. Through the window I saw the first jeep enter the camp. An officer jumped out, a Dutchman. He looked around dazedly and then began to run like a madman, arms outstretched, calling, “Margrett, Margrett!” A woman staggered towards him, her striped tatters floating like rags tied to a pole— his wife, three-quarters dead, in a frightening state of filth and decay; and he hugged her, hugged to him the smiling, living wraith.

Someone handed me a microphone.

It was strange. The process of breathing exhausted me, my heart was positively economizing on its beats, life had become a remote possibility, yet I straightened up, galvanized by joy, and I sang the
Marseillaise
again. This time it emerged with a violence and a strength I had never had before and which I shall probably never have again.

Clearly moved, a Belgian officer sank his hand into his pocket and handed me the most marvellous present: an old lipstick. I couldn’t imagine anything lovelier, three-quarters used as it was and despite its uncertain pedigree.

The microphone holder insisted: “Please, miss, it’s for the BBC.”

I sang “God Save the King,” and tears filled the British soldiers’ eyes.

I sang the
Internationale
and the Russian deportees joined in.

I sang, and in front of me, around me, from all corners of the camp, creeping along the sides of the shacks, dying shadows and skeletons stirred, rose up, grew taller. A great “Hurrah” burst forth and swept along like a breaker, carrying all before it. They had become men and women once again.

A few months later I learned that on that day, at that time, in London, my cousin heard me sing on the radio and fainted with shock: simultaneously she learned that I had been deported and that I’d just been liberated.

Madame Butterfly

“”Madame Butterfly!“‘

Someone was calling Madame Butterfly—in Auschwitz, January 23, 1944, in the quarantine block. Impossible! I scanned the endless rows of gloomy, stinking, three-tiered
cojas.
On each tier, six or more women were packed head to tail like sardines, shaven and virtually naked, shivering with cold and hunger. I’d just been told that there were a thousand women in this barracks. Despite the
“Ruhe! Ruhe”—
Silence!— bellowed by the blockowa, our block supervisor, you had to shout to make yourself heard. So Madame Butterfly was somewhat incongruous.

I’d just had a beating in connection with a bucket of dirty water I’d emptied outside, which wasn’t allowed. But what was? Tears of rage, mingled with blood, trailed down my grubby cheeks. I wiped the tears away with the back of my hand and huddled up against Clara, whose warmth afforded some comfort. I closed my eyes, and incredibly, it began again: in the midst of this babel a Polish woman was shrieking for Madame Butterfly.

“What is she saying?” I asked my neighbours.

“She’s looking for musicians.”

“What for?”

“For the orchestra.”

An orchestra here? I must have misunderstood.

“
What
did you say?” I insisted.

“The orchestra. Now let it drop, what does it matter to you?”

“But I can play the piano,” I protested, “and sing
Madame Butterfly.
I studied with Germaine Martinelli.”

“Well, go and tell her.”

I leant over, gesticulating; she had to see me. It was forbidden, but I decided to climb down.

Clara held me back. “They’re getting at you, it’s a joke. You’ll get another thrashing.”

“Too bad, I’m going anyway.”

The girls helped me down. In a f
og,
aching all over, I hobbled in the direction of the mammoth creature standing in front of the door. A veritable mountain. She stared at me suspiciously. I was so small, so dirty, spattered with mud and blood. She asked loudly, in harsh, bad German: “You, Madame Butterfly?”

“Yes! Yes!”

It seemed that I didn’t correspond to this leviathan’s idea of a singer, if indeed she had any such Platonic image. She barked something incomprehensible at me. I was steeling myself for another beating, when a girl’s voice translated from a lower tier of a
coja:
“She says follow her. One of the French girls in the orchestra recognized you and the
kapo
told her to come and get you.”

The impossible was happening. As I followed close on the heels of this mound of flesh I thought in amazement that this could not logically be the outcome of the horror sequences I’d just lived through…

At Drancy prison in Paris, the crossed-off days on my calendar formed a little ladder ending at January 20, 1944; I’d been there nine months. Now I was to be taken to Germany in a convoy of deportees.

Six o’clock. From the third storey, our group began its descent of the exit stairway. At each landing hands stretched out offering chocolate, a pot of jam, a pair of woollen gloves. On the last landing there was a sudden scuffle and a jeering voice called, “Don’t push, there’s no hurry. No danger of getting left behind!”

It was Leon’s voice. What was he doing here? Suddenly I felt a firm grip on my elbow, and heard the same voice, wheedling now, close to my ear: “I wouldn’t have liked to let you go alone.”

It was indeed Leon, brash as ever: a handsome little fellow whose exact line of business was unclear to me—brown-haired, perky, with a roving eye at present fixed on me.

“You see, I said to myself, ”That little girl is going to need a man to carry her things and put a little romance into her evenings when she’s down.“ I’m rather taken with you, and I don’t want someone else stealing my place. So I came back, pronto.”

“But hadn’t you escaped? You surely didn’t come back of your own free will?”

He laughed, like a child who has played a good joke. “Something along those lines. The toughest bit was to
get
myself put in the same group as you. It was hard to get them to swallow that one, because it’s not the kind of trip people normally clamour for. But as you see, I’ve done it.”

His words amused me and touched me, yet annoyed me. I preferred to
choose
the men in my life rather than the reverse.

Still, it was certainly a declaration. Poor Leon; we were immediately separated. A security man thrust him into one of the first trucks.

I was surrounded by people I didn’t know. My neighbours were a young woman of about thirty, very beautiful, with her two smartly dressed little daughters, and a girl of about twenty with a ravishing head set upon an enormous, deformed body. There was an immediate rapport between us; her name was Clara.

Early-morning Paris was a sinister place. It was very cold, and stalactites hung from the cracked and frozen gutters. The blue winking of the civil defence lights made the gloom seem colder still. Our truck was covered with tarpaulin and open at the back. The few chilly early-morning passers-by hardly bothered to cast a glance in our direction. And yet our convoy must have been rather unusual, with women wearing fur coats, men of all ages, old people, and children.

Awaiting us at the marshalling yard was a very old train which had seen action in World War I and a wheezing engine which certainly didn’t deserve its insolently large, immaculate white V, Churchill’s victory sign that had been expropriated by the Germans after Stalingrad.

We staggered beneath the weight of our luggage. Everyone had brought everything he’d managed to get together: clothing, food, drink, cigarettes, jewelry, money. There were a hundred of us, from all walks of life, all ages and races, crowded into the pitch black interior of a carriage meant for cattle. There was clean straw on the floor. The quick thinkers—and the strongest —did what they could to stake claims to their own corners: they dug in, flapping, shuffling their bottoms into the straw like chickens, acting as though they were going to be there for an eternity.

The enchanting young mother was quietly advocating various subtle points of etiquette to her children: “Don’t make too much noise, there are other people here.” Already there were quarrels of the “I was here before you” type. Laughable. People started telling stories, jokes, groaning, complaining, making conclusive but unfounded statements:

“We’re going to a work camp in Bavaria, with little German bungalows, quite clean and decent, and comfortable, with little gardens for those with children.”

“He’s crazy!”

“I’ll say. That camp is the worst of all, I know that for a fact.”

Me, I… I, me… One opinion followed another.

The smell of the improvised lavatory soon became unbearable. At every jolt, there was a worrying ploshing noise. The straw around it was already filthy. A child sitting on the floor in the middle of the carriage kept repeating in a piercing little voice, “I can see things moving everywhere.”

A woman called out, “Make that filthy brat shut up.”

“It’s obvious you’ve got no children,” shrieked the mother.

“You’re wrong—I’ve got six.”

“Where are they then?”

“I’m not saying.”

“Are you afraid I’ll expose you?”

It was outrageous, but no one laughed. Quite the contrary— the two women leapt at one another. The tension was exhausting.

The time came to eat: it seemed like a picnic without the bonhomie. The whole crowd chewed; it wasn’t an elevating moment, but it was restful.

Clara looked worried. “Have you brought something to eat?”

“Of course.”

I offered her some of my treasures: sardines, real ones in oil, sausage, pate de campagne, a Camembert, some jam. She gave me some foie gras and champagne.

“It’s astonishing, it’s like Christmas; and your Santa Claus seems to shop on the black market!”

That broke the ice, and she laughed; in the darkness, her small, regular teeth gleamed like the pearls in a necklace. Devouring our luxury fare, quenching our thirst with Roederer brut, we swore never to leave one another, to share everything.

In the stinking atmosphere, heavy now with the smells of food, people belched and dozed. Clara confided in me that she had once been very thin. She’d begun to
get
fat in prison. At Drancy it had been terrible: she had swollen up as though someone had blown air into her with bellows.

“Only my legs stayed slim. Look, I’m positively deformed. My boyfriend won’t want anything to do with me.”

Weeping now, she told me about her parents. Hers had been the life of a little rich girl, an illustration from a children’s book, a protected, untroubled youth into which the reality of war had only just intruded. “You see, Jean-Pierre, my boyfriend, belonged to a network. I carried letters and arranged meetings, took telephone messages without understanding their importance. But I think they arrested me because I’m half-Jewish.”

Here the young mother joined in. “My children are too. Since they couldn’t arrest my husband, who’s in the Resistance, they took us. They meant us to act as hostages, as a lure. Luckily it didn’t work, my husband wasn’t taken in. So they’re deporting us. The main thing for me is that their father has escaped the Germans; he would have been in danger of his life, but for us it will be just a rather grim interlude.”

“And what about you?” Clara asked me.

“Rather like you, really. I’m also half-Jewish, and I too did a favour for a friend in the Resistance, taking letters, arranging rendezvous; giving people beds for the nights when they needed them.”

“But that was dangerous.”

“Of course. Someone informed on me and I was arrested. That night, a friend had slept at my place. I’d slept at a neighbour’s. I was going back up to my room in my dressing gown, carrying my clothes. Imagine how I felt—there were three of them waiting at my door. They took me to the Quai de Gesvres. At first I wasn’t too worried, my papers were fine, my ration cards absolutely authentic, made out by a police commissioner in the name Fania Fenelon, the name I use as a singer. I even had a night pass issued by the Commandant.”

“Did you used to sing?”

“Yes, in nightclubs.”

“I couldn’t have heard you sing,” said Clara rather primly. “We’d stopped going out at night. We didn’t mix with the Germans, and no one went to nightclubs except Germans and collaborators.”