The Violinist of Auschwitz: Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel Read online

  The Violinist of Auschwitz

  Based on a true story, an absolutely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel

  Ellie Midwood

  Books by Ellie Midwood

  The Violinist of Auschwitz

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Hear More From Ellie

  Books by Ellie Midwood

  A Letter from Ellie

  A Note on the History

  Acknowledgements

  To my mom and grandmother, two of the strongest women I know. You taught me how to be a warrior and how to write about them. Thank you.

  Prologue

  Auschwitz-Birkenau, April 4, 1944

  There would be no curtain call tonight. Not for her, at any rate. Her eyes staring fixedly at the crack in the opposite wall, Alma’s fingers played with a small, glass vial full of clear liquid. It had taken her a month to secure it from one of the Kanada detail inmates. For weeks, he had stalled and grimaced and invented all sorts of excuses—he’d be glad to help but what she was asking for was nowhere to be had, only the German doctors had it and not their local ones and he didn’t know which one of the Germans to bribe; he wasn’t quite friendly with them, as she could very well imagine—in the hope that she would change her mind. Alma had listened and nodded and obstinately replied that it was all right and she was ready to wait for as long as needed until she wore him down and he had surrendered at last.

  “Here’s your goods. The best around, I’ve been told. Works best as an injection, but you can swallow it if you like. It’ll just take a little longer.”

  “Thank you. You’ll get my violin as a payment after—”

  “I don’t want anything.” A categorical shake of the head and a gaze directed at the ground, flattened by the feet of thousands of inmates, most of them now gone and forgotten. “It’s mixed with something, so there’ll be very little pain before…” He didn’t finish, simply staring at her tragically, with his pleading blue eyes, hands thrust in pockets.

  Smiling faintly, Alma reached out and gave his wrist a slight pressure, in gratitude for his help.

  Pain. If only he’d known the extent of the pain she’d been living with for the past few weeks, he wouldn’t have tormented her for so long with this unnecessary wait. This—this would end the pain, not inflict it.

  An urgent knock on the door brought Alma out of her reverie. Quickly dropping the vial inside the pocket of her black dress, she clasped her hands and squared her shoulders. “Yes?”

  Zippy, a mandolinist, Alma’s confidante and a friend she’d grown to love as a sister, stuck her head inside. “Lagerführerin Mandl is here! We’re ready to start.”

  Acknowledging the girl with a nod, Alma gathered her violin case, a conductor’s baton, and sheet music from the table. On her way out, she threw a last, appraising glance in the mirror.

  The women’s orchestra was considered among the privileged prisoners. The so-called camp elite, who wore civilian clothes and were allowed to keep their hair intact. The fortunate ones, who didn’t have to break their backs in the quarries or fear the dreaded selections. Nazis’ pets, well-fed, and spared the abuse that the others had to endure daily. “A swell arrangement; whatever is there to complain about?” Zippy’s words, exactly. But there was little dignity in such a humiliating existence, when one’s very reason to live was taken away. Not just taken but snatched, in the middle of the night, in the cruelest of manners; suffocated, burned, dumped into a lake, in a pile of ashes, until nothing remained of it but the memory.

  The memory and the pain—dull, never-ending, slowly poisoning her very blood.

  Aware of the vial sitting snuggly in her pocket, Alma smoothed her dark locks with one hand and fixed her white lace collar. Tonight, she was giving her last performance. She might as well look the part.

  Chapter 1

  Auschwitz, July 1943

  In the hazy afternoon, Block 10 stood silent and hot. From time to time, an inmate nurse made her unhurried rounds, checking for fresh corpses. Every other day, there were always a few new ones. Not that Alma counted—she had her own fever to worry about—but she heard the nurses pull them from the beds, through her broken sleep, now and then. Some had already been sick when they’d been herded along with Alma onto the train in Drancy, the French transit camp. Some got ill during their journey and no wonder, either, for they’d been packed like sardines, sixty persons per cattle car. Some had died from botched experiments already here, in Auschwitz.

  Slowly, Alma roved her gaze over the room. It was rather big, with beds standing so close to each other the nurses had trouble walking between them. But worst of all was the stench, the atrocious, overpowering stench of stale sweat, thick breath, gangrenous flesh, and soiled clothes that made one want to retch.

  Unlike the others, Alma’s group hadn’t been sent to quarantine upon arrival. Neither were they marched straight to gas; instead, they had the doubtful fortune to land here, in the Experimental block—a two-story brick building with windows shuttered closed to guard its sinister secrets from any curious outsiders.

  Sometimes, the nurses took pity on them and opened the windows for a few precious moments to ventilate the premises. Though, most of the time, that did more harm than good. Attracted by the smell, swarms of flies and mosquitoes rushed inside and attacked the emaciated bodies with ravenous hunger, spreading more disease and torturing the moaning women with their incessant buzzing and biting. More infected wounds, more corpses taken away by the shaven-headed attendants, one of them invariably marking down the numbers of the deceased in her papers to present them later to their superior, SS Dr. Clauberg. The infamous German order, enforced by the Jewish inmates. Alma was quick to see the irony of such a sad state of affairs.

  On her first day in the block, she had naively tried asking for some medication for her fever but was only laughed at. Gathering as much dignity as was possible given the circumstances—a rather difficult undertaking when one had just been shorn like a sheep and given a number instead of her name—she inquired about the X-ray machines she had noticed in two ground-floor rooms, but that question was also ignored by the inmate nurses.

  “Mind your own affairs.” That was the most she got from Blockälteste Hellinger, a blond woman with a severe face and an armband of a block elder on her left bicep. It appeared that the nurses, even though prisoners themselves, weren’t in any rush to make friends with the new arrivals.

  “I understand that this is not the Hotel Ritz, but hospitality leaves a lot to be desired here,” Alma had noted coolly to her.

  Caught off guard, the nurse had looked up from her clipboard
and blinked at the new inmate. The entire block had hushed itself instantly. All eyes were suddenly on her. It occurred to Alma that talking back must have been a rare occasion here.

  “French transport?” Hellinger measured Alma icily. She spoke German correctly but with a strong Hungarian accent. “I should have guessed. The most stuck-up broads always arrive from there.”

  “I’m Austrian.” Alma smiled.

  “Better still. Old Empire ambitions. The SS will adjust your attitude quickly enough, Your Highness.”

  “You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Much to her surprise, Hellinger shrugged indifferently. “Makes no difference to me. I was appointed as a block elder to mind the order, not bother my head about you lot. Half of you will croak by the end of next week and the other half will be chased through the chimney in the next three months and that’s if you’re lucky to last that long after the procedure.”

  The procedure.

  Alma was aware of the post-op ward next to theirs, but the access to it had been restricted.

  “Sign me up as a volunteer then,” she said out of pure spite. Like a cornered animal, she was snapping her teeth in a last attempt at useless self-deception—not so much to injure the enemy, but to persuade herself that she wasn’t afraid. “It’s all the same to me. The sooner it’s all over, the better.”

  Alma had expected the eruption to follow—the inmates were beaten on the slightest of provocations here—but the block elder remained oddly silent. Hellinger appeared to consider something for some time, then motioned Alma after herself. Eyeing her retreating back with suspicion, Alma followed the head nurse into the dimly lit corridor, where she was standing by the door to the post-op ward, holding it open for Alma. When Alma approached apprehensively, she made a mocking gesture with her hand—After you, Your Highness.

  In the ward, the air was even fouler. Hellinger stopped at the first bunk, on which a woman lay with a face so ghostly white and beaded with sweat, it resembled a posthumous mask of melting wax.

  With a chilling casualness, Hellinger yanked the hem of the woman’s robe upward. Alma felt her stomach contracting in revulsion; yet, she applied all her powers to prevent the emotion from showing on her face. Black crust covered the raw, red skin where the blisters had burst on the woman’s abdomen. Just above her pubic bone, a long, crudely sewn cut rose in ugly bumps, emanating a sickening stench.

  “Bloodless sterilization,” Hellinger explained in a dispassionate voice of a college professor. “An extreme dose of radiation applied to the ovaries, followed by their surgical removal to see if the procedure was successful. The X-rays are so powerful, they cause extreme burns. The surgery itself is performed mostly without anesthetics. As you can see, this case is badly infected; not that Dr. Clauberg is concerned about it. They’re trying to calculate the optimal dose that won’t cause such burns, but so far, this is what we’re ending up with.” She covered the woman’s abdomen and gave Alma a pointed look.

  For a long time, Alma stood motionless. “Is there a system to it?” she asked at last, finding her voice again. “Their method of selection of inmates, that is.”

  “They’re Germans.” Hellinger smiled for the first time. Though, to Alma, it appeared to be a grimace. “Everything’s in perfect numerical order. So far, they’ve completed it on numbers 50204 to 50252.”

  Alma looked at her left forearm, where her own number, 50381, was tattooed in pale-blue ink.

  Hellinger looked at it also. Her features softened a little.

  Alma glanced up sharply. Determination was back in her black eyes. “Could I ask you for a favor, perhaps?”

  Hellinger gave a one-shoulder shrug.

  “Is it possible to get a violin here?”

  “A violin?”

  Apparently, asking for a musical instrument in Auschwitz was just as unheard-of as talking back to one’s superior.

  “Are you a violinist or some such?”

  “Some such. I haven’t played in eight months. I understand that I don’t have much time. I should very much like to play one last time, if it’s at all possible. If such matter as the condemned person’s last wish is still respected in this place.”

  Hellinger promised to see what she could do. She stole a glance at Alma’s pale hand, as if considering taking it into hers for an instant, but changed her mind at the last moment and left the ward abruptly. Giving hope to the condemned was simply cruel.

  Alma remained standing before that unmoving ghost of a woman and envied the ones who were gassed upon arrival.

  Same endless days. Same block routine that drove one to distraction. Muddy water for breakfast—the Germans called it coffee. Dr. Clauberg making his rounds—“Open your mouth, show me your teeth.” A French woman praying in Latin in the corner, rocking back and forth with her hands clasped so tightly, her knuckles turned white.

  More muddy water for lunch—the Germans called it soup. The fortunate ones discovered a piece of a rotten turnip in theirs. Sylvia Friedmann, a Jewish prisoner-nurse and Dr. Clauberg’s first assistant, reading out the numbers from her list. The woman in the corner rocking faster; thrashing and howling as the two orderlies dragged her out of the ward and along the corridor. Stifling, oppressive silence.

  Hellinger collecting the bedsheets and nightgowns for disinfection. Naked, shorn women standing to attention—Dr. Clauberg again, squeezing at their breasts this time. Someone must have reported a pregnant woman. Dr. Clauberg, grinning like a vulture, rubbing his fingers in front of the woman’s face—“Milk!” She went quietly, no orderlies this time.

  Dinner time. A piece of sawdust bread and a smear of margarine on their palms, licked apathetically by the women. A Belgian girl on the neighboring bunk, her head covered with the blanket, crying for her mother softly—suppressed, pitiful whimpers into the wool, as though so as not to disturb anyone with her grief.

  Night. Tears, tears from every bunk around her, hushed prayers, names of the loved ones repeated for hours on end—in endless Kaddish she could no longer bear to hear.

  Stillness at last. Silver moonlight spilling from the shuttered window onto Alma’s arms. An invisible violin at her shoulder. Her fingers fluttering over the fingerboard like the wings of a butterfly. A bow in her right hand, kissing the violin’s strings. Outside, the Sankas, camouflaging themselves as Red Cross trucks, taking the bodies away from the neighboring Block 11; Alma had seen them briefly through the cracks in the shutters, setting off in the direction of the crematorium. Inside her head, Strauss, Tales from the Vienna Woods.

  Music.

  Peace.

  Serenity.

  A world, in which a place like Auschwitz didn’t have the moral right to exist.

  “Alma? Alma Rosé?”

  The young nurse with a fresh, pretty face, whom Hellinger brought to the ward, spoke German with a strong Dutch accent. A warm wave of memories, of happier times in Holland where several Dutch families sheltered her from the Nazis, washed over her. Seasons changed in war-ravaged Europe, but not her hosts’ loyalty. Risking their own lives, they had concealed Alma from the Gestapo and asked for nothing in exchange—only for a bit of her marvelous music. Alma was only too glad to oblige; she owed her life and freedom to those brave, selfless people. Repaying their hospitality with her music was the least that she could do. They had moved her from house to house when the rumors of the Gestapo raids swelled to disturbing proportions, but no matter where she was hiding, she had invariably felt welcome and at home.

  Naturally, Alma recognized the young girl’s face before her; Alma would never forget the kind smiles of the ones who had kept her safe for so long. Though, it took the girl much longer to recognize her. Alma hadn’t seen her reflection in days—or was it weeks?—but she could very well imagine what a sorry sight she presented. No longer a celebrated violin player in an elegant evening gown with an open back; that much was obvious.

  “Magda, do you know who this is? This is Alma Rosé herself!” The nurse was
beaming at Blockälteste Hellinger in apparent delight. “She’s a violinist, very famous in Austria!” Misinterpreting Alma’s silence, the nurse rushed to explain, “My name is Ima van Esso. You played at our home in Amsterdam. In 1942, a Telemann sonata; remember?”

  Of course, she did. A warm house heated against all German regulations; an illegal gathering of music aficionados; mismatched, elegant chairs assembled in a semicircle; women in evening gowns and men in dress suits, all eyes on her—the woman they had adored and risked the wrath of the Gestapo just to hear her play once again.

  “You accompanied me. The flute.” Somehow, Alma managed the words. The memories cut. It was strange to be holding Ima’s hand in hers again. It was a mirthless reunion for all the wrong reasons. The last time they parted ways, Alma was still a free woman.

  Ima presented her with a radiant smile. “Yes! It’s so kind of you to remember. I was such an amateur… most certainly you felt I was beneath your best effort.”

  Alma felt the beginning of a quiver in her bottom lip and bit into it, hard. “Nonsense. You played excellently.” Alma was proud to hear her voice so calm. The self-inflicted pain worked its magic, as it always did.

  Magda Hellinger whistled softly through her teeth. “A celebrity, then? Why didn’t you say so when you asked me for the blasted violin?”