The French Promise (2 page)

She watched in dread as the elderly, the young, mothers
with babies and infants, the infirm and invalids were pointed into a new line. Her father had already been placed in this queue but as they drew level with the man in his white coat, he barely acknowledged her mother as his finger flicked in her direction and she was pulled away from Sarah. Gitel
was noticed next, the careless finger flicked again – decision made – and her baby sister was ripped
from her grip. Rachel felt Gitel’s fingertips leaving hers, although the child was too terrified to fully comprehend separation. Sarah wept and Rachel, too shocked to speak, reached for her eldest sister’s hand instead and watched with a rising nausea that before Gitel could pull her mother to reach Jacob standing further up the line, he was being led away.

Rachel’s gaze followed him
and as he looked back, he stared directly at her, nodding once. She could never forget the haunted look in his expression, as though apologising for all of this pain. Her mother had not understood, wasn’t hearing or listening, when she’d been pointed in the same direction. Men had pushed her. She’d screamed from instinctive fear and so had Gitel when a dog had leapt at her, snarling; they’d both
appeared frozen. Another woman, elderly and looking like someone from the land, with large square hands and a face of granite, had reached for the pair of Bonet women and glanced at the elder girls. ‘I’ll keep them with me,’ she’d called before being shoved back in line. The line did not wait for Sarah and Rachel but had begun its slow shuffle, following the same pathway that their father had trudged
moments earlier.

Finally, it was Rachel’s turn to stand before the doctor, with his hair cut and combed so precisely, it looked as though he parted it each morning with a ruler.

‘Name?’

‘Rachel Bonet.’

‘Birthplace.’

‘Saignon, Provence.’

‘Closest town?’ He was still to look up at her but she
realised he didn’t need to; she’d already been selected by him but she didn’t know why or for what.

‘Apt,’ she said, only just keeping her patience. ‘Where are they going?’ she demanded.

The doctor raised his head, regarding her with a wintry blue gaze and thinly pursed lips, before pointing her towards a different queue. ‘For disinfecting,’ he replied. ‘You all stink!’ he added, his tone as glacial as his stare.

She ignored his wrinkled nose and disgusted tone. ‘Then why aren’t we being
sent with them? My sister here has contracted lice,’ she tried, speaking more politely than she thought possible. ‘You are a doctor, aren’t you?’

‘I am Doctor Josef Mengele.’ He’d shifted into French. ‘I’m new here, like you,’ he said, waving her on and beckoning to Sarah behind her. ‘But don’t worry, you’ll be next,’ he’d thrown over his shoulder. ‘And your sister’s hair won’t matter, I promise.’

Another guard pointed with his gun barrel. ‘You’ll all be reunited,’ he said scornfully in German, which she understood.

‘But I don’t understand why they—’

The guard growled and Sarah gave a hissing sound. ‘Hush! You’ll make it worse.’

Rachel watched the retreating backs of the longer queue and sensed the lie long before she’d ever learnt the truth. Even the strains of bright music being played
on the Judenrampe by fellow Jews in a small orchestra and dressed in what had appeared to be prison motley were a mocking parody. Just looking at their vacant expressions revealed enough. She returned her attention to those she loved and watched the stooped shape of her mother, her bright headscarf easy to pick out, as she hobbled next to the elderly woman. Gitel
held her mother’s hand but Rachel
could tell her little sister was sobbing. Her heart lurched painfully for them but she was helpless and Sarah held her so tightly now there was nothing she could do.

Guards motioned her line forward and they were not led in the same direction as the rest of the family for the promised disinfecting showers. Rachel looked back at their belongings that suddenly no longer mattered and yet
they’d all guarded so jealously on the journey there. She watched with detachment as the various suitcases and bags were being gathered up by other prisoners, dully focused on her own small holdall that held two precious books that she would gladly swap now in order to have a final hug and kiss with her parents.
Was it goodbye
? She was sure she would not see them again but the pain was so acute
it stopped her being able to talk, to think clearly, to even feel anger any more.

After she and Sarah were herded into a nearby building everything she had left was stripped away, including the tiny gold cross and chain she wore. She quickly understood the doctor’s sly smile and the quip about her sister’s lice-ridden hair as she watched it cut away in a careless rasping hack with huge
scissors before Sarah’s head was then shorn. The blade the man used on Rachel was blunt and it left two cuts so she emerged with blood running from the top of her head, behind each ear. Made bald and standing naked, however, was not the final indignity, nor was the foul-smelling powder they rubbed beneath her arms and onto her newly scraped scalp to delouse her.

No, the final dehumanising insult
was the careless, ugly tattoo made on her left forearm that had made Rachel realise she was no longer considered a person worthy of even a name. She was no longer Rachel Bonet of Saignon,
lately of Paris; brilliant violinist, sister, daughter. She was now a six-figured number that began with one and ended with seven. Sarah’s ended in eight.

She could see the tattoo now as she held the
violin beneath her chin and played. Eight months had passed and Rachel assumed that her parents and dear little Gitel had been killed. They hadn’t even wasted the ink of the tattoo on the less useful members of her family. Rumours abounded in the Birkenau camp for women that behind their buildings were secret killing rooms. Wily prisoners had pointed to chimneys that belched cloying, sweet smoke
constantly and warned that people were being killed in large numbers and their bodies burnt. Although she was still waiting for her promised shower, random selections continued for ‘showers’… but the prisoners chosen for theirs never reappeared.

‘They gas us, then burn us in communal ovens,’ one woman had said, tapping her nose and laughing in a hideous cackle to show her bleeding gums and few
teeth. Her name was Ruth and she’d been there for nearly sixteen months. Most people barely lived beyond a few months. It was a shock to realise both herself and Sarah had survived this long, but Sarah was a good worker and Rachel had her music.

Others ridiculed Ruth, claiming she was long lost to the ‘camp madness’ that took many in its maw, but Rachel believed her. She knew Ruth was well connected
to the hierarchy within the camp. Ruth gave her body frequently and willingly to the
kapos
– mainly Polish men – who held positions of authority as functionaries of the Nazi hierarchy. In this way Ruth enjoyed access to information as well as a thin veil of protection that the majority were denied. Ruth had no reason to lie.

As they played another Bach piece, Rachel looked around her
and decided that the Nazis had done everything possible to reduce their will and turn them into moving corpses that only cared about the next heel of bread and fighting each other to get to the ablutions block. Once a day only were they permitted access to the latrines, which were nothing more than concrete drop holes side by side where prisoners would rub thighs, buttocks, backs and shoulders with
others. According to Ruth it was worse for the men, but she didn’t elaborate. And they were only given twenty seconds each; some cruel female guards would amuse themselves by timing them, counting aloud if they knew someone had diarrhoea or constipation from the dysentery, typhoid and other nasty diseases that were rampant.

In truth, all that mattered to Rachel each day was seeing Sarah
return. Each morning her elder sister would be sent off in the numbing weather, with nothing between her and the snow or frost, rain or sleet, but a coarse cotton prison dress and a thin scarf. With her fellow wretched prisoners Sarah would walk the 6 kilometres to Farben Pharmaceutical to labour for eleven hours before retracing the journey for a single daily bowl of thinnest vegetable broth
and perhaps some bread. She would leave in the morning with her body nourished only by ‘coffee’ made from bitter acorns … if she was lucky. Sarah, though determined to survive, had begun to sicken this week. It didn’t matter from what; there was no point in looking for answers … or cures.

Auschwitz was a waiting room of death, for if the Germans themselves didn’t kill you for the smallest indiscretion,
then the malnutrition, disease, hypothermia, overwork or plain heartbreak would. One officer liked to use clearly ailing
prisoners for target practice and they’d be taken into the woods and told to wander. He would pick them off, usually complaining that his sights were off if he wounded before he killed. Roll call was the worst, though. After a brutal awakening at daybreak and their crude acorn
gruel breakfast, the whole of Birkenau’s inmates might spend hours standing to attention in the frigid air of a bone-chilling Polish morning being counted off. Many died where they stood in that period, waiting to be counted. Anyone who couldn’t stand was removed and put out of their misery. Anyone who was late was shot as an example to all. Sometimes whole barracks were punished with vicious beatings
because of one person’s momentary tardiness.

Bodies of the newly dead were piled like litter to the side of one building in open view of them all. A cart would come mid-morning and pull each emaciated, partly frozen corpse aboard. Eyes of the dead that no one had bothered to close stared sightlessly in all directions.

Rachel shivered at the recollection, glad to be dragged from the bubble
of memories as she noticed the workers returning. The nearby guard waved his hands at the orchestra to shift from the chamber music into a rousing march. There were nearly sixty of them in this curious, gypsy-like ensemble and yet the music was surprisingly accomplished. They had more than twenty-five professional musicians in their midst. Rachel didn’t think that one of their cellists would
survive the next few days, though, but she couldn’t worry about Marie. She only had enough room in her deadened heart for Sarah. Rachel craned her neck to catch sight of her sister but the raggle-taggle queue of workers seemed to be moving slower than usual. Instead she caught the guard staring at her and immediately intensified her concentration to appear enthusiastic about her
playing. She knew
he was looking at her for other reasons. He was young, hated his posting here and had seen something in her during the first week of his arrival when she and a few other musicians had been asked to play at a welcome meal for new recruits. The ‘ensemble’ had been permitted to wash themselves properly with a small scoop of gritty soap paste; to rinse their mouths and do their best to look presentable
despite bald heads, hollow cheeks and near skeletal frames. But Albert had noticed her that day when she’d played a brief solo; he was clearly a romantic, moved by the music, desperate not to be here amongst such horror and desolation.

These days he regularly looked out for her, casting shy smiles, and she knew he was the one who left small gifts: extra bread, a small knob of real soap,
even a scarf once. She had given the scarf to Sarah. And she was sure it had been Albert who had mentioned her to the camp commander when it turned out that Commander Hoss was looking for a music teacher. His family lived at the villa next door to the main complex – five children were growing up in the garden adjacent to where thousands of people were being murdered around the clock.

It had been
a horrible surprise for Rachel to be singled out as the perfect candidate. So now previous duties – save playing for the Germans at their functions, or for the camp, when required – were dropped in favour of teaching the two eldest Hoss children their violin and piano, and helping the younger ones to learn to read music. This new role required her to clean herself daily and that meant a brief shower
in an outhouse before she stepped into the alien, terrifying world of the commander’s household. Here privilege assaulted her – fine furnishings, regularly laundered linens, fresh fruit, the children’s exquisite
clothes, pretty flowers … But it was the attack on her senses that upset her most of all. Her life at Birkenau had become so colourless, so stripped of any smells but those of faeces,
vomit, sweat, death, burning flesh, suppurating sores, rancid breath and decay, that she had lost the recognition of what real life – or rather ‘happy life’ – smelt like. When one of her young charges, Hans-Rudolf, handed her an apricot, she had wept at its blushing ripeness and returned it, but not before she’d inhaled its scent, her lips dangerously close to its velvet promise. It transported her
to Saignon in Provence and its orchard groves of stone fruit that had spread for acres around their village.

To eat the apricot would be more damaging than to resist it … Rachel could imagine what its taste would do for her yearning, how it might break her resolve to survive, how it would curdle in her belly at the thought that she was enjoying too many privileges.

‘No, thank you, Hans-Rudolf.
You keep it,’ she’d said quietly, putting it back into his hands.

‘I cannot,’ he’d said casually. ‘Not now. Mama says we mustn’t touch anything a prisoner touches,’ he’d added in his childlike innocence.

‘But what about the piano? I touch that,’ she’d countered.

‘The piano is wiped down with stuff from a bottle,’ he’d said matter-of-factly, opening his book of music. She’d had to look away for
fear of weeping.

Rachel’s baldness had frightened the younger ones and apparently disgusted the eldest, Ingebrigitt, so she’d been permitted to grow her hair. Ingebrigitt had also demanded her mother provide their piano teacher with a scarf to hide
Rachel’s ugly head, and the silken, plain red square she was given, after so long without anything of her own, might as well have been an Hermès
scarf. Even so, she wanted to refuse it but daren’t. Ingebrigitt had wrapped it around Rachel’s head.