The One Who Stayed

I remember everything you told me. Every word. Even after you slipped into that eternal sleep and all the hope for your salvation was lost- I still remembered. And then, right before my dreamless sleep overwhelms me, I hear your voice, sometimes as a warning, sometimes as a comfort. And all I want to do is forget it. You told me everything, from the most insignificant detail to the most gruesome graphic memory of their devilish murder. And I remember both.

I want to forget what you told me, but I can’t. I made you a promise, and now it is time I kept it. I promised you on your deathbed to tell the world your tale, and now I am nearing the end of mine it is time I did so.

You were a musician. A brilliant musician who could manipulate three instruments: the piano, the violin and your own voice. You could command your voice like no other, though you always said there were people better than you. Often, in your childhood, you would get up in the middle of the night, after having dreamt of a beautiful piece of music and hum it to yourself, fighting against the fatigue you get as a small child, fighting to stay awake, until morning when you wrote it down. These pieces were all so hauntingly beautiful, and your mother loved them.

Most of the time you played the piano or sang, though you didn’t have a favorite instrument, but your father didn’t like the sound of the violin, so you could only play it when he was gone. Most of your dream pieces sounded better on the violin, so you would often transpose them, and when your father had left, play them beautifully to your mother and brother. Sometimes I remember you humming or even singing subconsciously while working. You sounded like a bird in paradise and I couldn’t get enough of your voice. But when I asked you to sing or you noticed your music, you would stop or reproach me for asking.

And then, one time, when Lillie came from America, she sat you down at the piano and said she wouldn’t leave until you had played the tiniest note, or an arpeggio or a scale. She stood at the door, guarding it so you couldn’t leave and I stood in the corner, where she had ordered me. You looked at the piano - lost for one second and then started playing and singing silently, moving your lips to “Voi Che Sapete” from the Marriage of Figaro by Mozart. You never really liked Mozart, but that Aria was an exception. You liked Scarlatti more, you admitted to me, but I still love Mozart, and that Aria is a common song in my family. For weeks after you played it on the piano I went everywhere humming it. After you finished playing with that beautiful ending chord, Lillie and I were stunned, and so were you. I remember the look on your face after you finished- half horrified, half amazed at your own memory. But some part of you, some distant part of you that was trying to protect you was mournful. That part wanted to forget, not remember the tune. The song reminded you of times when you still had a family which consisted of more than Lillie and me. You got up and walked out, and Lillie let you.

You refused to play anything after you got out of Auschwitz-Birkenau, even though you knew in some ways it could make you forget the suffering. You didn’t want that though. No, you wanted everything but to forget and pretend nothing had happened. Which is why you made yourself stop the music and its magical healing power was lost to you. You still had your hauntingly musical dreams, and you still stayed up trying not to forget them and often you wrote them down. Sometimes you burnt the manuscripts, but other times you knew the piece was too beautiful to destroy. Then you hid it in the drawer and sometimes, if I begged and pleaded, you would show me. But never sing or hum the melody.

Sometimes I think the lack of music is what killed you more than the memories. The memories you honored. You prayed for the dead, those who were friends and those who weren’t. You knew you had suffered and you wished you hadn’t, but you left it at that. You didn’t, like so many others, leave or hold any bitterness against us Germans. When I came around that first time you gathered me in your arms like a long lost mother or a grandmother, though you were too young to be one then. I was crying and you cleaned up my bloody knee and nose and told me when you had once fallen and broken your arm and how your brother had thought you weak for feeling the pain. You made me laugh that day.

The lack of music almost ate you up from the inside. Knowing what your hands could do on the piano, yet refusing to let them play, knowing how your hands could manipulate the violins touch, yet ignoring the instrument, knowing how wonderfully you could use your voice to bring tears to peoples eyes, yet staying silent. And that was constantly gnawing at your resolve and your pain.

I know that your memories didn’t kill you, and so I have always told myself I didn’t kill you either, though sometimes I think in some way I did. It would have been better for you had you hated all the Germans and gone to America like all the others did, instead of being forgiving, and the one who stayed. Sometimes you should have let your remorse and anger show, rather than always oppressing it and trying to forget it. Bottling up an emotion is never good, because one day your bottle will be full. But your’s never was full, your bottle developed a leak, and like poison the bitter thoughts washed through you. And that didn’t help anyone. Often I wish you had told me your anger and grief’s earlier, but I know why you didn’t. I was young and innocent and only when I was fourteen and our history teacher told us to find a person who had lived during the Holocaust did you deem me ready to tell me you were actually Jewish.

You never told me much about before Auschwitz-Birkenau. You told me that you were in the Berlin Ghetto, the Judenhof, and had been lucky to survive so long. They started deporting Jews as early as 1938, almost right after Kristallnacht. They had mistreated you long before that though; Jews weren’t allowed into a normal school, they had to go to a Jewish school, and you were no longer allowed to communicated with any people ‘not of Jewish race’. Both of your parents were made redundant and you could no longer play the violin due to your father’s constant presence.

Those were hard times for you, and the abusing only stopped for the Summer Olympics 1936, for the Fürher didn’t want the world to see anything wrong with his Aryan Germany. That summer was the only peaceful summer you had for three years, and the only one you were going to have for the next nine years. Perhaps, had you known this, you might have done better things with your summer.

But you didn’t and things deteriorated for you, as they did for me. When I first met you, it was in the summer too. It was a Saturday morning and the sun was already high in the sky, promising a hot day. You were in your garden, tending those roses that still hang on the wall of your house, right under the bedroom window so that, you explained to me, the scent could drift through and please you in your sleep. Now they are unkempt because how ever hard I try, I am not the gardener you once were.

I loved those roses, and after you bandaged my knee, you cut me one and gave it to me. I held it to my nose all the way home, worried it would lose its scent if it didn’t.

I never saw you again during that summer. The next time I saw you was three months later when I was running from some boys who were teasing me for misspelling vielleicht for the fifth time in class that morning. I was just running by your house while you were doing something with a bunch of weeds. You stopped me and told me off for running, telling me that I didn’t want to hurt my knee again. I told you, in tears, what the boys had said and you smiled and invited me in. I was wary at first, but you were young and pretty and I doubted you could do any wrong. You asked me what was wrong, and when I told you my life-long suspicion of my stupidity you laughed and offered to help me with my homework. I accepted. Both my parents had little time to help me and any help was welcome. I was just eight years old.

I think somehow that helped us both. You were no longer lonely and I was becoming better at school under your tutorage. My mother was pleased that I was improving and asked no questions about you. We lived in such a small community that everyone knew everyone who wanted to be known and left those who didn’t alone. She knew as little as I did what you had gone through, or that you were a Jew.

You told me that your mother had taught you after the Nuremberg Laws were passed. I asked stupidly what they were, and you, remembering it was me you were talking to and quickly told me about your brother, who was like me, you told me. I wasn’t stupid; I was dyslexic, according to you.

What is that? I asked, half desperate to believe that I wasn’t stupid, and half scared to know what was actually wrong with me. Perhaps it was something worse?

It means your brain works different to mine. You told me simply, and I bit back tears, hurt.

You saw my expression and nearly started laughing. You silly child! You scolded me. It is neither good nor bad, it’s different. My little brother was the same, and he was very good at drawing because of it!

I wasn’t a good artist, and so you told me I was probably musical, and compared to most, I was. Compared to you, I wasn’t.

And so you helped me with my German vocabulary and maths and English, which I hated with a passion. You helped me with everything. Except music. You refused to help me with any subject to do with music.

I remember the first time I realized this. I came over on a Sunday morning after my violin lesson, in tears because I was unable to manage a succession of notes that was crucial to my favorite piece. I thought you would help me, but when I showed you my violin you told me you couldn’t play. But I sensed the lie because you looked away with tears stinging in your eyes. I was about to leave, dejectedly, when you told me, with your back still to me, that I was holding the bow incorrectly. Of course you were right, and a week later I danced back from my lessons fully able to play the piece.

You were still so young when all this was happening though. You were born in 1920, and you were only twenty-eight when I pranced into your life, and yet you still lived the life of an invalid. You sewed and washed and gardened and wrote all day in your little house at the edge of the village, and you helped me. Except for me you had little contact at all to the outside world, and you liked that. You got letters from Lillie in America and letters from my mother and teachers ever so often thanking you for teaching me so well, but the only other letter you got were the bills and cheques from your seamstress duties.

I was twelve when I asked you about the absence of family letters. You were doing the crossword and I was doing my geography homework, an essay on the importance of trade, when I looked to find you struggling with ‘a six letter word describing a group of people with a strong bond’. I knew it was Family, and so I told you. You laughed and nodded and told me how silly that was of you. Now, looking back, I think it was a subconscious protection from painful memories. Because now I know the one thing you could never forget, however hard you tried, was your family.

Where is your family? I asked, curious to know, as we had never talked about it. You looked at me, scared and surprised about my question. You looked down at the newspaper and muttered something. You muttered, They’re dead.

How? I asked, ever persistent.

Murder, you answered, Genocide, Shoah, whatever you want to call it.

Tell me! I demanded, frustrated by your cryptic answers. I had never been one for cryptic answers and quiet voices, and I still hate it when people answer like that. I often tell my own daughter off when she tries to escape a punishment by using cryptic words.

They were killed by Carbon Monoxide, like six million other Jews! You shouted. I was scared. You had never shouted at me. I slowly stood up from your kitchen table and started packing my things. That is when you started to die. I know it, because the look in your eyes. That night was Friday, and I said as I left;

It’s Shabbat today.

Yes, Shabbat. I need to celebrate Shoah. You answered, accompanying me to the door. I pretended not to notice the mistake, though I know you did. You were just looking at me, eyes gaunt.

In some ways, it would have been better had I stayed away. In another way, I saved your life. I told Lillie everything when she first came to visit. I told her about the family you were still subconsciously mourning and the people who were dead. She told me it was natural and that I should make you talk about your past, because that would help. And that is what I am doing right now; piecing all the information you gave me, bit by bit, to write out your story, as it really happened.

You were one of the first to be deported, back in 1938. You were eighteen and your brother was sixteen. The men came with guns and shouted at you, and you were terrified. Raus, Raus hier ihr Juden Dreck! They shouted, and you went out, grabbing the first and most important thing you saw, your violin. You knew you couldn’t take your piano, though it still broke your heart as you left it, jumping on a large truck with the Müllers and the Friedrichs, the two other Jewish families in the quarter. That was the first time you saw Lillie, proud and grimacing, trying to comfort her mother by shouting abuses at the Nazis who just laughed at her.

They didn’t bring you to Auschwitz, not at first anyway, they brought you to Ravensbrück. In 1938 Auschwitz was just a dream of Hitler’s and a nightmare of the Jews. Ravensbrück was a Textiles Concentration Camp near the Border of the Third Reich, near Poland, which would soon be claimed. It was only the women who got off here though, and I remember the pain in your voice as you told me about the goodbyes.

Your mother wouldn’t let go of your brother. Her instinct knew what she should have never known then. And your mother was right, you and your father and brother never met again. The soldiers threatened to shoot your mother, and still she didn’t let go. Had it been later in the war, all the soldiers wouldn’t have batted an eyelid while shooting, but this was in the beginning, and all though you were Jews, you were still at least mammals to them. They wrenched your mother away from her son and so you were alone. Ten women from Berlin, thirteen from Düsseldorf and six from Hamburg you were, all Jews in the beginning. And then there was Elise, the criminal who had stolen a jewel. She, though the worst of all the women, was your mistress, the one who punished you.

She was harsh and not afraid to whip you, and you showed me one scar on your back. You were whipped because of refusing to eat. That was in 1941 when you had lost the will to live. The work was hard, the hours long and the food scarce and diluted with water and you were lonely. In this world, everyone kept to themselves. In 1941 there were eight hundred more women than before, but all the initial women, including you, stayed together. After you were whipped, you lay in your cot, your back smarting. That was when Lillie helped you the first time.

She came over and cleaned and bound your injury with some ripped of pieces of bed sheet. Then she comforted you. And since that one random act of kindness from a forlorn Jew such as yourself, you were saved and lost, all at once.

You saved your soul and sanity through all the murder and hatred, but you lost your belief in salvation and God. You were more sane than most because you had Lillie, but because you had Lillie you let yourself see what most people tried to blind themselves too. You saw other people die because other prisoners didn’t help. You saw people die because of the brutality of both the soldiers and the other prisoners, desperate and dead inside. Most of the prisoners lost their souls long before they lost their life.

Auschwitz was just as bad, you said, though I know you always meant worse. Much worse. Because you survived, not because you were strong, or determined or anything else, not because you deserved it. You survived because you were lucky. You survived because you abandoned your friend. You survived because you committed a crime worse than death.

Or so you told me.

I knew, the day you told me about this, that you weren’t the person I had believed you were for so long. You were different. You told me a week after Lillie had gone, a week after I had heard you on the piano, a week after I found out some of who you really were. I was twenty-one, and still unable to figure you out. I still loved and respected you, like a second mother, but now I had a degree on the history of Jews, I knew more about you. Or so I thought.

You told me about the time where you promised Lillie to stay together always. It was winter 1942, perhaps late March, on the cattle train which took you to Auschwitz-Birkenau, just after the Final Solution was signed. Squashed together, you held hands for support, because if you fell, you wouldn’t get up again. You felt like you betrayed her, and you were so glad that she survived without you, and had no bitter feelings. She was Lillie after all. If she had died, there would have been nothing to stop you from joining her in eternal oblivion.

When you get there, you were terrified. There were so many barracks, you would get lost! The first thing they did was disinfect you in a shower, and then they cut your hair and gave you a number. Your number was 139927, and Lillie’s was 139916. You tried to analyze them, but there was nothing lucky about yours. Thirteen was an unlucky number, 99 was the number before a hundred, before a century, and 7 was an unlucky number. This was going to end badly, or so you predicted.

But you didn’t die, and so the hard days began. You had to get up at four in the morning in the freezing barracks, after a day of hard work in the mines.

One day, after a month living like mice hiding from cats and nibbling crumbs, before you went to morning Roll Call, your Kapo, a fat German woman who hated the German Wagner music and had ended up with you because of that, told everyone who could play an instrument well, to raise their hand. Unsure, you and half of your division put up your hands.

Who can play an orchestral instrument? Was her next question, and only ten or twenty hands stayed up. She nodded to herself and then looked around randomly. You! She said, pointing to you.

Me? You asked, as you were pushed forward by Lillie.

Yes, you! She answered. I want you to tell me what instrument you play!

Violin. You muttered, sure this harsh women would kill you.

We need a violin. She said and told you, quietly, Stand on the left of the yard this morning if you want to live.

And that is what you did, you and Lillie. The men came down the line and chose twenty women who would be sent to be tested by The Angel of Death, Dr Mengele or other doctors such as Dr. Schuhmann and Dr. Clauberg. You were not chosen, and so you were sent to work in the kitchen. Your Kapo caught up with you before you got there though, and sent you to the orchestra, where a violin was ready and waiting for you.

You had to play the heavy work beat, but you didn’t mind. I remember how your eyes shone when you told me about touching a musical instrument after four years of never touching it. People in the orchestra were given extra rations and were treated better than most. There were about twenty of you, and only three of you were Jews. All the others were German criminals or political prisoners or homosexuals, mainly because the Germans, how ever horrid and murderous, were still patriotic to some extent. My research at university showed me that German Jews were often treated better than Polish Jews and there were a lot less German Jews in the death camps, more were in concentration camps like Ravensbrück.

And that is how you survived. You slept next to Lillie, you stood next to her in evening and morning Roll Call, you ate your breakfasts and dinners together, but it was no longer the same.

You didn’t bad mouth the Kapo together, you couldn’t bad mouth any work guards because you didn’t work together, but the guards treated you better than they treated her, so you and Lillie had nothing to talk about. But still, she stuck by you as much as possible, and although you didn’t tell her how glad you were that she was there, you were.

You survived the mass extermination where a third of all the women prisoners were killed when you moved from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II or also known as Birkenau. You survived the life expectancy, which were twice as short for women as it was for men.

The only time during the imprisonment you and Lillie were as close as in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp was when you had to watch your mother die. This was in 1943, a year after you had come to Auschwitz, and you knew it had been a miracle that your mother had survived so long. You were in different Barracks and only knew whether she was dead or alive when you caught a glimpse of her in Morning and Evening Roll Call.

It was summer, and the sun was just starting to show, but already it was beating down on you with full heat, promising another hot day. The Roll Call took longer than usual because one of the Kapos had forgotten to tell the Nazis that a prisoner was in hospital, so there was a scare. By the time it had been cleared up and the Roll Call was to be called again the sun was high up in the sky and the heat was almost unbearable. Three rows ahead of you, someone blacked out.

You didn’t recognize her at first. You thought she was some stranger. Her hair was as short as yours, and she wore the same uniform. You watched, like all the other prisoners, as the Nazis dragged her out and pulled her up. Then you recognized her, you saw the fear in her face, you saw the pleads to God she was thinking. She caught your eye and smiled as a Nazi took out his semi-automatic Lüdger and aimed it at her, and shot. She died with a blissful, empty smile on her face, and that is when you were sure that there was nothing like God or heaven. There was no one watching over you. There was just nothing.

Lillie comforted you that night, and all the nights to follow, and she hugged you and told you about heaven. You pretended to listen, but you didn’t.

At least she wasn’t beaten to death! You told yourself wryly, though you were still numb.

Lillie always reminded you, and you just nodded. She is in Gods hands now, Lillie would say. You knew that Karl Marx was right after all, Religion was really just the opium of the people.

So you survived three years in Auschwitz as a member of the orchestra and working in the kitchens, with long and hard hours, but at least you survived. You watched thousands of people, being lead to the gas chambers where they never got out with a living breath again.

Mid-January 1945, when all the hope had been drained from your body, the rumor sprang up that the soviets were coming. You heard it from your Kapo, who was telling another Kapo. You told everyone else in your barracks what you had heard, and there was elated excitement, until the Kapo ordered you all outside. You were sent to march, in freezing weather with only a thin blanket. You were forced to march in silence, and anyone who faltered, tripped or stumbled would die.

But you made it. You held Lillie’s hand, and together, you made it. Then, everything was a blur. You tried sorting out your memories for me, but you couldn’t. All you know is that you survived.

I know, from studying the history of Jews, that you were loaded on a cattle train where you were taken to another concentration/death camp, which was liberated soon afterwards.

And that was all you ever told me. Even Lillie didn’t tell me how you got here, in the middle of the German countryside, after surviving the Holocaust. I never asked you though, so it is no surprise that you didn’t tell me. I never asked you anything about what happened between the three years you were released and I skipped into your life.

That last night we were together, you looked so sad as you watched me. I know now why you died- why you took your own life. You didn’t think you deserved the honor of surviving. Why had you, Ruth Steiner, survived? You were worth nothing and it would have been much better hadn’t you survived.

I didn’t think so though. It is too late for me to tell you this, but at least I can write it down. I am no author, and I can use no eloquent phrase to express this. This is all I can say.

If you hadn’t survived, I would never have known what you went through. If you hadn’t survived I would still believe myself stupid. If you hadn’t survived, the roses would have never grown.

Had you not survived, I would have never passed my Abiture and I would never have gone to University and read Jewish history. If you hadn’t survived I would have been an unhappy seamstress who hated the world. I would never have been able to reach my intellectual capacity.

But, thanks to fate’s kind hand, you did survive and I became a happy child, no longer a victim of my own thoughts.

I am glad you survived, and I am sad you died. But I know, both were for the best. For the last thing you did before the sleeping pills had their effect, was play the piano and I heard the sweet notes as I walked away from the little white cottage at the edge of the village and I knew your spirit and soul was in every single note.

And I didn’t turn back.