Playing for Time by Fania Fenelon

Author:Fania Fenelon [Fenelon, Fania]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780815604945
Google: vr93PwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0815604947
Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr
Published: 1983-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

I never got used to these jokes, which drove Clara into an appalling state but which she was obliged to swallow, because she knew that she was little loved and unlikely to find a champion, even in me. To think that it was Clara with whom I had sworn eternal friendship, friendship unto death, in the fashion of incautious schoolgirls. And secretly I was worried that I might have been in some small part responsible for the change in her. Perhaps I should have been more vigilant. From a well-brought-up girl, engaged to a boy with whom she was still in love, she had become this kapo’s girl. Swinging her hips, complacently proffering her pallid fat, she would go towards the highest bidder, steering a course between her two main concerns, guzzling and singing. Occasionally she would go through phases of trying to revive our old friendship, attempting to flatter me: “Get me singing work. You can do anything with Alma. If I don’t sing enough they’ll say they don’t need me, and…” All her anguish lay in the dots that punctuated her sentences. She hated Lotte, Ewa, and probably me too; every singer was usurping her place.

She exaggerated when she brought up the possibility of being thrown out of the orchestra; she didn’t really believe it. It was a way of insisting on first place: she needed to shine. In the evenings, since she couldn’t make any headway in our circle, Clara sat apart learning new songs which would enable her to supplant the others. She refused to admit that there was no longer any hope of that: her voice, which had been very lovely, had been affected by the conditions we’d been living in and it was losing its strength and subtlety. She would have to give up her ambition to be a singer at the Opera, which was a shame because she might well have succeeded, everything being in her favour: she was very gifted, very beautiful, and so absolutely self-centred that she would have been able to cast aside anything that might have hindered her progress. In normal life, all this could have remained quite comme il faut, but the camp, exacerbating all needs and all desires, had thrown a cruel light upon her. So many people who would normally have been pleasantly unremarkable became monsters in Birkenau.

Clara’s latest lover was an enormous flat-skulled brute of a German with a frightful reputation; he was said to be a sadist of a calibre that aroused envy even among the SS. When he had come to the block, his little grey eyes sunk between two folds of flesh and his enormous hamlike hands had made me feel positively unwell. Apart from his duties as kapo, he also lent a voluntary if professional hand in the exemplary executions that took place in the camp. I had asked Clara whether she realized exactly what sort of a man he was and what his profession had been before he’d been interned:

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