Martin Goodman
This was the 21st century, and Helen Bamber was in her eighties. We met in the London offices of her Foundation, where they cared for trafficked women, and when Helen spoke she looked to the side. It was as though memories were sited there, not to be stared at head on. I had asked her to look back to her twenties, when as a young woman she volunteered to be among the first who entered the concentration camp of Belsen after its liberation.
Survivors at Belsen were skeletal. From film footage we know those images too well. What those survivors cannot do is reach out and speak to us. This was the role Helen Bamber assumed for herself. Despite their desperate hunger, Helen realized that the survivors’ keenest need was for something other than food. It was for someone to listen while they told their story. Helen listened, and became a witness to their lives.
Millions, of course, died with nobody to hear them. The Nazi state worked to strip people of their individuality. Families were separated, stripped naked, shaved, their names replaced by tattooed numbers, their bodies dressed in prison uniform, herded to mass deaths and burned. This was an industrialized operation to erase individual, racial and ancestral memory. When Helen Bamber became a witness to a survivor’s story, she offered them a rare victory. Their battle to retain individuality was won.
My progress toward meeting with Helen Bamber was a long and curious one. Summer 1997, and I was on a camping trip in the Teton Mountains in Wyoming. Bald eagles lined the river, snow packed the peaks, a grizzly bear had gone rogue, but I pressed wild strawberries against my tongue and felt at one with the natural world. And then suddenly the whole concept of what would become my novel The Cellist of Dachau slammed into me; plot, characters, wrapped around the horror of Europe’s twentieth century.
In essence, the book told of a musicologist who chases down an elderly Jewish cellist and composer. Their backstory links them to the concentration camp at Dachau, where her grandfather was the Adjutant and the musician played in a secret orchestra. She is driven by her fury, that the Jewish musician had spoken on behalf of her grandfather at his war trial.
Such was the idea, but no idea comes into an untrammelled mind. Mine had been affected by a recent obituary for the musician Herbert Zipper.
Zipper was a Viennese composer and conductor, ripped from his home and sent by train to Dachau. Once there, he was consigned to the mind- and body-breaking task of hauling rocks and sand from one place to another, and then back again. To maintain some grip on civilization, he formed a secret orchestra. Instruments were made out of scraps of wood, and manuscript paper out of old news sheets. To earn himself some time in a well-lit quiet space where he could compose the orchestra’s music, Zipper volunteered to clean the latrines at night. The music he composed in a latrine was also premiered in one – this one without its fittings. Groups of inmates passed through and listened to a series of fifteen-minute concerts. ‘We have to see the world as it is,’ he told the Los Angeles Times toward the end of his life, ‘but we have to think about what the world could be. That’s what the arts are about.”;
My own character was a young cellist, and I decided early on that Herbert Zipper would provide the template for my character’s early life. For any hope of finding folk who the Holocaust had snatched from history, and of telling their tales, I had to anchor my characters to the historical record. A truth about being Jewish in the Reich was that your fate was not of your choosing and your destiny became inexorable. I would start my characters in one place, and then follow what would have happened to them from there.
Research immediately gave me one corrective. I expected my character to see out the war in Dachau. The biography of Zipper taught me otherwise. In advance of the Nazi pogrom of November 1938, Dachau was emptied of its Jewish inmates to make room for the planned capture of many more. Zipper was transported to Buchenwald. My character, Otto Schalmik, would have to follow the same route.
Zipper was released from Buchenwald in early 1939, and became a renowned conductor in post-war Manilla, from where he moved to California. My character took his moral fibre from Zipper’s life in the camps. One telling scene came on the Appelplatz, the camp’s parade ground, when inmates were kept standing in their rows throughout a night of sub-zero temperatures. Many dropped dead, others were frost bitten. Zipper focused his mind on the passage of the blood through his veins, from his toes to the crown of his head. He kept his circulation flowing through the force of his attention.
My book grew through many drafts. In each draft, a different character stepped forward and asked for their story to be heard. First were the mother, the sister and the niece who Schalmik had left behind in Vienna.
When the Nazis first came for Vienna’s Jews, they took the men. Some families rounded up the funds to pay the extortionate exit taxes, and because they had been targeted the men were the first in the family to leave. It was hoped that no State would vent its cruelty on women. Of course, we now know better. I decided, lazily, that my female characters left in Vienna would have been consigned to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. Research corrected me once again.
The Jewish women of Vienna were mostly transported to Terezín (which had the German name of Theresienstadt). This Czech garrison town was emptied of its population and turned into a fortified ghetto. Up to 60,000 Jews at a time were crammed into its walls.
Terezín was an obvious setting for my novel. The composers Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, the next in the great Czech lineage of Janacek, worked to imbue this ghetto with a musical life. Most poignant of all was a staging of a children’s opera by Hans Krása, Brundibár. In my purist way, I intended not to use it. My musician had gone elsewhere.
But of course, his wife and sister were as musical as he. And I now knew they were sent to Terezín. I took the train and walked through the town, working to conjure it back to one weekend in 1943.
The town on that weekend in 1943 was more roomy than it had been. Red Cross Inspectors were due for a visit, and so the elderly and sick were hauled off to death camps. Streets were washed with soap, roses planted, shop windows installed, even a bank was set up. The marquee that covered the central park, in which Jews were forced to manufacture armaments, was removed. A bandstand was installed, in which the Ghetto Swingers played jazz tunes. Elsewhere a choir sang Verdi’s Requiem. And on a stage with sets designed by some of Prague’s finest designers, fronted by an orchestra, a child cast performed Brundibár.
Nazi filmmakers filmed the day. The Red Cross Inspectors were duly impressed and delivered a satisfied report. And the next day, the artists, musicians, audiences and child performers of Terezín were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Terezín was stage-managed as an act of propaganda. I wanted my novel to counter that. Imagine watching your children take to the stage in Brundibár. That is how close I wanted my readers to be. It’s a restoration of human individuality.
In reading memoirs of life in the concentration camps, it’s striking how often inmates struggled to recall their family members. Faces grew hazy, their voices indistinct, and sometimes the very names of their child or spouse vanished from memory. Inmates were stricken by a love with no details to attach it to. On a pedestal in the Jewish Museum in Sydney, a stone vessel gathers drops of water, each a tear to represent a child from among the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust. A wall gathers photos of some of those lost children, part of a project that collects their names. This Children’s Memorial is created by the local community in the face of monstrous evil and its purpose is to recover intimate detail.
One photo I recall from that wall is of a smiling girl in a white frock. It had been buried in a cigarette tin at Dachau. We don’t know her name or who buried it. We just know that she was once loved by someone who wanted her image at least to survive.
On my visits to Dachau and Auschwitz, I sensed a deep sorrow that blankets the camps, and interpreted this as the weight of millions of folk who never got to tell their stories. If you step inside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where long rail tracks lead toward the first of the crematoria, look right. Behind barbed wire stand the shell relics of dormitories of what was the Theresienstadt Family Camp. Unlike other inmates, families from Terezín kept their clothes and hair and names and lived together. If the Red Cross came, they could sing them a song. The Red Cross didn’t come. The families were all gassed.
I spent a week in Krakow and Auschwitz in a retreat run by the Jewish Zen master Bernie Glassman. After sitting in meditation on the railtracks we were invited to stand and recite the names of any loved ones we had lost in the camp. I stood and spoke the names of some of the musicians of Terezín and children from the cast of Brundibár. From a distance of time I had come to love them and so remember them.
[A version of this article first appeared in Jewish Renaissance.]
