The Wrong Boy by Suzy Zail Read Free Book Online Page B

that were skilled with their hands. It was just that I missed him. I missed my mother too – the mother I knew before the war. The one who sang me to sleep at night and never tired of watching me practise. The mother who washed my tangled hair every Saturday night and helped me with my algebra. The Mira Mendel who spoke four languages and sewed all my concert gowns by hand.
    I thought of Piri often. I wondered whether she’d looked for me after the ghetto had been emptied. Piri had taught piano at my school for fifteen years, quitting when the principal stopped music classes for Jews. She taught me privately after that, cycling into the ghetto once a week with her satchel of sheet music. She brought Liszt and Chopin, but she also smuggled in Goldschmidt and Krenek and jazz music, even though it was banned. Piri couldn’t stand bigots.
    I was thinking about my teacher when, a few weeks later, we were forced to congregate in the main square of Birkenau. I’d thought it strange that our barrack was invited to attend a concert, perverse even, given the audience were prisoners and had no choice but to attend. The conductor smiled at the guards seated in the front row, and introduced her ensemble as the
Birkenau Women’s Orchestra
. Most of them wore yellow stars, all had scarves on their heads, white blouses and pleated skirts. I recognised the violinist from the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. The woman sitting next to her was a famous flautist from France. Then Piri stepped into the spotlight.
    What was my teacher doing here? She wasn’t Jewish. And why was she playing for the guards? She despised the SS. The conductor raised her baton and Piri hunched over the piano. The conductor tapped at the lectern and Piri’s fingers flew to the keys. She played Schubert, then Strauss, her performance flawless but cold.
    The conductor took her final bow and we were ordered back to the barrack. When the block leader stopped to congratulate the conductor, I slunk to Piri’s side.
    “Piri, what are you doing here?” I pulled her behind a group of inmates.
    “Hanna! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. When I didn’t see you I worried that you’d been …”
    I didn’t let her finish her sentence, I had too many questions.
    “Why are you here, Piri?”
    “Because I’m ‘sympathetic to the cause’.” She pointed to the red triangle on her striped shirt and rolled her eyes. “I teach Jews to play piano so I’m politically dangerous.”
    “How can you do it?” I asked, pulling away from her. “Play for them. Entertain them. I want to scratch their eyes out.”
    Piri looked at me sadly.
    “I want to survive. Orchestra members get extra rations. We don’t have to work.”
    “Neither do the girls in barrack 24 who part their legs for the guards.”
    “I want to get out of here alive, and I won’t apologise for it, Hanna.”
    The block leader called our barrack to attention.
    “I can get you into the orchestra. There’s room for another pianist. Think about it,” Piri said, slipping back into line. “We’re in barrack 14.”

    “It’s the only way to beat them,” Erika said when I told her of my conversation with Piri. “Survive, and when you do, tell everyone what you saw–”
    “… and what they did to us,” I said, remembering Father’s parting words. “I just don’t know if I could live with myself.” I thought of the girls in barrack 24, their hair grown out, their lips painted red. I’d seen the guards go in there at night and come out again, buttoning their flys and straightening their shirts.
    “Do it for
Anyu
, then. You could give her your extra rations. She barely escaped the last selection. If she gets any frailer they’ll take her away.”
    I watched my mother drag her feet through the mud. In two days the guards would force us to hop up and down at the next selection so they could pick off the weakest among us. Last week a woman had tripped, another had collapsed. They were taken by