The next day at first light was her first time with the band that played to the slaves. They assembled where the men’s and women’s camps met, within yards of the ramp at which the transports arrived, on a banked mound of earth, seated on stools.
They saw the men out to work or die with a foxtrot and paused before the first exodus of women. It was fully light now, the floodlights were off, and a transport that had discharged its human cargo in the middle of the night was still parked at the ramp, all its doors open, a mess of abandoned property scattered in the mud and snow.
From where she was sitting Méret could see the remains of tinned and bottled food, items of clothing, hats and capes, walking sticks and crutches, pans and bowls and cutlery—all the expectant junk of survival that she’d seen on the train with the Italians—and, half buried in the sludge, the shiny head of a china doll like the one she used to have.
She left her seat.
Magda called out to her in a stage whisper, “Méret. Sit down. For God’s sake, sit down.”
It was only a few feet away, she might reach it and retrieve it before anyone spotted her.
“Méret!”
And as she reached down for the doll she saw that it was not a doll but a baby, its head glazed with frost, its body all but trampled into the ground.
Magda got up and dragged her back.
An SS guard approached but turned away as soon as he saw them seated again. Then the women began to pour towards the gate and the band struck up a waltz from The Merry Widow.
Méret sat holding the bow against the strings, wanting the glass wall to descend and cut her off, but it did not. And no act of will on her part invoked it. All she had was the sieve, and the world was leeching through.
“Méret, play something. For God’s sake, play anything!”
She hit a badly fingered note. The band was so off-key it scarcely mattered—but she now knew the answer to the question she had silently posed to herself the day the Nazis had taken over the youth orchestra. “Why or when would the Nazi party ever have need of an orchestra?”
This was why.
This was when.