The Forbidden Dance - Andante

      Corporal Karl Liebermann was in charge of overseeing the privileged prisoners, the F kommando, who served in the Herrenhaus in Buchenwald. It hosted gatherings for high officials. It was a monstrous mansion with 26 rooms, a ballroom, 10 meeting rooms, a three-acre back lawn, and four offices. Corporal Liebermann was two years fresh out of training, but because his father was a Gestapo detective, he was given many exemptions as he quickly rose through the ranks. And he had taken advantage of his father’s pull as far as he could. He was allowed to turn down training to become a combatant SS soldier. Since he had studied arts and culture in the university, he was placed in charge of the Herrenhaus’s parties held for the Gestapo and other high officials on holiday. His expertise would assure the finest music, décor, and foods were served at the galas, especially when the Führer was to attend.

Karl was a tall, 20-year-old young man. His hair was thick and dark. His eyes animated and always smiling. He had thin lips, but the smile of an angel. He was beautiful man, to the point that his allure would have him mistaken for an officer. And he treated his prisoners with manners, short of full respect. That is, he would be humane to them as discreetly as possible.

He was given new prisoners at least once a month, twice if those he had were to underperform, became insubordinate and tried to escape, or became too ill to serve or perform. Yet, Karl’s prisoners were more than servants and cooks to him. He had more than 60 Jewish musicians, painters, sculptors, and other entertainers under his watch. It wasn’t so much their dignity he respected, rather their crafts. Some of their works were popular all over Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and The Netherlands. He knew that an artist’s morale was important to transcend the best possible harmony and art. It was important for their lives.

An SS soldier brought her in on August of 1941. “Here’s another rat for your house. We call her, whore number 9. Make sure she is bathed before you let her roam these corridors,” scoffed the soldier.

“Danke. You may go now, Private… Hansier,” Karl replied as he sneered at the young soldier.

She was blonde with glossy blue eyes, but eyes lacking life. She was tall and had started to thin out from the malnourishment she endured for the last two months. But she had elegance, different than the other Jew women Karl had seen.

Her beauty mesmerized Karl. He was perplexed that such a fragile creature had survived what she must have gone through. She could not be Jewish, maybe she was a French POW. He asked her in French, “Mademoiselle, Are you a dancer or musician?”  She did not respond. “Do you speak French?” This she understood. She picked up small phrases from her time detained with French women POWs. Women used to pleasure camp guards. She shook her head but kept her gaze through him. 

“Sprechen Sie deutsch,” he asked in his native tongue. 

She looked down and nodded. 

“Good! Are you a musician or a dancer?” 

Keeping her eyes to the floor, she shook her head. 

“That is fine. We will find you a talent here.” 

Anzeka’s eyes closed in surrender. 

Karl assured her, “No, no, a real talent.” 

She remained silent. 

He continued, “But first, we must wash you. I am sure you are covered in filth from being with the whores… I mean, the French and Poles they had you with before sending you here, meine Liebe.”

She raised her head again upon hearing his last words, but did not look at him. My love? It had been so long since she felt the meaning of the word; love. Even longer since she had heard it. She was again looking through him, but could not help furrowing her brow. Was this his way of making a mockery of her? Two months of imprisonment, two months against her will to live, two months of escaping her body and surrendering it to the enemy. She was now a bruised soul without a body, without a mind, without a heart to love.

Karl ordered two house servants to take Anzeka to be washed. As he watched her walk away and a warmth overcame his body...

To be continued... 

The Forbidden Dance - Adagio

     Anezka came to Ohrdruf on the fourth cattle car train from Kaschau a week before it was bombarded. The Hungarian police had assisted German soldiers in deporting its entire Jewish population of 12,000 in a matter of days. Her memories of her beloved town were now a dream far from the conditions she now faced and the life she would be forced to live. German soldiers raided neighborhoods searching for gold, paintings, anything of value that was unacceptable and undeserving for Jews to own.

She was separated from her mother and father before being prodded into the cart. She feared the worst for her father as he had already began falling ill right before the early morning ambush. Supervising police officials refused him to be treated before the deportation. He was most likely in the infirm cart…if he even made the trip. Her mother had been pulled from her hand as they entered the train station, disappearing into the mass. There was no one with her now; just her memories, a broken soul, and fear.

The trek seemed like a travel into another world, another lifetime away. In reality, it was only a five-day journey packed in a cart with 90 other prisoners. The other people in her cart, though recognizable townspeople, were now strangers of the same fate. Some she vaguely recognized from her childhood, others she would forget, as many would not survive the dark and frigid transport. Her face soiled in tears, Anzeka struggled to keep warm. The only garments she was able to grab before being hurried out of her home were the night clothes she had on when she was pulled from her bed, her mother’s house shoes that were too small for her wide feet, and her father’s white overcoat he wore when he was practicing medicine.

The smell was what affected her the most. Five days of suffocating in the middle of the cart with little air or light, five days of other persons’ body odor, five days of human urine and feces, five days of not knowing, five days of death. Her father being a doctor, had always instilled in her to have good hygiene, and her mother always kept a clean home. Anzeka was not used to such conditions. How much longer could she bare this filth? How much longer would she wonder about her parents? How much longer could she live through the agony?

When the doors slid open, the dawn’s rays flooded the cart and blinded the prisoners. The clammy morning air rushed their lungs, many coughing forcefully as their bodies remembered what it felt like to breathe.

“Everybody out, Now!” shouted a frail, thin man who entered the cart. His facial structure was defined deep into his skull, every bone and muscle identifiable on his thin face.

“Men to the right. Women, children, and the old to the left,” shouted another man. He was taller but equally thin. He stretched his arm out pulling on the coats of the prisoners as they hurried off the cart. His arm…it looked more like a tree limb on the last days of autumn. It was just there; lifeless and cold, flesh pulled on bone. Both men wearing striped shirts draped off their shoulders and pants many sizes too big.

Anzeka was finally pulled from the sea of bodies. She turned around looking for her mother, her father, any face she could find comfort in. Maybe she had been crammed in the same cart with her parents or a close friend and had not known. She was pushed towards the left with the other women and children. The cries screeched out as families members were once again torn apart. She looked around some more, hoping someone’s eyes would recognize hers. But they were all the same, distant and fearful. She was able to see the last prisoners exit the cart and then the two men begin to drag out the bodies of the old, weak, and of the dead.

She was filed into a line where the prisoners were to be evaluated. Heads turned in all directions looking for loved ones. Mothers and wives fell to the ground in cries for their husbands and sons.

Gunshots rang for those daring to escape the crowd. The lines moved fast. Anzeka saw she was not too far from the German soldiers in the front evaluating the new arrivals. As the prisoners were looked over, they were dragged in different directions. Some mothers were allowed to be with their children, others belting out mercy not to be separated. It was now her turn for selection. She found herself in front of a man with a white overcoat much like her father’s.

 

He was tall, dark haired, with a scholarly mannerism about him. He was dangerously handsome. How could it be that he could be part of this ugly army of murderers? She stood at attention looking through him. He smiled and whispered to another physician next to him who scribbled on his clipboard. “You are very beautiful for a Jewish girl,” he told her. “How old are you?” His voice was something harmonic. Soothing compared to the moans and screams she had endured for those five days, yet it sounded final.

Without making eye contact she replied, “15.”

He grinned at the SS officer next to him holding a rifle at the ready, “Put her in the F kommando.” He motioned his head to have her taken away. As the officer pulled her away the beautiful man yelled back, “Halt!” His body did an about face and he marched up to Anzeka, “Though you are an exceptional beauty of your species, my dear, you are still a dog. And dogs do not practice medicine. Take off that coat.” The officer ripped her father’s coat off her shoulders. She gave resistance but eventually was stripped of her father’s last embrace. It was the last thing she had to remember him by, the last piece of love from him that she owned.

She would later come to know this beautiful devil was the infamous Dr. Mengele, “The Angel of Death” himself. The officer clubbed her in the back of the head, threw the coat to the mud, and hauled her off to a truck full of other young women huddled in the back...

To be continued...