A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [53]
Biedermann had to start life again. Like many survivors, he had lost everything he had known, and because he was a true survivor, he understood that to keep going he had to begin a new life as quickly as possible. He married Evelyne, a nurse who had looked after his wife in the camp and been with her when she died in Sweden. Evelyne also needed to begin a new life. Her entire family was dead. When her father was deported to Auschwitz, he had confidently boarded the freight car they were being stuffed into, saying, “Pve never been afraid of good, hard manual labor.” When Evelyne returned to Amsterdam she found that her father's millinery business was still in the hands of the elderly man, a member of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, who had been given the business through the “Aryanization” program. As a known Nazi, the man was convicted, ordered to pay damages, and sentenced to prison. But he was 87 and too ill to serve out his term. In 1947 he died without having paid back anything.
But she and Sieg now had their marriage and the millinery business., and life could begin again.
IN AUGUST 1944, when the Red Army entered Bucharest, four Russians tore into a night club thai Germans were known to frequent. Most of the Germans had left, but the Russians grabbed the piano player. He was a small thin man in his midthirties who spoke both German and Romanian, with an accent. He had been popular with the Germans, picking out tunes on the keyboard while booted Germans stood around him staring tearfully at the ceiling, singing, “… wie einst Lili Marleen,” or whatever else they wanted to hear. If you could give him a few bars, he could play the song.
As the Russians pulled this collaborator piano player out of the club, he shouted to them in awkward Russian. They didn't really understand him, and it didn't matter to them—these Romanians were going to pay for their Nazi alliance. But the wiry piano player wrestled one arm free and called out in German, “aus das Ledger/”—something about “escaping camp.” He cried, “Auschwitz!” and held out a bony forearm belly up, so they could see the numbers tattooed on it.
His name was Mauritz Auerhaan, from a diamond-polishing family on a small street off the Jodenbreestraat, the crowded old Jewish section of Amsterdam. He had spent two years in Auschwitz and was then shipped to Birkenau, the death factory down the road. One day he found himself in a group of prisoners who were being marched past the tracks, past the crematoriums, past the fields where they dumped the ashes, and into a woods of tall straight Polish pines. He started to hear the pop of the German weapons and saw prisoners down the line falling—and he ran. Struggling through Eastern Europe at the height of the war, he managed to survive from place to place, working at odd jobs, looking for people who would help him, running from people who would turn him in. He worked for Poles, Russians, Germans, Ukrainians, and Romanians, always hiding the telltale tattoo on the inside of his arm. Eventually, he had found safety as a club pianist in Bucharest.
When he returned to Amsterdam and got his pack of cigarettes and his ten guilders, he found little sympathy for camp survivors among the general population. The people in the Netherlands felt that they had suffered tremendously during the hunger winter. They were and have remained full of tales of deprivation—eating pets to survive, burning their furniture to try to stay warm, suffering through a terrible diphtheria epidemic just before the Liberation. They did not regard the suffering of these gaunt sickly people — some still in striped clothes—as anything