Lullaby in the Gas Chamber

Two images stay in my mind, as I think of the story.

First image—two men alone, whispering all throughout the night in a darkened train car rolling through Germany. One of the men, named Kurt Gerstein, is German, an engineer, and an SS officer.

Or was he? Certainly, yes—he rose to become Head of Technical Disinfection Services—the name some bureaucrat devised to describe the wholesale and systematic slaughter by gas of the Jews, gypsies, developmentally disabled, leftists, homosexuals. According to Wikipedia, on August 17, 1942, Gerstein witnessed the murder of 3,000 victims in Belzec; the next day he travelled to Treblinka, where he saw a massive pile of clothing and underwear.

But Gerstein has a backstory—as the kids now call it—that suggests he wasn’t completely an SS member. Like Ratzinger, Gerstein had a family member—in this case a sister-in-law—taken away and murdered by the Nazis under the euthanasia policy for the mentally ill. A devout member of a Protestant Evangelical group, the Confessing Church, Gerstein decided to join the SS to “see things from the inside,” try to change policy, and denounce privately what crimes were being committed.

And so by chance on August 20, 1942, a day after leaving Treblinka, he met on the train a Swede, though not just any Swede. Göran von Otter was a diplomat serving in Berlin at the time. As von Otter will write after the war, Gerstein was horrified by the mass gassing he had seen, and begged von Otter to get the news across to the Allies.

“Yeah, right,” you may be saying. “A convenient thing to be saying, as a war criminal after the atrocity had ended. How many similar songs were sung by greater—actually lesser—than he?”

But there’s every reason to believe it was true. Von Otter at any rate did tell his superiors, wrote a report, and waited for the action that never came. Gerstein also went to the Vatican, approaching people who were in contact with Pope Pius XII and describing the atrocities he had seen. He was met with similar silence and shrugs of the shoulder.

Whatever Gerstein whispered to the diplomat in that darkened train car, it haunted von Otter for years. Yes, he had written a letter defending Gerstein when he was being tried as a war criminal. But the letter had arrived too late to help; Gerstein had been found guilty, and chose to kill himself in prison days after the conviction.

Second image—a woman shepherding a group of children into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. While walking into the chambers, she sang them a lullaby she had written and sung often in Theresienstadt, where she had been a nurse in the children’s infirmary.

The woman, Ilse Weber, was a Jew, a writer, and a poet, as well as a musician and—it’s clear—a fine composer. In short, a very talented woman who finds herself among a very talented group of people.

Whether by chance or design, Theresienstadt had a large group of intellectuals, artists, musicians, and composers. My guess is that it was chance—all the musicians had their instruments confiscated on arrival. But the Red Cross, alerted to the situation, made a stink. So the Nazis—always keen to seize on a good public relations scheme—decided to give the instruments back, start up four orchestras and a theater group, and then film it all. A happy camp of smiling Jewish intellectuals and cultural figures—and look, here they are, playing Beethoven! Did I say “public relations,” a couple of sentences back? Sorry—propaganda.

And so Ilse, a German who had married a Czech and was living in Prague with her husband and two children, found herself in Thereseinstadt, though not before first sending one of her children to Sweden in the care of a diplomat (no—not von Otter; that only happens in the movies….) She had been interested in kids all her life—she had written a popular children’s book, so it was natural that she became a nurse in the infirmary.

Natural as well that she wrote a lullaby, which you can hear below. And then, her family already split once, she had to make a “Sophie’s choice.” Her husband would be sent to Auschwitz—she decided, yes, to go with him and bring the remaining son as well. The family would not be separated again.

She must have known, but she covered it up, she was strong for the children, she comforted them and sang the lullaby as the gas hissed through jets, filled the room, choked the kids, their eyes small ponds of terror and fear. She was bigger, had a slower metabolism, the gas would have taken longer to affect her than the children. She may have been there with the children dead all around her, still singing, still calming them, still lulling them to sleep. And then she would have died.

Her husband survived her by thirty years, reports Wikipedia.

“We must never forget,” says Anne Sofie von Otter, who is, as you will have guessed, the daughter of the diplomat, Göran von Otter, mentioned above. And it was after she had recorded the disc that she realized—it wasn’t just about no forgetting. She was paying a debt of her father’s, who had regretted never being able to help Gerstein on time.

Versatile, intelligent, always looking for the new and unexplored, Anne Sofie von Otter decided to record some of the music composed at Thereseinstadt, and was joined by other musicians, equally gifted.

In the end, it backfired—that little plan to give instruments and pen and paper to the musicians and composers of Thereseinstadt. Even today, the story inspires people to write music on the theme; the Oratorio Terezin, by Canadian composer Ruth Fazal had its first US performance in 2007.

When I started this post, I hadn’t yet checked out the story of Ilse Weber, so a third image hadn’t yet formed. Willi Weber, Ilse’s husband, standing and looking through chain link fence as his wife and child go to the gas chambers. She is singing her lullaby, or perhaps another song, the children are clustered around her, her small son is clasping her hand.

I had thought that Willi had the worst deal of all—better it would be to be Ilse. But many survivors of the camps reported that the experience taught them the value, the precious, unimaginable value of life.

Willi—I pray you had thirty years of life, not…

…thirty years of grief.