Free Auschwitz Violin by Maria Anglada

and waved his baton: before it could strike, the prisoners smiled. If you could call it a smile: their lips separated, their fear-stricken eyes wide open. While the prisoners staved off the blows by means of the bitter simulacrum of a smile, the girl photographed them from various angles.
    “All right, clothes off,” the prisoners were told, as the photographer and man laughed and pointed to their starveling bodies. Silently, the prisoners put on their old clothes again. They had escaped punishment, but they hadn’t gained any warmer clothes. Wearing the same tattered garments, the same old clogs, Daniel returned to his shop. It was an effort. His hands shook from nerves and the humiliation of having to smile for the enemy. He was young and still possessed a certain will to live, but he wasn’t sure how long he would last under such conditions.
    As he was preparing to start work again, the guard on duty surprised him by walking over to his bench and offering him the rest of his beer. Daniel guessed that the guard considered the photographer and official his enemies too, and had found the whole bit with the pictures disgusting. Daniel drank eagerly, thanked the guard, and shook his hand two or three times.
    The trembling finally stopped, and his thoughts returned to the violin. On the previous days he had finished the ribs and the back; now with a tiny hammer he was beginning to strike, one by one, the minute clamping blocks affixed to the mold. Because he had been careful to use only two drops of luthier glue per block, it didn’t take him long to remove the clamps. That ease compensated a bit for the repulsive photographs. He took a deep breath and was filled with satisfaction as he cradled the perfectly shaped object in his hands. He had taken no chances with any of the pieces. The exterior measurements were exact, the same as always. He knew them by heart but checked them again: 355 millimeters long, the breasts (as he called them) 165, waist 115, thighs 205. He couldn’t refrain from caressing the instrument he had come to love, the violin that might save his life if he managed to finish all the remaining work: the purfling, the scroll, the pegbox, the sound post … so many things. Most important, he had to find the proper varnish, all of this before he could assemble the violin.
    A tremendous amount of work had to be accomplished before that moment would arrive. He was almost sorry when the siren sounded, for this meant he couldn’t begin work on the C ribs. He couldn’t risk skipping the meal, however, or doing anything else that would attract attention. It could well be that a fellow worker envied him those two sips of beer! To cheer himself up, he thought about Freund. Then about Bronislaw, who had probably spent all morning cutting turnips and washing pots with hands so delicate they could make a violin sing, hands that one day would move across the finger-board of the instrument Daniel had crafted at the lager . He should be thinking about the musician, not the Commander, who didn’t deserve the violin. With this thought in mind, Daniel discovered that his soup tasted better than usual, and he good-naturedly accepted the inmates’ jokes about his makeup. He’d completely forgotten about it! He’d have time to remove it that night; it was his turn for a shower. Right now he had to think about lunch.
    As often happened at that time of day, Daniel began to recall the meals his mother had cooked for him. The longer he stayed in the camp, the more his mother’s image was superimposed on the blurred vision of Eva. His mother and his niece Regina. He remembered walking up the stairs from his workshop, smelling the food, guessing by the aroma what he would be served for lunch: soup with noodles, thick soup, sometimes noodles with chopped walnuts. The table well set, the cheese platter placed to the side on the days that meat was served, following the ritual of separating meat from dairy products. All of that,