PLAYING FOR THE COMMANDANT

A Jewish girl sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau lives because of the whims of a sadistic camp commandant.

Even in the squalor of the 1944 Hungarian ghetto, Hanna Mendel has hope for her promised place at the Budapest Conservatorium of Music, until the Nazis order the ghetto’s Jews onto cattle cars. As her journey progresses, Hanna systematically loses everything: her home and piano, cleanliness, preciously hoarded sheet music, her father at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and her clothes and hair—even her name—as she’s processed into the camp. Chance leads Hanna to a terrible hope, for the camp’s commandant seeks a pianist. Like all the commandant’s personal slaves, her life is only minimally improved. Though she doesn’t work at hard labor, she starves just as harshly as any prisoner. The commandant’s sulky son, who helps sneak tiny scraps of food into the camp, appeals to Hanna much more than the diseased, wretched Jewish boys. Except for the infelicitously handled romance, Hanna’s story is reminiscent of such classics as Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat (1981). If anything, Hanna’s tale isn’t brutal enough—her starvation has few physical implications, for instance, and she’s blithely ignorant until war’s end of what’s burned in the camp ovens or the fate of Dr. Mengele’s twins.

With fewer living Holocaust survivors each year, it’s increasingly important to tell their story, and this is one, however soft-pedaled