I Was Watching Bach in Auschwitz

and waiting to see if the phone would ring letting me know about a job about which I had been contacted, drifting in and out of sleep, hearing words in German I mostly didn't understand, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, but certain words would make it through the scrim of consciousness, like Gaskammer or the German word for Crematorium which sounds the same (is it spelled the same?) and then i'd half wake up and stare and it was filling me with the usual insanity of life, the usual inscrutability of the assignment of strength, the way these old women who played classical music (German or Austrian only, on orders) while the convoys constantly coming in were sorted, while people were led off to the Crematorium making comments on the music they heard...were so different in their strength or lack of it...here's one who had put it thoroughly behind her and here's one who was shattered, still having nightmares after more than half a century (this documentary is 1999) and whose eyes were still panicked even as she walked a path in empty forest holding someone's hand...and i just went into the nightmare of half-sleep which is not a good place to go...and at the end there they are, back at Auschwitz, bickering about who slept where in a room that no longer exists, because it is important where they lay the roses they hold...but one says left and the other insists right and who do you trust, the shattered one or the one who's concerned with moving on to lunch and telling the other old woman she's just being senile, drop the rose here...