A Woman of War

by Mandy Robotham

  ‘Out! Out! Quick!’ the men growled, while we stared wide-eyed at the women who were holding back the dogs, canine teeth large and looming in the gloom, spittle foaming against the pull of their leashes. On the other end of the leads, the women faded into the background almost, the crisp lines of their grey uniforms and hats only just visible. Their faces were granite but the shoulders jerked with the dogs’ strength. They made a play at restraining and then seeming to let the dogs leap forward in turns, the snarls jibbing at our space.

  Graunia and I stayed close to one another, shuffled onto a rough concrete ramp. They poked us into lines of ten, and it became apparent that more than a hundred women had been in that one carriage.

  ‘What a shoddy lot they are,’ one guard laughed. ‘I wouldn’t give any of them the time of day back home.’

  ‘Yeah, but at least they’re not Jews, or prostitutes,’ another said, and their cackles were as filthy as I felt. Marching off the slope, there was gravel underfoot, the tincture of the salt mixing with a strange, singed taste in the air. I couldn’t hear the sea and something in me sensed we weren’t at Germany’s coastal edge. But I might have been deaf, dumb and blind for all the sensory clues misfiring inside me.

  Our feet crunched for what felt like an age, made longer by having to help along the weaker among us. The woman with the dead eyes and the other with twig-like legs needed two shoulders apiece for support, which the guards tolerated with cruel cajoling, the women without dogs prodding with long, heavy coshes strapped around their wrists.

  ‘Come on, no stragglers,’ they crowed. ‘You’ve got to be fit to be here; you’ve got to hold your own. Be something to the Reich.’

  Large, iron gates swung open and we were halted in an open space, made square by the boundaries of the huts, while underfoot it was a finer, slate grit. Faint lights came from one or two windows in each hut, and I glimpsed faces bobbing behind the small panes. The guards surrounded us, barking orders to ‘Stand straight,’ ‘Heads up,’ the women circling with the dogs, wolves tenderising their prey.

  After an age standing, the cold seeped into the core of my bones and I felt them physically splinter inside me. Then, a numbness that was almost a relief. I couldn’t remember a time, even in the last two weeks, when I had been so cold. Had it not been for that stranger’s jacket, I felt sure I would have succumbed there and then.

  The woman with twigs for legs was the first to fall. Her body made a gentle thud as it dropped and the guards were immediately on her. The woman next to her bent to help as a reflex, and was pushed back by rifle butts. ‘Leave her!’ they barked.

  ‘Fucking weakling,’ one shouted at her unconscious body, stabbing at her midriff with his bayonet. When she didn’t even whimper, they hauled her up roughly, her head lolling as if she were dead. I glanced briefly at one of the female guards, and I saw a wry smile creep across her lips, ruby with fake colouring. Was she wearing lipstick? Adornment and vanity in this utter madness? Or was it my mind playing cruel tricks?

  The tiny woman was dragged away to a small, brick building, her legs making tracks in the gravel, the soles of her feet pinker where the arches hadn’t been infected yet by the grime. Maybe they stayed that shellfish pink. I never saw her again. Plenty of twig-like limbs in the months ahead, but none belonging to her.

  It was dark by the time we were formally addressed, snowflakes dancing and settling, making us a job lot of brides-in-waiting. A woman emerged from a solid three-storey building, its windows brightly lit, revealing bodies moving with purpose. Her uniform was the same grey, and as she came closer to the square I noticed her skirt didn’t part as she walked – like the others, she was wearing thick, woollen culottes. On her upper arms, her jacket sported several lines of embroidered red and silver diamonds. Heaven knows why I paid attention to such detail, as if my mind was searching for anything in this sea of drear, like a blind person seeking a sliver of light to create sense.

  She stood before us, grey hair swept under her small cap, stockings smooth against toned calves. When she spoke, her voice was that of a kindergarten teacher, matriarchal yet capable of being kind, hugging a needy child who’d bumped their head. As she raised her hand, thrust it towards us and barked: ‘Heil Hitler,’ the image popped like a fragile bubble.

  ‘You have been brought here for a number of reasons,’ she began. ‘Whatever they are, you are no friend of the Reich or our glorious leader, and do not deserve your liberty. You will therefore contribute to society, with our guidance. Ravensbrück is a work facility, with an emphasis on work. Those who cannot labour will be directed elsewhere.’ It was clear that ‘elsewhere’ was not preferable.

  Her eyes panned right to left, pausing for effect. ‘If you abide by our rules, if you work hard, you will be treated fairly. But discipline is vital. We will not tolerate any dissidence – punishments will be severe, that is my promise.’

  Her voice moved up the register, something of an ‘all girls together’ tone, but what she said next was pure ice. ‘Ladies, this is no holiday camp. Make no mistake, you will give back to the Reich. Or face the consequences.’

  I felt eyes swivel in the rows, women terrified to move heads but desperate to gauge reactions. Suddenly, I was eighteen again, when Matron Reinhardt had addressed us on our first day as trainee nurses; bewildered, expectant, scared. Only then, there had been light, the brightness of our snowy cotton uniforms, the barely suppressed giggles, the hopes we held inside of improvement, of moving on. Here, there was just abject gloom. The gates clanged shut behind us and I couldn’t see any way out or through this mire.

  33

  Empty Space

  The next days were a patchwork of empty hours, punctuated with spurts of activity. Dieter was absent for several days, but the disappointment was in myself, already missing the night-time curl of his limbs around mine. Wary of any physical touch within the walls of the Berghof, he had simply winked goodbye: ‘I’ll be back – soon.’

  Lena and I spent her free hours working on the dress for her dance, which was perhaps the longest time I had stayed in the house, since the servants’ quarters had the biggest table for cutting material. Frau Grunders ghosted in and out, wearing a variety of disapproving looks, although I caught a wry smile glancing across her lips as Lena twirled during a fitting. It was gone in a second. Was she ever that girl, young and carefree, with butterflies in her heart, before the mask of loyalty took hold? Before her passion for the Führer?

  ‘Lena, remember the dining room needs clearing,’ she said as she clipped out again.

  I spent some time alone in deep thought about Papa, mentally boxing him away into parts of me no one could ever reach – not the Reich, the Gestapo, this war, or Hitler himself. They were mine. With no prospect of a body or a burial, I did the only thing I had in my power and wrote him a letter. It was long and sometimes rambling, my pain bleeding out through the pen, mixed with fat tears that spilled over, making the paper wet and fibrous. The page looked war-torn itself, warped and smudged as I folded it and walked towards the gardens. A fire burned continually in the brazier, low flames crackling and popping at stray ferns and garden waste, carcasses from the kitchen kicking up tiny limbs. I hovered the letter over the glow and released it from my fingers.

  ‘Goodbye, Papa,’ I said, and watched the paper crimp, blacken and die, the ashes floating into the breeze, skywards.

  The calm was interrupted by a visit from the good doctors, who professed to be ‘concerned’ at the preparations made so far. Facing me in Sergeant Meier’s office, Dr Koenig sat while Dr Langer stood, arms folded as they took turns grilling me over what action I would take over in a variety of scenarios – a long labour, shoulders that were stuck, a compromised baby. They had a long list.

  ‘Have you delivered many babies by the breech?’ Dr Langer pitched in, mouth pursed, adding to the weaselled nature of his whole being.

  ‘I have,’ I said. ‘Both at home and in the hospital. I find they rarely need help if you leave t
hem well alone. But I’m quite confident Fräulein Braun’s baby is not breech.’

  I smiled inside as they exchanged dark looks. It was a bonus to be irritating these two heinous individuals, without the need for obvious dissent. The interrogation lasted half an hour, with my answers short, clinical and to the point. Dr Koenig sweated frustration.

  ‘I will, of course, share my concerns with Fräulein Braun this afternoon,’ he puffed. ‘I make no secret that this arrangement is not, in my professional opinion, the safest and the most appropriate for such a lady of the Reich.’

  He paused and waited for an answer.

  ‘I’m sure she will receive you and listen to your concerns,’ I said flatly. ‘If there is any change in requirements, I will, of course, respect the mistress’s choices.’

  Tiny blood vessels seemed to pop in Dr Koenig’s fat cheeks, and I could virtually hear his blood pressure hissing like a pressure cooker. Dr Langer, by contrast, did nothing but look intently at my face, unblinking. It was my turn to squirm inside, at the depth of his jet-black stare, and the darkest thoughts behind it. The blustering, pompous Koenig was a parody of himself, but Dr Langer was simply dangerous – a willing butcher – and I made a mental note to remember it well.

  Later, I learned from Eva that she had feigned tiredness and postponed Dr Koenig’s visit until his next trip to the Berghof, and I had to stifle a smile at the thought of the great man being sent away with a flea in the ear of his overinflated head.

  Sewing Room, The Camp, North of Berlin, November 1942

  The noise of the sewing room was ear-splitting when production was at its peak, a combined dancing of a hundred or so machine wheels creating a blanket roar across the hut. Oddly, the intense sound afforded a little cloak of privacy as the noise wrapped around each woman sat hunched over her table, an automaton as regards the task but jealously guarding thoughts as her own.

  The eight months in the camp had variously dragged and raced by; cruelly, the warmer months had flashed forward, to be replaced by freezing nights when we huddled together in the huts, the one blanket we were each afforded too thin to repel the cutting chill, cocooning our bodies, three at a time, in the bunks. My precious tweed jacket, donated by a fellow inmate back in Berlin, had been confiscated on arrival, along with our clothes and all bodily hair, razed in an instant and scalps scorched with boiling hot water as part of our cleansing. I hadn’t seen a mirror since. Nor did I want to. The crust on my head felt ugly to the touch, and my body itched with patches of raw, broken skin. And that was before the lice came to stay.

  Graunia and I managed to stay together in the same hut, although were separated by work divisions. After that first bewildering night on the floor of a block building, then being shorn and clad in regulation dresses of coarse wool, we were interviewed for our various skills.

  ‘Tell them, tell them what you do,’ Graunia urged in a whisper. I couldn’t imagine there was any need for a midwife and – with Papa’s advice still holding strong – I didn’t want to attract attention. I stretched the truth and told them I could sew, hoping my limited experience at my grandmother’s old hand-cranked machine and in stitching perinea would allow me to bluff it out. Graunia’s writing skills secured her a position in the office, drafting letters and transcribing, with her knowledge of Polish and Russian.

  My gamble worked, as the sewing was by rote and involved no real skill beyond a steady hand and ability to follow instructions. And work fast. The overseer in this workshop was a civilian, from a factory somewhere in a former life, where he’d no doubt scolded poor housewives to keep up their quotas, using money – or the promise of it – as his cosh. Here, Herr Roehm was happy to use the real thing, prodding us in the back with his long, polished rod when we attempted to stretch our sore shoulders, hitting bone when the work was shoddy, or the machines clogged with thread, as they frequently did.

  ‘What do you call this?’ he screamed, when he called a halt to the whole hut, flashing the lights on and off as our signal to quit. He held up the grey-green uniforms of the Wehrmacht we sewed, day in, day out. ‘If I put this on I would be the laughing stock of any invading army. Look at this seam. It’s shit. You are all shit. Do better.’ His face, a round, pink pudding, pulsed with anger.

  One woman’s punishment was always shared and Herr Roehm regularly allotted the whole room another hour of work, knowing we would miss the arrival of the soup pot in the hut. Graunia would campaign to save my meagre portion of soup – greasy water with thin slivers of cabbage – but there were those so hungry that she would have to work to keep my cup safe, let alone warm. The one square of bread would be stale anyway, dense and with the texture of sawdust, but a tasteless lifeline.

  Had I adapted? I suppose I had, as much as you can sink to a life so low. In that first week I functioned in a daze; every one thing, comfort or person I’d known gobbled up overnight and spat out in an oily ball of phlegm that was this life. The newcomers were either shoved, pushed, or piloted by kind camp veterans. You got through or you fell, simple as that. As a midwife I had learnt that women were resilient beyond imagination, and in those next weeks I saw for myself how humans can and will cling on to dignity and life in equal measure.

  Hunger was a constant companion; my own mother wouldn’t have recognised the scant flesh on my willowy frame, with only my lower arms maintaining any kind of wiry definition, from the constant pressure of pushing fabric through the machine. Even without a mirror, I didn’t recognise the contours in my own face, my cheeks so sallow I must have looked as if my neck might snap from the effort of holding up my bulbous head.

  The camp itself was run efficiently. It was filthy, disease-ridden and a haven for death, but it functioned like clockwork and dished out punishment with vicious regularity. Officially, it was commanded by male SS, but in reality the female guards kept order and thrived as overseers. They presented the appearance of a tailored, coiffured and painted posse, having bizarrely set up a small hairdressing salon on site, where prisoners teased their locks into the latest styles. When they weren’t goading the dogs to snarl at us, they lavished untold affection on their ‘babies’, grooming their fur and slipping them treats of meat that we could only dream of. Each of them could have given the male SS officers lessons in cruelty, as if concrete had been stitched into that grey uniform.

  Beatings were common, vicious and visible, the punishment block often overcrowded, and death a part of daily life. Days when the body cart didn’t leave for the lakeshore were rare, bloody feet poking through a thin shroud, although Graunia told us that – officially – the death certificates only ever gave a cause of heart failure or pneumonia. I only hoped they were buried in peace, instead of a thousand souls bobbing for all eternity around the mud-laden waters.

  I kept my head down, sewing at a rate of knots, and took solace from the company of Graunia and several others in the hut. There were eighty or so in our barrack, a human mosaic of cultures and creeds: German, Hungarian, German Poles and Czechs, but no Jews. Our unity came in that we were anti-Nazi, some Communist, some Social Democrat, and so by definition all failed patriots. We called ourselves The Pests and took pride in it.

  The rest of the camp was a lesson in how to divide and rule. Jews, prostitutes, native Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses – all deemed ‘undesirables’ – each had their own hut or huts, depending on the numbers, and the guards took pleasure in pitching the groups against each other. It would be heartening to think that women forced together in adversity would band as one, all looking out for each other, the strong supporting the weak. But human nature isn’t like that. Survival, I learned swiftly, is the most basic of human instincts, and the Nazis’ strongest weapon was that they knew it. They used it.

  Reissen, the chief overseer, was shrewd. She took time in recruiting prisoners as enforcers – or Kapos – to act as hut leaders, giving them titbits of privilege to make life more bearable, and a smidgen of power to exert over women in the hut, in return for information on d
issidence. They were also called on to do the guards’ dirty work for them. Some women, those who doubtless thought they had no morality left to lose, worked in the punishment block and dished out the beatings personally. The lust for life – your own life – is a powerful motivator.

  Because I kept myself under the radar, I was never singled out. Instead, I formed a tight trio with Graunia and Kirsten, a Czech-born German whose crime had been slipping Jews onto trade ships out of Germany. Together, we pooled food, stories, wishes and dreams. We kept each other alive. Each night, before lights out, we linked hands and whispered: ‘Another day gone, another day alive, another day towards freedom.’ It reminded me of the words I said almost daily at the hospital, to mothers who felt they would never reach journey’s end: ‘One contraction less, one closer to seeing your baby.’ Each day, that life seemed further and further behind me, like sand through my fingers.

  Until Leah. The industry in the sewing room that day was frenetic, with Herr Roehm even more ferocious than normal, due to an urgent order from the Reich’s upper office. There was a reward of a new Mercedes-Benz as a thank you for his ‘loyalty’ – Graunia told us as much when she typed the letter from Roehm, assuring the Reich office it would be ready on time, ‘whatever it takes’.

  That day, two women had already fainted from dehydration, and a snowstorm of fabric motes clogged the air as the cutters worked at full capacity. I had time only to concentrate on not catching my fingers under the machine needle, which was jumping at breakneck speed. The noise was endless and cacophonous.

  Leah was working two machines over from me. I had glimpsed her that morning walking into the room at six a.m., stooping slightly, with a hand clutching at her belly. Monthly bleeds were rare among prisoners but urine infections were common, causing intense bladder pain. I had flashed a look at her as we’d entered, bringing up my brow, as if to say ‘All right?’ She had smiled weakly, but didn’t nod. She was small and slight, and I hoped she would make it through the day. Graunia had told us the entire shipment was to be on the train by ten that night.