The Rabbit Girls

by Anna Ellory

  When she brings herself to open the envelope given to her by Lionel, she finds a small note and three pages of elaborate writing, large and legible, and the letters from the dress attached to each one.

  A small note on the front.

  I need to speak with you about the letters, please contact me.

  Eva

  Miriam puts it to one side and allows herself to be drawn into the world of the letters. A world in which he doesn’t exist.

  Henryk

  I have no pockets in my uniform. The fabric falls off my shoulders. I have nothing, yet I have everything. By luck or intent, I still have my ID card under the sole of my boots and the ring. I can feel the shape of it. A circle burned into the pad of my toe. I have the means of escape. I can leave this place. Now I am in, I can find my way out, find who I need to speak to to try and leave.

  I need to see the Kommandant while my features still resemble those on my card. Before I morph into the others. Before I become faceless. I need to find my way free, so I can find you.

  I keep my head low, following the cobbles, randomly aligned. If you don’t watch where you place your feet, it is easy to slip. I could feel the cobbles beneath the soles of my boots, I felt grounded. Where once many must have bled and died laying this path I am standing atop. Still breathing, still alive.

  The salt in the air reminds me of chasing Louisa across the beach, avoiding the waves, running as fast as I could, my shorter legs no match for her long ones. Hair streaming behind her. The fresh sea air, the lavender garlands we made together. The smell of her last summer.

  Here the salt air is tainted with the smell of people. This place was not designed to hold us all. The guards must be outnumbered one hundred to one, yet we do nothing.

  The ten-metre wall, the barbed wire, the inmates behaving like guards, the guards like dogs. Salt in the air, the taste on the skin. Fir trees and manicured lawns we saw on the way in.

  This is Ravensbrück.

  Miriam looks up from the paper and shivers, not from cold. The voice from the letters is haunting and she cannot help but wonder if this voice is coming from someone long dead.

  She takes the coffee table from the living room into her father’s room, bashing her knuckles on the door frame. She sets the letters down in order as the words repeat themselves unbidden and Miriam can hear the internal workings of this poor woman. She’s in Miriam’s head and there is nothing she can do about it.

  ‘She didn’t fight, there was no one for her to trust,’ she says to her father. ‘Should I have fought back?’

  The question feels heavy, a black stone in her stomach. ‘No one would believe me even if I did.’ The truth stings her eyes.

  She sees the image of the irate toddler in the pushchair and of herself pushing and pushing against something just as unyielding. Only not a pushchair, but a man, restraining her with arms and legs and worse. He held her with the force of what he could and would do to her if she broke free. And who would believe her if she spoke out? Who could she trust?

  We cannot trust anyone.

  ‘He’s back,’ she says.

  She picks up the next letter in sequence, it is in German, but so difficult to read, written around text in writing as light as dust, Miriam stops and starts, rereads sentences and tries to puzzle her way through it. And the thoughts that slice through the text drag her back to a reality she cannot bear to face.

  Henryk,

  The holding block was just a tent, its sides battered by wind and rain, blown open, its roof capsized and dripping water. We had no bowls, just two spoons. We placed our spoons under the drips and drank rainwater. Tiny spoons of rainwater. It took two long days to steal a bowl so we could eat.

  Everyone stealing and hurting and vicious, all looking for space. Our currency. Once you have space you don’t give it up.

  The soup is water, rarely vegetables or anything I can recognise. We get bread, which is like a pebble, and ‘coffee’ too. The soup and coffee are pretty much the same, although we are more accepting of there being bits in the soup than we are in the coffee. I mush the bread in my mouth then give it to Hani, her mouth is so sore and without teeth, she is still struggling to eat.

  I’ve been here a month. Today is my birthday: twenty-one. And yet I fear there may not be a twenty-two.

  The routine so familiar now I do not have to think, I pass through each day, my body moving to the beat of the camp. My mind and heart elsewhere. With you.

  I am almost there, transitioning into one of them. A walking zombie. I do not eat without a guard telling me to, I do not move, I do not rest or sleep or talk without a guard telling me to. I have no mind of my own.

  I miss you

  Love, Frieda.

  ‘Frieda!’ Miriam reads it again and moves closer to her father, picking up his hand and wiping her other gently across his face. She looks at her father’s thick, white hair, liver spots that freckle his face, his broad nose, thin lips. She studies him, drinking in the last of him.

  ‘Dad, can you hear me?’ She takes a deep breath. ‘These letters are from Frieda.’

  When he says nothing for a few minutes, she kisses the back of his hand ‘I’ll find out what happened to her for you, I promise,’ she says, and knowing this means reading the terrifying words makes her hands tremble, yet she continues. For him.

  HENRYK

  I left the apartment, I left Emilie there sobbing and raging at me and I went to Frieda. But every footstep judged me. I stopped on every corner. Should I go back? I turned, walked a few steps, then stopped again. For a wanted man, pacing the same street in a frenzy of indecision didn’t exactly make me inconspicuous.

  Emilie was right. I was married to her. She was in danger because of me already. Yet she stayed. She knew about Frieda and yet she stayed. The guilt was bile, raw acid, and it burned in my throat. Who was I? What kind of man does that to a wife he adores?

  And yet . . .

  I loved Frieda. In ways that I had never experienced before, and it was because I loved her as much as I did that I knew I couldn’t do this to her too.

  No more.

  Emilie was right. Frieda would be okay without me, better in fact. Much, much better. That thought made me panic. And the panic made me run, drawing yet more attention to myself. My heartbeat pushed me further, the wind soared in my ears, breath ragged and pulsing in my chest.

  I had to let Frieda go; she needed to be free from me. And then I would leave with Emilie. Try and do better for her, at least.

  Waiting for Frieda to open the door, I was cold and slick with nerves. This was the right thing. It was the right thing and the only way . . .

  Frieda opened the door, and the resolve to end things froze solid in my chest. And in that pause, Frieda greeted me with her lips on mine and then her hands, her fingers on my skin.

  She pulled me into the apartment and shut the door. And although my heart held an unwanted tick, and the knot in the pit of my stomach made me feel sick, the decision I had made only moments before seemed a distant echo.

  I left it all behind and melted into Frieda, willing to lose myself in her touch.

  ‘I missed you,’ she muttered, the rich cadence of her voice deepened. With her lips on mine, she pulled me on to the bed.

  MIRIAM

  In text that seems to be pressed harder into the page, Miriam reads:

  My boots were stolen today; with no boots, I have no ID, with no ID I am lost.

  She hurriedly finds the next letter and reads with as much speed as she can. She collects the magnifying glass from her mother’s sewing kit to try to ease the process. Axel fades, a paintbrush swirled out in water, and she focuses.

  She has found Frieda. Now all she needs to do is find what happened to her.

  Dear Henryk,

  The holding tent knows no peace. Hani and I lean head to head, her shoulder on mine, both leaning back into the fabric that grows warm from our touch.

  Hani asked me why I lied in the wagon when I s
aid I was Emilie and it made me think . . .

  Isn’t love simultaneously as violent, turbulent and wild as a storm and yet as fresh and calm as the sky in its wake? The kind of love we have makes us feel we can climb mountains or wrestle snakes, even though we cannot. Our love made us think we could take on the Nazis. I think our love has made fools of us. I am here . . .

  I looked around at the women, the noise and smell, the flap of the tent hitting an old woman just inside of it.

  Flap, whack, flap.

  . . . And you are not.

  Hani asked about you and I flattered in my portrait. I made you taller, broader, younger, because I could. I told of our love-at-first-sight romance, although it is not ours, it is your story, your history, how you met Emilie.

  Miriam swallows hard. The idea that this woman used Mum’s story, her parents’ love, and made it her own fills her with a deep revulsion.

  There is nothing else she can do but read on.

  Hani is one of nine children; she speaks Roma and her Dutch is basic.

  She said that no one was particularly pleased when she was born and since then she has, as she says, ‘Turned up, stayed put, stood up, shouted out and told the world that I am here.’

  The Nazis were not particularly pleased about this either.

  Her parents tried to marry her to a cousin when she was fourteen and he no older, but she left the family, went to school (hence the Dutch) and got a job. She had money and a room of her own, but never having slept in a bed alone, she found the cotton sheets cool and crisp on her skin. Coming from a family where there was always someone to share a mattress, Hani found living alone hard.

  She went home one day and her whole family had gone. Aunts, uncles, grandparents – everyone. She floated around with nowhere to go, got arrested and now she is here.

  She says, ‘I rather share my bed and know I am living than be alone and thinking I am always alone. I may as well be dead.’

  And I miss you. I miss you and the times we promised each other we would have. I have never woken up to you, nor have we spent the night together. Always snatched moments. I want the tiny things, the things that matter, the things that everyone takes for granted. I want those things, I want to not be alone.

  And now it is too late.

  I mushed the last of the day’s bread in my mouth and gave Hani the full amount, rather than swallowing a little myself.

  HENRYK

  A heaviness folded over me as I lay on Frieda’s bed in tangled sheets, she was draped over me like a blanket. Her soft breath tickled my neck, as I made waves with my fingertips over the back of her arm, illuminated in the half-light. She was becoming lean from sharing her rations with me.

  ‘If there could only be one, I choose you,’ I said.

  She opened her eyes, but when I turned to face her, her expression was dark.

  ‘You can’t choose me. I am not a choice,’ she whispered.

  ‘You are for me,’ I said, and kissed her on the forehead, clumsily, as she pulled her head away, her body still resting on mine.

  ‘No. You have Emilie.’

  ‘And I have you.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘There is no “but”, Frieda. I love you.’

  ‘You can’t choose me, Henryk.’ Her voice went quiet. ‘I am not enough.’

  I was about to counter that, but she placed a finger to my lips and then closed them with her own. The kiss was a practical solution to stop me responding, yet her lips shivered as they pressed into mine.

  I was covered, yet exposed, as the heaviness of her limbs rested upon me. I looked to the ceiling, pondering my fate, and as tears fell, great sobs joined them, wracking my entire chest open like a cleaver.

  Frieda sat up and drew me into her arms, she held me cradled into her naked body.

  ‘Henryk, what’s going on?’

  I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t find any words to explain that what was happening was breaking me. I had placed a sentence on us all. The bombs were getting closer and the weight of my guilt was like a mortar poised to fall over my head.

  Yet I couldn’t keep apart from Frieda, and by being there I was putting her at risk too. I didn’t know who I was anymore and the fracture inside me tore open as Frieda kissed my tears and brought her head to mine. I sobbed openly as she held me.

  She kissed my lips until our breath was shared and when she straddled her legs around me and drew me into her, I deepened our kiss, not wanting to be a singular being anymore.

  Moving on top of me, she didn’t let me go. She lifted my chin so I could see her. Her eyes so deep, I tried to turn away, not able to look into her beautiful face. To know I was causing such hurt, that soon it would all be over and it would be my fault.

  They were coming for me, and that meant her and Emilie too.

  I kissed her neck. ‘I’m handing myself in,’ I said, and it was a great weight that lifted. ‘I’ll hand myself in tomorrow. You and Emilie will be free.’ I drew her as close to me as I could. I couldn’t look up into her face, so I buried my head in her chest.

  Her heart beat angrily at me.

  ‘What did Emilie say?’

  ‘I haven’t told her. I didn’t know myself until I was kissing your neck.’

  ‘Then you go to Emilie, you pack a bag and you leave, just as she planned.’ She pushed a hand on my chest.

  ‘I can’t.’ Tears threatened again. ‘This way you are both safe.’

  ‘Safe? And what about you? You just said if there was only one—’ She shook the thought away. ‘But there isn’t, there are two. And there is you. It’s time you understood that we both love you. We need you to survive. You’re saying you’ll offer yourself up; that’s suicide!’

  ‘I can’t keep hurting you. Both of you.’

  ‘Look at me, my love. You are not hurting me. This is my choice as much as it is yours,’ she said gently. I turned my head back to her. ‘This isn’t something you have to take as yours alone. Hurting Emilie hurts you, therefore it is hurting me.’ She kissed me on the forehead. ‘What did you say on that bench at the Spree?’

  She drew my face up to her lips and kissed the tears as they fell. I nodded, the inaudible shrieking within me contained by Frieda’s heaviness surrounding me with her arms, her legs; her heart beat hard and I felt it in mine.

  And like a switch, an utter exhaustion dulled the ache in my body and I placed my hands on her thighs.

  ‘I said you were light,’ I mumbled as she moved her body over mine, pressing herself into me so that I was breathing through her too. Fully compressed by light itself. She pressed her mouth on mine to stifle the new sobs, the deep anguish that was crushing my chest.

  ‘Without darkness there is no light,’ she said in my ear.

  ‘But, Frieda, I am the darkness, look at—’ But she cut me off.

  ‘Give me a few days, Henryk.’ She said my name so that I felt it resound deep in my belly, lower.

  ‘A few days,’ I agreed.

  MIRIAM

  ‘Miriam.’ Her father’s voice punctuates the dark. She rouses herself, having dozed off curled up in the chair.

  ‘Miriam, I . . . you. Frieda,’ he says again and lifts his hand. She holds it and tries to wiggle her absent toes.

  ‘I . . .’ he starts. ‘I. Killed.’

  Her feet scream back into life, then tingle.

  ‘Frieda,’ he says.

  ‘Frieda? She is here in the letters,’ Miriam says.

  ‘I. Killed. Frieda,’ he says and deflates into a grief so raw it cannot be heard.

  15

  MIRIAM

  I killed Frieda.

  Miriam rocks on the spot.

  ‘No.’ A reflex response. It’s not true. It can’t be true.

  ‘Look, Dad.’ She places the letter on his chest. ‘It’s a letter, a letter from Frieda. It was hidden in the dress. She loved you. Dad, can you hear me? You didn’t kill anyone.’ But she looks at the page.

  How did the dress end u
p in Mum’s wardrobe? She reels back into the chair. She cannot make his statement untrue.

  Her father could never have killed anyone, not him. He was incapable.

  He collected spiders in cupped hands if one had crawled into the house. He protected it from Mum poised with book or shoe, and rehomed it.

  He spoke to wasps or bees and thanked them for taking time to visit. Her father could not even hurt someone, let alone kill them.

  She collects the letter from his chest.

  ‘It isn’t true,’ she says. The next letters, transcribed by Eva, will prove her right.

  Henryk,

  We have moved. We hoped to get a place in a block. There are so many women in the holding tent and the blocks are made from brick and stone, sheltered with a corrugated iron roof.

  My boots were taken in the holding tent. I was barefoot for two days, then we found some shoes on the body of one of the dead. Hani now has a pair of clogs that fit her feet and I have shoes again.

  Hani and I are in Block 15, but we did not have a bunk to start with. The wooden shelves attached to the wall were full of women. Six to a shelf. The sound of cat cries, calls, nightmares, shouts and taunts pulls and pushes. The shelves are stacked. There are three shelves up and eight across on each side of the block, A and B.

  When we arrived, there was no space for us so I talked to the Blockova, an old hardened prostitute. She hit me so hard my head reverberated against the side of a shelf and I was tossed into a small space in the centre of the bunk just behind the entrance. I came around to find myself in a toilet, a small sink, Hani behind me, and a mirror in front of me.

  In this toilet cubicle, above the toilet, are makeshift shelves. The shelves women have created; they look sturdier than the others. There seems to be space here too. We found out that they have ‘lost’ two women in the last few days and we sit and take in this wonderful sight, three shelves and now six people.

  For we have been welcomed. Without question.

  A large lady, in voice and spirit, helped mop the gash on my head and I saw my reflection for the first time.