by Anna Ellory
Is Eva right not to trust anyone? When Miriam herself believed her parents always told her the truth, now the lie bleeds into every memory she has. Who were the people before she called them Mum and Dad, and who was Frieda to them?
The ‘rabbit girls’ are all in pieces. Their legs operated on.
Wanda has a scar through both her legs from inner ankle up to knee.
Eugenia has a deep scar, a loss of a lot of flesh taken from her left leg.
Both their legs have healed.
Bunny, however . . . the sweet smell of rotting flesh is strong, it is the heart of our bunk. She covers her legs with a blanket. Her legs have not healed from whatever they did to them. She will never walk again; she doesn’t have enough bone left in her legs to stand.
None of them talk about what happened, aside from Eugenia, who whispers in hurried urgency. Her stories make my blood run cold, even now, putting her words to paper, a spike of fear runs along my skin.
Operations without consent, waking in agony, shards of glass in their legs, broken bones, the smell and then the infection.
On Eugenia’s round, only she and another woman, Katya, survived – all six other women succumbed to the infection forced into their skin, bone and blood supply. Many died on the operating table.
They couldn’t move – restrained in the bed, with legs not their own. No water, no painkillers. They lay there and prayed for death.
Katya survived. A drunken doctor stitched up her legs and she was released back into the main camp. Four months later she was ‘chosen’ and killed. Her legs were proof that they had used her as a human guinea pig. Many of the other ‘rabbits’ who survived have suffered the same fate.
On Eugenia’s release, she found the broken space in Block 15 and made a small bunk from the wood found in the upper loft space where other ‘rabbit girls’ were hiding. The women pretended not to see the rabbit girls, they are like the forgotten war-wounded; left alone to tenderly lick their wounds.
Yet the guards are always looking to smoke them out.
The broken bunks, our space, is their sanctuary, and the camp women have kept the rabbit girls a secret. It’s one of the only times, Eugenia says with pride, that the women have stood united against the guards.
Fear, Eugenia thinks. It is fear that keeps their secret. Because the women know that so random was the selection for the experiments, it could so easily be them.
Eugenia kept her leg clean by using water from the sink, which has now dried up. She escaped knowledge and detection. Soon other rabbits joined her, although many died. Eugenia went back in to rescue Wanda and Bunny, and Stella joined their group the following day.
The guards want ‘the rabbit girls’. They want to destroy the evidence.
Tomorrow I will hand them in. Three lives for the price of my release.
Wanda.
Eugenia.
Bunny.
And what will happen to Stella without Bunny?
I am awake, not fearing tomorrow, but I am doing what I have fought against all my life. One life is worth more than another. My life matters more. Because of this I can barter my life for theirs. A position of advantage. I am no better than the guards who kill with batons and guns. I am no longer Frieda. I am superior.
I will stand on those who have shown me kindness. I will stomp on them to leave. I think of my empty stomach, my own pain and I know the Nazis have won a war, whether in victory or not, they have won the war over humanity. Turning everyone against each other.
Eight weeks is all it takes.
Can you forgive me?
Can I forgive myself?
A disgust so deep pulls Miriam away from the letter, she feels tainted by it. By its roughness and an honesty that scares her. She looks at the remaining letters and considers burning every single page, every word removed in flame and smoke. Imagines the match scratching a flame into the air, taking each letter in the corner, flames igniting the paper into life. To eradicate the past, the present so almost at its end. Then the thought of her teetering on the side of the bath comes into focus, the cool bath under bare toes, and what she had considered doing to escape Axel. If anyone had given her an opportunity, or the means to leave . . . would she not have taken it, also?
Instead of setting them alight, she thinks of her father’s words, ‘I killed Frieda.’ And she knows no matter how difficult, she will see this through. She must, so he can rest in peace.
18
HENRYK
To look back is to relive.
To relive is to die a thousand deaths again. I barely survived it once. I would get lost in the labyrinth of black eyes and a loss of humanity that so startled me. We were nothing but animals, and within the barbed-wire walls, surrounded by the weakest mankind has made, we were slaves. Not to them, but to ourselves. Slaves for survival. Slaves to the next mouthful of food. We would kill for bread, all of us. He who fights hardest and longest wins.
I was covered in lice, watching them crawl along my skin. Did Frieda fight back, pick them off, shake them away, scratch? Or did she resign herself to their torture like I did?
I did what I had to do to survive, I tell myself that, but I know that I would rather have died than become who I became.
That is why I didn’t go back. That is why I am paralysed. I cannot think that Frieda would have done the same, I cannot know if she was so compromised.
Even though I smiled, I laughed and I enjoyed my life, I was also hollow. She holds something that cannot be returned, only shared.
For a time, I willed the memoirs, maps and reports to tell me she was shot in the back of the head, perhaps. Even though the crevice that opened for me at the thought was black and red and cindered as if on fire, it was peaceful.
And it meant that Emilie never lied to me.
It meant it was over. But I fear the opposite was true.
Emilie did not know the horrors that existed within me; she did not want to hear, she chose not to look and I cherished her the more for that.
Auschwitz was like a cancer: it ate and changed everything into one thick, black mass. An abyss.
Emilie found me in the hospital and I returned to her side. We had been married nine years, she took me back after the camp was liberated when she did not have to.
As a husband, I did not recognise myself. As a man, I was lost. Nine months was all it took.
After six months in hospital, I returned to the small room Emilie called home. As one of the very few married couples who had both survived the Nazi regime we were considered fortunate and many women in the large building we inhabited visited us. I remember nothing but an endless sea of women at the door and my wife at my side. For months I was, apparently, inert. I did not move unless told, eat or speak unless I had to.
Emilie told me many times that she thought about leaving me in that room. So deeply absorbed in my own trauma I had no ability to do anything when everything needed to be done. Emilie stayed because she had made a promise to, she always said. ‘I promised to stand by you, Henryk, even though I would leave you ten times over if I could.’ My wife never minced her words, but even in their harsh reality I was lost.
So, am I a weak man?
Yes. Of course I am. I am weak because I am strong, because I took from those weaker, when in every other circumstance, I would never have done so. I am weak because in giving Frieda myself I gave her a promise that never needed words: I promised that I would love her, and although I have, I have done so only in private, in words of my own heart.
Maybe I should have tried to find her sooner. Maybe I couldn’t really have loved her, because if I had I’d have gone back for her. Tried, even. Looked and turned over every stone to find the woman I loved. Maybe. But life is not a love story, it is not a fairy tale.
There are no happy endings.
MIRIAM
Leaving the apartment later than she intends, she hurries past shops belching out people, bags in hand and full of laughter. Miriam looks at their faces, sca
ns each one. Checking none of them are him.
The tomorrow of his note has arrived and she doesn’t know when or how she will see him, but she knows she will.
After shaking herself dry in the medical centre, she finds conference room seven from Hilda’s directions. The sign is black, it has peeled away at the corners. She represses the desire to pick at the tip of the ‘7’ as she stands facing the white door, hearing voices within.
‘Excuse me.’ A woman, glasses around her neck and a pad of paper in her hand, moves past her and opens the door, which propels Miriam forward. The chatter and the humidity roll over her as the door closes her in.
She is greeted with the eyes of everyone in the room. Everyone except the man pouring the coffee, the man with his back to her.
The man in his best shirt. He turns.
‘Morning, Mim. Coffee?’ He holds the pot up.
She backs away and knocks into the wall.
He puts the coffee down.
He’s here and she cannot run.
She is stuck. Frozen.
But she is also back: all the way back to a month ago; before she had left; before her father was dying; before the dress; before Eva.
‘Oh, sweetheart. I have been so worried.’ Everyone around the table is looking at him.
Miriam looks at him too. He is clean-shaven and wearing a shirt and suit trousers.
He is also in jeans and a sweater, casually leaning against the fridge, telling her that she couldn’t go. That he wouldn’t let her go to her father. That she was his and his alone. That she couldn’t abandon him as his mother had done. Leaving meant she couldn’t love him.
She says nothing and no one in the room moves to her aid.
She can hear the mechanical whirr of the fridge, his words sharp and pointed. No. She feels the cotton of her dress against her legs, her toes on the cool linoleum. Her back against the wall.
Axel pours a cup of coffee, turning his back to her, and she scans the room for other familiar, perhaps friendlier, faces.
‘What’s he doing here?’ she hisses to Hilda, sitting next to her; the floral bouquet of Hilda’s perfume blocks out the stale smell of confined bodies, and Miriam holds on to that smell to try and stay present.
‘Who?’
She points to Axel.
‘He’s here to support you.’ She smiles as Axel delivers Hilda a coffee.
‘Can you make him leave?’
‘Now that everyone is here,’ Dr Baum says, ‘I think perhaps it might be time to begin.’
There is a scrape of chairs and a flurry of activity.
Axel returns to his seat, opposite Miriam.
Hilda touches her on the arm. ‘There is nothing to worry about.’
She wrings her hands in her coat sleeves, aware she is overdressed but a frost has settled over her stomach and works its way out.
Please, she had begged. Actually begged to be let out of her own home. To go to her dying father’s side.
‘Miriam. Miriam,’ Axel said. ‘Going back now, what good will it do?’
‘He’s dying,’ Miriam murmured.
‘So let him die in peace, my love.’ He moved towards her slowly and touched her gently on the cheek.
‘But . . .’ she said meekly.
‘Welcome . . .’ Dr Baum looks around like a pastor at the podium. ‘I would like to start by thanking you all for . . . well . . . in the weather . . . the current parking issues . . . time from your, well, whatever you would normally be doing.’ As he speaks, he feels each word in his mouth before committing to it.
Before his first sentence is over, Miriam wants to scream.
The clock on the wall has no second hand, time passes in hours rather than minutes here.
Axel is directly opposite her, across the table. He looks the same, but slightly different. Familiar, yet with the novelty of not seeing someone for a while whom you normally look upon daily. His dark hair slicked back revealing his widow’s peak and a healthy dusting of grey just above his ears. She cannot tell what mood he is in. His lips are relaxed, his jaw doesn’t twitch. She studies his face, trying to predict what will happen next.
‘Let us start the meeting, and do this in a methodical, maybe more of a linear way, so that we are all aware of the current situation, as it happens to be, and all the possible alternatives that we can, perhaps . . . the options that are available to Herr Winter, should the opportunity arise and the members of this meeting agree.’
Miriam watches Dr Baum and feels lost to the conversation already. She concentrates on his words, yet finds none of them make sense. Understanding Dr Baum feels like studying a map with no reference point.
Everyone introduces themselves, while Miriam snatches glimpses at Axel calmly sipping his coffee.
She also sees him on top of her, sweating, pulsing, pushing, searing, scrambling, chasing, catching, teasing, hurting, laughing, finishing, apologising, crying, holding; promising.
Her head is spinning and she cannot stop her heart from racing. It’s going to beat out of her chest, or she is going to collapse in the plastic chair.
The heat of his skin, clammy, wet, pressed against her mouth, his lips on hers. She tries to push against him, but he doesn’t move. His mouth working on hers, prising her lips open, pushing his tongue into her mouth.
Dr Baum draws her back into the room, and she looks at Axel, sitting still, smiling pleasantly. And, like vertigo, she plummets back to a time before, as well as being aware of what is happening now; as though both are happening at once.
She sees the charming, middle-aged man in front of her, but she also feels her husband move his hands up her skirt. Grabbing her bottom and digging his nails deep into her so that she rises to meet his body. She can feel it happening, as though Axel’s hands from the past are still groping and squeezing at her skin.
‘One second,’ Dr Baum says, holding up a hand. ‘I see we’ve fallen out of sync.’
Then everyone looks at her.
‘Miriam,’ Dr Baum continues, ‘do you understand, comprehend or indeed apprehend your role in this meeting, as such, although perhaps meeting is not its name . . .’
Miriam drifts off into a haze.
Dr Baum looks at Miriam, who is unsure if she needs to speak or if there was a question posed to her.
‘Miriam. I am clearly asking you, if you would be so kind, to explain your role in the room today.’
Miriam looks to Hilda for help, but none is offered.
‘I’m here to speak on behalf of Dad’s wishes,’ she tentatively says.
‘Yes, the wishes of your father as you see them.’
‘That’s right, his wishes.’
‘Well, technically, no. Not his wishes as his state is one in which his wishes are not easily identified or articulated. You are basing your assumption of his wishes on your own ideology and inference, I suppose?’
‘Based on knowing Dad.’ She feels defensive.
‘Ah, yes, but . . .’
‘She hadn’t spoken to her father for a decade,’ Axel says. Miriam glares at him and his face lights up in a smile.
Axel had written to her father, once, before her mother had died. Telling him that Miriam hated him, blamed him for her current difficulties, which he catalogued in detail. Axel wrote that Dad’s episodes (which she had disclosed to Axel privately) were a trauma that Miriam needed medication to overcome. Axel had written it out in a long letter, stipulating that Miriam was a bad wife because her Mum had been a ‘raven mother’, abandoning Miriam for her career. The letter was barbaric, it was hideous, it was lies. But it was lies that would hurt her parents the most. Miriam had watched Axel seal the letter and lock her in the house as he went out to post it. And there had been nothing she could do.
But every night while she watched Axel sleep, she waited for a noise, for the front door. For her parents to come for her, because she knew they wouldn’t believe the letter. That they would know she was in trouble. That she was stuck. They would come for her
, and they would help her.
After a week she became frantic, checking the post like a maniac, walking down the street, lifting the receiver of the phone – waiting . . . wondering. After two weeks, she accidently cut herself while chopping carrots, the pain had shocked her. But it had shocked her out of the loop of why her parents hadn’t come for her.
Was Axel right? Did they not love her at all?
After a month and not one letter from her parents, not one phone call and no one to come to her door to rescue her, Axel had taken her to the doctor.
He had taken her to this doctor.
Dr Baum is talking and Miriam is trying to hear him through the clatter of pain that comes from the feeling of being abandoned, exactly when she thought she would be saved.
‘Thank you, Herr Voight. So, Miriam, I wonder how in fact you think that you know of your father’s wishes, or are able to adequately represent them in this room.’ Dr Baum raises his eyebrows.
‘His what?’
‘Why are you here? is what Dr Baum is asking, love,’ Axel’s cotton-soft voice.
‘Do you want me to leave?’ Miriam asks Dr Baum.
‘I think the question here is, do you want to leave?’ he counters.
Miriam is completely torn by this, more than ever she would love to run from the room, away from Axel watching her. But she thinks of her father, and she draws strength from the letters, what the rabbit girls went through, the operations and the doctors. If they can survive that, she can keep her head in a meeting. She shakes her head. ‘No.’
But, why did her father not come for her? When they must have received the letter – the letter that would have so hurt them.
Miriam knows it would have killed her mother, that her mother died thinking that Miriam hated her.
It wasn’t true.
The meeting continues and Miriam tries to breathe slowly. The woman who came into the room a little before Miriam is writing something, her pen scratching the paper furiously. A nurse with a plain, round face, named Sue, is eating biscuits noisily. Hilda is listening, Axel is listening and Dr Baum is talking . . . about hospice and hospital and her father leaving his home.