Johannes sipped. The younger boy lay down again and seemed to drift to almost-sleep. The liquid was lukewarm, sour, like vomit left in a bucket. But he drank it all, felt his shrunken stomach rebel, clamped his mouth shut to force his stomach to keep it down.
‘And remember,’ said the older boy. ‘Always remember: live!’
‘How?’ whispered Johannes. How could anyone live for long in this grey room, on this grey muck, as the cold draughts snapped and bit them on their bunks?
The boy looked at him steadily. ‘There was a radio hidden in the coat factory. I never heard it, but the news from the BBC was whispered every day. The Allies are coming,’ he said softly, and suddenly his eyes had hope. ‘Soon the war will be over.’
‘I . . . I don’t understand. Hitler is conquering the world.’
‘Hitler is mad. All who follow him like slaves are mad.’
‘Did the radio say that? The BBC is English. Maybe they lied.’
The older boy snorted. ‘There are many in Poland and Germany who know the truth too, and were sent to the camps for saying it. There are others who know, but do not talk of it, try not to think of it.’
Johannes thought of the major, the words he spoke only when drunk. True words . . .
‘We are slaves here, but we are not mad, like those outside,’ said the older boy. ‘Soon — if we can live — we will be free.’
The boy gazed at Johannes with eyes that burned. ‘Hitler took my family. Probably they are all dead by now. I do not know. But I know this. At night my hatred burns. My hatred keeps me warm.’
Chapter 10
FRAU MARKS
GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, DECEMBER 1944
Frau Marks had been a nurse at the camp hospital for a little over a month. It was called a hospital. It was just another set of barracks, four or five hundred people on straw mattresses on wooden boards in the same bunks as the other barracks, but here at least there was one blanket for four people.
Most of the patients had been waiting days or weeks to be admitted. And so they died. Others were infectious, so must be taken to the infectious diseases ward to stop disease from spreading. There was no infectious ward, of course. The trucks that took the patients to the ‘infectious ward’ took them to death. But there was no choice, for to keep people with scarlet fever or typhus or tuberculosis among the rest was to risk everyone.
She looked down at the new arrival, shoved from the stretcher onto the wooden bunk. She wore a nightdress that covered only her torso. Her shiny bald head was bright red, as if it had been burned. Her skin was white in places, red in others.
Frau Marks had seen patients like this before. Radiation experiments, one of the many kinds performed on prisoners here.
She knew too there was nothing she could do. No cure, not even any way to ease the awful pain. She turned, to others whom she might just possibly be able to help by seeing they drank till their fever burned away or their wounds healed — not much chance, but a little — when the whisper came.
‘My dear Nurse Stöhlich.’
Frau Marks turned back and saw Sister Columba’s smile in that ravaged face.
She had not cried since she’d come here. Tears were a waste of her body’s fuel and energy. She must stay alive for Georg. But now she kneeled and wept.
‘What have they done to you?’ She shook her head. ‘No, do not tell me,’ she whispered, ‘I know.’
Dr Mengele liked nuns for his experiments. The guards enjoyed humiliating them, stamping on their crucifixes, lashing them with whips, ordering the big dogs to attack and laughing as they did.
‘I . . . cannot help you,’ Frau Marks whispered. Sister Columba deserved to know the truth. ‘I don’t even have any morphia to help with the pain.’
‘You can pray for me, as I will pray for you.’ The old eyes met hers. ‘God is here.’
Was He? Frau Marks didn’t know. But she could not say that to Sister Columba now.
Chapter 11
FRAU MARKS
GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, DECEMBER 1944
The order came on New Year’s Eve. There had been another ‘selection’ on parade, this time of young people — the youngest ones still alive after the initial sorting at the station. The new order said that these older children were to be washed by some of the nurses and doctors of the barracks shed they called the hospital.
It was such an innocent request.
Frau Marks looked at the lines of children, looked at their thin bare arms in their grey rags. None wore the tattoos reserved for registered members of the camp. The tattoos were painful, and often became infected. Hers was still swollen, though she tried to keep it clean. But the tattoos meant some security — being registered meant that you were useful to keep alive. For a while.
The children marched. Hundreds of them, barefoot, thin and tattered, along the Lagerstrasse to the showers. The snow had melted, but the road had turned to ice. Frozen feet turned blue then red as that ice cut them like knives. And still they marched, child after child.
Frau Marks and the other nurses marched beside them.
At first the children cried, and then they whimpered. Then even the strength for that was gone. The children marched in silence, staggering, knowing that to stop was certain death.
‘Why?’ whispered Frau Marks. ‘Why?’
She did not expect an answer, but one came from a nearby guard. He leered at her, waiting to see if she might smile at him, flirt with him, in exchange for a piece of bread, or sausage. But she did not. He shrugged. ‘There are too many brats. Too young to be of use. They must be got rid of.’
‘But they are going to be bathed . . .’ She meant: They are not going to the gas chambers.
He shrugged again. ‘They are not jüdisch.’ Jüdische children of all ages were gassed as soon as they arrived. ‘One of the higher-ups suggested they be put into a pit and burned, but gasoline is precious. So are bullets.’
‘But they are just to be bathed!’
He laughed in his boots and overcoat. ‘Water is cheap.’
A child fell. The whip came down, splattering red. Two children bent to help the fallen one up.
They staggered on.
Another child fell. Frau Marks ran to help. The guard forced her back.
It began to snow. Flakes like plates, drifting down so gently onto the crumpled tiny bodies of the children on the ground.
They reached the showers. ‘Haltet hier! Halt!’
One by one, the nurses bathed the children, boys with ribs like xylophones, girls with wrists like chicken legs. Children who did not moan or weep, even when the icy water lashed them.
There was no soap. No towels.
‘Dress them!’
The nurses dressed the children back in their rags, still wet.
They marched out to roll call, nurses, wet children, onto ground of ice, into air of snow.
They waited, standing in their lines.
One hour, two. Frau Marks had thought she could not cry again. She cried now.
The children died, one by one, in threes and fours, collapsing in the snow.
Three hours. Four. Some children still stood to attention in the snow. More fell. More died. And more.
Five hours. A bored guard strolled beside the few children still standing in the lines, slashing at their faces with his whip, leaving some, choosing others, perhaps only on a whim, until they fell. No one was allowed to touch them. Each child lay till cold stole the last of the life within them.
She did not think she could stand. She did not think she could live.
Georg. She blinked and tried to bear the agony, the cold. She must live for him.
And finally the order, ‘March!’
Miraculously, a few children still stood, tottering. Miraculously, they marched, one step, or ten. Then fell. But the nurses were permitted to catch them now.
A boy fell beside her. A boy Georg’s age. No, younger: the age her son had been the last time she had seen him. She caught the
child before he slumped into the snow. He was surprisingly heavy. Vaguely she supposed he must be new, not yet starved to stick-like thinness. A faint hope prickled, so very, very faint. Maybe, just maybe, this boy might survive.
Each nurse carried a child now, for there were no stretchers. Skeleton children, who must weigh little, which was good, because most of the nurses had been here far longer than she had, and so were weaker. She was glad that she was the one who had the heaviest burden. Step by step the nurses struggled, carrying the children, the precious few children, through the snow.
How many children had died that day? She did not know. How many died on this march back to the barracks? Hundreds? Had anyone even counted them?
She looked down at the boy in her arms. He breathed, although his eyes were shut. She glanced at the nurse behind her, and briefly shut her eyes in grief. The girl the other woman was carrying had died, but how could she in all compassion tell the nurse to put the child down?
At last they reached the hospital barracks. She watched as the nurses piled the bodies they carried behind the shed, for the rats to eat that night. The boy she held still lived, his breathing harsh and faint.
She held him to her and stumbled inside the shed they called a hospital. She laid him on a bunk.
Yes, he was still alive. The faint hope grew stronger.
A woman, still a woman, was standing in the doorway, with a layer of flesh and fat that said she was new, as did the shock that showed on her face as she watched the nurses lay the children’s bodies in the pile, and the few nurses who carried live children struggle inside with them. ‘We have to get them warm,’ she ordered, her voice blank with horror.
‘How?’ asked someone wearily.
‘Hold them to you,’ said the new doctor desperately. ‘Two or three of you. Your body heat will warm them . . .’
What heat? thought Frau Marks tiredly. But she moved the boy to beside Sister Columba, then laid herself on the other side of him. They wrapped what life they still had about him, as the new doctor cajoled the starving nurses to give their almost-hot mugs of evening soup to the children.
The boy’s eyes opened. Frau Marks forced herself to smile at him. ‘Rest,’ she whispered. ‘I am Nurse Stöhlich.’ Her false name was automatic now.
The doctor brought a mug of soup. Frau Marks helped the boy sit up so she could hold the mug for him, while he sipped. Keep him warm, give him food. Maybe, maybe he would live . . .
The doctor stared at the boy, and then she almost fell across the bed to get to him. ‘Johannes!’ The new doctor clasped the boy, then gazed at Frau Marks, her face ripped by anguish. ‘This is my son.’
Chapter 12
JOHANNES
GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, JANUARY 1945
Dreams slashed him. The ogre thudding after him through snow that burned; he reached up to the forbidden books at home, but when he touched one it ate his fingers, then his arm. He tried to scream —
‘Sshh. Sshh, child.’ He opened his eyes. He was on the lowest of the bunks. A woman lay next to him. Or was she a woman? For she had no hair. Her eyes were red, as if she had wept blood. Her face was very white, except where it was blistered red. Her blistered hand stroked his cheek. ‘Do not be frightened.’
That was so stupid the dream vanished, and its terror too. ‘Why not?’
The woman — yes, she was a woman, her voice was a woman’s — said, ‘Because there is love here.’
Here, in the belly of the ogre? He shook his head. ‘No,’ he managed.
‘Oh, yes. God loves you. And I love you. We have become friends, you and I, though you did not know it. I have held you, and you kept me warm. I prayed for you, and praying for you meant I was with God, not here.’
Her words made no sense. And then she added, ‘Your mother loves you too.’
He shook his head, confused. He had dreamed Mutti was here. ‘I thought I saw her . . .’
‘Sshh. Save your strength. You saw her. Your mother is a doctor here. She has gone to fetch the food buckets. Ah, here she is.’
Mutti, carrying the buckets of ditchwater that was soup. She put them down carefully as the nurses brought the bowls to fill, and crouched down by the bunk. ‘I didn’t think . . . I was so afraid . . .’ She shook her head, then held him instead.
She smelled of sickness and rotting skin and ditchwater soup. She smiled like Mutti. He tried to hug her back and found his arms had turned to marzipan.
Mutti sat back. ‘Sshh. Do not try to move. You must keep your strength. Sister Columba?’
The woman next to him shuffled painfully upright. She waited till Mutti placed Johannes in her arms. ‘Drink,’ said Mutti, handing Sister Columba a bowl of soup, lifting another for him to drink.
‘You take my share,’ said Sister Columba to Johannes, as the boy had told him on his first night.
‘You must eat too,’ Mutti told her.
‘Must I?’ Sister Columba smiled. ‘You and I both know what my end will be here. I have few choices here, my dear. Do not deprive me of one of those left to me.’ She reached up with blistered hands to help steady the bowl for Johannes.
He felt better when he had drunk the bowls of soup, chewing the shreds of turnip at the bottom. He felt sleepy, grateful when Mutti eased him down. ‘This is Nurse Stöhlich,’ said Mutti as a tall woman with blonde tufts of hair on her scalp appeared by the bunk. ‘She carried you back, out in the snow. She or I and Sister Columba will always be with you.’
He could not remember Nurse Stöhlich. Or could he? ‘I have a son the same age as you — or he was the same age, once,’ said Nurse Stöhlich.
Everyone had been the same age once. But he did not have the strength to tell her.
‘Sleep,’ said Mutti.
He shut his eyes, then opened them. ‘Vati?’
‘I do not know. Not in the men’s camp, I think.’
‘But the soldiers said . . .’ He did not know if he said the words, or just thought them. This world had no truth, so why would Vati be at the same place they had been sent to, just because the Germans had said he would?
‘I must see to other patients,’ said Mutti softly. ‘I will be back.’
He didn’t want her to go. She had no right to go! She had left him once. She must stay with him, now, not go to ‘other patients’. ‘I want gingerbread,’ he whispered, knowing he sounded like a little child, not caring. Christmas was over and there had been no gingerbread or baked carp, and Mutti had left him, and Opa and Vati . . .
Mutti looked like she might cry. ‘Johannes, I will try to get you what I can. But gingerbread is not possible.’
‘I will give him gingerbread,’ said the scarred nun beside him. ‘Settle down, child, and listen.’
‘Gingerbread . . .’ whispered Johannes. But speaking was too much work.
The frail woman smiled up at Mutti and nodded slightly, then turned to him. ‘Once there was a whole land made of gingerbread. Not just the house but the forest and the earth. Gingerbread flowers grew in the gardens and gingerbread cats chased gingerbread mice. And then one day . . .’ she paused dramatically, ‘it rained! You know what happens to gingerbread when it rains?’
Johannes smiled and shut his eyes. The gingerbread would turn to ginger mud. The ginger cat would never catch the ginger mouse . . .
Vaguely he heard, ‘When you wake up, I will tell you how my mother stole the cherry jam when she was just your age. She was naughty, but it is a funny story and, oh, that jam, the best you have ever tasted. There will be roast potatoes in that story too, as well as gingerbread . . .’
Chapter 13
JOHANNES
GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, 14 JANUARY 1945
When you had stories about roast pork and apple sauce and how the dog had wriggled its nose up onto the table and dragged the roast away, and Sister Columba’s mother and father and sisters and brothers all ran after it, and how there had been sausages instead for supper . . . when you had stories like that, lying almost warm insid
e her arms, you could wait longer for real food.
‘Here.’ Mutti smiled, for she had a treat for him that day: bread with a thin scrape of margarine, and cheese! Real cheese. He nibbled it, as if he were a mouse, tried not to see the envious eyes of others watching him eat.
Sister Columba watched too. She had not told him a story that day, had hardly moved at all, though her lips moved silently as she gazed up at the bunk above.
Johannes blinked. ‘Mutti, what is that smell?’
‘The SS are burning the camp records,’ said Mutti flatly.
‘Why?’
She bent closer and whispered. This, it seemed, was one of the dangerous things to know, or talk about. ‘The Russian soldiers are close. If you listen, you will hear explosions. I think they want to hide what they have been doing here.’
The boy who had given him his coffee the first day had said the war was nearly over. Had he been right?
He must be dead, Johannes realised, and the second boy too. There hadn’t even been time to know their names.
‘You mean . . . we will soon be free?’
Mutti nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. But she did not sound sure.
Yells came from outside. Guards marched through the door. ‘All medical equipment must be brought out the front at once!’
Mutti stepped forwards. ‘But we need . . .’
‘Silence!’
Johannes clenched his fists in fear until Mutti stepped back. Didn’t she know she must not look the guards in the face? She must not let them notice her?
To his relief the guards didn’t strike her with their rifles. They simply left, as if they had more important things to do.
The senior doctor nodded to Mutti to begin collecting the equipment, the bowls and the few syringes and tubing.
Johannes finished his bread and cheese. He slept, for he was still weak. Sister Columba still seemed mostly asleep. Voices yelled and screamed and whimpered, but those were noises of every day. His body had taught him to sleep through noises like those.
He woke to Mutti’s hands. ‘Johannes, Johannes, wake up!’
Goodbye, Mr Hitler Page 4