by Cathy Gohlke
But an hour after dark the order came to form ranks again and follow. We marched into a long, low building. Sprawling open, like a warehouse, the room divided into sections. Groups of male guards with rifles stood at the entrance to the next room division. Women—clerks, with boards and paper lists—sat at long tables. Female guards marched the length of each formation, shouting orders to throw our hats and coats in separate heaps and return to our lines.
“Give your names—last name first!”
If our line moved too slowly to match names against the seated clerk’s clipboard, a gunpoint pushed us forward.
“Mmm, such a pretty Fräulein to lighten our days.” One of the male guards stepped into line behind me, lifted my hair from my neck, drawing it to his nose.
I didn’t answer but, terrified, moved forward in line as quickly as possible.
“Does the cat have your tongue, little girl?” he teased, rubbing my hair against his cheek, his lips.
“Name!” the clerk at the table barked.
I stepped forward, flustered, and said, “Sommer . . . Li—” I coughed.
“Again!” The clerk looked up.
“Excuse me. I’m Kirchmann—Marta.”
“What is this? You don’t know your name?” the clerk bellowed.
The guard behind me smiled. “Do I make you nervous, pretty Fräulein?”
“Ja, check. Kirchmann, Marta. Next!” the seated woman shouted.
I turned to follow the line but glanced back at the flirting guard, who’d stepped away and winked.
Two women guards stood at the top of the next line, one with a clipboard and one with a long pair of scissors. Without explanation, the woman with the shears began chopping off the hair of the first woman in line—one, two, three snips and a long sawing—leaving tufts and spikes of hair on one side, and nothing much more than her victim’s scalp on the other. The hank of rich, dark hair was thrown to the floor, and the woman with the clipboard announced, “Brunette.”
Down the ranks they walked, desecrating the head of each woman, dividing the hair spoils by color into separate heaps on the floor.
Tears of pity welled in my eyes as they sawed Mutter Kirchmann’s rich auburn bun from her head, but some dread mixture of anger and fear and a desire for revenge filled me as they cut my hair—thick, golden hair that Lukas had run his hands through two nights before, hair that had caressed his face, his lips.
Women could not, dared not, look one another in the eyes. What could such a thing mean? Why had we been made to look so hideous—not a haircut, but a rabid shearing?
Orders bled from one section into the next, so that it was hard to hear from the back what was said in each formation. But when the women in front of us began unbuttoning and pulling off their dresses, their shoes, their undergarments, their faces registering shame, my heart sank in horror and disbelief.
It wasn’t that I’d never changed clothes in front of other girls—that had been routine in my gymnasium classes at school and even in the BDM when we changed into our uniforms. But not this. I’d just given my body to Lukas in our marriage bed, just two nights before shared the intimate uniting of our lives, our very souls—all that made us “one flesh.” I belonged to him and he to me. I never again expected to so much as change my blouse before another human being.
“I can’t.” I shook my head. “I can’t. Lukas—”
Mutter Kirchmann pulled my hands from before my heart. “Lukas wants you to live—would insist that you live.”
The female guard prodded a hesitant young woman two rows ahead with her truncheon. “Schnell!”
“Hurry!” Mutter Kirchmann whispered. “It’s a shower. They’re sending us to a shower.”
I unzipped my skirt and let it fall to the floor, unbuttoned my blouse, and stepped out of my shoes. Following the other women’s examples I folded everything into a neat bundle.
“Everything!” the guard shouted, staring at me.
“Tochter!” Mutter Kirchmann whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Ja, you can, and you must. We’re not the first ones and we won’t be the last. But we will live!”
I set down my bundle and pulled off my undergarments. Bent over, I grouped everything in a pile and stood, holding them before me, covering myself.
The female guard sneered, pointing to the floor. I looked around and realized the other women had set their entire bundles on the floor. I set mine down too. The way she looked at me—how I hated her!
We were savagely shaved, then herded by the group of leering male guards toward the shower room. Three minutes of icy water poured from spigots in the ceiling, but I was too numb, too shaken, to appreciate anything. When the shower stopped, Mutter Kirchmann led me toward the entrance.
Back in the open room, dresses had been thrust into a pile on the floor. In that mad scramble I woke, desperate to find my skirt and blouse—the last shred of my identity. But they were not our own clothes, and not dresses that fit our bodies or even the weather—simply whatever we could grab from the heap or the hands of another, just as starving animals rip the food from the mouth of their opponent. I’d never fought like a tiger, but in that moment I learned and fought for Mutter Kirchmann and me, shivering in anger and desperation to cover ourselves.
Mutter Kirchmann must have pulled the dress over my head, or else I did it without thinking. Each dress had a large X sewn on the front and back. Only later did I realize how grateful I was to have grabbed thick woolen dresses—the difference between freezing or not in the months ahead.
We were herded yet again through the line of SS guards, and they ran their hands over us—up and down, front and back and on the sides, searching our bodies, lingering on and fingering some women more than others. What they thought we could have hidden was impossible to imagine. That they wanted to violate and humiliate us, to demean us, was clear. In that moment something of my nature returned, and I wanted desperately to kick them, to bite them, to spit in their faces.
Before I could form a plan, I was shoved forward and the moment passed. Marched through yet another line of female guards, we stopped before a table spread with colorful cloth triangles.
“Charge?” The clerk didn’t even look up.
“Criminal,” Mutter Kirchmann whispered, and I after her. We were, after all, “dangerous enemies of the state.”
“Sew it on. See the chart for placement.” The clerk handed us green triangles, and the next clerk doled out needles and thread.
How they expected us to sit on the cold, damp floor and sew with steady fingers after all we’d been through, I didn’t know. But sewing a patch on my right sleeve was the most normal thing I’d done in so many hours I could no longer count them.
Needles collected and counted, we were ordered to the exit door and found ourselves standing once again in the cold night air.
The long, sweeping arc of the searchlight continually scraped high walls, and the barbed wire, three rolls thick, that ran along their tops, reminded us of the futility of any hope for escape.
Marched down the wide avenue between buildings, we filed into Barracks 28 and were assigned to beds already packed with women. They must have expected new recruits, for many grumbled and some swore, but all shifted sideways, and we lay like spoons in a drawer until morning.
Mutter Kirchmann tucked me on the inside and took the colder outside shift on the bunk first, the thin blanket not even covering her. I should not have let her do this. I should have been the one to protect her, but I didn’t.
I lay awake until the sirens wailed long before dawn.
It was still pitch black when the guard threw open the door, shouting, blowing a whistle, ordering everyone outside for roll call. With barely enough time to shake the sloth from our limbs we hurried to the parade ground to stand in new formations—ten wide and ten deep.
Roll call began at four thirty. We no longer bore names, but were assigned numbers by the woman guard bellowing over the list on her clipb
oard—numbers we quickly memorized, numbers called over and over again in roll calls. That morning, someone—a number—was missing. The guard made us run through roll call three times before she determined the person was indeed not there.
Ten minutes later we heard a gunshot from the direction of our barracks. Mutter Kirchmann looked at me and I at her. We would never sleep late. We would never be too sick to stand in formation.
35
HANNAH STERLING
APRIL 1973
Carl traced the next two families on the ledger’s list to America—one now living in Brooklyn, New York, and the son of another on the list living in a little town called Woodbine, New Jersey. He traced a third name to a daughter living in a kibbutz in Israel. I wrote to Ward Beecham, asking him to follow any lines of inquiry at his disposal in order to locate the US émigrés. I didn’t explain the situation fully, only said in general terms that I needed to talk to them about something I’d discovered from WWII. I warned him that I wasn’t sure how I’d proceed if he found them; I could only follow the trail as it unfolded.
The fourth and sixth and seventh and eighth had perished in concentration camps across Germany and Poland. There was no one to contact—no one I could trace. But the fifth name on the list lived in an institution for older men in Hamburg. And he was still using the name listed in the ledger—a name that sounded distinctly Jewish, so I knew he was not hiding that fact from anyone.
Carl’s employer hesitated to send a car all the way to Hamburg, but I paid handsomely, as long as Carl drove. I couldn’t imagine making the trip without him.
Beyond the reception desk of the institution in Hamburg, we faced sterile white walls and floors polished to a sheen so high I feared slipping and skidding to the end of the hallway. Rooms, sealed off from one another, seemed more like a series of apartments than those of a nursing home.
We waited for Mr. Horowitz in a large common dining room, empty in the early afternoon. An orderly wheeled him in and promised to return after his late lunch break. He wished us all a good visit.
“Mr. Horowitz, thank you for seeing us.” I stood and extended my hand but he didn’t take it. I thought perhaps he didn’t speak English, so I turned to Carl.
“Herr Horowitz, danke schön—”
“I understood the American. But I do not know why you are here.”
“Oh, I’m glad you speak English. It makes everything so much easier,” I bubbled, smiling, desperate to brighten the mood, desperate to make him like me.
He didn’t smile in return.
“My name is Hannah Sterling.” I moistened my lips. “I’m visiting from America. I wanted to talk to you about something that happened during the war.”
I reached for the chair across from him, but Mr. Horowitz’s eyes glazed abruptly—as if hoarfrost suddenly settled over a summer field. “Orderly! Orderly!” he called after the man who’d wheeled him in. But the young man was long gone.
“What is it? Can I help you?” Carl asked. “I will go for the orderly if you like, but he said he would return after luncheon.”
Herr Horowitz’s stubbled chin trembled in indecision and frustration. Finally he spat, “He will not come until he has finished eating.”
“Herr Horowitz, we don’t wish to upset you, but we—”
“Then why do you come? Why do you torment me?” he demanded. “Can you not leave an old man in peace?”
“You’ve misunderstood; we’re not here to torment you at all, but to help you. In fact, we—”
“Journalists—American journalists digging up the horrors of the past. Again and again you come, writing stories and making your movies. You think the Shoah was an amusement ride for your readers.”
“Nein, Herr Horowitz,” Carl assured him. “Fräulein Sterling is nothing of the sort. I swear it. She wants to return something to you—something of great value that she believes once belonged to you.”
The old man’s wary eyes searched my frame.
On Carl’s cue, I rushed in. “Long ago, in the early years of the war, you lived on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin; isn’t that right?”
He glanced away. He didn’t nod, but his jaw muscles tightened, a shadow of remembrance sweeping his face.
“There came a day, I believe, when you tried to get new identity papers, or perhaps you tried to leave the country.”
His breathing changed, grew more shallow, but I pressed on.
“A man offered to provide those papers—or promised you something—for these.” I pulled a small velvet pouch from my purse and opened its drawstring. I lifted his hand and, before his widening eyes, poured into his palm three gold rings, two filigreed and encrusted with diamonds and the third a perfect circle of emeralds. “Are they yours?”
His breathing labored, he fingered the rings in wonder. “Where did you find them? Where did you get them?”
“You recognize them, then?”
“My Rebecca’s wedding ring . . . her mother’s emerald anniversary . . . Where did you get them?” he gasped.
I glanced at Carl for support. “I found them among the possessions of someone whom I think you might have known—the person you gave them to. I want to return them, to say I’m so very sorry that he took them, and that—”
“He sold us out!” Any spirit of dread or defeat died away, and Herr Horowitz’s eyes blazed in a sudden fury. “He promised me freedom—papers, new identities, for all of us!”
“Can you tell me what happened? How did you find this man? How did he find you?”
Herr Horowitz slumped back in his chair, stone-faced. A full minute passed before he spoke. “Wolfgang Sommer.” The name sounded vile in his mouth and horrific in my ears. “A clerk in the municipal office, a nobody. I was his superior until all Jews were ‘relieved of their duties for the greater good of the Fatherland.’ Civil service positions closed to the children of Abraham. Consequently, those Aryans already on staff . . . some moved up the ladder, prematurely promoted. Not always in the best interests of the work at hand.”
“He took over your position?”
“The one below mine. I barely knew the man. But I learned, months after dismissal—from our rabbi—that Sommer’s daughter was active in the black market. When authorities cut the rations of Jews so severely—too severely to survive, especially for the children—we approached her.”
“You met . . . Fräulein Sommer?”
“My wife met her. All their transactions were carried out behind the butcher’s shop.”
“Was she fair in her dealings?” I held my breath. Carl nudged me, but I needed to know this.
Herr Horowitz shrugged. “We believed her at the time. As fair as anybody. More than most, even generous—at first. This is why I trusted her Vater, why I believed him. It was, perhaps, a long ruse they developed, a way to build trust.”
“No, please. I don’t believe that. Perhaps Fräulein Sommer’s father followed her or tricked her. Maybe she—did you ever meet her?”
“Only my wife. Why do you care? How did you come—?”
“Please. Please tell me what happened. What did you mean that he sold you out? I’ll explain everything as best I can, but it’s very important that you tell me.”
“What difference it makes now—to you—I do not understand.”
“Please.”
He stared beyond me. “After the letter came . . .”
“The letter?”
“Ordering us to report to the collection point. We knew what it would mean, that we would be held and then deported—sent away in the railcars to the camps. Everyone knew that much by then.” He grunted. “Early on we didn’t understand so much about the camps . . . mostly that no one came back.”
“How did you make contact with . . . with the man who promised to help you?”
“Wolfgang Sommer came to me. He said he was the father of . . . I do not remember her given name. The girl who supplied my wife with food. He claimed that he knew people, people who could get us out of Germany—all
of us. My wife, my two sons, my daughter—so little.” Herr Horowitz’s voice caught.
“And you paid him with these?”
He nodded, hatred in his eyes. “With these and the lives of my family.”
I held my breath.
“The night we were to meet him . . . beneath the bridge beside the Spree nearest our home, at ten—after the curfew. We waited there from seven o’clock to make certain we were there, and ready, no delay.”
“He never came?”
“The Gestapo came, driving us into their trucks. My wife tripped, tearing her stockings, cutting her leg badly. But they did not care. They shouted at my wife—my gentle Rebecca who spoke all her life just above a whisper—and threatened to shoot her if she did not hurry.”
“So you all got into the truck?”
“Ja, but Wilhelm, my youngest son . . . so spry . . . such a runner.” Memories filled his eyes. “Always a thing of beauty to see him throw back his head and run like the wind—run for the joy of being alive and in the day, in that one moment.” Herr Horowitz stopped.
“And then?”
He sighed. “Wilhelm climbed into the truck last, after his older brother. We were driven to the outskirts of Berlin. Already we knew we were betrayed but had no idea where they were taking us. And then the truck stopped at a roadblock—too dark to see more than your hand in front of your face. The guard jumped from the back and was gone—only a moment.
“Wilhelm slipped from the truck and ran. He ran so quickly I imagined for a moment that he would be free—at least one of us would go free. But the guard at the roadblock lifted his machine gun and opened fire into the night. So many rounds! Such noise—and Rebecca screaming, screaming as I never heard her.”
“Did he get away?”
“They shot him like a dog in the dirt.”
My heart stopped. In my mind I saw the child running, running, stop short, hang motionless, suspended in midair, and fall, blood trickling from his neck in the moonlight. I was convinced we all saw him again in that moment. “I’m so sorry. So very, very sorry.”
A minute may have passed while Herr Horowitz worked his jaw, trying to control the emotion that spilled from the corners of his eyes.