Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  Suddenly, he falls forward, facedown into the dirt, and a German guard now stands in his place. It takes several seconds to understand that the blow from the heavy butt of a rifle has made an indentation in Omar’s head.

  I look at the guard who has done this. He looks back at me, stony-faced.

  “What for?” I yell, rushing to Omar’s side.

  “He was out of the line.”

  I roll him over to check his breathing. There isn’t any. His heart has stopped, also. It did not need much to give up so quickly.

  “I will have you imprisoned for such actions!”

  But the guard isn’t listening. He is marching the others toward a wall.

  I look down at the wretched form: a person, a man reduced to rubble.

  Someone steps beside me.

  “He was as good as dead anyway.” I turn to look at the speaker, another guard, who nods toward the wall at the end, between the two blocks.

  The prisoners are being lined up. I stand up, back away, then turn and walk briskly to my room, legs trembling, heart racing. Breathing is difficult. The sun burns through the clouds to uncomfortably rest on the back of my neck. I feel a cold sweat break out over me.

  This is not a world I belong to. It can’t be.

  Nothing can be the same.

  Behind me are the sounds of gunshots.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MATILDA

  I am instructed by Cook to take some bacon and rolls to Nurse and Frau, then return to the kitchen to clean up. When I return, I find another girl sitting at the table. I have seen her outside the house but never this close. She is older than me and lives in the big house but must spend much time in her room. She has pretty cloud hair, white and fluffy, but she reminds me of an owl with her angry, watchful eyes that look over me suspiciously. She wears a white dress like the older girls.

  “Hello,” I say. “My name is Matilda.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Are you going to tell me your name?”

  “No.”

  “Alice!” says Cook, frowning at her.

  “There! You have it now,” she says, without looking at me.

  “Do you know the story about Alice and the looking glass?”

  “No.”

  “It is a storybook about a girl who climbs through the mirror into a strange place.”

  “How would a stupid peasant girl know any stories?” she says.

  “I’m not a peasant. I’m a lavender farmer.”

  “That means you’re a peasant.”

  “We read lots of books. I can read lots of things.”

  “I doubt that. You’re a liar.”

  “How come you don’t go outside with the older girls?” I say. “Do they hate you? Do you smell?” I am angry that she has called me a liar.

  “How come you don’t shut your mouth,” she whispers while Cook is emptying rubbish in a bin outside the back door. But her words don’t deter me.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Long enough for it to be annoying,” she replies.

  I smile at that. I like her attitude. When she sees my smile, her eyes linger a little longer on me. I see that she is slightly curious and wondering if perhaps I am more interesting than she thought.

  Cook returns.

  “Alice has been sick, but she is feeling better now. Aren’t you, Alice?”

  “Yes, Cook,” she says. I believe that Cook may have overheard my question after all.

  “What do you do here?” I persist.

  “More important things than you do.”

  “What are they?”

  “Learning to be a German woman.”

  A laugh escapes me. I am surprised at the sound that I haven’t used in a while.

  “What is so funny?”

  “I don’t know. It just sounded silly. The fact that anyone has to learn to be a German woman.”

  “Saying those things will get you into trouble,” says Alice.

  Cook has turned her back to us. She doesn’t interfere this time.

  “You don’t sound very busy. Surely you must be doing something else?” I say.

  “Are you always so rude?”

  “Frau says that some girls are for greatness and others for purpose. Which one are you?”

  Cook finally participates. She looks in my direction and shakes her head. It is a warning. Alice has gone very still, staring out from her very white face.

  “That is enough questions,” says Cook.

  “Matilda,” says Nurse. She has appeared at the door suddenly, hair like wire, a wicked troll. “Have you practiced the first paragraph from our Führer’s book?”

  I recite the first three paragraphs from memory and then begin the fourth until Nurse says, “Enough.” I think I hear Cook say remarkable under her breath, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps it was something else.

  Alice is looking at me from under her large eyelids as Nurse leads me to Frau’s office to recite the passage again.

  There is no toilet inside our hut. We each have buckets that we must empty, ourselves, into an outdoor toilet in the backyard. Then we must wash out our buckets in the sink outside the building. I can see the room where I was locked in like an animal in a trap, and suddenly I feel I might vomit. I never want to go back to where it is dark and lonely. It is better in the hut, where I can sleep near others, though the mattress is thin and hard, on wooden slats. We must also clean our sheets when they are soiled, and it is my job to clean the baby’s, too. I wonder why Jacek is not given such tasks. It seems I am given everything to do. Perhaps I am still being punished. Perhaps because I am a girl.

  Nurse is like a ghost who haunts the house, appearing around corners suddenly. When we are in the kitchen, she appears silently behind us. Then when we are at the swings, she is there, watching us. Once she told us to keep the noise down when we were laughing. It seems there are rules even for laughing. One day she was called inside the house by Frau, and while she was gone, we chased one another around the yard and laughed very loudly. The best time is at night, inside the hut. It seems we can do anything in there, and if we are quiet, we can even stay up late.

  “Do you ever get frightened?” I ask the twins, who sometimes now respond in German when they can. We do two hours of German each day.

  “We used to, but not anymore. Not with you and Jacek.”

  Jacek adds, “We used to play games in the dark. We used to jump across the beds like cats.” He is smiling when he tells me this.

  “Ah, I see. So you were being naughty then and not sleeping.”

  The smiles disappear into stormy faces. “No it was not . . .” One of the twins screws up her eyes as if she might cry.

  “It is quite all right with me. I would have done exactly the same thing if I were you. I won’t say anything.”

  “One time we were told on. One time they sent in one of the older girls to spy. Are you a spy?” says Jacek suddenly.

  “Of course not,” I say angrily. I know that the older girls will report anything they see. But they keep their distance, as if they will catch an infection from us if they get too close.

  “In fact,” I say, to ensure their trust, “let’s all be like cats now.”

  The three oldest ones exchange guilty smiles. They can’t quite believe it.

  I saunter on all fours and pretend to lick my hand, then I skulk around the beds crying, “Meeoooow.”

  The others do it, too, though the baby just crawls, without the cat actions.

  When we are finished acting like cats, I teach them some more words in German. It is enough for now. I open up a book with another German title. I pretend to read from it a story called Rumpelstilzchen, but they do not know I am pretending. They cannot read the front of the book. And I tell them another story that I remember from home.

  “She’s coming,” says Jacek.

  “Who?”

  “Nurse. I heard the door squeak from the house.”

  Nurse turns the k
ey in the door to enter. I begin to read a passage from the book. It is very boring, and I don’t think about the words; my mind is on Nurse, who is standing and listening. I stop and turn to her.

  “Carry on,” says Nurse.

  “More story,” says Baby.

  “Story?”

  “She thinks it’s a story,” I say.

  “How is the children’s instruction of Mein Kampf progressing?” she asks. “They must learn a paragraph a day. They must be able to speak it from memory.”

  “Yes, I am teaching them every day. Is that not right?”

  Jacek nods, as does Baby when she sees Jacek do this.

  “Good! It is a very special book, and this would please the officials when they visit.”

  It is not a special book at all. It makes no sense.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WILLEM

  I have been to the commander to explain that I want to be moved. He has politely refused my request, citing a letter from Himmler’s office that ensures I continue in these duties for several weeks yet. Again he talks of opportunity.

  Here, there are no rules in medicine. We can make our own. But I do not want the opportunity. I do not want to see.

  My body has been trembling over the past few days. I try not to look at the faces of the prisoners, out of fear that I will see someone else I know. I do not think recovery for patients is possible at this terrible place.

  Yesterday a shipment of Hungarian Jews arrived. All the children and elderly were sent to special rooms to be killed by poisonous gas. I could hear a pounding, a stampede of animals, while they were locked in the room, slowly dying. And then the loud thumping slowed, then softer, until nothing.

  How can I face Lena again after everything I have seen? She will see it in my face. I must not let her. She must never know this.

  A guard comes to my door to advise me that I have a phone call from my father. I am instructed to go to the administration office.

  “I have heard what you’re doing,” he shouts through the receiver. “Refusing to work.”

  “You hear everything, Father,” I say flatly, forcing down the tremor at the back of my throat.

  “You have made a spectacle of yourself. Get back to work. Be a man!”

  And then he disconnects the call. He is ashamed of me, for my outspokenness. I have never felt so helpless. I have never had reason to, as I have never known anything but structure. Here in the surgeries there is none. This is a cold, brutal facility, and my father knew this before I came here. He is just as cold. My aunt once said that he changed after my mother died, but I don’t believe that people change that much. My father was born cold; he was just able to hide it for a while.

  Several days have passed. I have written several short letters to Lena, describing my room, the doctors, and the food, but nothing else. Dr. Wirths visits me in my quarters and says that I am to take my time. As soon as I feel better, I can return to my duties. He reminds me that our work here is pioneering, but he understands that for some, there is a period of adjustment. It is from these words that my trembles begin to disappear, that I begin to accept this is my prison, also, with no escape. When the walls begin to close in on me, I return to the medical barracks.

  I will be handling my first case alone today. I have spoken to Kohler, who says that I am to have full access to the facilities to complete my tasks. He says that Dr. Wirths has said that I am to apply the experiments, but in the way I see fit. Kohler calls me aside to remind me of the state of the women.

  “These women have no future. You must remember that.”

  I do, but while they live, there is always hope. I must not consider their fates as terminal. It is the only way I can treat them.

  The woman I observed undergoing treatment the previous week is dead. She bled out that same night. I put her face out of my mind and focus on the one now in her place. She speaks some German, and I question her on her family background, though she does not say much. I tell her what is happening, and she has agreed to sterilization. She is thirty-four and hungry. She has children, but she does not know where they are. They were separated at the beginning of the war.

  I hand the patient a fresh hospital gown and send her to be showered. When she returns, I help her up onto the bed and cover the top of her body with a soft blanket, not the coarse kind she is used to in the prison blocks. Such small attempts to give comfort are not common practice here, but the nurse does not question me. I suspect that she has been warned about me.

  To calm my nerves, I begin to hum Lena’s favorite tune while I work. I squeeze my patient’s hands at times and think of Lena, imagining her at home by the large front window.

  There are no guards to hold this woman down, as I requested, although the nurse does rest her hands on either side of the woman’s shoulders in case she should move while I inject pain relief and apply the syrup. This time, though, I halve the dose that Kohler has written on the chart. There is some bleeding, but not like the last time. She moans slightly and clutches her lower abdomen. I give her more pain medicine that I have brought in my own medicine bag.

  There is the sound of some gunshots between the buildings. Inside I flinch, though outwardly my hands are steady.

  Kohler enters and reads the chart. “We have already experimented with this dose. This is too low. It doesn’t work.”

  “As high as you did, and they die,” I challenge him.

  He says nothing and leaves.

  I increase the dose in an hour, and the woman starts to writhe and sit up. I call the guards to hold her down while I strap her to the table. It is something I reluctantly have to do.

  At lunch, the other doctors and I discuss our patients. I must remain objective as I listen to their various accounts of treatment. I hear horrid tales of people vomiting from radiation, of people too sick to stand and return to their blocks, and bodies in stacks to be cremated. A prisoner walks past the doorway of the lunch area wheeling away a patient who died earlier today from treatment that I am not involved in. His body lay on a hallway table for several hours.

  A telegram is placed on the table in front of me. This communication is not from my father this time—he has sent several blunt reminders of my commitment—but from one of Lena’s relatives. I read the message, fold it, and place it in my pocket.

  In the evening I return to my quarters. Dr. Marquering passes me with several children. I was told at the meeting that medical trials will soon begin on children, also. The doctor between them holds their hands and tells them a funny story. Their eyes wander over the doctor, curiously, some rapturously clutching sweets in their little hands as if they will be their last.

  I see a naked woman carry her dead child through the camp. The child lies stiffly in her arms, having been dead for perhaps longer than a day. The woman walks in the direction of the gas chambers willingly, as if there is no more to lose except her life—a life that she no longer wants.

  I have seen some terrible sights in the ghetto: people dying from disease, starvation, and executions, and families separated. I have seen soldiers killed in the street. I have seen people mourn over their loved ones, wailing, the sound penetrating the souls of those around them. But there is something about this place and the things that occur here that make me feel accountable. A feeling I have never had before. Perhaps it is the separation from Lena and the idea of fatherhood that deeply affects me on a personal level. I want to be imprisoned. I have carried out the most heinous experiments on women. I want to pay for what I have been a part of.

  My father does not believe in God. Nazism is his chosen religion. But Lena does. If there is a God, I wonder if at that moment he is looking directly at me, waiting for me to act. Waiting for me to throw myself at his mercy.

  I drag myself on heavy legs back to my room. I carry the weight of the atrocities and feel Lena’s eyes upon me.

  I walk with my eyes looking ahead, for fear they might fall on the eyes of the prisoners and someone I know. When I get
to my room, I sit down on the bed and stare at the floor. I begin to shake violently, sweat on my forehead and in my armpits. The room is dissolving, fading, and stretching into one ghastly blurred and bloated shape, as if the objects around me are no longer solid.

  I open the telegram again and read the first line.

  “Lena has died.”

  1943

  JANUARY–MARCH

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MATILDA

  Cook made a cake on Christmas Day while Frau was away visiting family for two days. Christmas is different in here. At home, Mama used to make pies and cakes, and Tata would bring us home each a gift, and we would invite other people from the village, and people would sing. But we are not allowed to sing our songs from home. The older girls went home for several days, except for Alice, who stayed in her room.

  Nurse has left a bag of washing at the back door. I do not feel like washing today. I say to Jacek, “Why don’t you do the washing?”

  “Because I am not a girl.”

  “Well, you act like a girl.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “You’re mean.”

  I storm off to the washroom, and Jacek comes in a little while later. He stands in the doorway and rubs his shoe back and forth on the ground noisily. I ignore him.

  “I can help with some,” he says. “We can do it together.”

  It takes longer than normal because we talk the whole time and stop more for breaks. He says he has a sister back in Poland somewhere. She was a few years older than him, and he remembers that his parents both worked and did not come home till late sometimes. His sister did a lot of the cooking.

  I tell him stories about my brothers fighting, and we laugh all the rest of the day.

  At breakfast Alice is there. She has porridge with apple, nuts, honey, ham, bread, and butter. The rest of us are to have only porridge now. I wonder why we are not to eat what she eats. She sits at the other end of the table and does not want to talk to us. With my hand I scoop up a handful of porridge and put it in my pocket.