Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “And Auschwitz. What is Auschwitz?”

  §51

  Approaching the main gate she found her Tabak man. He had moved she was almost sure, but he had resumed the same position—and he’d found another source of tobacco and was puffing on Klaus’s pipe. He was, the last two days had taught her, one of the “healthy” ones. She doubted he weighed much more than fifty kilos, but that was health by Belsen standards.

  She crouched down, copied the posture, tried to look beneath the tilted brow.

  “Pamiętasz mnie. To ja, dziewczyna z tytoniem.”

  You remember me. I’m tobacco girl.

  The head lifted. The light not yet on behind the eyes.

  “Nazywam się Nell. Nell Burkhardt. Jestem Berliner. Jak masz na imię?”

  My name is Nell. Nell Burkhardt. I’m a Berliner. What is your name?

  The merest flicker. For the first time he seemed to know what was beyond the reach of his hand, to what he reached out, to be able to see the person he had heard and never looked at.

  “Tabak?”

  “Yes. Tabak.”

  “Berlin?”

  “Berlin.”

  Now he looked directly at her for the first time.

  “Jestem . . . Kraków,” he said.

  Then his head tilted, he drew on the pipe and said no more.

  She waited, hoping that her silent determination might draw more from him. Minutes passed, the pipe smoked out, the head lifted.

  “Jestem . . . byłam . . . nikim . . . mniej niż nikim . . . jestem . . . niczym.”

  I am . . . I was . . . nobody . . . less than nobody . . . I am . . . nothing.

  “Nikt nie jest niczym. Nawet pies ma imię.”

  No one is nothing. Even a dog has a name.

  “Jestem mniej niż niczym . . . mniej niż psem.”

  I am less than nobody . . . less than a dog.

  §52

  In the morning she asked Klaus for more tobacco. As she passed the main gate, the same hunched figure, the same hand extended, the same head bowed.

  “Dziewczyna z Berlina. Gib mir Tabak.”

  She found Dekker.

  He said, “I can’t put you back in with the German nurses. I really don’t want to take that risk.”

  She said, “I have found something better to do. You’re treating people whose names you don’t even know. Give me access to the records, the papers, the card indexes, whatever system the SS had. Let us give them back their names.”

  “The buggers burnt the lot.”

  “So the only way we have of finding out anything at all about anyone is to ask them?”

  “And you’re going to be the one to ask, is that it?”

  “If you let me.”

  Dekker did what he always did, looked away, took his eyes off her, took in some object in the middle distance and made up his mind without the persuasive glare of her gaze. He picked up an RAMC battledress. Tossed it across the desk to her.

  “It’ll be as well if they don’t think of you as German. Put this on. It’s the smallest I could find. You may look daft wearing it with a skirt but no dafter than any other ragamuffin in the camp. And it may just protect you from another attack. See the stores NCO, Staff Sergeant Cox, ask for pen, paper, cards, whatever you need or more precisely whatever he can spare. When we can we’ll set you up with a desk somewhere. But you can’t do this on your own. We really could use some sort of record, but it’ll only stand a chance if we have nurses and the med students involved. That will take a while. A few days at least. We’re moving people out haphazardly. I’d prefer to take the sickest first, but it just isn’t possible. It’s selective, and a selection will be about as welcome as an injection. Meanwhile what we have is a mixture. The walking “healthy”—that is anyone who can stand unaided—and the chronic. Start with a “healthy.” Someone who’s fit enough to talk. See what it yields. See what you can do for him or her. For all we know you may be the first person to ask anything of them in months. Even if we don’t get answers, your asking may be worthwhile. Implant the idea that they matter to someone. And if they do answer, get what you can, in particular get medical history. Operations, permanent conditions, immunisation. I’ll give you a checklist to tick off. I suggest two of everything. One card for us, one for them. Give them the second card and hope they don’t lose it. For a while, possibly for months, it may be the only identity card they have.”

  He stopped as suddenly as he had begun. Drawing breath. Hitting the buffers.

  “That’s quite a speech,” Nell said.

  Dekker was smiling now. “I was improvising. It’s quite an idea. It may not work, but it’s quite an idea. And I have to ask you . . . why?”

  It was her turn to pause. She knew what she wished to tell him, but it had to be precise.

  “Having been nothing, they wish to be someone,” she said.

  “Yes,” Dekker replied, “I suppose they would.”

  “These are people who have families . . . brothers . . . sisters . . . children . . .”

  “Nell—the tense of what you say may be your biggest mistake. These are people who had families, who had brothers, sisters, parents, children. These are the survivors. The rest are probably dead. Germany is an open grave. The dead we are burying here are the tip of an iceberg. People are dying every day, and many more will die. This is not peace, this is merely the absence of war. And if you can help these people resurrect their identities you will also be invoking a roll call of the dead. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  And Dekker thought that perhaps he was looking at the most determined, the most po-faced child he had ever met.

  “Then perhaps in the end you may find all you can do is listen.”

  §53

  Of course, it did not work.

  She began with her pipe-smoking acquaintance. The next time she saw him, he had moved fifty feet, was sitting in the sun and had traded his camp stripes for a brown woollen jacket that fitted loosely and grey flannel trousers that bagged around his bottom and thighs. He still squatted, but instead of dirty bare feet he balanced in a pair of shining brogues, confiscated from some bourgeois citizen of fastidious cleanliness. The dust of Belsen had not even had a chance to settle on them.

  She squatted opposite him, a leaky fountain pen and a small stack of index cards in her hand. In the absence of a camera, she would sketch. She would put in a name, a date of birth, a place of birth, an occupation and a simple sketch. If possible she would add medical history. If further possible a date and place of arrest.

  He raised his head. His pipe was lit. He did not ask for tobacco.

  “Dziewczyna z Berlina.”

  The girl from Berlin.

  “Tak to ja. Czy mogłabym Cie prosić o Twoje imię?”

  Me again. Could I ask you your name?

  “Co tu robisz w tym brudzie?”

  What are you doing down here in the dirt?

  “Cóż . . . Co robisz w tym brudzie?”

  Well . . . what are you doing down here in the dirt?

  “Jestem psem . . . jestem gorzej niż psem . . . jestem niczym . . . jestem numerem.”

  I am dog . . . I am less than dog . . . I am nothing . . . I am number.

  He rolled up the left sleeve of his woollen jacket to reveal the number tattooed into his forearm.

  “Jestem Auschwitz.”

  I am Auschwitz.

  §54

  In the morning she passed him again. He was standing now. She’d never seen him stand before. He was over six feet tall. He was looking out through the wire.

  She didn’t wait for him to speak, and held out the tobacco before he could ask for it.

  The eyes that had looked at nothing could see her clearly now. He took the tobacco, looked at it in the palm of his hand, looked down at her.

  “Nowak,” he said simply. “My name is Aurelius Nowak. I should have told you that when you asked me. I am sorry. It was rude of me. Hunger is madness. You must fo
rgive me.”

  She took out her pack of cards.

  She had two for him, all they showed was an inky sketch and the word “Krakau.” She wrote in his name.

  “Did you think I had forgotten my own name?”

  “I thought it was possible . . . hunger is madness.”

  “I can forget nothing. I wish I could.”

  “Anything would help. The SS burnt everything. We have no records. Nothing. Can you tell me your date of birth?”

  “I can but I won’t. It’s just another number. I am . . . through with numbers. I have been a number too long. Sit with me a while. Play the prisoner with me in the dirt again.”

  While they squatted Nowak lit up his pipe and in scarcely more than fragments gave her the bare facts of his life.

  “I was professor of music in Kraków. They shot most of my colleagues in 1939. Perhaps I was not enough the intellectual to merit a bullet. I was merely expelled and found work in a bakery. They came for me only in the March of last year. My entire family was sent to Auschwitz. My son died on the train. I never saw my wife again after we arrived. In January this year, at least I think it was January, they marched us out of Auschwitz fifty kilometres to a railway yard and put me back on a train. This is where the train stopped. I fell from it alive. Many did not. The rest you know. I was, I have been, as you found me that day in the dog kennel . . . mad with hunger.”

  She tried to reduce his narrative to keywords, found herself crossing out and rephrasing. Ink leaking onto her fingers.

  “Can I ask you about your medical history? Diseases and the like?”

  “Ah . . . the British doctors. Everything in its place. Yes. And I shall answer. I had not a day’s illness in my life until last year.”

  “And . . . then?”

  “I caught an incurable disease.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Germany.”

  §55

  Of course, it did not work.

  As more and more inmates moved from the squalor of the camp to the relative order of the nearby Panzer Barracks, the British organised hospital wards. Nell followed, and as the British Red Cross nurses treated the results of prolonged malnutrition, she gently probed, filling in her cards, sketching faces, trying, as Nowak had told her, not to make it all sound like statistics. Statistics were no more than a hypodermic in the hands of a German nurse, and that no less than a Luger in the hands of a Wehrmacht soldier. Fear was everything. Once overcome, there was listlessness, aggression, and lethargy.

  On one day, she estimated, she had made out over one hundred and fifty cards. She gave each individual a card and handed the duplicate set to Dekker. The next morning she found dozens of them, blowing with the dust or strewn across the ward floor. It was predictable. So many of the women on the wards had looked blankly at her as she had pressed the half-filled cards into their hands. She doubted that any had really forgotten their name, but a good number had seemed incapable of uttering it.

  “Futility,” Dekker said, “is the name of the game.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you have to risk it; nothing ventured nothing gained. And when it all goes Fuß über Kopf you accept it as futile and start again.”

  She gathered up the cards. Sat in the nurses’ lavatory, tearful, trying to interpret Dekker’s homily on futility. It would have been hubristic ever to think that she could give anyone back their identity, and she had only ever thought that for a second. The best she could do was help someone, anyone, resurrect their own identity. Nowak, in his unsubtle way, had pointed out the gulf between identity and an identity card, but what other method was available to her? Was Dekker’s “perhaps all you can do is listen” all there was to be done?

  Two Red Cross nurses came in to scrub up.

  “Ah,” said one. “The little ink girl.”

  And she saw herself as some transparent, useless flake of a child in a Hans Andersen tale. No longer invisible, but futile. The Little Ink Girl.

  Then the other one said, “Cheer yourself up, ducks. I always find a bit of makeup does me the world of good. That and a nice cup of char.”

  And she pressed something small, hard, and metallic into her hand.

  Nell unfolded her fingers.

  It was a tube of lipstick.

  She had never worn lipstick.

  She pulled off the little golden cylinder. It was searing red, and the imprint of the nurse’s lower lip was sculpted in. A twist grip on the base propelled the lipstick upwards. It was a toy.

  She looked at the bundle of cards, sifted through them. Her sketches now looked to her to be all alike—the same hollow cheeks and new moon eyes, the same shining skull.

  She clutched them in hand, pen, cards, and lipstick and returned to the ward. Most of the women were milling around in a susurrus of slow Polish talk, the effort of animation all but beyond them.

  Alone on her bed sat a Belgian woman she knew only as Bruges—knees tucked up to her flattened chest, Nowak-style, Belsen-style, hands around her ankles, head down. Her card was on the top.

  Nell sat on the edge of her bed and held it out to her.

  She looked up and offered no reaction.

  Nell set the rest of the cards on the bed—the pen rolled off the pile, she reached out for it. The lipstick rolled off the pile and another hand grabbed it.

  What to Nell had been a toy was a magic wand to Bruges. She took the twist grip between finger and thumb and turned it as slowly as was possible, the fierce red tip peeping out like the tongue of a cat. And when she looked up she was smiling.

  Nell looked around, almost desperate for a mirror. She tipped a few shreds of gauze out of a kidney dish and held the flat base up to her.

  Bruges tipped her head from side to side, coping with the distortion, looked once at Nell and then put the lipstick to her lips.

  It occurred to Nell that there were few mirrors in the barracks and none in the camp—it could be the first time Bruges had looked at herself in an age. But Bruges was focussed, if she was shocked by her thin face and sparse hair, she did not show it. She applied the lipstick with artistry, arching her top lip, stretching her lower, pursing them together in a scarlet pucker, almost blowing a kiss to herself in the mirror.

  She smiled at Nell, as Nell lowered the dish, and held the lipstick out to her. Nell did not take it—around her, all around her, gathered like silent shadows, every woman in the ward.

  §56

  Later the same day, the afternoon brightening into April sunshine, Nell sat at a makeshift desk outside Dekker’s office filing her cards alphabetically.

  “Sabine Michel,” Bruges had said at last. “I am twenty-six years old.”

  Nell had sat on the edge of the bed and listened, and then she had sat on the edge of every bed in the ward and listened as every pair of red lips told a tale.

  She had just filed Katya Żebrowska when the quartermaster, Staff Sergeant Cox, appeared with a cardboard box under his arm.

  “I hear you can use these,” he said.

  She looked at the stencilled label on the outside.

  “Field Dressings x 40. RAMC type 101/7. Dec. 1944”

  “Thank you Mr. Cox, but I think not.”

  “Not so fast, Inky Fingers.”

  He flipped the lid off. There were no field dressings, the box was full of lipstick, hundreds of tubes of lipstick, all marked “Max Factor,” and “Made in the USA”—rose red, poppy red, flame red . . . every red that Max could factor.

  “My God! Where did you get this?”

  “You don’t think I ordered them do you? Nah. Cock-up back at HQ. I was getting ready to send ’em back before some light-fingered bugger got his hands on ’em and sold the lot on the black market, but then I heard about you and yer tube of lipstick.”

  “You heard?”

  “The whole bleedin’ camp heard.”

  Nell sat on the edge of a bed, any bed, and listened to red lips talk. She would go on listening for over three months. />
  §57

  Of course it did not work.

  Dekker had been right about futility, right about the pursuit of futility, but as soon as resources permitted he assigned Red Cross nurses to record keeping. And some of those who would not or could not talk to nurses would talk to Nell, and Nell would listen.

  She would go on listening for over three months. She would go on listening for eternity.

  §58

  Weeks passed. The Allies, in the form of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force—a phrase that put Nell more in mind of an Antarctic trek than a total war—recognised the nature of the problem and found a bureaucratic solution. By the thousand printed, tick-in-the-box, Displaced Person cards arrived. Twenty questions poised upon a precipice. The card asked all the questions Nell had been asking and several she might not. It invited the contempt Dekker had so accurately predicted, and Nowak so acutely embodied with his “just another number.”

  So often the answers were all too predictable.

  “Do have a husband?”

  “Auschwitz.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Auschwitz.”

  “What was your last address?”

  “Auschwitz.”

  “What is your religion?”

  “I left that in Auschwitz too.”

  And sometimes not.

  “You are a Displaced Person.”

  “No I’m not. I know exactly where I am.”

  What she had learnt fed into the system. And the cards fell in the dust, fluttered in the wind, blew out across the heath into a symbolic, anonymous confetti of freedom much as her first efforts had done. She had not learnt not to care, she had learnt not to mind.

  Dekker could not resist a joke. Which was more prevalent the Displaced Person or the Displaced Card?

  §59

  On May 20 no one died. The first day without a death, but by then they had buried over twelve thousand, and would bury more.

  On the twenty-first the original Belsen camp was evacuated. The survivors were housed in the former Panzer Barracks, now renamed a Displaced Persons Camp.

  The British burned Belsen to the ground and threw a party.