Two Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom I knew well, worked as cleaning women in the Bunker. Every morning the light went on and a Witness with a livid, expressionless face would hand me a dustpan and brush to clean my cell with. The corners of her mouth were drawn down in a mask of sympathy. A few minutes later she would come back for her dustpan and brush. Then, before I had time to say a word, to ask her for a piece of bread, for instance, she would put the light out and close the door. Yes, the Jehovah’s Witnesses carried out their duties to the letter. They were prepared to take risks for Jehovah, but not for a fellow prisoner.
And yet one morning, before the usual distribution of bread— I had just completed a supplementary punishment of three food-less days for talking with the woman in the next cell, and I was lying half unconscious on the floor—the shutter in my door opened and a voice whispered breathlessly, “Grete, come quick, I’ve brought you something from Milena.” I crawled on all fours to the door and pulled myself up. The woman pulled a small, squashed parcel out of her dress. “Take it quick. Milena sends you all her love. But hide it for the love of God.” The shutter closed. I sank to the floor, the tears streaming down my cheeks. Milena hadn’t forgotten me. She had sent me a handful of sugar, some bread, and two buns from a package she had received from home.
Dreams played an important part in concentration camp life. Strange to say, cheerful dreams were much more frequent among prisoners than among free persons. My own dreams, I might add, were often in color. But in the darkness of my cell I had dreams of a kind that were new to me, daydreams in which I escaped, not out into the camp but into true freedom. I was running with pounding heart through the narrow twilight streets of Berlin; I was in a hurry, because the train would soon be leaving for Prague, where Milena was expecting me. I went into a dismal shop, where in addition to great heaps of books there were reproductions of our favorite paintings. Brueghel in soft colors, impressionistic landscapes bathed in tremulous light. I leafed and rummaged and picked out one thing after another. Delighted with so many riches, I finally bought everything I could lay hands on. In the next shop I bought a fur-lined dressing gown. The fur was cinnamon color, made up of small pieces, some lighter, some darker, like the miraculous fur in the fairy tale.* I felt its warmth and softness and knew that it had curative power, that it would make Milena well again. I ran to the station with my treasure. The train was waiting, but I rushed to the newsstand and bought an armful of beautifully colored magazines. There were station sounds all around me; I breathed in the travel smells I loved so much. And then it all vanished. The light went on, the cell door was opened.
Early one morning about two weeks later, the shutter in the iron door was opened again and the same Witness handed me a small parcel. Her face was convulsed with fear, I could see she was frantic. “Grete,” she whispered, “I beg you, let me tell Milena that you don’t want any more packages, it’s too dangerous. Please, can I tell her that?” In the face of such terror, I could only consent. “Yes,” I said, “I forbid Milena to send me anything more. I don’t need anything.” It was enough for me to know she was alive.
Later, at the end of my fifteen weeks in darkness, Milena told me how she had put pressure on the two Witnesses. Several times she had approached them on the camp street and begged them to bring me some bread. They had refused and left her flat. Then one evening she went to their barracks. She found out where their bunks were. On the third tier. She had trouble getting there with her bad leg but this time they could not escape. Again she implored them. You had to be really hardhearted to resist Milena, but they were unmoved. Milena reminded them of all I had done for the Witnesses over the last two years. That too had no effect. Then she resorted to the language of Jehovah, the God of vengeance; she gave them a sermon on Christian charity and described the torments they could expect in the next world if they persisted in hardening their hearts. Whimpering, they promised to bring me the food she gave them.
One day I was taken from my dark cell to the prison office, and there stood a smiling Milena with Ramdor. My knees began to shake. I could think of only one explanation; now the beast had arrested Milena too. She guessed what I was thinking: “No,” she said, “I haven’t been arrested. I’ve only come to see how you were getting along. Everything is all right.” Then I was brought back to my cell. For weeks I looked for an explanation. Could Ramdor have forced her to spy for him? Had she given him some information under questioning and been allowed to see me as her reward? No, that was impossible.
Even under normal conditions nothing is more dangerous to a concentration camp inmate than self-pity, than constant worry about his own personal fate. This is especially true in a dark cell. Terror gives way to apathy. I knew that if I was to survive I had to pull myself together and keep busy. I systematically divided the day into periods, each devoted to a different activity: walking, crawling, gymnastics, telling myself stories, reciting some of the countless poems I had had to learn in school, singing songs. In telling stories I took great pains not to leave anything out, and if I forgot a stanza of a poem I was reciting, I tried to make up one of my own and was very happy when I succeeded. But my storytelling was to take a dangerous turn.
I started retelling Maxim Gorki’s story “A Man Is Born.” The author tells us how as a boy he used to walk along the shore of the Black Sea near Sukhum, over roads and paths which I myself was to see forty years later, but under entirely different circumstances. One day, as he sat leaning against a tree at some distance from the path, waiting for the sun to rise over the sea, he saw dark forms against the light and heard the voices of people passing. It was a group of peasants, one of them a young woman, who along with many others had fled from the famine in the Orel district and found work near Sukhum.
The sun rises over the horizon and the boy follows the group. The path twines with the shoreline, and he soon loses sight of them. But then he sees something yellow in the bushes to one side. Coming closer, he hears moans and screams of pain. He runs to the woman’s aid. He bends over her, sees her enormous quivering belly, sees her convulsed face, and realizes that she is in the throes of childbirth. He wants to help her, but she repulses him, crying out, “Go away! Have you no shame?” In her need, however, she accepts his assistance, and he helps a new citizen of Orel into the world. He bathes the infant in the sea and puts the wriggling little fellow into the mother’s arms. Then he makes a fire and makes tea for her. At the end of the story the boy and the peasant woman follow the other peasants; in one arm he carries the baby, with the other he supports her.
In retelling this story, a strange transformation occurred in me. I couldn’t drop it. A daydream took over, and the story went on. I slipped into the skins of the protagonists. I myself became the boy and the peasant woman, walking along the Black Sea shore that I knew so well. From that point on I was two people, two fugitives from reality. We found a hut on the edge of a dense forest. A friendly place, though not much larger than my cell; it, too, had no window, but it had a door that could be opened. Now that there were two of me, I took twofold pleasure in our refuge. My days now had a bright morning. I went to the open door, looked out over the glittering sea, and breathed the salt air. A happy ending in every respect. The owner of the hut, a hunter, became our protector. There was plenty of food, we were glad to be alive, we lay in the sun and swam in the limpid water of the Black Sea. There was nothing vague about the paradise I dreamed up; I relished every detail, every hour, every minute of the day. I lost all sense of time and reality, I no longer knew if it was morning or evening; I would stay awake at night, because we were expecting a visit from the hunter at midday and a meal had to be prepared for him. So why bother about my bread ration when the table was groaning under the choicest dishes?
The boy and the peasant woman loved each other, an idyll of tender happiness. If only my neighbor wouldn’t call me back to reality by knocking on the wall between us. What were these people to me? I shut my eyes and the boy took me in his arms again.
One Sunday the cell door opened and I was released from the Bunker. I hated the daylight and the ghastly reality. I wanted to shut my eyes again and go back to my fantasies. I would have been lost without Milena’s help. She understood the danger I was in, because mentally deranged inmates were put to death. She got me into the annex of the infirmary with a Czech Block-dlteste. Whenever she could get away from her work, she came to see me. Over and over again I would tell her about the life of my heroes by the seashore, and she would listen with infinite patience. In this way she enabled me to return slowly to the reality of concentration camp life.
It was only then that I learned how she had come to visit me in the prison and what a risk she had run for my sake. For three weeks she had waited patiently for my return. She was afraid they might leave me to die there, and her fear grew from day to day. And then she made a heroic decision. She requested an appointment with Ramdor. Surprisingly enough, he agreed to see her. Possibly he expected her to denounce someone. He received her in his office, and she came right to the point. “I would like to speak to you about my friend Grete Buber. She is in the Bunker.” It is unlikely that any other prisoner could have finished that sentence without getting at least a slap in the face. But Ramdor must have been affected by Milena’s magic. He gave her a look of consternation but let her go on. “If you promise me,” she said, “that Grete Buber will leave the Bunker alive, and that is in your power, I can do you a great service.” Ramdor muttered something on the order of: “What the confounded … !” And Milena went on. “Horrible things are happening in this camp. If nothing is done to stop them, you can say good-bye to your career.” That was too much. Ramdor pushed his chair back from the desk and went red in the face. “Who do you think you’re talking to!” he blustered. “I beg your pardon,” said Milena, “you don’t seem to understand. I’ve only come here to help you. My asking a favor of you is something else again. If you’re not interested in what I have to tell you, I beg your pardon. Just send me back to the infirmary.”
It’s a wonder that Milena wasn’t taken directly to the Bunker. But she brazened it out, and in the end Ramdor gave her an opening. “What are these horrible things that are happening?” he asked. Milena kept him in suspense for as long as possible. “Serious criminal offenses,” she said. “Both prisoners and members of the SS are involved. But before I give you the details, I want to know whether you are prepared to meet my conditions?” “What is this impertinence? Do you think you can blackmail me?” “Of course not, Herr Kriminalassistent. How could I, a mere prisoner, think anything of the kind? But I thought that you, as a German, would know the meaning of friendship. Tell me, would you abandon a friend in such a situation?”
Ramdor turned to face her. She had succeeded in touching some chord in this scoundrel and was quick to follow through. “Can you tell me if Grete Buber is still alive?” “Of course she is.” “Can I see her? This very day?” “Take it easy. Don’t go too far.”
Milena started telling him what kind of person I was. Ramdor made his next mistake. He listened, and that enabled her to go on with her seduction program. When at last he had given her his word of honor to keep his promise, she told him what crimes were being committed day and night in the infirmary. Of course this was nothing new to Ramdor and of course he did not find it revolting. He himself was a murderer. But this was a threat to his career. It would have been his duty to expose Dr. Rosenthal, because in the eyes of the Gestapo it was a crime for a member of the SS to sell the gold teeth of the dead for his own private profit. So Ramdor stepped in and before long the medical officer and his mistress were arrested.
But what would have happened to Milena if Ramdor had chosen to cover Dr. Rosenthal? She would have been shot that same day. Of that she was well aware, but it did not deter her. Buoyed by the momentum of her onslaught, she forgot the burden of her sick body. But when she got back to the infirmary, her weakness gained the upper hand, and she was paralyzed with fear that Quernheim would come and kill her with one of her lethal injections.
Some months later Ramdor tried to blackmail Milena. He came to the infirmary, sent for her, and asked her to spy on one of the prisoners. “Herr Ramdor,” she said, “you’ve come to the wrong address. I am not a stool pigeon.” Ramdor gulped. And then he made the astonishing remark: “I can’t deny it. You really are a decent person.” And Milena shot back: “Yes, I am. And I didn’t need you to tell me.”
After my release from the Bunker, I found out what had become of Senior Overseer Langefeld. On the day after my arrest, she was allowed to go to her office. On the way, she had a conversation with Milena, who rushed up to her and implored her to save me from death. Though Langefeld promised Milena to do everything in her power, she knew that her own hour had struck. That same day she was put under house arrest and separated from her child. She spent the next day in strict isolation in her apartment. Her only thought was to let someone know what was happening to her. Late that afternoon she heard a column of prisoners singing as they marched past on their way back from work. She leaped to the window, opened it, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Help!” The SS man who was guarding her dragged her away from the window.
The next day the order for her arrest arrived from Berlin. She was taken to Breslau, her last place of residence, and tried by an SS tribunal. The charge against her was that she had been “a tool of the Polish political prisoners and had shown sympathy for Polish nationalists.” The hearings went on for fifty days, at the end of which she was acquitted for lack of proof and dismissed from Ravensbruck.
* “Thousandfurs” in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
21
HER LAST BIRTHDAY
To want death but not the pain of dying is a bad sign. Except for that, death can be faced.
—KAFKA BRIEFE AS MILENA
One of the most dreaded institutions in Ravensbruck was the “labor mobilization.” Every day labor gangs were formed to work in munitions or other war-connected factories or in the construction of airfields. Every prisoner hoped to stay in the main camp and to avoid being shipped to the annexes, in most of which the food was much worse.
After my recovery, for fear of being shipped out, I looked around for a “good” outside job in the main camp. Some Polish prisoners who knew me offered me a job in the logging gang, and I accepted gladly. The prisoner in charge, Mother Liberak, as the Poles called her, was an angel, and from time to time each member of the crew was given a day off. A week later my turn came. It was a sunny day in the late fall. I couldn’t bear to stay shut up in the barracks and Milena had errands in various parts of the camp, so I joined her. This was risky, but as Milena was wearing the yellow armband of an infirmary worker, the camp police didn’t bother us.
We walked about, deep in conversation. On one side, we could see the last yellow leaves at the top of a willow tree on the far side of the wall, on the other, there were dark pine trees. We talked about the forests and cities we planned to see together someday and about the loved ones who were waiting for us. On the outside, life was going on; perhaps our children, who would soon be young girls, had forgotten us. Fear of the censorship had reduced the few letters we received from outside into impersonal stereotypes. “I really know nothing about Honza,” said Milena sadly. “If only she would tell me the color of her dress or whether she’s started to wear silk stockings, or what she does on some particular day. If she’d only stop telling me that she goes to school and likes to play the piano.” Milena worried about the child, she reproached herself for having involved Honza in her own private and political life so young. And now this independent, precocious child was having to contend with her grandfather, who must be treating her as capriciously and tyrannically as he had treated her mother. In his letters he referred to his granddaughter as pohanka, the little pagan, and Milena gathered from certain cautious hints that Honza had run away from him and had been getting into trouble with various sets of foster parents. What Milena did not know was how very much the
child’s grandfather admired her courage and strength of character, because not even the Gestapo had succeeded in making her talk.
Milena showed me her father’s latest letter, which expressed only worry and real affection. In a mellow mood that day, she said, “My father’s love for his own flesh and blood had a strange way of expressing itself, but it can’t be helped. He’s a tyrant and that’s that.” Then she spoke of his good qualities, how splendidly he had behaved when the Germans marched into Prague. And she also had pleasant childhood memories connected with him. He was an enthusiastic skier; he had taught her to ski at a time when such activities were unusual for women and he had taken her on marvelous skiing trips. With a group of his students and often with his old friend Matus, he had led her through the wintry beauty of the Bohemian forest. “To look at me now,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe that I was once one of the best woman skiers in the country. I even tried to keep it up with my stiff knee.”
As we were turning back at the end of the camp street, we were horrified to catch sight of Dittman, head of the labor mobilization service. Before he had even reached us he started bellowing, “What are you doing here during working hours?” He remembered me from Langefeld’s office and knew about all my “crimes.” “Why haven’t you reported for labor mobilization?” he shouted at me. His face, which owed its special character to a boil on one cheek, went purple with rage. “I’m sick,” I said. “I’ve been assigned to inside duty.” That was the only he that occurred to me. Luckily, he left Milena alone because of her yellow armband. “You haven’t been in the Bunker for quite a while, have you? Report to the labor mobilization office this minute or the fur will fly.” His top boots creaked as he turned to go.
Milena Page 19