by Ellen Keith
“To Friedrich,” she added, “and all the other good people the world lost this week.”
We nodded, and the others shot back their drinks, lips curling at the bitterness. A moment of soberness followed as the air strike played out again in our heads. The crackling of fire, shooting sparks into the air. The wounded holding our hands as they cried. But most of all, the fear, the uncertainty.
Gerda leaned forward. “You know what I heard?” She paused. “Goethe’s Oak was hit in the bombing.”
Several of the German girls gasped. “Really?” Sophia asked.
“One of the prisoners told me. He said it was a stray fire bomb, that it burned all night.”
“What?” I asked. “You mean that old tree by the laundry building, the one with a girth the size of Göring’s belly?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Goethe penned some of his best work under it,” Gerda replied. “And legend says that whenever Goethe’s Oak falls, it will signal the fall of the German Reich.”
“Aha,” I said. “Confirmation that the end is near.” But inside, I questioned how it would feel to know that the collapse of your own country would be the one thing that could save you. The air strike had brought all of us hope, even the German girls, yet I couldn’t help but think of their families scattered in cities and towns across the map and what the approaching Allied bombers meant for them. I stood and went to the bedroom to clear my head. My mind drifted to Theo again, and for the umpteenth time that week, I wondered if he was safe, what he was doing, what he was thinking.
Sophia appeared in the hall. “Everything all right?”
“Yes, I think so. You know, I’m so sorry about Friedrich.”
She sighed. “Maybe, in another life, he might have made a good husband. He was married, though; did I tell you that? I keep asking myself if his wife will ever find out how he died, although maybe she’s dead herself.”
“All the suffering this week, yet somehow we feel the need to rejoice in it.”
“I’ve stopped trying to make sense of things.” She extended her hand. “Look, why don’t you come do my hair? Gerda wants to watch how you braid it.”
I followed her back into the day room and got her to sit cross-legged in front of me. The tension filtered from my mind as I sifted my fingers through her thick hair.
“Tell us, Sophia,” Gerda said, “how will you celebrate your next birthday as a free woman?”
“As a free woman? Why, I’ll eat and eat, of course! Stuff myself silly. Chocolate tarts, marzipan, macarons, lemon custard. Perhaps Marijke’s father can teach me a thing or two about opening a bakery.”
I smiled. “Then the first thing you’ll need to learn is how to make proper Dutch boterkoek.”
And then the game began again as it did so often. While I twisted Sophia’s hair up into a crown around her head, we all swapped recipes, our favourite meals from childhood, the dishes we’d mastered, down to every little detail. The way icing sugar melts on your tongue. The tart juices from freshly picked blackberries. The taste of ocean as you slurp down pickled herring. The butter-richness of old Gouda cheese sliced over warm rye bread. Our mouths watered and our stomachs grumbled as we pretended we were dining in fine restaurants with white-gloved waiters or, as I imagined, at home by candlelight, with my husband at my side.
The game ended when Wilhelmina came back in and ordered us to get ready for bed. As we turned out the lights, Sophia leaned over to whisper her thanks, for making her feel a few hours of happiness, for turning her back into a young girl who knew nothing of hunger or air strikes or brothel madams.
SUMMER slid into autumn, and as Karl had affirmed, the camp rose up again on the backs of the prisoners. The SS buried their dead and burned ours. They forced the prisoners to repair the damaged buildings and keep making weapons. Yet something at Buchenwald had changed. The Nazis became rabid with vengeance. We heard of a guard who had thrown a man’s cap into the electrified wire and demanded he retrieve it; of an officer at evening roll call who made the prisoners sing without pause until dawn; of a jailer who hanged inmates by their wrists until their joints detached. News of the jailer made me nauseated, a reminder of my own stint in the Bunker, of what might have happened, had Karl not intervened.
These stories came to us in whispers over the brothel mattresses, but we saw little of it ourselves. The men in the waiting room looked thinner and paler by the week, but we had gone back to receiving many of our meals from the SS canteen, and with Karl claiming me for himself, I was freed from that vicious cycle of man after man. Instead, I had to help Bertha with the cashier duties, so she and Wilhelmina could take long smoke breaks on the front steps.
Karl took advantage of my idle time, calling on me more and more often until seldom a night went by without him. Since the bombing, he’d stopped sharing news of the war and boasting of the German progress, and switched to topics he called pleasant: nights at the opera, his boyhood hikes in the mountains, his dreams for a life with me at his side.
JUST before dusk one day in early November, Sophia came into our bedroom, where I was changing. “Your presence is demanded outside, Madame.” She winked, a faux loftiness to her words.
“Outside?” I didn’t need to ask whom to anticipate. Cold air radiated from the windowpane beside me, so I put on her sweater overtop of my own and pulled the mittens Karl had gifted me from under my bed.
He was waiting beyond the fence that encircled the brothel, his hands in the pockets of his leather overcoat. I hesitated at the top of the stairs, having never ventured from the brothel without a line of girls behind me.
“Come, Marijke, hurry.”
I obeyed. He checked behind him before placing his hand against the small of my back. “This way.”
He led me to the right, down the hill and away from the main pitch of the prisoners’ camp to an area I’d never seen before. My breath escaped in clouds, the winter air tickling my lungs. Above the forest, a deep blush tinged the grey sky. I waited for another command, something to indicate what he expected of me, but when we passed the stables, he wrapped his arm farther around my waist. “I want to show you something.”
“What?”
But he didn’t reply until we reached a patch of meadow and a path that must have led out of the camp. He stopped in the middle, pointing to the treetops. The branches formed silhouettes against the horizon, so thick they appeared to bear leaves.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look harder.”
A movement in a far-off copse caught my attention.
“Aha, birds.”
“Wait.” He stood behind me, holding me with his chin resting on my hat. We waited for several minutes, and for the first time in months, I felt the stillness of my surroundings. No girls snoring. No men groaning or panting. No sirens, no orders. His embrace was relaxed. It felt almost like Theo’s.
A bird took off from its perch, followed by another. Karl squeezed my elbow. “It’s happening.”
And the sky filled. Birds poured from the trees. Hundreds of them—no, thousands. They soared in unison, shifting together into shapes. I couldn’t tell one from another; beating wings swooped en masse, their movements growing, contracting.
“Starlings,” he whispered.
They rose and fell, dove and swirled like one long, winding ribbon. I had both the feeling of a deep calmness and the sense that something in my chest was floating up, like part of me wanted to leave my body and twirl with them beneath the wisps of cloud.
I turned to gaze up at him. “This is what music looks like.”
He smiled as he stared at the sky. Then he began to hum. The opening bars of Pachelbel’s Canon, off-key, but still recognizable. He stepped back with a slight bow, raised his arm and spun me in a slow circle, his throat snagging on the high notes. Above us, the ribbon twisted and rippled, and behind it, the sky bled indigo. He turned me around and around, and when the moment felt right, my voice picked up to match his.
The starli
ngs danced into the twilight. But as they began to settle and return to their roosts, we stopped to watch. And in that briefest of moments, he became just a man, and I just a woman. There was no master, no slave. He held my hand, and the clouds of his breath disappeared alongside my own. And everything I thought I knew—home, my dreams for after the war, my love for Theo—wavered, like the ground beneath me was no longer solid.
I took Karl’s gloved hand and pressed it to my lips. “Thank you; that was beautiful.”
We walked back in silence. My feelings for him were growing sticky, harder to tame, the sense of wanting more and unbidden thoughts that proved impossible to ignore. As we neared the brothel, the distance between us widened and I slowed my steps, reluctant to return to my prison within a prison. I considered what we’d witnessed, the mesmerizing force of the birds’ choreography. It was easy to see the comparison between the starlings and us prisoners, the strength in numbers. But having faith in this idea was another matter.
At the edge of the fence, Karl stiffened and stood up straighter. The Kommandant was coming out of the infirmary. He stopped in front of us. “Müller, there you are. I’ve just been to see Fischer. All the frostbite this week has been a nuisance for our labour capacity. They’re lopping off toes and fingers faster than you can count.” He raised an eyebrow as he noticed me.
Karl replied in a callous, unfamiliar voice. “I found this one wandering along the camp perimeter. Seems she thought she needed an evening stroll.” A look of apprehension crossed Karl’s face as he registered what he’d said. I bristled and stared at his feet, the moment we’d shared slipping from my grasp.
The Kommandant seized my wrist, his thumb pressing against my pulse. He tugged off my fur-lined mitten and let it dangle from his fingers. “Someone is taking good care of her.”
Karl cleared his throat. “She must have found a suitor from the clothing depot.”
Inside I was seething, furious at how quickly he would betray me but also at my own surprise at seeing this happen.
Karl grabbed me by the shoulder. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t feel tempted to pull anything like this again.”
“Good, and find out where she got those mittens.” The Kommandant paused, and I felt him taking me in. “Such pretty Aryan skin. She looks familiar, don’t you think? Who does she remind you of? An actress?”
“I—that’s a good question. I can’t quite place her.”
“Whatever the case, I think I had a good eye, choosing our brothel women from the herd.” He turned and started off toward the camp gate before calling back over his shoulder. “Come by my villa in an hour, Müller. My cook is preparing a nice veal tonight.”
Karl didn’t move until we were alone. His expression had hardened, the same shielded look he wore whenever he arrived at the brothel. He clenched and unclenched his fist as he debated what to say. “Go back inside,” he mumbled at last. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
AT the end of March 1945, rumours began to trickle into camp. The Allies had made incredible progress, and victory seemed inevitable. Talk of the American advancement stirred the SS guards into a panic, but uncertainty about the future frightened us even more. There was no telling what the moffen would do when cornered with defeat. A Dutch prisoner had told me about the reprisals for the resistance activities back home. After a resistance group took out two big Dutch collaborators, the Nazis raided a few universities and executed civilian hostages. At least fifty, he’d heard. The story made me sick, knowing that these were innocent students, that Theo might have taught some of them.
One piece of good news was that the Soviets had started to liberate camps in the east, but the moffen were doing everything possible to keep the prisoners from freedom. Recent transfers from the newly liberated Auschwitz warned us of what they called death marches. Was that what awaited us at Buchenwald when the Allies drew nearer? Gruelling treks on foot for days on end? Mass shootings? We were certain they wouldn’t concede to losing their labour force, nor would they allow us to survive as witnesses to their crimes.
On Easter Sunday, the guard who accompanied us on our strolls decided to switch up his route, leading us girls along the western edge of the camp, taunting us with glimpses of the forest of budding trees that lay beyond the barbed wire. Near the edge of the blocks, a white mound stood a metre high. Corpses. My stomach rolled. We marched single file along the fence, and our escort warned to stay at least five metres from the wire. But the guards in the watchtower weren’t concerned about us. They had their machine guns trained on a large circle of men who had gathered up ahead.
Our guard tried to lead us out of the way, but we had a good view of what was unfolding. A group of SS officers taunted and kicked three inmates wearing pink triangles. I could tell right away that Karl stood at the head of the group, overseeing the abuse without a flicker of remorse. As we got closer, I realized one of the prisoners on the ground was the handsome young man I’d gotten into trouble on my first day of work at the brothel. Welts covered his forearms, and a purple shiner bloomed around one eye.
I stepped out of line, ready to cry out, but Sophia clapped her hand over my mouth. “Goddammit, Marijke,” she said. “Remember your place.”
So we turned and carried on back down the pitch toward the brothel. The yelps of the prisoners faded away, but I could still picture Karl, the sternness of his expression, the sober reserve of a minister presiding over a funeral.
WHEN Karl came into the koberzimmer that evening, I lay on the bed, clothed and facing the wall.
“Hello, beautiful.” He bent to kiss my cheek. When I didn’t respond, he started undressing. I waited until he had removed his boots and tucked away his gun before I flipped over to face him.
“Oh, there you are.” He winked and tried to cuddle up beside me, but I sat up.
“I saw you beating those prisoners today,” I said. “How could you?”
Karl jerked back his head. “You saw? Were you girls out for a walk?”
“Just tell me.”
“I didn’t beat them myself.”
“You gave the order!”
He grimaced. “Some things are necessary, Marijke, but I wish you didn’t have to see them.”
I curled away from his touch. “Necessary?”
“We have to control the spread of that disease before it takes over the nation. Himmler is very concerned.”
“One of the first prisoners who visited me was among those men. There was nothing perverse about him.”
“If he came to visit you, that’s a sign of progress.”
“What do you mean?”
He went on to tell me about the medical experiments Dr. Fischer carried out at Buchenwald. The doctors had been injecting these prisoners with testosterone, trying to realign their sexuality. “We’re fixing them, my dear. It’s the best thing for them, for everyone.”
“What if you can’t convert them?”
“Then we have to take care of it another way.”
I stood up and backed away from him. When he beckoned me over, I didn’t move. He shot me a bewildered look.
“I don’t do it myself, Marijke. I’m not a killer.”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me nobody has ever died at your hands, at your command.”
He slouched, dropped his chin to his chest. “I do what’s best for my people.”
“Your people? How could you want to be part of this?”
“Germany is my country. I’m not ashamed of that.”
“A nation of executioners.”
“Stop.”
“Why? Are you afraid of the truth? Are you scared to admit that you’re like all the others? You act like you have this halo over you because you knew a Jew as a child. One single Jewish friend—as if that excuses you from everything. All this time you pretend you’re better than them, but you’re just as cold and bloodthirsty.”
He put on his shirt, missing buttons in his haste. “Don’t you talk to me that way. I have no choice.”
He was dressed then, everything but his boots. He clutched my shoulder, his fingers digging into my collarbone.
I wrenched free. “How could anyone ever love you?” I moved for the exit.
“Marijke, don’t. Please come back. I’m sorry. Listen to me.”
Sophia’s warning returned to me as I walked through that door, and I realized the grave risk I took in treating him like any other lover. In the hall, I waited for him to call out again, to drag me back, to exact punishment. But he didn’t, so I returned to the sleeping quarters more frustrated and repulsed than ever.
Chapter Twenty
KARL
APRIL 1, 1945
BUCHENWALD
ON APRIL FIRST, KARL AND A NUMBER OF OFFICERS were having Easter lunch at Brandt’s villa when his telephone rang. The American army had reached the vicinity of Eisenach, roughly seventy-five kilometres from Buchenwald. Brandt hung up the call, pushed his chair out from the table and locked himself in his study, where he spent the next half-hour on the phone with Berlin. Ritter cut into his piece of lamb, but the rest of them pushed away their plates and called on the butler for a bottle of strong schnapps, which they drank to the bottom.
That afternoon, the prisoners were quieter than normal, but a strange, tense current ran through the camp. Karl’s nerves felt raw, and the schnapps wasn’t sitting well. He kept checking the horizon for signs of smoke and bombers. A group of men huddled together around the prisoners’ canteen, whispering. He planted his feet wide apart to watch them. They knew something; he could sense it. They were probably trying to organize, conspiring, foolish enough to think they could make a stand against the SS. A month earlier, a secret radio transmitter had been discovered in one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. Karl’s orders for a thorough search at Buchenwald had left them empty-handed, but he had a nagging feeling the inmates were getting information from the Allies.