The Dutch Wife

by Ellen Keith

  THE illness I’d thought I’d overcome reared up like a tidal wave, and for days I was frail and out of sorts. I woke up feeling like someone had tied me to the back of a truck and driven around camp, dragging me through the mud and potholes. I lay in bed for hours. Even water was too much to handle.

  Wilhelmina and Bertha tried to send me to the hospital, but I wouldn’t hear of it and begged Sophia to keep me safe. Karl had said that disease and infection ruled the infirmary blocks, and his stories of medical experiments had haunted my nightmares. Still, I saw the word clinging to the other girls’ lips, the terrifying fate they’d predicted: pregnant. If that were true, they would mark me as “spoiled meat” and send me back to Ravensbrück. Or worse.

  The sixth morning, I received word that Karl would come by in the evening. By then, I was desperate to see him. But I could hardly move, save for the trip between the sleeping quarters and the facilities. Sophia ran a bath for me, and I wallowed in the warmth, covering myself in a thick layer of soap. When I got out, the water ran down my skin and puddled on the tiled floor as my stomach gargled. My breasts were sensitive to the touch. I refused to accept the possibility. After all those contraceptive injections, months without being strong enough to menstruate and even then only scattered periods—it seemed impossible.

  As the day pressed on, I tried to make myself useful, lest Wilhelmina or Bertha judge me as too weak to receive Karl. I had to see him, to ensure his protection from whatever danger the illness could bring. I pulled the broom from the closet in an attempt to sweep, but found myself stopping every few steps to lean on it for support. The other girls filed out for an afternoon walk, leaving me on the settee with a book, but my thoughts kept fluttering away. I stood to open the window in the reception room. The fresh scent of spring wafted in, enough to send me reeling yet again. But the air carried something else along with it: harsh, frantic shouts. I couldn’t spot the source of the racket, and the words were muffled but sounded like orders. Heavy feet: running, not marching. Back on the settee, I sat on my hands and stared at the window.

  On cue, the girls returned, wild-eyed with answers. “They’re coming!”

  “Who?”

  Sophia rushed over and threw her arms around me. “The Americans! They must be advancing; the SS are in a panic.”

  “They know this is it,” Gerda said.

  “And what will become of us?” I asked.

  Wilhelmina and Bertha slid into the room, their expressions a scramble of excitement and dread. Wilhelmina stood in the corner with her hands clasped against her chin.

  “My guess is, they’ll shut us down,” Bertha said. “They have better things to focus on than keeping their prisoners’ dicks wet. Rumour is that the Americans still have to advance quite some way. At this point, anything is possible.”

  “We just need to hold off,” I said, but I heard the tremor in my voice and I latched on to Sophia’s wrist.

  “Yes,” Wilhelmina replied. “Who knows what the Nazis will do when cornered?”

  That night, I went to the koberzimmer early to wait for Karl. I kept my clothes on, knowing I was far too sick to make love to him but hoping that wouldn’t matter. More than once, he had stopped by just to sit beside me, to stroke my hair and kiss me as his words bridged our separate worlds. But I hadn’t seen him since our argument and didn’t know how to patch things over with the weight of the Americans interfering. Sophia’s accusations, her condemnation of Karl grew like a nettle in my mind, spiny and eager to choke out any pleasant thoughts of him. My gut told me she was right; through my plan of keeping him pleased, stirring up his will to protect me, I might have stumbled backward into my own trap.

  The nausea returned, so I lay down to rest my eyes. A wall of blackness seemed to rush toward me, and any moment, I would crash into it.

  The door opened without a knock.

  “Karl, darling.”

  But when I looked up, it wasn’t Karl towering over me. It was Bruno. His jaw clenched tight. A maniacal glint in his stare.

  I shut my eyes, praying he was a hallucination, but those heavy breaths continued.

  “Do you remember me?” He grabbed my shoulder, forced me to look at him. “I asked you a question. Or do you still not know how to obey your superiors?”

  “Please, Schutzhaftlagerführer Müller—”

  “I don’t have to listen to his orders anymore. Haven’t you heard? It’s all over.”

  My buttons popped open as he yanked at my blouse. Stinking breath: vodka and hot mustard. His fingers tangled with mine as I tried to wriggle out of his grip. He pulled me forward, tossed me to the side like a doll. Clawed between my legs.

  “No, stop.”

  A hard slap across my face. My cheeks stung; the dark wall came closer. His trousers unzipping. One hand on my shoulder, turning me. Bent over. Ripping holes in my stockings.

  “No!” My own voice, but the cry seemed to come from far away.

  The jangle of his belt as it hit the floor. Shadows growing closer, closer. I reached back a hand, sunk my nails into his skin. His yell. Curses. And then, blackness.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  KARL

  APRIL 2, 1945

  BUCHENWALD

  BAD NEWS KEPT FLOODING IN FROM THE FRONT AND the phones wouldn’t stop ringing. On Monday morning, Karl got word that the radio operators had intercepted a transmission requesting that the Allies drop weapons for the prisoners at Buchenwald. He had a hunch that it had come from the communist resistance cells in the camp, and the idea of them arming themselves kept him up late at night. Dreams of bombs exploding at the gatehouse, being woken up with a gun to his head. He also feared how the Americans would react when they got wind of what the SS were doing at Buchenwald, how much faster they would try to advance. At least the number of civilian prisoners might save them from further bombing.

  More than once that afternoon, he caught himself staring at a blank wall in the office, the coffee beside him cold. To make things worse, the women at the brothel claimed Marijke was sick. He was sure that was a lie and worried he’d fucked it all up but decided to give her time to cool down while the camp demanded his attention.

  His focus turned to making plans for handling the prisoners. He ordered the Blockführers to scour the blocks for any radio transmitters and had the guards check the adjacent buildings. The SS garrison contained several thousand men, all heavily armed, and even though the prisoners had strength in numbers, their weak, malnourished condition meant they wouldn’t be able to put up a strong fight, even if the Americans responded to their appeal for weapons. Yet the inmates had found ways to sabotage SS plans through the one thing the Nazis relied on them for—their labour. In February, the workers in the armament factories had met only one-quarter of their production quotas for infantry vehicles, and the output of gun carriages was almost as dismal. The factory managers reported that the inmate technicians and foremen were ordering the wrong parts and tampering with repair jobs, but the ensuing investigation proved that the managers were too corrupt and disorganized themselves to pinpoint the source of the problems. As a whole, Karl didn’t trust the prisoners. Any dog locked in a crate all day will have the nastiest bite.

  ON Tuesday, the Americans sent a warning. Leaflets fluttered down over the streets of Weimar, landing on the cobblestones, on chimneys, in women’s purses. One of Karl’s men brought a stack of them back to Buchenwald and left some on his office desk. A German message printed in bold typeface: We promise harsh retribution for anyone who commits atrocities against the prisoners of Buchenwald.

  Karl crumpled up the leaflet and threw it at the opposite wall. It bounced off and landed on one of the windowsills, where it remained for the rest of the day. He avoided looking at it, but couldn’t block out the image of a firing squad, of a hood slipped over his head.

  The Blockführers hadn’t located the radio transmitter or any receivers. He considered asking Marijke about her work making crystal radios for the Dutch resistance,
how she and her husband had learned to conceal them. But she would see right through his questions and would despise him even more for trying to trick her into helping. Instead, he went to speak to Brandt about the search, who promised to do something about it personally.

  An hour later, Brandt barged into Karl’s office, shaking a fistful of files. “You were supposed to approve these changes!”

  Karl glanced at the papers, an order about increasing staffing at the infirmaries, which had been overflowing for months. He realized he’d signed the wrong line, but didn’t remember ever seeing the form. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long week.”

  “You’d better be ready for a whole lot more, Müller. The Americans have almost reached Ohrdruf. We’re marching those inmates here, and we’ll ship them on to Dachau once they arrive.” Brandt crossed his arms while Karl sat there envisioning that firing squad. “Get that look off your face. Don’t you have any faith in our boys at the front? We’ll push them back in time.”

  “Of course.” Karl’s voice cracked.

  “Pull it together, Müller. I need you to keep everything under control here. We have to crush any signs of resistance.”

  “Have you heard from Berlin?”

  “Himmler hopes to get the prisoners as far away as possible, but the Americans keep bombing the railways. However, we can count on him to find a solution; he always does.”

  Karl’s thoughts flashed back to that crumpled leaflet. It would take days, maybe weeks for the evacuees to make it to Dachau. They wouldn’t survive being crammed back into those boxcars, not even the march to Weimar.

  “We’ll lose thousands en route,” Karl said. “And what about the rest of the prisoners?”

  Brandt gave him a strange look. “We’ll deal with them if the time comes.”

  BRANDT’S idea for handling the masses was to give a speech, and he summoned one of the German labour Kommandos to the cinema to listen. He promised he wouldn’t evacuate the camp but would continue to operate things as usual, as was his duty. After declaring that he knew about the radio transmitter, he accused the foreigners and Jews of trying to spread their vengeance to the German prisoners through their appeal for weapons. But Brandt claimed he would help the German nationals, provided they co-operated, behaved civilly. The men in the crowd exchanged glances but didn’t look convinced. Suddenly, the roar of machine-gun fire interrupted Brandt. He tried to carry on, but stuttered and had to repeat himself while the guards ran outside with their weapons raised. Karl followed them. The noise clattered in his ears like it was coming from all sides. A plane swooped down overhead, its fuselage glinting in the sun, dipping low enough that he could make out the star-and-bar on the underside of its wings. It circled back again, spraying the area near the camp kitchen with bullets, a building he’d walked past only ten minutes earlier. Then the rumble of the propellers faded into the distance.

  Later, after Brandt had finished his speech, Karl headed back across the camp while a crew of prisoners cleaned up the debris—shards of wood and punctured cans of beans that leached brine into the dirt. While surveying the damage, he thought of his father, bullets whistling past his ears each morning as he scrambled up into no man’s land, armed with more courage than Karl could ever hope to have.

  BRANDT’S orders ate up the next several days, giving Karl no time to make amends with Marijke. He slept only a few hours each night and ate his meals at his desk, leaving sticky fingerprints on files and telegrams. Word of the approaching troops had passed through the camp, and more and more blocks grew resistant to the guards’ commands. The officers called the Jews to the muster grounds over the loudspeaker, with the hope of transferring them to another camp, but no one showed up. The inmate functionaries didn’t enforce the order either. A senior Kapo reported that the Jews didn’t want to be killed, but Brandt assured him that they planned to turn them over to the Red Cross.

  The Gestapo in Weimar sent Karl the names of forty-six anti-fascists who had been accused of being saboteurs, but these men also disappeared and went into hiding, and the Kapos and Blockältesten made only a weak effort to find them. Eventually, the guards succeeded in rounding up some Jews at roll call, but according to camp records, the numbers were off by hundreds. Karl cursed at the roll-call officer and demanded the prisoners stand at attention while they re-counted. He ordered armed SS men to hunt down the remainder, with little success. Brandt told him not to worry, but Karl knew better. With the inmate functionaries ignoring their demands, the camp hierarchy was rotting away beneath them.

  ON Sunday, Brandt called Karl into his office after lunch. Brandt had heavy bags under his bloodshot eyes.

  “You look terrible, Müller.” Brandt folded his hands on his desk. A bronze writing set shaped like a jester with a fiendish grin sat between them. Brandt pulled a pen from the holder and started jotting down a list. “I’m ordering an immediate evacuation to Dachau. Get as many prisoners as possible out of here, starting with the ones from Ohrdruf. Try to keep the guards in check. The prisoners may revolt if they get wind of the news.”

  “They’re already banding together to stall the evacuation. We’ll never get them all out in time.”

  “We have to try.” Brandt continued with his list of instructions, and Karl tried to note them all, but he was sweating in his tunic and itchy all over as he realized that Brandt had lost faith in the Wehrmacht.

  “Everything clear? Good. I’ll check in with you in a couple of hours.”

  Karl moved to leave, but Brandt put out his hand to stop him. “We’re the ones with the guns, Müller. Don’t let their numbers intimidate you.”

  Back in his own office, Karl paced the room. A pair of planes flew low overhead, but they didn’t drop anything, so he assumed it was a reconnaissance mission. He checked his wall calendar, trying to guess how much time he had left as a free man, before he would be shot in the head or hung from the gallows, depending who got to him first. His mouth went dry. He reached for his chair, gripping the armrests while weighing the options. Nowhere was safe anymore: not Weimar, not Berlin. Switzerland perhaps, but even that was uncomfortably close to the Allies. The only refuge lay far away, outside of Europe. Brandt’s remark about Argentina returned to him, the content life his relative had there. Karl could either try to escape and face execution for desertion, follow orders and wait and hope, or count down his remaining hours with Marijke.

  KARL sent a message to the brothel, making plans to see her at seven. He tried to conceive a plan to keep them together. But in the meantime, the prisoners needed organizing. A few dozen armed SS men would help facilitate the evacuations. They’d sort the Ohrdruf inmates and march them out by priority: Jews first, foreign prisoners, and then the Germans. After passing on instructions to Ritter about the evacuation, he waded through a mess of files about labour allocation and the Jewish evacuees and placed calls to the Gestapo in Weimar about the denouncement of those anti-fascists.

  Officers ran over every ten minutes to confirm his intentions or inquire about the evacuation plans, panicking as they caught shreds of news about the weakening Wehrmacht defence. The air-raid siren had gone off that morning, and the hum of planes in the distance grew louder and more constant. To boost their spirits, Karl told them that Brandt had heard that the Germans had gained some ground and forced the Americans on the defensive. That, and Karl had all the cigarettes from the prisoners’ canteen delivered to the SS garrison for the officers. With each passing hour, the racket around the administration buildings grew louder, the smell of booze stronger. While Karl was grabbing a file from the records office, a drunk guard stumbled in, tugging down his fly. Upon spotting Karl, the man turned red. “S-s-orry, sir. Wrong room.”

  “If the Americans catch you with your trousers down, you’ll walk away without any balls,” Karl said. “Get out of my sight.”

  Dusk fell across the camp. His stomach began to growl, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He looked at the clock: quarter past seven. He still neede
d the final evacuation list from Ritter, who wasn’t in his office, so he hurried across the compound to the SS garrison, checking his watch to estimate how long it would take him to get back over to the brothel.

  When he entered the barracks, Ritter’s nasal drone drifted over from the mess hall. Raucous laughter bounced off the walls. Eleven SS men, all of them stinking of beer. At the end of the table sat half-eaten plates of sauerkraut drowning in mustard.

  “Ritter, where in God’s name is that list?”

  Ritter looked startled but scooped some papers from the bench and brought them over. “My apologies for the delay, sir.”

  “Damn it, don’t you understand how urgent this is?” Karl’s words fell flat as he spotted the full jugs of beer. Ritter passed him one, but he pushed it away. “You think the Americans are sitting around getting soused right now?”

  Ritter’s cheeks drained of colour. “I’m sorry, sir. None of us knows what to do. We just sit around, waiting for them to march in here and cart us all off to POW camps? I bet they’ll kill us all.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “With all due respect, sir, we’re fucked.”

  Those words echoed in Karl’s head, and he realized they were the same ones he’d been repeating to himself all afternoon. But the Allies wouldn’t give a shit about anyone as low-ranked as Ritter.

  “Nothing’s over yet.” Karl turned to address all the men. “Sober up. The Kommandant is calling a meeting of head officers in an hour. Inform the others.” He paused to recount the men. “Where is everyone?”

  Ritter fidgeted, but one of the others piped up. “A few ran off to the brothels.”

  “Goddammit.”

  Karl left the SS barracks and broke into a jog. A handful of prisoners turned as he ran past, his boots pounding against the gravel and dirt. He thought he caught looks of malice on their faces and decided to sleep with his Luger on his nightstand that night.