“Those weeds will be eradicated” he proclaimed, but he was not sure that anyone heard him.
Red was everywhere. The little curtains in the shattered carriage windows were billowing in the icy wind. He saw a dead body with a stony face, in an impeccable uniform. That was how one should die, he thought to himself. He caught sight of a plump colonel with an engagement ring, a wedding band and a ring with a large stone on his fingers.
“They have honoured us with a visit. We are fighting an invisible army,” said an officer – one of those The Frog had just greeted with an enthusiastic Heil Hitler.
“Of bandits,” the Oberführer completed.
The officer asked who the girls were. The Frog looked at him as if he didn’t understand.
“Feldhuren,” he said. “Sex partners serving the army.”
“Disgusting,” the officer said into the freezing air.
“Quite so,” the Oberführer said.
It occurred to him, fleetingly, that the weakness of some officers possibly extended right into the Führer’s bunker. It was not just a physical weakness but equally a psychological and moral one.
The frantic bustle of the guards was largely due to their anxiety not to get frostbite. The Frog wondered how many cases he would have to treat in the morning. He divided his attention between the activity on both sides of the train. It was a frightening thought that it took just two or three guerillas to stop a Herrenwaffe train on its way into battle. A general had been killed and they’d had to carry his broken body out like split logs. By the nearest carriage on the floodlit side a young officer was standing, but almost at once his knees gave way and he collapsed, hitting the back of his head against the carriage steps. For a moment he looked like a juggler.
The Frog went on assigning tasks and supervising their execution. He issued orders for amputations of arms, legs and fingers to be performed in the tent that the guards had erected by the outside wall. It looked like a Turkish refreshment kiosk. The patients were exposed to the wind, but there was nothing that could be done about that. The male nurses worked efficiently. They knew, even in the dark, what they had to do. The Oberführer made the girls’ cubicles, the guards’ dormitories and even his own office available. He ordered more tents to be erected.
“Looters will be shot,” he shouted at Madam Kulikowa.
Within five minutes Long-Legs had given Skinny two warm flannel shirts from an open suitcase. Next to it lay a woman with a smashed head. Long-Legs was unmoved. The dead woman was too heavy for the girls to lift. Her white face was spattered with blood as if powdered with sand. The blood had immediately frozen and congealed. The woman’s eyelids were closed; darkness hid her death’s grimace.
Skinny left the shirts under the carriage.
Two hours later a rail trolley arrived from the Wehrkreis with a repair crew, doctors and the Gestapo. Behind the trolley a locomotive was pulling a field hospital. They came to a halt as close to the wrecked train as possible, where the track was still undamaged.
The Gestapo men quickly strode around the train. With them was a Waffen-S S general. The Frog was exhilarated at being in the vicinity of the top-ranking army and Gestapo officers, and he had good reason. Proximity to power like that and promotion were twins. He must not fail even the greatest challenges. He reminded himself that the army was retreating. He prepared himself for what he would say if the general addressed him. They were not hard enough; that was the prime cause of all troubles. But he was not sure they wouldn’t criticize him for letting his searchlights provide targets for enemy aircraft. Heavy guns were rumbling in the distance.
By the track the wounded were laid alongside the dead. Those rescued were stumbling about. The amputation tent was full. Amputation at that temperature, even though the tent had warmed up a little, was no fun for the doctors, the nurses or the auxiliary staff. The surgeons from the hospital train – accustomed to working 18, or sometimes 24 hours without a break, without a thought to the quality of the operations they were performing and exhausted to death – had their hands full. One of the doctors from the hospital train looked like Klaus Schneeberg, Dr Krueger’s assistant. The Oberführer thought of his friend from Mauthausen, an amputation specialist, and of his wife-to-be, now a doctor at Buchenwald.
Skinny was terrified of blood. It made her dizzy, and she closed her eyes. Even so, she felt excited, full of a secret joy, not triumphalist but no longer defeatist. Madam Kulikowa had assigned her to the matron of the Brown Nurses, Obersturmbannführer Kemnitz. The woman got her to soak patches of gauze in aluminium caprylate. The basin soon froze over, making the task difficult. Skinny straightened the blankets of the injured who were taken into the estate or the hospital train. Now and again she slowed down and faced the burning tanker to warm herself. It burned with countless flames, big and small, constantly changing colour and yet remaining the same. She felt weak.
“Keep going,” Long-Legs said.
“Yes,” she replied.
It was impossible to be amid the blood of the others and not absorb a fraction of their pain. She passed the stretchers of battered women. They looked at her as if she was one of them.
The matron scrutinized her for quite a while. She had tired watery eyes, and she was about the age of Skinny’s mother. At the moment of the train’s derailment some of the Brown Nurses were dozing, while the others had been singing about the Führer, and how he loved Berlin. “Mein Führer,” the song addressed Hitler like a prayer. It spoke of that promise which must not and would not be broken. A spiritual glow. A difficult operation from which eternal peace would spring. Of humiliation and of honour regained. What Germany was in the eyes of the world and in its own eyes. Then, abruptly, the explosion.
When dawn came they were exhausted. Heavy guns were still roaring in the distance as if they had nothing to do with what had happened on the railway track. The fire at the back of the train had burnt itself out. The area, as the Obergruppenführer informed the Oberführer, was being searched by Einsatzkommandos of the Einsatzgruppen, by their best Jagdkommandos. They would leave not a single stone unturned in the quarry. The weather was in their favour, it was a clear day. The meteorologists did not expect a snowfall for the next 24 hours, there was just a hideous wind. With these observations the Gestapo general departed, along with the hospital train pulled by a diesel locomotive and followed by the rail trolley.
The Frog’s report stated that there were 78 dead, 327 severely injured and 83 slightly injured. The train and its engines were almost totally destroyed. Both engine drivers and three firemen were among the dead. Most of the damage was repaired within six hours of daylight. The track was expected to be back in operation in another six hours.
The repair work was directed by Obersturmführer Xaver Kinkel, a dwarfish man in a colonel’s uniform which made him look like a green gnome. He wore fur boots and a woollen ski mask on his face. A little man of indefatigable energy and organizational talent, he wore several Nazi decorations. He appeared to have sprung straight from a Dr Caligari film. All one could see of him were his bespectacled eyes.
Obersturmführer Kinkel knew how often similar disasters happened on the Ostbahn, the eastern track whose repair and maintenance – but not its security – he was responsible for. Not one of them had been an accident. He claimed no other merit for his work on the Ostbahn than that which a clockmaker would claim for repairing a broken timepiece. Those who threatened the Ostbahn threatened Reich property, the spirit of the Reich. Germany’s railways now seemed to him like a wounded, bleeding beast.
The matron organized blood donors. The Brown Nurses all volunteered. So did servicemen and women who’d come through the disaster unscathed. The matron got Skinny to bring out some chairs. Who knew their blood group?
Ginger, Maria-from-Poznan and Smartie had already volunteered. The matron noticed Skinny’s tattoo on her forearm. A number? Feldhure? She was shocked. Only then did Obersturmbannführer Mathilde Kemnitz realize where they were. This was the esta
te they’d heard about. She stopped being impersonal.
“Schämst du dich nicht?” Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
Skinny shook her head at the nurse.
“She’s not one of us,” the nurse said.
“She passed my screening,” Oberführer S chimmelpfennig intervened. “She has Aryan blood.”
At least I hope so, he added to himself. In the chaos of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Festung Breslau the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.
“Jawohl, Herr Oberführer” the matron said.
The Frog hung up an acetylene lamp by the gate. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the gilded tin eagle. A truckload of army engineers pulled up. They had come for sex, but the truck did not even enter the estate. Operations were suspended. The men could dismount, the truck would stay. They could wait in the waiting room. Was it warm in there? Yes, warm and there was music.
The Oberführer took the matron on a tour of the estate. He showed her the latrines, the kitchen, the guards’ dormitories, and where she would find drinking water. Skinny helped her until nine in the morning. She could scarcely stand. Finally Obersturmbannführer Kemnitz allowed her to go and lie down. The dormitory was full of soldiers. She stretched out in Cubicle 16 and fell instantly asleep. She dreamt that she was a Brown Nurse and that her train had been derailed. When a Hitlerjugend boy saw her blood he shouted that she was a Jewess. Her blood turned to water. Rats were crowding round her. She screamed when the heat from the fire got under her skirt. Her heels were burning, she was afraid she might lose her legs. Her stomach was aching. She tried to fight off the rats with her hands.
She was woken by the matron, who had heard her scream. The woman gave her a plate of tapioca pudding with a scattering of sugar and chocolate and a topping of raspberry juice. She put a little jug of milk before her. The first thing Skinny was aware of was diarrhoea. Was that why she’d had a bellyache in her dream? She ate faster than she wanted to in front of the matron.
“What are you afraid of? Do you have diarrhoea?”
“Sometimes.”
“From the food or from the cold?”
“I don’t know.”
“No wonder, in these conditions. All of us have it, out east.”
Then she said: “It happened so suddenly, in a matter of seconds. A colossal bang. Cases were flung about, people screamed. We were thrown from our bunks and seats, hitting other bodies. There was shattered glass everywhere. People were pushing and stumbling, stepping on each other. And at last the train came to a halt. We were lucky it didn’t happen on the bridge. Perhaps we were moving too fast. If it had happened on the bridge we would all have been drowned in the icy water.” She paused. “We came to the east to bring them civilization,” she continued. “To teach them German, get them used to German laws.”
Her voice broke. She watched Skinny eat, licking her plate clean and drinking the milk in big gulps. It was the first milk she had had for three years.
“No-one’s going to take it away from you,” the matron said. “And look what they’ve done,” she went on. “We were on our way to the front. They ought to shoot anyone getting close to the track. Surely the Ostbahn is ours? Who’s going to make up the loss? Doesn’t anyone guard the track? Where are our aircraft?”
“I am full of misgivings,” the matron said.
She raised her eyes to Skinny: “So few like us.”
Skinny needed to belch.
“It is Germany’s fate,” the matron said. Her neck wrinkled into folds that seemed to Skinny like a many-stringed necklace. Lines appeared on her forehead. In spite of her ample figure she was a good-looking woman.
Then she added: “Would you want it to happen all over again, seeing that you’re not German?”
After a while she asked, with her eyes on the ground: “How many?”
Skinny did not understand. Her short hair was stuck to her neck with sweat. She felt different now to how she had at the beginning of the night, more like an uninvited guest at someone’s feast. Or someone’s wake. She was aware of the pudding and milk in her stomach. Small amounts rose now and again to her mouth. It was pleasant, reminding her of food and of being full.
“How many soldiers each day?” the matron asked, explaining her question. “Those poor boys. My name’s Mathilde – Sister Mathilde or Frau Mathilde. On duty they call me Obersturmbannführer Mathilde.”
Her voice and gaze echoed the numberless sick, wounded and dying she had seen.
“Twelve,” Skinny said.
“Twelve?” Sister Mathilde repeated.
“Sometimes more.”
“Every day?”
“Except Sunday. But sometimes on Sunday too. Not today.”
“I saw the troops arrive. Will you have to catch up?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.”
The matron reflected on the different lives that people were born to, how their fates differed. Her mother had also been a matron, just as her mother’s mother was before her. The Kemnitz matrons. It was a family tradition, a dynasty.
She looked at Skinny. Might she have become a nurse? She did not wish to know how a 15-year-old had become a whore in Germany.
“I wouldn’t have the stomach for it.” Then she asked: “Didn’t the Lebensborn organization have this place before?”
“So they say.”
It seemed to Skinny that there was distaste in the matron’s well-fed voice. And Skinny was right, the matron had a rather bourgeois view of fallen girls and of marital fidelity. She would not allow a man other than her husband to have anything to do with her body.
“You must have started early. You look very young. Fifteen?”
“Eighteen,” Skinny said. “Getting on for 19.”
“You did a good job,” said the matron.
Skinny didn’t answer.
Skinny had gulped her food down like a sick animal, afraid that someone might snatch it away. This aroused both suspicion and compassion in Obersturmbannführer Mathilde Kemnitz. And when, earlier on, she had kicked off her blanket and screamed in her sleep, the matron had noticed a festering sore on her bottom. For a moment she considered enrolling the girl in the Brown Nurses. Was she in the brothel as a punishment?
“Lie down on your tummy,” she ordered.
With her fingertips she probed the wound.
“Has the doctor seen this?”
“He gave me some sticking plaster.”
“It’s not healing too well in this cold. How long have you had it?”
“A few days.”
“A couple of weeks?”
“About that.”
“Do they beat you?”
“Only as a punishment.”
“Punishment for what?”
“For a complaint.”
The matron squeezed the pus out of the wound. With skilled movements she covered it with a piece of sterile gauze. She said something about how helpful the prostitutes had been during the night. For a while she looked into the girl’s eyes. This young army whore had the same green eyes that she herself had had in her youth.
Twelve
Twelve: Kurt Vischel, Norbert Peltz, Helmuth Brünnich, Kax Joachim Klein, Bruno Bartels, Ottofeld Bader, Pritz Urban, Hans Markvart, Hans Feldmann, Sutr Johannes Schulhof, Anton Kahler, Alex Roubal.
The girls got up at 4.30 a.m. They shared their reveille with the guards, and then the cook struck his iron bar. The guards had their roll-call, morning exercises and breakfast, and then began their duty. The first shift ran until 8 p.m., the second from 8 p.m. until 8.00 a.m. the next morning. In the evening they had Party lectures on racial hygiene. Every day they had an air-raid practice, in which The Frog included the girls, though not all at once. For the slightest infringement of discipline the guards got three days of severe-regime imprisonment. The essence of the Waffen-S S was discipline. It was sufficient for a guard to be caught wearing a scarf in the blizzard for him to end up in the “glasshouse”. They learned to patrol around the estate
with their chins pressed against their throats so that the wind did not blow down their collar. In a blizzard they wore motoring goggles with green-tinted glass. Any infringement was a disgrace for the whole of the Waffen-SS. For a second disciplinary punishment an S S man was sent to the front. But some of the guards had had their application for transfer to the front rejected.
At breakfast, Ginger told them that, if it came to it, she could look after the entire backlog of soldiers. There was no upper limit where she was concerned. Fasting did not do her any good. Her body was like a fish, it needed water, or better still a river, even a lake. She felt like a sponge, if they knew what she meant. The choice was theirs. With a full stomach she could do wonders. Long-Legs ate the sugar she had received for giving blood all in one go. They had been given sausage, which smelled, and potato salad made from frozen potatoes.
Twelve: Fritz Knoll, Raymond Stoll, Gerd Hartmann, Adalbert Neustadt, Hugo Brill, Karl Rek Neumann-Zaneski, Igor Vogel, Paul Scheer, Wolf Neugebauer, Siegfried Sessendheim, Marcel Seebauer, Jens Lindauer.
The girls’ latrines were surrounded by a partition made of rough planks covered with tarred paper. The paper was held only by a few nails and was regularly torn off by the wind. From outside it was possible to see the figures moving about inside. Occasionally a guard would peep in. The girls sat next to one another, wrapped in their coats and with kerchiefs round their heads, leaving only a gap for the eyes, each holding a stick for driving away the rats. At 25 degrees below it was difficult to maintain personal hygiene. The soldiers had inflamed backsides, brownish emissions, rashes, eczema and blisters, but from the girls they expected total cleanliness.
“I had a bellyache with all of them today,” Long-Legs announced. She kicked some rats away from her. What were they trying to do? Bite off her nose? How could such disgusting creatures be considered sacred in India? She had an aristocratic nose – experts on Aryan features had drawn her attention to it. Her legs and her high, foal-like ankles were as slim as her nose. When there was nothing she could steal from a soldier she would make do with twisting off his buttons.
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