A roar of agreement rose from the audience in the Sportspalast. She could hear the beginning of chanting.
Katja winced. “Listen to them. They’re in a frenzy. Are Germans so easily driven mad?”
“Maybe. But in this case, he’s also got a select audience. It’s all staged. You’ll see.”
German comrades. In front of me are rows of wounded German soldiers from the Eastern Front, who’ve lost legs and arms, or their sight. Some wear the Knight’s Cross. Behind them are workers from the tank factories. Soldiers, doctors, scientists, artists, engineers and architects, teach-ers, office workers, people from every area of our intellectual life. I see thousands of German women. The youth is here, as are the aged. Every class, age, and occupation. Before me is gathered the German population, from the homeland and the front. Here is the entire nation.
The mass of people packing the hall roared its approval. Then his questions began.
Do you believe in the final victory of the German people?
The crowd sent back a hurricane of affirmation and wordless cheering.
Katja still stood before the window, her arms across her chest. “Lies. It’s all lies. And Dietrich died for them.”
Frederica joined her. “Hans Gottschalk died for them too. I just heard. On the Bismarck.” She stared off into the distance. “And millions of British and French and Russian soldiers did too.” She slid her arms slowly around Katja’s waist.
Will you follow the Führer, accept the burdens, and work twelve hours a day?
Katja leaned back into the embrace. “Please don’t leave me. You’re all I have that’s untainted by this.”
Frederica brushed her lips over short brown hair. “We’re all tainted, my darling. But, no, I’ll never leave you, I promise.”
Katja turned around in Frederica’s arms and laid her head on her shoulder. As the warmth between them grew to arousal, the shouting on the radio grew more intense. Frederica covered Katja’s mouth with hers, insistent, more urgent than party melodrama. The minister’s exhortations, so avidly followed by the Nazi neighbors and millions of war-weary Germans, faded away. Katja could think only of Frederica’s hands, holding her tight, of her breasts that pressed against her own.
She opened to the sudden kiss and gave it back, luxuriously and long, wordless release of the yearning she’d harbored so many years. She stepped back, wet-lipped and panting, gazing in joy, disbelief, and gratitude into gray-green eyes. “Frederica…” was all she could utter. No other word was as rich. Frederica drew her toward the dark bedroom.
Do you take a holy oath to the front line that the homeland stands behind them and approve the severest measures against those who harm the war effort?
The shrill voice called after them from the other room, high-pitched and tinny.
Frederica drew off Katja’s sweater and then her own. “I’ve waited so long, so long,” she whispered, pressing ardent lips on her brows, her eyes, her cheek and ear. “A thousand times I’ve imagined leading you here to my bed, pressing you down just like this, feeling the shape of your body that I’ve always only seen.”
Wordlessly, Katja pulled her close and held her motionless, feeling each exhalation warm against her throat.
Is your faith in the Führer absolute?
The radio voice buzzed on, like a rodent gnawing behind a wall, while Katja marveled at the thrill of Frederica’s body, not a weight on her but another part of herself. “How can you still want me after all these years?”
Frederica slid her knee between Katja’s willing thighs. “I’ve wanted you since I saw you filming that day in Nuremberg. The entire stadium was silent, watching that monster march across the field, but I saw only you, up on your platform. I had lewd thoughts of you even then.”
“I’ve thought about you too since Nuremberg.” Katja squirmed deliciously, feeling the sudden moisture of her arousal. “I tried to imagine you when my husband touched me, but he was so clumsy and I knew you’d never be.” She slid her tongue quickly along Frederica’s open lips. “And it never, ever, felt like this,” she breathed.
I ask you, do you want total war? A war more radical than anything we can yet imagine?
The radio in the other room broadcast a tumult of “Heil!” and “Führer command!” over and over again, but they were like bursts of rain on the window.
Frederica bit softly. “I’ve had you so many times in my imagination. I know how you feel and taste. I’ve learned you, centimeter by centimeter.” With each word Frederica slid downward to brush her lips over Katja’s throat and chest, and the softness of each breast, as delicately as if she kissed a bird. Then, reaching the tip, she traced a circle around it with her tongue.
A shock went through Katja and she moaned and squeezed tangles of Frederica’s hair, inhaling the earthy fragrance. “Oh,” she murmured back, “so this is what ecstasy is like.”
“No, this isn’t ecstasy, my love. Not yet. I’ll teach you ecstasy.” Frederica’s hand slipped down along her belly and over her pubis, her fingers meeting the slick groove at the center. She stroked gently, patiently, letting the warm flesh swell to receive her. When she felt the tiny hood grow rigid under her fingertips, she slid them inside.
“Witch,” Katja breathed into Frederica’s hair.
Frederica chuckled softly. “Witch? Oh, yes. And here’s the cauldron,” she teased, beginning her gentle thrusts. Unhurried, she penetrated and withdrew, and penetrated again, with soft bites on Katja’s breasts and throat. Skillfully, tauntingly, she turned the coil of desire ever tighter and brighter.
A command reverberated from the distant radio like the buzzing of a fly.
Now, Volk, rise up, and storm break loose!
Katja’s soft moans dissolved to breathlessness, until the burst of incandescence and her cry of consummation.
In living rooms all over Germany, people prepared to submit to Total War. Only in Frederica Brandt’s tiny apartment in the Richterstrasse was it a night of liberation.
PART THREE
JANUARY 1944
BERLIN, GERMANY
Chapter Twenty-seven
When the bomb struck, Katja was thrown to the floor, along with the patient she was guiding. The windowpane shattered at the end of the corridor, sending a spray of glass shards several meters into the hospital.
“Are you all right?” she asked the patient. Though he was ambulatory, he was blind and recovering from concussion and deep cuts to the scalp.
“Crap.” He pressed his hands to his bandaged forehead. “Dizzy, head hurts.” He slid sideways and leaned against the corridor wall.
“Stay down,” she said, scrambling toward him to examine his bandages. “No sign of bleeding. Just stay quiet until the raid is over and we’ll get you back in bed.”
“Shit, shit, shit. Head hurts so bad.” He moaned.
“What did they hit?” someone asked.
Peering outside from the corner of a shattered window, one of the orderlies said, “It looks like the lecture hall, but there’s so much smoke, I can’t tell.” He crept farther back along the corridor away from the broken glass and leaned against the wall with the others.
“Now the bastards are bombing the wounded,” someone said.
It was an outrage. The roofs of all the buildings were painted with huge white crosses, identifying them as a hospital. They had no air-raid shelters, since it would have been impossible to evacuate the sick and the wounded into any one safe place.
“God damn them all,” the patient snarled. “The filthy Brits and the filthy Ruskies and the filthy Nazis.” Katja and the other nurses recoiled from the treasonous talk.
“It’s the RAF,” one of the other nurses said, attempting to divert the anger toward the appropriate object. “It’s always the RAF. The Amis only come at night, and the Ruskies can’t fly this far yet.”
“Shit on all of them,” the patient muttered, still holding his face. “I don’t care any more. The bastards on the other side shot me and I ca
me home and got patched up, and the bastards over here sent me back where the bastards over there shot me again. The bastards over here fixed that and sent me back a third time, so the bastards over there blinded me. Now I don’t give a damn.”
“Be careful, soldier,” one of the orderlies said. “People can hear you. This is total war, and it’s a crime now to talk like that.”
“Shit bags. They’re all shit bags, the Nazis too, and the shittiest shit bag is the ugly little dwarf who got everyone to agree to this shit bag of a ‘total war.’”
“Shhhh.” Katja tried to silence him. “It’s the injury talking, not you. I know you’re a good soldier, a good German. Just be quiet and let us take care of you.”
He wrenched his arm out of her grasp. “Oh, yeah, take care of me. Like this Nazi hospital took care of my cousin Manfred? So he was slow, so he couldn’t learn. He was a sweet kid and never hurt no one. But you know what they did? Gnadentod, they called it. A mercy death. A goddam murder, it was. What a shitty thing to do to a kid who trusted everyone.”
“Please, you’ve got to be quiet. You can’t say these things.” Katja was the only one talking. The other nurses and patients crouching on the floor were speechless.
“You think I’m wrong?” He moved his bandaged head back and forth as if addressing a wide audience. “I recognize your voice. I heard you say you lost a husband last year. That doesn’t make you mad? What did he die for? For crap. For a big shit-stinking lie.”
“He died at Stalingrad fighting for Germany,” she said softly.
“For Germany? What was Germany doing in Stalingrad? Russia never attacked us. It was a battle we didn’t have to fight. You know I’m right. I can tell it in your voice.”
“There’s nothing in my voice but exhaustion, and that’s what you’re feeling too. Because it’s taking so much longer than we all thought. You’re discouraged. We’re all discouraged.”
The noise of the raid tapered off and finally the all-clear sounded. “There’s no place for people like you in this hospital.” Katja glanced over her shoulder at Nurse Rumoldt, at the full height of her patriotism. “Wounded or not, you’re talking like a traitor.”
“Let him go back to his bed,” Katja said. “Tomorrow he won’t even remember saying it.”
“And you, you’re just as bad, humoring him.” The nurse looked contemptuously down at Katja, who still squatted next to the patient. “This is total war. You know the laws. You’re not going to undermine the morale of the nation when those swine are bombarding all of us. It’s a capital crime.”
“He’s got a brain injury. He’s out of his head and doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“But he’s still saying it, and other wounded men can hear him. And you, you’re worse than him. I heard you agreeing with him. ‘Discouraged,’ eh? That’s treason, plain and simple.” She stamped away back to the nurses’ station farther down the corridor.
“Don’t mind her,” another nurse said. “The air raids are just making her edgy and she gets that way sometimes. Nothing will come of it.”
“They’re making us all edgy. Here, help me get him back into his room.”
An orderly stepped in, grasped the patient under his arms, and hauled him to his feet.
“I’m all right. I can walk by myself,” the patient grumbled. “Someone just guide me, okay? The one with the nice voice.”
“I guess that’s me,” Katja said, leading him by the arm back into his room. “You’re lucky. No broken window here. Come on, you’d better get back into bed and learn to keep your mouth shut.”
“I don’t care any more. My parents were killed by bombs. My brother fell in Russia. I was a farmer, but how am I going to farm blind? What woman’s going to marry me? I’m finished, and I don’t give a shit about their ‘total war’ against Bolshevism.”
“Finished is right. Undermining the war effort is a crime against Germany.”
Katja glanced toward the door from where the accusation had just come. Two nondescript men in dark suits. The taller one came forward and took hold of the patient’s arm. “Put your pants on, traitor. You’re going to continue your ‘treatment’ with us.”
“You can’t do that. He’s my patient. He’s got a right to stay here.”
“He’s got no rights at all. And neither do you. You’re under arrest.”
*
February 1944
The arrest, perfunctory hearing by the SS, incarceration in Moabit prison, then a day in a boxcar all happened so fast, Katja felt she had fallen from a cliff. Did her father know her whereabouts? Did Frederica? Where was she, in fact?
The boxcar door slid open and she looked out toward rows and rows of huts, surrounded by barbed-wired fencing and surmounted by guard towers. A concentration camp. Directly below the rail embankment was a stream, with a thin lace of ice along its edges from the winter cold. She stood, bewildered, in the prison clothing issued to her at Moabit.
“Alles raus! Schnell!” Guards came toward them with dogs, and the women clambered out of the boxcar onto the ground. Katja could see how long the train was now, some twelve cars, all loaded with women. The guards tried to line them up but, mad with thirst, the majority simply scrambled down the embankment toward the stream. The guards let them drink and then herded them back into a column and marched them forward.
Cramped from sitting in one spot for so long, but anxious to be indoors once again, Katja let herself be pulled along toward the camp entrance. Her feet were cold, but she was better off than most of the arriving prisoners. Some of them staggered and fell, obviously having been in the freight cars far longer than she had.
The sign over the entrance said RAVENSBRÜCK.
Just beyond the entrance, the column divided into two lines, both filing through a small building with a counter. Upon reaching the counter, each prisoner had to surrender her coat and any jewelry. As Katja edged closer, she could see some of the women crying as they gave up their wedding rings. Katja had no valuable jewelry, and she already wore prison clothing, but when she had to surrender the jacket the bitter afternoon air struck her like an ice bath. She hugged her arms to her chest as she passed on to the one of the four barbers. More women began weeping as they lost their hair, but Katja endured the scissors stoically. Within a few moments, her hair was shorn, and the exposure of her scalp to the cold air made her shiver.
But she saw immediately that it would get worse, as they were again prodded into columns and into a courtyard where they were stripped of the rest of their clothes. A guard counted them off into groups of fifty and sent them into a shower room where cold water that smelled of disinfectant sluiced over them.
The shower room served as the actual entry into the camp, for some forty meters away from the exit, women were handing out prison clothing—underwear, a dress, and a coat—to the naked arrivals. The dress and coat were a set, and each set bore a number on the left shoulder. Katja drew hers on as quickly as possible, noting that her number was 112,013. Laid out on the ground were hundreds of pairs of wooden shoes, and she slid her bare feet into the ones closest to her size.
The line wound past a final table where each prisoner received a triangle of fabric designating the category of “crime” in each case. Everyone around her had a red triangle, so evidently the transport that brought them consisted largely of political prisoners
Exhausted and trembling with cold, she was finally assigned to a barrack along with a dozen or so others. The new arrivals
clustered at one end of the block, while the block senior walked along the center aisle of the barrack and read the names already posted on the sides. Wherever there was space, she assigned a new prisoner.
The “beds” consisted of three levels of wooden platforms with thin straw mattresses. Judging by their width, she guessed they had been designed for two prisoners to sleep side by side, but the row of numbers tacked to the posts at the head of each one suggested they contained more.
“You.” The block senio
r pointed with her baton toward Katja. “You take this one.”
Katja obeyed, noting that it was at least a middle platform. She climbed up onto it and asked. “Do I get a blanket?”
“No more blankets,” the block senior said indifferently. “Everyone shares,” she added ominously. Katja could not imagine anyone willingly relinquishing half a blanket in a place like this. Would she be able to sleep uncovered in the ice-cold barracks?
The earsplitting sound of a buzzer broke her brief reverie. “Roll call is over,” the block senior said. “Stand by your bunk when the others return, otherwise you’ll sleep on the floor.”
Katja hurried to obey, amazed and ashamed at how quickly she had learned subservience. But the deprivations of the boxcars—no blankets, no food or water, and a bucket for bodily needs—had shown her how bad things could become. She would not relinquish a space on one of the bunks.
In just a few minutes, the block was filled with women, dirty from work, faces drawn from exhaustion. They lined up shoulder to shoulder in front of their respective bunks, and Katja found herself standing next to the women with whom she would soon sleep. She eyed them sideways as the block senior announced the additions. Talking was forbidden as the evening soup and bread slice were distributed, but the moment the meal was finished and the block senior was gone, eighty women began to talk at once.
The woman to Katja’s right looked at her venomously. “Where’s your blanket?”
“I wasn’t issued one. They said they don’t have any more.”
“Well, shit. You’re not getting any of mine.”
Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright Page 17