‘You’re in good labour, your baby is well on its way.’ With certainty, I promised: ‘Today is your baby’s birthday,’ and then remembering her fussing about the timing: ‘It’ll be here well before Gretl’s wedding. You’ll be showing off your baby to all the guests.’
This raised a smile at least. ‘She’ll be so envious,’ she murmured into the pillow as another contraction welled up.
Christa padded along the corridors to fetch more fresh water, and reported the house was still quiet. The kitchen maid would be up by five to light the stove, and after that, we might have to reveal ourselves. I figured Dieter would be smart enough to send Daniel to collect the doctors rather than employ a car already in town – adding another hour to their journey, if not more. Then I would begin the defence of one wall while trying to break down the other.
The Camp, North of Berlin, April 1943
‘Well, if she won’t come in, we’ll have to drag her, or she’ll die in her bed. It will serve her right.’
Mencken shut her desk drawer with such force several bodies recoiled, as if a gunshot had sounded right inside the Revier. She was in a foul mood – her workforce had been cut yet again, which dented her pride and put her reputation under threat.
Only a month before, Mencken had received the highest of all Party accolades, a letter signed by Heinrich Himmler himself, praising her for an ‘exemplary record of workforce provision’ in the camp. With the letter neatly framed and locked in her desk drawer at the Revier, Mencken was driven to maintain Himmler’s confidence in her work. She didn’t spare a human thought for the labouring woman in Hut 16 who was refusing to come into the Revier – but if she bled out and wasn’t at her work post within a week, it would reflect badly on the Chief Nursing Officer.
‘Send the guards into the hut,’ Mencken barked at one of the Kapos. ‘And make sure they take the dogs.’
A sudden, crass vision of a contracting woman faced with snarling dogs and the fear welling up inside her made me speak out. ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘I’ll attend her in the hut.’
Mencken’s face crinkled with distaste. Hut 16 was an all-Jewish barrack, and as much as she hated Jews tainting her dominion, she wanted eyes over all births – and us midwives, no doubt. Only those babies born rapidly during Appell – roll call – or in the toilet block were outside the Revier.
‘Why would you do that?’ she said, soot-dark pupils directly on mine.
‘The dogs will only halt the contractions. If it stops the baby could suddenly turn and we’ll have a transverse or obstructed labour, and she’s more likely to bleed.’ I was exaggerating wildly but Mencken was a nurse, not a midwife, and it was easy to blind her with jargon. Two midwives on either side of me nodded, joining the conspiracy. Mencken’s mind churned, thinking no doubt of the moral infection of her relatively clean unit and the tiny room set aside for Jews, already full to capacity.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I want to know the minute she delivers. It’s on you, Hoff – if she’s not back at her place within the week, you may just lose yours. Or be going East.’ It might have been a bluff on her part, but it was enough to make my nerves flutter – we had gradually learnt that transport out was to a place not designed for labour, or life. No one spirited away in a lorry bound for the East ever came back.
Hut 16 was almost deserted, with all prisoners on work duty. The only noise was a low moan from the front of the hut, backed by the clatter of the camp. It was as much silence as I’d heard in months. A young woman stood as I entered, shoulders stiff, her expression on alert. She relaxed a little on seeing I wasn’t a guard or a Kapo. At just seventeen, she was an aged head on young shoulders.
‘I’m Rosa,’ she said, obvious worry lines on her young brow. ‘I’ve tried reasoning with Mama, but she won’t go. She says the baby should live and die in our home.’
‘It’s fine,’ I told her, a hand on her thin flesh. ‘We can stay.’ At those words, Hanna came out of her labour bubble, rolled to one side, and we began the journey towards birth.
We waited and tended, Rosa by her mother’s side constantly. I sat vigilant as the roles were reversed, daughter dissipating her mother’s distress, reassuring when she uttered the inevitable, end-stage words: ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Yes, you can, for us, for all of us,’ Rosa reassured, and she watched – wide-eyed but with silent maturity – as her mother birthed a surprisingly bumptious boy. His sandy hair and light eyes confirmed what Rosa later told me: Hanna had been raped by a civilian factory foreman, taking advantage of his well-earned ‘perks’ as he called them, as he stole from her. He plundered her body, and the Reich thieved the resulting life just hours later. Hanna, though, was alive, Rosa still had a mother, and the warped scales of justice in this new world told us we should be grateful for that.
I stayed until the work detail returned. Almost a hundred tiptoed in, the news having somehow been spread among the camp. Quietly, they moved to the bunks, and then by degrees towards Hanna and Rosa, each offering a hand or a hug. Almost all gave up a meagre portion of their dishwater soup that day to Hanna, so that when they sat singing in a circle around her, she fell asleep in Rosa’s arms, with the fullest belly she’d had in months, but a heart left scraping at its own empty insides.
Hanna was up and at her work post in six days, and Mencken noted the extra days’ toil, reluctantly affording me a nod as I passed her in the Revier. Over the next months, more births occurred in the huts. They were Jews mostly, but it wasn’t treated so much as dissent, as long as I or another midwife was willing to go out. Mencken revelled in keeping her tight ship morally clean, despite the ever crumbling walls and filthy floors; they had fewer rats there than the huts, only by virtue of the building being up on wooden stilts.
However, since most babies died well before infection could set in, dirt wasn’t my main concern. Besides, when a baby was due to be born in a hut, a general rallying and hoarding of rags or paper by all the women made the area cleaner than the hospital block, making it oddly safer against infection. And in their own ‘home’, they were surrounded by friends and love, a vital balm to their inevitable grief. I felt, in a small way – as I had on my community stint in Berlin – among strong women who understood each other, spiders spinning elegant webs of love and protection, who would weave repeatedly, never mind how many times that web was brought down.
Even so, I set out to each birth with a heavy heart. No matter how close the community in the hut, the end result was always the same – a mother without a baby, either in hours, days or sometimes weeks, if she was unlucky to watch her child mew with hunger for that long. The separation was agony every time, and we could not battle against the cosh or the gun. I composed myself before each birth, an icicle wedged somewhere deep in my own heart muscle, and then sobbed on Graunia and Kirsten when the level of injustice became too much. It was they who reminded me what we were doing – affording dignity inside the Nazi machine. But I needed reminding often that it was good, and not simply aiding the bad.
Over time, I was trusted enough to move from hut to hut, tending the ante-natal or post-birth women, and using my nursing to help with the rounds of the sick, the endless sores and wounds that needed dressing. Soon, I was rarely at a birth in the Revier and I became known as the ‘homebirth midwife’, though it was sad to imagine any woman would think of those hovels as home. After that first birth, Rosa became my official helper, and we worked as a team at countless arrivals.
It’s true that we never lost a baby at birth. In pregnancy, yes – and after was the norm. Our only success was in the recovery – that women survived. Tended by their friends, they were cradled in love and shared sorrow, and as long as Mencken’s workforce provision was healthy enough to stand, she tolerated my efforts.
The mobility meant I was a good messenger, practised at hiding minute, folded pieces of paper around my body or in my shoes, with larger items nestled well among the sodden rags post-birth. None of the female guards ever wan
ted to delve into these with their manicured nails, and the male troopers were even less likely to. The best gains were on visits to the vegetable kitchen – each of the workers was searched religiously in and out, but I was often too filthy for even the guards to touch, given my proximity to birth blood and pus. Sometimes, I managed to smuggle a small potato, on a good day a badly grown turnip.
One fortuitous day a new guard was so clearly sickened by a newborn’s end that she forgot to ask for the return of a penknife she hastily gave me for cutting the cord. She was either too ashamed or afraid of the consequences from her superiors to ever challenge me about it. With a sharp edge, I could distribute tiny pieces of contraband among the huts, a potato shaving here, a sliver there, to the sickest or weakest women.
The knife gave both calories and comfort. At each birth I severed a wisp of the baby’s hair, while Graunia had spirited away a printing pad and some paper (she got two days in solitary for her incompetence at the ‘stationery count’), and we were able to create hand- and footprints as memories. It was a poor substitute, but as they cradled the precious paper, the women held on to a brief life that became history – tangible and real. For some, in their post-birth grief and madness, it was the only thing that tethered them to reality.
And so we lived, and survived. Much like Berliners who came to barely register the flutter of Nazi insignia through the city, our expectations of life slowly lowered by degrees.
37
Watching and Waiting
Dieter’s watch signalled we had managed to get to almost six a.m. before there was a gentle knock on the door. He was dressed, newly shaved and his cologne came through the gap in the door, pushing down the anxious pulse of my heart.
‘How are you doing? Anything to report?’
I slipped outside the door and laid myself flat against the wall, hoping to sink my voice into its fabric. Our fingertips met briefly, ears scanning for nearby bodies.
‘Well, no baby yet, but Eva is in good labour,’ I said. ‘She was four centimetres at about three, but it’s always best to be conservative – two for the doctor’s benefit.’
Dieter’s face reflected confusion at my midwife’s tongue.
‘It means she’s almost halfway to pushing the baby, but still a good few hours to go.’ I sighed heavily. ‘I suppose you’ll have to get a message to Koenig now. We can’t hide it any longer, and we’ll need help from the kitchen soon.’
‘All right, if you’re sure,’ and he turned to go. I caught his arm.
‘Dieter, when they arrive, please come and collect me. Don’t let them come knocking on the door. And no maids lingering in the corridors.’
His face took on a look of concern.
‘I know it’s a big request,’ I added. ‘But I don’t want Koenig bulldozing in here. It might send Eva off balance.’
His eyebrows went up. Was it Eva, or me, whose calm would be upset?
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘It could delay the whole labour. Trust me on this.’
He looked at me intently, no facial theatrics now. ‘I do trust you, Anke. Implicitly.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll keep you well informed. I won’t leave you in the dark.’
Christa and I took turns tending to Eva, who was generally uncomplaining for a woman experiencing so much back pain. She simply needed reassurance that the agony was normal as the contractions became more intense. Every half hour, I listened to the baby, and we spooned camomile tea into Eva’s mouth and warmed the lavender leaves for relaxation, the odour strong in the room. We drank insipid coffee to counter the lavender’s soporific effect and keep us sharp, given the early start. In between, I wrote copious notes on the progress of the labour, choosing my words carefully, knowing they would be crawled over by medics and the Reich alike, perhaps even the Führer himself. More so if anything went wrong.
At 8.30 a.m., there was another light knock of the door. Dieter again.
‘They’re here,’ he said. ‘I’ve put them in the parlour and Lena is keeping them busy with breakfast. But they’re insisting on seeing you – soon. Koenig appears to be nursing a large hangover, but Langer is razor-sharp. Be careful.’
‘I will. I’ll be there in five minutes – promise.’
I listened to the baby and left Christa in charge. As I walked towards the parlour, it was obvious some of Eva’s moans were snaking through the corridors and prompting a house on high alert. She was getting more vocal, and I could only guess it meant the labour was progressing.
‘Fräulein Hoff.’ Dr Langer got to his feet as I entered, but Koenig’s girth stopped him rising quickly. That and the mouthful of bread and meat he was working through. He nodded in reluctant acknowledgement.
‘How is the labour progressing?’ Langer’s eyes were jet black, more weasel-like than before.
‘Fräulein Braun is doing very well,’ I replied. ‘She was two centimetres at three a.m., the contractions are good, her waters broke at two-fifteen.’
‘Clear fluid?’ Dr Koenig managed, mouth still full.
‘Yes,’ I lied unashamedly.
‘Heart rate?’
‘Within normal limits, Doctor.’
He grunted. ‘I’d like to see her.’
Here it was. The distrust not only of doctor to midwife, but also of Reich to prisoner. I took a breath. ‘Fräulein Braun has asked that unless there is any reason, she would only like myself and Christa, one of the maids, with her. As planned.’
She hadn’t said this explicitly, but it had been every way implied.
His eyes blazed into mine and his delivery was pure pomp: ‘I think, Fräulein, if you tell your mistress why we are here, she will admit us to her bedroom briefly. We are present for the safety and survival of her baby. Perhaps she needs reminding of that.’
‘With all due respect, Dr Koenig, I think you will find I am also here for the same purpose, and Fräulein Braun is already aware – and grateful – for your concern.’ The words were crisp, born out of irritation and a profound contempt of his arrogance. I ignored a shuddering somewhere in my stomach. ‘I am concerned, however, that any interference will not help. She needs quiet and calm for the labour to progress.’
‘Hmph.’ He dismissed centuries of midwifery intuition with one derisive sound. His face coloured to match the boiled ham piled onto his plate. Langer was a ghost in comparison, and they glanced at each other. The temptation to shoot me down must have been overwhelming but they were still mindful this was the Führer’s mistress – treading eggshells was wise.
‘Very well, but I want to know of the slightest change or delay.’ His voice attempted to command.
‘You have my word.’
At Eva’s door, I stood for a moment eavesdropping on the sounds from within – not out of distrust of Christa, simply a need to switch on my birth radar. With the pressures outside, there had been no time to gauge the change in pitch, the rolling weave of the contractions.
‘Christa!’ Eva’s voice was needy.
‘I’m here,’ I heard Christa say through the door. ‘Come on, one closer to seeing your baby, one at a time, Eva.’ She had a perfect midwife’s patter.
‘But it huurrtts,’ Eva moaned, as a statement more than a complaint.
‘And you are strong, and the reward is your baby,’ Christa kept up as Eva mooed noisily into her own body. How many times had she said that already, and how many more would she say it again before we saw this baby?
Contraction over, I opened the door and saw it immediately – the familiar white fold on the floor, just inside the doorway. I scooped it up and pocketed it before Christa could see me. She had enough to deal with already. I listened to the baby, whispered to Eva that the doctors were here, as confirmation the baby was truly on its way. She smiled meekly, and asked me if it would be all right. Eva’s wet face showed such need, this lonely princess in the tower. I told her she was the strongest woman in the room, everything was going fine – she nodded, content with such loose assu
rances.
I retreated behind my notes, slid the folded paper from my pocket:
We’re ready and waiting. We have safe transport for you and your companion. Your families will be safe. You have the future of the Reich in your power, and of Germany. We will seize the opportunity, as can you. Leave us a sign, back door by the pantry.
Was it a promise or a threat? Or both? If we didn’t deliver the baby into their arms, would they – army generals, German dissidents or even a small group of Allies – take it by force and leave Christa and me to face the consequences? I had lived this war as long as any German, but my experience was overt and brutal, violence not shrouded. I had no experience of these games, nor of an ugly exchange of bullets. And if there were a showdown, up here on the mountain, people would be caught in the crossfire. Dieter would be forced to defend, and he’d already dodged one bullet.
My brain was a quicksand of doubt, fear and bloody-mindedness. How dare they? And yet they could and would. This war had no boundaries, no rules. How could I appease them, delay for more time, and shore up Eva’s safety with the baby?
I decided quickly I could no longer do this alone and be a midwife to Eva. On the pretence of checking the gas and air, I found Dieter in the office. He looked up quizzically.
‘No, no news,’ I said. ‘But I do need your help.’
I came clean, as he looked on, surprised but not aghast – about the notes, the unknown mole at the Berghof, the plan to scupper the Reich, the threat here and now to the baby. His eyes hardened as he read the latest threat, a sea glass blue as they narrowed. Was he angry with me? He had every right to be. A furrowed brow meant he was thinking hard – torn no doubt between his defence of the regime he hated, the woman he had proposed love to, and the Germany he aspired to, all twisting uncomfortably around his core of concrete morals.
‘Dieter, what shall we do? I’m really at a loss.’
His answer seemed to take an age. ‘Well, if the labour goes as you predict, the baby will give us real time, but we can delay the resistance by promising what they want.’
The German Midwife Page 23