by Kate Hewitt
The heat was stifling in the small cell, but Lotte didn’t mind. She rested her head against the concrete wall and closed her eyes as she silently mouthed the words of the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Aperi Domine, os meum ad benedicendum nomen sanctum…” Open thou, O Lord, my mouth, to bless thy holy name…
It was strange and wonderful how, over the course of these months, these words had come to her as the greatest comfort. They were like old friends—soothing, emboldening, strengthening, enlivening. She had said these prayers for years at the abbey, but they had never meant as much as they did now, when they were all she had.
Already, just after dawn, the sun was sending bright fingers of light through the tiny window at the top of the cell. By noon it would be utterly airless, and Lotte would be desperate for the water she would not be given until evening. Something more to go without. She did not mind.
How strange, she had mused more than once during these long, empty days, that the thing I feared the most has come to pass, and all I feel is freedom.
Yes, freedom, even in this cell, this isolation; by her reckoning she had not spoken to another soul save the guard, who responded only in grunts, for several months. Early on after being transferred to the Schanzlalm she had been questioned by a man called Oberleutnant Wolf. He had been, in his own way, kindly but purposeful; Lotte had told him all she knew, which had amounted to next to nothing.
“The only person I knew who was involved in any activity you have already arrested,” she’d said simply.
“You mean Sister Kunigunde.” She had nodded and he had told her rather sharply, “She is dead. She was executed for treason.”
Lotte had simply bowed her head. “She is free now.”
“If you wish to be actually free, Fräulein, you will tell me more. I want to help you.”
She had looked up at him and spread her hands wide. “I have nothing more to tell.”
He must have believed her, for he sent her away and never asked for her again. Weeks passed, and then months, and she would have thought she’d been forgotten, save for the food and water that was delivered every day, and two precious parcels sent by Johanna.
She was at peace, aside for her concern for Birgit; was she safe? Well? Lotte had not seen or heard her since arriving in Salzburg back in February.
Then, finally, change. The guard rapped on the door of her cell. “Get your things! Move! Schnell, schnell!”
Lotte gathered her few possessions—a sweater Johanna had sent her, her rosary, which had, by some miracle, not been taken from her, and a comb. She had nothing else. She wrapped the rosary and the comb in her sweater, making a bundle of it. Then she waited by the door for what was to be several hours before the guard finally came.
It was clear that there were many people on the move, for the guards were milling about, shouting at everyone to get in lines of five. Startled, Lotte glanced at the others emerging from cells, blinking in the light. As they gathered in the prison courtyard, she thought there had to be twenty or thirty people there—some women, mostly men. She looked for Birgit, and saw her at the far end of the courtyard, looking weary but alert. Lotte tried to wave, but a guard shouted for her to put her hand down. There would, Lotte hoped, be opportunity to reach her sister later.
Outside Schanzlalm there was a bus parked by the curb with blacked-out windows and the seats removed. The guards prodded the prisoners hard between their shoulder blades, demanding they get on the bus. Lotte let out a cry of joy when she saw Birgit standing in the back, and she hurried towards her, pushing her way through the crowds.
“You’re here!” Birgit exclaimed, smiling even though she looked exhausted, a grayish cast to her face. “Thank God.” They embraced clumsily, weak as they were. “You are safe, Lotte? Well?”
“Yes, well. Very well.” As the other prisoners crowded onto the bus, Lotte inched closer to Birgit to give them more room. “Where do you think we are going?”
“A camp, I should think.” Birgit folded her arms across her middle as her face set in grim lines. “Where else?”
A camp. Lotte knew of the camps, of course, but that was not the same as knowing what they were like, or actually being in one. “Are you afraid?” she asked, and her sister shrugged.
“I’m just tired,” she said, her voice wavering a little. “I’m so very tired.” Lotte put her arm around her, and Birgit gave her a grateful smile. “I’m sorry, Lotte, for involving you in all this.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“You only wanted to stay at the abbey. Live peacefully—”
Lotte shook her head. “I was wrong to want that. I know that now.”
“Is it so very wrong to want to serve God?”
“I was serving my own comfort, really.” She glanced around at the crowded bus, sweltering and airless in the midday heat. “Perhaps I can serve God better here.”
Birgit gave her a look full of doubt, but for once Lotte felt certain. She understood so much more now what the Mother Abbess had been talking about. Obedience and sacrifice were to be acted out in the prison cell, the crowded bus, even the camp, not just in the peaceful solitude of the abbey. That was easy; this would be hard. She understood it; she felt the rightness of it. Here I can truly serve God.
“Look at all these people, Birgit,” she whispered. “They are broken and desperate, so much in need of love.” She caught the eye of a man whose face had taken a battering, his skin livid with violet bruises. She smiled at him and he looked away.
Birgit let out a huff of disbelief. “It’s not love these people need, Lotte, but food and water, safety and freedom.”
“Love is freedom,” Lotte replied firmly.
Birgit just shook her head.
Lotte’s determined optimism did not dim as they waited for several hours in the stifling heat, exhausted and aching with thirst, before the bus finally lumbered off. It was a short journey, only to the Hauptbanhof, where a train made up of wooden, windowless freight cars was already waiting on the platform.
As they left the bus, they were separated into men and women; there was only a handful of women, and the guards prodded them towards a waiting car, its open door looking to Lotte like a yawning black mouth.
Birgit stepped inside first, reeling back with one hand covering her mouth and nose. “Dear heaven.”
Lotte came in after her and struggled not to retch at the smell of dirt, sweat, feces, and death that was like a miasma in the air. The car was empty save for a pile of flat black loaves in one corner. Lotte’s stomach swooped at the sight. How long would they be on the train, to leave that much bread?
Only a few other women shuffled in after them, everyone giving each other uneasy looks.
“More will come,” one woman, old and withered and resigned, said flatly. “Enjoy the space while you can.”
As the door was rolled shut, the car was plunged into near darkness, sun filtering through the wooden slats and creating thin bars of light across the floor. Lotte took a deep breath and then wished she hadn’t. With the door closed, the smell was more overpowering than ever. She and Birgit sat against the side of the car, their legs drawn up, both of them clutching their paltry possessions. No one spoke, but after a few moments Birgit let out a sudden choked sob before shaking her head and pressing a fist to her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry.”
“I am.” She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “Do you know Werner is at one of the camps?”
“He is?” Lotte had heard about Werner from Johanna; she had referred to him with derision as Birgit’s “Nazi boyfriend.”
Birgit let out a ragged laugh. “Yes, they arrested him when he refused to obey orders. He was brave, no matter what anyone else thinks, and I would have married him.” She turned her head away from Lotte. “He was the one who told them Kunigunde’s name. They had to torture him to get it. And he only knew it because I told it to him, and I
didn’t even have to.” She let out another sob as she shook her head. “It’s all my fault.”
“You cannot blame yourself for others’ evil,” Lotte said softly. “And Kunigunde is truly free now. Do not mourn her, Birgit. She is better off than we are.”
“I shouldn’t have been so foolish,” Birgit insisted as she wiped her face. “I was chasing a stupid dream. It will never come to pass now.” She shook her head again and then turned her face to the wall, away from Lotte.
The train did not leave the station for hours, and by the time it did the women inside the freight car were raging with thirst. At least the sun had set, which provided a little cool relief. Yet as the train moved off through the endless dark, Lotte wondered where they were going. A camp, yes, but where? There were camps all over Germany and Poland, and even farther east than that. They might be traveling days, even weeks. Would they survive? Would they be given more to eat, something to drink?
She glanced at the elderly woman who was half-sprawled against the side of the car, her scrawny, withered limbs jerking with every jolting movement of the train even as she slept, her eyes closed, her mouth slack.
They traveled throughout the night, often stopping for no apparent reason, sometimes for hours at a time, before juddering onwards.
Sometime in the mid-morning of the next day, when Lotte’s mouth was so dry, her tongue so swollen, that she could barely speak, the door opened. After a few anxious minutes when no one came, one woman stuck her head out before jerking it back in.
“Guards everywhere,” she whispered. “And women too. We’re at a station… it’s busy. I think we might be in Vienna.”
After an endless hour, more women boarded their car—a dozen, two dozen, and then Lotte lost count. It was so crowded no one could sit down, bodies pressed intimately against each other as women angled their heads to avoid hitting the women next to them. The stench of sweat and fear was overpowering. A guard shoved a bucket of water into the car, spilling nearly half of it. Birgit let out a strangled cry as she watched the water slop onto the floor.
“Please,” Lotte forced out through dry, stiff lips. “My sister is thirsty. We have been traveling all night.”
It was, she knew, only God’s mercy that allowed both her and Birgit, as well as the other women who had been with them, to have a few sips of water each. The door clanged shut and the women moved around, trying to find some way to get comfortable. Lotte swayed on her feet, exhausted by it all, and yet how much longer would it go on? When she met someone’s gaze, she tried to smile, to offer them hope, but everyone seemed to be in too much of a daze to receive it. I want to do something good, she thought, but all she could do was wait.
They traveled for three days, often stopping for hours at a time, subsisting on no more than the flat black bread that had been left in the freight car. Halfway through their journey, they were given another bucket of water, but only the women by the door drank any; by the time the bucket reached Lotte and Birgit, it was empty.
“We’re going north,” one woman announced, as she peered through a knothole in the wood one evening, gazing up at the stars. No one replied. North meant, of course, toward Germany, where none of them wanted to go.
On the morning of the third day the train finally came to a halt. Lotte felt the finality of it in the long, low hiss of the engine, the judder of the freight cars rocking back once and then going still. They would not be traveling on.
The women, some of them in a stupor, others as good as unconscious, shifted uneasily, their expressions glazed and unseeing. Lotte looked around for the old woman who had traveled with them from Salzburg, wanting to help her out of the train; she saw with a frisson of shock that she was very clearly dead, and had been for some time. She grabbed Birgit’s arm, not wanting her to see, but her sister’s gaze skated over the dead woman with weary indifference.
“We’ll all end up like that. It’s just a matter of time, and most likely not much.”
“Don’t, Birgit.” Lotte gave her arm a gentle shake. “Have faith.”
“Faith? In what?”
“In God. In His love and mercy, even now. Especially now.” Lotte studied her sister’s face, gray with exhaustion, smeared with dirt. “Do you not still have your faith?”
“I don’t know,” Birgit replied starkly. “I’ve seen and experienced too much to know anything any more.”
The sliding door to the freight car was pulled open; bright, hard sunlight poured in. The women reeled instinctively back; they’d become used to the dark in the last few days, along with the stench, the exhaustion, the hunger and thirst.
“Out, out,” the guards began to shout as they pulled women off the train none too gently. “Out! Schnell! Schnell!”
Lotte linked arms with Birgit as they were herded off the train with the others. The sight that greeted her as she stepped into the clear summer’s day shocked her with its simple beauty—a lake, deep and blue, fringed by sycamore trees; in the distance, a white church steeple pointing to the achingly blue sky. To Lotte it felt like a sign.
“Water,” Birgit murmured longingly, and Lotte urged her on.
“Come. We’ll drink. Wash.”
Women were milling around, looking dazed; a few young guards, no more than a handful, watched with lazy, bored indifference. Lotte urged Birgit towards the lake, crouching down to cup the crystalline water between her hands. She drank, marveling at the taste of it, so clean, so pure, and then she sluiced water over her face and hair, scrubbing her cheeks to get at the worst of the grime. Birgit did the same, but only half-heartedly; she seemed too tired, her heart too weary, to do much more.
“Doesn’t it feel good to be clean, Birgit?” Lotte exclaimed. She let the water trickle between her fingers, the crystal droplets catching the sunlight.
“We’re hardly clean,” Birgit protested. “Look at us.” She held out now-scrawny arms as she regarded her wasted, filthy body.
“Even so.” Lotte would not be deterred, but her sister gave her an irritated look.
“You don’t need to try so hard,” she told her with an acid edge to her voice. “God won’t think you more holy, you know, for being thankful for a simple drink.”
“I’m not trying,” Lotte exclaimed. “Birgit, do you know, I’ve been trying all my life—trying so hard to do the right thing, to find some sense of satisfaction, of peace and… and belonging, and I’ve never truly found it, not until now.”
Birgit stared at her incredulously, not even bothering to reply.
“I mean it,” Lotte insisted. “It’s horrible, what they’re doing, what they’ve done. It’s wrong and evil, of course it is. All of it. I do not deny that in the least. But God is here, Birgit. He is here with us.” She lifted her head to glance around at the women still milling about. Some were drinking from the lake, others simply sat on the grass and stared dazedly in front of them while the guards loitered about. “We can do good here,” she said softly. “I feel it. I don’t know how, but… we’re here for a reason.”
“Maybe you’re here for a reason,” Birgit snapped, “but I’m not. I’m here because our aunt’s nosy neighbor ratted us out.” She clambered up from the lake with effort as one of the guards blew a whistle, and another shouted for them to form into lines.
Neither sister spoke as they organized themselves into a line with three others and, with the guards urging them on, began a slow, weary march around the edge of the lake, for a mile or more, their feet and bodies both aching.
Lotte drank in the beauty of the day—the sky such a brilliant bright blue above them, the sun pouring over the countryside like butter, turning everything golden. As they walked, a few children ran up to them, smiling cautiously, curiosity in their innocent eyes.
Lotte smiled back but Birgit just looked away. What must these children think of these tattered lines of women coming off trains, skeletons dressed in rags, only to disappear behind barbed-wire walls? Already the camp was coming into view—a sea of gray barracks s
urrounded by wire, a wooden watchtower at each corner.
Her heart fluttering with fear for the first time in this whole miserably arduous journey, Lotte swallowed hard. Once she and Birgit went through those looming gates, would either of them ever come out?
She didn’t have time to think about it, for the guards were prodding them onwards, angry now, pushing them through the gates and then into a massive tent without any walls, the ground covered in dirty straw that Lotte saw, to her horror, was crawling with lice.
“Never mind,” she told Birgit. “At least we’re out of the sun.”
After being hurried by the guards into the camp, Lotte thought they would be seen to directly, but she realized she should have expected them to make the prisoners wait—again. They sat for hours under that tent, eventually sitting down on the straw, heedless of the lice.
“We’ll get lice anyway,” Birgit had told her with a shrug. “It might as well be now.”
It was early evening before they were finally summoned to stand before a woman with a face like stone and arms like slabs of meat on a butcher’s hook. She gazed at them all with cold disdain, impatient as they hurried to form yet more lines, as if they were wasting her very precious time.
Lotte tried not to sway where she stood; she had not eaten anything but the black bread on the train, and then only a little, for several days; she’d had nothing that day save for the cup of water at the lake. Her body felt like no more than a collection of bones held together by a bit of sinew and skin.
Soon they were marched past the woman and into a room resembling a concrete shed or a milking barn; at a table sat several bored-looking officers who asked for their names and ages, and then pointed to a pile of belongings—battered suitcases and carpet bags, leather handbags and worn pillowcases crammed with precious belongings—all now lying in a jumbled heap.
“Put your belongings there,” one of the guards barked.
Briefly Lotte thought about when she’d surrendered her pressed edelweiss to the Mother Abbess, feeling so magnanimous, so holy, for sacrificing that precious object. Now she threw her bundled sweater with its comb and rosary onto the pile with barely a flicker of remorse. She would miss the rosary, yes, she would, but they could not take away her prayers.