by Kate Hewitt
“Thank you.”
Werner slipped back into the barracks while Johanna waited, her eyes closed, everything in her racing, straining.
She heard the slap of the door opening and closing again, and then footsteps. She opened her eyes. Stared. That man isn’t Franz was her first wild thought. It can’t be. Why, the man standing in front of her—he looked old! He looked as if he were at least fifty or more, not under thirty. His head was shaven, his scalp gleaming white, the bones of his face so sharply drawn she could see his skull plainly, his body like a stick underneath the shapeless uniform. She opened her mouth. Closed it.
“Johanna.” The voice, little more than a rasp, was recognizable. Johanna let out a cry and then covered her mouth with her hand. “Why did you come here?” Franz demanded; he sounded angry.
Johanna rushed to him, flinging her arms around him, his bones pressing sharply into her, his body so painfully thin she feared she might snap him right in half. He smelled terrible, he felt strange, but he was Franz. Franz. “I had to see you,” she whispered.
Franz’s arms came around her as he shook his head. “I never wanted you to see me like this,” he choked out, and then, to her horror, he began to cry.
“Franz… Franz.”
“I never wanted you to see me like this,” he said again as tears trickled down his wrinkled, withered cheeks. “Or this place. Oh God, this place…” He shook his head again. “This terrible, terrible place.”
“It can’t go on forever,” she whispered. “It can’t.”
“What happened to Birgit and Lotte?”
“They’re at Ravensbrück.”
“Your father?”
“He’s still the same,” she told him, even though he was worse.
“And you? How on earth did you get here?” Quickly she told him about her job, and he drew back. “You work for them?”
“It’s—it’s not like that,” she said quickly. She wouldn’t burden him with the knowledge of details, information that could be tortured out of him if anyone ever suspected.
He stared at her for a moment, and then he lowered his voice to a whisper she strained to hear. “You mean you are doing… other work? Risking your life?”
“Why shouldn’t I, after everything that has happened? If we don’t risk our lives, nothing will change.”
“But your life, Johanna—”
“It’s just one life.” She thought of Ingrid, talking about serving the cause rather than saving individuals. She understood the sentiment more now, and yet this was what she was fighting for—her and Franz together, two beating hearts, a life shared still to dream of. “If you promise to stay alive,” she told him, “then I will too.”
Franz smiled sadly, his lips sticking over his gums, his face so painfully narrow. “I don’t know if I can make that promise.”
“You must.” She held him by the shoulders, staring into his face, longing to imbue him with her strength. “Remember our apartment in Vienna? It’s there, waiting for us. The mirrors, the paintings on the wall, the view of Stephansplatz. It’s there. I swear to you it is.”
For a second, no more, she saw the old wry gleam in his eyes. “What about the farmhouse in the Tyrol?”
“That too,” she said fiercely. “All of it—and Paris! You still have to take me to Paris.” He let out a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “I’ll hold you to it,” she told him. “I swear. You won’t believe how cross I will be if you don’t take me. I still want to see the Eiffel Tower, Franz.”
“I couldn’t bear to make you cross,” he told her with the ghost of a smile, his eyes bright with tears.
Somewhere a whistle blew and a dog barked. Franz threw a fearful glance behind him. “This is so dangerous, for both of us. You’re lucky Werner is in charge of this barracks. He’s a reasonable man, unlike some others.”
“He’s a kapo?” Johanna exclaimed, recoiling at the knowledge. Even in the office she had heard about the prisoners who were chosen by the SS to act as guards; they were disdained and reviled, often doling out harm on their fellow inmates to obtain little luxuries for themselves, or even just because they could.
“He’s one of the good ones. He does what he can—he finds extra food, sends us to the infirmary if we’re ill. Don’t judge him for it. Now, go.” He gave her a gentle push. “If we mean to keep those promises, you must leave. Now. Don’t take such a risk again, Johanna. It’s not worth it.”
Johanna nodded, even though she wanted to cry out, to scream, to sob. She forced a smile as she embraced Franz one more time, memorizing the feel of him, so different, and then she watched him go back into the barracks, his shoulders slumped, an old man.
After the door had closed behind him she walked blindly back through the camp, through the gate, and out into the night. She’d only gone a few meters towards the town before she sank to her knees by the side of the road and began to sob.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Birgit
Ravensbrück, Germany, August 1944
A whisper was running through the camp, as dangerous as wildfire. The Allies have invaded. No one knew for sure, although the skies were often filled with fighter planes, the growl and swoop of them causing the prisoners to silently cheer and rejoice, even though they did not betray so much as a flicker of what they were feeling as they went about their work—hauling stones, shoveling dirt, making—and sabotaging—the rockets that Germany was desperate to send westward.
The guards who prowled around them seemed more short-tempered than usual, snapping or slapping at every imagined provocation, flinging their food—a barrel of porridge or stew, and another of coffee or water—into the barracks at night with so much force that much of it spilled. They whipped a prisoner for merely a look, more often than they usually did, and many mornings they made them stand for hours at roll call as the sun rose and then beat down high above, for absolutely no reason at all.
No one actually seemed to mind. “If they’re angry, they’re scared,” one woman said, her eyes gleaming in her gaunt face. “They’re losing. Finally, they’re losing. It won’t be long now. It can’t be.”
Birgit wasn’t so sure. She wanted to hope, God knew, but time and suffering had beaten it out of her. She could no longer imagine a world where Nazis did not exult in their reign of terror, as much as she wished she could. She had forgotten what freedom felt like—to lie in a soft bed and stretch, to stroll down a street, or simply to wash her face. Even as the whispers of defeat and retreat traveled around the camp, she struggled to believe in them, or to feel anything but resentment or despair.
Surely the Nazis would fight to the very last man, and even if they did lose, would they allow their prisoners to survive, or kill them all beforehand, either out of spite or to hide the evidence of their evil? Either way, Birgit could not see a future where she and Lotte—and Werner and Franz—strolled out of the camps, whole and healthy and free.
Lotte, nearly two years on from their arrival at Ravensbrück, had somehow continued to maintain her indefatigable good spirits, despite the starvation rations, the back-breaking work, the endless abuse. She prayed every morning and night, lauds and compline, whispering the words so as not to attract the attention of the guards. Over the course of the months and years, women had begun to join her, a huddled little group of devotees, the faith they clung to shining in their eyes, their faces: Catholic Poles and Orthodox Russians, women who had only a little German or even none at all, who found joy even in the midst of their terrible brokenness, heads bent together as they fervently whispered their prayers to God and trusted that He heard and would one day answer.
Birgit never joined her sister at these times. She couldn’t bring herself to, even though she thought it seemed to help Lotte and some of the others, because she was too angry at a God who, in the midst of such grievous suffering, had made himself so terribly absent.
“God is here, Birgit,” Lotte would insist, her lovely face, now so painfully thin, wreathed in smile
s. She looked even more ethereal now, her eyes alight, her body so slender, her hair grown long, in wild blond tangles about her lovely face. Unlike the Jews and Poles, Germanic women had not been forced to have their heads shaved, although it meant they often lived with a head of matted, dirty, lice-ridden hair. “He is working here, in so many ways. You simply need to believe.”
“I need to see,” Birgit had snapped. “And I don’t.” She felt mean to speak to her sister so, but her anger—even if it was aimed at God—sometimes felt like the only thing that sustained her. Without its strength she would give in to despair, and then she feared her fighting would be over. She would no longer have the will to keep living—day in and day out, breath after breath, fighting starvation and cold, beatings and cruelty, and most of all, a swamping sense of futility.
When they’d first arrived at the camp, struggling to acclimatize to a world even more brutal than what they’d experienced before, Birgit had expected to be killed right away. She’d wanted to die, because the prospect of existing in this living hell for any length of time had sickened and terrified her. Death was surely preferable, as long as it was quick.
A bullet in the head would be quick, and plenty of women were shot for no reason at all, dragged out of line during roll call and put against a wall, their lives ended in a single moment. After just a few months, Birgit stopped so much as blinking an eye when it happened. Sometimes she just felt tired, even irritated, by the wait, for they had to stand the whole while.
Then there were the gas chambers, constructed during her first few months at the camp, and used with horrifying regularity, mostly for the Jews and gypsies. Even so, she’d thought more than once that it was only a matter of time before she was taken to them, and the thought brought mostly relief.
She’d seen piles of dead bodies thrown into carts, legs and arms dangling. Just as she’d seen the children who roamed the camp like desperate, feral dogs, until they wasted away to nothing, dying of starvation, if they weren’t first targeted by a vicious guard, just for their amusement. Some of the SS Aufserherinnen, Birgit had found, were even crueler than the male guards. The prisoners called one such woman, a stony-faced guard who delighted in tormenting prisoners in sick and novel ways, the “Beast of Ravensbrück.”
As the months had passed, Birgit had watched as Jewish women were lined up and taken away, never to return. Polish women were singled out; some of them returned, eyes glazed with horror, barely able to walk, while others never did. Birgit had heard whispers of medical experiments being performed on the women; they’d become known as “Die Kaninchen,” the rabbits. She couldn’t bear to think of such horrifying possibilities, even as she supposed nothing could surprise or horrify her any more. She felt flattened and hardened by it all, as if the very humanity was being leached out of her, day by day and drip by drip, and she could not keep it from happening.
Now, nearly two years on, she had nothing left to feel but a weary numbness, and still she didn’t die. Early on she and Lotte had been sent out each day with hundreds of others to shovel dirt; it seemed a useless task, moving a pile from here to there, and Birgit was sure it would be the death of them both—back-breaking work with little food or rest; the women who fell during their work were either beaten or shot.
But then someone in authority at the camp had discovered she’d once been a clockmaker, and had sent her to the Siemens factory to make electrical components for V-2 rockets. Lotte had been sent to another factory, to haul metal plates, and so they only saw each other in the evening, to eat a hasty meal before Birgit fell into bed, and Lotte went to pray.
The days at the factory were easier than the shoveling, and yet they were, in their own way, terrible. Birgit knew the rockets would be used against innocent people, as well as the Allies she was praying would save her, and everyone she loved, even as she struggled to pray or believe at all.
The mood in the factory was desperate and unrelenting; the work they were doing was far more important to Germany’s war effort than shoveling dirt, and so they were constantly patrolled by grim-faced guards, who were all too quick to pull someone from her workstation if they thought she was being too slow. Somehow the guards thought a beating made you work faster, but Birgit knew nothing did.
A month after she’d started in the factory, Birgit looked down at the pile of her components on her work station and realized it would take no more than a simple twist of her fingers to render one of them useless. No one would know until it was too late—until the rocket was fired and shown to be faulty.
It only took her a second of indecision before she picked up a component and gave it a little wrench. Then she continued on with her work, her fingers not even trembling as she put the rest of the components together and then into the basket.
Punishment for sabotage was death—either by hanging or a bullet to the head, and that was if you were lucky. If you weren’t, the guards might use you for their amusement; an agonizingly leisurely target practice, or perhaps as prey for their dogs—huge, slavering Alsatians that strained at their chains.
And yet I always expected to die here, she thought as she reached for another component, gave another twist. Why shouldn’t I risk this?
Even though the guards patrolling them wouldn’t be able to tell what she was doing, Birgit knew she could still be found out. Every V-2 rocket was numbered, and that number was associated with the prisoner who had worked on it. If one were rendered useless, they would, with a small amount of effort, be able to trace it back to her.
But by that time the war might be over… or I might be dead. The knowledge had been, in a strange way, comforting. When the guard had gone back down the aisle, Birgit had done the same again. This time the woman working next to her, Frieda, saw what she did and let out a soft gasp. Birgit met her stricken gaze with a silent plea of her own; the guard was coming back up the aisle. Frieda could give her up, to save her own skin.
“Schau weg,” she whispered. Look away.
Frieda turned away and Birgit took a steadying breath. Would she inform on her? These might be her last moments on earth. So be it.
The guard paused by them, and Birgit’s body prickled with a cold sweat. She was both unafraid and completely terrified at the same time, her mind cold and clear as her body trembled. Then he continued on, and Birgit glanced again at Frieda. The other woman gave a small nod and then a twist of her fingers. Filled with an exultant relief, Birgit smiled and kept working.
And so the months passed as planes flew overhead and bombs fell on Berlin, only seventy-five kilometers away. Sometimes they could hear the crackle and thuds, and once the town nearby was bombed, the sky lit with a strange, otherworldly orange.
“I’d rather a bomb got me than a Nazi,” Birgit told Lotte one night as they lay together on the wooden board that was their bed, a woman on either side of them, and nothing but a thin blanket to cover them all, even though it was September, and in the mornings there was frost on the ground. They could hear the distant crackle of the bombs, the growling of the planes.
Lotte put her arms around her and said nothing; she’d learned, at least, not to offer the platitudes of faith that only annoyed Birgit.
“It will be over soon,” she whispered. “It has to be. We must hold on, Birgit, for just a little longer.”
Over the months, hopeful whispers had continued to run through the camp, the wildfire burning higher. The Allies had liberated Paris, prisoners said under their breath; Parisians were dancing in the streets. Belgium, too, in September, and soon, they hoped, the Netherlands. They were coming! The Americans and British were finally coming.
But then so were the Soviets, and the guards loved to tell them, with deliberate relish, what the Soviets would do to anyone they found, prisoner or not. Birgit tried to close her ears to their poisonous words about murder and rape, but she still felt hopeless. The Soviets would get to Berlin, to Ravensbrück, before the Americans or British did.
“You don’t know that,” Lotte
insisted, but somehow Birgit did. Nothing had gone right for them so far—both of them here, Werner and Franz most likely dead or in a camp like this one, her father insensible if he hadn’t already died. And what about her mother and Johanna? Birgit had no idea where they were, what they were doing, or even if they were alive.
Why shouldn’t more bad things happen, even the worst? God didn’t care. Birgit didn’t say as much to Lotte, for she knew how much it would hurt her, but she felt it all the same, a burning resentment in her heart, her gut.
In late September, as summer faded and a chill entered the air, Birgit developed a cough in her chest. At first it was no more than a tickle, a sense of never quite being able to catch her breath. Then one morning she woke up and felt as if her throat were on fire, or covered in razor blades. Every swallow hurt.
The guards had little time for ill prisoners, Birgit knew. No one was sent to the infirmary, such as it was, unless they had a fever of over one hundred and two, and even then they were usually sent away again, to stumble back to their barracks and shiver under a thin blanket.
Those who became too ill to be useful disappeared, loaded onto stretchers and then into trucks that never want farther than the gas chamber, the crematorium. As much as she’d once wanted to die, Birgit realized that she did not want to die like that.
“You must hold on,” Lotte urged her, gladly giving her sister her own blanket, her bowl of soup, even though it meant she went without. “They’ll be here soon, Birgit. I swear it.”
“Will they? The Americans or the Soviets?” This grim question was followed by a hacking cough that tore at Birgit’s chest until she felt as if she were being stabbed with fiery knives. She was drenched in a cold sweat, shivering uncontrollably, barely able to stand at roll call every morning in the chill morning air, and yet still she went on, because the alternative was worse. It infuriated her, that after surviving two winters in the camp, she was falling ill now, so near the end, when a hint of summer still lingered in the air like a taunt of what had once been.