by Lou Cadle
“Nein,” she said to the woman who had given them their prison clothes, for surely this was a prison. A large one, from what she had glimpsed.
“You will wait,” she said, and then left via the interior door.
For a moment, Antonia thought about walking out the door. Her legs were not broken. But then she remembered the raving woman who had been shot, and the guard towers, and realized that she did not have to be in leg irons here to be securely confined.
She glanced at her fellow prisoner, but the woman would not meet her gaze.
The door opened a half-hour later, and a different woman in a Nazi uniform barked an order, pointing at the other prisoner. Antonia was left alone.
I did not betray my circuit. No matter what happened now, she had passed that test. And Will was back in England, feeling much better by now. She held to that and tried to make it enough.
But it was not enough. She wanted to live. Such a burden, this reawakened longing for more life. It made her weaker, more vulnerable. It would make her obedient to the worst people in the world. Was it worth it?
If she could survive until the invasion, perhaps only ten weeks or so from now, and then to the liberation, then she might have a life after the war, a normal life. A good life. This was her new assignment, then. To survive. To do whatever it took to stay alive here. To make it to the end of the war.
When it was her turn to be led away, the Nazi woman asked her questions, in passable French, about her skills. She hesitated only a little before she admitted to being able to draw. She almost said, “A bit,” but that was not true, and humility would do her no good here. “I am an illustrator.” All the while she spoke, she made sure she moved her fingers normally. They ached. Could she hold a pen yet? Perhaps this was not the skill to claim, for she was not sure she had it any longer.
“We need no artists.”
“I can cook and sew a little, but not professionally.”
“A spoiled rich woman, then.” She sneered.
“Not rich. I make nice canapés,” she said, but of course that sounded as bourgeois as the Nazi woman assumed. “I was at university for a short time.”
“Do you translate languages?”
She could translate between three, but she was not willing to admit to that. “No, I’m sorry.”
“Then you will dig and plant. We have a lot of people to feed, and extensive fields to grow our own food. Surely a housewife can manage that.”
“Of course,” Antonia said. She added, “Thank you,” though she did not feel gratitude. If her goal was to live, she needed to learn cooperation and acting pleasant to her enemies.
She’d had a hard enough time being pleasant to her cold mother-in-law. Nazi captors would be a challenge much larger than that.
You want to live. Remember that. You want to live. So you will do what you must.
She was taken then to a shower facility, where she showered and was given yet a different set of uniform clothes. She wasn’t sure why, as the second set of clothes was no better than the first. Then she was taken to what was, apparently, to be her home for the duration, a cold barracks made of the thinnest boards, not painted or stained. Wood floors. Holes in the ceiling that let in light. The smell of sickness and urine. She passed women lying on thin mattresses, moaning or staring as if hypnotized. More insanity? Or physical illness? The mattresses were piled nearly one on the next, so any illness here would fly through the prisoners in no time at all.
The women she saw were thin, even more than she was. So they weren’t being fed well. At least her assigned work might be useful, to grow food for herself and these other women. She wondered if it was possible to snatch a mouthful of food from the crops when the guards’ backs were turned. If so, it might be the best possible work assignment.
She was led to a mattress against one outer wall, on a bunk stacked on top of a bottom bunk. Someone apparently slept there, but the Nazi was insistent she go up there, so she did. The mattress smelled of vomit.
You want to live.
With that reminder, she climbed into the reeking bed. She was left there, with a stern warning, though she couldn’t understand the warning. From the way the Nazi woman pointed, she thought it might be an order to stay right there, so she did. At least the mattress was not wet, nor even crusted with regurgitated food. The vomit had dried.
In late afternoon, women prisoners began coming back into the barracks, sometimes only one entering, and once, over fifty pushing in within seconds. Outside, the light was fading. The air coming in the cracks of the wall grew chilly. She looked around and realized she had no blanket, nor was there one on the bed. Surely they had blankets.
She sat back and watched as the women settled in. Some spoke to one another in low voices. There was one bizarre, silent fight over something she could not see, the women shoving each other and punching, scowling but saying no words. Antonia wouldn’t be having such a fight. She had nothing to fight over, not a comb, not a blanket, not even a pair of socks.
A woman came to her bunk, looked up with a frown, then shook her head and pointed at Antonia. She spoke in a tongue Antonia did not know at all. She focused, listening in Spanish at first—no, it was definitely not a Romance language—and then listened the best she could via her basic German.
It wasn’t that either. Antonia shrugged helplessly. Then the woman tried German, heavily accented, and gave her what appeared to be three short orders about sleeping arrangements. Antonia grasped that she was to take the spot against the outer wall and moved. The woman climbed up onto the same mattress.
The woman might be happy to have someone breaking the flow of cold air, but Antonia wasn’t unhappy with the arrangement. Listening to coughs and moans all afternoon had convinced her disease might kill her before Germans did. So she would face the outside wall and breathe in fresh air all night, even though it was cold, and perhaps not catch any illness that would kill her.
I want to live. It was a reminder she would have to give herself many times a day as the weeks passed.
In that time, she made no friends. Friendship seemed rare. A few people wearing yellow Jewish stars spoke together, but there seemed to be cliques and enmity, even among the Jews.
When she found the woman she had traveled with after a morning roll call, she tried speaking to her in French. “Slippers aren’t much good against the cold ground, are they?”
“Leave me alone,” was all the woman said.
All right. She would. But it seemed wise to have one friend, or an informant, among the other prisoners.
But she reconsidered when two days later, that same woman passed her in the prison yard and said. “I could be a spy for the Germans. You could be a spy for them.”
That was so. So Antonia became a ghost, moving silently from roll call to a meal, from there to the fields where she hoed rocky ground day after day, from there to another sparse meal, from there to the barracks, where she lay still in her spot and conserved her strength and slept.
One day, her bedmate did not come back. She knew no one well enough to ask where she might have gone. Another day, not long after, she was there when a nearby body was carried out and knew enough by then to snatch the blanket that dead woman had used. She fought another woman for it, but the woman had been there longer than she, and was thinner and weaker. She felt bad for the woman, but she had an obligation to herself.
I want to live. She reminded herself of this sternly, whenever compassion threatened to make her do something suicidal.
Every day, she learned more German. She heard other languages and came to believe that her one-time bedmate may have been Hungarian. She heard English more than once, and once an accent that was close enough to Will’s that her heart ached to hear his voice again.
Hunger became a terrible, constant companion. She had been hungry at times while hiding in France, but nothing like this. The hunger accumulated, and every day was worse than the one before. Her mind fixed on food, and food invaded her dream
s.
There was fear, as well. The German guards chose some women to be ferociously mean to, and she learned to not make eye contact unless ordered to. She tried to be invisible, and she tried to not listen to cries of pain, or to the voice of a woman begging for the end of some punishment.
The deadness she had felt after the telegram about Reg served her well. It had been her rehearsal for making herself be even more dead inside these fences.
In her role as obedient, unfeeling ghost, she heard more than if she had made a friend. People began not to notice her walking nearby.
There was a tinny-sounding speaker system in the compound, and sometimes prisoner names were called as they took their exercise. This was not a good thing, it seemed, for only some of the time did women return from having their names called. Sometimes, after names were called, there was a burst of smoke from a chimney in a building at the edge of the camp. A crematorium, said a whisper she overheard. So there was no proof of what had happened to the women.
At the end of her sixth month there, winter came, an early winter, and soon the barracks grew less crowded, for many women died. She was reassigned to a burial detail. Her hand ached when she tried digging graves in the frozen ground, but she did not stop work. When women stopped work—whether they refused or collapsed—they were shot and tossed into the graves they had been digging.
Toward the end of winter, one morning after roll call, four women’s names were called out over the loudspeaker, and two of those names were French. They must be in another barracks, one far away, for she’d never encountered them. Whispers in the prisoners’ ranks said they were spies to be executed.
It was time to go to her job then, but Antonia longed to find a way to see the faces that went with the French names. Perhaps one was a woman she had seen in training in England. But her work group was gathering to be marched outside the compound fence, and she reminded herself that it was her job to stay alive, nothing more, nothing less. She shut off that longing to gain information, as she shut off all her emotions, and marched out to the burial site.
They executed spies. She knew that now. If the war was going badly for them, and she prayed it was, perhaps they would execute all suspected spies, and that meant her. She looked around the other women in her work group, some digging new holes, and some covering up other holes. Spring was coming again. The days were longer.
Where was the invasion? She shut off that thought every time it came to her.
A week after the execution of the women with the French names, she was seen by a doctor. This apparently happened from time to time, an examination for no reason. She understood his German by now but, upon hearing her accent, he switched to French.
“Are you well?” he asked.
She was hungry and tired and lonely, and despite her continual lectures to herself about staying alive, she was disheartened. Sometimes, she thought she stayed alive only out of habit. She thought of Will at times, and of England, but only as distant memory. She no longer dared to hope that she would see either again. She said none of this, of course. She answered, “Thank you. I am quite well.”
He was looking through her papers. “You seem a healthy type.”
“I am.”
“Jewish?”
“No,” she said.
“I won’t report you if you tell me,” he said.
“I am not Jewish. I was raised—nothing, really. No religion at all.”
“Ah,” he said. “I wouldn’t repeat that to anyone else here. They like atheists no better than they like the Jews.”
She shouldn’t have said it to him, but perhaps the loneliness was finally getting to her. No one speaking in her languages in the barracks, no friends, no family, no laughter. All she had were memories of times in her life she’d had such things. Perhaps were it summer here, and there were wildflowers blooming, and birds sang, she might have been able to tolerate the conditions. But even birds and grass seemed to have abandoned this place.
He was studying her. “There is a study on disease. I think you would make a good subject.”
She only raised her eyebrows.
“Twenty prisoners will be tested for treatment of a disease. Some will be given no treatment, some a known treatment, and some an experimental treatment.”
“I have no diseases,” she said.
“Of course. That is why you would be ideal.”
It took a moment for her to understand. “You would give me the disease. And then see if you could cure it.”
“That is right.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“Not as dangerous as going on as you are,” he said. He tapped a finger on the folder of papers that were about her.
“I see,” she said, staring at the finger. His nails gleamed as if they’d been recently buffed. Her own broken hand looked like a laborer’s—and not a young one’s.
“Do you volunteer, then?”
“Is it to be done here?”
“No. That was an intelligent question, Madame.”
“It seemed sensible,” she said. She had not observed any sort of hospital here. Prisoners were left to die in their bunks, not taken away for treatment.
“It is at a facility, small, once for mental patients, over fifty miles from here.”
“And if I say no and stay here, what will happen?”
“There are other ways to die than disease,” he said, touching her papers once again. “Quicker, perhaps.”
She understood he might be doing her a favor of sorts, but she could not bring herself to see it that way. Nevertheless, she thanked him, as she had thanked so many of her captors as they abused her. “I will volunteer. Thank you.”
“Good, good!” he said, smiling broadly. “I will arrange for you to be transported tomorrow morning. Go back to your barracks and say your goodbyes.”
She had no goodbyes to say. But she went back to her barracks and sat, and thought. If an opportunity came to escape on the drive to this new place, she would do it. If not, she would be injected with some disease. She did not begin to hope that it would be a benign one.
She did not have a god to pray to, but she prayed anyway. She prayed that Claude was blowing up bridges and still free, that Genevieve would grow up to be a happy woman, that Madame Charlevoix would have so much butter by the end of this year, she’d hardly know what to do with it all. She prayed the Allies would come soon and free the prisoners in this camp.
She prayed that if she died badly, which seemed likely, Will would never find out the details of what had happened to her. She prayed Miss Atkins and Mr. Marks and all the rest of her instructors at the SOE would not feel bad when they learned—if they did learn—that she had died.
They might not ever know. The four women spies whose names were called, who had disappeared as black smoke drifting up into the sky—their loved ones might never know what had happened to them either. It could be that a record would remain of her here, and someone would see it, but they’d never find where she’d been taken. She could die of this disease, and be buried in an unmarked grave at the hospital, in a land far from any home she had known.
She prayed that Hitler and Franco and Mussolini would end a worse way than she, and soon, dying in pain and terror. She prayed that at the end they would understand how many millions of people hated them, and understand that the few who had worshipped them had been evil, that their followers had abandoned every bit of their own humanity for a false promise.
By the time a Nazi guard came for her the next morning, she had prayed enough that she felt emptied and resolved. Maybe there was something to the idea of Catholic confession after all. Her fate would be her fate. She would not die without a fight, but if her fight were in vain, she would die knowing she had done her best.
At the end, it is all any of us have.
Chapter 38
Typhus. It was typhus they gave her.
The doctor with the manicured hands, smiling, explained in French to her why he was doing the
research. “It is for the camps, you see. Your kind gets fleas, and fleas carry the disease. One in three, sometimes one in four die. Our soldiers were given it by the Russians, and far fewer died of course. A superior race.”
He was quite clearly insane. Germans and French were not different races. He could have been Claude’s cousin.
His insane, heartless cousin who simpered while he spoke of death, as if it were a mathematical point of interest, and not actual people dying and leaving behind other people who would cry over the loss.
“So understand,” he said, “that by volunteering you are helping those like you, others in the camps. If I can devise a treatment, more will survive. And all of our soldiers.”
“Of course,” she said. She was being pleasant and cooperative. And looking for every possibility of escape. It wasn’t going to be easy. There was a nurse with them every day, a different one every night, and there were bars on the windows. This had been some sort of mental hospital, out in the country, meant for the mad relatives of those with a little money.
Except now, days after her arrival, with the typhus taking hold, she was not in any shape to escape. The fever was worse now than it had been the day before when it began, and then the headache had come on, and the headache was made so much worse by any light. When the doctor shone his little flashlight in her eyes, she couldn’t help but moan.
“Good,” he said. “Very good.”
Disgusting little pervert. Who could sound so cheerful at another’s pain?
Well, you. You yourself, Antonia. When you killed the Germans. Were you not cheerful then? Would you not be cheerful if you took a syringe full of typhus and plunged it into the smiling doctor?
You are a monster.
I’m afraid.
“Shhh,” a voice said. Not one of the voices in her head. A real voice. She forced one eye open, but the light suddenly was not bad. It was night, the doctor was gone, and only a dim light in the corner of the ward reached her. “Do you hurt?” The question was in German. The questioner was a nurse, all in white.