Two Princes and a Queen

by Shmuel David

  Soon, the block supervisor will come to do the head count. Each block has five hundred women living crowded together. The girl who is responsible for us is young, like all women in authority here, sixteen to twenty-three years old, and all of them seem born to the role. Interesting that they all come from Banat. That lot always knows how to manage. There are almost a hundred policewomen like that, all of them actually doing the Germans’ job in the camp.

  February 16

  Two thirty in the morning. I’m doing another shift at the infirmary. I only do a shift every four nights now. That’s something too! The sound of raindrops on the tin roof is mixed with a symphony of coughs coming from the sickroom.

  I no longer get upset by the work I do. Today, I did something I’m used to now, although it is actually horrifying. Hilda and I laid out the bodies collected over the past two days in the yard of the Turkish Pavilion. Twenty-seven bodies. We placed them one on top of the other in a pile, like medication cartons in the storeroom. There was already another pile there of the same height.

  Tonight, when I return to the block, I weep like a little girl. The women around me don’t understand why a young woman who heroically works with bodies and disease just has to cry. But I’m not only crying because of the work, although one of the bodies was that of a little girl I knew. Children are the hardest. It breaks my heart to see them here. A child comes into the world and this is all he knows. He doesn’t know any other life. At least I experienced something else once. I’m crying because of the futility, suffering, and loss of humanity here. No one knows when it will all end, just as no one knows why we are imprisoned here. They should just tell us what they intend to do with us.

  Shoot us in the neck, as they did yesterday to the four women who tried to steal bread? Or maybe hang the lot of us, as they hanged those who accompanied patients a week ago and tried to smuggle out a letter Hilda had written to her friend Marianna at the Christian hospital in the city. I couldn’t calm Hilda. Her eyes were a sea of tears. She cried as if she was about to be executed. She didn’t understand that a bitter end awaits her, too, and said that she didn’t care if she were hanged instead of those who’d tried to do her a favor. She’s afraid to write now. I see the light in her eyes when she receives a letter from Nada or Marianna. Suddenly, she’s someone else for an entire day. Her eyes are veiled with tears of happiness. I recall her receiving a letter once while making milk tea. She dropped everything with cries of joy.

  Today, after we’d finished with the bodies, she whispered a secret to me.

  “You’re the only one I’m telling. Tomorrow, I’m accompanying patients. I’ve also added patients who aren’t really terminal, as we’ve been ordered to do, just to get out of here. I’m going to meet Marianna, my good friend from university days, at a café near the hospital gates.”

  “How will she know you’re coming and wait for you?” I asked in order to check Hilda’s plan.

  “Don’t worry. From her last letter, I understand she’s at home with her parents. I’ll ask someone who works there to call her from home, tell her to meet me at the café near the gate. Luckily, they give us a half-hour break at this café. It’ll be all right, Inge,” she tried to soothe me. “Just cooperate with me and tell them they’re terminal patients. They can check the register at the infirmary where they’re listed. But ignore the list, because those I registered are not really terminal. It’s just between us,” she whispered.

  Naturally, I agreed. I’d do anything for Hilda. She suffers like everyone else here. Just the fact that she came of her own free will is troubling. However, her parents and little brother, Hans, arrived a month after her in the last transport of privileged Belgrade Jews. But she could have remained in Belgrade with her parents, like Marianna, or tried to escape like Jennie Lebel30 and not come here at all.

  She has moments of regret. She arrived when the camp just opened, armed with Dr. Pijade’s promise to open a branch of the city hospital here and a strong desire to help the unfortunate. Today, she says she hates them. That’s what she said. She’s surrounded by women who behave like animals, who constantly talk about bowel movements and digestive juices in their mouths when they taste a morsel of cheese or a piece of bread.

  “Inge, look what’s happened to us here. The hardest thing isn’t the icy winds that blow through broken windows into your very bones. And it isn’t the hunger either. It’s the people who watch every motion of your jaws while you chew, as if you’d stolen the last piece of bread out of their mouths.”

  February 17

  Yesterday afternoon, an unconscious woman was brought to the infirmary. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slightly open. The two women who brought her in looked tough and stocky.

  “She collapsed while cleaning the officers’ quarters.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, although they looked to me to be Banat women.

  “We were guarding the cleaners,” the older one answered. “And we were told us to bring her to the infirmary at once.”

  “Why is she so wet?” Hilda asked.

  “She fainted, so we threw water on her face and gave her a few slaps. It didn’t help.”

  I immediately realized it was a panic attack. They laid her down on one of the beds, and I told them they could go. I remained alone with Hilda. I began to massage the woman’s temples and asked Hilda to raise her feet, and she set them gently on a stool I’d placed on the bed. Slowly, she opened her eyes. She had a strange look about her, and I realized it was connected with her hysterical state. When she opened her eyes, she seemed familiar. A woman in her fifties, head shaven, and so thin that her legs and arms had barely any flesh and looked like match sticks. Many of the camp women were in bad shape, but I’d never seen such thinness before.

  And yet, the look in her eyes reminded me of someone. I thought of Mara’s grandmother, a woman I knew in Sabac before coming here. But it couldn’t be. She was in her sixties with silver hair in a bun on her head, very different from this woman with her shaven head and wild eyes. In the meantime, Hilda said her breathing was returning to normal. She removed the stool and laid the woman’s legs, knees up, on the bed. I tried to encourage her to talk, and when she opened her mouth, only a few broken words in Serbo-Croatian came out, which I recognized from my time with Hanne, and then, in a flash, I realized it was his mother, Louisa. She looked at me expressionlessly, and I called her by name. “Louisa, Louisa.”

  She tried to raise her head but fell back. Again she tried, and again she failed. I continued to massage her temples and call her name, and then she finally focused on me and called out, “Inge! What am I doing here? What are you doing here? Are we in Sabac?”

  In my most soothing voice, I explained that she was at Sajmište and I was at Sajmište, a nurse again. She gave me a brief look, lay back, and said in German, “That’s impossible, impossible. I must be dreaming.”

  I told her, “It’s no dream, and I’m here to help.”

  Hilda was surprised and asked, “Do you know her? Where is she from? I heard her speaking in Serbo-Croatian.”

  “Yes. She’s from Belgrade. I told you that everyone in our transport was from Austria and Germany, but there was one family from Belgrade. She’s my boyfriend’s mother; he managed to get an immigration permit and left with the youth group on the train.”

  As we talked, Louise continued to recover.

  “What’s their name?” asked Hilda.

  “David. This is Louisa, and her husband’s name is Emil.”

  “Good heavens!” Hilda cried out in astonishment. “I also knew her. What a small world. Louisa David? I can’t believe it!”

  “Yes, it’s her. You can ask her yourself in a while.”

  “Hilda!” Louisa suddenly cried out, to our surprise. “You’re here too!”

  She tried to sit up and talk to us. Hilda brought water and held it to Louisa’s mouth for her to drin
k carefully. With our help, she sat up a little, murmuring all the time in a mixture of Serbo-Croatian and German.

  “How did you get here, Hilda, my poor child? What have they done to you?”

  “I’m fine, Madame Louisa. I came voluntarily. It’s a long story.”

  Louisa sat up a little more, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “Weren’t you at Aleksa Šantić’s Literary Society?” she asked.

  “Yes,” responded Hilda. “And I came to your house once. You lived on Dedinje Hill, right? You had a huge house.”

  “Ah, yes. That house seems unreal to me now, like a memory from another world,” said Louisa.

  “You invited me and two friends to an evening of Aleksa’s poetry. Nada is considered an expert on his poetry.”

  “It’s hard to believe I’m actually meeting you here, in this terrible place. And you, Inge, you saved me when we boarded the boat. I will never forget it. You were a life-saver for me, and later in Kladovo as well.”

  “I only did what anyone would have done, nothing special,” I answered her.

  “Don’t underestimate your own worth. I can’t believe I’m meeting you here. Did you get the letter I sent with Miklos?”

  February 17, Night

  It is ten o’clock at night. Tonight, Hilda is on duty. She replaces me every two nights, so I have more time to sleep. The wind is wailing, banging on ripped-out windows and letting in cold that freezes the bones. Today, we had sauerkraut again for the afternoon meal, the seventh time in the last two weeks. Everyone knows the exact cycle of sauerkraut, and they talk about food all the time. Hilda told me she can’t bear these discussions. They apparently don’t have anything else to give us, except sauerkraut or gray potatoes. The women are getting thinner, and who knows how they’ll be able to do their work in the sewing workshop or cleaning soldiers’ quarters and the latrines when the food portions are so poor.

  I try to sleep, but again and again I see pictures of their attempt to escape as Louisa described; how the Serbian driver, who had already received the money they’d scraped together, betrayed them to the Germans.

  That afternoon, I met Hilda when she returned from her meeting. The minute I saw the ambulance come in, I knew she’d returned, and I was looking forward to hearing her experiences. She looked like a different person.

  “You have no idea,” she said. “What all that does for me.”

  “As soon as we crossed the bridge over the frozen Sava, I sent someone to tell Marianna that I’d be at the café. It’s lucky the soldiers accompanying us allow this break after we’ve handed over patients to the emergency room. To get a little taste of the world I knew, even if it’s only for a moment—and then back to our hell behind the fences. She came twenty minutes later. This was our third meeting at the café. She was groomed and fashionably dressed, as always. I sat there with a cup of tea that I was too excited to drink. We held hands, and Marianna looked at me in my gray prison clothes with tears in her eyes. I tried to comfort her and paint a less harsh picture, but she said she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to see me soon—I was all skin and bone. I wasn’t plump before, but now… We’ve gotten used to our skeletal bodies here, but to someone from the outside, who used to know us, it looks terrible.

  “Marianna told me that all of Aleksa’s activities had been stopped. The university was closed, and she sat home with her parents, bored and wanting it all to end. When I told her about you and what you’ve gone through, with sailing and the endless wait on the Danube, she recalled that in December 1939, on a trip along the Danube with her parents, they anchored in Vukovar and saw three ships in port. They even transferred food to one of the ships. When they asked who was on the ships, they were told that they were Jews from Austria and Germany who were waiting for immigration permits for Palestine. What a small world.

  “Marianna asked if I still think volunteering for the camp was the right thing to do. I told her that I wanted to help where I knew I was needed. But I couldn’t have imagined where all this was going. I tried to soften the picture, but Marianna is smart. She understood. I told the story you’ve already heard, how as a small girl in Vienna I had a recurring nightmare of being buried alive. It was after I understood, or thought I understood, what death meant, when my parents returned from my grandfather’s funeral. I understood he was in a grave now. Outside, snow was falling, and I didn’t understand how my mother could have left him alone in his grave when outside it was cold and snowing. Today, I feel as if I’ve been buried alive. And our life behind the fence is like being buried underground.

  “And then, so it wouldn’t sound so dark, I told her about the rumors of our perhaps being transferred to a labor camp in Poland, where conditions are better.”

  February 24

  I’ve been working in the office of SS-Untersturmführer Herbert Andorfer for a week now. He saw me one day at the infirmary and decided he wanted me in his office. His aide recently had to return to Germany. This was last Wednesday. I was on night shift in the infirmary. It was after midnight, the sounds of groaning had finally calmed down, and I had time to organize the medication cabinet. I heard the familiar sound of boots on the paving stones. I had no doubt as to whom those boots belonged. He appeared with his two aides, tall and trim in his ironed uniform. Both held their guns in their hands, and he held a thin cane and seemed somewhat perturbed. I immediately saw the dark circles under his eyes.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  He asked his aides to wait outside.

  “I’ve been told there are two highly professional nurses at the camp infirmary who can help me.”

  “What’s wrong? At a guess, you are suffering from insomnia.”

  “How did you know?” he asked in surprise. “Is it written on my forehead?”

  “More or less,” I answered. “It’s written in the dark circles under your eyes.”

  “It’s been going on for quite some time,” he said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall asleep again…”

  “Do you want a sleeping pill?”

  “Yes, I do. What do you have that could help?”

  I wanted to tell him it was hardly surprising that he couldn’t sleep. With all the atrocities going on in the camp, he’d need heavy armor to block his heart and mind, but instead I went to the medication cabinet and put a few pills in a small packet.

  “Here you are,” I held it out to him. “There are five pills here. But you need to be careful. No more than one at a time.”

  He took it, put it in his ironed pocket, and bowed his thanks.

  “No need to thank me. Just be careful, those pills are narcotics.”

  And then he sat down, crossed one leg over the other, resting his stick on the floor.

  “My name is Herbert. I’m camp Untersturmführer Herbert Andorfer,” he introduced himself.

  “I’m Inge. Inge Müller.”

  “I wish to offer you an opportunity it would be hard to refuse,” he said. “My aide returned to Germany two days ago. He has family problems. His wife has been hospitalized in a psychiatric unit.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” I asked.

  “It’s simple. I hear how well you speak German and see how practical you are, and I thought you might take his place.”

  “That’s out of the question,” I said. “How can I leave the infirmary? It would be a crime.”

  “It wouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “I’ll find you a replacement from among the Banat women.”

  “Just like that? It’s that simple to replace me?”

  “Yes, it won’t be a problem. You’ll just have to train her for a couple of days.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “You’ll be able to eat properly. You won’t freeze in this huge football stadium of a place.”

  “I’ll see. I’ll need to think about it.�
��

  “Tomorrow, an aide will come to fetch you. Think about it tonight.”

  He got up, put his stick under his arm, clicked his heels together, turned to the door, and left with his two aides, the sounds of their boots filling the building space.

  That entire night was devoted to the bombshell thrown by Untersturmführer Herbert Andorfer. Why would I go with him? But not really with him, just to his office. So what? Be his aide? The enemy’s aide? I might be able to save myself that way. How can I do this to the group? Although we aren’t really a group now. We’re all here together, all the women and children of Belgrade, Banat, and surrounding places. What connects me to the Banat women we all hate? Many of them have turned into camp policewomen, collaborators. Is that what I’ll become, too? A collaborator?

  No. I’ll never be like them. They treat us brutally. I’ll just sit in an office and organize papers. Maybe it isn’t so bad. Maybe I’ll even find a way to help my friends in the group. I’d especially like to help poor Hilda. She so regrets having volunteered to come here. Now, when it’s too late for regrets, she understands she made a mistake. But who could have known? Maybe it would be a mistake to refuse Commander Andorfer. Maybe I should learn from Hilda’s mistake, because who knows what will be? All she wanted was to help others, and now she’s buried here, like her childhood nightmare, buried alive and screaming from the grave, her mouth full of earth and no one to hear her. That’s how she feels today—buried alive. So why shouldn’t I take what he’s offering me now?

  In fact, I have a wonderful idea: I’ll suggest that Hilda go to Andorfer’s office instead of me. She came here voluntarily, and maybe it will compensate for her suffering. That’s it. I’m at peace now. I’ll talk to her about it tomorrow. If she agrees, I’ll tell Andorfer’s aide there’s someone else here who speaks German just as well as I do, so why shouldn’t he take her in my place? In this way, I comforted myself until morning.

  The following morning, while making beds, I told Hilda about the offer I’d received. I suggested she go in my place, and maybe she’d manage to get herself freed to go home to Belgrade, which is so close by.