by Andie Newton
I ate my soup, and it was the best thing I’d ever tasted. I slurped every last spoonful from my bowl. ‘I can’t get enough of this! It’s not the broth, it’s the vegetables, and the—’ I looked up, not wanting to mention how the market shelves were getting thinner and thinner and what selections they did have were already ripened and wilted. I set my spoon down, and Erik smiled. I thought we’d begun to notice our mutual cues, when to change the subject to keep from mentioning the war, and what the Party had done to us.
I set my bowl off to the side. ‘What do you want to do?’ I said. ‘Ski?’
‘You pick.’
The day was at my choosing, and it was a beautiful day, with snow hanging heavy on the trees and the sun glistening off drifts that had formed in the night. I tore my pretzel in half, watching the white middle steam. ‘How about the rodels?’
Erik laughed. ‘Me on a rodel? I’m too big.’
‘It will be fun,’ I said, suddenly chuckling, thinking about him trying to fit his long legs on a sled. ‘Trust me.’
And he did. I couldn’t believe he did, because I actually didn’t know if he would fit or not. But there we were on top of the hill standing with our sleds. I adjusted my winter hat, playing with the fuzzy ball. Our cheeks were already pink.
‘Are you sure?’ he said, looking down the steep hill of snow.
I nodded. ‘Absolutely.’
He motioned with his chin. ‘You go first.’
I dropped my sled in the snow and sat down on the worn, lacquered wood, straddling the sled with my legs while Erik watched me. ‘Give me a shove,’ I said, and he tapped the back of my sled with his boot. I went slowly at first, gently resting my feet on the steering peg, but then hunkered down, grabbing my ankles, and flew down the hill. A frozen breeze whistled in my ears, twisting my hair behind my neck as I squealed. ‘Woohoo!’
When I got to the bottom all I heard was the pant of my own breath surrounded by the hiss of the crystallized snow. Snowflakes stuck to my eyelashes and melted into a slushy, wintery mix on my face.
I stood and yelled up to the top of the hill ‘Come on!’ even though Erik couldn’t hear me. The tracks of my sled curved down the slope, to the left, to the right and sometimes straight down the middle, which he followed with his own sounds of terror and joy.
Erik’s sled swooshed passed me. I waited for him to get off, but he didn’t move. He turned to me when I laughed. ‘Ella Strauss, what did you do to me?’
I balled up some snow and threw it at him, and that got him off the sled. He chased after me as I balled up another snowball in my mitted hands, and he caught me, wrapping his arms around me.
I looked up at him. ‘Let’s never leave this place.’
I tossed the snowball over my shoulder, and we kissed.
*
We drove back to Munich that evening. The girls sat on one side of the car, the boys sat on the other, looking out of their windows, barely speaking. Erik and I sat in the middle and talked the entire way back home about the snow, and where to get the coldest beer in Munich.
Alex looked over at us. ‘Sounds like you two really hit it off.’ He had a strange look on his face, when normally he would have been beaming from my connections with the Reich.
‘It’s a new year,’ I said. ‘Perk up.’
The driver turned the radio on, and through the crackling interference we heard the latest war bulletin. ‘The mighty Germans have made a significant effort on the Eastern Front…’
I’d sat in on the last administration meeting long enough to know that the Red Army had used the weather to their advantage. With the RAF on the Western Front, levelling Berlin and now targeting Frankfurt, the Reich was being squeezed on both sides. I could feel the end of my embittered world crumbling like a building under a RAF bomb.
Soon, I thought, this war really will end.
1944
27
January
Despite the winter air, there was a light spring in my step as I walked into work. It followed me all morning like a merry jingle. I had just collected a folder for Erik from a set of files on the main floor and stopped to chitchat with a guard about the snow and rodels. Not long after, Erwin’s cake-thick voice snuck up behind me.
‘Well, well, if it isn’t Ella.’
I rolled my eyes before he could see them. ‘Hello, Erwin.’
His body nudged mine. ‘Heard about your little trip with Koch.’ He whispered into my ear, the stench of sour milk heavy on his breath. ‘You just keep getting higher and higher on the food chain now, don’t you?’
I had never offered Erwin my condolences after Louise died. I knew he probably missed her, blamed me even, but I hadn’t anticipated he’d corner me about it, especially not in the lobby of the V-building. ‘I know you’re upset about Louise, but…’
Erwin left as I was talking, and right out the front doors of the V-building. Even for Erwin our exchange seemed odd. His voice had changed, it didn’t squeal like it used to but sounded formulaic and prescribed. The guard watched Erwin leave and then gave me a wondering look. I shrugged my shoulders.
I sat in my office and arranged the things on my desk. Sometime after lunch Erik rushed through the door, opened up the file cabinet near the door and vigorously thumbed through the file folders inside.
‘Good morning!’ I said, glancing at my watch. ‘I mean afternoon.’
The back of his neck was red as if he had been rubbing it. ‘Hello,’ he said, still thumbing through the file cabinet. He seemed upset about something, but he was fine earlier in the morning when I saw him. He’ll have a drink and then he’ll relax.
I spun my chair around and pointed out the window. Snow had started to fall, and it tapped against the paned glass like tiny pebbles. ‘It’s snowing,’ I said with delight. He gazed hard out the window and swallowed. The sharp angle of his chin matched the crooked cross on his NSDAP cuffband. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Anything you want to tell me, Ella?’ He glared, and I realized I had done something wrong.
‘The folder.’ I left it at the bottom of the stairs after I saw Erwin; I was supposed to send it by courier across the Königsplatz. I cursed Erwin for distracting me, and then apologized for leaving the folder downstairs, but Erik walked into his office and slammed the door before I had even finished talking. Hoffmann waved from down the corridor. I wasn’t sure he was waving to me, but when I walked toward him it was clear he wanted to talk.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
His face was straight, almost scared, and stubby from not shaving. He ducked into a cleaning closet and turned off the lights. One hand motioned for me to join him.
‘You need to leave.’ His breath smelled of whisky. ‘Something big is going on. They won’t tell me what.’
‘Is this about the folder?’ A puff of air pushed the closet door away from its casing. I saw my office at a distance. Everything was still, plain, almost sterile; and I realized how empty it was without Louise’s things, that I had gone too far stripping it of the necessities and it was hard to tell I had moved in at all.
‘Folder?’ He shook his head and winced as if I had told him too much. ‘Just go home, wait for it to blow over.’
The tone of Erik’s voice—he was angry, that much I knew. I must have really messed things up for him in some way. ‘You’re right, maybe that would be best.’
Hoffmann sat down on a stool in between a broom and a dustpan and wiped his sweaty brow. ‘I’m staying in here,’ he said.
There was an ominous charge of static hovering in my office. I grabbed my coat and knocked on Erik’s door. ‘Erik?’ I knocked again. ‘I’ve finished up for the day and I’m going home.’ I peeked through the frosted glass that separated his office from mine. He stood over his desk with his head down and his arms bracing the top as if he was going to flip it over.
Everything was silent.
*
It was nearly three o’clock before I made it to my flat. The
buses were full and the tram had broken down so I had to walk, which seemed to happen more often as the war dragged on—the city had given almost all of its working equipment to the war effort, and the trams had to make do with what parts were left behind. Broken couplings and wheels that squealed along rusty tracks had become daily life.
I hadn’t even taken my coat off before Max flew through my door. He panted for breath as if he’d been running and pushed his hands against the sides of the doorframe with wild eyes, his face stretching in all directions.
‘They know—they know everything!’ He lunged at me, grabbing the lapels of my coat. ‘They know you’re a spy.’
My stomach dropped.
‘I overheard a story at the Braunes Haus: a British mole in the NSDAP had information about a contact named Sascha at the V-building—a snake in administration.’
I gasped. ‘Christophe.’
‘I don’t know how they made the connection, but somehow they found out Sascha was you.’
My bones shook, and not from the cold but from fear, the kind a doe feels just before the arrow strikes, and in that millisecond I counted all my mistakes; the obvious ones told in Schliersee. Erik found out about my nickname. He asked some questions, and I told him about my aunt. I told him just enough to get myself caught.
Max shook my shoulders. ‘I’ll get a car. Meet me in the alley!’
He ran out of my flat and the door swung shut behind him. I stood, paralyzed yet shaking, with my hands in my pockets staring at the closed door. That’s when I felt the Bavarian figurine Erik had bought me still in my pocket. His painted yellow mittens, his buttoned red lips, and those mouldable blue eyes. I was still holding it when I heard the Gestapo pound up the stairs, and I braced myself for what was to come.
My aunt’s egg cups scooted across the shelf, falling one after the other onto the floor and shattering into a million tiny white pieces. Boom! They kicked my door in, and I shrieked. Max fought his way through, pleading, his face red and patched white from the strain of arms holding him back. ‘Ella—’
I reached for his hand, screaming his name when something hit my temple—a muffled thump—and everything went black.
*
There was a tingle in my ear and the vague sense of the afternoon, but it was the smell I noticed first: like the inside of a rotted peach, sickening sweet, with hints of acid and sulphur. Then the voices came. At first, they were low and deep, blending together like a song on a sluggish turntable; then they turned loud and sharp like a bell ringing in my ear.
‘This one is special. Give her everything,’ a voice said.
‘I planned on it,’ another said.
My eyes fluttered open. I lay on a chilled, silver-topped table with wet fleeced straps tied around my wrists and a white sheet with watery-pink stains draped heavily over my body. Above my head, a glass cylinder filled with cloudy liquid that dripped into a thick pointed needle hung from a hook. A woman dressed as a nurse with a flat metal tray laden with sharp, pointed instruments—the kind I thought only dentists used—stood next to my bed humming a nursery rhyme. ‘All the pretty flowers open to the sun, clap, clap, clap… clap, clap, clap…’
I tried to move my arms, but they were as heavy as tree trunks. When I moved my head my body shuddered with a rolling twitch.
‘I see our princess is awake.’ Her voice was cheery and as pleasant at the nursery rhyme. She put her hands on her hips and rocked back on her heels. ‘How’s our little dumpling doing this morning?’
I rasped and wiggled in the straps.
‘Oh, don’t even try to get up,’ she said. ‘I’ll push you right back down.’
She talked to another woman I couldn’t see and they laughed and joked as if they were chatting over a cup of tea. Then their voices quieted, and the air got still. The nurse pulled the sheet off. A sinister grin spread across her face, and she admired my naked body like a fresh fish from the lake. The other woman tapped my shins from the foot of my bed. I squinted, but all I could see was the outline of a pink suit, her sleeves rolled to her elbows.
‘You’re going to give her everything, right?’ the woman said.
The nurse nodded. ‘She’ll be here a while.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘This one deserves it.’ There was a long pause, and I felt her hot breath on my cold shins as she leaned over me. ‘You’re younger than I thought,’ she murmured. ‘Shame. You’re about to be ruined.’
The nurse held a long needle in between her fingers and squirted liquid from its point. ‘You didn’t tell us you were pregnant.’
My eyes bulged. Pregnant? She pushed on my stomach and shooting pains spread like the points of a thousand arrows flying through my body. I squealed in pain. Then it felt like someone was yanking my insides out through my vagina.
The woman in pink laughed. ‘Listen to that voice!’
I tried to push my knees together but my ankles were held as tight as my wrists in fleeced straps. Something wet and heavy hit the floor. The nurse leaned in, covered my mouth with her other hand and gritted her teeth.
‘Don’t worry. We took care of it for you.’
When I realized what she meant my belly jutted into a wave and I flopped up and down on the table. She slammed the needle into my arm, a prickled pain burned its way to my head and the room closed in.
*
It seemed like days had passed before they unfastened me from the table. When I was, my legs buckled and I fell to the floor. I lay there until a female guard with whiskers on her chin kicked me into a long corridor. ‘Git!’ she huffed. ‘Git, git!’
I dragged myself away from her boot until I got to a large cemented room, painted dull white, with twelve other women walking slumped over in a circle; a thick rope connected them together at the waist. They wore tan gowns with inverted red triangles sewn at the breast. It was a patch I knew well, studied even; it was the patch of a political prisoner.
They stopped to stare, then they clapped, slowly, one by one, until they’d all gathered enough courage and it echoed into a sort of triumphant song.
‘Why are they—’
‘Everyone knows who you are,’ one guard said.
‘We get rats here, but it’s not every day we get a snake, especially one so high up in the Reich,’ said another.
The guards shouted, threatened to take their food away if they didn’t stop. I wondered how they had heard about me, what they had heard. It was the acknowledgement I had never wanted, yet unexpectedly felt I needed.
A tired smile rested on my lips, listening to the clapping.
‘All right, lift her up,’ the guard bellowed.
Two other guards yanked me up by the armpits and dragged me into a cinderblock room no bigger than a large closet, with a concrete slab protruding from the wall and a tan gown slung on top of it.
I scooted into the corner. The guard with the whiskers threw a soiled rag on the ground. ‘For the drips,’ she said. ‘Makes the cleaning easier.’ She turned to leave, the heavy steel door gripped tight in her hand.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Where am I?’
She stepped back into the room and smiled, the glint of a silver tooth separating her lips. ‘Welcome to Hinzert.’
She poked me in the ribs with her boot and I curled into a ball. Cramps twisted near my bottom and pink liquid oozed out onto the rag she had tossed on the ground. I had become a Night and Fog prisoner, after all. I had vanished, just like Claudia had vanished.
My hands trembled and my chin quaked. I touched my belly, feeling the emptiness of what I hadn’t known was inside, and quiet tears burst from my eyes.
28
September
I stood with two other girls, our backs pressed against the corridor’s cold stone wall, and waited for orders to move. Depending on if it was night or day shift, the guards were either going to humiliate us or beat us with sticks. I hadn’t seen the sky for months; they kept me in a small concrete room tied to a wetted rope that burned like fire, or on the
table, as I called it.
We were escorted into a room with a metal desk and a door too small to be anything other than a closet. Out the corner of my eye, I could tell there were three heavyset male guards standing at the end of the desk, and one short guard standing by the door.
‘Congratulations, you three,’ one of the guards said. ‘You’ve been specially chosen to play a game. But first you have to pass a few tests to prove your worthiness.’
One girl, whose ears had been nibbled on by rats, was slapped immediately across the face. Her limbs crumbled like brittle chicken bones, and she fell to the ground, didn’t even try to get back up. A guard pulled her by the scruff of the neck out the door and back down the corridor.
The other girl remained still, but cowered after another guard whipped the back of her shins with a switch he had tucked in his belt.
‘She moved,’ he said. ‘Get her out of here.’
The guard walked past me with the girl’s head under his arm, his belly spilling over his belt. She had one eye and yelped like a puppy when his boot hit her, thump after thump back down the corridor.
My back straightened when I realized it was just me and two guards left. I took shallow breaths and looked at a paint-chipped dimple in the wall. Be strong. The last of the heavy guards leaned in, got a finger’s length away from my right eye and stared, the tang of cooked apples and cabbage wafting from his nose. ‘Mmm.’ He took my wrist and examined the skin where it was rubbed raw from the table’s fleeced straps, and grey with peeling dead skin. ‘This one should work.’
I broke my gaze and looked at him dead in the eye. ‘What, no whip?’ I said. ‘You can do better than that.’
Fire burned in his eyes, and he swung his arm back, the power of his muscles behind a flat hand ready to hit me, but the other guard stopped him, grabbing his arm mid-swing. ‘Isn’t that why we chose her?’ he said. ‘Only the strongest survive the Nazi Clock.’
My stomach sank with the words Nazi Clock—the machine Claudia tried to destroy all those years ago, the night she asked me to deliver that key. I had spent days on the table, not knowing its real name or why I felt its punch more than anyone else. I asked once. The nurse told me it was because they liked the way I twitched.