Leeway Cottage (41 page)

Her legs ache and she is woozy with headache and hunger when the car stops and the door is opened again. A faint gray light is beginning to show in the night sky. Outside standing on the frosted ground there are SS men, and some female overseers,two with large dogs. Nina is among the first to reach the door, moving along in the pack which is like one sorrowing beast with hundreds of legs. At the edge of the car,the beast breaks apart as it goes over the ledge and drops to earth. As she shuffles forward, through the open door she can see pine trees in the dim morning. They are in the country. What country? Where are her father and mother,which direction? What would they feel if they knew where she was?

She drops to the ground and her frozen feet feel as if they have shattered on the impact. Trying not to stagger,she obeys the order,barked in German, that they fall into formation, five abreast.“Weiter! Rasch! Rasch! Los! Los!” From her rank in one of the first rows, she hungrily breathes in the scent of pine and the gray light after the long odiferous blackness. She sees Ulla come to the door of the car. Ulla looks old, her skin gray. This night has been hard on her. Ulla looks down at the drop and hesitates.“Rasch!” yells the overseer. She jumps, crumples, and disappears from view. The SS men shout at the women who move to help her up, but in a moment Nina sees Ulla standing on her own.

When all who can have left the car,two guards climb into it and throw out the corpses left behind. Nina watches them land on the frozen ground, their eyes staring, their arms and legs at painful angles.“Marsch!” yells the young woman with the biggest dog. Not all of the women understand German, so their progress is ragged at first. The women who are confused are shouted at to obey;the women who try to translate for them are shouted at to shut up. As they march away from the railway into the silent village, Nina looks back to see the name on the front of the station.
FÜRSTENBURG
says the sign. They are still in Germany.

 

As they march through the silent village, it is stunning, after all these months,to be so near to people sleeping on sheets in their own beds,people who will wake to the sounds of the bells from their own church, and the voices of their own loved ones. Who are they? If they knew we were out here, would they try to help us?

They soon leave the village behind and walk into the countryside. There is a hole in Nina's shoe and stones have gotten in. She is very cold. But the air smells of snow, and fir balsam; then there is a lake, lovely in the autumn morning. The walking is beginning to warm her. Nina watches the pale mauve colors of dawn on the slate gray water,and admires the little summer cottages standing shuttered here and there in the woods. And then, there are the walls of the camp. They are high and smooth, and there is barbed wire stretched along the tops. “Rasch!” bark the guards. Before them, the gates open. Their first view of Ravensbrück.

Inside, suddenly in a new world with only treetops visible beyond the walls,the women stand at the edge of what they will come to know as the Appelplatz, the roll-call place.

Roll call is in progress. Thousands of prisoners, all women, stand in ranks,ten abreast,eyes forward. Most wear striped prison dresses,but some wear oddly assorted street clothes. They are all ages and shapes and sizes. As the newcomers watch, the guards and trusties pace around the prisoners, counting, shouting, calling names. An old woman not far from them falls over and lies in the dirt. No one else moves. Very few eyes even shift to her when she falls. Nina gathers that the head counts are not right, that people are missing. For hours—how many, two?—the prisoners stand in silence, eyes forward, amid shouting and snarling, with trusties and guards going to the barracks and back, looking for the missing, until an order is given and the ranks break up into work details and are marched away.

Still, the newcomers stand where they are. Separated from them by a ribbon of barbed wire is a low building through whose windows they can see SS men and women eating, smoking, drinking coffee. Off to the left is the main “street” of the camp, flanked by rows of barracks. Across the Appelplatz Nina can see and smell what she correctly assumes to be the kitchen. It has been full daylight for many hours, and they have been told nothing, and given nothing to eat. The overseers come and go, and no one speaks to them, except to tell them to shut up and stand still. A woman near Nina with a hard cold snuffles and hawks and wipes her dripping nose with her hand. Finally a woman in SS uniform arrives and impatiently, as if they had kept her waiting, orders them to take off all their clothes.

SS men continue to come and go as the women obey. Soon Nina stands naked in the pale autumn sunlight with her belongings at her feet, angry and ashamed. For some of the older women it is even worse; they have not been naked in daylight before even closest family members since they were children. Let alone outdoors before strangers. She thinks of how her mother would feel. Plump maiden Faster Tofa, who plays the violin so gracefully.

Ulla stands in the row behind Nina, her bearing straight,her eyes still and focused far away. Her gray body hair is sparse, and her flesh hangs loose. She does not meet anyone's eyes.

An SS woman looks them over and orders them to move in single file into the building before them, leaving belongings behind. They will never see these again, except in rare cases on the backs of more privileged prisoners. A scrap of pencil Nina brought from Frøslev, and her birthday card from her friends there, and a warm pair of socks from her last Red Cross bundle, all disappear. They are on their way to the “showers.” Showers. There have been rumors about these showers. In they march, their feet bare against wet scummy floors. There are rows of showerheads along a concrete wall. They crowd underneath them as ordered, and wait for water or death.

The water is actually warm, and while the soap is harsh, made with little fat and mostly lye, it is a surprise and relief to wash at all. When the water stops,they are herded off, still wet,to be inspected for lice, while new arrivals take their places under the showers.

The lice inspectors are prisoners. They wear uniform striped dresses, aprons, kerchiefs, wooden shoes, and lavender triangles. Their prison numbers are in three digits; they have been here a long, long time. They are German Jehovah's Witnesses, who could have gone home years before if they would only hail the Führer. They will not, because their Jehovah forbids acknowledging false gods,but this doesn't mean they are gentle.

The lice hunters' hands are horny, with dirty fingernails. Methodically they pick through each woman's hair, on her head, in her armpits, at the crotch. If nits or bites are found, the woman's head and body hair is shaved. When this happens,Nina can't look in the direction of the weirdly bald creature, stripped and stripped, she is so filled with dread and horror. She waits for her turn, as already more dripping-wet naked women come from the showers. These women are speaking something Nina doesn't understand, Czech or Hungarian, and some have children with them. Naked young boys and girls,bug-eyed with fear.

Nina holds her mind blank as a big stale-smelling woman with a goiter on her neck paws through the hair on her head and body. The woman wheezes as she works, as if some sort of untuned stringed instrument is stuck in her throat. Nina can hardly believe her relief when the inspector woman pushes her to move, get out of the way. She is done, and she still has hair. She follows the others out the door to the roll-call grounds again, where they stand naked, waiting for the doctor.

Nina passes the time watching brightly lit clouds form into mansions or cotton balls or piles of white peonies in the sky. There must be a lot of wind up there in the crystal blue; the clouds move fast across the dome of heaven. She makes bets with herself as to how long it will take a particular cloud to hit the sun, and counts out the seconds until the eye of the world blinks out. Then the seconds until it blinks on again.

They don't own anything except their bodies at this juncture. There is not a rag, a towel, or a hairpin among them. Nina and Ulla and a woman from Fyn called Søsti huddle together. They are not allowed to talk. Time has turned into an alien substance, sluggish and punitive.

The SS doctor arrives at last with a detail of guards, and the women are ordered to walk, on parade, past these men who study their figures, their gaits. It is not, in this instance, an advantage to understand German. The coarseness and contempt that is felt for them as captives, and as women, is revolting.

Nina notices that a teenaged girl, not yet starved enough to have stopped her menses, is bleeding down her leg. She is pointlessly trying to screen her pubic area with her hands, but the blood smears between her thighs like bright paint. Two of the guards point and nudge each other. Nina can imagine the sticky feel of it. It's been months since she bled;how many? In Vestre prison, must have been the last time. She doesn't remember having to organize or wash rags in Horserød or Frøslev.

When they have all been stared at, walking, some with heads high, most with eyes on the packed dirt beneath their bare feet,they are once again lined up at a door to go in to the doctor. Nina thinks she has never been so cold.

The line is moving like a worm a hundred feet long, into a room and out the other side, with a brief pause by each worm segment at the examining table. Through the door as she waits her turn, Nina can see the doctor. He has curly red hair and thick glasses. His method is practiced, his manner bored. With each woman he lifts her arms,then her breasts,to be sure she isn't concealing deformities or contraband. He bends her over and searches her anal cavity. Then he orders her onto a bare table on her back. He stands between her raised knees and jams a cold steel speculum into her to hold her vagina open. He settles his ample buttocks on a stool and with angled mirrors on metal stalks,has a good look around inside her. There is a light stand on little black wheels in the corner, but it must be broken. Instead, for light, a guard standing beside the doctor holds an electric torch trained on the woman's most private parts. The only conversation is between these two, about where the doctor wants the torch aimed. It doesn't take long, but it's much more like a search and seizure than a medical exam. Most are weeping by the time they are done.

The doctor rarely shows any reaction to what he is looking at, or to the gasps of shock or pain or the tears coming from the other end of the body on the table. He makes no attempt to sterilize his instruments between uses. He just sticks them into woman after woman. Nina feels fear like nausea creeping on her as she moves toward him. Sweat is pricking her armpits. She tries to steel herself, tries not to look, tries to take herself mentally elsewhere. But when it is her turn and she feels those hard fingers in her rectum, followed by the legs roughly spread, and the cold and slimy metal pushing in, she is so horribly present and alive simultaneously to what it feels like and what it must look like, that she feels she will never again be completely human.

The doctor adds a fillip to her examination. When she gets off the table, he stands,too, and puts his moist hands up to her face. He curls her lips back with his thick fingers and examines her teeth. He says something to an SS man lounging nearby, and a note is made.

They are outside again. Nina can't help herself; she spits on the ground. She wants to do it again and again but a guard steps toward her,threatening. Now Ulla is beside Nina, and Søsti is coming out the door. A large cloud has blotted out the sun and the afternoon is colder than the morning. It's been more than twenty-four hours since they had anything to eat.

They are ordered into lines,for their final processing. On long tables before them are piles of civilian clothing. The Reich has run out of striped uniforms. One by one each woman is handed a dress, a coat, a pair of shoes, some underdrawers. There is no attempt to give them clothes that fit;if anything, the opposite is the order of the day. Slight skinny Nina gets a fat lady's summer dress of flowered georgette and a coat of navy poplin with the buttons missing in place of her own winter clothes. Ulla gets a dress with a tight bodice she can't possibly close. Søsti gets shoes she can only get her feet halfway into. The clothes all have big X's painted on the back, in case anyone thinks she can get away and melt into the surrounding country unnoticed. There are hundreds of dead lice in the seams of the coats. And their owners are…where?

They are given numbers in the high five digits,and one by one assigned to categories. The Danes are all Politicals but they get no red triangles to wear,as the Reich is out of those, too. At last,they march off to the admissions block where they will be quarantined.

The quarantine is hardest for those who have not come from other prisons. They are homesick and shocked, like houseplants stuck into freezing cold ground with no chance to harden off. Although they are healthier coming into the camps, they die much faster. They fail to heed warnings from more experienced prisoners;they don't yet believe they are here. A Jewish girl from Liguria who had been living aboveground, passing as Christian, has her coat stolen immediately. She has to stand in a thin dress in the winter morning at roll call with her head and arms bare and blue;roll call takes six hours that particular day as an unusual number who have died during the night fail to appear,and all are punished.

They are given typhoid shots from fat blunt needles. The doses are much too strong and Nina grows hot and ill from hers,but she is lucky. She has Ulla and Søsti to bring her food and water and to see she isn't robbed as she sleeps. The Italian girl is dead in four days. The Frenchwoman who shared her bed points this out to the Block senior so the body can be carried off to the funeral parlor crematorium in Fürstenburg and the rest of them won't be punished at roll call.

The Block senior is Polish. The Poles as a group are the intellectuals of the camp, the best linguists and best educated generally; so many Block seniors in the camp are Polish that all the seniors are known as Blockovas. This Blockova is in charge of teaching them the camp rules while they are in quarantine. How to make their beds, how to wear their kerchiefs, how to address superiors. She gives all instruction in German only. Some new arrivals don't know what's happening or why for weeks,if they live that long.