Leeway Cottage (43 page)

Nina is outside the gates. Bright lights shine on the frozen earth around them. A men's work crew from one of the satellite camps is hauling a cart, loaded high with sand, through the rutted and frozen mud. One of the men wears a woman's overcoat, with a pinched waist and padded shoulders. The men don't even look in her direction.

Nina has worked a whole day in the spinning shop, and now she is apparently to work a night shift, too? The workers on night shift suffer even more than the rest, as they have to get what sleep they can in the noisy barracks during the day, while the life and death of the camp goes on around them.

They are approaching a fence two meters high around the new structures, which are just over the wall from the undressing barracks where her own clothes were taken away from her. Above the fence she can see a smokestack; this is the building they have been smelling for many weeks. The young overseer opens a door in the wall and follows Nina through.

Here is a squat concrete block with a tall smokestack belching greasy smoke with a rotten sweetish odor. Beside it is an even newer building. In fact,it is not entirely finished:it lacks a necessary step up to reach the door. A block of loose bricks must be used for now. Like the other,this new building has no windows,just a door and a vent pipe on the roof.

The overseer points to this door,and orders Nina to go in.

She is in a room lit from above by a single bulb. The room is crowded with women, hollowed out and gaunt,who turn to stare at her. Their eyes are avid. Who is she? Has she come to join their fate, or to make it worse in some way? Nina doesn't know the answer. She feels like vomiting.

They have all been brought here under cover of darkness. Is this a deportation station? Are they to be marched off to another camp? Lately women have been disappearing, officially to a new “rest camp” in the north called Mittwerda. But the people who go there are the ones who are too weak to work but too strong to die, and no news has ever come back from any of them.

This room smells of urine and shit and sweat and vomit,all of which the women have brought in on their clothes. The overseer orders a group of them to move aside, and when they do, Nina sees that behind them, there are children.

Three boys and five girls. It is hard to guess their ages, as they are starving, and thus small, with big peony heads on thin neck stalks. They look up at her, or don't bother. Two girls seem to be sisters; the others are palpably alone, although they are bunched together.

“You are to help with the children,” says the guard in German. “Keep them calm, get them ready for their journey, as you did in Denmark.” She goes out,locking the door behind her.

Nina and the other women look at each other. Yes, all right, she will help with the children. But these other prisoners could help, too. She believes she can see that they want to—it makes you feel less subhuman if you care for a child, or in some way comfort somebody else.

Nina goes to the children and kneels down to them. The two older girls look at each other. Nina reaches out to a small boy, but he doesn't know her. He cringes.

The outer door opens,and more women, a half dozen, are marched in by someone who closes the door and locks it behind them. One of the new women stares at the children, puts her hand to her mouth, and begins to weep. She stretches her hand toward one of the girls. They shrink from her. The woman is deranged. The outdoor lock tumbles and chucks again and a guard comes in.

“All you women, take off your clothes.”

This is it. This is the way it ends. Nina thinks of her mother—what will she say, when she learns how it was for her? Will she ever learn? Or will all trace of her disappear in oily smoke? She reaches for the buttons on her dress.

“Not you, moron,” says the guard to her. All the women's heads turn to Nina. Not her? Why not her?

Now all the women save Nina are standing naked, their last belongings on the floor in piles. Some seem hairless because they are old and their hair is sparse and white. Some have swollen bellies and breasts that hang like emptied sacks and stick arms and legs like an insect's. There is a Rabbit among them, Nina sees now. She hasn't seen one for months. They are Polish Resistance fighters on whom the doctors did medical experiments here in the first years of the war,transplanting bones,rubbing dirt and gangrene into gunshot wounds (to test new drugs under “battlefield conditions”), or cutting muscles and shattering bones with hammers (a regeneration study).When the experiments ended, the ones left alive were returned to the barracks,but known as Night and Fog prisoners;it was understood that they could give evidence in any war trial, and thus must disappear before they left Ravensbrück alive. When the Germans began killing them this winter, they fled their barracks and disappeared into hiding places all over the camp. Some had even been sheltered by the miserable inhabitants of the tent. This woman, whose face must once have been quite beautiful, is missing a foot and most of her shin, and has a crippled arm besides. She is unable to stand by herself but the guard allows another woman to brace her up. Most of them stand still and silent. A few look at Nina as if to say Do something! Help us!

An interior door opens, revealing another room beyond the one where they stand. From her corner, Nina can see only the light from inside it and a glimpse of blank wall. A guard and a prison senior, a man, come into the room. The guard orders the women to go through the door, and one by one, they go. The Rabbit,who had survived so much, goes in last,with her human crutch. The door is shut behind them, and locked from outside. The men go out and Nina is alone with the children when the screams and pleas begin from inside the room.

It doesn't take long. By the time there is silence, the children have drawn close to each other and several are crying quietly, as Nina is herself, though she doesn't know it. The little boy who first shrank from her lets Nina take him into her lap.

Time ticks on. The ticking sound is in Nina's imagination;somewhere in the world there are still clocks. Somewhere in the world free people know what time it is. Somewhere there is a world where no one knows this is happening.

When the outside door opens again, the guard and the trusty come back in. Their skin is pinched and colored from the cold outside. The trusty has a gas mask on his chest,dangling from the strap around his neck.

“Make them take their clothes off,” says the guard to Nina.

It's not exactly that she didn't know this was coming. It's more that she's slowed down the ticking of the absent clocks so that the moment wouldn't arrive. Tick.

She turns to the children and says to them gently, in Danish, “Take off your clothes,now, little ones.”

They stare at her. No one moves.

She tries again in German, then French. At last, the twin girls let go of each other's hands and untie the belts around their thin dresses. Nina nods and praises them, knowing she is betraying them utterly. She turns to the others and says, “Good. See?,” and the others look. Two more who understand begin to undress. The rest are too young, too stunned; they stand like dead dolls.

Nina takes off the shoes of the little boy she is holding. He looks up at her. Does he have any memory of loving hands doing this,before his evening bath? She has no idea. He would have been born in wartime; perhaps he's never known the animal pleasure of warm soapy water after a good supper, before lullabies and bed.

The little boy's underpants are a dirty gray rag. The guard indicates she can leave those on him. Of what use to the Reich are torn and shitty baby underpants?

The strangest thing about this room now is the quiet. Nobody speaks, nobody weeps. The children stand like little naked wraiths. When the last kerchief and shoe are removed, the guard says, “Good. Line them up over here.” Nina somehow herds the children toward the interior door,where they move instinctively into a line; they have already been in so many. The little boy in Nina's arms doesn't move, however;he won't or can't stand on his own, so she carries him and stands in the line with him in her arms. The guard opens the door before them. Nina can see most of the room beyond;a blank concrete square, empty. There's one lightbulb burning inside. The guard orders the line to move forward and Nina repeats him in French. The two oldest girls walk forward, and the rest follow. Nina thinks,Now we die.

When she reaches the door, the guard takes the boy from her arms and carries him into the room. He sets him down with surprising gentleness. Then he comes back out and pulls the door closed. The small faces of the figures huddled in the middle of the floor stare out at her until the door cuts the link between them. Maybe I'm already dead, Nina thinks.

There are only a few puzzled yips from inside this time. Nina stands with the guard, waiting for silence. Then silence is there, and they stand waiting some more. Nina wonders if it's crazy that all she can think of is a clock ticking somewhere. The clock on the kitchen wall at home. Is it ticking?

The guard says a word, and goes to the outside door, indicating she should follow. Nina notices she is fully dressed, wearing her coat, her kerchief, everything, as she was in the bunk a million years ago, before she was called. You aren't allowed to wear coats or extra stockings to bed, but until bed, in this winter cold, they wear all they've got,all the time. The guard leads her outside, back into the rotten smoke smell, and takes her around to the back of the building. They have to pick their way around a ladder leaning on the roof. Only years later, surrounded by peacetime pleasures, will Nina remember that ladder and think, Oh. Of course…that's how they got the poison gas in, canisters, pellets, down the flue. She'd been wondering how it was done.

At the door in the back, they stand and wait. The winter wind ruffles Nina's hair; there are big crows, maybe ravens, coming and going over the high brick walls of the camp.

The trusty reappears, wearing the goggles and snout of the gas mask on top of his head. He puts the mask on his face, transforming himself into something like a nightmare pig. He opens the door,and Nina is looking into the room the children disappeared into. No one inside is standing. The trusty goes in. In a moment he is back, carrying Nina's boy. The guard orders her forward; what, is she asleep? The trusty holds out the body and her response is instinctive;she takes it. You cannot drop a child.

The boy is limp, his body cooling. His eyes are open and there are tears on the lashes. He has died crying. The guard leads her away while the trusty starts carrying the bigger bodies out and dumping them into a cart like the ones she saw being used to haul sand. He leads her into the crematorium building, right up to the open furnace door,and she throws her boy in. Then she is taken back to the gas chamber building where more children are waiting for her care.

 

Nina does this job for two weeks. Ulla has gotten sick, probably with pneumonia. Nina doesn't really care. Or if she cares,the caring seems to be outside her, on the moon, somewhere she can know about with her brain but not begin to feel. She sleeps as she can during the day, when Søsti and the others are at work. At night she goes to her job carrying children to their deaths. Ulla dies. The next day a white bus with the big red cross arrives,with packages for the Danish prisoners. When Nina's is handed to her (they have to wake her up for this), she sees the handwriting of a person in Copenhagen who has packed this box for her,and written her name on it,and then at the end of the day walked through the familiar streets,or ridden a bus,or a bicycle, home to a Danish supper. She looks around for Zsuzsa to share her package with, but Zsuzsa is off somewhere.

That night, of course, when her children are brought in to her, Zsuzsa is among them. She is so relieved to see Nina. She says, “Water, please, Nina,” in Danish. “Later,” says Nina. When she tells the children in Danish to take off their clothes,Zsuzsa understands and obeys. Her small prisoner doll in its striped uniform is tucked in her belt inside her clothes. She gives it to Nina to hold for her when their little line is ordered forward into the inside room.

Nina lies in a sort of altered state most of the next day on their foul-smelling mattress, a sack stuffed with straw, shocked to realize that she is a human being, with a name, who is remembered at home. She sleeps for an hour or two in the afternoon, finally at peace, and after supper,when the overseer comes for her, she says that she will not have anything more to do with the children. She expects to be killed at once.

She is sent instead into the sewing factory for the night shift. She is much weaker than she was when she arrived, and she doesn't learn the work very fast. She never sees Søsti anymore except for minutes at roll calls. She has lost her camp family. She knows what will happen next. She takes to carrying a small bar of soap from her Red Cross package around in her pocket.

One night,a woman comes into the sewing shop as Nina's shift is beginning. She is a prisoner, but her job is like the job of hall monitor children prized at school, the person who keeps the others in line and quiet, as they pass from classroom to assemblies or to music or art studios. This woman has a list. She gives it to the foreman of the floor and he calls out the numbers. Some fifteen women lay down their tools. Nina is among them.

They are lined up. They are marched downstairs. They are walked outside into the night air. The weather is mild and there are puffs of cloud in the starry night. The trusty woman walks up and down their line, waiting for a guard to escort the women to the building outside the gates. Nina catches her eye.

“I have soap,” she says to her in French.

The woman looks up and down the street between the barracks. No one is near.

“Show me.”

Nina slips the soap out of her pocket and cups it in her palm. Real soap is incredibly rare here.

“Donnez-le-moi,” says the woman, and Nina slips it into her hand. The woman pockets it and jerks her head. Get out of here. Nina steps out of line and walks quickly back into the factory and up the stairs. The factory foreman gives her a look of surprise as she comes back, but does nothing further. Nina sits back down to her work.