Leeway Cottage (42 page)

The Blockova tells them that if they are strong enough, they should volunteer for work outside the camp walls. It is physically grueling, but there is a chance there in the gardens or forests to dig a potato or gather mushrooms, and unlike those inside, you get a noon meal. This Blockova is reasonably kind, though not to the point of compromising the special deals she has organized to benefit her favorites and herself.

Quarantine is expected to last two or three weeks,but the sudden arrival of hundreds of Jewish women from the Budapest ghetto swamps the admissions block after a week and a half, and the Danes are moved out to a barracks that is now a mixture of cultures and languages, the most common being Ukrainian. The new Blockova is another Pole, a pharmacist in her old life. Here they sleep three to a “bunk,” really just a wooden platform, the platforms stacked three high. Ulla, Nina, and Søsti are assigned a bottom bunk, which they think is good luck; it means Ulla won't have to climb up and down, which is hard for her, as the cold and her fall from the freight car has aggravated an injury to her shoulder.

They are wrong about the luck, as they learn the second night, when a woman in the bunk above them suffers an explosive bout of the shits. It runs down over the edge of her bunk and onto the inside edge of theirs. Søsti yells as she finds it in her hair. In the bunk above, the sufferer weeps and apologizes (they infer from her tone, though they don't know her language) while her bunkmates shout angrily at Søsti. Most of the toilets in their barracks,of which there are only twelve for hundreds of women, are broken. Eventually the sufferer is led by her bunkmates outside to the “chicken roost,” a long row of seats braced above a pit,entirely exposed. The smell of shit and lime from these pits is one that will never entirely leave Nina's sense memory. It appears on the wind at unexpected times until she is an old lady.

The woman is still helplessly evacuating during roll call at five the next morning. Watery shit runs down her legs, into her shoes, and onto the ground. Women to whom this happens are called “Schmuckstücke,” piece of jewelry, as in “what a gem she is.” When they are finally released from roll call, about eight o'clock this particular morning, the Schmuckstücke is told to stay where she is,wet and stinking. They never see her again;she has been transferred to the diarrhea barracks, known inevitably as “the Shit Block,” where conditions are so vile as to be indescribable.

Ulla has learned that their Blockova teaches classics in the underground camp university. Ulla asks her,in Latin, to be allowed to move with Nina and Søsti to a top bunk.When they come back from work detail at the end of the day, it has been done.

They have acquired bowls by now, and wooden spoons. Ulla brought a bowl from quarantine and shared it with Nina. Søsti had to save half her bread ration to barter for a bowl from a woman who had two, as her bunkmate had recently died. Nina does the same, and on their first Sunday in the barracks, the only day of freedom now (work shifts now run eleven hours a day, six days a week),Ulla sews for them pouches in which they can keep their belongings always with them;their bowls and spoons hang from their waists.

They eat in their barracks. At 4
A
.
M
.,when the first siren sounds,panicky activity explodes from the quiet bunks. Women run to line up for the toilets. Others make the beds in the precise way ordered. The table seniors and their helpers go to the kitchen and carry the food back to be doled out by the room seniors. In the morning, it's “coffee” (a brown liquid the Blockova claims has sedative in it, probably bromide) and the day's bread ration. At 5
A
.
M
., the siren sounds for roll call. The morning roll call is shorter than the evening, often not even two hours long, as the SS wants the work details on the job as soon as possible.

Ulla and Nina are assigned to the textile factories,working yarn-spinning machines alongside mostly Soviet army women. Ulla is older and much less physically strong than most of the workers. One who works at Ulla's bench, a Slavic girl with big bones and most of her teeth missing, is struck by Ulla's pale blue eyes,with their yellow lights around the pupils. She tells Ulla whom she is missing, who it is in her life who has eyes like that, but they have no common language. Still, the girl protects Ulla;she and Nina know they could have drawn much worse work.Standing at the machines over ten hours a day is painful. Also the light is bad, and the air is filled with fibers that make their eyes and noses burn. But the SS men who oversee this shop are older and calmer than the ones in the sewing and fur shops, who stride up and down between the aisles of the machines yelling “Your quotas! Your quotas!” and punching women who fall behind. The workers who can keep the pace are paid half a reichsmark a day, which they can spend at the canteen for such luxuries as a paper of salt. Workers who miss their quotas have their pay docked, and the pay is in any case a tenth of what the work would have fetched outside the camps. Himmler,who set up the camp system, is getting rich. Lucky him. It may be true that there is sedative in the “coffee.” In any case, those who will survive this experience have the trick of narrowing their brain functions to a pinhole, as an alligator in winter goes for hours without breathing and drops her heart rate to almost stopped.

Søsti is in the furrier's factory, where the air smells all day of blood and tanning acid. Skilled furriers are sewing the skins of angora rabbits,raised in the camp for the purpose, into the lining of hats,and larger pieces of fur into winter coats for SS officers “in the east.” The “larger pieces of fur” is where Søsti's bench comes in. Fur coats,they are told, are turned in by patriotic Germans to aid the cause of the mighty Reich. But it is perfectly clear that in fact almost all of them have been stolen from Jews. The workers are watched as if they were deceitful rodents scavenging for nuts, as they unstitch the linings, sometimes silk and satin, often monogrammed, from these coats. Usually the coats have been stored in SS warehouses for who knows how long, and are full of fleas and lice. But sometimes there will be a handkerchief in a pocket, still smelling of lavender or cloves. Once the woman across from Søsti found a cough drop and managed to unwrap and eat it before she was seen. Once Søsti found a green suede glove. She held it to her nose and tears started in her eyes. The next thing she knew, a guard had clubbed her in the back of the head. He stood over her,yelling in German, as she got up from the floor and delivered the glove to him. (Why? What did the Reich need with one glove smelling of lily of the valley…?) The saddest was when they found bank- notes or jewelry sewn into the linings to pay for escape and a new life.

When the furs had been stripped of embellishments,they ripped out the seams of the garment. You had to work very fast, with your face close to the dust- and bug-filled pelts, to be sure to cut only the threads that held them together. Søsti hated it; she couldn't stop wondering what the owners were thinking when they first put on this coat or jacket of mink, of beaver, of fox fur or Persian lamb, feeling loved and warm and lucky, looking forward to a dinner party or a night at the opera. She was with them in the hopefulness of sewing valuables into secret pockets, picturing themselves at safe harbor in Cuba, Brazil, the United States. She cried at night and threatened to accept the offer made to her and Nina, to go to work in the whorehouses at Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen.

“You get your own room;you can sleep all day and work only two hours a night. And they let you go after six months,” she wept to Nina. This was in the hour before lights-out at 9
P
.
M
. Søsti lay with her head in Nina's lap, while Nina patiently picked out lice nits from her hair and crushed them with her fingernails.

“Liebchen,” says the Frenchwoman in the bunk below them, “if they let you go after six months,we'd all do it. They work you until you get syphilis or the clap, then they send you back here. Stop crying.”

In early November, hundreds of skeletal women arrive in Ravensbrück from Auschwitz, where the gas chambers have been closed as the Soviet army approached. The result was overcrowding. The governors of Auschwitz solve this problem by sending it to Ravensbrück. In the “slum” barracks,where the Danes are, there are suddenly four and five to some bunks, and the overflow women sleep on the floor. Even the elite barracks,the Polish and the Jehovah's Witness blocks, lose their day rooms; everyone eats her “coffee” or soup standing up. The hundreds for whom there is still no room are put into “Block 25.” Block 25 is a tent.

The tent had been set up as auxiliary admissions but by this last winter it is permanent housing for Jews, Gypsies, and the weakest from Auschwitz. There are no toilets or washing facilities except a ditch outside. There is little light. It is literally freezing inside, and the savage, starving women lie in their own shit in wet icy straw. There are no work assignments for them. The seniors of Block 25,who would ordinarily dole out the food to the inmates,are afraid to go inside, so they put the food through the flap, and those strong enough to get to it first,eat. The rest lie in their filth and starve to death. Practically all the Auschwitz women assigned to the tent will die there, and the screams and stink from inside are with everyone else day and night. Guards patrol the outside, to keep the tent dwellers in and the other prisoners out. When some of the Communists,the best-organized group in camp, manage to steal ten-gallon vats of watery soup and smuggle them into the tent, the women inside lunge,fighting, for the stockpots and overturn them all.

There is now a sickening greasy smoke in the air,coming from right outside the front walls of the camp. The crematoria in Fürstenburg cannot dispose of the bodies fast enough anymore, and the camp has built its own ovens. Nevertheless,in all the blocks,the dead pile up faster than they can be burned. They are stacked now in the washrooms overnight, and Søsti hears that in some of the blocks when the bodies are carted out in the morning, they bear marks showing people have tried to eat them.

Nina, Ulla, and Søsti are allowed to keep their bunk to themselves, because Ulla is a favorite of the Blockova. This means, too, that when the room senior dishes up their soup at night,she dips to the bottom of the pot,so they get bits of potato peel or other solids. But the degradation of conditions all over camp has created a new problem. There are more and more orphaned children. The children in the tent whose mothers die simply starve to death. But when children from the barracks lose their mothers,other women adopt them, hide them and feed them and share with them whatever they have. A week before Christmas, Ulla brings a small Hungarian girl home with her from evening roll call.

The Blockova doesn't like it. The room senior doesn't like it. The girl is small, she looks unhealthy, she may be Gypsy. The Frenchwoman in the bunk below vehemently doesn't like it and says things Ulla is glad the child can't understand. They think her name is Zsuzsa;anyway, that's what they call her. Now they sleep in the bunk with Søsti's and Nina's heads at one end, Ulla's and Zsuzsa's at the other. They teach the child Danish words for “please,” “thank you,” and “water.” When they are at work during the day, she stays in the block and plays very quietly with a doll someone has made for her out of straw.

Astonishingly, some women from the elite blocks get permission from the Head Overseer to put on a Christmas party for the camp children. (The Head Overseer is,after all, a woman, too.) They are allowed to build and paint a set for a puppet theater. There is a Christmas tree. A choir sings “O Tannenbaum,” and many in the audience, prisoners and guards, cry, thinking of home. The puppet theater falls flat—the younger children are frightened of the talking horses and sheep; the only animals they've ever seen are guard dogs. But the Christmas Man puts presents under all the children's pillows that night. Zsuzsa gets a tiny doll, a stick dressed in a striped prison uniform dress and a kerchief. It's more like a fetish than a doll, but it must remind Zsuzsa of her dead mother,for she is never without it after that.

On the second day of March, Nina is braiding Zsuzsa's hair in the hour before bed when an overseer appears and orders the Blockova to summon Fräulein Nina Moss. Ulla and Søsti reach to touch her,hold her back. After a stunned pause Nina climbs down from their bunk and goes to the overseer. She can feel her friends' eyes on her back as she walks away from them through the babble of bodies and voices on the bunks and floors. With the overseer,she disappears outside.

The overseer,a tall blond girl in a skirt,thick stockings,a warm black coat, and boots,marches Nina between the rows of barracks to the administration building. She is shown into a room, where an officer is waiting for her. He does not rise when she comes in. He has a sheaf of papers on his desk he pretends to study, while filling and lighting his pipe. Upside down, she can read her name on the folder.

“Miss Moss,” he says at last, in German. Nina bobs her head. “I am told you have been very modest about your war work.”

Nina says nothing. Adrenaline jolts her like a seizure.

“Others, though, have told us a good deal. We have found new work for you that will be familiar. We think you will be good at it.”

“Danke,” says Nina automatically.

“Oh, you are most welcome,” says the SS man. He is about forty, fleshy and quite handsome, with pink cheeks and blue eyes. “Overseer Bauer will show you the way.”

Nina is walking now under the low winter sky with the girl in the boots. Is she a draftee or a volunteer,this young woman? Was she taken from her parents' apartment or farm perhaps, and required to join the war effort so her family could eat? Or is she enjoying this?

The woman doesn't talk.They are going toward the gate to the outside of the camp, where one of the endless construction projects has been going on all month. What is it this time? Garages, kennels, new hutches for the rabbits? They can build kennels,but they can't build a barracks for the people in the tent.