Once home, I tried to find my first job as a doctor, but even though I’d graduated second in my class, practices were reluctant to hire a woman doctor. It seemed the Party rhetoric about a woman’s rightful place being at home raising children had taken root and many patients requested a male physician. Since, as a female university student, I’d been required to take needlework classes, I took in sewing work for extra money.
I finally found a part-time post at the Skin Clinic of Düsseldorf, which paid a small fee for each patient I treated. It was a dull job, the highlight of most days lancing a boil. Would I forget the few surgical techniques I’d learned in medical school? A surgeon must operate consistently to stay proficient.
Our economy had improved markedly by then, which only reduced the number of patients seeking skin treatment. Even dishpan hands, once the bread and butter of dermatology, were not a problem for most German housewives anymore. Polish laborers provided by the Reich, imported from the east, took care of the scullery work.
As a result, my earnings soon dropped to almost nothing. Father’s condition went from serious to critical, and Mutti had to stay home with him. I barely sustained all three of us. In no time I became the only starving doctor in Düsseldorf, so I continued to work part time at Onkel Heinz’s butcher shop.
After the stillness of the Camp Blossom woods and the quiet clinic, the bustle of the crowds coming to the shop for their meat, the anxious Hausfrauen in their ironed housedresses jostling to the counter, like a polite herd of cattle themselves, was a welcome variation. There I could escape my troubles and just tear great sheets of white paper from the roll and practice surgical knots as I wrapped packages in striped twine.
I came to work as usual one Sunday, when the shop was closed to the public. That was the day Heinz had me work there alone, so no one could see what I made for him.
His special project.
“Hurry up,” Heinz said.
He pressed himself against the butcher-block table, which sagged from the blows of his cleaver and his father’s before him. His bulge was plain even under his butcher’s apron, which was stiff with dried calf’s blood. How did I get myself in such a fix? Years of being too afraid to say anything; that is how.
Heinz watched as I stood at the worktable and chose the tautest lamb intestine. The waiting was the best and worst part for Heinz. I turned the tissue inside out, macerated it in bleach, and removed the mucous membrane, careful to leave the peritoneal and muscular coats. Onkel Heinz urged me on, but I took my time, since any tear or pinprick could spell disaster.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I said. It was best to stall, for once I finished, the worst part came, and the whole process began again.
Bad thoughts stung me as I worked. Why wasn’t I home researching new jobs? It was my own fault I was stuck there, trapped by Heinz, fearing he would reveal our secret. I should have told on him years before, but Tante Ilsa would never have paid for my schooling if she’d known. What would Mutti say? I could never tell her, of course. Even sick as he was, Father would murder Onkel Heinz if he knew. This was the price I paid for my education. Heinz said I’d brought it on myself, a young woman alone there with him.
Heinz moved next to me and lifted my skirt. I felt the familiar creep of his calloused fingers onto my thigh.
“Why does it take you so long?” Heinz asked. I smelled that sweet wine he liked on his breath.
I pushed his hand away. “Things take time.”
Heinz was not exactly the cream of the master race. With an IQ somewhere between borderline deficient and mildly retarded, he was easily put off by any excuse more than two words long. I patted the delicate tissue dry, measured, and cut. Heinz was red in the face by the time I rolled it down, smooth and clear as a silk stocking.
I didn’t have to be told to go to the meat locker with the tin bucket of lard. There was a curious comfort in the sameness of it. I pulled the string attached to the bare bulb to illuminate the space and braced myself against the cold wooden shelf behind me. Even with the flour sack across my face, I knew what was coming. The sweet flour smell cut his odor of beef blood, cigars, and bleach. Don’t cry. Crying only angered Heinz and made it take longer. He inched my handiwork over himself, dipped one paw into the lard, ran it down the membrane, and began.
I reviewed the bones of the hand.
One: the scaphoid bone, derived from the Greek skaphos, which means boat.
Folds of fat hung from Heinz’s abdomen like a hairy apron and flapped against me with each thrust. With his irregular breathing coming faster, it would not be long.
Two: the lunate bone, shaped like a crescent moon.
I had long ago stopped wishing for a sudden heart attack. Years of fatty roasts must have provided him with arterial plaque buildup two fingers thick, but he managed to stay alive nonetheless.
Three: the triquetrum bone. Four: the round pisiform bone, named for the Latin for pea.
Heinz could not contain himself and began his usual moaning and so on, his breath a cold fog on my neck. His hands shook as he gripped the shelf, his thick butcher’s wrists supporting his weight.
Without warning, the refrigerator door opened, and the flour sack slipped from my face. Ilsa stood in the doorway, holding the door open with one hand, a jar of marmalade in the other. She must have heard Heinz groaning like a stuck pig.
“Shut that door, woman,” Heinz said, pants puddled at his ankles, face purple.
Was that disgust on her face or just weariness? She placed the marmalade on the refrigerator shelf, turned, and left.
The locker door chunked shut behind her, and Heinz went back about his work.
—
ONE SLOW DAY AT the skin clinic, I sat at my desk after finishing with my last patient, a rotund four-year-old thumb-sucker. I’d sent his mother home with some antiseptic cream for a rash. How would I make a living doing this? I was much better suited to the tranquility of a university position, but a teacher’s salary would not support my family much better.
I picked up The Journal of Medicine and noticed a classified ad for a doctor needed at a reeducation camp for women, 90 km north of Berlin, near the resort town of Fürstenberg on Lake Schwedt. There were many such camps at the time, mostly for the work-shy and minor criminals. The idea of a change of scenery was appealing. A resort town? I would miss Mutti but wouldn’t miss Heinz.
The only other thing I knew about the camp was that Fritz Fischer, my former medical school classmate, worked there, but it had a pleasant-sounding name.
Ravensbrück.
DECEMBER 1939
Christmas Eve day, Paul and I made it over to the Fifth Avenue Skating Pond in Central Park. I loved to skate, having learned on Bird Pond near our house in Connecticut, but rarely practiced, since I avoided most activities that made me look taller than necessary. Plus, I’d never had anyone to skate with before. Betty would have rather swallowed live bees than be seen on skates. I vowed to take full advantage of Paul’s time in New York.
It was perfect skating weather that day, clear and sharp with a stiff wind, which overnight had made the ice smooth as the finish on a billiard ball. As a result, the flag atop Belvedere Castle was up, the red sphere on a white field every skater coveted. Word that the ice was ready passed from doorman to doorman along Fifth Avenue, and the pond became thick with skaters as a result.
The first tier of skaters was already there when Paul and I arrived. The men, near professionals, performed their genuflections and whirligig spins, icicles on their beards and noses. Then the ladies arrived, two or three at a time, their heavy coats like sails blowing them across the ice. With a little practice, Paul proved to be a serviceable skater, and arms linked, we glided throughout the network of adjoining ponds. My old self never would have skated in such a public place, but I tackled the ice with vigor, and we soon found a nice rhythm together. Suddenly I felt like trying every sort of new thing.