THEY RELEASED US FROM quarantine two weeks later, with only our uniform shift and blouse, enormous wooden clogs, a toothbrush, a thin jacket, gray bloomers, a tin bowl and spoon, and a piece of soap we were told had to last two months. Two months? Surely we’d be home by then!
Our new home, Block 32, was much larger than the quarantine block. Women, some in their uniform gray shirts and striped dresses, some naked from the shower, ran about dressing, squaring up their straw mattresses, and tucking in their blue and white checked sheets. There was a small washroom in the block with three showerheads and three long sinks, each filled by means of a spout. Women sat with no modesty atop a platform drilled with holes to send nature’s offerings to the putrid ground below.
The block smelled like a chicken coop, rotten beets, and five hundred unwashed feet. All of the girls in the block spoke Polish, and most wore the red triangle of political prisoners. If there was any good thing about the camp, it was that so many of the prisoners were Polish—almost half—most there, like us, for what the Nazis called political crimes. After Poles, the next largest group was German women arrested for violating one of Hitler’s many rules or for criminal activity such as murder or theft.
“Square your bed!” shouted Roza, the Blockova, a German woman with sleepy eyes. She was from Berlin and not much older than my mother. Later I learned she’d been arrested for sticking her tongue out at a German officer.
“Attend your mess kit!”
We quickly learned that survival at Ravensbrück revolved around one’s tin bowl, cup, and spoon and the ability to safeguard them. If one looked away for a moment, they might disappear, never to return. As a result we kept our kits tucked in the chests of our uniforms or, if one was lucky enough to acquire a piece of twine or string, made that into a belt and wore them strung on it at the waist.
Luiza and Matka chose a top bunk, what the prisoners called the coconut palms, since it was high up. It was very close to the ceiling, so they could barely sit up, and in the winter icicles hung from above it, but it was more private up there. Zuzanna and I slept just opposite.
I had to push down my jealousy at Luiza sleeping with my mother. I got Zuzanna, who shifted all night in her sleep, mumbling doctor talk. When she woke me up, I would spend the night fretting in the darkness, paralyzed with guilty thoughts. How could I have been so reckless to have gotten us all sent to this terrible place? To make things worse, the block was never quiet, always filled with the sounds of shrill voices of women tortured by nightmares or the itch of lice, night-shift workers returning home, sleepless women exchanging recipes, and calls for a basin for the sick who could not get to the washroom in time.
I did find moments to be alone with Matka, though. That night I crawled into the bunk with her before dinner.
“I am so sorry I got you here, Matka. If you hadn’t brought that sandwich, if I hadn’t—”
“Don’t think that way,” she said. “In here, you have to concentrate all you have on being smarter than the Germans. I’m glad I’m here with you girls. This will all be fine.” She kissed my forehead.
“But your ring—I hate them for taking it.”
“It’s just a thing, Kasia. Don’t waste your energy on the hate. That will kill you sure as anything. Focus on keeping your strength. You’re resourceful. Find a way to outsmart them.”
Blockova Roza strode in. She had a kind face but did not smile as she made announcements.
“Work call is at eight A.M. Those without work assignments, report to the labor office next to the block where you were processed. That is where you will pick up your badge and number.”
“She speaks only in German?” I whispered to Matka. “What about the girls who don’t understand?”
“Say a prayer of thanks for Herr Speck’s German class. It may save your life.”
She was right. I was lucky I spoke German, since all announcements were made in that language, no exceptions. The non-German speakers had a terrible disadvantage, since ignorance was no excuse for disregarding rules.
—
THE NEXT MORNING THE SIREN startled us awake. I’d just dozed off, dreaming about swimming with Pietrik in Lublin, when the lights in our block came on at 3:30 A.M. The worst part was that siren, a screech so loud and piercing it was as if it were from the bowels of hell. With this siren, Roza and her Stubova assistants came through the rows of beds. One Stubova banged on a tin pan, and one poked at sleepers with the leg of a stool, and Roza splashed ladles of water from a bucket onto sleeping women’s faces.
“Get up! Hurry! Everyone up!” they called.
This was a special kind of torture.
Matka, Zuzanna, Luiza, and I made our way to the dining hall, the long room next to our sleeping quarters, and squeezed onto a bench at the end. Breakfast was the same as it had been in quarantine, lukewarm yellowish soup that was more like turnip water and a small piece of bread that tasted like sawdust. The soup hit my stomach and almost came back up.
Roza read a list of new assignments.
Matka was assigned to the bookbindery, one of the highly sought-after inside positions. It was much harder to work a prisoner to death when she was sitting at a desk.
Luiza became an assistant to the Bible girls who processed Angora rabbit fur. The Angora rabbits lived at the far end of the camp in specially heated cages and were fed tender lettuce from the commandant’s greenhouse. Their fur was periodically shaved and sent to the tailor’s workshop, a massive complex of eight interconnected warehouses where prisoners assembled German army uniforms.
Zuzanna, who did not reveal she was a medical doctor, ended up sorting the booty piles—the mounds of Hitler’s stolen plunder that came by train.
I was assigned as an Available, a good and bad thing. Good since we lined up every day and, if not chosen to work, had that day to lie in the bunk. But bad since, if chosen, we were assigned some of the worst jobs, like latrine cleaner or road crew worker. Being assigned to the road crew and used like an animal to pull a heavy concrete roller could kill a person in one day.
—
OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS AT RAVENSBRüCK was especially bad, for many of us had been certain we’d be home by then. Matka, Zuzanna, Luiza, and I had only been there for three months, but it felt like three years. We had received a few letters from Papa by then. They were written in German, per regulations, and mostly struck through with black marker, leaving only a few words and his last line, Your loving Papa. We wrote letters too, on single-paged camp stationery, limited by the censors to writing about the weather and vague positive thoughts.
As the days grew shorter, Zuzanna warned us to keep our spirits up, for sadness was often a more potent killer than disease. Some just gave up, stopped eating, and died.
Christmas morning started with a pane of glass shattering in the cold. The air rushed in, waking us all. Did this devil wind prying us from our beds on Christ’s day mean bad things for us?