Nurse Gerda pulled a gurney from the hallway to Luiza’s bed.
“She just needs more medicine,” I said. “Please.”
Dr. Oberheuser put one finger to her lips, signaling for me to be still.
“Please let me keep her.”
Together, two nurses lifted Luiza onto the gurney.
I reached out to the doctor. “We’ll be quiet. I promise.”
Dr. Oberheuser came to my bed and rested her hand on my arm. “You mustn’t wake the other girls.”
“Where is my mother?” I said. “Halina Kuzmerick.”
Dr. Oberheuser froze there next to me and slowly pulled her hand away, her face suddenly blank of expression.
“I need to speak with her,” I said.
The doctor stepped back. “Your friend will be fine. Don’t worry. We are just moving her.”
I reached for the doctor’s jacket lapel, but my plaster weighed me down. Nurse Gerda jabbed a needle into my thigh.
“Tell my mother I need her,” I said.
The room grew blurry. Where had they taken Luiza? I tried to stay awake. Was that her crying in the other room?
—
I THOUGHT I’D GO insane after that. Those of us in casts just lay in the same spot for days listening to classical music played over and over again somewhere in the Revier. Where was my mother? Had she helped Luiza? We’d lost all track of time, but after what seemed like a few months, Zuzanna had improved to the point where she could sit up. She pleaded with Dr. Oberheuser to remove or change our plasters, but the doctor ignored us and went about her work, most days in a foul mood, banging her charts around and handling us roughly.
The bedsores were awful, but they were nothing compared to the deep pain of the incisions.
One day Anise Postel-Vinay, Zuzanna’s French friend whom she worked with at the booty piles, tossed a gift she’d organized from the SS kitchen through our high window. It all showered down around me on my bed. Two carrots and an apple. A square of cheese and a sugar cube. Such heavenly rain.
“That is for the Rabbits,” she said just loud enough for us to hear. She would go to the bunker for sure if she was caught.
I’d wrapped a note for Matka, written on paper Regina supplied me with, around my soup spoon and tossed it out the window.
“Can you get that to my mother?”
“I’ll try,” came Anise’s reply.
The spoon came flying back into the room, relieved of its letter, and safely landed on my bed.
“They’ve banned many of the prisoner-nurses from the Revier since the operations,” Anise said.
Such news! So that was why Matka could not come.
“Thank you, Anise,” I said. How wonderful to be able to tell Matka we missed her, even by means of a note.
After that, the name Rabbits stuck, and everyone at the camp called us this. Króliki in Polish. Medical guinea pigs. Lapins in French. Even Dr. Oberheuser called us her Versuchskaninchen. Experimental rabbits.
—
FOR WEEKS AFTER THAT, all of us with plaster casts had a terrible time using the bedpans, and the itching from my wound drove me crazy. When I woke from it at night, I lay there feverish, unable to get back to sleep, worrying about Luiza. What would I tell Pietrik? His parents? They would never recover after losing their Lou.
One day I pulled a long piece of bent wire from the metal frame of my bed and pushed it down inside my cast to scratch the incision.
That helped.
We composed a hymn to bread pudding. Regina read to us from her English book and told us stories about her young son, Freddie, who had just started to walk when she was arrested. I spent hours watching the bird Luiza and I had seen making its nest on the day we came to the Revier. It was charming until I realized the little wren was feathering her new home with fluffy bits of human hair, blond, auburn, and chestnut, woven in with her reeds.
One morning the nurses came to get the girls with plasters.
“It is time to remove your casts,” Nurse Gerda said, as if it were Christmas morning.
They took me first, and I was overjoyed we would finally be released. A nurse helped me onto a gurney, put a towel over my face, and took me to the operating room. I could hear several people in there, men and women, including Dr. Oberheuser and Nurse Gerda.
I lay on the gurney, gripping the sheet beneath me, glad I had a towel over my face. Did I even want to see my leg? I prayed I would be able to walk and dance again. Would Pietrik think me hideous? Maybe my leg wouldn’t be so bad once the cast was removed.
“I will do the honors,” a male voice said, as if he were opening a bottle of fancy champagne. Was that Dr. Gebhardt?
I felt cold metal run up the side of my leg as some sort of scissors cut through the cast. Air rushed to my skin as the two pieces of the plaster separated, and someone lifted off the top. The stench reached me under the towel. I sat up, the towel falling away, to see the doctors and nurses recoil. Nurse Gerda gasped.
“God in heaven,” Dr. Gebhardt said.
I tried to support myself on my elbows so I could see my leg, but Gerda stretched the towel back over my face to keep me down. I managed to push her away, sat up, and saw the horror my leg had become.
1942
We Germans were optimistic come the spring of 1942.
True, there were rumors that Hitler’s two-front war would be our downfall, but every morning at Ravensbrück we woke up to find more good news in Der Stürmer. According to the paper, our führer dominated Europe, or at least the parts of it we needed. The war would certainly be over by summer.
The end of the previous year had also brought success for our Japanese ally against the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and we celebrated their continued military advances that spring. A Japanese delegation had toured Ravensbrück and had been impressed with the neatness of the Bible girls’ quarters and the window boxes filled with flowers. It was Himmler who’d ordered those window boxes built, since at a show camp such as Ravensbrück, it was essential to make a good impression.
I had an entire scrapbook devoted to Germany’s successes in Russia. The capture of Kiev. The advance toward Moscow. True, we’d suffered our first major retreat there just miles from the Kremlin due to the early, cold winter and the fact that our soldiers were fighting in light uniforms. But when the Führer asked the German people to send warm clothes to the boys, we had all sent skiing boots, ear protectors, and half a million fur coats! The paper predicted that, with warmer weather coming, developments would progress rapidly in our favor.
My career at Ravensbrück was progressing rapidly as well. In the summer, Commandant Suhren replaced Koegel, and it was a welcome change. Where Koegel had been corpulent and long-winded, Suhren was trim and concise. He was a charming man who appreciated the hard work I had put into cleaning up the Revier, and we got on well from the start.
The commandant threw a welcome party for himself at his home, a snug beige stucco place with an A-line roof and forest-green shutters, high on the ridge overlooking the camp. I left my quarters at five minutes until seven that night and climbed the steep steps to the commandant’s residence.
From that perch, Suhren enjoyed a complete view of the whole camp and surrounding area, including Uckermark, the youth camp, and the Siemens subcamp a few kilometers in the distance. As night fell, I could see lines of H?ftlings returning from work to the main camp, and the powerful camp lights came on, illuminating the blocks below. The siren sounded and H?ftlings streamed out onto the courtyard for Appell.