“Make sure the faces stay covered, Doctor,” Dr. Gebhardt said. “Just a precaution for anonymity. And be aggressive. Jump right in. No need for gentle tissue handling.”
One after the next, Gerda wheeled the patients in, towels across their faces.
We worked well into the evening. I was careful not to rush the closing, crafting my square knot sutures, spiky and black, like tracks of barbed wire guarding each incision.
“I don’t compliment often, Dr. Oberheuser, but you have a gift for surgery that cannot be taught. All you need is practice.”
Such praise!
We finished the night with a few sterilizations, a new treatment ordered by Himmler himself. I walked back to my room through the quiet camp and slept soundly thanks to my sleep aid of choice, Luminal, waking only once, to the sounds of Binz and her boyfriend Edmund making love in the bathtub.
—
I TOOK MY TIME getting dressed the next morning, knowing the nurses would record patient vitals and Halina would handle the Revier for me, but when I arrived there, things were chaotic. I found a new camp staff nurse sitting in for Halina, and the line of those awaiting medical attention was out the door.
“Madame Doctor, we have run out of paper bandages,” the nurse said, as she shook a thermometer.
“Where is Halina?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Madame Doctor. Wardress Binz told me to sit here.”
I went to the recovery room to check on my patients from the previous day, and the smell there was terrible. I knew that meant the cultures were doing their jobs, but the charts were untouched, no vitals recorded. One of the patients was already out of bed, hopping on one foot, visiting with the other patients.
“Please, we need water,” she said. “And more bedpans.”
I left the room and found Gerda in the hallway enjoying a cigarette.
“Keep them in bed,” I said. “Movement prevents the infection from taking root.”
I locked the door and went to locate Binz. After trudging about half the camp, I found her at the Angora rabbit pens, a vast complex of cages heated and kept spotless by the Bible girls. She and one of her subordinates were cooing over a baby rabbit, a white ball of fluff with ears like feather dusters.
“What is going on in the Revier?” I asked.
The other Aufseherin slid the rabbit back in the cage and beat a hasty retreat.
“You come out here without a word of hello?” Binz said. “Someone had to take charge in there.”
“You have no right—”
“It could not be helped,” Binz said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Make some sense, Binz.”
“You don’t know?”
It was all I could do not to shout at her. “Where is Halina?”
“Maybe we should talk about this elsewhere.”
“What have you done, Binz?”
“For God’s sake, don’t cry. You don’t want my girls seeing you emotional. I warned you about the Poles, didn’t I? You have no one to blame but yourself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, that makes two of us. Suhren couldn’t believe what that Pole of yours was up to. Let’s just say you’ll be needing a new assistant.”
1942
“All the way to the back, and face the front,” said our new elevator operator, Estella.
In her orthopedic loafers and nylon knee-high stockings, Estella was a far cry from Junior Rockefeller’s ideal elevator attendant. Since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous year, America had finally entered the war, causing young men of all walks of life to enlist, including our elevator boy.
“Any word from Cuddy, Estella?”
“The U.S. Army does not send me updates, Miss Ferriday. Seems you’ve got big problems in France right now. That’s what Pia says.”
Estella was right. Once Germany invaded France’s so-called free zone, in November 1942, all of Vichy France had become a puppet state. The French transit camps began sending transports to a complex network of concentration camps throughout Poland and Germany. I was on my third box of red pins.
“That’s what Pia says?”
For someone who handled secure information, Pia was playing a bit fast and loose with it.
Once in the reception area, I took the long way back to my office to avoid Pia’s desk, but she sensed movement, like a black mamba.
“Roger wants you, Caroline.”
“Fine,” I said, doubling back. “By the way, Pia…must you share our business with Estella? This is supposed to be secure information—”
“When I want your opinion, I will ask for it,” Pia said, bringing to mind a sign on the baboon cage at the Paris zoo: CET ANIMAL EN CAS D’ATTAQUE VA SE DEFENDER. This animal, if attacked, will defend itself.
I hurried to Roger’s office and stopped short, for it looked as if a squall had blown every book and paper in it about. Below his window on the Rockefeller Ice Rink, a line of skaters followed a scrawny Santa on skates. He stopped short, and they fell like dominoes.
“We have to double our orphan-aid boxes, Roger. I got the new numbers. Over two hundred thousand French children parentless. Hundreds of them with parents lost to the underground.”
“We need a lot of things, Caroline, but Pearl Harbor changed everything.”
“I can use some personal funds—”
“You know the rules. Can you close the door?” he said in a voice that could only be described as tremulous.
“What is it?” I braced myself against the cool marble of Roger’s fireplace. Please, not Paul.
“A few things. Do you have much information on Drancy?”
“Six files full.”
Drancy, a former housing complex on the outskirts of Paris, had become a clearinghouse of sorts for prisoners from all five French subcamps on their way out of the country. From the few reports I’d read, it was a hellish place, a waiting room for deportation. It was under the control of the French police, but supervised by the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs.
“Why, Roger? What did you find?”
Could Paul be in such a place? True, Rena was Jewish, but did that put him at risk? She was a French citizen after all, but even in the supposedly free Vichy zone, anti-Semitism had become the law of the new state, and foreign Jews were rounded up. The spirit of freethinking France had seemed to disappear overnight.
“Roger, just tell me. Did you find him?”
“Several transports have left with French prisoners, to camps all over Hitler’s real estate.”
“Paul?”
Roger nodded.
“Oh no, Roger.”
“A group of French men was taken to Natzweiler-Struthof, Caroline. There is good evidence to suggest Paul may be among them.”
I pulled a chair from the conference table and sat. The dampness from my palms left two silver handprints on the polished wood and then disappeared. Natzweiler.
It was terrible news to be sure, but oddly hopeful, for at least he was alive.
“How can you be sure?”
“There were only a few men in Paul’s transport processed at Drancy, and they all went to Natzweiler.”
“In the Vosges Mountains?”
Natzweiler-Struthof was the only permanent Nazi concentration camp in France, located fifty kilometers southwest of Strasbourg. My mind ran ahead to forced labor and corporal punishment.
Roger nodded. “Near a little town my grandparents used to visit. Quaint but isolated.” He tossed a manila packet on the table. I sifted through the documents, scanning for anything about Paul’s captors.
From the Royal Air Force reconnaissance photo, it appeared to be a small camp, only twenty rows of barracks and four other buildings, all wedged into a walled area surrounded by thick, snow-covered forest. So much snow. Was Paul freezing to death while I sat in a warm office? I scanned the photo, looking hard at the groups of prisoners gathered outside, trying to spot Paul among them.
“Thank you, Roger. I’ll have Pia run a search on it.”
“No more searches, Caroline. Washington has officially broken off diplomatic relations with France.” Roger pawed through the mess of papers on his desk.
“How can that be? You have to call—”
“Call whom, Caroline? The embassy in Paris is no more. And this office is officially closed. Just heard. I’ve been ordered to destroy anything of consequence.”
“What do we do?” I asked.