I whispered in her ear, “We can fight this, Regina.”
She didn’t answer, just placed her spoon in her bowl and handed it to Zuzanna. “I’d like you to have this,” she said.
Zuzanna took the bowl, water shining in her eyes. Such a gift!
Regina stood. “Janina, would you fix my hair?”
Janina nodded and we followed Regina to the bunk room, bringing her full bowl with us, since left unattended it could be stolen in seconds.
“Do you know the first thing Spartans condemned to death did before their executions?” Regina asked. “Had their hair styled.”
Janina pulled Regina’s dirty kerchief off. Ordinarily, fixing one’s hair was a punishable offense. The rule was hair must be kept back, tied with a regulation kerchief, but Binz relaxed the rules when a prisoner was about to die. Regina’s hair had grown longish when she was recovering from her operation, thick and dark. Janina swept it back in the prettiest French twist. Someone from a top bunk handed down a hairpin she’d probably traded a bread ration for.
“Kasia, I want you to have my English phrase book,” Regina said. “Homework tonight is prepositions. And if you could get my Troilus and Cressida to my Freddie once all this is over…”
I nodded.
“I’m going to refuse the drink,” Regina said. We all knew a sedative drink was offered to those taken to the wall to make things easier for all. “Do you think I’ll be brave enough to shout ‘Long live Poland’?”
I held her hand. “It doesn’t matter—”
“It does, Kasia. You know they hate that.”
Prisoners faced death in different ways. Some cried and raged. Others grew quiet or prayed. Regina stood near her bunk and read us her favorite lines from Troilus and Cressida, rushing to fit in as much as possible before Binz arrived:
O brave Troilus! Look well upon him, niece: look you how his sword is bloodied, and his helm more hacked than Hector’s, and how he looks, and how he goes! O admirable youth! He ne’er saw three and twenty.
As Regina read, we pinched her cheeks to bring color to them. A girl who worked in the kitchen had some beet juice, and Janina smoothed a bit of it on Regina’s lips.
It wasn’t five minutes before Binz and her guards burst into the block. Regina leaned close to me, book clutched at her chest.
“Tell everyone this happened,” she said.
“Hand it over,” Binz said. She snatched the book. “What are you so worried about? The commandant himself has said you are to be freed.”
Was that possible? Surely it was another lie.
Janina untied the string from her own waist and cinched it around Regina’s, making her uniform look more like a real dress.
“Out, out,” Binz said, jabbing at Regina with her rubber stick.
Regina limped to the door, her leg not yet fully healed. At the door, she handed her reading glasses to Zuzanna and turned to smile at us. She’d taken on a radiance, a new sort of glow, and there was high color in her cheeks.
Binz tossed the book to an Aufseherin and pushed Regina out to the road. Not one prisoner who watched Regina go could keep from crying. How brave she was. The name Regina means “queen,” and this was fitting, for she looked regal that day. If not for her uneven way of walking, Regina could have been a movie star or fashion model, standing tall and proud on her way down Beauty Road.
With heavy hearts, Zuzanna and I shared Regina’s soup with Janina. How guilty we felt eating that, but she’d not meant for it to go to waste. We split the sweet little carrot, such a delicacy. I would get strong on Regina’s soup and live to tell the world about it all.
Soon Zuzanna and I reported to the Strickerei to knit, but we listened all afternoon, hoping not to hear the shots. Maybe Binz was right, and the girls were being released? Sent to a subcamp?
Later that day we heard a truck drive toward the lake and four muffled shots, one after the other, and we prayed silently to ourselves, for praying was a punishable offense. Later, Anise told me she’d heard from the girls working in the kitchen, which was adjacent to the shooting wall, that Binz had taken all four of the Rabbits there for execution. One had to be carried, her wounds not healed enough for her leg to support her.
“We wept,” they told her, “when all four of them cried, ‘Long live Poland!’ at the end.”
After that, I could no longer just be angry and not act. Would we be the next to go to the wall? Who would be left to tell the world? Even if it got me killed, I would launch my plan.
—
THAT SUNDAY, WHILE ZUZANNA slept trying to shake a nasty case of dysentery, I loosened the boards above an upper bunk and shimmied up into what we called the Annex, an attic of sorts, where girls went to smoke cigarettes sometimes. With my bad leg, just getting up into the Annex was an ordeal. There was little light up there to see, and my eyes adjusted to the dark as I assembled my tools for the secret mission.
1. A letter I’d written in German on a single page of camp stationery in which the first letter of each line spelled out “letter written in urine.”
2. The toothpick I’d paid half a bread ration for.
3. My water cup, into which I sent my warm secret ink.
My first tries left puddles on the page, but I soon grew better at writing between the lines and wrote of the operations and the names of the Rabbits who’d been executed. Regina first, then Romana Sekula, Irena Poborcówna, Henryka Dembowska. It felt good to tell Papa about the firing squads and the operations and ask him to send word to everyone he could. By then seventy of us had been operated on. It would take many more letters to get Papa all the names. I asked him to send back a spool of red thread as a signal he had received and understood our secret letter.
—
THE NEXT MORNING WE WOKE to a cold drizzle and lined up ten abreast at Appell, waiting for letter collection before we went to the Strickerei for work. I kept my letter dry under the sleeve of my jacket. As Marzenka came down my row to collect letters, I took it out and ran my finger over it. It was just a bit warped from where urine met paper. Would Marzenka see? The censors?
Marzenka stepped closer and stretched out her arm, her palm up. My hand shook as I placed the letter on her palm. A gasp caught in my throat as the letter slid off and fluttered toward the ground.
“Clumsy,” she said.
I lunged to catch it as it fell, but it ended up on its back in the mud.
“I’m not touching that,” Marzenka said.
I picked the letter up and wiped the mud off with the hem of my dress and handed it to her. “Please, Madame Blockova.”
She took it with two fingers and squinted one eye. “Why so worried about one little letter?” She held the letter up to the spotlight overhead.
I could barely breathe.
She handed it back. “You addressed it to the Lublin post office. Take it back—”
I kept my hands clasped behind me. “In care of Adalbert Kuzmerick. My father works there, Madame Blockova.”
“Oh,” Marzenka said. She slapped it onto her pile and moved on.
I wished that letter safe travels on its way. Be careful with it, Marzenka. It’s our only chance.
CHRISTMAS 1943
Come Christmas of 1943, morale among Ravensbrück staff hit a new low. Earlier that year German troops had fought hard at Stalingrad, despite being underclothed and underarmed, but in the end capitulated. We also faced increased Allied bombing in Berlin, but our troops retaliated in Great Britain, and we seized control of northern Italy and rescued Mussolini, who’d been arrested by the Italian military. So there were still things to celebrate.