He gathered his tool bag and settled his hat back on his head. Tears pricked at my eyes. Would he catch a chill in this weather? We’d been forgotten by everyone. Did he know he was our only ally? He walked by our bunk and tipped his hat to me. Please take care, I thought. You are our only friend.
I was happy Zuzanna slept through it all. One day of rest not having to stand in the sleet for hours as Binz and her guards counted us would help her recover. It wasn’t until Herr Fenstermacher was out the door and on his way that I saw what he’d left at the foot of our bunk.
The most beautiful pair of hand-knitted socks!
I reached for them and could not believe the softness. I stroked my cheek with them. They felt like Psina’s downy underfeathers. And the color! The palest blue, like an early summer sky. I slid them down under Zuzanna’s chin, between her clasped hands and her chest. A Christmas miracle.
No sooner had Herr Fenstermacher left than the door to the block opened and Marzenka trudged in, stomping the mud off her boots. How we envied her boots, since bare feet in oversized wooden clogs in the middle of winter is a torture unto itself.
Marzenka carried an armful of packages. My chest thumped at the sight of them. It was too much to ask for, a package for us on Christmas after waiting so long.
She walked about the block, called out names, and tossed packages and letters into some bunks. How strange, I thought, that we were allowed parcels, being political prisoners and all. But lucky for us, Commandant Suhren was practical. A prisoner’s family sending her food and clothing saved the camp money. It meant fewer funds were necessary to keep a worker alive.
By the time Marzenka made it to our bunk, she only held two more parcels.
Please let one be ours.
She slowed as she approached our bunk. “Merry Christmas,” she said with a rare crack of a smile. Even she had become sympathetic to the Rabbits.
Marzenka lobbed a parcel onto our straw mattress, and it landed with a thump. I sat up and snatched it. I was a little dizzy and held the box wrapped in brown paper for a few moments, letting it all sink in. A package. Little splotches of rain had spotted the brown paper, giving it an animal-skin look, and the rain smudged the ink of the return address, but it was from the Lublin Postal Center.
Papa.
Had he somehow cracked the code and ironed the letter? Should I wake Zuzanna so we could open it together? The package was already half-open, having been rifled through by the censors, so I went ahead and pulled off the brown paper. I was left with an old candy tin, cold to the touch. I popped off the lid, and the smell of stale chocolate came up to meet me. Oh, chocolate. I’d forgotten about chocolate. Even stale chocolate made my mouth water.
In the tin were three cloth-wrapped bundles. I unwrapped the first to reveal what was left of a poppy-seed cake. More than half! Ordinarily the censors would take a whole cake. Were they being generous since it was Christmas? I tasted a crumb and thanked God for creating the poppy flower, then wrapped it back up with haste, for I would save it for Zuzanna. Polish cake would be good medicine for her.
The next bundle I unwrapped was a tube of toothpaste. I almost laughed. Our toothbrushes were long gone, but how wonderful it was to see something so familiar from home. I twisted off the cap and breathed in the cool peppermint. I tucked it under our mattress. With proper bartering, such a treasure would trade for a week’s worth of extra bread.
The last bundle was small and wrapped in Matka’s little white kitchen towel, the one she’d cross-stitched with two kissing birds. Just seeing that sent me into choking sobs that delayed my progress, but I finally loosened the little bundle, hands shaking so hard I could barely untie the knot. Once the towel fell open and lay in my lap, all I could do was stare at the contents.
It was a spool of red thread.
“Joy” is an overused word, but that was what I felt there that day, knowing Papa had understood my secret letter. It was all I could do to keep from standing in the middle of the room and calling out with happiness. Instead, I kissed the little wooden spool and slipped it into my sleeping sister’s clasped hands.
That was the best Christmas in my life, for I knew we were no longer alone.
1944
“Vilmer Hartman is here to see you,” Nurse Marschall said with a knowing look. Why did she continue to enter my office without knocking?
I’d woken that morning in a foul mood and with a strange buzzing sound in my head. Maybe it was due to the fact that the camp was bursting at the seams. Ravensbrück had been built for seven thousand prisoners but by that summer held close to forty-five thousand. Maybe it was the constant air-raid sirens or the ominous war news. In early June word reached camp that the Americans had landed in France. Or maybe it was the fact that the camp was overrun with infectious prisoners, and every other week I had to cleanse the Revier completely of patients not fit for work and send them on black transports. Even after a few cuts to relieve the tension, I still couldn’t sleep.
To make it all worse, Suhren had made no headway in the case of the Rabbits. The blocks were so overcrowded and mismanaged it would be impossible to find them without a camp-wide lockdown. Gerda told me their friends exchanged numbers with them and hid them everywhere, even in the TB block.
I was in no mood to visit with old friends.
Vilmer Hartman, a psychologist I had known at medical school, wanted to tour Uckermark, a nearby former youth camp for girls, where Suhren sent prisoner overflow. I knew psychologists did the rounds of the camps checking the mental health of the camp staff—a waste of time when there were so many more important tasks. I hoped to take him to Uckermark, conduct his tour in five minutes or less, and be on my way without complications. I planned on an early evening and a cool tub, for we were in the middle of a heat wave. It was the hottest July on record.
I found Vilmer out in front of the administration building, waiting in the passenger side of a Wagen. I took the wheel, started the engine, and switched on the radio to discourage conversation.
Germany continues to be victorious. Allied supplies continue to dwindle as German troops continue Operation Watch on the Rhine. In other news—
Vilmer switched the radio off. “Victorious? Such lies. How can we delude ourselves? We’ve already lost the war. It was over back in Stalingrad.”
“So what brings you to camp, Vilmer? The last time I saw you was in biology class. You were having a hard time with a fetal pig.”
Vilmer smiled. “That class almost did me in.”
Vilmer was a good-looking man with a slight wave to his blond hair and a gentle way. He wore civilian clothes, I assumed to gain the trust of the patients he spoke with. His expensive-looking pair of cordovan brogues somehow stayed polished even through the dust of the camp.
“The medical doctor path is not for everyone,” I said.
“It certainly pays better,” Vilmer said. “But I’m happy being a psychologist.”
Once we reached Uckermark, I parked and Vilmer, a typical German gentleman, opened the Wagen door for me. We surveyed the three newly built blocks and the enormous canvas army tent set up on the platz, under which hundreds of H?ftlings stood and sat, still in their civilian clothes.
Vilmer had excellent manners, typical of a cultured German man, but was a dull sort. He’d asked me for a date once, but I’d been too busy to go.
“You publish so much, Vilmer. What a career you’ve made for yourself.”
I brushed the sleeve of my white coat, for black ashes had collected there.
“It is too warm for long sleeves today, isn’t it?” Vilmer said. “No need to dress formally for me.”
“Why are you here, Vilmer?”
“Studying the connection between trauma and psychosis.”
“Another study? You will have endless subjects here, starting with the officer’s canteen.”
“I am more interested in the prisoners.”
“Who cares about them? Don’t touch them unless you want to catch something.”
“I care very much,” Vilmer said. “It’s only part of my assignment, but through talk therapy with prisoners, I’ve learned a great deal.”