I headed for the linen shop, heart beating out of my chest, guessing the direction in the darkness, one arm around Zuzanna, the other outstretched in front of me like the cowcatcher in front of a train, bumping into people in the darkness. The fire from the crematorium in the distance was not bright enough to illuminate the camp, but I navigated by it. I practically dragged Zuzanna, her full weight against me.
I knew we were in the right area when I saw a bus in front of the linen shop, the vehicle lit from within, the only light in the camp. As we drew closer to the shop building, I heard French girls talking. I felt for the back window and helped Zuzanna climb in, then followed her, pulling my bad leg in with great effort. It was warm in the room, and the crowd smelled good as I pushed through, a mix of perspiration and perfume.
Zuzanna leaned against me. “I can’t go much farther.”
“We are almost there,” I said. “You can rest soon.”
I saw Anise’s friend Claire in the glow of a flashlight.
“Kasia,” she said.
I grabbed her arm. “Binz has us on her list. As soon as the lights come on, Zuzanna and I will be taken.”
“The lights won’t come on tonight,” Claire said. “The Russian girls turned them off. Szura flipped the switch at the transformer station once they heard Suhren was coming for the Rabbits. The whole electrical grid is down, and they’ll not turn it back on until morning.”
“How do you know these buses are really Red Cross?”
“Suhren has been stalling them, but they threatened to ram the gate. The girls in the office said Himmler himself authorized Count Bernadotte of Sweden to take us.”
Elaborate hoaxes had been made up before to get girls to go peacefully, but it was our only chance.
“Anise gave me a number,” I said.
“Make sure you move along,” said Claire. “This is the last bus. Two have already loaded and are waiting at the gate to go.”
I held Zuzanna and pushed through the crowd in the darkness. From the French I’d learned, I could tell the girls were all excited to be going home. As the last of them loaded, there were few left in the shop.
Once I made it to the front of the line, I saw two men stood at the back of the bus checking numbers. One I did not know. The other was fat Winkelmann, dressed in his long leather coat. The rear door of the bus was swung open wide to reveal French girls packed into the bus, standing, waiting. A blond nurse dressed in a white uniform stood inside, helping people up the few steps. If this was a Nazi hoax, it was an elaborate one, but German guards often wore the uniforms of doctors and nurses in order to fool us.
I breathed easier once I told Winkelmann the number Anise had given me and I helped Zuzanna into the bus. When my turn came to step up into the bus, the nurse bent toward me.
I set one foot on the wooden step stool.
Was this really happening? Going home? To Lublin? To Papa…The nurse smiled and reached her hand to me and I took it.
Winkelmann placed his white stick across my chest.
“Stop. Number?”
The nurse clenched my hand tighter. “Their numbers have all been checked. We don’t have time to argue.” She spoke German but with a Swedish accent. We were going home.
Winkelmann pushed me back with his stick, and the nurse released my hand.
“My orders are French H?ftlings only. If this girl is French, I am Charles de Gaulle.”
“I am indeed French,” I said in German. Did he see my legs shaking?
“Yes?” Winkelmann said. “Say something in your native tongue, French girl.”
Without hesitating, I said in the most forceful French I could, “This dryer is too hot. Can you cut a little more off the sides? May I have a permanent wave, please, with medium curl and extra end papers? And use the boar-bristle brush, for it seems to help with my dandruff.”
Winkelmann looked at the other man. “She’s a Pole for sure,” he said.
“Just get on the bus,” the other man said and waved me on.
“We need to move,” said the nurse, pulling me up to join Zuzanna. “Come in quickly.”
As the nurse began to shut the doors, a prisoner ran to the bus with a bundle of clothes. “Wait, your baggage!” she called out, and handed the package up.
“That’s mine,” said sweet Pienotte Poirot, a friend of Anise’s, from the front of the bus. The girls passed the bundle down to her, and her friends drew near.
The bus jerked forward, and we started on our way toward the open gates. Just a short way to freedom.
Please let this be a real hospital bus.
The white pole at the guard station lifted, the bus driver gunned the gas, and we left the gates behind. Why did I not feel the joy of liberation? We made our way down the road along the lake, and Pienotte opened her bundle.
“My God, it is Guy,” said Claire to me. Pienotte opened the blanket to show a tiny newborn, pink and healthy, with a head of dark hair. “He was born two days ago. Thank God he didn’t cry. Smart boy.”
We rumbled down the road, the bus lights showing the way, illuminating the backs of our escorts, three German soldiers on motorcycles.
How strange to be on a bus once again. How I had missed the pleasing pull of it: gears shifting then hesitating, gliding and pushing on, going somewhere. The road went from cobblestones to smooth paving made flat by the road crew’s concrete roller. What a fine job you did, ladies, I thought. If only you could feel the smoothness of it.
A teakettle cried somewhere close, already at a boil.
A bomb.
The earth shook, rocking the bus, and the lake lit up like a camera flash.
“It’s the Allies, bombing,” the nurse said. “They must think we are a German caravan.”
The driver cut the lights, the engine too, as the Germans left us and buzzed back to camp, their taillights growing smaller and smaller in the darkness. The teakettle whined again, and we cried out as the ridge above us split and our faces lit up, as if around a campfire. At least the impact felt like something, like we were alive, and sent us to the rubber floor. I held my sister to me, bone on bone, and we fell against the others. Did she breathe? Did I? I pressed her to my chest, warm against me.
Soon the bus engine came alive, and we lurched on toward Sweden, our two hearts one.
1945
By April of 1945, Germany had lost the war, though the news media would not admit this. They clung to their fairy-tale world until the end. I knew the war was lost from listening to foreign broadcasts in my quarters. According to the BBC, the western Allies had pushed past the Rhine, and German casualties soared. Suhren said it was only a matter of time before Germany reclaimed Paris, but I knew we were defeated. On April 18 we heard that American tanks rolled into my hometown of Düsseldorf and easily captured the city. The British and Americans were headed full speed toward Berlin.
One afternoon I left camp and stole along the lakeshore, my steps muffled by humps of moss, suitcase handle slippery in my hand. The lake was angry, and whitecaps whipped across it. Was it stirred by the breeze or by those whose ashes were buried there, settled into silt? How could I be blamed? I had only taken the job of camp doctor out of necessity. It was too late for the lost to raise their bony fingers and give testament against me now.
As I neared Fürstenberg, I met a sea of German men, women, and children walking, some with luggage, some with only the clothes on their backs. Half of Fürstenberg’s civilians had headed south months before, and it seemed the other half was evacuating that day to escape the Red Army. From their posture alone, one read the humiliation of defeat. I joined that great autobahn of the displaced and was swept up in the crowd, half-numb. It was hard to believe it was all over, that I was running away. The shame of it was near debilitating.
“Where are you going?” I asked a German man in a tweed overcoat and mustard yellow hat. He carried a birdcage strapped to his back. The bird swayed, perched on its little wooden trapeze, as the man walked.
“We are taking side roads to avoid Berlin, then south to Munich. There are American troops advancing from the west, Russians from the east.”