The other difficult thing on my wedding morning was the blessing by the mother of the bride. So important is this blessing at a Polish wedding that if the bride’s mother is deceased the wedding party walks to the cemetery to visit her grave before going to the church. Of course we could not visit the lake at Ravensbrück, where Matka’s ashes had probably gone. Marthe had prepared a long blessing, but I chose Zuzanna to give the blessing instead, causing the heat to rise in Marthe’s face. Resigned as I was to making amends with Marthe, it was not always easy. Zuzanna came first in my life and always would.
The ceremony at the church was brief. Though free elections had still not taken place and the Stalinist authorities were not in official control, Moscow’s Polish Workers’ Party was becoming more entrenched by the day. They discouraged anything that distracted workers from the collective needs of the people, including church weddings. They considered them gaudy spectacles, so people were wary of being seen at them. As a result, only three of my nurse friends braved the ceremony, though it could have cost them their jobs. The few friends Pietrik had left from the underground were still hiding out in the forest. We all were careful, since just putting flowers on a former AK member’s grave was cause for arrest.
Guests were not shy about celebrating at the postal center, though, for it was somewhat private there. As soon as I arrived, guests surrounded me and pinned paper money to my dress, my favorite tradition of all. Where had Marthe and her friends gotten such food? Cold cuts, sausages, salads. Tree cake and delicate pastry angel wings! Maybe the food came from na lewo. The black market.
“Come. It’s time for oczepiny,” Marthe said.
Oczepiny is the ritual of taking off the bride’s veil and replacing it with a cap to show she is officially married. First the single women surround the bride and take her veil; then the married ones circle the bride and pin the cap.
Marthe clapped her hands above her head, and the single girls came around. “Zuzanna, remove the veil.”
“She knows what to do, Marthe,” I said.
The band played, and the young girls circled me, hands together, as my sister took the hairpins from Pietrik’s mother’s veil. My bad leg ached from standing so long, but how could I go sit with the old ladies on their folding chairs lined up against the wall? I’d dreamed of this wedding ritual since childhood.
Zuzanna handed the veil to me and joined the circle. I covered my eyes with one hand and tossed the veil with my other, timing it perfectly for it to land in Zuzanna’s hands. God willing, she would be next.
“Now married ladies assemble,” Marthe called to the crowd.
She held the white cap in her hand. Where was Pietrik? He was missing it all.
“Who will pin the cap?” I asked.
“I will,” Marthe said.
“But a married woman must do that.” The married women gathered about me in a circle, hands together.
Marthe stepped closer. “Kasia, that’s just an old folk tradition.”
The married women began circling around Marthe and me to the music. The smell of violet perfume and beet soup was overpowering. I grabbed a hand at random and pulled the tanner’s wife into the middle of the circle. “Mrs. Wiznowsky will pin my cap.”
Marthe took my hand. “Kasia. Please let me do this.”
One look at her brown eyes tearing up was all I needed. She had been good to me after all. Had fed Pietrik, Zuzanna, and me back to health. I let Marthe pin my cap and she burst out in a smile. You’ve never seen a happier person in your life.
I broke out of the circle, the paper bills flapping as I walked. Where was Pietrik? He’d been so quiet all day. I stopped on my way to find him to let a friend of Papa’s pin another zloty note to my dress.
I found Pietrik in Papa’s office, alone, slumped in the old leather desk chair, hands in his lap. The lamps were off, and a glint of light from a streetlamp hit the glass on a picture on the desk. It was Papa’s favorite, though my eyes were half-closed in it. The one with his arms around Zuzanna and me, taken by my mother.
“Come and join the party.” I brushed the millet from Pietrik’s hair, still there from when guests had thrown it as we left the church. The millet Papa had buried that night so long ago. Dangerous as it was to call attention to the ceremony, I was happy some had not been able to let the tradition of throwing millet go.
I knelt beside Pietrik.
“You haven’t eaten a thing. The hunter’s stew’s almost gone, and they just brought more of those sausages you like. Plus they’re going to dance the kujawiak.”
“Soon, Kasia.”
Pietrik was a quiet person, but he had never been given to such brooding.
“They are wondering where the groom is,” I said.
He was quiet for a long minute, his face in shadows. “What a coward I am, Kasia. My old underground reports hiding in the woods eating grass while I’m here feasting.”
The music in the other room reached a fever pitch.
“It’s not your fault Papa wants to protect his son-in-law. We have our troubles too, you know—”
“I am just thinking. About what my father would do if he were here. He was no coward.”
Though Pietrik seldom spoke of it, more rumors had surfaced about Katyn Forest, and though the Russians blamed the Nazis, we all knew it was the Russian NKVD who’d murdered thousands of Polish intelligentsia there. Captain Bakoski had most likely been among those executed.
“What are you talking about?”
I put my head in his lap and felt something cold and hard in his hand. As he pulled it away I saw a glint of light on silver.
“Papa’s gun?” I said. “Are you—”
“It makes me feel better to hold it,” Pietrik said.
I eased the gun from his hand.
“You’d better get back,” Pietrik said. “The bride can’t just disappear.”
Simply touching that gun, smooth and heavy, made my whole body cold. “They want to see you as well,” I said.
He made no effort to grab the gun back.
I opened Papa’s desk drawer and placed it inside.
“Oh, Pietrik,” I said, kneeling next to him.
We stayed there in the dark together for some time and listened to the guests sing as the band played “Sto Lat.” One hundred years of happiness for the bride and groom.
1947
The so-called Doctors Trial at Nuremberg was a farce from beginning to end, and the trauma of it caused me a series of debilitating bronchial infections. The waiting. The reams of paper that could have been burned to keep good Germans from freezing. The 139 trial days, eighty-five witnesses, and endless defendant cross-examinations.
Dr. Gebhardt’s testimony alone was three days long and especially difficult to watch. As he explained the operations in great detail, he only dragged Fritz and me down with him. Gebhardt even offered to have the same operation performed on himself to prove how harmless the procedures were, but his offer was ignored.
And why did I ask my lawyer, Dr. Alfred Seidl, to tell me the fates of Binz and Marschall from the trial of Ravensbrück camp staff, the so-called Ravensbrück trial at Hamburg, on the day I was to testify? It only roused more fear about going on the stand that morning.
“They took Elizabeth Marschall first,” Alfred said, “then Dorothea Binz. And Vilmer Hartman last. Ladies first, I suppose.”
My abdominal muscles contracted as he indicated the picture in the newspaper. It showed Vilmer, hands fastened behind his back, neck broken at the fifth vertebra, his feet hanging there in their beautiful shoes. He had dropped well. The noose knot, placed under his left jaw, had broken the axis bone, which in turn severed the spinal cord. I scanned the pictures of the others, all hung like ducks on a hunter’s rack, and was convulsed with a terrible fear, which sent tremors to my hands. Many of them had turned to religion before they walked up the thirteen steps to the gallows. All were buried in nameless graves.
That day’s events in court did nothing to calm me either. First up, a Rabbit from Ravensbrück on the witness stand.
“Can you identify Dr. Herta Oberheuser?” Alexander Hardy, associate counsel for the prosecution, asked. He was a reasonably attractive man with a receding hairline.
The Rabbit pointed to me. How could that be? They remembered me? I had no memory of them. They knew my name? We’d been so careful. Alfred had told me the Poles asked to have me extradited to Poland to stand trial. Only me. Had others not done much worse? Alfred had challenged this request and won.
Soon it was my turn.