She looked to the wall next to the narrow cot. The wood was scarred with initials, full names, and occasional phrases. Eva, my child, you are 9 years old, who will tell you the truth? Try to grow up the way I hoped was scratched in tiny letters and dated June 1939. A heart with initials and an arrow slashing through. A crooked single word: REVENGE.
Out the window, the sunrise was incandescent. In her other life, the one before camp, Elise had slept through sunrises or, if she was up, didn’t take the time to notice their beauty. We miss so much, she thought, watching the sun change from red to rose to gold. I have missed so much.
The word came to her: infirmary. She was in the infirmary. The pressure of her bladder made her move. Ach! The pain! But she managed to stand on her bloody and swollen feet, and shuffle down the row of beds to the toilet she glimpsed through an open door. Afterward, she cleaned and washed herself the best she could, shoulders, arms, and hands burning with pain.
She shuffled back, blocking out the wails and moans of the other prisoners. Back at her cot, she eased her aching body down, and once again slipped out of consciousness.
Minutes passed, or maybe hours. A nurse came, a fellow political prisoner with a red triangle, who brought her food and helped her sit up. Elise tasted the first spoonful of lukewarm soup—turnip broth with a bruised potato floating to the top—and thought nothing could be more delicious.
She had swallowed one spoonful when one of the guards entered.
“Attention!” the guard called.
Elise knew her—Hilda Jaeger. In reality, she was quite an average-looking middle-aged woman, with tightly braided light hair, the black buttons of her gray uniform straining against her ever-increasing bulk. But in the eyes of the prisoners, her actions had transformed her into a creature neither human nor animal, more like a she-devil in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
“25487! You will come with me!” Jaeger commanded. “Now!”
It took Elise a moment to remember her number. Jaeger was calling her. She handed her soup to the prisoner next to her, who bolted it ravenously. Next to her cot were her cap, coat, and clogs. She reached for them.
“Schnell!” Jaeger roared. Rage mottled her complexion.
Elise walked, stumbled, and slid with Jaeger out of the infirmary down icy paths, to Ravensbrück’s administration building. It was an innocuous-looking yellow-brick structure. Nothing about it betrayed its true purpose.
Himmler and his cronies had worked out the ratio of the cost of keeping a slave alive to profit off her labor—to keep her working as long as possible, and then to liquidate her as cheaply as possible, chiefly through the principle of “extermination through labor”—working all the prisoners to death. The profit motive drove everything. When the mathematical equation proved it cost more to house and feed a slave than the worth of the work she produced, the worker was killed.
But each woman was ostensibly at Ravensbrück for a specific “crime.” Elise, along with the other political prisoners, wore a red triangle sewn onto her jacket, above her number. So-called race defilers wore red triangles with black borders. Common criminals wore green. Homosexuals, pink; Jehovah’s Witnesses, violet. The Gypsies wore brown. All others wore one yellow. Jews wore two yellow triangles, making a facsimile of the Star of David.
Of course, categories overlapped, so a Jewish woman who’d fought for the French Resistance wore both a yellow triangle and a red. A prostitute who spied for the German Resistance wore a green triangle and a red. “It’s easier in America, with the colored people,” the woman overseeing her sewing on her own red patch had said. “With their black skin, they don’t need anything else, the way we do here. Although I pride myself on the fact I can always spot a Jew.”
Now, Elise’s curiosity finally overcame her fear. “What’s this about?” she managed to ask Jaeger, taking off her shoes and shuffling barefoot on the icy path to keep up. “Where are you taking me?”
“Don’t you know?” The guard laughed, a humorless yap. “You’re to see the Commandant.”
Everything had still seemed distant and removed to Elise, but that word, Commandant, brought her back to reality with a blow.
Jens Foth, the Commandant of Ravensbrück, was infamous, even among the thugs and villains he’d hired for guard duty. Under Foth’s rule, canings were distributed arbitrarily. He liked to hear the prisoners howl. “Start screaming, you pig!” he’d cry, often making another prisoner—usually a friend—beat one of her own. But often the prisoner being beaten stayed mute—at least as long as possible. Self-control was the only form of rebellion.
As they walked up the slippery steps to the main building, Elise wondered if she’d have been better off dying on the cross.
—
Inside Commandant Foth’s office, it was excessively warm, a fire burning red in a cast-iron stove across from his massive desk. In a place of honor was the ubiquitous official framed photograph of Hitler.
Elise’s heart was beating wildly. She knew what it meant to be sent away. To be “transported”—sent to Auschwitz or one of the other camps, where no one was ever heard from again. But why was she here in the office then? The Commandant must have another fate in mind for her. What would they do to her first?
“How much money do you have?” Foth barked at Elise without preamble. He was an older man, with silver-gray hair and a chin as wide as his forehead. His once-trim figure had run to fat, and a hunch ruined what must have once been impeccable posture. There was an open bottle of schnapps on his desk, and the office reeked of alcohol.
Elise stared at him, shock freezing her tongue.
“How. Much. Money,” he repeated, his chewed fingernails starting to tap in agitation. “Do. You. Have?”
She thought back to the wallet she’d surrendered when she first arrived. “Thirty marks,” she replied. “Sir.”
“Is it enough to get to Berlin?”
Berlin? Go to Berlin? “Yes,” Elise managed, bewildered. Berlin? The city was as real as a kingdom in a fairy tale. “Yes, sir, it is.”
Foth grunted, then thrust a form at her. Bold black letters spelled out: RELEASE.
The letters danced in front of her eyes, tantalizing her with their elusive meaning.
Then Foth snatched the paper back, slashed RELEASE with a black pen, and wrote below, 9 DAYS LEAVE.
Elise stared at the piece of paper. The letters seemed to float. She couldn’t recall the meaning of the number 9, or the words release or leave. They were black squiggles on white paper.
“Well, what are you waiting for, Fr?ulein Hess? Don’t you want to go?”
All Elise could comprehend was, for the first time in months, she was being called her name once again. A name, instead of a number. It sounded almost indecently intimate coming from his lips.
Foth turned to Frau Jaeger with a sneer. “Look, she wants to stay! I’m sure we can accommodate that….” The two sniggered.
But Elise had grabbed at the paper. To be warm, to eat, to sleep in a bed. To go to church and receive the Blessed Sacrament. No more endless roll call in the freezing darkness, no more barking and biting dogs, no more screamed abuse…
Foth put his palms together. “Elise Hess, you are released.” Then, “Well, get ready! Schnell! In ten minutes, I want you out of here! Take her! Get her cleaned up!”
—
Frau Jaeger led Elise to the warehouse where all the prisoners’ clothing was stored, sorted, and meticulously labeled. When Elise saw her old clothes—her underthings, a floral linen dress and cotton sweater and high-heeled sandals—she thought once again she was in a dream. She remembered them, and yet did not—so much had happened since the summer and it seemed so long ago—although in reality it had been less than a year since she’d arrived at Ravensbrück.