Her fingers fumbled with the buttons on her uniform, but they were too swollen, too bruised. When Frau Jaeger saw, she helped Elise undress, as though she were now a small child instead of a prisoner. Elise stood very still, frightened by the change in Frau Jaeger’s demeanor. The summer dress, once tight, hung off her gaunt frame.
“Before the war, my parents took me to Berlin,” Frau Jaeger said in a kind, low voice. She was hunting for something—and procured a silk scarf with a smile, the like of which Elise had never seen from her before. “This will cover your head until your hair grows out,” she added. “And here’s a pair of thick tights. And a wool coat.”
“Thank you,” Elise responded, accepting the items, trying not to imagine what had happened to their former owner.
Frau Jaeger continued to help her dress, as if she were a doll. Not gentle, but not rough, either. “We lived in Dortmund,” she prattled, “but my family and I went to the opera in Berlin once, when I was thirteen. Such a grand occasion!” She paused, savoring the memory. “We saw your mother in the role of Isolde—oh, she was so beautiful! And your father conducted. So romantic!”
Elise didn’t know what to say. She managed “Oh.”
It was impossible for her to put her old shoes on—not only were they strappy sandals but her feet were too swollen for them to fit.
And so Frau Jaeger found her large-size men’s bedroom slippers, which would have to do. “When I heard the famous opera star Clara Hess was your mother, you can bet I wrote and told everyone in my family!” Frau Jaeger eased Elise’s feet into the black slippers. “They were impressed, let me tell you.”
“Oh.”
Frau Jaeger’s face fell. “I was so sorry to hear of her death.”
“What?”
“Don’t you know? She died, from wounds she received while protecting Germans on a train to Switzerland. Your mother is a national hero. That’s why you’re being released—to attend the memorial service.”
Elise was silent. She’d wondered what happened to Clara on the train they’d all taken—she, Clara, and her father—from Berlin to Zurich, and now her suspicions were confirmed. Clara was dead.
“I’m sorry.” Frau Jaeger’s brows were knit with concern. “I thought you knew. I thought they’d told you.”
“It’s all right,” Elise assured her, although she felt nothing inside. How odd, to be comforting this Nazi creature when it’s my mother who has died. “Really—it’s fine.” And, for the moment, it was. She was too numb to take the thought in.
Frau Jaeger blinked back tears and sniffed. “Now we must go back. There are many forms for you to sign.”
—
Back at the camp’s main office, Elise struggled to write with her damaged hand. One of the forms she signed stated, The released inmate is never allowed to talk about camp life, the setup of the camp, camp punishments, and other events. Frau Jaeger was happy to explain: “If we discover you’ve said or written anything about the events in the camp, you will be immediately transported back by the Gestapo and receive fifty to a hundred lashes. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
“In Berlin, you will be able to attend the memorial service planned for your mother. You will also go to the office of the Gestapo. There, you will sign official documents to denounce Father Licht and exonerate the doctors of Charité Mitte, including Dr. Brandt.”
Like hell I will, Elise thought.
The last form she signed stated she had been released from the camp in good health and would lay claims of no kind upon the state in regard to possible future sicknesses. As a trained nurse, she knew all too well the damage her body had suffered, and what it boded for her health in the future—should she even live to see the future. But she signed the paper anyway.
In the office, Elise saw another political prisoner, not more than thirty, as tangible as a ghost. The two exchanged glances for a brief moment, but didn’t dare speak. The other woman gave the slightest nod.
Elise smiled back.
And then, in less than ten minutes’ time, Elise found herself being walked by Frau Jaeger to Ravensbrück’s high guarded gates. There, Frau Jaeger exchanged a few words with the SS guard on duty. “I’ll take you to the station,” she informed Elise.
Elise wanted nothing more than to walk alone, and certainly not to be accompanied by the guard—but she acquiesced, mute. Frau Jaeger began walking, and Elise followed, the borrowed black slippers sliding through the slippery white snowflakes. She had a suitcase of the things she’d arrived with in one hand and her papers in the other. She was leaving.
Alsatian dogs barked as they went through the black metal gates, and Elise let out a soft sigh of relief as they finally left the sinister walls. As she walked behind Frau Jaeger, she saw, on the other side of the road, beautiful houses, gardens, and even two chubby little children playing and laughing in the snow.
One, a boy about seven, ran up to the chain-link fence to stare at her. Elise tried her best to smile, her dry lips cracking in the cold. She was aware that her bald head, even under the scarf, marked her as a prisoner. What do they know about us? What do any of them know? They’re so close, and yet a universe away.
She and the young boy locked eyes, blue to gray. Even in her time at the camp, she had never seen such a vicious glint, such a brutal expression. The boy bent down and scooped up a stone.
He threw it.
It struck her on the face, hard, causing her to flinch and take a step back.
Elise raised one hand to her face, a red mark already blooming on her pale skin. As the boy ran off, she stood still, watching. She’d become accustomed to random cruelty during her time at Ravensbrück, but it was still startling to see it from a mere child.
“Schnell!” Frau Jaeger ordered, seeing only that Elise had stopped. Then, in a milder tone, realizing she wasn’t talking to a number anymore, but Fr?ulein Elise Hess: “Come, please. You don’t want to miss your train.”
Elise looked wide-eyed at everything as they trod over the slithery snow to the station. She’d never seen it; she’d come to Ravensbrück in a van with black-painted windows.
On the platform, people stared at them—such an unlikely couple, a prison guard in her gray uniform and a former prisoner. The train arrived in a cloud of steam and a shriek of brakes. “Here,” an older woman urged, pressing bread and butter wrapped in a coarse cloth into Elise’s hand. Elise gasped at the woman, speechless, as she disappeared into one of the cars.
Frau Jaeger raised an eyebrow but decided to ignore the transaction. Instead she asked, “Now, do you know where you’re going in Berlin?”
“I still know where I live,” Elise stated flatly.
“No.” Frau Jaeger pulled out even more papers. “Your family’s home in Grunewald has been requisitioned and taken over for official Party business. You will be joining your father, who has been set up in the Adlon Hotel. The address is here.”
Elise knew the hotel, a short distance from the Brandenburg Gate. “Thank you,” she managed.
Frau Jaeger’s face turned red, and she spoke quickly. “Would you mind very much inscribing something in my album?” she asked, pulling out a small leather notebook. “Just a few lines? In remembrance of our meeting?”
Is the woman mad? Elise could not process the request. Once again, reality seemed to float away and she tried hard to remember names for things before they left her. Book, pen, guard, she made herself think.
Frau Jaeger continued, “For instance, a few lines from the Liebestod, in the last act of Tristan and Isolde? It’s just—your mother was so wonderful. I have such fond memories of her.”
Elise wrote as though it were someone else performing the task:
Do you not see?
How he shines
Ever brighter.
Star-haloed
Rising higher
Do you not see?
Then she wrote, underneath, Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner. And then, Clara Hess, soprano. Under her mother’s name, she added her own: Elise Hess. She handed the book back to Frau Jaeger, who took it with a shy smile.
“Good luck, Fr?ulein,” the guard said, as Elise struggled with her suitcase up the steps of the train car.