I shook my head.
‘Too bad!’ She twisted her mouth in disappointment. ‘I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie. Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you for being American. If you don’t understand anything I say in German, just ask. Now I’m going to shout at you all to straighten up and get moving, OK? French morons.’
And she did, just launched into a long tirade of orders in German.
French morons? I wondered.
Irina, who was Russian, was in line next to me. I stole a glance at the girl walking ahead of her, whose left sleeve I could see pretty well. Her red triangle had a defiant black letter ‘F’ embroidered in it the way Elodie had embroidered hers, and I could just make out the number above her political prisoner patch – 51444. She was from my original French transport.
Then I tried to check the other women around me. I could see the numbers of the two ahead of me – we were all from the same transport. None of them was Elodie, but they were from Elodie’s transport.
Elodie! I thought, my heart lifting in the ridiculous way it did at any faint promise of hope – a tattered kite soaring and going nowhere. Elodie, my comrade-in-arms from the first three weeks in quarantine! Maybe I could get a message to Elodie!
Our German Kolonka barked another incomprehensible order at us, then unexpectedly followed up with a quiet translation first in French and then in English. ‘Stay over this side. Don’t go near the tent. Don’t look.’
We tried not to look. But the tent was between us and wherever we were going, and we couldn’t help seeing.
It was as big as a circus tent and had been put up while I was still in quarantine, in an open place too marshy to build on, as a temporary shelter for the new prisoners who were pouring into Ravensbrück every day – thousands of civilians from beaten Warsaw, from Auschwitz as they started to evacuate it before the Red Army got there, and from a ton of other camps and prisons closer to the front as they moved people around. You could see the tent from inside the fence around Block 32, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it while I’d been working with the knitters. Today there were more guards and dogs than usual all around the tent perimeter, keeping people inside, and the reason everyone in there was trying to get out in the rain was because they were dying of thirst.
Really dying of it, I think.
Hands and arms and heads stuck out anywhere there was a gap – cupped hands collecting rainwater, some holding bowls or even just a piece of cloth to collect moisture – I saw one woman lying on her back with her hair in the black cinder mud at the tent’s edge, her mouth open, letting a rivulet of water stream down the canvas and into her mouth.
You know, it set you at war with yourself.
A back-of-my-mind part of me wanted to help – the Lutheran-church-bred Girl Scout in me wanted to race back and forth with buckets of water for everybody.
But another back-of-my-mind part of me, cowed and self-centred, was going, Thank GOD I am in Block 32. Thank GOD I am not in that tent.
And the front of my mind – the biggest part of me – was just screaming over and over in denial and disbelief: WHAT AM I DOING HERE?
‘Don’t look,’ the German Kolonka advised again, and then her voice suddenly went hard and flat. ‘Oh, what the hell, go ahead and look. If they throw any bodies out of the tent, we’ll probably have to pick them up. But stay on this side just now!’
There were twelve of us, all with numbers in the 51000s except for Irina and the Kolonka, and when we got to work, I realised that what we had in common was our height – all of us were tall. That’s why the guard had pulled Irina out of line on a whim when she’d come to get me that morning.
The Kolonka wasn’t kidding about picking up bodies. We got marched down the main street of the camp, the Lagerstrasse, to a depot. There we collected half a dozen handcarts, and then our very first job was clearing the top bunks in the Revier, the sickbay, which shorter women couldn’t see or reach as easily as we could. We left the carts standing at the back door of the Revier and lined up to go in. The Kolonka pulled the neck of her dress up over her nose like a gas mask, yelled another order at us through the blue-and-grey striped cloth, and we marched inside like we were going to war. The stench was unbelievable. Within seconds we all had our dresses pulled up over our noses.
And I do not remember what we did.
I know what we did, of course, and I remember doing the same thing later – we moved hundreds of corpses this winter. We lifted them out of the bunks and undressed them. We stacked them in rows on the floor of the mortuary. We carried them out to our handcarts and hauled them to the crematorium and unloaded them again. But I don’t remember the first time I did it. It was worse doing it for the first time. And I have blocked it out.
This is what I do remember about that first day of work as an Available: just before we marched back to our blocks for the 6 o’clock roll call, our Kolonka assembled us in the washroom of the Revier and gave us each a vitamin C tablet out of a green triangular package.
‘These are from the Swiss Red Cross, and yes, they’re stolen. Take them now – nothing leaves this room. Any of you breathe a word and I’ll get you transferred to the Punishment Block. Not the Bunker – don’t expect a cosy private cell with nothing to do all day. You’ll be digging toilet pits and hauling road rollers.’
She didn’t have to threaten us again. Even I knew already what the Punishment Block was, and it wasn’t the extra hard and filthy work people dreaded about being sent there. The women in the Punishment Block were known for being the nastiest people in the camp. Probably with good reason, but you didn’t want to have to fight for sleeping space or food with someone who’d kick you under the bunks and steal your bowl and make you buy it back with your bread ration for the entire week.
The Kolonka watched us all closely while we swallowed the vitamins, her pale green eyes narrow with suspicion. Suddenly she advanced on Irina. She seized hold of Irina’s jaw and rammed her head back against the tiled wall, pinching her nostrils closed and holding a hand over her mouth.
‘H?ftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ the Kolonka rapped out over her shoulder. Prisoner 51498! – me. I stepped forward fearfully.
‘Does this bitch understand anything but Russian?’
‘A little French,’ I gulped.
‘Swallow!’ The Kolonka ordered Irina in French, punctuating her command by bashing the back of Irina’s skull against the wall. Irina choked and spluttered and finally swallowed.
The German girl turned round and told us, ‘No hiding stolen vitamin pills under your tongue to take to your friends back in your block. I’m not being nice or doing you a favour. I’m taking care of myself. No one on my team gets scurvy. Line up!’
We lined up meekly.
‘My name’s Anna,’ she growled at us. It seemed like an odd thing to finish up with. I think it was the closest she could come to an apology.
‘So what did they make you do?’ Ró?a asked cheerfully as we scrambled to get our tepid soup that evening.
My hands were shaking. Karolina put her own hand under my bowl so I didn’t spill anything.
‘We were working in the Revier. Irina tried to organise vitamins for you,’ I told Ró?a. ‘She got bashed in the head for it.’
‘For me? Really, Russian Bat Girl?’
Irina shrugged. ‘No, not for you, Rabbit. If I got away with it I would have sold them.’
‘Can you get calcium tablets?’ Lisette asked.
Irina shot me a warning glance which said clearly, Shut up or Anna will get you transferred to the Punishment Block. But Lisette wouldn’t let it go, and after we’d all squeezed into our spot under the end of the table and she’d said her grace in Polish, she said to me again, ‘Calcium tablets.’