It was getting harder and harder for the guards to keep track of what we did – we couldn’t get out of the camp, but the whole place was so crowded and filthy that it was easier to hide sabotage and thievery, if you weren’t too sick to move.
‘It will need a hell of a wind,’ Irina said. ‘If we could be ready to launch – find a place to hide it –’
‘I can launch it!’ Karolina said. ‘I can launch it from the air raid ditches. I can hide it in the sandbags till we get the right wind. You can sneak it out to us in one of your Corpse Crew carts!’
‘Corpse Crew’ – more and more, that’s what they were using my team for. During the winter, as everyone started collapsing with cold and starvation and a million diseases, that’s all we did – they stopped giving us other jobs and we were just one of a dozen Corpse Crews. They gave up on us boarding up broken windows, and concentrated on clearing the bunks in the Revier and the other sickbay blocks (they kept adding extra ones, trying to keep the typhoid and tuberculosis cases separated from everyone else). There were always dead bodies piled outside the tent in the morning, and there were usually a few from our own block with so many new people coming in – the incinerator in the crematorium was always working, greasy black soot splattering the daylight sky and red cinders spattering the sky at night.
I carried so many dead women this winter that I am – I don’t know how to put this. I want to say it’s like typhoid – I have been inoculated. I am immune. After the first couple of weeks, it stopped being appalling and became ordinary. It was better than if I’d been put to work in the crematorium. Wasn’t it?
It was better. I didn’t do anything I’m ashamed of. Some of it was too fearsomely gruesome to write about, even to think about any more, and my mind skips lightly over it, the same way I can’t remember the week between my beatings. There was that time we had to pick up one of the schmootzichs and it turned out she wasn’t dead – this pathetic bundle of bones and rags lying in the Lagerstrasse, still breathing. The guard who’d found her made us load her up anyway, but we managed to sneak her into the washroom in the Revier on our way out to the crematorium. She was dead when we got back.
I made the place a little cleaner, a little less of a hellhole. Not much less, but what can one living girl do when there are two dozen dead women she has to move in a day? What can one starving girl on her feet do to help out a couple of hundred others who can’t get up? Especially if you don’t want to catch typhoid yourself.
I kept telling myself: I’ve been inoculated. I’ve had the ‘jabs’.
I was the only one of my work team who didn’t get sick this winter, but none of us ever got admitted to the Revier ourselves. We lived in horror of it, partly because of what we saw there several times a week – for me it was also because I knew in much too much detail what had happened to the Rabbits there. For a while Micheline had a fever high enough that she could have begged off work and got herself into the sickbay – you had to have a fever of 102 before they’d let you in – but instead she hid for three days in one of the blocked-up toilet cubicles in her barrack. None of the guards ever went in the broken toilets. Micheline was such a genius at pretending to follow rules that the whole time she was sick she didn’t miss a single roll call.
We never launched Irina’s glider. We did get it hidden in the sandbags, but we never got the right wind or a moment when we wouldn’t be spotted trying to hurl a model airplane an open-arm-span wide over the twenty-foot-high walls. Who knows what happened to it, whether anyone found it, whether the names scribbled all over the fuselage were still legible? But dreaming about the potential success of our air mail service, doing it all in secret, kept us alive. When you lost hope, you turned into a schmootzich, one of the mindless beggars who were the bottom-crawlers of that entire scummy camp, or you died.
Kite Flying
(by Rose Justice)
Hope has no feathers.
Hope takes flight
tethered with twine
like a tattered kite,
slave to the wind’s
capricious drift,
eager to soar
but needing lift.
Hope waits stubbornly,
watching the sky
for turmoil, feeding on
things that fly:
crows, ashes, newspapers,
dry leaves in flight
all suggest wind
that could lift a kite.
Hope sails and plunges,
firmly caught
at the end of her string –
fallen slack, pulling taut,
ragged and featherless.
Hope never flies
but doggedly watches
for windy skies.
*
Lisette had bigger plans than paper airplanes.
‘There are transports leaving every day for Ravensbrück’s satellite camps,’ she directed. ‘We need to get the Rabbits out of here. We need to be organised. We’ll start with the youngest – all the Rabbits under twenty-one, the schoolgirls. Smuggle one or two at a time into the evacuation transports as they leave. Now listen, my darlings, the next time they try to pull any more Rabbits out of a roll call, we’re going to have to be brave. We’re going to have to disrupt things so violently they can’t count us. Everyone switch numbers – something like that. And every one of the girls who gets out will take the list with her – the names from the Lublin Transport, everybody who was operated on. We are going to tell the world.’
Lisette got dragged out of line the next morning without warning and we thought she was dead. I marched off to my hideous work snivelling like a two-year-old. I sobbed quietly to myself all day – Micheline worked beside me and Irina without asking what was going on. It wasn’t the first time one of us had sobbed quietly to herself all day. But Anna got so fed up with me that she smacked me with someone’s empty shoe.
And it turned out Lisette wasn’t dead anyway. Because she was an archivist she’d been hand-picked to do some secretarial work in the record office. She came back unbelievably excited. She whispered her news to us in the evening roll call.
‘There’s a radio in the record office – a radio! It’s always on! We’ve pushed the German army back!’
‘Really?’ Karolina gasped. ‘Really?’
‘Well, back to where they were in December – everyone is fighting up to their hips in snow.’
We groaned. It was the end of January, and the best we could do was beat the Germans back to their December starting point?
‘What about France?’ Ró?a and Karolina clamoured together. ‘What about Belgium? Have the Allies crossed the Rhine yet?’
‘No, no. Look, darlings, forget about the Western Allies! The Soviets are going to get here first. Yesterday they liberated Auschwitz!’
It was all I could do not to yell. We stamped our feet wildly in the black slush, a little defiant dance of triumph.
‘Shit,’ Irina said. ‘I will go straight from a Fascist prison camp to a Soviet one.’
‘Why? You’re a double Ace! A decorated Hero of the Soviet Union! You spent four months being interrogated by the enemy and didn’t tell them anything!’
‘When a person spends four months being interrogated by the enemy and is still alive at the end, the Soviet Union calls her a traitor, not a hero. No, thank you. I would rather hang myself than go home.’
She sounded like she meant it, too, which kind of put a damper on our excitement about being rescued by the Soviets.
Anna caught me in the horrible converted washroom and handed me a list of numbers written on a strip of grey paper a quarter of an inch wide.
‘What is this?’
‘Tomorrow’s list.’
‘Tomorrow’s death list? But –’
There were dozens and dozens of numbers there. I started to read them, and realised that I knew almost every one of them. I associated faces with most of them. 7705 especially – Ró?a. Karolina too. Every single one of the Rabbits was on that list, and a few others, including Lisette.
‘They’re going to shoot eighty people in a day?’ I gasped.
‘Just tell everyone you see. That’s what I’m going to do. Maybe . . .’
I was reeling. Except Irina, my whole family was on that list.