The Nightingale

Micheline Babineau gave her a tired, encouraging smile. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Isabelle said. They both knew that the women who cried at night were the women who died in the morning. Sadness and loss were drawn in with each breath but never expelled. You couldn’t give in. Not for a second.

Isabelle knew this. In the camp, she fought back the only way she knew how—by caring for her fellow prisoners and helping them to stay strong. All they had in this hell was each other. In the evenings, they crouched in their dark bunks, whispering among themselves, singing softly, trying to keep alive some memory of who they’d been. Over the nine months Isabelle had been here, she had found—and lost—too many friends to count.

But Isabelle was tired now, and sick.

Pneumonia, she was pretty sure. And typhus, maybe. She coughed quietly and did her job and tried to draw no attention. The last thing she wanted was to end up in the “tent”—a small brick building with tarp walls, into which the Nazis put any woman with an incurable disease. It was where women went to die.

“Stay alive,” Isabelle said softly.

Micheline nodded encouragingly.

They had to stay alive. Now more than ever. Last week, new prisoners had come with news: the Russians were advancing across Germany, smashing and defeating the Nazi army. Auschwitz had been liberated. The Allies were said to be winning one victory after another in the west.

A race for survival was on and everyone knew it. The war was ending. Isabelle had to stay alive long enough to see an Allied victory and a free France.

A whistle blared at the front of the line.

A hush fell over the crowd of prisoners—women, mostly, and a few children. In front of them, a trio of SS officers paced with their dogs.

The camp Kommandant appeared in front of them. He stopped and clasped his hands behind his back. He called out something in German and the SS officers advanced. Isabelle heard the words “Nacht und Nebel.”

An SS officer pointed at her, and another one pushed through the crowd, knocking women to the ground, stepping on or over them. He grabbed Isabelle’s skinny arm and pulled hard. She stumbled along beside him, praying her shoes wouldn’t fall off—it was a whipping offense to lose a shoe, and if she did, she’d spend the rest of this winter with a bare, frostbitten foot.

Not far away, she saw Micheline being dragged off by another officer.

All Isabelle could think was that she needed to keep her shoes on.

An SS officer called out a word Isabelle recognized.

They were being sent to another camp.

She felt a wave of impotent rage. She would never survive a forced march through the snow to another camp.

“No,” she muttered. Talking to herself had become a way of life. For months, as she stood in line at work, doing something that repelled and horrified her, she whispered to herself. As she sat on a hole in a row of pit toilets, surrounded by other woman with dysentery, staring at the women sitting across from her, trying not to gag on the stench of their bowel movements, she whispered to herself. In the beginning, it had been stories she told herself about the future, memories she shared with herself about the past.

Now it was just words. Gibberish sometimes, anything to remind herself that she was human and alive.

Her toe caught on something and she pitched to the ground, falling face-first in the dirty snow.

“To your feet,” someone yelled. “March.”

Isabelle couldn’t move, but if she stayed there, they’d whip her again. Or worse.

“On your feet,” Micheline said.

“I can’t.”

“You can. Now. Before they see you’ve fallen.” Micheline helped her to her feet.

Isabelle and Micheline fell into the ragged line of prisoners, walking wearily forward, past the brick-walled perimeter of the camp, beneath the watchful eye of the soldier in the watchtower.

They walked for two days, traveled thirty-five miles, collapsing on the cold ground at night, huddling together for warmth, praying to see the dawn, only to be wakened by whistles and told to march again.

How many died along the way? She wanted to remember their names, but she was so cold and hungry and exhausted her brain barely worked.

Finally, they arrived at their destination, a train station, where they were shoved onto cattle cars that smelled of death and excrement. Black smoke rose into the snow-whitened sky. The trees were bare. There were no birds anymore in the sky, no chirping or screeching or chatter of living things filled this forest.

Isabelle clambered up onto the bales of hay that were stacked along the wall and tried to make herself as small as possible. She pulled her bleeding knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around her ankles to conserve what little warmth she had.

The pain in her chest was excruciating. She covered her mouth just as a cough racked her, bent her forward.