She ate the moist meat greedily, and felt her strength returning. But she wasn’t happy because she was thinking of Mother the whole time.
The way she had looked when she died. Her skin yellow, and her mouth black. Gnarled, and sort of shiny.
She had spent her last days screaming before she gave up.
Since then the house had been quiet.
Gilah missed her the way she was before the sickness. When she used to let Gilah sit in her lap and drink warm milk from a glass bottle. When she thought up funny games. When she and Father would kiss and cuddle and were happy. When she tucked Gilah in and read from the Torah.
The last bit of chicken tasted best of all, and Gilah realised that was because there was no more to eat. Never again would she taste a chicken as good as Father’s.
Under the Nacht und Nebel directive, civilians who jeopardise the security of the Third Reich will be sentenced to death. Anyone breaking the Nacht und Nebel regulations or withholding information about enemy activities will be arrested.
– German proclamation, Second World War
Twelve years later Gilah Berkowitz is travelling through a disintegrating Germany. She can still taste the yellow flavour of her father’s chicken.
The white bus with red crosses painted on its sides was no guarantee of free passage, because there were no longer any international rules. A red cross on the white roof of a van was an easy target for British aircraft, who had complete control of the skies. But there were no problems at German roadblocks, because the convoy was being escorted by the Gestapo.
Gilah was stronger than most of her fellow prisoners, and one of the few that were still conscious.
When they left Dachau there had been forty-four men, forty-five in total including her. At least four were dead and several more were well on the way. They were all suffering from boils, infected wounds and chronic diarrhoea, and many more would die unless the store of essential supplies was replenished soon.
She too was in a very bad way. Four large carbuncles on her neck, her stomach a terrible mess, and the infection she had had in her crotch for the past couple of weeks was worrying her. She had ruptured veins on the inside of her thighs, as if she had blood poisoning, but she couldn’t get treatment here on the bus because her genitals weren’t the same as everyone else’s.
No one must know, and the only person who did know probably wouldn’t survive the war.
The reason her secret had remained intact during her time in the camp was that one of the guard commanders had taken a liking to her from the start. Or a liking to him, depending on how you looked at it. The fat guard commander had a taste for hermaphrodites, or Ohrwürmer, earwigs, as he called them, and he had leaped at the chance to acquire his very own earwig in exchange for a bit of protection and some food every now and then.
It was the fat man who had given her those injuries in her crotch, but in spite of her shame she had never tried to escape from the camp. Now, though, when people were saying she was going to be free, she was prepared to make an attempt to escape. Freedom wasn’t something you were given, it was something you chose for yourself.
Something you took.
In her pocket Gilah Berkowitz had a document that confirmed she was a Danish citizen and had the right to receive care at the Neuengamme Camp near Hamburg, and then transportation to a quarantine centre in Denmark. But for her the truth had been a relative concept for so long that she no longer believed in anything. Nothing was falser than the truth.
In her pocket she also had the thumbscrew, a small wooden vice that she had been given by the guard commander to help distract her from pain. It had helped against headaches and stomach cramps, and now it helped her with the churning feeling in her crotch. She put the vice on her thumb and tightened it. One turn, then another, as she looked around inside the bus.
The stench and angst were the same as in Dachau.
Gilah closed her eyes and tried to think of freedom, but it was as if it had never existed, and would never exist. There was no before or after Dachau. The memories were there, but they didn’t feel like her own.
She had arrived at Lemberg in western Ukraine two years ago, thirteen years old, but with the body of a twenty-year-old man. She had stolen a suitcase from a German military bus, been captured by the Gestapo, and became one of the thousands of Nacht und Nebel detainees who were taken to the extermination camps.
The Germans hadn’t examined her when she arrived, just threw her a card and some work clothes. There was no need for a medical examination, she was healthy and strong.
She had liked the forced labour, whether it was digging ditches or putting together machine parts. To begin with her body had got stronger and she had enjoyed watching her fellow prisoners give way, one after the other. She had been tougher than all the adult men in the camp.
It became harder towards the end, but she had endured until the white buses arrived.
Only Scandinavian citizens were being collected, and when the last of the Danish names had been called out Gilah had raised her hand in the air.
They had dressed her in a grey coat and marked it with a white cross to indicate that she was a free person.
Vita Bergen – Sofia Zetterlund’s Apartment
SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS walking along Renstiernas gata and looks up at the rock face to her right. Located in a cavern blasted out of the rock, thirty metres below Sofia Church, is the biggest server farm in Sweden. The steam lies like a white cloud across the street, and the autumn evening’s chilly gusts of wind keep blowing it against the jagged rocks.
Excess heat. As if things are boiling away down there.
She knows that the underground transformers and generators are designed to ensure that all the digitised information belonging to Swedish authorities would survive a disaster. And among them are the confidential files about her. About Victoria Bergman.
She passes through the thick, damp cloud, and for a brief moment she can’t see anything.
Soon she’s standing outside the front door of her building. She takes a quick look at the time. Quarter past ten, which means that her walk has lasted about four and a half hours.
She doesn’t remember which streets and places she’s been to; she can hardly remember what she was thinking about during the walk. It’s like trying to remember a dream.
I’m walking in my sleep, she thinks as she taps in the door code.
She climbs the stairs, and the sharp echo from the heels of her boots wakes her up. She shakes the rain from her coat, adjusts her damp blouse, and when she finally puts the key in the lock she has no recollection of the long walk at all.
Sofia Zetterlund remembers that she had been sitting in her office, and had imagined S?dermalm as a labyrinth, with the door to her practice on St Paulsgatan as its entrance, and the door to her apartment in Vita bergen as the exit.