Page 42 of The Lies We Leave Behind

42

Lena

Ravensbrück Concentration Camp March 1945

Despite all I’d been through, there had been nothing in my life that could’ve prepared me for the scene that greeted me when I exited the military vehicle that brought me from Hamburg to Ravensbrück.

The first thing I noticed when the truck stopped was the stench. I gulped in a breath through my mouth as I stepped carefully to the ground, slipping and nearly falling on a patch of ice. Following the line of women in front of me, I rounded the truck, only to be faced with a large wooden cart filled with dead bodies.

“Oh,” the woman behind me said.

The bodies, their arms and legs spilling over the sides, stared out in all directions with empty eyes, their mouths open as if waiting to inhale a breath that would never again come.

“This way,” a woman in uniform snapped, and we hurried to obey, not wanting to end up like those in the cart.

I’d spent two awful months in a jail in Hamburg before being transferred to Ravensbrück. My crime, per Lieutenant Schmeiden, was theft.

“Caught her in the Holl?nder estate with another young woman who was carrying a gun. She shot Mrs. Holl?nder and the maid before I put her down.”

One of the guards had chuckled. “Clearly they didn’t know they were stepping on your turf.”

The lieutenant had smirked in return. “I’m having it cleared out as we speak.”

I didn’t talk to anyone unless spoken to, my mind too full of what had transpired in my mother’s bedroom, my heart broken for all that had been lost in a matter of seconds, my soul empty.

I moved when I was told to move, ate when I was told to eat, and when it was time to go, I didn’t listen to where we were headed, nor did I question it. I just went. It was only through the other women murmuring to one another on the way there that I learned the name of the camp and noticed the scared looks on their faces. I had no idea where their fear stemmed from or if I should feel frightened as well. But even if I’d wanted to, I wasn’t sure I could. The only thing I felt was numb. The only thought I had in my mind was an image of Catrin as she lay lifeless on the floor.

“Cat,” I whispered as I followed behind the others to a long narrow building.

We were marched down several long hallways until we reached a room where we were told to strip down. We were sprayed, made to wash, and sprayed again, holding our hands up to ward off the water coming at our faces and bruising our tender skin. After we’d dried off, we were handed black-and-white striped uniforms. Our belongings were gone through, some items confiscated, others tossed in a bin. I was allowed to keep my journal and the clothes I’d brought. But others cried as small pieces of their lives were found and thrown into a bin like trash before we were then led to another room where different-colored triangle patches were handed to us to be sewn onto our sleeves. Mine was green.

There were twelve barracks for living in and the seven of us that had traveled together were dispersed among them. As I entered my new home and saw the crush of bodies inside, I wondered if I’d ever see the women I’d traveled with again. There were so many of us, I wasn’t sure it was possible to see the same face twice.

“You’re in the back,” a woman with a worn face and shaved head said with a wave of her hand. “Come on.”

I followed, trying not to blanch at the smell. It was hot in here. Humid. And smelled of dirty bodies and dirtier clothes. There were flies in the air and rats on the floor. I tried not to imagine the other things I knew must be there, though I couldn’t see them. Things like disease and lice.

We squeezed between bodies and beds. So many beds. Bunks stacked three high, reminding me of the planes I’d worked on carrying the wounded. Reminding me of William.

The baby kicked inside me and I ran my hand over my belly. Without fail, should I think of William, a kick followed.

“This is you,” the woman said, pointing to a middle bunk. She frowned and took in my belly, which was much more prominent in the striped uniform than it had been in my father’s bulky sweater. “Hmm. This won’t do.”

“I can manage,” I said, not wanting to bother anyone by making them move.

“We can do better. Not much, but certainly better than making a pregnant woman climb up to bed.” Her eyes flicked over me. Friendly, but guarded. “I’m Zuz, by the way.” She held out a red, calloused hand. “Zuzanna.”

“Lena,” I said, placing my hand in hers.

She showed me around then and introduced me to several of the other women, their names and colored triangle patches floating in and out of my mind as I tried to breathe in the acrid, humid air accumulated by so many bodies gathered in one enclosed space.

The population was mostly Polish, but there were women from the Soviet Union, Germany, Hungary, France, Czechoslovakia, the Benelux countries, and Yugoslavia too. A cacophony of languages filled the large building, our only saving grace to communicating the overlapping English we’d either learned in school or picked up from friends and family.

We ended up back at the bunks and the woman who was assigned the bottom was thankfully amenable to swapping. I was shown where to put my belongings, where to find the threadbare and stained towels for showering, and then I followed the crowd through the cold to another building where a small bowl of lukewarm soup with barely more than a couple of small potatoes was served for dinner.

Throughout the next week I was put to work doing physically demanding labor in the sprawling, near-frozen fields surrounding the camp. Digging, planting, building fences... My pregnant belly allowed me no mercy, but I kept my mouth shut, refusing to utter even a whimper as my body, now depleted of the meals I’d had access to only a few weeks ago, were reduced to rations that couldn’t adequately nourish an adult body. Much less one carrying a baby. I was tired, exhausted...and starving.

“Can I have that?” a voice said.

I stared at my bunkmate, Agata.

“Can you have what?” I asked, looking to where she was pointing on my body and seeing nothing.

She reached over and pulled a thread hanging from the cuff of my sleeve.

“You want the thread?” I asked.

She nodded and I shrugged, holding out my arm and watching as she wrapped it around her finger twice and gave it a quick tug, severing it from my uniform.

“Thank you,” she said, and then set it beside her with a small pile of similar bits of thread and fabric.

“What are you making?” I asked, noticing what looked like a small lump of fabric in her hand. She held it up and my eyes widened. “Oh! It’s a doll.”

She smiled and nodded. “One of the kids in the other barracks lost her mom two days ago. I’m making it for her.” She pointed to my belly. “I could make one for you too if you like.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

She shrugged. “Helps pass the time, searching for scraps, putting them together.”

“What do you stuff them with?”

“Usually just more scraps. Sometimes hair.”

My mouth went dry.

“Hair?”

“I was able to fill five dolls when Zuz first got here. She had a beautiful head of dark hair. She saved a handful for me when they shaved it off. Snuck it from the floor and stuffed it in her pocket.” She glanced at my hair. “Yours is nice too. They won’t shave you though.”

“They won’t?”

“Nah. They don’t shave the Germans. Only the Poles and Czechs.”

“Why?” I asked.

Her eyes met mine with a frank look. “Why do they do any of it?”

The following morning we were back out in the fields after a meager offering of food that would leave no one satiated. The number of hours we worked were cruel. The work backbreaking as the skin on our palms, fingers, and feet blistered, broke, started to heal, then broke again the next day until calluses formed. It wasn’t an uncommon sight to see women lined up for the bathroom to rinse their bloodied hands in brown-tinted water at the end of a long day. I wondered what kind of infections we were breeding, and whispered at night to my baby how sorry I was that I’d brought him or her to this dreadful place.

“Please forgive me,” I murmured before drifting off into a sleep filled with nightmares.

Catrin was never far from my mind. I went over the few interactions we’d had as I clawed with insufficient tools at the earth, trying to make peace and always failing. This wasn’t how it was supposed to have turned out. The only person who was supposed to have died was my mother. Losing the sister I’d loved so dearly, and Paulina, the woman who had taken me in and given me shelter, and a friend when she’d been putting her own life at risk by doing so, had altered me. I didn’t want to make friends with the women I bunked so close to and shared meals with. I didn’t want to share any part of me with them. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to survive. The only things that kept me going were the child inside me, and the thought that one day I might see William again.

The days began to blur into one. Each the same as the last. Wake, go through an endless round of roll call, and then get our instructions for the day by an aufseherin , the female guard assigned our barracks. They were the most unpleasant women I’d ever had the chance to be around. Save for my mother.

Aufseherin Elfriede Muller was the worst of the bunch, earning her the name the Beast of Ravensbrück. We avoided her at all costs.

These women were hard-faced with bellowing voices filled with cruelty that demanded, shouted, belittled, and sneered as we stumbled by, trying to keep our wits about us and look strong, praying not to be noticed and pulled from the group. Being “selected” was not something anyone wanted.

“What’s it mean?” I asked Agata one night, lying on my bunk below hers.

“Being selected?” she asked. A doll appeared above me and I reached out to take it from her. “How’s it look?”

I grinned at the little doll, no bigger than my hand with its skinny limbs, plain face, and body made out of someone’s old blue-and-white polka-dot garment.

“She’s perfect,” I said, handing it back up and then waiting for her to answer my question. But when she didn’t, a voice across from me did.

“They make it sound like a good thing,” a woman called Brigitte said in thick, French-accented English. “Ah...you have been selected! You are so lucky!” She tsked and slid from her bed, her thin body barely covered by a black slip that had seen better days, her bones protruding through the thin fabric, her breasts, probably once full, now barely filling the cups of the gown. “But you pay attention. The ones they select, they are not strong. They are not pretty or smart. They are the weak. They tell them they are being moved somewhere better. But they are not.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I hear things,” she said, lifting the hem of her slip and scratching at a rash on her inner thigh. “The men. They talk sometimes. Give warnings.”

The men.

Brigitte was one of many women who had either been chosen or volunteered to work in a brothel located just outside the camp, their “services” a reward for soldiers risking their lives for their country. They had been told, Brigitte divulged, that performing this job would get them early release from camp.

“But I have been providing my body for two years,” she’d told me the first night we met. “And here I still am. One of the lucky ones not killed by their brutality and diseases.”

Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for the women working in the brothel to get infected with a venereal disease that oftentimes killed them. Or if not the disease itself, a guard shooting them to keep it from spreading.

But as I watched Brigitte now, scratching at the raised, red rash, I feared her time with us was waning.

“You should get a cold damp cloth on that,” I said, pointing to her leg. “It will help with the itching.”

Her cheeks flushed and she dropped the hem of her skirt. “It is nothing,” she said, and climbed back up onto her bunk.

I was knee-deep in a muddy trench the next afternoon following a rainstorm that had washed much of our work from the day before back into the areas we’d dug out. I was soaked, my back screaming with pain, my brain driving me to keep going, don’t stop, don’t look up, just a little bit longer.

“What was that?” the woman beside me said, stopping her work to stand and look down the line of bodies driving trowels into the ground.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered, glancing down the line the other way where Aufseherin Bosel was stalking back and forth, watching our progress from beneath a black umbrella.

“I think someone is hurt.”

“They’ll take care of it,” I said, placing my hand on her arm. But now I was listening too, my nurse’s training making it impossible not to help if I could.

Somewhere nearby someone was whimpering. I turned, trying to find where it was coming from.

“You hear it?”

“I do. Where is it coming from?”

There was a flurry of movement then as several women left their posts to help whoever was hurt. I looked back toward the aufseherin , but she had marched farther away to inspect another line.

“Dammit,” I whispered, dropping my trowel and hauling myself out of the mud. “Stay here,” I told the woman beside me. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

I walked as fast as I could, my feet sticking and slipping in the mud as I hurried to where a small group of women had gathered around one, the bright red of her blood staining her otherwise mud-covered dress.

“What happened?” I asked, pushing through and kneeling beside the woman. Her sleeve was torn and a deep gash ran up the inside of her arm. “How did this happen?” I looked around to the others and then moved into action, taking hold of the torn sleeve and ripping it free of the seam at the shoulder and tying a tourniquet around her biceps. “We need to get you to sick bay. Now. This needs to be cleaned and dressed.”

“What is going on here?” a voice snapped.

There were gasps all around as everyone but me and the wounded woman scrambled to their feet.

“Elsa’s been hurt,” someone said.

“Show me,” she said and Elsa lifted her arm, her dirty face tear-streaked, lower lip trembling. The guard looked at me. “Take her to sick bay and then come right back. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I stood and helped the young woman to her feet, the two of us stumbling as our shoes stuck in the mud, the rain blinding us as we went. We were a sight as we entered sick bay, our clothes dripping and filthy, hair plastered to our faces, her blood now on the both of us.

“What happened?” a serious-looking man asked, hurrying over.

“I was digging,” Elsa said. “My hand slipped off the trowel and slid down the edge.”

“Come,” he said and led her away. A few steps in he stopped and turned back to me. “Are you coming?”

“I have to go back.”

“Are you not hurt too?” He motioned to the blood on my uniform.

“It’s hers,” I said.

He nodded and began to turn away again when once more he looked to me. “Did you do this?” He pointed to the makeshift tourniquet.

“Yes, sir. I’m a nurse.”

His eyes narrowed and then he did a quick glance around the rows of beds filled with patients. When he returned his gaze to me it dropped to my belly before raising to meet my eyes again.

“How far along are you?”

“I’m due early May.”

“I’m not doing you any favors, you got yourself that way. But you’d be doing me one. We’re short-staffed. Think you could get cleaned up and help out?”

My mouth opened and shut. I wanted to say yes. But I couldn’t imagine Aufseherin Bosel letting me out of trench duty.

“I’m to be digging,” I said.

He waved a hand. “I’ll take care of it. Stay there.”

A few minutes later he’d sent someone to inform the aufseherin that my expertise was needed in sick bay. Indefinitely. I was led to a storage room, given a clean uniform, undergarments, and a coveted pair of shoes. And then I was shown to the shower room where I was allowed a quick shower in tepid but clean water.

I worked as fast as I could, lathering my hair and face and body with soap. Scrubbing under my arms and between my legs, savoring every second before I turned off the water, dried, and dressed in the cleanest clothes I’d worn since I’d arrived.

“You’ll need to attach that before you do anything,” the doctor said when I exited the restroom, my dirty uniform in my hands. He was pointing to the green triangle attached to the sleeve of the soiled dress. I nodded and was pointed in the direction of scissors and sewing supplies.

Ten minutes later, green patch attached to my clean uniform, I was helping dress Elsa’s wound, then moving down the line of beds, checking temperatures and injuries, cleaning scrapes and boils, and washing out bins filled with vomit.

My back still screamed, my feet still ached, my hands were sore...but I was clean, for the most part, dry, and I was doing something I was good at. Something that could help these women who came in tortured, terrorized, and scared. And I knew the care they received from me while I was tending to them might be the only kind words and touch they got all day. Maybe all month.

But there was something else I knew as well. Most of these women would die. Not from the infections or injuries, but from being too weakened to be of any use at the camp. The longer they stayed, the more likely they’d never go back to their barracks. And so as I checked each one, I made sure to give them my full attention, brushing my fingers across foreheads, holding hands, rubbing backs, and whispering words I hoped comforted them, and that they kept close to their hearts when they were eventually taken away, never to return.