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 anaufseherin, 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 Bösel 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 theaufseherin, 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.”
