‘Yes.’
The clipped reply sent a firm message, and I decided not to let it hang awkwardly.
‘So, were you in hospital long? Were the nurses nice to you?’
‘Nice enough,’ he said, ‘but not as nice as you would have been, I’m sure.’
‘Don’t be so certain – I’m a better midwife than I was ever a nurse. I might have been an ogre of a matron to you – a young whippersnapper of a soldier.’
He pulled me close to him and kissed the top of my hair. ‘Well then, I’d better behave myself, hadn’t I?’ He pinched me playfully.
‘Did it hurt, the bullet?’
‘Like hell.’
‘In that case, I’d better administer care and compassion to the best of my ability.’ With a wry smile, I pressed my lips against the wound, a waxen crater amid his softened belly, and it was the only signal he needed. The gravelly tiredness in his voice disappeared and we sank under the covers and into the warm balm of safety again.
32
Waiting
He left again at first light, skulking across the no-man’s land of the complex towards his own room, and I wondered how much of such bliss would be allowed before this war took it away again, the way it sucked everything tender and kind into its black vortex. For now, though, the morning sky was painting itself a crisp mountain blue, the curtains puffed gently inwards, and I allowed myself a few moments of self-pity. Then, my mind turned towards Papa, Mama, Ilse and Franz, and I roused myself to begin another day of survival.
Eva’s mood matched mine, although she wasn’t aware of anything other than her own discomfort, complaining of backache and ‘odd pains’, most of which sounded like twinges of late pregnancy.
‘When will this baby come, Anke? Surely there’s something I can do to move it along, something you can give me?’
‘No,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘nothing but a healthy dose of patience, and a smattering of faith.’
‘You and your faith,’ she grumbled. She glanced sideways like a cunning child. ‘I’m sure Dr Koenig would oblige, if I asked him in the right way.’
‘I’m sure he would,’ I countered briskly. ‘Always assuming you wanted to end up in a hospital, when your body decided it didn’t like being pushed and pulled into labour. And the baby along with it.’ I was in no mood to deal with her silliness, or be centre stage in a minute power struggle.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Really? Is that what happens?’
‘There’s a fair chance,’ I said truthfully. ‘Babies don’t take kindly to being forced out. Besides, what you’re feeling is a good sign the baby is descending, and is getting ready.’
‘Are you sure?’ Her face lit up, like I’d given back the lollipop I’d just taken away.
‘Nothing is sure at this point, but the baby’s head feels nice and low, and it’s pointing in the right direction. So, it’s all good. But if you’re asking me when, I simply don’t know. Only the baby does.’
‘Come on, baby!’ she said urgently into her bump. ‘Come on, your mama wants to meet you.’ With superb timing, the baby kicked again and she giggled like a schoolgirl. ‘Oh, it heard me!’
Arrival, Somewhere in Germany, February 1942
I’d never given much thought to what hell might look like – youth gives you that luxury, plus my father’s general distrust of religion meant the rhetoric of hellfire and damnation didn’t feature in our household. On that juddering journey, neck aching as my heavy head tick-tocked in synch with the train’s motion, I repelled any images of furnaces and black holes pushing up through the cracks of my half sleep.
I needn’t have worried about any fiery predictions. Because hell is grey – grimy, vapid and devoid of any pigment designed to lift the spirit. As the doors were finally pulled back on a dusky, barren world, the image couldn’t have been any bleaker.
There had been a twitch of noses as we ground to a halt, to orientate, gain some idea of the geography. I detected a faint saltiness, and there were mutterings: ‘Are we near the sea?’ ‘Will they ship us out?’ We settled ourselves in for a wait, some women giving up their floor spaces for others to rest their legs. There was shouting outside, but senses piqued when we heard female voices among the low bark of men and dogs. Then, the heavy scraping of the latch, and the door sweeping back, followed by the recoil of those outside to let the foul odour fly.
‘Out! Out! Quick!’ the men growled, while we stared wide-eyed at the women who were holding back the dogs, canine teeth large and looming in the gloom, spittle foaming against the pull of their leashes. On the other end of the leads, the women faded into the background almost, the crisp lines of their grey uniforms and hats only just visible. Their faces were granite but the shoulders jerked with the dogs’ strength. They made a play at restraining and then seeming to let the dogs leap forward in turns, the snarls jibbing at our space.
Graunia and I stayed close to one another, shuffled onto a rough concrete ramp. They poked us into lines of ten, and it became apparent that more than a hundred women had been in that one carriage.
‘What a shoddy lot they are,’ one guard laughed. ‘I wouldn’t give any of them the time of day back home.’
‘Yeah, but at least they’re not Jews, or prostitutes,’ another said, and their cackles were as filthy as I felt. Marching off the slope, there was gravel underfoot, the tincture of the salt mixing with a strange, singed taste in the air. I couldn’t hear the sea and something in me sensed we weren’t at Germany’s coastal edge. But I might have been deaf, dumb and blind for all the sensory clues misfiring inside me.
Our feet crunched for what felt like an age, made longer by having to help along the weaker among us. The woman with the dead eyes and the other with twig-like legs needed two shoulders apiece for support, which the guards tolerated with cruel cajoling, the women without dogs prodding with long, heavy coshes strapped around their wrists.
‘Come on, no stragglers,’ they crowed. ‘You’ve got to be fit to be here; you’ve got to hold your own. Be something to the Reich.’
Large, iron gates swung open and we were halted in an open space, made square by the boundaries of the huts, while underfoot it was a finer, slate grit. Faint lights came from one or two windows in each hut, and I glimpsed faces bobbing behind the small panes. The guards surrounded us, barking orders to ‘Stand straight,’ ‘Heads up,’ the women circling with the dogs, wolves tenderising their prey.
After an age standing, the cold seeped into the core of my bones and I felt them physically splinter inside me. Then, a numbness that was almost a relief. I couldn’t remember a time, even in the last two weeks, when I had been so cold. Had it not been for that stranger’s jacket, I felt sure I would have succumbed there and then.
The woman with twigs for legs was the first to fall. Her body made a gentle thud as it dropped and the guards were immediately on her. The woman next to her bent to help as a reflex, and was pushed back by rifle butts. ‘Leave her!’ they barked.
‘Fucking weakling,’ one shouted at her unconscious body, stabbing at her midriff with his bayonet. When she didn’t even whimper, they hauled her up roughly, her head lolling as if she were dead. I glanced briefly at one of the female guards, and I saw a wry smile creep across her lips, ruby with fake colouring. Was she wearing lipstick? Adornment and vanity in this utter madness? Or was it my mind playing cruel tricks?
The tiny woman was dragged away to a small, brick building, her legs making tracks in the gravel, the soles of her feet pinker where the arches hadn’t been infected yet by the grime. Maybe they stayed that shellfish pink. I never saw her again. Plenty of twig-like limbs in the months ahead, but none belonging to her.
It was dark by the time we were formally addressed, snowflakes dancing and settling, making us a job lot of brides-in-waiting. A woman emerged from a solid three-storey building, its windows brightly lit, revealing bodies moving with purpose. Her uniform was the same grey, and as she came closer to the square I noticed her skirt didn’t part as she walked
– like the others, she was wearing thick, woollen culottes. On her upper arms, her jacket sported several lines of embroidered red and silver diamonds. Heaven knows why I paid attention to such detail, as if my mind was searching for anything in this sea of drear, like a blind person seeking a sliver of light to create sense.
She stood before us, grey hair swept under her small cap, stockings smooth against toned calves. When she spoke, her voice was that of a kindergarten teacher, matriarchal yet capable of being kind, hugging a needy child who’d bumped their head. As she raised her hand, thrust it towards us and barked: ‘Heil Hitler,’ the image popped like a fragile bubble.
‘You have been brought here for a number of reasons,’ she began. ‘Whatever they are, you are no friend of the Reich or our glorious leader, and do not deserve your liberty. You will therefore contribute to society, with our guidance. Ravensbrück is a work facility, with an emphasis on work. Those who cannot labour will be directed elsewhere.’ It was clear that ‘elsewhere’ was not preferable.
Her eyes panned right to left, pausing for effect. ‘If you abide by our rules, if you work hard, you will be treated fairly. But discipline is vital. We will not tolerate any dissidence – punishments will be severe, that is my promise.’
Her voice moved up the register, something of an ‘all girls together’ tone, but what she said next was pure ice. ‘Ladies, this is no holiday camp. Make no mistake, you will give back to the Reich. Or face the consequences.’
I felt eyes swivel in the rows, women terrified to move heads but desperate to gauge reactions. Suddenly, I was eighteen again, when Matron Reinhardt had addressed us on our first day as trainee nurses; bewildered, expectant, scared. Only then, there had been light, the brightness of our snowy cotton uniforms, the barely suppressed giggles, the hopes we held inside of improvement, of moving on. Here, there was just abject gloom. The gates clanged shut behind us and I couldn’t see any way out or through this mire.
33
Empty Space
The next days were a patchwork of empty hours, punctuated with spurts of activity. Dieter was absent for several days, but the disappointment was in myself, already missing the night-time curl of his limbs around mine. Wary of any physical touch within the walls of the Berghof, he had simply winked goodbye: ‘I’ll be back – soon.’
Lena and I spent her free hours working on the dress for her dance, which was perhaps the longest time I had stayed in the house, since the servants’ quarters had the biggest table for cutting material. Frau Grunders ghosted in and out, wearing a variety of disapproving looks, although I caught a wry smile glancing across her lips as Lena twirled during a fitting. It was gone in a second. Was she ever that girl, young and carefree, with butterflies in her heart, before the mask of loyalty took hold? Before her passion for the Führer?
‘Lena, remember the dining room needs clearing,’ she said as she clipped out again.
I spent some time alone in deep thought about Papa, mentally boxing him away into parts of me no one could ever reach – not the Reich, the Gestapo, this war, or Hitler himself. They were mine. With no prospect of a body or a burial, I did the only thing I had in my power and wrote him a letter. It was long and sometimes rambling, my pain bleeding out through the pen, mixed with fat tears that spilled over, making the paper wet and fibrous. The page looked war-torn itself, warped and smudged as I folded it and walked towards the gardens. A fire burned continually in the brazier, low flames crackling and popping at stray ferns and garden waste, carcasses from the kitchen kicking up tiny limbs. I hovered the letter over the glow and released it from my fingers.
‘Goodbye, Papa,’ I said, and watched the paper crimp, blacken and die, the ashes floating into the breeze, skywards.
The calm was interrupted by a visit from the good doctors, who professed to be ‘concerned’ at the preparations made so far. Facing me in Sergeant Meier’s office, Dr Koenig sat while Dr Langer stood, arms folded as they took turns grilling me over what action I would take over in a variety of scenarios – a long labour, shoulders that were stuck, a compromised baby. They had a long list.
‘Have you delivered many babies by the breech?’ Dr Langer pitched in, mouth pursed, adding to the weaselled nature of his whole being.
‘I have,’ I said. ‘Both at home and in the hospital. I find they rarely need help if you leave them well alone. But I’m quite confident Fräulein Braun’s baby is not breech.’
I smiled inside as they exchanged dark looks. It was a bonus to be irritating these two heinous individuals, without the need for obvious dissent. The interrogation lasted half an hour, with my answers short, clinical and to the point. Dr Koenig sweated frustration.
‘I will, of course, share my concerns with Fräulein Braun this afternoon,’ he puffed. ‘I make no secret that this arrangement is not, in my professional opinion, the safest and the most appropriate for such a lady of the Reich.’
He paused and waited for an answer.
‘I’m sure she will receive you and listen to your concerns,’ I said flatly. ‘If there is any change in requirements, I will, of course, respect the mistress’s choices.’
Tiny blood vessels seemed to pop in Dr Koenig’s fat cheeks, and I could virtually hear his blood pressure hissing like a pressure cooker. Dr Langer, by contrast, did nothing but look intently at my face, unblinking. It was my turn to squirm inside, at the depth of his jet-black stare, and the darkest thoughts behind it. The blustering, pompous Koenig was a parody of himself, but Dr Langer was simply dangerous – a willing butcher – and I made a mental note to remember it well.
Later, I learned from Eva that she had feigned tiredness and postponed Dr Koenig’s visit until his next trip to the Berghof, and I had to stifle a smile at the thought of the great man being sent away with a flea in the ear of his overinflated head.
Sewing Room, The Camp, North of Berlin, November 1942
The noise of the sewing room was ear-splitting when production was at its peak, a combined dancing of a hundred or so machine wheels creating a blanket roar across the hut. Oddly, the intense sound afforded a little cloak of privacy as the noise wrapped around each woman sat hunched over her table, an automaton as regards the task but jealously guarding thoughts as her own.
The eight months in the camp had variously dragged and raced by; cruelly, the warmer months had flashed forward, to be replaced by freezing nights when we huddled together in the huts, the one blanket we were each afforded too thin to repel the cutting chill, cocooning our bodies, three at a time, in the bunks. My precious tweed jacket, donated by a fellow inmate back in Berlin, had been confiscated on arrival, along with our clothes and all bodily hair, razed in an instant and scalps scorched with boiling hot water as part of our cleansing. I hadn’t seen a mirror since. Nor did I want to. The crust on my head felt ugly to the touch, and my body itched with patches of raw, broken skin. And that was before the lice came to stay.
Graunia and I managed to stay together in the same hut, although were separated by work divisions. After that first bewildering night on the floor of a block building, then being shorn and clad in regulation dresses of coarse wool, we were interviewed for our various skills.
‘Tell them, tell them what you do,’ Graunia urged in a whisper. I couldn’t imagine there was any need for a midwife and – with Papa’s advice still holding strong – I didn’t want to attract attention. I stretched the truth and told them I could sew, hoping my limited experience at my grandmother’s old hand-cranked machine and in stitching perinea would allow me to bluff it out. Graunia’s writing skills secured her a position in the office, drafting letters and transcribing, with her knowledge of Polish and Russian.
My gamble worked, as the sewing was by rote and involved no real skill beyond a steady hand and ability to follow instructions. And work fast. The overseer in this workshop was a civilian, from a factory somewhere in a former life, where he’d no doubt scolded poor housewives to keep up their quotas, using money – or the promise of it –
as his cosh. Here, Herr Roehm was happy to use the real thing, prodding us in the back with his long, polished rod when we attempted to stretch our sore shoulders, hitting bone when the work was shoddy, or the machines clogged with thread, as they frequently did.
‘What do you call this?’ he screamed, when he called a halt to the whole hut, flashing the lights on and off as our signal to quit. He held up the grey-green uniforms of the Wehrmacht we sewed, day in, day out. ‘If I put this on I would be the laughing stock of any invading army. Look at this seam. It’s shit. You are all shit. Do better.’ His face, a round, pink pudding, pulsed with anger.
One woman’s punishment was always shared and Herr Roehm regularly allotted the whole room another hour of work, knowing we would miss the arrival of the soup pot in the hut. Graunia would campaign to save my meagre portion of soup – greasy water with thin slivers of cabbage – but there were those so hungry that she would have to work to keep my cup safe, let alone warm. The one square of bread would be stale anyway, dense and with the texture of sawdust, but a tasteless lifeline.
Had I adapted? I suppose I had, as much as you can sink to a life so low. In that first week I functioned in a daze; every one thing, comfort or person I’d known gobbled up overnight and spat out in an oily ball of phlegm that was this life. The newcomers were either shoved, pushed, or piloted by kind camp veterans. You got through or you fell, simple as that. As a midwife I had learnt that women were resilient beyond imagination, and in those next weeks I saw for myself how humans can and will cling on to dignity and life in equal measure.
Hunger was a constant companion; my own mother wouldn’t have recognised the scant flesh on my willowy frame, with only my lower arms maintaining any kind of wiry definition, from the constant pressure of pushing fabric through the machine. Even without a mirror, I didn’t recognise the contours in my own face, my cheeks so sallow I must have looked as if my neck might snap from the effort of holding up my bulbous head.
The German Midwife: A new historical romance for 2019 from the USA Today best seller. Page 20
