The Dressmaker of Dachau

by Mary Chamberlain

  ‘What happened to Stanislaus von Lieben? Did you ever see him again?’

  ‘He was in Dachau,’ Ada said. ‘The town of Dachau. At the end of the war.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘I didn’t know at the time. I only learned later. Business, I was told.’

  ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘I saw him. Crossing a street. I ran after him, but he’d disappeared. There were too many people.’

  ‘You were sure it was him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Stanley Lovekin. What makes you think he and Stanislaus von Lieben were one and the same?’

  Ada began to fiddle with her cuff, unravelling a yarn that dangled like a coiled spring. ‘I recognized him,’ she said. ‘He had the same voice, only without an accent. Except when Stanislaus got excited, his accent went, and he spoke sometimes like a Londoner. I wondered, even then.’

  ‘Did he look the same?’

  ‘He was a bit fatter,’ she said. ‘Lost some hair. But his eyes were the same colour.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Ada rolled her weight over onto the side of one shoe. Hard to admit this, given what Harris-Jones had thrown at her, but she had to show the jury she was right.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice soft.

  ‘Please tell the jury what made you so sure Stanley Lovekin and Stanislaus von Lieben were one and the same.’

  A swarm of heat circled her neck, threw her cheeks into florid, red flushes. She licked her lips, swallowed. Didn’t want to say the word but Mr Wallis said she must. Shouldn’t be embarrassed. ‘He was circumcised,’ she said. ‘He never said he was Jewish. I mean, it’s not only Jews who get circumcised. But Stanley was. So was Stanislaus. And not many men are.’ She bit back the words but they tumbled out. ‘That I know of.’

  The foreman was scowling, and the man in the demob suit, the one she thought was probably a Baptist, spluttered.

  She couldn’t help it. ‘Didn’t mean to cause offence,’ she said, looking at them.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He told me he’d been in Namur when the Germans invaded,’ she said, ‘with someone else. He called her an empty-headed tart. That was me.’

  ‘He hadn’t recognized you?’

  ‘He said I reminded him of her. But I’d changed, too. War does that to you. I have to wear glasses now. I’d dyed my hair, too. Blonde. I was thinner.’

  ‘And how did you feel when he told you this?’

  ‘It was like he pulled a trigger,’ Ada said. ‘All those years at Dachau, the loss of Thomas, my baby, our baby, coming back, the rejection. Years of misery and unhappiness. It all blew out, like a bazooka.’

  Mr Wallis nodded. Ada was breathing hard, gripping the handrail of the witness box, her knuckles glowing white through the magnolia skin.

  ‘And what happened next? What were you thinking?’

  ‘He’d been drinking. Heavily. Called me names. Shocking. Denied he’d put me in the family way. Insulting me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He said I was a tart. Only I never was,’ Ada said, looking hard at the foreman. ‘I never was a prostitute. But that’s what he took me for.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought then that perhaps that’s what Stanislaus had wanted me to do. In Paris. It made sense. He knew Gino Messina, before the war, during the war, only something happened and his plans fell apart.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I wanted to run away, but I knew he’d find me, or tell Gino. They had spies, that’s what they told me. I’d be done for then. I thought, it’s him or me. That’s what I thought. And he was out cold. I couldn’t stop myself. I turned on the gas. It was the only way to get free of him, and Gino, to escape.’

  There, she’d admitted it again. But he’d asked for it. Couldn’t they understand that he had?

  ‘Don’t you see? He drove me to it. He insulted me. He—’ she hesitated, but she had to say it. ‘—he abused me, assaulted me. He had raped me. I couldn’t think straight.’

  The jury foreman raised his eyebrows, and the man in the demob suit adjusted his tie. The judge peered at her over his glasses, nodded to Mr Wallis to continue.

  ‘Did you see Stanislaus’s passport?’ Mr Wallis said.

  ‘He didn’t have one,’ Ada said, ‘not a British one. He had some kind of papers, but they were stolen ones.’

  Stanislaus and Stanley. One and the same. Her knees buckled beneath her and she sank to the floor, her face streaked with tears, her nose running. The policeman helped her up.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Vaughan,’ Mr Wallis said. He smiled at her, a beam of pride, affection almost. Well done, she read it there, in his eyes. Well done. Provocation. Slow-burning provocation. Grossly. Insulting. Assault.

  The next day Ada looked again into the public gallery. Perhaps today she'd be lucky. But the people on the front bench were the same strangers who had been there the day before and the day before that. Her mother wasn’t coming, would never come, she knew that now.

  It was Mr Harris-Jones’s turn to question her. He’ll play dirty, Mr Wallis said. It’s his job. She’d told her story. Wasn’t that enough? The jury had to believe her. They’d heard the truth now. Manslaughter. Three years. Maybe four. Good behaviour.

  ‘Dachau,’ Harris-Jones said. ‘You weren’t actually in the concentration camp, were you, Miss Vaughan?’

  ‘No,’ Ada said. ‘I worked in the house of the Commandant.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  ‘Obersturmbannführer Weiss. Then, after he left, Obersturmbannführer Weiter.’

  ‘The nature of your work there?’

  ‘It was forced labour. Day and night. Sewing. Washing. Ironing.’

  ‘Nothing strenuous then?’

  Ada glared at him. ‘Have you ever done housework?’ she said. ‘Have you ever scrubbed and rinsed heavy linen sheets, wrung them out by hand, hung them on the line? Ironed them?’

  He smirked. ‘You’re talking the kind of work that every married woman in England does as her duty to her husband and family.’

  ‘No,’ Ada said, ‘it was more than that. I spent all day with my arms in scalding water and borax, all night sewing and mending.’ But the men in the jury wouldn’t understand that. It wasn’t men’s work, that.

  ‘The more you tell me, Miss Vaughan,’ Harris-Jones still smirking at the jury, ‘the more normal it sounds.’

  ‘I ruined my eyesight. I nearly starved. I barely slept. I was alone.’

  ‘But you didn’t starve, Miss Vaughan,’ he said. ‘You didn’t die. You weren’t in the camp. Those poor wretches knew the nature of forced labour, of starvation. How many was it died at Dachau? Do you even know?’

  He faced the jury, spun round on his heel to Ada. ‘Upwards of thirty-two thousand documented deaths. Thirty-two thousand people. And you’re complaining about a little borax and poor food.’

  He turned once more to the jury. ‘The Germans eat a lot of sauerkraut,’ he said. ‘Pickled cabbage. Can’t stand the stuff myself, but Captain Cook took it on his explorations. Not a single sailor died from scurvy on his expeditions. Not one.’

  Pivoted back to Ada, like a cuckoo in a clock. ‘Your war was rather easy, wasn’t it, Miss Vaughan?’

  ‘No. It was hard work, hard labour. On cabbage soup, nothing more.’

  ‘Did you try to escape?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was locked in my room. There were bars at the window.’

  ‘Were you in your room all the time? Did they ever let you out?’

  ‘I was let out to do the laundry. Hang it on the line. Empty my bucket.’

  ‘And why didn’t you run?’

  ‘I was under guard,’ Ada said, ‘all the time.’ Not that Anni would have stopped her, but she didn’t say. Anyway, where would she have gone? She’d have been captured in no time and shot.

  ‘You performed your duties well?’

&nb
sp; ‘I was punished if I didn’t.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The belt. I was beaten.’

  ‘You did nothing to resist? Fight back against the Germans?’

  ‘How could I?’ Ada said, adding, ‘I tried.’

  ‘How did you try, Miss Vaughan?’

  She puffed air out of her lips, breathed it back in. Her hands were sticky. One of her suspenders had worked free and her stocking was drooping at the front, cutting across her thigh. ‘I’d try to contaminate the clothes,’ she said. ‘I’d put them on before I handed them over, rubbed them against my skin so flakes would stick in the seams and the weave. I knew they were disgusted by me.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘I put rose hips in the gussets and gathers of Frau Weiter’s clothes.’ Ada turned to the jury again. ‘She wore dirndl skirts and blouses, so there were lots of creases. It made her sore.’

  He laughed then. Harris-Jones laughed. ‘Do you see, gentlemen of the jury? While our boys were fighting Hitler, sacrificing their lives in the cause of freedom, Ada Vaughan was trying on clothes and putting itching powder in the laundry.’ He turned to Ada. ‘Well done, Miss Vaughan. That made a big difference to the war effort.’

  A church bell struck outside, a sonorous, gong gong. St Sepulchre’s. When will you pay me, said the bells of Old Bailey. She counted. Twelve o’clock. The judge said nothing. She only heard the scritch of his bristles as he rubbed his hand against his chin. She shifted her weight. The thick stockings, ‘H.M. Prison Holloway’ stamped across the top, itched her calves and she lifted one foot and rubbed it against her leg. The laces on her left shoe had come undone. He was making her look small, mocking her.

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’ Ada had had enough. ‘You don’t know what it was like. I was their slave. At their mercy. Locked away. Day in, day out. No one to talk to. No hope. No escape. Hard labour. Really hard. Have you ever been a slave? Have you?’

  ‘That’s quite enough, Miss Vaughan,’ the judge said, leaning forward, peering over his nose like a crow over carrion. ‘You have been warned many times.’

  ‘I was by myself,’ Ada said, ignoring the judge, staring at Harris-Jones. ‘I did what I could. What would you have done?’

  ‘I’m sure you did your best, Miss Vaughan.’ Harris-Jones’s voice was laden with irony. ‘I’m sure you did.’

  He flicked through the papers on his desk, pulled one free of its folder and put it, face down, next to him. She wished he’d move on, talk about Stanley Lovekin, or Stanislaus, what he was like, what a bastard he was.

  ‘Could you tell me, Miss Vaughan, how you came to be at the Commandant’s house?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ada said. ‘I was taken out one day and driven there.’

  ‘Did you go voluntarily?’

  ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘What can you tell me of Herr Weiss?’

  His scrawny face flooded her vision. She could feel his trembling fingers enclosing hers. She shuddered and flicked her wrists to shake off the sensation.

  ‘He was one of the old men we nursed.’

  ‘What was the nature of this nursing?’

  ‘We made sure the old people were clean and fed, given their medicines. The usual.’

  ‘Was there anything special about Herr Weiss that caused you to treat him differently?’

  ‘He had been a school teacher. He had a lot of respect, from the guards, especially. And he spoke English.’ Why all these questions about Herr Weiss? She looked at Mr Wallis for guidance but he was concentrating on his notes. ‘He asked me to speak English with him, so he could improve it.’

  ‘Did you take advantage of this?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Did you exploit his attention?’

  ‘He taught me German in return. I was grateful to him for that.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No,’ Ada said.

  ‘You didn’t give him services of a more intimate nature?’

  He was guessing. He must be. Ada had never said, not to anyone, ever.

  ‘Answer the question, Miss Vaughan,’ the judge rattled from the dais.

  ‘He was a bit frisky sometimes,’ Ada said. ‘Forced me to hold him while he did his business.’

  ‘Did his business. Did you enjoy that?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘He was well connected, was he not? In Dachau. In the Nazi party.’

  ‘He was a relative of Martin Weiss, the Commandant.’

  ‘And did you ask him to get you moved into the household of the Commandant, in exchange for sexual favours?’

  ‘No,’ Ada said.

  No. She had never asked. ‘Life can be easier for you, meine Nönnerl. Did you know that?’ Whispered in her ear so she felt his breath warm on her cheek, his bristles rough against her skin.

  What was her life now but the steady drip of death among the dying?

  ‘Just one small favour,’ he’d said, ‘and it can be arranged.’

  Did she agree? What choice was there?

  His flesh hung loose over his bones, like a coat too big for him.

  ‘And you,’ he said, picking up his stick and flicking the hem of her habit. ‘Take off your clothes. Let me watch.’

  His skin was oily, rubbed against hers, rubbed into hers. He was kissing her, crinkled tongue in her mouth. She lay still.

  ‘I won’t hurt,’ Herr Weiss said. ‘Adelheid. Ada. How can I give you pleasure? Tell me what to do.’

  She wanted to say, Leave me alone. She didn’t know what he meant. His lips were close to hers, dribbling over her.

  ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘You are a nun. But you’re not a virgin, are you, meine Nönnlein?’

  She felt him as he thrust into her, heard him grinding his teeth, concentrating. His body was soft and heavy on top of her.

  ‘I am a man of honour,’ he said. ‘I always keep my word. I will make your life agreeable. You will like that.’

  He pushed himself free and rolled to one side, one arm behind his head like a younger man.

  ‘I know someone who needs a dressmaker. Would you like that?’

  ‘A dressmaker?’

  ‘Ja,’ he said. ‘This will be our little secret, Adelheid. Mine and yours.’

  Ada pulled her shift towards her, clutched it against her breasts.

  He watched while she dressed, gave her the key. ‘Open the door.’

  She walked through, into the corridor. He’d seen a person behind the flesh. Adelheid. Ada. A woman. No one had done that in a long time.

  And a dressmaker.

  ‘Even back then,’ Mr Harris-Jones was saying, ‘you’d sell your body for a better life. Your soul, too. Body and soul. To the Nazis. A pact Faust would have been proud of.’

  ‘How would you understand?’ she said. ‘How could you?’

  Her life wasn’t easier at the Commandant’s house. She’d wondered more than once whether she wouldn’t have been better off with the nuns in the home. She’d have had company, companionship, protection.

  ‘Was the Commandant married?’ Mr Harris-Jones said.

  ‘There was a woman there, with a child.’ Her voice hitched up again. Poor little mite. Screaming and screaming till he burst a blood vessel.

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘I found out, after, that he wasn’t married. I don’t know who she was.’

  ‘You made her clothes. Did you make anybody else’s clothes?’

  ‘She brought her friends along.’

  ‘And you made their clothes too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Talk me through how it went, Miss Vaughan. A typical day.’

  This had nothing to do with provocation, or Stanislaus. He was wasting the jury’s time, everybody’s time. Well, she could do that too. He wasn’t the only one who could drag it out.

  ‘I’d wake up,’ she said. ‘Daylight would wake me. I’d put my bedding in order, use the bucket. I’d pick up whatever sewing I had. Perhaps some mending. Or a
hem. Wait until I was let out. Sometimes it would be quite soon. Sometimes I’d have to wait until midday. No breakfast then. Nothing to eat or drink. I’d pick up my bucket, make sure it didn’t slop, because sometimes it was quite full, go outside to—’

  ‘Spare us those details,’ Harris-Jones said. ‘We want to hear about dressmaking. What happened when the women came to the house?’

  ‘They’d come with their material. And a photograph or a picture of a dress. I’d have to make it for them.’

  ‘What did that involve?’

  ‘Measuring them,’ Ada said, ‘advising. Suggesting. Designing a dress, to suit. Making a toile, a pattern. Cutting. Tacking. Sewing. Finishing.’

  ‘Designing. Bespoke. Making a toile,’ Mr Harris-Jones said. ‘That’s some skill. You weren’t an ordinary seamstress, were you, Miss Vaughan? You were a couturière.’

  He was playing on her vanity, Ada knew, but she enjoyed the recognition, couldn’t help it.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose? You built up quite a following in Dachau. This woman, whom you thought was Frau Weiss, was your front man, front of house. A mannequin, was she? Quite a business. The dressmaker of Dachau, couturière to the Nazis.’

  ‘No.’ Ada scratched at the loose skin of her thumb. ‘No.’

  ‘Your own atelier.’

  ‘That’s not it. I don’t know why you’re saying this, what it’s got to do with Stanislaus.’

  ‘Did you take pride in what you did?’

  Her thumb was bleeding. She sucked at the blood, wiped her nail against her skirt.

  ‘It kept me alive,’ she said, ‘the dressmaking.’

  ‘I asked if you took pride in your work,’ Mr Harris-Jones said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ada said, jerking her head high and glaring at him. ‘Yes, I took pride in what I did. It made me human.’ She clenched her teeth, hissed through them. ‘What would you understand?’ She turned to the jury. ‘I wasn’t given a choice. I was trapped there. I was never paid. How could I be? Not even any special favours. So what if Frau Weiss got me work, wore my creations, she and her friends. So what. It kept me alive. I did what I had to, to survive.’

  ‘You did your best for those women, didn’t you, Miss Vaughan? You hung on their praises, lapped up their plaudits.’

  ‘They never spoke to me. Only one of them was ever kind to me and yes, I lapped that up. I craved love. I don’t expect you to understand that.’