Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  I was free of spending my life pleasing them, free to go it alone.

  1942–1943

  When Gebhardt cracked open my cast and I saw my leg, it no longer looked like a human limb. It was swollen fat as a log, covered in dark blue and greenish-black patches. Black sutures strained to hold the flesh together along the incision from anklebone to knee.

  I don’t remember screaming, but later the girls back in the ward said they thought I was being operated on again, this time with no anesthesia, and others heard my screams in the courtyard at Appell. Dr. Gebhardt rolled a towel and forced it into my mouth as one of the nurses gave me a shot of something that put me to sleep.

  I woke up back in the ward, my leg wrapped tight in gauze, the incision feeling like a thousand knives cutting it. Zuzanna slipped out of bed to look at it. She pried a corner of the gauze back.

  “Is it bad?” I asked.

  “It isn’t good, Kasia. I think they’ve removed bone. And maybe muscle.”

  It didn’t make sense. Why would muscle just be taken out of a person? “What is all this for?”

  “It might be some sort of experiment,” Zuzanna said. “They give you tablets, but some of the others received nothing.”

  “I’m so hot,” I said.

  “Hang on, Kasia. Matka will help us soon.”

  —

  I WAS OPERATED ON three more times, and each time the suffering began anew. Each time the fevers were higher, and it was harder to recover, as if the doctors were seeing how far they could go before I’d die. By the last operation, I’d given up all hope of dancing again and just hoped for walking. I lay on my back all day all mixed up, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, dreaming of Matka and Pietrik and Nadia, thinking I was back at home.

  I grew angrier as I lay there completely in their control. Though it was hard to track time, I knew it was the late winter of 1942 and I tried to stay positive and think of seeing Matka again.

  As we lay there, Regina drilled us on English verbs and told us funny stories about Freddie and his habit of climbing out of his crib. Janina taught us all French, for she’d learned many phrases working at the hair salon in Lublin. She taught us phrases such as “This dryer is too hot,” Ce séchoir est trop chaud, and “May I have a cold overnight permanent wave, please, with medium curl and extra end papers?” After Janina’s tutoring, I had a working knowledge of French, with a heavy emphasis on things like asking for help with dandruff.

  “I can’t just lie around like this any longer,” I said.

  “Sure,” Janina said. “Let’s go out and ride bicycles.”

  “I’m serious. I have a plan.”

  “Oh no,” Zuzanna said.

  “I think we should write secret letters home to our families.”

  Regina propped herself up on her elbows. “Like in Satan from the Seventh Grade? I loved that book.” What schoolchild had not read Kornel Makuszynski’s adventure story about the boy detective?

  “Yes, exactly,” I said. “We did it in Girl Guides.”

  Zuzanna looked up from the bread bead she was rolling for her homemade string of rosary beads. Why was she not eating that bread? Prayer had long since proved ineffective. Even my favorite saint Agnes had forsaken me.

  “That’s a good way to get us all killed, Kasia,” she said.

  “The boy in that book used lemon juice,” Regina said. “He coded his letters so the first letter of every sentence spelled out a message.”

  I sat up as best I could. “Our own urine would work just as well. It’s acidic. We could code in letters written in urine…”

  “It’s ingenious,” Regina said.

  “It’s insanity,” Zuzanna said. “Put it out of your head.”

  —

  ZUZANNA WAS RELEASED BEFORE I was, and I missed her terribly. We heard new girls arriving in the room next door.

  Then one morning Janina made a comment while old Nurse Marschall was in the room, walking about taking vitals, a towel to her nose to stem the stench. It was a harmless comment about how tired we were of being there. Nurse Marschall walked out of the room in her prickly way, and a moment later Dr. Oberheuser came back with her.

  “Well, if you don’t want to be here, then get out,” Dr. Oberheuser said. “Right now. Stand up and get back to your block.”

  At first we thought she was joking, since none of us were fully healed. We realized she was serious when Marschall poked and prodded us out of bed.

  “But we haven’t been issued shoes—” I began.

  “Out,” Dr. Oberheuser said, one arm outstretched toward the door. “Hop if you cannot walk.”

  I tried to stand but fell. My plaster was gone by then, but I couldn’t put weight on the leg without the worst pain.

  “Get up and be off with you, quickly,” Dr. Oberheuser said.

  I froze there on the floor. Dr. Oberheuser curled her strong fingers around my upper arm and pulled. She dragged me out through the Revier front entrance as one pulls carpets out on cleaning day.

  Dr. Oberheuser tossed a wooden crutch out after me and left me there in the cold, the sharp slag that covered Beauty Road like glass jabbing my skin. I looked to see if Matka was anywhere around and tried to sit up.

  It was strange to be outside again, like being on the moon. It was cold and overcast, everything gray, and no birds flew in the sky. Pieces of ash floated in the air, like black snowflakes in a grimy snow globe, and there was a new stench. A cleaning detail was sweeping the windowpanes of the blocks, for black soot had drifted there the way snow does. In the distance, just behind the bunker, outside the camp walls, twin crimson tongues shot into the sky from new chimneys. You could hear the roar of that fire from almost anyplace in the camp, a giant belching furnace from the mouth of hell.

  How good it was to soon see Zuzanna hurrying toward me, a look of deepest concern on her face! I leaned on her as she helped me stand and take a step. Zuzanna, already in our new home for a few weeks, led me toward the block. I was eager to see Matka again.

  I hadn’t taken more than one step in months, and even with the crutch the walk was too much, especially barefoot across jagged pieces of slag. I stopped.

  “I can’t make it. Leave me. Please.”

  “Come now,” Zuzanna said as she half-carried me. “Baby steps.”

  Block 31 was our new home, an international block: some Poles, including all the “Rabbits,” as we’d come to be known; French women arrested for working in the underground; and Red Army nurses, all political prisoners. This block was even more crowded than our previous one.

  Since I’d been in the Revier, there had been a new development. Some prisoners, including the Poles, were now allowed to receive packages from their families. The soup had become even thinner by then, so it was easy to tell who was receiving food packages from home and who was not. Those who got packages walked about relatively healthy. Those who did not were reduced to skeletal wretches who lay in their bunks no longer able to clean the lice off themselves.

  I dozed and then woke as the girls were coming in for lunch. Zuzanna knelt by me and held my hand. Her friend Anise, a quick-witted, handsome woman who gave the impression she could solve any problem, stood behind her.

  “We missed you,” Anise said. “We have a new Blockova. Marzenka. A tough one.”

  “I missed you too,” I said. “What is that smell outside?”

  Zuzanna squeezed my hand. “They’ve built a crematorium. Furnaces.”

  “For what?”

  Zuzanna hesitated. “To burn—” Zuzanna said, not able to finish. I figured it out, of course. To burn those of us unfortunate enough to die there.

  “I’m sorry to tell you, sister, but everyone has heard about Luiza,” Zuzanna said. “I thought it best for you to hear it from me. One of the Norwegian girls told me she saw her in the room they use for a morgue—”

  “No, it’s a mistake.”

  Poor sweet Lou, who never hurt anyone. Pietrik would never forgive me.

  �
��No mistake. She said it broke her heart to see such a young thing lying there. Alfreda too.”

  Luiza and Alfreda both dead? It was hard to understand. Why had they killed such loving girls?

  “You mustn’t dwell on it,” Zuzanna said. “Only think of getting better. At least you don’t have to work this week. Nurse Marschall issued you a bed card.”

  “Such an angel,” I said.

  “The whole camp is up in arms over what they did to you all,” Anise said. “There’ve been more than fifty Polish girls operated on now, and word is they’re planning more. The Girl Guides have organized—over one hundred strong now.”

  “We call ourselves Mury,” Zuzanna said. The Walls. “Someone found a Girl Guide badge in the clothing brought back from the shooting wall, and we swear in new Guides on it.”

  “They’ve collected all sorts of good things for you,” Anise said. “So much bread. And the French girls wrote a play for you all called The Rabbits.”

  “Did my mother see it?”

  Anise and Zuzanna just looked at each other.

  Anise squeezed my hand. “Oh, Kasia.”

  “What?” Why was everyone looking so scared? “Tell me. Zuzanna, please.”

  “No one has seen Matka since we were taken for the operations,” Zuzanna said. Her eyes were glassy, but how could she be so calm?

  I tried to sit up, but a stab in my leg sent me back down. “Maybe they sent her to a satellite camp. Maybe she’s in the bunker.”

  “No, Kasia,” Anise said. “She was never there. We think it happened the first day you were operated on.”

  How could it be? There’d been a terrible mistake.

  “She’s gone, Kasia,” Zuzanna said.

  “Impossible. No one saw anything? She was always so good at hide-and-seek. Remember? The time she hid under my bed?”

  “Kasia—” Zuzanna said.

  “And we spent all morning trying to find her, and she had fallen asleep under there?”

  “I don’t think so, Kasia.”

  “She is probably with the Bible girls,” I said. “Maybe Suhren has her cutting hair.”

  “No, Kasia.”

  “You just don’t care enough to look,” I said to Zuzanna.

  Zuzanna pressed her homemade rosary into my hand. “Of course I care.”

  I threw it to the floor with a clatter. “You never loved her like I did.” A black ink spot grew over my face, seeping into my eyes and nose and taking me down with it. “No wonder you’ve given up.”

  Zuzanna retrieved her rosary.

  “I will forget you said that, Kasia. It’s just the fever talking, and the shock.”

  “Don’t forget it. I mean it. I am going back to the Revier right now to find her. I don’t care if they kill me.”

  I tried to get out of bed, but Zuzanna pinned me down. I raged against her until I’d lost all strength. I slept, waking only to fall deeper into despair.

  —

  IT TOOK A FEW DAYS for it to sink in that Matka was not coming back.

  At first I hoped that our Polish network just failed to find her and she was tucked away somewhere safe or transferred to another camp. When I asked girls from the block to help me find her, they were kind, but after a few days, it was clear they all believed she was dead.

  There would be no funeral. No birch cross. No black cloth nailed to our door.

  Before I learned to use my crutch, I depended on Anise and Zuzanna to carry me to and from the latrine. Janina needed an escort too. Our helpers were gracious, but I hated being a burden. I imagined my own death. What a wonderful, quick death it would have been to throw myself on the electric fence. Of course, no one would carry me there.

  Until that time, all through our arrest, our arrival at the camp, and the operations even, I had always found good things to think about and Polish optimism to fall back on, but once Matka was gone, I could not pull myself out of the darkness. I felt like a fish I read about when I was a child, the African mudskipper. Each year when the drought came, it burrowed deep into the mud and lived there for weeks, neither dead nor alive, waiting for the rains to come and bring it back to life.

  —

  LIFE WENT ON AS USUAL after our release from the Revier—the brutal waking, the endless hours of Appell, and the most terrible gnawing hunger, our bosom companion. The only thing that interrupted this pattern was the terror that accompanied our Blockova reading the names of those in our block to be executed.

  The procedure seldom varied. It was preceded by warnings from the prisoner-workers in the front office that the courier had arrived from Berlin with an order of execution and that the male guards who served as executioners had been approved for extra schnapps rations. Then Binz would order certain blocks locked down. Once the noon soup was delivered but before it was served, the Blockova would read the numbers of “the pieces to be called.” The unlucky ones prepared their things, and Binz and friends came to get them shortly. My reaction seldom varied either: The cold fear my name would be called out. The relief it was not. The terrible stabs of sadness watching a blockmate go through her final ritual.

  The day the first executions of Rabbits were announced we waited, barely breathing, on the benches of the dining table, packed tight—Zuzanna on my right, Regina to my left. Those of us who’d been operated on had just graduated to eating at table, a big event, for it meant our soup no longer had to be brought to our bunks. There were many rumors that the commandant would schedule the Rabbits for execution, liquidate us to eliminate the evidence of the crime, but could we believe rumors? There was always a new one, like that the Americans were on their way to save us or that there would be steak in the soup.

  “Attention,” Marzenka said as two Russian girls struggled the soup boiler into the block. “Häftlings with numbers called up will finish here, collect their things, and await further instruction.”

  Marzenka pulled a square of paper from her jacket pocket and unfolded it, the crinkling of it the only sound in the room.

  “Number 7649.”

  To my left, Regina stiffened.

  Marzenka read the names of three other Rabbits, all still recovering in the Revier.

  “No,” Zuzanna said. “There must be a mistake.”

  I wrapped one arm around Regina.

  “No hysterics,” Marzenka said.

  How could this be happening?

  I whispered in her ear, “We can fight this, Regina.”

  She didn’t answer, just placed her spoon in her bowl and handed it to Zuzanna. “I’d like you to have this,” she said.

  Zuzanna took the bowl, water shining in her eyes. Such a gift!

  Regina stood. “Janina, would you fix my hair?”

  Janina nodded and we followed Regina to the bunk room, bringing her full bowl with us, since left unattended it could be stolen in seconds.

  “Do you know the first thing Spartans condemned to death did before their executions?” Regina asked. “Had their hair styled.”

  Janina pulled Regina’s dirty kerchief off. Ordinarily, fixing one’s hair was a punishable offense. The rule was hair must be kept back, tied with a regulation kerchief, but Binz relaxed the rules when a prisoner was about to die. Regina’s hair had grown longish when she was recovering from her operation, thick and dark. Janina swept it back in the prettiest French twist. Someone from a top bunk handed down a hairpin she’d probably traded a bread ration for.

  “Kasia, I want you to have my English phrase book,” Regina said. “Homework tonight is prepositions. And if you could get my Troilus and Cressida to my Freddie once all this is over…”

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to refuse the drink,” Regina said. We all knew a sedative drink was offered to those taken to the wall to make things easier for all. “Do you think I’ll be brave enough to shout ‘Long live Poland’?”

  I held her hand. “It doesn’t matter—”

  “It does, Kasia. You know they hate that.”

  Prisoners faced
death in different ways. Some cried and raged. Others grew quiet or prayed. Regina stood near her bunk and read us her favorite lines from Troilus and Cressida, rushing to fit in as much as possible before Binz arrived:

  O brave Troilus! Look well upon him, niece: look you how his sword is bloodied, and his helm more hacked than Hector’s, and how he looks, and how he goes! O admirable youth! He ne’er saw three and twenty.

  As Regina read, we pinched her cheeks to bring color to them. A girl who worked in the kitchen had some beet juice, and Janina smoothed a bit of it on Regina’s lips.

  It wasn’t five minutes before Binz and her guards burst into the block. Regina leaned close to me, book clutched at her chest.

  “Tell everyone this happened,” she said.

  “Hand it over,” Binz said. She snatched the book. “What are you so worried about? The commandant himself has said you are to be freed.”

  Was that possible? Surely it was another lie.

  Janina untied the string from her own waist and cinched it around Regina’s, making her uniform look more like a real dress.

  “Out, out,” Binz said, jabbing at Regina with her rubber stick.

  Regina limped to the door, her leg not yet fully healed. At the door, she handed her reading glasses to Zuzanna and turned to smile at us. She’d taken on a radiance, a new sort of glow, and there was high color in her cheeks.

  Binz tossed the book to an Aufseherin and pushed Regina out to the road. Not one prisoner who watched Regina go could keep from crying. How brave she was. The name Regina means “queen,” and this was fitting, for she looked regal that day. If not for her uneven way of walking, Regina could have been a movie star or fashion model, standing tall and proud on her way down Beauty Road.

  With heavy hearts, Zuzanna and I shared Regina’s soup with Janina. How guilty we felt eating that, but she’d not meant for it to go to waste. We split the sweet little carrot, such a delicacy. I would get strong on Regina’s soup and live to tell the world about it all.