Lilac Girls

by Martha Hall Kelly

  I sat in the reception area paging through the newspaper. I turned to the society page by habit and saw a full page of photos of the April in Paris Ball. Just under a picture of Marilyn Monroe and the British ambassador, his gaze fixed upon her décolletage, was a photo of Paul and me. I just about fell off my lobby chair. Though his tuxedo was cut in the European style, a bit too nipped at the waist, and my train was soiled, we did make a reasonably handsome couple. The caption read: Miss Ferriday and Paul Rodierre, back on Broadway?

  I was still reeling from seeing the photo when the receptionist ushered me down a hallway past oversized prints of Saturday Review covers in aluminum frames to a conference room. Norman had gathered his staff at the long conference table, a yellow legal pad at each place.

  “Nice to meet you, Caroline,” Norman said, as he stood to greet me. It was impossible not to be charmed by his old-fashioned good looks and generous smile. Though even the simplest bow tie can be most unbecoming on the wrong man, Norman wore his madras butterfly with aplomb. “You have our undivided attention for a whole five minutes.”

  Norman went to the far end of the room and leaned against the wall. I was thrown for a moment to be in the presence of such a distinguished editor, known around the world. All at once the butterflies in my stomach would not settle, and my mouth went dry. I summoned Helen Hayes’s advice, which had always helped me onstage: “Don’t be boring. Use your whole body.” I drew myself up and started strong.

  “Mr. Cousins, since you and your wife have raised a considerable amount of money for the Hiroshima Maidens—” I paused and looked about the room. Norman’s staff was anything but attentive. They fidgeted with their watches and pens and wrote on their pads. How could a person communicate with such a distracted audience? “I thought you might be equally interested in this group of women in similar circumstances.”

  “These are Polish women?” Norman asked, playing with his handheld tape recorder.

  “I’m afraid I can’t continue without your full attention, Mr. Cousins. I need to use the little time we have effectively, you see.”

  Norman and his staff leaned forward, all eyes on me. I had my audience.

  “Yes, Polish women, Catholics, political prisoners arrested for their work with the Polish underground. Held as prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp, Hitler’s only major concentration camp for women, and used for medical experimentation. There was a special Doctors Trial at Nuremberg, but the world has forgotten the victims, and there’s been no help or support for the ones who survived.”

  Norman averted his gaze and looked out the window to the taupe stone rectangles and water towers of Gotham that filled the view ten stories up. “I don’t know if our readers will be up for another campaign so soon, Miss Ferriday.”

  “The Hiroshima project isn’t even off the books yet,” said a man built like a pipe cleaner, his Dave Garroway glasses at least two sizes too big for his face. I knew him by sight as Walter Strong-Whitman, a man who attended our church, though we’d never been introduced.

  “These women were operated upon in a complex series of experiments,” I said.

  I passed a series of eight-by-ten glossies around the table and watched the staffers’ faces as they passed each photo on to the next person, revulsion turning to horror.

  Norman stepped to the table. “My God, Caroline, these barely look like legs. This one is missing whole bones and muscles. How can they walk?”

  “Not well, as you can imagine. They hopped about the camp. That, in part, is why they were called the Rabbits. That and the fact that they served as the Nazis’ laboratory animals.”

  “How did they even make it home to Poland?” Norman asked.

  “However they could. The Swedish Red Cross rescued some. Some were sent home by train when Russians liberated the camp.”

  “What are their immediate needs?” Norman asked.

  I stepped closer to Norman. “They are having terrible trouble in Poland, behind the Iron Curtain with little access to modern medical care and no help from the German government.”

  “The Iron Curtain,” Mr. Strong-Whitman said with a laugh. “We have no place messing with all that—”

  “West Germany has compensated other deportees, but not the Rabbits, since they don’t recognize Communist Poland as a country. Some have died from the simplest conditions we can cure here.”

  “I don’t know, Caroline,” Norman said. “The Russians aren’t cooperating with anyone these days.”

  “Why should these girls have to suffer because their oppressors won’t allow them to leave the country?”

  “Murphy got into East Germany for the United Airlines story,” one young staffer said.

  “This might work as a travel piece,” said a woman in a handsome houndstooth jacket.

  “The Pan Am client might help,” said another.

  “This is a terrible idea, Norman,” Strong-Whitman said. “We can’t go to our readers for every little thing, on the dole for this and that. Our readers couldn’t care less about Poland.”

  “Why don’t we find out?” I said.

  “This is a literary magazine, Miss Ferriday,” Strong-Whitman said. “We can’t be expected to cover the pet charity story of every clubwoman in New York.”

  Clubwoman? I took a deep breath.

  “You can maintain high standards and still aid the disadvantaged. Norman has proven that with the Maidens.”

  “We can run a piece in Lifestyle and offer an address for donations,” Norman said. “Nothing too fancy, mind you. Maybe a page.”

  “This country’s charitable muscle has atrophied,” Strong-Whitman said. “It has been how many years since the war ended? Twelve? No one will give.”

  “What address should we print?” asked a young woman with a steno pad.

  “The Hay, Main Street, Bethlehem, Connecticut,” I said.

  Were they really doing this? Every muscle relaxed.

  “Sure you want mail sent to your home address, Miss Ferriday?” the woman asked.

  “How’s the post office in Bethlehem?” Norman asked. “Can they handle some extra mail?”

  I thought of our postmaster, Earl Johnson, white as Wonder Bread in his summer pith helmet and khaki shorts, often thrown by a misspelled surname.

  “Why, it’s first-rate,” I said. “They are inundated with mail every year, since everyone wants the Bethlehem stamp cancellation on their Christmas cards. Our post office can handle this.”

  “Bethlehem it is,” Norman said. “Congratulations, Caroline. Let’s see if we can bring your Rabbits to America.”

  —

  NORMAN ENDED UP WRITING a lovely article about the Rabbits, four pages long.

  It began, As I start to write, I know my greatest difficulty will be to convince people that what is told here is not a glimpse into the bowels of an imaginary hell but part of our world, and only got better from there, explaining in careful detail the plight of the girls and their grim situation.

  After the Saturday Review went to print, a few letters trickled in, one asking if the Rabbits needed a theatrical agent, another inquiring whether the ladies could perform at a 4-H club meeting. I faced the reality that America might indeed have charity fatigue.

  The following week, on a glorious, warm fall morning so hazy it was like looking at the world through cheesecloth, I finished feeding the horses in the barn and walked to our Bethlehem Post Office to pick up the mail. Our sow, whom Mother had named Lady Chatterley, followed close behind, apparently unable to let me out of her sight.

  I passed Mother’s Litchfield Garden Club friends assembled in the garden, washing down Serge’s coconut washboard cookies with whirligig punch, their crystal cups flashing rainbows as they sipped. Sally Bloss, Mother’s lieutenant, still in garden clogs, her bandana tied like a baby’s bib, stood at the front of the group lecturing on their topic of the day: wasps, the garden’s friend. Slight, dark-haired Nellie Bird Wilson stood adjacent, skinny as a wasp herself, holding a
presumably vacant papery nest aloft. Mother’s social calendar was much fuller than mine, filled with garden club, charity fetes at her Nutmeg Square and Round Dance Club, and coaching her baseball team.

  Once I made it to the post office, just a few steps across the street from The Hay, the American flag above the door waved me in, and I left Lady Chatterley with nose to the screen door. Our little Bethlehem Post Office was a warren of small rooms tucked under the wing of Johnson Brothers Grocery. Johnson Brothers was a town meeting place with our only gas pump and ice cream counter.

  I found Earl Johnson in his mailroom, a tight space no bigger than a closet. He sat atop his high stool, a white wall of mail cubbies peppered with envelopes behind him. For his clothes, Earl favored the neutral part of the color wheel, giving the impression that if he stood still long enough he would become indistinguishable from his mail. Beads of perspiration shone on his forehead, no doubt due to that morning’s ten minutes of rigorous mail sorting.

  Earl leaned toward me through the window and slid a flyer for the upcoming Bethlehem Fair my way.

  “Been hot,” Earl said, unable to look me in the eye.

  Was I that ferocious?

  “It has indeed, Earl.”

  “Hope you’re not here to see the barber downstairs. He’s not workin’ today.”

  I took the flyer. “Is this the only mail for me?”

  Earl stood and sidled out of his mail closet. “Can you help me with something, Miss Ferriday?”

  Country life has its charms, but I had a sudden yearning and appreciation for the Manhattan post office at Thirty-fourth Street, that massive, columned complex of efficiency.

  “Must we, Earl?”

  Earl waved me down the back hallway, and I followed. He lingered next to a closed door.

  “Well?” I said. “Open it.”

  “Can’t,” he said with a shrug.

  I fanned myself with the flyer. “Well, get the key, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It’s not locked.”

  I took the knob in hand and turned it, then pushed the door with one hip, but it only opened a crack into the darkened room.

  “Something’s blocking the door, Earl. What do you do here all day? It can’t take much to keep things tidy.”

  “Clyde!” Earl called at the top of his voice. Mr. Gardener’s nephew came running.

  “Yes, Earl?” said dear Clyde, who was no thicker than two sheets of paper.

  “Get in there for Miss Ferriday,” Earl said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Clyde, happy to have a mission that celebrated his size. Clyde slid through the door opening like a stinkbug slipping under a window sash.

  I put my lips to the door crack. “Open the door, Clyde.”

  “Can’t, Miss Ferriday. There’s stuff in front of it.”

  “Stuff?” Where was Clyde getting his slang? “You really need to clean this place up, Earl.”

  Earl toed a knot of wood in the floor.

  “Just clear the door, Clyde,” I said. “Open the window shades. Then we can help.”

  I heard shuffling, a groan from Clyde, and the snap of an ascendant window shade.

  “Almost there, Miss Ferriday,” Clyde said.

  Clyde opened the door, and a lovely Steinway smile seized his face, his teeth white and straight as keys.

  The room was heaped with canvas bags, each big enough to fit Clyde himself, U.S. MAIL stamped in blue letters on all of them. The bags covered the floor and the counter that ran around the room. Some had burst at their rope handles, belching out piles of letters and packages.

  I waded in through an avalanche of envelopes.

  “It’s all addressed to some rabbits, Miss Ferriday,” Clyde said. “Look, one from Hawaii.”

  “My God, Earl,” I said, a bit dizzy. “All for us?”

  “Got ten more in the truck. Been dumpin’ them in here through the windows.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,’ Earl?”

  “Beg pardon, Miss?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I scooped up a handful of letters with return addresses from Boston, Las Vegas—Mexico?

  “At Christmas I have fifteen extra employees,” Earl said. “It’s just me here summers. There’s more in the basement. So much the barber can’t get in there.”

  Mr. Gardener led Mother’s garden club over with a convoy of wheelbarrows, and we ferried the mail back to The Hay, with Clyde astride one bag, riding it like a pony, Lady Chatterley struggling to keep up. We opened every letter, separated them into piles on the dining room table, and called out their contents.

  “Seventeen magazine is designing a clothing line for the girls!” Sally Bloss said. “Dr. Jacob Fine at Beth Israel Hospital donating medical care—”

  Nellie Bird Wilson waved a piece of Roy Rogers stationery. “Kevin Clausen from Baton Rouge sent his allowance.”

  “How lovely,” I said, scribbling it all down.

  Mother couldn’t rip open envelopes fast enough. “National Jewish Hospital in Denver, Caroline.”

  “Wayne State University,” Mr. Gardener said. “Dr. Jerome Krause, dentist.”

  Sally held up a letter on blue-castled letterhead. “Disneyland in Anaheim is donating passes…The girls are to be Mr. Disney’s honored guests.”

  “The Danforth Foundation is forwarding a check, Caroline,” Mother said. “A whopper.”

  Nellie fanned herself with an envelope as she read. “The Converse Rubber Company wants to design a collection of footwear for the ladies.”

  “Clothes and handbags from Lane Bryant,” Serge said.

  We made a pile for the radiologists and osteopaths donating medical care and one for the dentists offering free cleanings. A pile for hospitals offering beds. Families from Bar Harbor to San Diego opening their homes to the girls. By nightfall we added up money and checks totaling over six thousand dollars, more than enough money to support a trip for the girls.

  In the next Saturday Review, Norman called America “electrifying in its generosity,” and I was numb with happiness.

  Our Rabbits were coming to America.

  1958

  Dr. Hitzig and I arrived in Poland that spring. It was a pleasure to travel with the doctor, for he was blessed with a razor-sharp mind and a gentle way one generally finds only in the Amish. He was our American medical expert in orthopedic surgery, charged with determining which of the Polish ladies were healthy enough to withstand a trip to the United States later that year. I was along to organize the travel documents and smooth the way.

  An official delegation met us and whisked us to the Warsaw Orthopedic Clinic by private car. Once we entered the clinic, Polish doctors surrounded Dr. Hitzig. They pumped his hand, patted him on the back, and escorted him to a conference table in front of a makeshift stage. I took a seat next to Dr. Hitzig as twenty-nine other doctors, Polish and Russian, followed. There were also two members of ZBoWiD there, the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, an official Polish veterans association, the authority Norman and I worked with to ensure the Rabbits’ rights.

  The clinic was much like the Bethlehem Grange Hall, wide open and so drafty we felt the breeze from the windows even in the center of the room.

  The first three ladies entered the clinic huddled together, clutching their coat collars to their chins. Each wore a cloth purse over one forearm and the strain of the trip on her face, for simple steps appeared to still be painful for all three. Our translator, a severe young man with a Stalin-like head of hair, took a seat next to Dr. Hitzig, and the women walked to the changing screen behind the stage.

  The first Rabbit, a pretty woman in her midthirties with short dark hair and dark eyes, emerged wrapped like a Greek goddess in a dull white sheet. She shuffled to the folding chair on the stage, wincing with each step. Once seated, she looked over the audience, her chin high.

  The lead docto
r, Professor Gruca, an energetic, avuncular man shaped like a fire hydrant, took the stage and read from the document. At seemingly endless intervals, the translator shared the English translation:

  “The death of Adolf Hitler’s close friend, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, precipitated the ersatz medical experiments referred to as ‘the sulfonamide operations’ at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Dr. Karl Gebhardt, close friend of and personal physician to Heinrich Himmler, was called to treat Heydrich, who’d been critically wounded in an attempted assassination, a car bombing arranged by the Czech underground.”

  I kept my eye on the woman onstage. She held her head high as she listened.

  “In treating Heydrich, Dr. Gebhardt refused to use sulfa drugs, and chose other treatments instead. Once Heydrich died, Hitler accused Gebhardt of letting his friend die from gas gangrene. As a result, Himmler and Gebhardt planned a way to prove to Hitler the decision not to use sulfa had been correct: a series of experiments, first performed on males at Sachsenhausen and then on female Ravensbrück inmates.”

  The woman onstage brushed her hair back from her forehead, her hand shaking.

  “Gebhardt and staff performed surgeries on perfectly healthy women, specially chosen for their sound, sturdy legs, to replicate traumatic injuries. They added bacterial cultures to the wounds to produce gas gangrene, then administered sulfa drugs to some. Each sulfa patient that died proved Gebhardt’s case. The inmates operated on”—Dr. Gruca indicated the woman in the chair—“included Kasia Bakoski, née Kuzmerick, currently employed as a nurse for the state.”

  The doctor pulled back the sheet to reveal the woman’s leg. Next to me, Dr. Hitzig took a sharp intake of breath. Her lower leg was shrunken and horribly disfigured, like a gutted fish.

  “Mrs. Bakoski was operated on in 1942. She underwent three subsequent surgeries. All Group One: Bacteria, wood, glass, and additional materials were introduced. An incision was made in the left lower extremity and blood vessels on both sides of the wound tied off.”