Leeway Cottage

by Beth Gutcheon

  They don’t own anything except their bodies at this juncture. There is not a rag, a towel, or a hairpin among them. Nina and Ulla and a woman from Fyn called Søsti huddle together. They are not allowed to talk. Time has turned into an alien substance, sluggish and punitive.

  The SS doctor arrives at last with a detail of guards, and the women are ordered to walk, on parade, past these men who study their figures, their gaits. It is not, in this instance, an advantage to understand German. The coarseness and contempt that is felt for them as captives, and as women, is revolting.

  Nina notices that a teenaged girl, not yet starved enough to have stopped her menses, is bleeding down her leg. She is pointlessly trying to screen her pubic area with her hands, but the blood smears between her thighs like bright paint. Two of the guards point and nudge each other. Nina can imagine the sticky feel of it. It’s been months since she bled;how many? In Vestre prison, must have been the last time. She doesn’t remember having to organize or wash rags in Horserød or Frøslev.

  When they have all been stared at, walking, some with heads high, most with eyes on the packed dirt beneath their bare feet,they are once again lined up at a door to go in to the doctor. Nina thinks she has never been so cold.

  The line is moving like a worm a hundred feet long, into a room and out the other side, with a brief pause by each worm segment at the examining table. Through the door as she waits her turn, Nina can see the doctor. He has curly red hair and thick glasses. His method is practiced, his manner bored. With each woman he lifts her arms,then her breasts,to be sure she isn’t concealing deformities or contraband. He bends her over and searches her anal cavity. Then he orders her onto a bare table on her back. He stands between her raised knees and jams a cold steel speculum into her to hold her vagina open. He settles his ample buttocks on a stool and with angled mirrors on metal stalks,has a good look around inside her. There is a light stand on little black wheels in the corner, but it must be broken. Instead, for light, a guard standing beside the doctor holds an electric torch trained on the woman’s most private parts. The only conversation is between these two, about where the doctor wants the torch aimed. It doesn’t take long, but it’s much more like a search and seizure than a medical exam. Most are weeping by the time they are done.

  The doctor rarely shows any reaction to what he is looking at, or to the gasps of shock or pain or the tears coming from the other end of the body on the table. He makes no attempt to sterilize his instruments between uses. He just sticks them into woman after woman. Nina feels fear like nausea creeping on her as she moves toward him. Sweat is pricking her armpits. She tries to steel herself, tries not to look, tries to take herself mentally elsewhere. But when it is her turn and she feels those hard fingers in her rectum, followed by the legs roughly spread, and the cold and slimy metal pushing in, she is so horribly present and alive simultaneously to what it feels like and what it must look like, that she feels she will never again be completely human.

  The doctor adds a fillip to her examination. When she gets off the table, he stands,too, and puts his moist hands up to her face. He curls her lips back with his thick fingers and examines her teeth. He says something to an SS man lounging nearby, and a note is made.

  They are outside again. Nina can’t help herself; she spits on the ground. She wants to do it again and again but a guard steps toward her,threatening. Now Ulla is beside Nina, and Søsti is coming out the door. A large cloud has blotted out the sun and the afternoon is colder than the morning. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since they had anything to eat.

  They are ordered into lines,for their final processing. On long tables before them are piles of civilian clothing. The Reich has run out of striped uniforms. One by one each woman is handed a dress, a coat, a pair of shoes, some underdrawers. There is no attempt to give them clothes that fit;if anything, the opposite is the order of the day. Slight skinny Nina gets a fat lady’s summer dress of flowered georgette and a coat of navy poplin with the buttons missing in place of her own winter clothes. Ulla gets a dress with a tight bodice she can’t possibly close. Søsti gets shoes she can only get her feet halfway into. The clothes all have big X’s painted on the back, in case anyone thinks she can get away and melt into the surrounding country unnoticed. There are hundreds of dead lice in the seams of the coats. And their owners are…where?

  They are given numbers in the high five digits,and one by one assigned to categories. The Danes are all Politicals but they get no red triangles to wear,as the Reich is out of those, too. At last,they march off to the admissions block where they will be quarantined.

  The quarantine is hardest for those who have not come from other prisons. They are homesick and shocked, like houseplants stuck into freezing cold ground with no chance to harden off. Although they are healthier coming into the camps, they die much faster. They fail to heed warnings from more experienced prisoners;they don’t yet believe they are here. A Jewish girl from Liguria who had been living aboveground, passing as Christian, has her coat stolen immediately. She has to stand in a thin dress in the winter morning at roll call with her head and arms bare and blue;roll call takes six hours that particular day as an unusual number who have died during the night fail to appear,and all are punished.

  They are given typhoid shots from fat blunt needles. The doses are much too strong and Nina grows hot and ill from hers,but she is lucky. She has Ulla and Søsti to bring her food and water and to see she isn’t robbed as she sleeps. The Italian girl is dead in four days. The Frenchwoman who shared her bed points this out to the Block senior so the body can be carried off to the funeral parlor crematorium in Fürstenburg and the rest of them won’t be punished at roll call.

  The Block senior is Polish. The Poles as a group are the intellectuals of the camp, the best linguists and best educated generally; so many Block seniors in the camp are Polish that all the seniors are known as Blockovas. This Blockova is in charge of teaching them the camp rules while they are in quarantine. How to make their beds, how to wear their kerchiefs, how to address superiors. She gives all instruction in German only. Some new arrivals don’t know what’s happening or why for weeks,if they live that long.

  The Blockova tells them that if they are strong enough, they should volunteer for work outside the camp walls. It is physically grueling, but there is a chance there in the gardens or forests to dig a potato or gather mushrooms, and unlike those inside, you get a noon meal. This Blockova is reasonably kind, though not to the point of compromising the special deals she has organized to benefit her favorites and herself.

  Quarantine is expected to last two or three weeks,but the sudden arrival of hundreds of Jewish women from the Budapest ghetto swamps the admissions block after a week and a half, and the Danes are moved out to a barracks that is now a mixture of cultures and languages, the most common being Ukrainian. The new Blockova is another Pole, a pharmacist in her old life. Here they sleep three to a “bunk,” really just a wooden platform, the platforms stacked three high. Ulla, Nina, and Søsti are assigned a bottom bunk, which they think is good luck; it means Ulla won’t have to climb up and down, which is hard for her, as the cold and her fall from the freight car has aggravated an injury to her shoulder.

  They are wrong about the luck, as they learn the second night, when a woman in the bunk above them suffers an explosive bout of the shits. It runs down over the edge of her bunk and onto the inside edge of theirs. Søsti yells as she finds it in her hair. In the bunk above, the sufferer weeps and apologizes (they infer from her tone, though they don’t know her language) while her bunkmates shout angrily at Søsti. Most of the toilets in their barracks,of which there are only twelve for hundreds of women, are broken. Eventually the sufferer is led by her bunkmates outside to the “chicken roost,” a long row of seats braced above a pit,entirely exposed. The smell of shit and lime from these pits is one that will never entirely leave Nina’s sense memory. It appears on the wind at unexpected times until she is an old lady.
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br />   The woman is still helplessly evacuating during roll call at five the next morning. Watery shit runs down her legs, into her shoes, and onto the ground. Women to whom this happens are called “Schmuckstücke,” piece of jewelry, as in “what a gem she is.” When they are finally released from roll call, about eight o’clock this particular morning, the Schmuckstücke is told to stay where she is,wet and stinking. They never see her again;she has been transferred to the diarrhea barracks, known inevitably as “the Shit Block,” where conditions are so vile as to be indescribable.

  Ulla has learned that their Blockova teaches classics in the underground camp university. Ulla asks her,in Latin, to be allowed to move with Nina and Søsti to a top bunk.When they come back from work detail at the end of the day, it has been done.

  They have acquired bowls by now, and wooden spoons. Ulla brought a bowl from quarantine and shared it with Nina. Søsti had to save half her bread ration to barter for a bowl from a woman who had two, as her bunkmate had recently died. Nina does the same, and on their first Sunday in the barracks, the only day of freedom now (work shifts now run eleven hours a day, six days a week),Ulla sews for them pouches in which they can keep their belongings always with them;their bowls and spoons hang from their waists.

  They eat in their barracks. At 4 A.M.,when the first siren sounds,panicky activity explodes from the quiet bunks. Women run to line up for the toilets. Others make the beds in the precise way ordered. The table seniors and their helpers go to the kitchen and carry the food back to be doled out by the room seniors. In the morning, it’s “coffee” (a brown liquid the Blockova claims has sedative in it, probably bromide) and the day’s bread ration. At 5 A.M., the siren sounds for roll call. The morning roll call is shorter than the evening, often not even two hours long, as the SS wants the work details on the job as soon as possible.

  Ulla and Nina are assigned to the textile factories,working yarn-spinning machines alongside mostly Soviet army women. Ulla is older and much less physically strong than most of the workers. One who works at Ulla’s bench, a Slavic girl with big bones and most of her teeth missing, is struck by Ulla’s pale blue eyes,with their yellow lights around the pupils. She tells Ulla whom she is missing, who it is in her life who has eyes like that, but they have no common language. Still, the girl protects Ulla;she and Nina know they could have drawn much worse work.Standing at the machines over ten hours a day is painful. Also the light is bad, and the air is filled with fibers that make their eyes and noses burn. But the SS men who oversee this shop are older and calmer than the ones in the sewing and fur shops, who stride up and down between the aisles of the machines yelling “Your quotas! Your quotas!” and punching women who fall behind. The workers who can keep the pace are paid half a reichsmark a day, which they can spend at the canteen for such luxuries as a paper of salt. Workers who miss their quotas have their pay docked, and the pay is in any case a tenth of what the work would have fetched outside the camps. Himmler,who set up the camp system, is getting rich. Lucky him. It may be true that there is sedative in the “coffee.” In any case, those who will survive this experience have the trick of narrowing their brain functions to a pinhole, as an alligator in winter goes for hours without breathing and drops her heart rate to almost stopped.

  Søsti is in the furrier’s factory, where the air smells all day of blood and tanning acid. Skilled furriers are sewing the skins of angora rabbits,raised in the camp for the purpose, into the lining of hats,and larger pieces of fur into winter coats for SS officers “in the east.” The “larger pieces of fur” is where Søsti’s bench comes in. Fur coats,they are told, are turned in by patriotic Germans to aid the cause of the mighty Reich. But it is perfectly clear that in fact almost all of them have been stolen from Jews. The workers are watched as if they were deceitful rodents scavenging for nuts, as they unstitch the linings, sometimes silk and satin, often monogrammed, from these coats. Usually the coats have been stored in SS warehouses for who knows how long, and are full of fleas and lice. But sometimes there will be a handkerchief in a pocket, still smelling of lavender or cloves. Once the woman across from Søsti found a cough drop and managed to unwrap and eat it before she was seen. Once Søsti found a green suede glove. She held it to her nose and tears started in her eyes. The next thing she knew, a guard had clubbed her in the back of the head. He stood over her,yelling in German, as she got up from the floor and delivered the glove to him. (Why? What did the Reich need with one glove smelling of lily of the valley…?) The saddest was when they found bank- notes or jewelry sewn into the linings to pay for escape and a new life.

  When the furs had been stripped of embellishments,they ripped out the seams of the garment. You had to work very fast, with your face close to the dust- and bug-filled pelts, to be sure to cut only the threads that held them together. Søsti hated it; she couldn’t stop wondering what the owners were thinking when they first put on this coat or jacket of mink, of beaver, of fox fur or Persian lamb, feeling loved and warm and lucky, looking forward to a dinner party or a night at the opera. She was with them in the hopefulness of sewing valuables into secret pockets, picturing themselves at safe harbor in Cuba, Brazil, the United States. She cried at night and threatened to accept the offer made to her and Nina, to go to work in the whorehouses at Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen.

  “You get your own room;you can sleep all day and work only two hours a night. And they let you go after six months,” she wept to Nina. This was in the hour before lights-out at 9 P.M. Søsti lay with her head in Nina’s lap, while Nina patiently picked out lice nits from her hair and crushed them with her fingernails.

  “Liebchen,” says the Frenchwoman in the bunk below them, “if they let you go after six months,we’d all do it. They work you until you get syphilis or the clap, then they send you back here. Stop crying.”

  In early November, hundreds of skeletal women arrive in Ravensbrück from Auschwitz, where the gas chambers have been closed as the Soviet army approached. The result was overcrowding. The governors of Auschwitz solve this problem by sending it to Ravensbrück. In the “slum” barracks,where the Danes are, there are suddenly four and five to some bunks, and the overflow women sleep on the floor. Even the elite barracks,the Polish and the Jehovah’s Witness blocks, lose their day rooms; everyone eats her “coffee” or soup standing up. The hundreds for whom there is still no room are put into “Block 25.” Block 25 is a tent.

  The tent had been set up as auxiliary admissions but by this last winter it is permanent housing for Jews, Gypsies, and the weakest from Auschwitz. There are no toilets or washing facilities except a ditch outside. There is little light. It is literally freezing inside, and the savage, starving women lie in their own shit in wet icy straw. There are no work assignments for them. The seniors of Block 25,who would ordinarily dole out the food to the inmates,are afraid to go inside, so they put the food through the flap, and those strong enough to get to it first,eat. The rest lie in their filth and starve to death. Practically all the Auschwitz women assigned to the tent will die there, and the screams and stink from inside are with everyone else day and night. Guards patrol the outside, to keep the tent dwellers in and the other prisoners out. When some of the Communists,the best-organized group in camp, manage to steal ten-gallon vats of watery soup and smuggle them into the tent, the women inside lunge,fighting, for the stockpots and overturn them all.

  There is now a sickening greasy smoke in the air,coming from right outside the front walls of the camp. The crematoria in Fürstenburg cannot dispose of the bodies fast enough anymore, and the camp has built its own ovens. Nevertheless,in all the blocks,the dead pile up faster than they can be burned. They are stacked now in the washrooms overnight, and Søsti hears that in some of the blocks when the bodies are carted out in the morning, they bear marks showing people have tried to eat them.

  Nina, Ulla, and Søsti are allowed to keep their bunk to themselves, because Ulla is a favorite of the Blockova. This means, too, that when the room senior dishes
up their soup at night,she dips to the bottom of the pot,so they get bits of potato peel or other solids. But the degradation of conditions all over camp has created a new problem. There are more and more orphaned children. The children in the tent whose mothers die simply starve to death. But when children from the barracks lose their mothers,other women adopt them, hide them and feed them and share with them whatever they have. A week before Christmas, Ulla brings a small Hungarian girl home with her from evening roll call.

  The Blockova doesn’t like it. The room senior doesn’t like it. The girl is small, she looks unhealthy, she may be Gypsy. The Frenchwoman in the bunk below vehemently doesn’t like it and says things Ulla is glad the child can’t understand. They think her name is Zsuzsa;anyway, that’s what they call her. Now they sleep in the bunk with Søsti’s and Nina’s heads at one end, Ulla’s and Zsuzsa’s at the other. They teach the child Danish words for “please,” “thank you,” and “water.” When they are at work during the day, she stays in the block and plays very quietly with a doll someone has made for her out of straw.

  Astonishingly, some women from the elite blocks get permission from the Head Overseer to put on a Christmas party for the camp children. (The Head Overseer is,after all, a woman, too.) They are allowed to build and paint a set for a puppet theater. There is a Christmas tree. A choir sings “O Tannenbaum,” and many in the audience, prisoners and guards, cry, thinking of home. The puppet theater falls flat—the younger children are frightened of the talking horses and sheep; the only animals they’ve ever seen are guard dogs. But the Christmas Man puts presents under all the children’s pillows that night. Zsuzsa gets a tiny doll, a stick dressed in a striped prison uniform dress and a kerchief. It’s more like a fetish than a doll, but it must remind Zsuzsa of her dead mother,for she is never without it after that.