Secrets She Kept

by Cathy Gohlke

  But I couldn’t. I turned into Carl’s outstretched arms as Geoffrey lifted the sheet over Grandfather’s face.

  As if Mama’s death is replaying itself. I trembled, as I’d done in mourning. But how could I mourn after what I’d just learned? You can’t be gone. You haven’t told me everything. You never told me about Mama! Did you ever see her again? Did you get her out? Is Lukas my father—or was there someone else? I wanted to scream in agony and despair and frustration.

  Carl cradled me in his arms, rocking me from side to side.

  “Shall I telephone the mortuary?” Geoffrey quietly asked. “I pronounced the cause and time of death, but you’ll need someone to pick up the body.”

  I couldn’t do this alone. I looked to Carl. Please, please take over for me.

  “Ja, that is good. Danke schön, Geoffrey.”

  “He received good care, Fräulein. You have no need to worry about that man—that Dr. Peterson. Herr Sommer’s heart gave out, as we knew in time it would. I will vouch for that.”

  I couldn’t turn, couldn’t stop shaking.

  “Come.” Carl pulled me toward the door. “You must go to bed. I’ll bring you some hot tea.”

  “No—no, I don’t want to be alone. Please.”

  He pulled me toward the door. I glanced one last time at the sheet-covered form, not knowing what I felt, understanding only that this moment would not come again, and that every connection to my mother was severed.

  38

  LIESELOTTE KIRCHMANN

  NOVEMBER 1944–APRIL 1945

  It had been more than a month since I’d crept back to Barracks 28 in the middle of the night, my dress torn and blood running down my legs. Mutter Kirchmann had cried over me and the Sisters had washed me as best they could, cleaning the bruises on my face and arms.

  But they could do nothing about the terrible knot in my throat and the ache in my stomach. My heart had been ripped from my body—the body I’d saved so carefully, all of my life, for Lukas.

  Over and over at night I woke, screaming from my nightmares or memories. Mutter Kirchmann held me in her arms and whispered, “Though a mother—or a father—forget their little child, I will not forget thee. God loves you, my Lieselotte. He loves you with His everlasting love, with the love of His life.”

  I wanted to believe her. I knew she believed, and the Sisters so close to her believed. They radiated light—some life inside I could not see. But all the light had gone out of me. All I could see was Ravensbrück, the brutality, the cruelty of men and women, and the hatred.

  It was not unusual for women worked to the bone and within an inch of life to miss their monthlies. No one thought anything of it as the days melted into one another. With no sanitation, it was better for all of us to be free of that curse. But when the morning sickness began, Mutter Kirchmann realized first what it meant.

  “You must let me do the heavier pulling from now on. You must take special care—for you and your baby.”

  “This is not my baby! This is not—”

  “New life—a life created by God in your womb, Lieselotte. A child to be brought into this world.”

  “How can you say that? How can you forget Lukas?”

  “I never forget Lukas. How do you know the child does not belong to Lukas?”

  I gasped and groaned. Would that this is our baby! That I carry part of him in me! “It can’t be.”

  “How do you know? The time was so close together.”

  Sobs of uncertainty, of hope against hope, fought with disbelief and despair, racking my body. Light as I was, my heaving shifted the straw on our hard wooden pallet and must have awakened the woman who slept on the platform beneath us, a Dutch woman who worked in the dispensary.

  “Shh,” she whispered, reaching round the bunk for my arm. “You musn’t let them know.”

  “If they knew, perhaps they’d grant lighter work—” Mutter Kirchmann began.

  “Nein. Nein! All pregnancies are terminated or experimented upon. If you value your life, or the life of your baby, never let them know,” she whispered.

  If I value my life? If I value this life inside me? How can I live without Lukas, or live with the knowledge that this child might not be his, is probably not his?

  “Let me see what I can do—something for the sickness, and some vitamins, maybe.”

  “Ja, ja,” Mutter Kirchmann enthused. “And she will need more to eat.”

  They meant well, but they were out of their minds. The only way to get more food was to steal it from the mouths of the women around me. I wouldn’t do that. I would die before I did that.

  There were those willing to help me die, willing to end my nightmare quickly—without ever telling the guards. And there were those willing to help me kill my baby. I was not the only woman raped by guards—before or after incarceration at Ravensbrück. Some chose not to go on, or not to carry their child. I considered this.

  But when it came to it, I wanted to live and wanted my baby to live. Mutter Kirchmann was right—I didn’t know for certain that the baby was not Lukas’s. Even if it wasn’t, I could not take its life.

  Though it hardly seemed possible, I didn’t need to steal to survive. The Dutch woman slipped me vitamins, and the food, others offered freely. Not because Mutter Kirchmann asked them. As the days passed, one and then another realized I was pregnant with that sixth sense women have about such things. And strange as it may seem, in that dark and evil place, the child growing within me became a source of light and hope for them.

  Often I’d find a crust of bread pressed into my pocket or a cup of the thin turnip gruel passed across bunks to me. At night, women, exhausted from their day’s labor, sometimes touched my arm, sometimes reached shyly to rub my abdomen, smiling at their own memories.

  In the factory, women, without a word, suddenly appeared on either side of me, helping to push the heavy cart, lightening my load. I hadn’t the strength to thank them, but I wondered that they used their energy for me—for the child growing inside me.

  “New life!” The more feeble of the Sisters often squeezed my hand in passing as smile lines wreathed her face. And I wondered that it was true. Could there be new life in Ravensbrück?

  I cherished their care, but sometimes I felt such a fraud. Finally, I confided to the Sister, “But I don’t even know if this is my husband’s baby—if—”

  “But God knows this is His child, just as you or I or anyone here.”

  “What if . . . what if that trash of a Nazi is the fa—?”

  “My dear,” she laughed softly. “We’re all trash. It’s only His love and grace, His forgiveness, that make us clean.” She wrapped her thin arm around me. “And it’s only by forgiving that we can be free of that poison that would steal our life.” She held my face in her hands. “Don’t hate, my child. That’s a prison worse than Ravensbrück.”

  In early November a coat was issued to each prisoner, and we stopped going to the Siemens factory. Word spread that perhaps the factory had been bombed. Daily we wondered if the camp itself might be bombed. We never knew if the explosions we heard by night came from Allied bombs or if the Germans themselves destroyed bridges and land structures to keep their enemy at bay.

  Guards grew more sadistic in their beatings as the weather turned colder—as if they didn’t have enough to do, as if our suffering entertained them.

  The Bible readings, the recitations of poems in different languages, the hymns sung by small groups and occasionally in a solo continued in the barracks at night. Sometimes I prayed, giving the outcome of our lives to God. And then I’d take it back and worry until I fell asleep, exhausted.

  Mutter Kirchmann urged me to trust that God would provide all things needful. She reminded me of the Scripture Lukas gave me at our parting: “I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.”

  “But can I do them in Ravensbrück?” I asked, sarcastic.

  “You can do them anywhere,” she admonished. “Because He does it in
you.”

  In late November the frail one of the Sisters weakened. The stronger Sister rubbed her pencil-thin legs by night and cradled her head to drink when she grew too weak to lift it after a long day’s work. But even when she could no longer read her Bible aloud to the women at night, still, as she listened, her face shone as if she’d been to the top of the mountain and seen God Himself.

  In December, the weak one was delivered to the infirmary, and the hole in our society gaped, a great chasm. The stronger Sister stole away every chance she found to glimpse her suffering sister through the hospital window—to offer smiles of encouragement and to reassure herself that her dearest one, through weak and in terrible pain, was still alive.

  One day in mid-December, the stronger Sister came back too soon, a mixture of sorrow and grief in the stoop of her rounded shoulders. We knew without asking, and our hearts ached for this faithful Sister, and for ourselves. But we also breathed relief that our special light suffered no more, and even envy at the hope of what lay beyond the confines of Ravensbrück, of all this weary life.

  The Dutch woman who worked in the dispensary snuck the Sister in to see her dear one before her body was sent to the crematorium.

  “You should have seen her face,” the Sister whispered to us later—her own face a study in contradictions. “So beautiful! A picture of peace, as it was when she was a young girl, so long before the war.”

  “Heaven!” Mutter Kirchmann whispered, the awe and wonder, the hope of our future, in one word. I wanted to believe.

  The stronger Sister was released—called from the ranks of roll call one morning near the end of December—so unexpectedly that we didn’t understand our terrible loss until nightfall. It was as if grandaunts had left our family circle, and their sweet voices—singing hymns in Dutch and sometimes in German—left a great void.

  That night, Mutter Kirchmann insisted that I join them. I could not deny her, though my heart wasn’t in it. And yet, the doing of the thing—the singing aloud, the praying, the listening to Scripture as it was translated into German from the Dutch Testament left behind by the Sisters—made a difference. Something grew inside me—more slowly, more feebly than the child, but just as sure.

  Sometime in what might have been the fourth month I felt the baby move—what Mutter Kirchmann called the quickening. It was in that moment that the baby first seemed real to me—as if it might actually grow and thrive. And what then? If the baby lived, how would I care for it? It was one thing to hide my pregnancy; quite another to hide a baby. And for the first time I knew I wanted to hide it, to protect it. But I could not do that alone.

  A woman two bunks down and one across had once been a fine seamstress for wealthy patrons of the arts. She unraveled the hem of my uniform and, pulling away threads, found a way to gusset slim pieces in each side so that the seams didn’t show. It was enough to accommodate the slight bump in my figure and to allow me to stuff extra newspapers up my coat as the temperatures dropped.

  Roll call continued, despite the deep freeze and falling snow. Some mornings we stood for two hours as inches of snow covered us, stamping our feet to keep them from giving way beneath us. Mutter Kirchmann’s hair had turned white in the few months we’d been here. By February, it was falling out in clumps.

  “It’s the poor nutrition. Not enough vitamins,” the Dutch nurse lamented. “I see it every day.”

  “Take mine,” I insisted to Mutter Kirchmann. “Your life means more to me than my own. I cannot live here without you.”

  “But you can, my dear, and you must.”

  “Nein.” I would have sobbed if I’d had the energy.

  “You must bring my grandchild into the world, and—”

  “It may not be Lukas’s child,” I protested, but feebly.

  “But our Lukas will love this child as his own, so of course it is my grandchild.”

  “How can he?” Though I desperately wanted him to. No matter the father, this child was mine—bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

  “Because he loves you, because he—”

  “What if he’s not alive?” It was the question I asked each day, the one I feared to voice, the question that kept me from abandoning my heart to my baby.

  “Then you must live for him, and raise this child for him. Never, never give up.”

  I couldn’t imagine raising my child without Lukas and Mutter Kirchmann beside me. I couldn’t imagine living—or my child living—beyond this pit of Ravensbrück.

  “Remember what the Sister said. ‘There is no pit so deep that He is not there.’” Mutter Kirchmann squeezed my hands, and I knew she’d read my thoughts. “Jesus loves you, my darling girl, and He is with you always, even when I cannot be, even if Lukas cannot be.”

  The bombing came still nearer. Rumors spread that the Russians had broken through German lines in the east, that prisoners must be moved west. Each morning at roll call new numbers were shouted and pulled from the ranks. Those prisoners were transported from camp—no one knew where. I prayed—more fiercely than I’d prayed for Lukas—that Mutter Kirchmann and I would not be separated.

  It might have been late March when Mutter Kirchmann’s number was called. Snow still lay on the ground, but morning light came earlier. She hesitated, waiting, I know, for my number to be called too. The numbers droned on—mine not among them. No, dear God! No!

  The numbers finished. The women in line were counted and their numbers called off. Mutter Kirchmann’s number was shouted again, and the guard began walking down the ranks. She could not wait. Squeezing my hand, she mouthed, “I love you, my Lieselotte. God be with you and the baby!” She walked forward and followed the line inching through the door of the processing center.

  How long we stood for roll call that morning, I don’t know. It might have been forever. I grasped no sense of time.

  Of all the things that had happened in Ravensbrück, being separated from Mutter Kirchmann was the worst, the most final, the thing that could not be undone or scabbed over or rationalized or prayed away or replaced in my heart.

  That night, as I lay in my bunk, the space empty beside me, I could not cry. The shock was too deep, too great, to cry. I cradled my baby, willing it to move inside me, to reassure me that this life would not desert me. But how could I protect him or her? How could I protect a life so fragile?

  Mutter Kirchmann’s words trickled back to me—the same words Lukas had left me with: “I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.” And the Sister’s words: “There is no pit so deep He is not there.”

  I was not sure.

  A week later the Swedish Red Cross came and took hundreds of women away. I was not one of them.

  Still another week passed. Sometimes I prayed that the bombs we heard in the east might come and blow us all away.

  Finally, in what must have been early April, at predawn roll call, my number was read from the list. It took half a minute for me to realize, to understand that I must walk forward.

  I passed through the processing center in a daze. There were no more checks, no inspections—just a herding of us through the forest to a spot beside the railroad on the outskirts of town, far from fields or townspeople.

  Surely they mean to shoot us in this deserted place, so no one will hear—my first thought. My second was to wrap my arms around my middle, sorry that my baby, still barely a bump protruding from my abdomen, would know no life outside my womb, sorry that I would never know if my child was a boy or a girl, sorry that I’d never look in its face and hopefully see Lukas’s eyes or mouth or nose.

  But then the train came, stopping right there, in the middle of the forest. A long metal ramp was shoved to the ground.

  “Schnell! Get aboard!”

  We fumbled and climbed into the cattle cars, pushing one another forward, too weak to pull ourselves up.

  No checking of numbers from endless lists—just more shouting and shoving. The only counting came when a guard barked, “One hundred!” and pu
shed the heavy door through its metal groove until it slammed, sealing us in the dark.

  39

  HANNAH STERLING

  APRIL-MAY 1973

  A week later, Carl stood beside me as I collected the urn with Grandfather’s ashes. Long ago, Grandfather had made arrangements for cremation. That, too, was a first for me. The whole idea of burning bodies brought horrific images to my imagination.

  “It’s not the same thing as what they did in the camps,” Carl counseled quietly.

  “I know. I just . . . just wish I could undo all of it. His whole life. What he did to my mother, to everyone he touched.”

  “You cannot cancel another man’s sins. We cannot even cancel our own.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “But you can continue what you started.”

  “I . . . I don’t know if I can. No, I can’t. I can’t.”

  “You will keep the remainder, then?”

  “No, of course not. There must be someone—those organizations that you mentioned that find people . . . perhaps they can return the items.”

  “As long as it is not you; is that what you mean?”

  “I didn’t steal them, Carl. I didn’t send people to their deaths. You know as well as I do that nothing I’ve returned has made anyone happy.”

  “Happy,” Carl repeated. “Did you expect them to be happy?”

  Maybe I did. Maybe I expected them to be glad to have their things returned. I thought, at least—I don’t know . . . that they would know I was trying. But that didn’t even sound right. It wasn’t about me. Why was I making it about me?

  “Perhaps,” Carl said softly, “there is more of the journey important for you, if not for them. You still don’t know about your mother—what happened to her after the camp—or about your father.”

  “Grandfather’s dead. Your parents didn’t know. Who is there left to ask other than Dr. Peterson, who seems to have conveniently disappeared? I can’t see him being helpful, and I don’t know that I’d believe anything he told me.”