The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  He pronounces “Jeseník” with a j for “jam,” not a y for “yes,” so it takes me a moment to recognize where he means. Then my heart leaps. I’ll be back in my own country! It will be so beautiful in the mountains. Surely that’s where the resistance is hiding.

  The Aussie scrutinizes us carefully, and I see us with fresh eyes: Bill, thin but wiry; me, small for a man and skinny now after a month without my mother’s cooking and with only half our parcel ration; Max, like a skeleton, full of nervous energy; Ralph, bespectacled and somehow feminine; Scotty, square and tough.

  “It’s hard graft. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

  “We’ll just have a powwow,” says Ralph, and we withdraw to a corner of the hut for a whispered conversation.

  Scotty says, “Heavy work in a quarry.”

  Ralph indicates me, asking Bill, “Can he manage it?”

  Bill searches my eyes anxiously, reading my eagerness, before he says, “Anywhere’s better than here, and he’s stronger than you’d think. We can cover for him, maybe, or get him work in the office once we’re there.”

  And so it’s agreed. We’ll go to Saubsdorf quarry. I’ll be home in Czechoslovakia again and might even be able to send a message to my mother.

  The Aussie completes the paperwork and hands us each a chit.

  “You need to pack up your gear and transfer to the Arbeits compound till we can get you transport. Shouldn’t be more than a day or two.”

  * * *

  On the way back to our hut, I feel as if I’m flying. I’m going back to my homeland, where we can easily escape and find the partisans. My happiness must be apparent, because Bill and the others smile indulgently whenever they catch my eye.

  We begin to pack our small possessions into our kit bags, and the trusted men in our hut come over in ones and twos to wish us luck.

  They all shake my hand vigorously, and some whisper things that make tears prickle the backs of my eyes.

  “I’d just about given up hope till you came.”

  “If you can do it, we all can.”

  “It gave me something to focus on, having you here. A purpose. I’ll miss you.”

  “I think we can make it now I’ve met you.”

  I can hardly believe Bill and I have been at Lamsdorf for less than a month. It feels like a lifetime. I wonder if I might miss the familiarity of Bert’s thunderous snores, Chalky cracking his knuckles, even Harold cleaning his ears with his fingers. I look over at Tucker’s bed, but he isn’t there, and I have a rush of panic.

  Ralph sees and says, “I promise he’s under guard. They won’t let him tell.”

  We pull on our coats, shoulder our kit bags, drape our blankets around us and carry the precious remains of the last Red Cross parcels in our hands as we wave good-bye.

  We have to pass out through one layer of the perimeter fence to the Arbeits compound and show our chits to the guard.

  The tall guard from the latrine is on duty here today, picking his nails with the fingers of the other hand. Bored. He brightens up as we approach and tells us to halt. I don’t like the enthusiasm with which he searches our meager belongings; he’s enjoying it all too much. He makes a great play of opening each of our kit bags and looking inside, of poking his fingers into some of our open tins, as if searching for something, licking his fingers and then shoving them into more of our food. And then, as I knew he would, he turns to me.

  “So our little washerwoman is going away,” he says in German. Bill and Scotty stir nervously, but Ralph holds out a warning hand as the guard circles slowly, looking down at me.

  “There was always something that bothered me about you,” he goes on. “I never believed that story about you being stumm.” He pauses in his circling and then, without warning, brings the butt of his rifle crashing down onto the instep of my right foot. I can’t help gasping at the pain and doubling over to grip the foot, but no words escape me. Ralph and Max are holding Bill firmly, and he mutters a stream of invective, but the guard ignores him.

  I straighten up, and this time I’m not feeling Izzy’s ungovernable temper, but Cousins’ stony resistance in the face of bullying. The guard looks disappointed that he hasn’t made me speak, but I am Cousins to my very core, staring straight into his face and silently mouthing, “Fuck off!” at him, my right arm shooting up in the two-fingered gesture, holding it close to his nose.

  The guard glowers at me and my fingers. This could land me in solitary, while Bill goes off to the work camp without me. But, to my astonishment, the guard laughs. “Go on, then. Go and be mute down the mines,” he says, and waves us through.

  I limp toward the second perimeter wire, and we show our chits to a new guard, in charge of the Arbeits compound. The gate’s locked behind us and we are led to our new hut. As we’ll be here only for a couple of days, my friends have decided not to tell anybody my secret.

  I have a moment of terror when I realize that the empty bunk beds are scattered throughout the hut, but there are two free spaces on adjoining bunks, and Bill and I take those. The straw mattresses are old and flattened. This time we are deep in the forest of bunk beds with men all around us. I must be even more careful to keep absolute silence. Bill explains again to the prisoners immediately around us that I’m mute from shell shock. “He kind of tags along with me since I found him.” Bill shrugs.

  They look curiously at me for a moment and then return to whatever was occupying their attention before, and I breathe again.

  * * *

  At roll call the next morning, a guard calls the names of those who will be leaving, and ours are not among them, so we have a whole day to fill without the distractions of the main camp. I pad my boot before lacing it, and I’m able to join the others walking around the compound wire a few times like tigers in a zoo, carrying all our possessions in our kit bags. We stop to watch a line of people being marched up from the railway station, toward the Russian camp, just beyond the woods. They pass close to the wire at this point, and Ralph says, “Oh, God, look at them.”

  The Russian soldiers are bearded and filthy, and their greatcoats hang off them in a way that makes it clear their bodies inside have shrunk to bags of bones. Some of them are barefoot, and their feet are lacerated and bleeding. One stumbles and his companion lifts him back onto his feet. The Nazi guards prod them with rifles and scream abuse at them, as if they are cattle being rounded up.

  Max whispers, “Hitler’s classified them as untermenschen—subhuman. Stalin didn’t sign the Geneva Convention, so they can do what they like to them.”

  Bill swings his kit bag off his shoulder and reaches inside for today’s bread ration. Breaking it into three pieces, he throws the pieces over the barbed wire. The Russians catch the pieces and push them whole into their mouths. I open my pack too, intending to do the same, but the guards have spotted us.

  “Stop that! Move away from the wire or I’ll shoot. These animals don’t deserve your good German bread.”

  We start to move backward as soon as the shouting starts, instinctively saving ourselves.

  “Move away, or you’ll have a month in the cooler.”

  We retreat to a safe distance, but continue to watch the line of the hopeless Russians shuffling past us. How can God let this happen? Is God even watching? Is he even there? I turn away from the others and cross myself to protect me from Cousins’ blasphemous thoughts, and we trudge back to our hut in silence.

  * * *

  The next morning, the tall guard comes to the wire with a handwritten message for Ralph from one of our friends in hut seventeen. Ralph cleans his glasses, then reads aloud, “Listen, everyone. It says, Tucker found dead in his bed. The doc says rat poison in his food.

  I clap my hand over my mouth as relief washes through me.

  “Good riddance,” says Bill, not meeting my eyes.

  Did Bill do this? Is my gentle husband
capable of killing a man to defend me?

  Scotty slaps his thigh with delight. “Rat poison!” He might have done it, perhaps, but he looks too amused to be a murderer.

  Not Ralph—I’m sure it wouldn’t be Ralph. He says, “All his tins had already been pierced, and everyone knows there’s rat poison under the huts. It would have been the work of a minute. But who could have done it?”

  Max exhales. “Talk about the punishment fitting the crime.”

  I think it might have been him.

  Him, or Scotty, or Bill.

  I wish it were me.

  * * *

  We spend five interminable, second-ticking days in the Arbeits compound, and I have to grip myself tight in frustration at the forced idleness. Only Cousins keeps me under control, telling me, “Easy now, easy now.” And I’ve begun to itch—in my groin, under my arms, and up into the back of my hair. It seems these mattresses are harboring lice.

  It’s raining hard at roll call and I’ve almost given up hope of our names being called when I hear, “Sergeant Ralph Maddox, Bombardier William King, Private Algernon Cousins, Private Maximillian Greenberg, Private Alistair Forsyth . . . report to the gate at ten a.m.”

  We visit the latrines. I’ve been careful to have only sips of mint tea this morning, not knowing how long it will be until I can safely relieve myself again. We present ourselves at the massive gates with the Nazi eagle over them. Outside is the world. Poland. There are about thirty other prisoners gathered with us.

  Our travel documents are studied, the gates are opened and we walk through, away from the hated watchtowers and sentries. Already the air smells different to me, rich with the must of autumn, as we march along the road toward the station. Here the trees are close enough to hear wind in the leaves, and I’m looking about me all the time as we walk, at the different shades of green in the pines, at the birch leaves’ gold and bronze. There’s a scattering of bright yellow leaves on the path, and they swirl up in eddies as we pass.

  Two guards line us up on the platform in front of the ticket office. There’s something so utterly normal in seeing civilians buying tickets for a train and waiting on the platform alongside us that I want to hug Bill with excitement. But my eagerness dwindles as we wait one hour and then another and are finally allowed to sit down on the cold platform.

  A goods train pulls in across the tracks from us, and the massive doors of the sealed wagons are pulled back to reveal hundreds of captured Russian troops crammed into the trucks. They stumble down from the train, supporting one another. They have many days’ growth of beards and look half-dead with exhaustion and starvation. We look at each other in silent shock, and our mood is further depressed.

  After we’ve waited three hours, another train pulls into the station.

  As Ralph predicted, we are loaded into a cattle truck, but since there are only about thirty of us, there’s room to sit on the dirty straw. The big doors are slammed shut, and I have a moment of panic that we may just be left to suffocate here, in the dark, but then my eyes adjust to the gloom, and I realize that trickles of light are seeping through airholes. With a lurch, the train moves off, and despite the discomfort, joy rises in me again as we leave the camp behind. The train moves so slowly that it would be possible to walk faster, and after a while, I doze, lulled by the movement. In a few hours, the train stops, and we hope we’ve arrived somewhere.

  “Must be in a siding,” Bill concludes, trying to look out through a small slit. “I can’t see anything,” he reports. “Just trees.”

  Finally, we move again, and just as I think the journey will go on forever, or maybe we’ve all died and this is the train through purgatory, we stop and the doors are hurled open. Clean air rushes in, and we throw up our arms to cover our eyes. As we jump down from the train, someone can’t find a haversack of food, and it seems it’s been stolen by another prisoner in the dark. I am disgusted that prisoners steal from their own countrymen.

  A jowly, red-faced postern calls our names, and we five separate ourselves from the other Lamsdorf prisoners. Our documents are checked, and the postern tells us to move to the other end of the platform. He gives Bill and Scotty a good poke in the back with his rifle butt and says, in German, “Don’t think you can try anything because I’m not regular army. You bastard English killed my brother.”

  * * *

  As we wait, Bill and I share a slice of bread and the last of the Spam. The meat is lukewarm, and I wonder if it’s safe to eat, but we wolf it down just the same. The men discuss having a brew, but decide it would be too tricky if our train suddenly arrived.

  Another train pulls into the station, and this time we aren’t loaded into a cattle truck but are allowed into a third-class carriage. Bill is fizzing with excitement as we load our kit bags and parcels onto the luggage racks. He and Ralph have had long conversations about train journeys.

  “Add this one to the list.” He beams at Ralph.

  We sit on the wooden benches and watch the countryside fly past. It’s wonderful to be able to see as far as the horizon, to see farms working just as usual, animals grazing in fields, late crops still waiting to be harvested. The guard in the corner doesn’t bother us one bit. We are having a day out, a holiday! It feels like freedom, to be out and moving. Ordinary people pass our carriage in the corridor and look in, some with sympathy, others with curiosity, but one woman spits on the glass.

  Our train passes from the flatlands of Poland into the Jeseník Mountains, climbing and climbing. Now there are no more birch trees but only evergreen pines, with their broad branches spreading, ready to take the snows of winter.

  Eventually our train arrives at Saubsdorf. We are in the Czech region of Silesia, where many of the people speak German, just as they did at home. Outside the station is a waiting cart drawn by two big horses.

  I pat the nose of one of them as the postern hands us over to a middle-aged civilian wearing a well-cut green coat and a Bavarian hat. He is armed with a small pistol.

  The civilian eyes us all as we climb into the back of the cart, and addresses us in German with a strong Czech accent. “I am Herr Rauchbach, the owner of the Saubsdorf quarry.”

  I hope his first loyalty might be to Czechoslovakia, rather than the Third Reich.

  Ralph translates for Bill, Max and Scotty, and replies to Herr Rauchbach in German, saying we are good workers who are eager to increase the productivity of his quarry.

  As Ralph makes his little speech, Herr Rauchbach appraises us with his dark, deep-set eyes. He raises his eyebrows and nods, then clambers up beside the powerfully built younger man holding the reins of the horses. My stomach lurches as he speaks to him in my beloved Czech.

  “This lot looks even worse than the last. Half-starved city types and a skinny boy.” The skinny boy must be me!

  The horse driver swivels in his seat to look back at us as Herr Rauchbach continues. “Let’s just take them to the main quarry and get some stronger men from there for Supíkovice.”

  His companion looks me slowly up and down and smiles a thin, humorless smile. He says, “Then it will be dark, and we’ll have to start again in the morning.” He too speaks Czech, with a Silesian accent, as though his first language is German. He’s almost handsome, in a square-jawed, thick-necked way, but has none of Herr Rauchbach’s intelligence in his face. Herr Rauchbach clicks his tongue with impatience. “Yes, yes, very well, Kurt. If they aren’t any good, we’ll take them to Saubsdorf in a few days. Do what you can with them. But don’t push them too hard to start.”

  Kurt touches the horses lightly with the whip, and we are off, farther up into the forests and mountains, far, far away from Lamsdorf.

  PART THREE

  SUPÍKOVICE QUARRY, OCCUPIED CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  October 1944 to January 1945

  Seventeen

  Bill and Izzy are thrown against each other like sacks of corn as the horse
s trot from the railway station to the quarry. Late-October dusk is descending fast as the cart rattles over potholes in the road. Herr Rauchbach and Kurt have their backs to the prisoners as they drive, although Kurt turns from time to time and waves his pistol. Bill has seen too many trigger-happy young men before, and this makes him nervous.

  The floor of the cart is hard and filled with a white dust that coats everyone’s clothes. They try to sit on their kit bags but are constantly thrown off them, and Bill can feel bruises blooming on his bony bottom and legs. He fears it will be the same for Izzy. As daylight slowly departs, the cold mountain air begins to penetrate their clothes. With difficulty, they haul their blankets out from beneath them and wrap themselves. Izzy huddles against Bill, though he can’t imagine that any warmth comes from him.

  When he glances down at her, he can see that despite the cold and discomfort she’s gazing around her with undisguised delight at the beauty of the mountains in the deepening twilight. Peaks and crags and the spiky outlines of pine trees are silhouetted in black against an indigo sky. Izzy feels Bill’s eyes on her and gives him a wide smile. He grins in return just as Kurt turns again, taking in their happiness and closeness. Kurt stares hard at Izzy in a way that makes Bill feel uneasy, and he feels her stiffen too and drop her head. In a moment Kurt has his back turned to them again, driving the horses forward and talking in a low voice to Herr Rauchbach in Czech. Bill wonders if Izzy can make out what they are saying over the clattering of the hooves and the whir of the wheels on the road.

  It’s completely dark by the time they arrive at the quarry. The horses are walking slowly and great clouds of steam rise from their noses as they haul the cart up the steep hill toward the shadowy buildings. Kurt jumps down and runs round to let down the tailgate and motion all of them to climb down, waving his gun in a dangerous way.