The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  We’re all remembering the little concessions Herr Rauchbach made to us, how he eased our lives as much as he dared.

  I wonder if God is dead or just cruel like in the Old Testament, and then I fear He’ll no longer look after me and Bill, so I quickly say the Lord’s Prayer to myself, even though doubt runs like a river deep under ice.

  At ten p.m., when the lights would normally go out, a siren begins to sound. The door of the hut is flung open, and a guard tells us we’re leaving in fifteen minutes. We put on all our clothes, layer upon layer. I wind my Christmas scarf around my neck and pull on my bobble hat. I notice Max isn’t wearing the hat with earflaps that Bill knitted him. He’s a fool. Bill helps me put my mum’s waxed cape and hood over my coat; he insists it must be mine. We have to help one another awkwardly pull our kit bags onto our overpadded backs, and over all that, we cloak ourselves in a blanket each. We’re pouring with sweat from the effort as we carry the sled into the night.

  Outside it’s chaos, with men running this way and that in heavy falling snow. There’s a big bonfire smelling of cigarettes, and someone tells us that a successful gambler with a stash of seven thousand fags has set fire to all that he can’t carry, rather than let the Nazis have them. There are meters of toilet paper thrown up over the huts like streamers, again so anything that can’t be carried is destroyed. The ground is littered with ripped clothes, squashed cigarettes and trails of powdered milk.

  On the unlit parade ground, a strong wind blows the snow directly into our faces. We pull our hats down and our scarves up. The wind also carries the sounds of heavy Russian artillery closer than we’ve ever heard it before. But, to my astonishment, all around us men are laughing and joking, as if we’re heading out on a midnight holiday. A hearty and filthy conversation starts up around me about the number of them who had wet dreams last night, knowing today might be the day they finally leave Lamsdorf and start to head home.

  Most of the guards are coming with us, with just a few left to gather the wounded onto ambulance trains. We are to leave in batches of a thousand or so, over the next few hours. The tall guard and the bald guard are in our section. By eleven p.m., when we pull our sled out of the gates, into the black night beyond, the snow has turned to a blizzard. It whirls about our heads and blinds us. There’s joyful singing for the first few meters, but it quickly peters out as the snow blows into our mouths, our noses, our eyes. We fall to silence, put our heads down and begin to trudge forward, already looking like a long line of snowmen.

  PART FOUR

  THE LONG MARCH WEST

  January to March 1945

  Twenty-three

  I can’t lift my head, as the swirling snow would blow into my eyes. Our long line shuffles into the blizzard. Despite the bobble hat pulled low over my eyebrows and ears, and a scarf pulled up over my nose, my face is so cold that it feels like nails are being driven into my cheeks. My eyes water, and the tears turn to ice on my eyelashes. My exhaled breath freezes to an icy fringe on the edge of my scarf. I’m wearing two pairs of gloves, one inside the other, but my fingers are alternately numbing and burning. I clench and straighten them repeatedly to keep the blood flowing. We are all walking bent forward from the waist, to keep the snow out of our faces. I fix my eyes on my trudging feet, as much as I can see them in the dark, for fear of falling over and twisting my ankle. We shuffle in the wake of the men in front of us. All around us the air is thick with the thunder and smell of artillery bombardment. Flashes of gunfire shimmer through the falling snow. The Red Army is that close.

  The tall guard and the bald guard walk alongside us. They are better shod and clothed than most of us, but are carrying heavy rifles and packs. The bald guard seems to be struggling already. The guards shout to us to go faster, but their shouts are halfhearted because they can’t move any quicker themselves, and they haven’t had any sleep either. Only their terror of the retribution of the Russians drives them on.

  At about two a.m., the wind starts to drop, and the snow slowly turns from a whirling cloud to a light feathering, and finally eases to a few stray flakes fluttering down on us. The snow underfoot has been trodden by thousands of men ahead of us, and compacted to ice. We slip and slide. Bill holds firmly on to my arm, and Max grips onto Ralph. Ralph limps but pins his lips together tight and says nothing.

  Images of Kurt and what he tried to do to me replay in my head, and I can’t stanch them. I remember leaning forward in the cold snow on the pile of marble slabs as I waited for the world to end; my terror when I thought Bill had been shot; Scotty with the hole in his stomach, the blood in the snow. I try to block them out, to think of nothing, to think of one foot in front of the other.

  We take turns pulling the sled. It’s well-made and easier to pull over the icy ground than it was through the newly fallen snow. Already we see the wreckage of sledges made from packing cases that haven’t held together and are now abandoned by the side of the road. Tins of food are scattered around some of them, and though other prisoners bend to pick them up, they can’t carry any more and soon have to let them fall again.

  “We can’t manage any more tins,” says Bill, and the sound of his voice makes me jump. Nobody has spoken for four hours. “But we could maybe burn the wood.” He and Max scoop up some pieces of the light timber as they pass and shove them onto the sodden blanket covering our sledge. They work together without making eye contact.

  Some of the other POWs laugh at us with our heavy sledge because the Lamsdorf guards have told them we won’t be going far, so they haven’t brought much food.

  A man near us slips and falls. There’s a surprisingly loud crack as his arm breaks. We look around for a doctor, but of course there isn’t one. The tall guard knows Ralph has some medical training, and he lets us pull out of line while Ralph tries to set the break. Ralph’s face is white with nausea. It’s almost impossible to set the break properly through so many layers of clothes, but if the man takes his coat off, he will freeze to death. Ralph uses a length of our packing-case firewood to make a splint, and ties it with the man’s scarf. Nobody has anything to give him for the pain.

  “That’s the best I can do,” Ralph says. “I’m sorry.”

  The tall guard says he’ll try to find a medic when we make camp. The man mutters his thanks as we all rejoin the endless, shuffling line.

  At three a.m. we are allowed a half hour of rest.

  “The Russians are close,” explains the guard. We don’t need to be told. The sound of their guns is all around us. Ralph says it’s just as well we aren’t being allowed to stop for longer, as falling asleep could be fatal in this temperature. We sit down in the snow. The skirt parts of our coats, which I couldn’t wax, are already soaked through, and so are our scarves and the blankets we’ve wrapped round us. As we sit still, our trousers and coats freeze to the ground. The waxed shoulders and hats seem to keep out some of the wet, although we’re so cold that it’s difficult to tell. I have icicles on my eyelashes, and the scarves we’ve breathed into are stiff with ice.

  On every side of us, we can see tiny flames of blowers as men use the snow to make themselves hot drinks. Bill and Ralph set to work with theirs, and when the water is boiled, drop a pinch of tea and sugar into it.

  The sodden blankets we wrapped around us are heavy with ice, so we tie them on top of the sledge, and that makes it easier to walk when the call comes down the line for us to get up and move on.

  Ralph winces as he puts his left foot to the ground, and when we all look worriedly at him, he dismisses us with a flick of his hand. Bill rubs his wrist from time to time. I alternate between sliding my feet as if I’m skating on the compacted ice and walking in the slushy snow to the edges, which soaks through the eyelets of my boots. I’m so tired that I don’t know how I’m continuing to walk, but too afraid of being left behind to stop.

  As the sky lightens for dawn, the line comes to a slow stop. We stand for a long time,
banging our hands on our sides, stamping our feet, clouds of steam around our heads. We’ve said perhaps five words to one another in as many hours. The raggedy queue shuffles forward for a few hundred yards and comes to a halt again, and a rumor is passed back to us.

  “They’re billeting us in farms. We’ll be inside soon and able to sleep.”

  I think it’ll take a lot of farms to fit us all, but at last I can lift my head and take in the lightening world around me. Snow-covered fields rise toward woods. A deer walks out from the trees. It looks down on us for a long time before the bald guard spots it and raises his rifle. The crack of the shot echoes all around us, but the deer’s unhurt, and it leaps back into the woods. The gunfire sends ravens shooting into the air, cawing their outrage, black against the snow-heavy sky.

  On the trees nearest to us are great clumps of mistletoe, just like at home. Farther up the hill, in the dark wood, the snow on the uppermost branches of the trees is the purest white, lighter than the sky. Tall firs have their branches weighed down to the ground. The birches glitter.

  It’s completely light before we’re in the yard of a farm. We are among the first being counted into a large barn. I point up to the hayloft.

  “Up there,” says Bill for me. “Might be less cold, and hay to bed down in.”

  It’s very awkward to pull the sledge up the ladder behind us, and men below shout loud complaints to us.

  “Fucking idiots. Leave it down here.”

  “You’re holding us all up. Get a move on.”

  But we are determined not to be parted from either our belongings or the sledge itself, and so we heave and haul until it’s up in the loft. We manage to get it into a corner and start to pull hay into our area to sleep on, wringing out our wet blankets and hanging them in the rafters above our heads. More and more men keep coming up the steps of the hayloft, until there isn’t enough space left for us to lie down.

  “Move that fucking thing,” growls a heavily bearded man, pointing to the sledge. We stand it on its end, so it takes up less room. Then we lie down next to it, claiming the minimum space we’d need to sleep.

  All around us, pressed close, men are trying to gather their possessions into little nests of frozen, wet clothing. Many men light up fags or set their blowers going to make a brew, and I’m horrified. My mother would sack a man who smoked in the hay barn. It could all catch fire and go up in minutes, and we’d never be able to get out.

  Bill sees my agitation. “Any of us could roll on a fire and put it out,” he points out. “We’re all soaked through. Now, then, a brew before we sleep?”

  I remember the raisins and the plum brandy Berta gave me and we share them out. The brandy warms our insides if not our extremities. Ralph unlaces his boots, and I dry his feet with straw while he rubs some of the cream into them. They look swollen and raw.

  The barn is locked from outside, and men carefully extinguish their cigarettes. There are no toilet facilities, so people pee next to the places where they’ve made their beds. Angry cries come up from beneath us. I haven’t drunk much in the last nine hours, so I think I’ll try to hang on until they let us out again. Cigarette smoke hangs in the damp air, mingling with the smell of urine, and steam rises from our wet clothes and our breath. Some men are gorging on the food from their parcels, but I’m too tired for once to feel hungry.

  “We ought to ration the food,” says Ralph, watching them. “God knows if we’re going to get anything from the guards.”

  We all nod miserable assent.

  Part sitting and part lying, Bill and I lean against each other in our wet clothes.

  I sleep fitfully, for only a few hours, and when we’re woken by the sounds of the barn being unlocked, I’m stiff. My clothes are still thoroughly wet and very, very cold. I didn’t think it was possible to be so chilled and damp and still live. The ice is unmelted on the skirts of my coat.

  Some men have eaten too much of their Red Cross rations while we slept and the reek of sickness and diarrhea is added to the strong ammonia scent of urine. I cover my nose and mouth with my frosty, wet scarf.

  We stand and stretch, and the ache in my legs and back from yesterday’s long march makes me feel like an old woman.

  As we shake our arms and legs, trying to get some warmth back into our limbs, Max shouts, “Thieving bastards! Who is it? Come on, who is it? Low, bloody scum. I hope you choke on it.”

  While we slept someone has untied a corner of our sledge and taken a whole food parcel. And above our heads in the rafters, Bill points out that one of our blankets is missing.

  “Not me, mate,” protest all the men around us.

  I try to read their faces to see who’s lying, but all I see is desperation.

  Some clean air enters from the open barn door, and I can’t wait to get out. Two men have been bitten by rats while they slept, but there’s no antiseptic for their wounds.

  In the snowy farmyard, there’s been a Nazi army truck delivery, and the tall guard gives us a dense black loaf to share among six. The four of us team up with two other prisoners, and Max carefully measures the loaf before cutting it with his identity tag. He lets the two men we don’t know choose their portions first. Ralph has some margarine in his kit bag. It’s too frozen to spread on the bread, so we hack off slivers to suck. I rub some margarine on my cracked lips and chapped face, and the others do the same. Ralph gives us each a thin slice of Spam, which only makes me hungrier. For a second I see myself grabbing the whole cube and running off to ram it into my mouth. I see other men eyeing it hungrily. What will happen when we’ve eked out our rations but others have nothing left?

  Bill heats snow for tea.

  “Always find the cleanest, whitest snow, and make sure it boils properly. You don’t want dysentery,” cautions Ralph.

  The tall guard tells us we covered twenty-nine kilometers since leaving Lamsdorf, and Max protests. “But the Geneva Convention says prisoners can’t be made to march more than twenty kilometers a day.” The guard shrugs expressively. What can he do about it?

  “How far is twenty-nine kilometers?” Bill asks Max.

  “Eighteen miles, I think. Leicester Square to somewhere like St. Albans.”

  “Blimey, it felt like Leicester Square to Manchester.”

  This is the first time they’ve spoken to each other since the Cable Street row.

  * * *

  Then we’re on the road again, putting weight gingerly on our sore feet, stretching the aching muscles of our thighs, calves and backs. For the first time, I think we aren’t fit enough to survive this, and I look with panic at my companions: three young men bent and limping like pensioners.

  It’s midday. We only stopped for five hours. The long dark line of thousands of men stretches on ahead between rows of trees, a black band through the snow-covered open fields, showing the way we have to travel. Every half hour or so, there’s a house surrounded by a small patch of garden. A river runs close to the road, but its silence tells me it’s completely frozen.

  Some men set up singing down the line, but most walk grimly on. The singing is defiant, but the men around me—even Bill—don’t sing and don’t speak, as though we are folding our energy reserves into the heart of our frozen bodies. It’s as if my silence has passed like an infection to everyone else. I know how exhausted Bill must be if he isn’t humming or whistling, and my fear for him is like a stone I’ve swallowed. What if I’ve come all this way only to lose him now? Our sledge bumps along behind us. We walk and walk and walk. Every so often, I think, when I reach that tree, or when we pass that gate, then I will allow myself to nibble my small hunk of bread. It’s soon gone.

  In another three hours, dusk is beginning to fall, and the line slows to a stop and moves to the side of the road. Civilian families pulling handcarts piled high with their belongings pass us. Mostly they are women, children and old people, with their faces set
hard. The men who should be helping them are somewhere else, freezing in snowy trenches, shuffling like us in lines of prisoners, or dead.

  A village or small town slowly emerges from its snow camouflage, buildings solidifying out of a mist.

  Carefully holding my coat, I take the opportunity to pee in the slush beside the road, which is already yellow with urine. Groups of prisoners are counted off and directed to different buildings around the village, barns and halls. We are to sleep in the church. I cross myself when I enter, and someone behind me scoffs, “Pray hard, kid, and maybe a fuckin’ angel’ll flap you out of this.”

  I tut. He shouldn’t say “fucking” in a church.

  We choose pews in a side chapel, away from the night-soil buckets provided by a thoughtful verger. Again there are complaints about the space our sledge is taking up, and it seems even harder to lift and manhandle tonight. We are already getting weaker. It’s cold in the stone building, but at least we don’t have to sleep on the floor. I put my kit bag at one end of the pew for a pillow and long to wash my hands and face. Ralph shares a tin of processed cheese between the four of us. I suck my portion for as long as I can. Then he opens a can of strawberry jam. We don’t have anything to spread it on, but we hand it around, taking a couple of fingers full each before passing it on.

  “It’s calories,” he says, “though not nearly enough.”

  The smell of it is so thick and sweet that I inhale deeply before I eat, as though the smell alone will sustain me.

  We don’t take off any clothes, but lay the damp blankets over us. The pew is hard and uncomfortable, but it feels good to stretch out properly. The sledge stands at the end of our pews. I wonder if men will dare to steal in a church. Some are already smoking here, which I think is wrong, but Ralph says smoking helps to keep the hunger at bay. Perhaps I should take it up.