The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  Max wants to argue, but he knows Bill’s right. We reluctantly shuffle forward.

  “Fucking scum,” mutters Max.

  Until she’s out of sight, one after another of us looks back to see if she’s managed to clamber to her feet. When we turn the corner, she’s still curled up in the snow with the Hitler Youth standing over her. I think about her for hours.

  There’s a column of Russian prisoners somewhere out ahead of us. We know this because every day we pass nine or ten of them lying dead beside the road. They are no more than skeletons in coats, and many of them are barefoot. Their feet are lacerated, red and shiny or black from frostbite. Some may have had boots on when they fell, but they’ve been taken by others who needed them more. One has cut the ends off of a pair of boots that are far too small for him, and his blackened toes peer out at us. Some of them have been shot, and blood has spread out into the snow around them, like a warning.

  * * *

  After eight days of marching, we reach a larger, more prosperous village, and we stand for two hours in light, swirling snow, waiting to be billeted. The four of us are directed to join a group going to a sawmill just outside the village.

  “Home from home,” remarks Bill, looking around. “Just like the sawmill at Mankendorf.”

  He hurries us across the icy yard to the building adjacent to the offices, where there might be a stove. The tall guard, Hans, tells us tomorrow is Sunday, and we’ll be there for the whole day, with a chance to rest. He sounds relieved himself.

  Bill and Ralph prop our sledge in a corner, and Bill begins to gather up wood shavings and sawdust.

  “We can make a bed. That’ll lift us off the floor,” he says.

  We take turns staying with our sledge in the corner we’ve staked out and gathering armloads of shavings and sawdust, which we spread in an area big enough for the four of us to lie down in.

  Ralph unstraps the last two parcels from the sledge and puts them under the head end of our sawdust bed as lumpy pillows.

  Lying between Bill and Ralph, I look at a wood shaving, at the beauty of its curling shape, and I inhale the warm smell of it.

  In the morning we are given a loaf to share among six, and it tastes as if it isn’t only the bed that’s been made of sawdust. This time some men we hardly know cut the bread, and they don’t give us first choice of the pieces. Max complains that one of their pieces is bigger, and one of the other man squares up to him.

  “And if it is, what are you going to do about it?” he sneers.

  Bill pulls Max away, and Max doesn’t shrug him off.

  Later in the day, the guards drive up on a truck and unload a bucket of soup. It’s gone cold on the journey from the cookhouse, but it has some real pieces of potato in it. We spend the day sleeping and resting, and the tall guard lets us out into the yard. We gather snow to make drinks and to try to wash ourselves. It’s too cold to remove many clothes, but I dip a rag in the snow and hurriedly scrub my face and reach in under my clothes. Ralph and Bill heat a little water and rub a sliver of soap through their beards and scrape them off so my beardlessness won’t look so strange. Max’s beard is growing black and curly. He says it’s full of lice but gives him some warmth.

  Ralph carefully removes his boots and socks. His toes are like patchwork: pink, swollen and shiny or white like frost itself. I inhale in horror as I see that the little toe on his left foot is starting to turn black.

  “You should get those looked at,” says Max.

  “By who?” snaps Ralph. “I’m probably the nearest thing to a doctor for fifty miles, God help us. It’s frostbite, not cancer.”

  We heat a little water, and I try to warm the deadened skin, and rub in the last of the cream. I wonder how he can stand the pain.

  Several hours of the day are spent trying to kill some of the lice. We light a cigarette and run it up the seams of our coats and battle dress, to sizzle them.

  Bill takes the opportunity to make some improvements to his sledge. Someone offers him a thousand reichsmarks for it. I’m amazed that anyone can have amassed so much money, but Ralph tells me he’s the man who used to run the secret “casino” at Lamsdorf.

  And then we’re back on the road, stopping overnight and setting off again each morning. For hour after hour the scenery is identical. Sometimes a small flock of sparrows circles over us and wheels away. Sometimes there are power lines, and telegraph poles show up blackly in the snow. Sometimes the road is raised above the fields. Sometimes there are no trees lining the road and fences have been erected to stop snowdrifts from blocking the carriageway.

  Then fir forests become closer and closer to the road on our left, until they are so near that I wonder whether we could simply slip away into the woods. Far ahead of us I hear a gunshot and wonder if someone else tried it.

  From time to time we see men who’ve just sat down by the side of the road and given up, from cold and exhaustion. The army chaplain is going up and down the line, exhorting these men to get to their feet, to continue. I hear him use language I wouldn’t have expected from a priest.

  After three more days, we have another rest day, and there’s soup again, of indeterminate flavor. Bill, Ralph and Max constantly count and recount the items left in our food parcels. Our little stock is running out. A guard tells us we’re headed for Görlitz POW camp and that there might be fresh Red Cross parcels there. The guard says Görlitz might be four days’ walk away. He asks, embarrassedly, if we’ve got any cigarettes, and we say only if he can get us extra food. He disappears.

  Ralph says, “Let’s divide what’s left into four days, then. Or five, maybe.” And the others agree. It’s even less than we were having before, and when I put my hands on my hips, it feels like my body isn’t where I expect it to be. The time for my monthlies comes, but there’s no blood.

  I hide one square of chocolate at the bottom of my kit bag. It comforts me just to know it’s there. I eat my last prune and suck the stone for hours. When I finally drop it into the snow, I hope it will grow in the spring.

  For days we’ve been walking across almost flat land, but now it’s becoming hilly. The snow is thicker, deep to the edge of the forest, and we heave the sledge up a long, steep hill. As we come over the top, shaking and breathless from the effort, we see rolling snow-covered hills to both sides and purple mountains up ahead.

  We shuffle slowly past a castle on a hill. The snow has stopped falling at last, and clods of settled snow begin to drop from the deciduous trees, though it stays on the fir branches. The cattle we glimpse here are hairy, as though they are wearing long fur coats.

  I name the things we pass, in Czech, to keep my words alive: the redbrick chimney of a factory, birch woods, a tattered advertising poster for glassblowing, a pigeon loft. And still we are climbing. On the road now, there are even more civilian refugees, who stand aside to let us pass, or walk doggedly on as we thread past them in single file. At a railway station we watch German soldiers disembark from cattle trucks. They’re filthy and almost as ragged as us, with long, unkempt beards. They are wounded, sick, terrified, young. One of our guards says they’ve come from the eastern front, from fighting the Russians.

  Every day Ralph’s feet get worse. Skin that was swollen and pink has bleached white, and the toes that were white begin to turn green and then black. He hobbles more and more painfully, until a day comes when he admits he can no longer walk. There’s a wagon for the injured, and the tall guard lets us drop back to lift him onto it. The wagon’s pulled by prisoners with friends on board, and those are given an extra bread ration—though not enough to make up for the calories they’re using up on pulling a heavy wooden vehicle, laden with the sick and injured, through icy slush. Bill and Max take their turns, but Bill refuses to let me. “I need you to stay strong enough to walk.”

  We heap all our blankets onto Ralph, but lying still on the wagon, he shivers uncontrollably.
At night we lift him down and bring him to sleep with us, trying to warm him with our own bodies. I try to use a little water and some rags to warm the frozen skin of his feet, though the cream is long gone. He pushes his lips together in a thin line so as not to let any groan escape. When the pain diminishes a little, he says, “You lot’d be better off without me. You should just look after yourselves.”

  I poke him hard in the ribs, and even through all his clothes, I can feel he’s no more than bone.

  As he shivers on the wagon, I pull the sledge alongside. I pray in time with each footstep, “Don’t let him die. Don’t let him die.”

  On the mountain to the right of us is a ski slope, with motionless cable cars. Clouds cover the tops of the mountains. We pass a tall observatory tower on a hill and then a town with factories. The houses are half-timbered like in a fairy tale. One is thatched.

  It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life just to take one step after another, and pulling the sledge up the steepest hills is pure pain. Then after the crown of the hill, the sledge wants to run down the other side, and I have to hold it back.

  We pass a grand house with stables, perhaps a riding school, and a flock of geese. At a railway station the tracks head off in different directions, and I wonder if it would really have been worse than this to be carried in cattle trucks.

  There’s a redbrick church with a Gothic steeple, and we begin an agonizing climb to a high plateau where the wind snatches away every breath as though the world begrudges us even that. An old windmill spins implacably. I can almost smell the corn it must be grinding.

  On the fifth of February, word comes down the line that we’re almost there, just one more hill and we can rest. But even one more hill feels like an impossibility. Max heaves the sledge. Bill’s with the men pulling the wagon of the injured. More men have fallen in to help with that, both pulling and pushing to get their comrades to safety. I don’t know how they are finding the strength to risk their own lives for one another.

  We somehow sweat and struggle to the top of the hill, and before us is peaceful, snowy country with clumps of trees, and a huge prisoner of war camp. The line slows to a crawl. It’s only two weeks since we left Lamsdorf but it feels as though I’ve been forcing my exhausted body to keep moving for months or maybe even years.

  Eventually ahead of us loom the tall gates with the eagle and swastika emblazoned on them. The wire fences and watchtowers spread out over the top of a huge flat hill. We stagger into Görlitz, Stalag VIII A.

  Twenty-five

  Görlitz is so crowded with thousands of men from all the Eastern European camps that nobody counts us or takes our details. We’re told there may be room for us in hut thirty-seven, but when we find the hut, all the bunks are taken, and there’s barely space for us to find a patch of floor. Ralph struggles to sit down on the floor, and Bill props our sledge beside him. I sit down too, huddled close to Ralph to make room for the others.

  “You stay here,” says Bill. “I’ll go and see if I can find anywhere better.”

  “I’d better come with you,” says Max, “so one of us can stay to guard the place we find and the other can come back for these two.”

  I feel stricken as I watch Bill walk away. I try to hear Cousins’ voice in my head. “Steady on,” he says kindly.

  Ralph’s watching me. “It’s OK,” he whispers, tapping my arm. “He’ll be back soon.” Sometimes I think Ralph understands me better than Bill does.

  Max comes back alone, and my heart leaps into my mouth.

  “We’ve found somewhere,” he says. “It’s not much better, but there’s one bunk, and we can take turns. We decided Bill looked better able to defend it than me!”

  I exhale in relief. This means they’re on speaking terms at last.

  He leads us to the other hut. It’s hard to pull the sledge through the icy mud of the parade ground. The empty bunk is a top one, which means insects will fall from the ceiling onto us, but there’ll be a little more warmth. The warmth now matters to me more than the insects.

  “Can you get up there?” Bill asks Ralph, but he shakes his head.

  “I’m off to see if I can find a quack,” he says, and we all know he must have come to the end of his endurance to even consider such a thing, because it will mean parting from us.

  Max nods. “Bill, why don’t you hold the bunk and our stuff, and we’ll pull Ralph to the sick bay on the sledge?”

  Bill agrees readily, and I can see he’s longing to stretch out and sleep, even on a lumpy, lice-infested straw mattress. We pass up our blankets and kit bags. Max’s rucksack is surprisingly heavy, and I wonder if he’s stockpiling food and hiding it from us. Then I’m ashamed of the thought. I want to stay with Bill, but I know Max can’t manage Ralph on his own.

  Max and I drag Ralph on the sledge to the sick bay hut, which is full but has a stove lit and is at least less cold. Patients sit on packing cases and the floor as well as on beds. A British soldier takes Ralph’s name and asks what the problem is. “Frostbite.” Ralph grimaces.

  “Oh, another! Well, over there and wait.” He looks at Max, with the sledge. “You can’t bring that fucking great thing in here.”

  “Well, I’m not leaving it outside to get nicked by the first tea leaf who passes.”

  Max makes a decision. “I’m taking it back to the hut,” he says. “Then I’ll come back. You stay with Ralph.”

  I sit close to Ralph on the floor, and I see that most of the sick and injured have buddies close by. I think how human beings cleave together in pairs—husbands and wives or close friends—and how truly lost we are when we’re alone. I think of all the years that Bill had Harry with him, and how he left him behind to run away with me. Ralph’s hand rests on the floor. Out of sight, I cover his hand with mine.

  Max returns just as a harassed medical officer arrives to look at Ralph’s feet. I help him remove the boots and peel off the socks. All Ralph’s toes are black now, and they seep with pus. The doctor says, “Well, you aren’t walking a step further. You’ll be taken on by train—if the Russians don’t get here first.”

  “Are they so close?” asks Max.

  “Apparently. A week away.”

  But Ralph has other concerns. “Will I lose my feet?” he bursts out.

  The doctor considers. “We haven’t got anyone to do it, but if your mate can come in and bathe them in warm water every couple of hours, we might be able to save them.”

  I nod eagerly. The thought of Ralph with his toes or feet amputated is a horror. I remember how much he loved walking with his friends, and I think I’ll do everything in my power to give him that again after all he’s done for me. I point to an imaginary watch, and the doctor looks questioningly at me.

  Ralph explains, “He doesn’t speak. Mute. Some sort of shell shock.”

  The doctor looks interested. “Do you want to stay here too and go on by train?”

  I shake my head with such force that the doctor laughs. “OK, OK. Well, for as long as you’re here, come at two-hour intervals. You can start now if you like. There should be some water on the stove. Just warm, mind, not hot.”

  He turns to Ralph. “It’ll hurt like hell,” he says. “I’m sorry I haven’t got anything to give you for it.”

  “I know,” says Ralph, and we know he does. “But if it means I don’t lose my feet . . .”

  Max says, “I’m going to see if I can lay my hands on any grub. I’ll come back.”

  * * *

  We stay in Görlitz for ten days. After three nights another bunk comes free in our hut, and Max moves to that. Bill and I share the one up near the ceiling, “topping and tailing” as two men might do. We are fully clothed, of course, but under the blankets we can at least hold hands.

  The normal rules are much relaxed, but we are still confined to barracks at night. There’s a change in the way the guards look a
t us all, as though they know that the tide of war has turned and one day soon they might be held to account for their actions. Although broadcasts in English from the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw are still regularly played through the camp’s loudspeakers, telling us of Germany’s successful battles against the Allies, we no longer believe anything we hear, and men openly shout insults in return.

  Max and I take turns bathing Ralph’s feet every two hours during daylight hours, and he tries to do it himself once it’s dark and we’re confined to barracks. I’m careful not to have the water too hot, but he grips the seat of his chair in pain, as if I’ve immersed his feet in boiling fat, as the skin begins to warm through. I know he dreads each treatment session, but I’ll go on doing it as long as he can stand it and as long as we’re here. After a couple of days, he looks down and says, “Do you think there’s less pus?” I do, but he has to look away. “Ugh! Revolting!” I wipe away the offending discharge.

  We learn from other patients that we were “lucky” to be in the second wave of evacuees from Lamsdorf. The first was led by Hauptmann Schultz, who forced the men to march farther and faster than us every day, sometimes with no shelter for the night and with less to eat. Nobody could guess the number of prisoners who died on the route. Some of the men in the sick bay were forced to abandon friends who’d come through five years of battle and imprisonment with them. The man in the bed next to Ralph says, “Remember Schultz’s name, lad. . . . Tell the authorities when you get home.”

  Bill spends most of his days scrounging around for food. We get the usual daily ration of bread and soup, but the Red Cross convoys can no longer break through the lines of battle with parcels, and we’re hungry all the time. Although we’re able to rest, there isn’t enough food to regain the weight we lost on the march, and all of us look like scarecrows. We cut the string that secured our parcels to the sledge into shorter lengths and use them to hold up our trousers. Bill, Max, Ralph and I have finished the last parcel we carried from Lamsdorf, though Ralph gets “invalid rations” in the sick bay. He tries to share these with me and Max, and sometimes I don’t refuse, just to please him. We don’t dare leave any food on our bunks, but carry the meager bread ration with us all day in our kit bags. Every day I see a fight break out over food. Bill has located the tall guard, Hans, and he manages to exchange our last cigarettes for a sausage. We allow ourselves an inch of it each a day.