by Sara Young
For one thing, the babies. I lay in bed, calmer, imagining it: There were babies in this building, dozens of them, a richness of pleasure. As soon as I could, I would find out if I could visit the nursery to see them. Perhaps even to hold one.
I watched the sunrise—so normal, as though the sun wasn't shocked to find itself in Germany. A bell rang. Leona stirred and opened her eyes. She looked as though it was a surprise to see me in the next bed but then she smiled, as though it was a nice surprise. She reached over to her night table and found her watch. "We'd better go down."
We dressed; Leona in her vast shift and me in the skirt I'd worn yesterday. This morning the waistband seemed tighter—was that possible already? Or was it just that enormous meal?
Downstairs, a line of girls stretched along the hall, more than had been there the evening before.
"What time do they open the dining room?" I asked.
"Oh, it's open," Leona said. She was still buttoning her sweater. "It's just weigh-in day."
"Weigh-in day?"
"Every Saturday morning. They set up the scales at the dining-room doors ... ruins your appetite, I can tell you that."
The girls chatted and the line moved forward steadily. My mouth tasted of metal, and a bloom of perspiration shivered down my spine.
"Frau Klaus. Try not to make eye contact," Leona advised me in a low voice as we got near. "Don't even smile at her. Once I ... if she singles you out for anything..."
Leona got on the scale and groaned at her weight.
And then it was my turn.
"Name?"
I told her.
"Step out of your shoes. Hurry up, there are girls waiting."
"Fifty-nine kilos," Frau Klaus announced and then noted it. I stepped off the scale and moved next to Leona.
"My belly alone weighs fifty-nine kilos!" she sighed.
Please call the next girl, I willed.
"Wait."
I turned slowly, pretending not to know who she was calling.
She frowned and lifted a paper accusingly. "Fifty-three and a half kilos on your last weighing." She looked back down at the form. "Eleven days ago."
I tried to look amazed. "I've been eating everything in sight," I said, as agreeably as I could. The chatter of the other girls had disappeared entirely.
"Five and a half kilos. That's impossible, of course."
And then I thought of something. "Wait," I said. "Are you sure it says fifty-three? Because the nurse who weighed me said fifty-eight and a half last week. I remember, because it was more than I'd thought."
Frau Klaus stood, my chart in her hand.
"Couldn't that three really be an eight?"
Frau Klaus shook her head, pinched her mouth down into a thin white line. "Where were you weighed?"
I realized that I didn't know. Where had Anneke gone that day? "In the Netherlands," I said.
She looked at me hard for another moment.
"They seemed to be very careless there," I confided. "Not organized, like here."
She nodded, satisfied. "Incompetent." She sat back down and changed the three into an eight with her pen. "Next girl. Name?"
In the dining room, Leona handed me a plate and I took it with both hands so it wouldn't shake. Once again, I was struck by the sheer abundance of food—in a year and a half, I had forgotten that food could be offered as choices. Platters of fresh fruit, real eggs, muesli, cheeses. Three kinds of jam. Again I had the urge to take everything, to fill myself. At either end of the buffet table sat a large tureen of porridge.
"Porridge at every breakfast," Leona muttered. "And if you don't eat it, you'll hear about it."
"They keep track of what you eat here?"
"Just the damned porridge ... Himmler's got an obsession. The rumor is he has to eat it because he suffers from terrible stomachaches, which I hope is true. So I guess he feels everyone else should eat it, too."
"I don't mind it," said Aimée, behind us in line. She was Belgian, and seemed as sweet as her name. "Back home in my village, people would be grateful for it."
Next to her was the other girl from Belgium. "Me, too," she agreed. "I don't mind anything here. It was much worse at the home in Liège."
We took seats at the table—I was between Leona and Aimée. "What was wrong there?" I asked her, low enough that the serving girls pouring tea at the end of the table couldn't overhear.
"For one thing, the doctor there was only a dentist!" Aimée pointed at her belly. "Does this look like a tooth to you?"
"None of the staff was professional," the other girl agreed. "And it was filthy. They found bits of wire in the babies' broth once, and I heard they'd let the chamber pots in the nursery overflow before they'd empty them."
"And you couldn't keep anything valuable," Aimée added. "Everything was stolen. The nurses just took whatever they wanted—we were always running out of soap and linens—and they'd steal half the food. No, say what you want about the Germans—at least they run the homes right over here."
"Oh, there's plenty of stealing here, too," Leona said. "My last roommate came here with a fur coat—God knows why in the summer—and it disappeared right out of our room. She didn't even trust me after that ... slept with her things under her pillow."
I thought of my father's letter and the photograph at the bottom of the wardrobe. Maybe I could bury them outside.
Suddenly Greetje, sitting across from us, threw down her spoon and stood. "I've had it!" she cried. She dumped her bowl of porridge onto the tablecloth. "I can't look at another bowl of this shit again. I say we boycott it and send a message to Himmler."
There was a second of shocked silence, as if the other girls were thinking what I was thinking. But Greetje's face said, Well, what are they going to do about it? She was right: We were geese about to lay golden eggs, safe at least until we gave birth. Then the other girls laughed, and a few others dumped their porridge onto the table, the gray clumps spattering over the white linen and the silver sugar bowls.
"You can give him the message in person in two weeks," Aimée said, and the table went quiet again.
"I'd almost forgotten," Leona said. "On the seventh."
I'd been trying not to talk—to just listen—but I wanted to know about this.
"What happens on the seventh?"
"It's his birthday—the Reichsjührer himself, the great porridge-eater. We're being graced ... a naming ceremony ... I'm planning to have a headache. And if I go into labor that day, someone chain my legs together."
Resi came in then and eased herself into Greetje's empty chair. "I wish I could wait that long." Her belly rode so high and enormous, it was hard for her to reach the table.
"Why?" I asked, lost.
"If your baby is born on the seventh, he gets special presents. Not just the bankbook."
I was about to ask what she meant, but I felt Leona tap my thigh under the table. She broke in and changed the subject.
Later, in our room, she explained: "Resi's boyfriend is a Dutchman who joined the Waffen SS. That's the worst, as far as I'm concerned—traitors. She's going to marry him, and they'll keep the baby. So there'll be another little collaborator in the Netherlands soon. I just thought you should know. Be careful how you talk around her."
I suddenly remembered a picture I'd seen in a schoolbook once. A beekeeper. Bees covered his face, his head, his neck. Covered him. He wasn't wearing a shirt, the caption said, although it was impossible to tell this from the photo—his chest and arms were black with bees. "The bees are harmful only if disturbed," the caption assured the reader. The photograph had haunted me for weeks.
I thought again of those bees, trembling against my skin.
"Leona, why do they room us by country?"
"Divide and conquer, that's what I think. I don't think they want a dozen girls from enemy countries getting together any more than they have to. Not that there's anything we could do ... what do they think, anyway? Of course, they certainly don't want us rooming w
ith German girls, either."
"Too many fights?"
"Ja, that. But it's more ... I wasn't here when this happened, but my first roommate told me about it: Three or four months ago there was a huge blowup here, had everyone in a ... Seems one of the older women was always bragging about her work with the Gestapo—in Smolensk, I think—about how they were mur-dering Jews. Once she told about how they were killing the babies, too. Bullets to the back of the neck ... can you imagine?"
"Babies?"
"They shut her up, of course. Told the girls she was crazy. And she must have been, to make up something like that: Everyone here is pregnant, for God's sake! And there are a lot of prisoners from the camps working here—the cleaning women and the men who work on the grounds. By the way, don't ever talk to them."
"Leona, do you believe it? What she said?"
"About the babies? No, of course not. Although ... no, she was only trying to horrify us. It worked—some of the girls from Holland and Belgium tried to leave. Since then, they've had this policy of rooming the German girls separately and keeping girls together by nationality if they possibly can. I like it."
"Me, too," I said. "Leona?"
"Yes?"
"Where is she now?"
"Who?"
"The woman who worked for the Gestapo. Is she still here?"
"Well ... I don't know. I doubt it. Most of the older ones go home immediately. But I don't know. Why?"
I didn't answer.
Bullets to the back of the neck.
THIRTY
It was difficult being surrounded by so many people, feeling wary all the time. But it was worse to be alone—thoughts of the soldier were always waiting. I filled my time by studying the layout of the home and the schedules—the two things that would be most important to know when the time came for my escape. The information was not encouraging.
The building had originally been owned by the Catholic Church and used as a hostel for retiring priests. It was completely surrounded by walls: granite and brick in the front, and then on the sides and the back, where the hostel had needed only hedges, the Germans had erected well-lit steel-mesh fences. The perimeters were guarded, by dogs as well as armed men. The first time I saw the patrol, I was disoriented—the guards were on the outside of the fence. Then I realized: I was probably the only one inside who wanted to leave. These walls were to keep people out.
The year before, Leona told me, the townspeople had staged a violent demonstration when it was learned that a shipment of chocolates and oranges had been delivered for the girls at Christmastime. The townspeople were hungry. They kept away now, afraid of the dogs and the guns. Isaak, or whoever he sent, would have to walk up the front entryway, past those guns and those dogs, and be admitted to get me.
Because I couldn't leave. This was a new development, and I worried about how Isaak could learn about it. Just a few months ago, some of the girls who had been working outside the home in Baden had contracted tuberculosis and there had been an epidemic. After that, the girls needed official permission to leave the grounds and when they returned they were quarantined for two weeks. Then in August, a group of girls from the Austrian home had been set upon by a group of villagers angry at the "horizontal collaborators"—beaten and stoned—and one of the girls had lost her baby. So just three weeks before I'd come, Himmler sent down the new order: No girl could leave a Lebensborn home for any reason, except in the company of an SS guard or the soldier who had fathered her baby. Only the German girls complained about this.
In that first week I stayed to myself as much as I could, only braided myself into the constant lines and knots of girls at meals, classes, and lectures, and tried to avoid conversation. Leona had been right about the German girls, and in some ways we felt like their prisoners of war. The staff never allowed any open hostility toward us—their job was to deliver healthy babies—but it seeped through as an undercurrent nevertheless.
I stayed away from the staff as well. Frau Klaus especially—she had never had any children and she seemed to take every rising belly as a personal attack.
"If you need anything, go to the little nurse with the dark curly hair ... in charge of the delivery ward." Leona leaned in to study herself in the mirror. "Do you think I should get a permanent? When I ... in Amsterdam, they're doing a new wave..."
By now I was used to Leona's rambling conversation, the way her thoughts flitted like fireflies. "Sister Ilse? But I've met her. She's German."
"But she's not a Nazi like all the others. And she likes us better than the German girls—you can tell."
I stored this bit of information, but I reminded myself that my situation was different and I could never allow myself to trust anyone in here. What worried me most, of course, were the letter and the photograph I foolishly had brought with me. I knew I should burn them, but whenever I even thought of lighting the match, my chest hitched, breathless.
At the end of that first week, I found a solution.
The girls on my floor used the laundry on Tuesdays and Fridays. I took my time in there. The big washing machines growled too loudly for conversation, and the other girls left as soon as they could, so I could be alone in the hot room—a luxury to not hear German. And it was a comfort to iron and fold Anneke's clothes, although I hated wearing them. Except, strangely, for a pair of pearl-gray trousers. Anneke had loved wearing trousers—she said they made her feel different: modern, stronger, freer. I'd just laughed at her, but now I understood.
On my second trip to the laundry, I noticed three large rolls of tape on a shelf. The instant I was alone, I took one of them and hid it in my basket of clean laundry.
Back in my room, I pulled out my accusing belongings in the velvet bag and knelt down to find a piece of furniture with enough clearance. The base of the wardrobe, too heavy to be moved casually, stood about fifteen centimeters from the floor—perfect. Just as I was finishing taping the bundle to the bottom, I heard the door open. I rolled out and raised my head, prepared to tell Leona I had dropped an earring.
But it wasn't Leona.
For a second, I was shaken—the woman standing in my room could have been any of the shopkeepers in my hometown in Poland, any of my friends' grandmothers. She was not as plump, though, and her dress and kerchief were the color of concrete—when the women in my town gathered, they always reminded me of a collection of stuffed rabbits, dressed in gaily colored dolls' clothes.
"Sorry, sorry!" she said. She lifted a mop and pail as if in offering for some offense. "I will come back."
We cleaned our rooms ourselves, but on Fridays the floors were mopped. I had forgotten. "No, I was just leaving."
I realized my safety could depend on knowing exactly how things were done here, down to the smallest detail. By the end of the week, I knew where the sun fell in each room, what day we ate herring, what nights we heard lectures on nutrition. I found out what time the post was delivered and what days the food shipments came in. I learned how long it took the staff to set up for meals and how long it took them to clean up afterward. I learned the hierarchy: Dr. Ebers was the chief of the medical staff, but like the other doctors, he was rarely seen, and Frau Klaus was in charge of the nurses. All the nurses were called Sisters, from the head nurses down to the student nurses, or Little Brown Sisters, none of whom seemed old enough to have had any medical training. I knew that in addition to the delivery ward, Sister Ilse was in charge of the newborns' nursery, and she didn't mind if I went down there to gaze at the tiny babies in the neat rows of white iron cribs.
Another week passed. I began to watch for Isaak.
THIRTY-ONE
I became used to responding to Anneke's name more quickly than I would have guessed. But hearing it could sometimes completely undo me—like cutting the strings of a marionette—and I could never tell when it might happen.
"What were you studying, Anneke?" Leona asked one morning, walking back from breakfast. "Before this happened?"
A sudden image: Ann
eke curled over her books beside me, tapping her red fingernails on the table, frowning and then pushing the books aside. "Come on, Cyrla! We can study later. I want to see a film!" The image was so vivid and the wish to see her again so sharp that I gasped.
"What?" Leona asked.
"Nothing." I tried to gather myself, but the tears were too close. I touched my stomach and motioned to the washroom ahead. "Maybe something I ate. Don't wait."
There was no one inside; still, I shut myself into a stall before I fell against the green-tiled wall, shaking. It was so hard to be alone in this place. I pressed my fists to my eyes and calmed my breathing; after a few minutes, just as I was ready to leave, I heard the door open. Then the sound of a bucket being set down and water sloshing. It brought back the sound of my aunt washing away Anneke's blood. I fell back against the wall again, my hands to my mouth to stifle a cry.
I heard the door open again, then close. The mopping stopped.
Voices—a young woman and an older one—whispered so quietly I could only make out a few words. The younger woman asked something about children and grandchildren. "Who can know, who can know?" the older woman sighed. I didn't want to hear any more. I pulled the chain and walked out.
Sister Ilse's hands flew behind her back and the cleaning woman—the same one who had startled me in my room the week before—fumbled at her pocket with something. She looked so frightened, I wanted to reach out and comfort her. But at that instant the door opened again, and Frau Klaus swept inside.
Sister Ilse and the cleaning woman froze. An apple fell from the old woman's skirt and rolled under the sink. In the silence, the sound filled the room.
Frau Klaus bent and picked up the apple. She held it up to Ilse's face with an ugly smile. "You've been warned before. I'll have to report you this time."
Sister Ilse flushed. "It isn't right," she began.
Fear flickered across the cleaning woman's face.
I stepped forward. "I'm sorry! I took the apple at breakfast, but then I didn't want it after all. Sister Ilse was just explaining that I shouldn't have given it to her."
