Chapter 35 Audrey 
VECHTA, GERMANY | SPRING – AUTUMN 1939
The morning after their arrival at the prison, a loud voice called for Audrey outside her cell. Her heart skipped as keys rattled in the lock, and a guard entered.
For a moment, hope flared—that they were going to tell her there’d been a mistake, that Friedrich had found some way to secure her release.
“You’re next for Dr. Adler,” the guard said, beckoning.
Audrey looked to Wendelein, who was lounging on the top bunk. “They just want to check for VD and lice,” she said, flipping over onto her stomach and peering down at Audrey. “All the prisons do it.”
The night before, they had curled up in their bunks under insufficient blankets, listening to the motors and screams of planes flying overhead from the Luftwaffe airfield nearby as they laid out all that had happened to them in the preceding months, and how each had ended up at Vechta. Wen told Audrey about her time with the Red Orchestra, aiding both the Dutch and German resistance efforts. She still didn’t know how their cell had been discovered, but could only assume one of their contacts had turned, or been interrogated beyond toleration and given them up in exchange for some leniency. Wen had evaded capture for three weeks before she was arrested and sent to her first prison, from whence she’d escaped—twice.
The first time, she’d bribed a guard who fancied her to leave the outer gate unlocked at the end of his watch. But he reneged on the deal, alerted his superior, and she had been on the run for only thirty minutes before she was recaptured and sent back. The second time, she managed to goad two of her fellow inmates into a fistfight to distract the guards, allowing her to slip out through a gap under the fence that she had slowly tunnelled during their exercise hours.
“For some reason they didn’t just shoot me, the idiots,” Wen had said with a scoff. “They sent me here instead.”
Audrey found Wen almost mythological in existence: a baroness of high pedigree; a rebellious, educated woman with a hatred of authority and a thirst for adrenaline. She seemed to fear nothing but captivity.
Audrey followed behind the guard now, cradling her aching hands. She didn’t want to undergo the physical examination, but perhaps the doctor might be able to set her broken fingers.
Dr. Adler was an older gentleman, heavyset with grey hair and glasses, and was surprisingly gentle, a welcome reprieve from the harsh shoves and barks of the guards. He tsked as he assessed her bruised fingers over the top of his spectacles. “What happened to them?”
Audrey told him baldly of the assault, and he winced.
“And when was that?” he asked.
Audrey shrugged. Time had slipped by during her arrest and detainment, too fast for her to grasp it, yet somehow torturously slow.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “A week, maybe?”
Dr. Adler frowned. “I shall do my best. You’ll need to be able to work,” he added quietly, glancing at the closed door beyond which stood the guard. “Things will be worse for you if you can’t work.”
There were five broken fingers between her two hands, and each had to be set individually. Audrey bit down and tried not to cry out as Dr. Adler worked, apologizing after every crunching thrust. By the time he was finished, they were both sweating, and Audrey panted in pain. But it was duller now, less pronounced. Her fingers felt hot.
“Try to move them a little. Just a little,” Dr. Adler said.
She hesitated but did. “It’s better than before,” she said, as tears slipped down her cheeks. “A bit.”
“Let’s hope it takes,” he said. “Enough to get by, anyway.”
Vechta Prison, Audrey soon learned, was effectively a workhouse for homegrown German and Allied irritants, women like her and Wendelein who acted as resisters to the Reich, either within Germany or in the surrounding countries. It became evident that Germany was in full-on preparation mode for a war, and the women of Vechta were being utilized as free factory labour. They knitted socks for faceless German soldiers, men whose names they didn’t know, whom they would never meet, and who, at the rate things were going with Hitler’s rumoured new agreement with the Soviets, might very well be lying dead on a battlefield with three bullets in their chest by the time the socks reached their regiment. Other one-off projects were sometimes set up in the mess hall—assembling radio transmitters or sewing parachutes by hand.
Once her fingers healed well enough, Audrey took her spot on a bench in the mess hall. Her nanny, Sophie, had taught her needlepoint, but not knitting, as her father had believed it to be an activity more fit for the likes of servants and middle-class grandmothers. So it was in prison that Audrey learned how to manage the needles, modifying the proper form and accepting help from Wen to accommodate the limitations of her damaged hands. She had grieved the loss of them, and put to rest any feeble dream of ever playing the piano again. That skill, that joy, along with so much else, was now part of a past life to which she could never return. But she played music in her head. She was still composing Ilse’s theme in her mind, trying to polish that always-unfinished piece of herself as she toiled away at her workstation.
During the countless hours spent in the factory, the laundry, or tending the prison garden, Audrey’s thoughts swirled around nothing but Ilse. Daniel and Friedrich too. What they were doing, whether they remained safe and undetected. Her nights were filled with vivid nightmares of what might have happened to them, and, as always, the explosion in Hanover, the confused faces of the children in their fleeting, final moments.
She and Wen were desperate for information from the outside, and they strained their ears for snippets of news whenever the guards gossiped to each other in low tones. From what they overheard, it sounded as though Europe was on the precipice of war. Just as Ira, her father, and Friedrich had predicted.
When they weren’t knitting or repairing radios, they peeled mountains of potatoes for the thin, revolting soup that allegedly constituted a meal. Potatoes made up the bulk of it—there never seemed to be any shortage of them—but the rest came from the slop from the adjoining men’s prison, the bones and carrot peelings left over from their heartier stews. As always seemed to be the case, women were meant to subsist on the dregs that remained once men had had their fill.
She and Wen were always starving—intellectually as well as physically.
A month after her arrival, a loud knock at their cell door jarred them both.
“Books!” a woman’s voice called from outside.
“Yes, please!” Audrey had said, rolling off her bunk. Newspapers weren’t allowed, and she worried her mind had begun to dull, disconnect. There was no intellectual stimulation beyond her conversations with Wen, and the thought of a book thrilled her. The guard had opened the door and a tiny young woman named Hannah entered with a rusty metal cart. She was one of the youngest prisoners, and allegedly a member of the White Rose student protest group in Munich—the distributors of the resistance leaflets. Their leaders had been murdered and the rest imprisoned, but Hannah was so mild that Audrey wondered sometimes whether her arrest had been a mistake.
She and Wen pawed through the two dozen titles, several of which Audrey had already read, then she stopped, smiled, and pulled out a battered copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. After everything that had come after, she never actually finished it at the Kaplans’. She ran her hand over the cover, warmed by its familiarity. Reading it in the Kaplans’ sitting room, she never would have imagined she would finish it in a prison cell. But there was little about her life now that she had imagined. They were all at the centre of a great tempest that tossed them around at will, landing them in places that hardly resembled their previous lives.
“A comedy?” Wen said with a grin. “Not a bad idea.”
Audrey laughed aloud, which felt both wonderful and foreign. “It’s not a comedy,” she said. “I assure you.”
On one scorching afternoon in early September when Audrey and a few others were digging up the last of the season’s potatoes, the guard’s whistle sounded, announcing the end of their shift. Audrey slowly rose from her knees, wiping her dripping brow with the back of her soiled hand. The fingers had healed now, but imperfectly. They no longer hurt, but several were crooked, the knuckles enlarged and bumpy.
The prisoners hadn’t been given enough water or food for this sort of exertion in this heat, and she felt faint. She squinted into the sun, noticed the three guards on duty in the yard were huddled together. One of them gesticulated in anger, and Audrey wondered what the fuss was about, but she knew better than to stare. She took advantage of the moment to slip two potatoes into the pocket of her apron, something she always did when she got the chance.
After loading the last of her potato harvest into the rusted wheelbarrow, she fell in line with the other inmates. The muscles in her arms flexed as she wheeled the load to the kitchen doors at the back of the prison. They bulged beneath her thin flesh, giving the appearance of a ball stuffed into a transparent stocking. She had never had such muscle mass in all her life, yet had never been so weak.
She returned the empty wheelbarrow to the garden shed, then traipsed back to her cell, dirty and exhausted. They were only allowed one bath per week, so she would have to wash as best she could in the shallow basin on the floor. She always thought of Ilse when she washed in the basin, of those first weeks before Müller revealed himself, the indignity she suffered without complaint. She hoped Ilse was still in a position of being able to have a proper hot bath. She hoped to God everything had stayed stable for her and Friedrich. She thought of little else, especially late at night with no work to distract her racing thoughts.
The hall guard unlocked her cell and Audrey entered to find Wen there, on her feet, pacing back and forth.
“You’re back already?” Audrey asked. “I thought—”
“Did you hear?” Wen said, eyes bright.
“Hear what?”
Wen ceased her pacing, glanced at the door as it shut with a clang.
“What?” Audrey pressed.
“The guards are all talking about it,” she said. “We’re finally at war. Britain and France have declared war on Germany.”
It was all anyone could talk about for the next several weeks. As the autumn wore on and the cooler weather moved in, so too did a new sense of excitement among the guards, though it was laced with a tense thread of trepidation. They were now openly discussing the war and there was plenty to overhear, if you knew enough to keep your head down and your ears open. Germany had invaded Poland, and was joined by the Soviets a few weeks later. No one knew what would happen next, only that it seemed clear Hitler had no intention of withdrawing.
Audrey wondered whether the war was the beginning of the end of her tribulation, or would spell the end of everything for everyone. She couldn’t know, of course. No one could. But she thought a little too often about what things might have looked like had they succeeded in killing Hitler in Hanover. She might still have been arrested and sent to prison, but they wouldn’t have been at war. Perhaps Ephraim and Ruth and the other detained Jews would have been released by now. Perhaps, as Ira had hoped, reason would have prevailed.
Perhaps. Though Audrey had come to understand that there were many questions in a person’s life that might just remain unresolved. In some cases, the lack of answers was agonizing. In others, it could be a mercy.
“Where are you?” Wen asked her from the top bunk as they relaxed in their cell after dinner one night in mid-December.
It was a question they often posed one another. They each knew the telltale expression when one disappeared into the past—somewhere they both travelled to often, visiting their lost loved ones and haunting themselves with the ghosts they couldn’t manage to exorcise. For Wen, it was her dead husband, Henrik, and the lost pregnancy before he was killed. And for Audrey, always Berlin. Always Ilse.
“Mail!” A voice boomed from the hall before Audrey could respond to Wen. The tiny window near the top of the cell door slid open and an ivory envelope dropped onto the floor with a flutter like birds’ wings. Footsteps retreated.
“Mail?” Audrey’s brow furrowed. “What?”
She stood in her sock feet, staring at the letter. Ada Jakob’s name and the prison were on the front in handwriting she would know anywhere, but there was no return address. The gold wax seal had been broken.
“What is it?” Wen asked.
With a jolt of electricity Audrey opened the envelope and unfolded the paper, a thick, deluxe gauge. Audrey scanned it, hardly hearing Wen’s continued inquiries. Her hand came to her mouth, and she burst into tears as some great levee in her chest gave way.
“It’s from Ilse,” she choked, looking up at Wen, who had come to her, face full of concern. Wen reached out, and Audrey grasped her cold hand in her own mangled one. “She’s fine. She’s alive. They’re all alive.”