We are in Ravensbrück for a few days, but there are so many of us and such little food that they decide to divide the camp up. The thumbs choose Danka, Dina, and me; I look around for Janka, Mania, and Lentzi, but they’re not in our group. I don’t know where they are. Danka, Dina, and I are piled into a flatbed truck, clinging to each other. Are they taking us to the gas? The flatbeds cross out under the gates of Ravensbrück and turn west; they are moving us again. We lean against the wood sides of the truck, jostling into one another. The road is full of potholes and bumps. Danka and I avoid looking at the girl-women riding with us. We are too tired to care where they’re taking us or why; we just want to rest and eat.
We arrive at Neüstadt Glewe, get counted, and are handed pieces of bread.1 At least we don’t have to sleep on the floor here. In the morning we stand at roll call and quickly notice that there is no crematorium in this camp. There is a mound of bodies, though, about six feet high. The smell in camp is of decaying rather than burning flesh.
We are marched through the middle of town to work. The townspeople come out of their shops and homes to spit at us as we pass. The hatred in their eyes is dismaying; we are not human beings to them, we are lower than dogs. At the edge of town we are forced to dig trenches in an effort to stop the Allied forces. One would think the townspeople would be grateful for the work we do to protect them, but they spit at us that evening as well. We get another crust of bread and half a bowl of tea that night; that is all the food we are given. Rations are shrinking before our eyes. The Germans are losing the war.
For a month we are chased out of dreamless sleep and marched through town, and every morning, every night we are spit at as we pass. We wake. We get counted. We march. We dig. We eat. We starve. We wonder if it will ever end.
Four A.M.
“Raus! Raus!” We stand at attention for roll call and are then dismissed.
“It isn’t Sunday, is it?”
“I don’t think so.” Part of the camp continues to work at an airplane factory; the rest of us have nothing to do. Rumors circulate that we won’t be working anymore.
“The Allies must be close,” our whispers speculate. “Maybe the war is almost over.” We hope this is true, but after the death march, we know better than to put any hope in this desire. They could move us again to another prison if they wanted to. They could march us to Madagascar.
The lull of not working and spending all day behind the fences is enough to drive me crazy. I notice that the pile of bodies lying behind the barracks in camp is getting larger and I learn from the other prisoners that many of these women were arrested after the Warsaw Uprising. They are Jews and Poles, left to rot together outside without even a ditch to be buried in.
I go to the camp elder and say, “With no other work in camp to do, I was wondering if you might give us permission to bury the bodies of these few hundred women?”
“Jawohl,” she says. “I’ll give you a hand wagon. Choose nine others to help you. You start tomorrow morning. I’ll assign two SS men to escort you.” I make a note: she has a green triangle on her uniform, she is a murderer.
I ask for volunteers for this leichenkommando. Danka and Dina volunteer, as well as seven other girls. Covering our noses, we take the cart out to the mound of bodies. “We don’t have gloves, so we must be careful,” I warn the girls. “Only touch the arms and legs, and be very careful of any open wounds. We can’t wash our hands before we eat, so we must be very careful so that we don’t get sick.” I take the arms while another girl takes the legs, and we swing a corpse onto the cart. It sighs as the last air is expelled from its lungs.
We falter. “Schnell!” The guards yell. “Come on!” We load the cart as quickly as possible, about fifteen bodies. Then we begin our march to the burial place. Across the road is a men’s camp of Italian political prisoners.
“Not much longer! Not much longer!” they shout as we walk by. We do not have a radio in camp; the news of the world has been cut off from us. We stare at these wild-eyed men; they do not look crazy, just desperate for freedom. “Not much longer! Not much longer!” Can they be right? How long is not much longer?
The SS take us up a hill. The cart is heavy and we strain our muscles to keep it moving. It figures they would choose a burial site that is difficult to reach.
“You will bury them here.” The guards stop, pointing to the area where we should dig, then they move away to rest on their rifles.
I thrust my shovel into the soil. It’s rock-hard. We try to dig deep, as we’re supposed to, but it is impossible. I get in the hole to dig out the bottom. The soil is so unforgiving that it takes hours to dig the graves, though. Thoughts run through my head while I’m in the hole trying to dig a little deeper; the SS could just shoot us and we’d fall in having dug our own graves.
“Help me out,” I call to the girls above. A hand reaches over the side; my sister pulls me out of the pit.
“I don’t like seeing you in there,” she murmurs.
“I don’t like being in there.” I mean it, too.
This detail is difficult. We are so weak. But when we get all the holes dug and the bodies are put to rest in unmarked graves. We stand on the hill, the sun slowly sinking toward the horizon.
“Let’s say a prayer for the women we’ve buried,” I whisper.
There is a unanimous nod. Over the mounds of fresh dirt we say the Kaddish. The guards do not notice our stillness, our soft voices. It is very important to me to give these women who have died some sacred ground in recognition of their lives. The prayer make us feel good, and there is not much that does that. We walk wearily down the hill back toward camp. We have worked hard today and buried only fifteen women, and the mound of bodies still in camp looks no smaller for all our effort. I am sorry that I volunteered us for this job.
“Do you think I could sneak some potatoes from the pile and get something to eat?” I ask Dina one Sunday afternoon. The portions are getting smaller and we can no longer count on getting both soup and bread every day.
“I heard that the camp elder killed a girl for stealing a potato when she went out to get coal; she made the girl empty the bucket and there it was. She kicked the girl until she fell on the ground, threw a board on top of her, and jumped on the board until she was dead,” someone tells me.
“Oh my God.”
“Don’t do anything to make this camp elder mad,” another girlwoman adds. “She killed her husband and her in-laws. She’s insane.”
I shudder but am still enamored by the thought of trying to get two potatoes without getting caught. I am more capable than the girl who is now dead. I know I can do it.
The mound of bodies does not get smaller very quickly. The first week we bury about eighty bodies, but new ones have been added to the top of the heap.
The SS men who take us to the burial site are old and tired and mean. We do not fear them as much as we feared the younger, stronger SS men in Auschwitz-Birkenau, though. “I think we should devise a plan to overcome them. Knock them out,” one of the girls from our kommando suggests.
“We could hit them on the head with our shovels and throw them in a really deep grave so they couldn’t get out. Then we could escape!”
“Yah!” Their eyes dance with the thought of rebellion.
“I can’t kill anyone,” I whisper.
“Not kill—we’ll just stun them.”
“Think about it.” I look at their fervored faces. “First of all, think how hard it’d be to make a hole that deep—we’d kill ourselves trying. Second, we’re in Germany. There’s not one German in this town who would help a Pole, let alone a Jew. Do you think it will be different elsewhere in this country? They hate us. If we were in Poland it would be different. We might be able to count on our own people to help us escape. But we’re not. We don’t even know where we are. How far is it to the Polish border? Which way should we walk?” No one can answer my questions. “We would be caught and killed by villagers, or by the SS. Besides, my guess is we are far from any borders.”
Their faces fall with disappointment.
“Maybe the Italians are right and it won’t be long now,” Danka adds. “Maybe we’ll be freed soon.”
“Maybe.” No one really believes it, though.
We have started putting two or three bodies in each grave. Our strength is failing fast with the lack of food and the terrible conditions in camp. Pushing the cart up the hill is a chore we can barely accomplish. The chance of overpowering the old men is slipping away as quickly as our weight and our hope that liberation will come soon. The lower the pile of bodies gets, the worse it gets for us, because it is spring and the bodies are beginning to decompose. And there are fresh bodies on top now, too, so it’s hard to tell until you touch one how long it’s been lying there. Some of them we have to leave or they will fall apart. We’re very careful not to disturb the very old, decaying bodies.
I wake, huddling in our bunk alone. Was it another nightmare that woke me? Rain falls on the roof overhead. The sky above us rumbles and clashes as violently as if God were at war rather than mankind. Where is Danka? She is terrified of thunderstorms.
Mama used to light candles and say a prayer during electrical storms in Tylicz. There are no candles here. I stare through the darkness, unable to tell whether she is in the block or not. Other eyes shine in the dark. Finally the storm overhead moves on. I wonder if its rain has fallen on Allied as well German heads. The door creaks open and my sister steps inside. Like a mirage she glimmers in the dark. Her red hair, finally growing back after several months of not being shaved, frames her face.
“Where have you been?” I cannot tell if her cheeks are wet from tears or rain. She shakes her head, silent. “Danka, what were you doing?” I demand.
“Praying,” she whispers hoarsely. “I was outside praying that the lightning would strike me dead so I wouldn’t be hungry anymore.”
We bury women all day and get in after roll call, after the bread has been handed out. There is nothing left. No food for those of us who have worked all day. I cannot bear my sister’s hunger any longer and volunteer to get a bucket of coals for the block elder to put in the stove. Danka and Dina send me a warning glance. I ignore them both. At the pile of coal I check the vicinity, grab two potatoes, and thrust them under the coal in the bucket. Head forward, eyes down, I walk slowly across the compound.
Out of the shadows by the blocks I hear the camp elder’s voice, “Let me see you empty that bucket on the ground.”
I freeze and turn slowly around.
“Well?”
I dump the contents onto the ground. The potatoes could be covered by enough black dust to be masked amidst the odd-shaped lumps of coal that she won’t see. . . .
She hits me in the left eye before I can even think to duck. “You stole potatoes!” She throws me on the ground, kicking me, stomping on me with her boots, trying to tear the flesh from my bones with her fingernails. I cannot see anything but the blazing hatred in her face; it is the face of Death itself. She loses her grasp on me for a second. I scramble away, fleeing across camp.
“Thief! Thief! Scheiss-Jude! Get back here you filthy dog!” Her harpy’s voice follows my tracks like a bloodhound hot on the trail. I vanish behind the blocks, dodging searchlights and the madwoman’s screaming voice. Under the cover of darkness I slip into one of the other blocks.
“I stole a potato and she’s going to kill me for sure,” I whisper into the dark.
“Come here.” An anonymous voice calls out. Quickly, I crawl in between two bodies, hiding under their blanket.
Outside the Wardress screeches. “Come out you miserable mist biene! Come out here! You can’t hide forever. I’m going to get you!” It seems a lifetime until she quiets down. I wait for a little bit longer just to make sure she’s not hiding somewhere and then slip out of the bunk I’ve hidden in. “Thank you for saving my life,” I whisper to the girls whose faces I do not know, then creep back across camp, so she won’t know which block has hidden me. Blinded in my
left eye, I thread my way through shadows and along walls until I reach our block. I slip in next to Danka. Her arms grab me. Squeeze tight.
“Oh, Rena. What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know.” We hold each other all night, sobbing, both of us shaking in terror. This is it. I am done for. That is all I know and all either of us can think about. There is nothing we can do but cling to each other for the last time. My teeth chatter from the chill of fear, the fear of death itself. Liberation is so close, and now this. Danka will be alone in the world after the camp elder gets through with me. We do not sleep at all. I will never survive roll call.
“Raus! Raus!”
My eye is swollen shut and black and blue and purple. Danka tries to put some dirt on it but it hurts to touch. We line up in the very back of the rows. The camp elder stalks across the front rows, screaming and cursing us.
“Anyone who knows who stole the potatoes last night should turn the prisoner in immediately. If I find out you are withholding information from me I will kill you instead. Who knows who stole the potatoes?” No one moves, no one makes a sound. The SS women walk up and down the rows counting each prisoner, looking for me. Surely the camp elder saw my face and recognized me as the one from the leichenkommando. She’ll see me and kill me.
I try not to tremble, try to be brave for my sister.
“You’d better turn yourself in! You’d better come out!” the SS yell. No one says a word, no one lets them know where I am. An SS woman comes down our row, counting us, inspecting us, looking for me.
Suddenly I feel very calm and warm. There is the slightest tingle on my cheek as if someone has touched my face. Mama?
The SS woman is just a few prisoners away, but I am warm and comforted. Remember
how you escaped Mengele. You told Danka you were invisible and you were. The fear drains out of me through the heels of my feet into the earth and I stand confident that I am imperceptible. Mama is here, standing next to me. Her hand is over my eye.
The SS woman looks at me, counts me, turns away. Danka sighs.
Protect me through the gate, Mama, I pray. I still have to march out with the bodies, and the camp elder is always standing there, counting the bodies, checking our numbers. I pretend to be rearranging the bodies in the back of the cart, making sure there is an arm obscuring my eye so she can’t see my face and won’t recognize me.
Every morning I feel a warm tingle on my cheeks as the SS walk right past my black-and-blue, swollen eye. Every morning I fumble with the bodies while we take them out the gate, and every morning I pass unseen under the nose of the camp elder.
How long can this go on? For six days I hide from the murderess, and she never sees my face. They don’t see me because they are blinded by prejudice. We all look alike to them. We have the identity of shit-scheiss-Judes , mist bienes.
2 May 1945.
Four A.M. We wake up automatically and step into the dawn nervously, wondering what new trick this is that our captors are playing. There is no roll call. There is no one but us in camp, just one lone guard still in the watchtower. Not one SS woman, no wardress, no camp elder anywhere to be seen. We stand on the camp road gazing at the guard in the watchtower, wondering what to do. He is the only thing between us and freedom, and his gun is aimed directly at us. I look at my watch. It’s ten o’clock. How long must we wait here when freedom is laughing just on the other side of these gates?
A mother and daughter decide they are hungry enough to brave getting to the pile of potatoes. They run across camp toward the only food left. A gunshot rips through the girl’s heart. She collapses.
Her mother screams, rending her clothes and cursing God. No one dares to go comfort her. A second shot rips her throat out. Lamentations.
Their bodies taint that fatal pile of potatoes. The sweet taste of freedom grows bitter in our mouths.
The SS in the watchtower finally climbs down and disappears.
At eleven o’clock the Italians from the prison camp down the road shout outside our fences: “We’re free!”
They have rubber gloves and wire cutters. “Come on! Storm the gates!” They sever the wires, breaking the electrical current and leaving a hole big enough for us to tear through. I grab Danka’s hand, dragging her through the fence. We have bloody hands from the barbs we push out of the way. My sweater catches on the wire. I do not stop. It rips. I do not care.
Suddenly we are on the road. We blink, unable to believe our eyes. Soldiers dressed in dark green and olive, Russian and American soldiers are coming toward us.
“We’re free!” We hug each other, crying. “We are free!” My heart is a stone in a river of tears.
The girls from camp disperse down the roads. There are girls going this way and that, all in confusion, all lost, trying to decide which way is home. Danka and a small group of girl-women watch me as if I should know what to do.
We walk for a little while until we reach a crossroads. Danka, Dina, and I stop and look down the two paths. One goes east, to the Russians and eventually to Poland; the other goes west, to the Americans. I do not know which way to turn. The sun is gold and brilliant, burning through the layers of obscurity in my mind. My fog begins to lift.
Mama is in the distance. Her babushka has fallen from her head, her arm is waving more slowly now. Which way should we go, Mama? . . . She is no longer running through the snow; the long winter has melted into spring. Go west, Rena. She pulls her babushka back up around her head and blows me a kiss.
Don’t go, Mama. Wait for me. I brought you the baby back! . . .
Goodbye, Rena. You are a good daughter.
I stand in the middle of the crossroads waving to the vision that has kept me alive—Mama!
She stands there for one brief moment, her arm still in the air. Goodbye. Her image shatters into a thousand shards of light. My eyes wince with pain as if slivers of glass fallen from my eyes. The dream is gone. There is no one to go home to anymore.
_____________
1 Neüstadt Glewe is approximately 132 kilometers northwest of Ravensbrück.