It was about two hours later. She had lost Magda and clung to one thought—that she might find her again.
Time and geography had dissolved. She had marched—at least that was what the Germans had told them to do: “Links, links, schnell, schnell!” It had been more of a ragged, slow footed shuffle—from the ramp, across a muddy crust of trampled snow, through a gate in the barbed wire into a world of barbed wire. Single-storey blockhouses, laid to a grid—row upon row like a motionless machine in bricks and mortar. All the fit young women: none of them too elderly, none of them too young, none of them infirm.
Now she stood naked in the snow, dripping wet from a cold shower, robbed of her clothes, blue with cold, her entire body a moonscape of goose pimples, a smear of blood on her thighs from her broken hymen. The rape of the rubber glove. One of a dozen naked, bloodied women.
The tattoo on her left arm was stinging. She scratched at it and looked down. A five figure number ending 757 . . .
A female guard swathed in an SS greatcoat, feet snug in sheepskin-lined boots, yelled that they should move into the next hut—“All’interno! All’interno! Hinein! Hinein!”—and when Méret obediently moved with the others the guard rapped her across the belly with her stick.
“Not you.”
She would not watch as the rest of the women were herded in with kicks and slaps and blows from truncheons, and turned away. There was Magda, less than six feet from her. Stock still, feet planted firmly in the snow, hands clasped in front of her. She reminded Méret of a nun. She was pitifully thin, although her eyes seemed to be shining.
“I know what you’re feeling,” she said.
“You do?”
“You’re feeling that you will die now. But you can no longer trust your feelings. You may very well die, but not today. You may very well live, but who knows for how long? You may survive. I have.”
“How . . . how . . . long have you . . . ?”
“Since the summer of 1942. Or did you think I’d taken an extended holiday? Now, follow me.”
The ice cut her feet, a snail trail pink in the snow as she walked behind Magda, between the first and second blocks to a third one behind.
“You will not believe this, at least not right now, but you are lucky. Since last summer they have killed only Jews on arrival. Doesn’t mean they won’t find a reason to kill you at any point, but right now the master race is too busy exterminating Jews to bother much about us.”
“Exterminating?”
“By the thousand, by the hundred thousand—by now it could be millions.”
They had reached the hut. Magda threw the door wide and motioned Méret inside.
“All those people who arrived when I did—the Italians?”
There was a pile of clothes dumped on a table. They were not clean clothes. Nor were they her own clothes. There was a pile of shoes on the floor.
“Pick what fits. Find a skirt, a blouse, and a headscarf. Whatever you can find to wear on top of that and keep out the cold. You don’t have to wear stripes and they won’t shave your head, that’s your first privilege—and this is a world of privilege and denial—it makes humanity much easier to control—but if I were you I’d keep it short and always wear a headscarf. You’ll be less likely to get lice.”
“Privileged. Why privileged?”
“What size shoes? I’ll try and find two in the same style.”
“Thirty-six. And you’re not answering a single question.”
Magda knelt on the floor sifting through the shoes. Méret pulled on a pair of cream-coloured cotton knickers with a sense of disgust readily overcome by the greater sense of cold and naked.
“Oh, I can answer any question you like and save you the fun of finding out for yourself. The Italians? They are dead by now. Men with pliers are pulling out their gold teeth as we speak. In a matter of hours their bodies will be ashes. When the ashes are cold, men with rakes will sift them for any gold they might have missed. And in the spring, in two or three months women less privileged than us will scatter those ashes on the ground as fertilizer for corn. And next autumn we shall eat the bread of the dead.
“Meanwhile, the better quality clothes in which they arrived will be shipped west for the benefit of Aryan Hausfraus in Germany. The tat will be reserved for us. So much depends on when they were taken. We have had people arrive straight from the opera, straight from weddings—what are the Germans to do with all those top hats? How many curtains can one make out of a bridal dress? And once, an entire hockey team, seized at half time. It’s probably why you and I have pleated skirts and matching blouses to wear on days when we need to look like a marching band. Somewhere there will be piles—no mountains, mountains of things the Germans do not quite know what to do with—all those suitcases, all those pairs of spectacles to dispose of. At least the false teeth are incinerated with their owners. Burned up with the dead.
“Privilege? Well, it saved your life today. You were dealing with one of the biggest bastards in the camp when I spotted you. Jew or no Jew he’d have wasted a bullet on you if you’d gone on provoking him. But Schönbeck was at hand, and when I told him who you were he grabbed you for the Frauenkonzentrationslager orkestra. You’re our new cellist. I do hope you like Strauss waltzes. We play them every Sunday at the behest of the commandant. And, as you’ll have heard, we play tangos almost daily. We have turned the dance of love into the march of the dead.”
It was too much. Her body began to shake beyond control. Wet tears upon her cheeks, wet blood upon her thighs. All she wished was that Magda would take her in her arms.
She didn’t.
She fished around among the topcoats—found a green woollen jacket in a small size and threw it to Méret to catch. Her arms dangled at her side, useless appendages. The jacket bounced off her breasts and fell to the floor. The tide of disgust rose in her throat.
“Magda, whose clothes are these?”
“Why take ye thought for raiment?”
It was a line from the bible. Something from the New Testament. It was the predicate to something often quoted. Méret could not remember what.
Magda continued to sort through the pile of cast-offs, not looking at her, muttering to herself almost savagely, hissing, ironic curse rather than the words of Christ, “Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you?”
“Magda, please! Whose clothes are these?”
“O ye of little faith.”
Méret had never heard those five words sound so sneeringly abused, so stripped of meaning.
She bent to pick up the jacket. Magda reached into her pocket and tossed a needle and thread, bound around a small piece of cardboard, down onto it.
“You’ll need those.”
Rummaging now in the other pocket of her skirt.
“And this.”
Méret watched it float down, eddying like an autumn leaf to land on the jacket. A scrap of cotton, a scarlet triangle.
“Sew it on. It means you’re a political prisoner.”
She who had no politics.
O ye of little faith.