How naturally what’s needed comes from you, always!
—KAFKA, BRIEFE AN MILENA
In the hot summer of 1941—the SS had introduced night shifts in the tailor shops—the undernourishment and weakness of the prisoners became increasingly evident. Their legs were swollen, covered with boils and abscesses. A few cases of paralysis were reported, possibly, we thought, brought on by Dr. Sonntag’s syphilis therapy. Not until there were twelve cases was Camp Commander Kogel notified. There were violent scenes between him and Dr. Sonntag. Rumors reached the camp of a polio epidemic in the vicinity. Dr. Sonntag imposed a quarantine. The prisoners were confined to their barracks, no work was done, and no SS overseers were allowed inside the camp. At first prisoners were delighted but then the paralysis spread; every day more women were carried off on stretchers and placed in a special barracks. The victims all showed the same symptom: sudden inability to stir a muscle. But strangely enough, none of the “old” politicals were affected; most of the victims were asocials, Gypsies, and “Polack lovers,” that is, German women convicted of “consorting” with foreigners. A week later, if I remember correctly, there were a hundred cases. I shall never forget the two weeks of quarantine. Glorious summer weather, deep-blue, cloudless skies. Except for two daily exercise periods the prisoners were confined to their barracks. Milena volunteered for service in the “paralytic shack,” a punishment barracks enclosed in a barbed-wire fence, which had been evacuated for this purpose. Every afternoon, relying on the protection of my green armband, I made my way to it by a circuitous route. Milena would be expecting my visit; she came out to the gate, and we would sit on the ground with the fence between us. Blessed silence. No bellowing overseer, no barking dogs to disturb the peace. The camp seemed enchanted. Two woodlarks hopped about on the path not far from us, and from somewhere we heard the monotonous summer song of the yellowhammer. The air shimmered with the heat and smelled of sunbaked earth. Time stood still. It was the hour of Pan. Milena began to sing softly, a tender, sorrowful Czech song: “Oh, green hills that were mine. Oh, joy of my heart! It’s a long time since I’ve heard birds sing. A time of sadness is rising over the horizon.”
We spoke of past summers, of childhood vacations. “Do you remember how wonderful it felt when the summer breeze blew your thin dress against your bare legs? And the soft grass under your feet when we ran barefoot across the meadows?” Milena on Mount Spicak, and I not far from the Czech border, at my grandparents’ house in the Fichtelgebirge. The same round hills in both places, the same dark pine trees and mountain meadows full of flowers. And now? I look at Milena’s bare feet, perfect in their beauty, like a statue’s. And now they have to hobble over the coke gravel of the camp street. It wrings my heart.
As I was leaving, Milena handed me a folded piece of paper through the fence. “Read this, then throw it away.” This time it wasn’t one of her usual notes, addressed to “my darling blue girl!” It was a fairy tale she had written for me: “The Princess and the Ink Blot.” To get the feel of Milena’s mother tongue, I had been learning Czech. Milena had to write. She couldn’t resist a blank sheet of paper. For a while we exchanged letters every day. The paper was stolen from the office of the infirmary. We would reply “by return mail” during the next exercise period. Milena had a remarkable command of German; I was amazed at the richness of her vocabulary. Once she wrote a sort of preface to the book we were planning. I wanted to hide it, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. But Milena insisted, and it was only when I realized that I would be endangering her as well as myself by keeping it that I finally destroyed it. Thus not a single line has been preserved of what Milena wrote in Ravensbrück. Once, when I told her how miserable this made me, she laughed and said, “I’ll write it all over again as soon as we get out. It will be as easy and natural as peeing.”
Milena wasn’t always so optimistic about the future. Like all journalists, she hoped to write something better than newspaper articles someday. She felt she had it in her but feared that the opportunity might never come. “Do you think I’ll ever accomplish anything?” she would ask me. “Or have I wasted my life to no purpose?” And she would add: “You have nothing to reproach yourself with. You’ve lived a full life, and that’s more important than any scribbling…. How I envy people like your mother, raising five children. That is really a full life.”
During the quiet quarantine weeks, we talked about poetry and prose. She deeply loved the poetry of her country, it had played an important part in her development. But when I told her how much poetry meant to me, she declared categorically that the age of poetry was over, that there could be no excuse for writing anything but disciplined prose; most of all she admired Kafka’s prose.
After two weeks our blissful quarantine came to a sudden end. Another SS medical officer, a specialist, no doubt, came to Ravensbrück and lost no time in diagnosing mass hysteria. Dr. Sonntag was in disgrace. He avenged himself on his false “paralytics” by subjecting them to electric shock. The first batch were quick to jump up and go about their business. When the news got around, terror restored the remaining paralytics to good health. Only a few unfortunates, suffering from articular rheumatism or tertiary syphilis, failed to respond to this treatment.
In 1941 the first Ravensbrück “book” appeared. Conceived by Anicka Kvapilová, it was dedicated to Milena. It was an anthology of remembered Czech poems, written in pencil on stolen paper and carefully bound in stolen toweling, colored with light-blue tailor’s chalk.
But AniCka did not stop there. She couldn’t help it. She had to produce, though her literary activities put her in constant danger. She was the only prisoner to keep a diary and she collected the songs of all the nations represented in Ravensbrück. One of her most touching works was a little volume of Christmas songs in many languages, which she had heard the prisoners singing. The words and music of every single song were carefully inscribed and each song was decorated with a vignette. Her next work was entitled “Songbook for the Hungry”; it was a collection of recipes from all countries, lovingly bound in blue velvet stolen from the overseer of the SS private tailor shop, who had planned to make a new evening dress out of it.
In addition to her own writings, Anifka collected those of the other Czech women. She kept them in a big cardboard box which she dragged around with her as a mother cat does her kittens. She kept having to find new hiding places for it, and it was the cause of a serious fight with Milena, who feared it would get her into serious trouble and wanted her to destroy it. But like many gentle souls, Ani£ka was uncommonly obstinate. She never argued, she just quietly did what she pleased. She kept her box, and its contents grew. New artists appeared on the scene. Nina Jirslkova, a friend of Milena’s, formerly a dancer and choreographer at the Prague Osvobozene Divadlo (Free Theater), discovered a talent for caricature. The result was the “Ravensbruck Fashions Magazine,” a series of comic drawings. The first showed the new arrival, a lamentable figure with shorn head, wearing a long, striped sack-dress and enormous wooden clogs. The ensuing pictures embodied fashion hints for the demanding inmate. Shorten—secretly, of course, for it is strictly forbidden—the sack-dress. Take in the waist; here a few safety pins, filched wherever possible, will come in handy. Puff up the bust—here you will need all the resources of the dressmaker’s art. Then you will be in fashion, your feminine morale will benefit. Further sketches illustrated the acme of Ravensbruck elegance, attained in 1943 when some of the inmates received parcels from outside. In conclusion the artist showed, side by side, a poor, bedraggled, parcel-less, “proletarian” prisoner and a supercilious representative of the “propertied class,” dressed fit to kill.
Another of Nina’s caricatures dealt with the struggle of each against all in the overcrowded barracks. In one sketch two hundred women are crowding around a small cast-iron stove, each trying to find a place for the soup she is trying to warm in a tin cup. A battle rages: Faces are convulsed with rage, one pushes another aside, the pile of cups on the stove totters and collapses.
Another sketch bears the caption: “I am in daily contact with the duchess.” It shows an inmate climbing down from her upper bunk and putting her foot square on the face of the “duchess,” who is lying in the next tier below.