February 1940
“Appel! Appel! Raus! Schnell!”
Four o’clock in the morning. Everyone jumps from their flea-infested bunks. Frieda seizes Mutti’s hand while the female guards storm them from the barracks along with the hundreds of other women. The guards rain blows on their backs with clubs as they fly past the dead bodies in the bunks, on the floor. Shrieks of pain. Howls. Outside in lines. Sub-zero. Floodlights shine in Frieda’s eyes.
The muscles in her legs cramp after two hours of standing for roll call. The guards have been counting the thousands of women since 4:00 a.m. in their obsession with accuracy. The prisoners all wear striped dresses with long knickers, kerchiefs, and aprons, but no stockings. All in the same posture of arms across their breasts to keep in what small measure of warmth is left. All shivering, shivering.
Frieda is beyond numb and can only glance at Mutti beside her. Her mother’s eyes are closed: perhaps she has managed to send herself into one of her books. Ivanhoe? Jane Eyre? As long as her body remains to be counted, that is all the guards care about, night after night. Their numbers must add up; the bodies of those who have died in the night — the death toll is staggering — are dragged out of the barracks to be included in the lineups.
She wonders how long Mutti will survive the work details during their twelve-hour days. Her grey hair has turned white. Exhaustion is shrivelling her face with each day. The work would be bad enough, but the guards take great pleasure in beating the prisoners whether they work or not. Truncheons, whips, resounding slaps with an open hand. She has seen her mother beaten on the head with a club by a woman guard just passing by. Mutti is all she has left, the only familiar face in a sea of faces. They have grown close, these few weeks in the camp, sharing a bunk with two other women. Mutti’s face lights up when she sees Frieda.
Like most middle-aged women, her mother’s waistline has thickened over the years. But the thin soup and piece of dry bread that passes for their main meal, the black ersatz coffee twice a day, have eroded their bodies. Frieda can feel the outline of the bones in Mutti’s body beside her in the bunk.
Some of the sick and elderly, the children too young to work, have been put on a truck and taken to a nearby youth camp they are told will be less harsh. A coddling camp named Mittverda, it is said, where conditions are easier and the food is better. Everyone wants to go. At first Frieda considers asking the block leader to put Mutti’s name on the list. Then the rumours begin to spread: there is no camp, or if there is, it’s being used as a killing ground for prisoners. Someone saw one of the trucks come back within the hour, loaded with the clothes that the “coddled” were wearing. How could they have thought otherwise?
A layer of thick grey cloud hangs above their snow shovelling detail. Their group has been assigned to clear the road between the barracks. Though she told the camp authorities she was a doctor when they questioned her on arrival, they have not seen fit to use her medical skills. Instead, she lifts the heavy snow one shovelful at a time, the muscles in her back complaining with each movement. She is unused to physical labour and hopes her youth will make up for it. But what about Mutti?
She glances sideways at her mother, who pushes her shovel along but manages to lift very little snow off the road.
“You!” barks a woman guard. “What d’you think you’re doing!”
Frieda is the only one who looks up to see the whip lash out at her mother. The others keep working. Instead of trying harder, Mutti drops the shovel to the ground. Clink. The sound breaks Frieda’s heart.
She wants to shout at her mother, Pick it up — shovel harder! But the words die in her throat as the guard begins to bawl out obscenities.
“I’ve been watching you, you Jewish whore! That’s it for the likes of you!”
She grabs Mutti’s arm, wrenching her elbow. Mutti groans with pain. The guard pulls her away from the group.
“You’ll see what we do with people who won’t work!”
As she is dragged away, Mutti turns large eyes on Frieda one last time. Their eyes lock for a moment.
“Mutti!” Frieda says, stepping toward her. The one face left that she loves and that loves her moves further and further away till it vanishes around the corner of the barracks. She is so angry — not at the guard but at Mutti. Why couldn’t she keep working? She didn’t even try — she wanted to die. She didn’t care if she left Frieda alone.
“Keep working!” a guard shouts, lashing her whip at Frieda, who is in a daze.
The pain stings her body, but her body has separated from her and drifted off somewhere. Where has it gone? She is barely there, feels nothing. Who is she? Come back! she thinks to herself frantically. Don’t leave me! Whose voice is she hearing? Her own or Mutti’s? Mutti. Then she remembers: they’ve taken Mutti away.
What will they do with her? Frieda thinks wildly, as she digs her shovel under the snow again. What does she think they would do? Mutti is too old. She won’t work and she’s too old. Fifty-two. They have a cement corridor where they take “asocial” women. Frieda has passed by it and seen the blood. People have heard the shooting. She will not picture her mother in the corridor. She will not. Though she is shovelling snow faster and faster, Mutti’s eyes haunt her. She will see those eyes long after Mutti is gone.
Weeks go by, and Frieda loses track of time. The other women in the bunk, Lola and Herta, consoled her after Mutti was taken away. But there was another transport and two more women now share their bunk. Six in a bunk meant for two. In their misery and exhaustion, they have forgotten Mutti. Except when they say she was the smart one, choosing death. Frieda has not forgiven her mother for leaving her and tells her so in her dreams. Sometimes Mutti comes to visit in the barracks at night when no one but Frieda can see her.
The days are not quite as cold, but the nights still freeze them as they stand for appel, the roll call, night after night, hour after hour, to be counted.
One day as she is lifting bags of sand to carry them from one spot to another, she hears a strange sound. Yet eerily familiar. Birdsong. A bird is whistling in a tree somewhere, maybe near that picturesque lake beyond the cement walls of the camp. How can that be, in this place? The gentleness of the song amid the barking of the guards confuses her. The truncheons beating on women’s heads, backs — how can the birds sing here?
The week the birds start singing, Frieda is in a detail digging an area of ground that will be a garden. The guard sits on a rock with the sun on her face, her eyes closed as if she’s on a beach. Frieda looks up to see a line of prisoners passing by. The same striped dresses with aprons, kerchiefs on their heads. Wait! A face in the line pops out at her.
“Hanni!” she cries.
The guard looks up. Frieda doesn’t care.
Hanni’s face turns, her mouth opens when she sees Frieda.
“What barracks are you in?” Frieda says, trying to keep her voice down. The guard is staring at her.
Hanni points to the distance in front of her. “The end.”
“I’ll find you,” Frieda says quietly.
The line passes. Hanni turns her head as far as it will go to take Frieda in one more time.
Frieda digs into the soil with renewed strength. The guard lifts her face to the sun again and closes her eyes.
When their shift is over that evening, Frieda’s detail walks back to their barracks. Frieda slips away and heads past her building, past one barracks after another, no small distance. The full face of the moon shines in the black sky, outlining the women lingering in the open air like ghosts taking in their last fresh breath of spring.
As she passes Frieda hears someone murmur, “Pesach.” So, it is Passover. Yes, she remembers the full moon during the holiday. They were not religious, but they celebrated the deliverance from bondage in Egypt with a special dinner, matzo ball soup, potato kugel, a fluffy sponge cake. They would eat matzo that night and relapse the next day to eating bread. They could have denied themselves bread for the week and eaten matzo, the bread of affliction, as was the custom. But like many German Jews, they didn’t. Were they being punished for it now? Was God punishing them for not worshipping him enough? Frieda has thought about this at length during the months of incarceration while her body has gone through the motions of shovelling and lifting and digging. Such a God would be unworthy. More likely they are alone in the universe and God has been dreamt up by people asking unanswerable questions.
Frieda reaches the last barracks. She asks some women standing in groups if they know Hanni Sussman.
A figure bolts toward her and launches herself into her arms. Frieda feels her heart lift for the first time in months. Hanni’s body is lean but muscular, still healthy.
“When did you get here?” she asks, holding Hanni at arm’s length, trying to see the dark eyes, the dark unruly hair in the moonlight.
“Two days ago.”
Frieda hesitates but has to ask. “With your mother?”
Hanni looks away. “They took her. Almost as soon as we got here. They put her on a truck to the youth camp, and I thought they were saving her. Then people told me ...”
Frieda puts an arm around her shoulder.
“And your mother?” Hanni asks.
Frieda shakes her head, her eyes down.
Hanni says no more but swallows in the silent dark. They don’t speak for a while.
“At least Wolfie is all right,” she says finally. “I was with him the day before they took us. He’s still in hiding.”
“Wolfie.” Frieda turns the name over on her tongue as if it is candy, a taste from another life. She smiles at the memory of the handsome face.
During the hot months Frieda helps trim the trees and bushes, tend the marigolds, carnations, and chrysanthemums in the ornamental gardens that give the camp a deceptively benign look. Her back aches picking the tomatoes and beans on the low vines, the cucumbers on the ground that will go to the kitchen for the guards’ dinners. This, she decides, is the cruellest job. She is being driven insane by constant hunger, yet she dares not put anything in her mouth. If she is seen chewing, they can shoot her. She wonders how long she can keep a bean in her mouth without chewing. Whether she can swallow it whole without moving her jaw. She is too much of a coward to try.
She meets Hanni every evening during the general milling about before bed, both of them exhausted but grateful for the presence of the other. Hanni has been building a wall with bricks; since they must use their bare hands, Hanni’s, like the others in the detail, are chapped and bleeding. Frieda uses the underside of her own skirt where it is cleanest to wipe the dirt and blood from Hanni’s hands. She has no water, no soothing cream. But Hanni is young and strong and she will survive this.
In September someone says it is Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. Frieda remembers the honey cake Oma used to bake, golden brown and sticky sweet. Sweet things for a sweet year. There will never be a sweet year again. Oma’s face rises up into the air, grey hair pulled back into a tidy bun, lips smiling. Frieda-mouse, she says.
“Oma!”
The sound of her own voice brings her back. She is bent over a garden of roses, pulling the weeds out with her hands, sweating from the direct sun. Her hands are clammy, and her back aches. When she tries to straighten up, her arm catches on a thorn. Drops of blood rise to the surface and trickle down her skin. She wipes them away with a leafy weed.
Then to her right, she hears a groan, a thud. “Frieda!” someone calls softly. “Help her.”
The women around her know she’s a doctor and have come to call on her in their times of need. The guards lean against a fence in the shade, talking and smoking.
Frieda creeps to the figure lying among the roses. Olga. She turns her over and bends her head down to the woman’s chest. Puts a finger on the pulse.
“What d’you think you’re doing?”
Frieda looks up. A guard.
“She’s a doctor,” one of the women dares to say. “The woman fainted.”
“Well?” the guard says, smirking at Frieda. She looks drunk. “What can a doctor do for a dead person?”
“She’s not dead,” Frieda says quietly. “She has heat stroke. She needs water.”
“Maybe she’d like some schnapps,” the guard snarls, taking a flask from her skirt pocket and taking a swig. “Pull her out of there and get back to work.”
It is also in September that Frieda notices Hanni’s dress fits differently, though she has moved her apron higher to disguise it. She cannot be getting fat in the camp, so it can be only one thing. Frieda is barely able to contain her anger in the dusky evening by the side of the barracks.
“Why didn’t you tell me right away? I could’ve gotten rid of it for you. Now it’s too dangerous for you. You’ll have to have it. What were you thinking?”
Tears slip down Hanni’s bony cheeks. Frieda takes a deep breath.
“I’m sorry, Hanni. Was it Wolfie?”
She nods.
“He should’ve known better.”
“Each time we saw each other we thought it would be the last. And then it was.”
“When is it due?”
“End of December.”
“Like Jesus,” Frieda says, scowling.
One morning late in November, before work starts, the block leader shouts out, “Number 43709! Get your things and come with me!”
Frieda repeats the number to herself. It’s her! She’s going to die. They’ve found out what she’s been doing and now she’s going to pay with her life. She deserves no less. Ah, well. It wasn’t much of a life. If she believed in God, she would pray. If she believed in God, she might not have played God. In His absence, she did what she had to.
The other women stare in pity as she walks past them carrying her soup tin and a comb, payment for tending to a woman with a broken wrist.
She follows the block leader to a building near the entrance of the camp. “Find some clothes in there,” she snaps, pointing to a room piled high with clothes. “Hurry up!”
Frieda is confused. At least she wasn’t sent to the corridor. They don’t seem to be planning to shoot her. Amid the detritus of stolen lives, she finds a grey tweed skirt, an off-white blouse, and a black wool jacket. And in one pile, a heavy woollen coat! She pulls the comb through her tattered hair, then steps out. She feels human again.
She shares the back of an enclosed truck with five other women. None knows where they are going or what is in store for them. After about a half-hour, the truck stops and the five women are led off. Sitting by herself, all she can see out the window of the back door are trees with their bare branches.
The truck drives on. Twenty minutes later, it stops again. The back door opens, and the guard motions for her to get out.
She makes out a stone block building surrounded by pine. The forest smell revives her; when she dies, she would like it to be amid the smell of pine. The building looks like it might have been a hospital once, though the vegetation is encroaching.
The guard takes her inside and gives the uniformed man at the desk her papers.
“Fräulein Eisenbaum,” says the man, perusing her documents.
She is surprised to hear her name spoken after so long being a number.
“Come with me.”
She follows him down a hallway of closed doors to the back of the building. Finally he leads her into a room with counters and cupboards and a sink near a window. A laboratory. A young blond man is washing glass tubes at the sink. The sound of running water amazes Frieda.
“Where’s the doctor?” the escort says to a man at a desk off to one side.
“He went out, Herr Scharfuhrer.”
“You take care of her, then.” He turns and leaves.
The youngish man at the desk stands and proffers a hand.
Nobody has asked to shake her hand for a long time. But this man is a prisoner like her; he wears a green triangle on his jacket, the sign of an asocial or criminal prisoner. She slowly gives him her hand. He sits down and reads her documents.
Asocial usually meant beggars in the street or gypsies. His sallow skin could be gypsy. He doesn’t look like a criminal, but then who do the Nazis consider criminal? Thieves? Kidnappers? Murderers? The irony would make her smile, if she still could.
“What do they do here?” she asks.
The water stops running, the room suddenly quiet. The blond man must be standing at the counter behind Frieda.
“Medical experiments,” says the man at the desk. His tone is matter-of-fact, as if it is a normal activity. “You’re a doctor.” It’s not a question. He has her papers before him.
She nods. “What kind of experiments?” Not that long ago she would have been horrified. In this new universe, horror is the new normal. It is the everyday, where all things are possible.
“All kinds. Surgery. Drugs. All kinds.”
“Why am I here?”
“Oh, didn’t they tell you? Herr Doktor Brenner asked for you.”
Herr Doktor Brenner. A name from another life.
“He said you were important for his work. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you, getting a Jewess reassigned.” He seems compelled to explain. The shock must be visible on her face. “It was convenient for him. You happened to be assigned to the same camp. You’re lucky. This is a satellite camp of Ravensbrück. You understand?”
She stares at him, not understanding. Or maybe understanding too well. The black and white tiles mesmerize her; she wants to lie down and not get up. A small white spot on a black tile begins to pull her in. She wants it to suck her in and make her disappear.
The man bends forward. “Don’t worry. It’ll be better than where you were before. And you may find the work scientifically interesting.”
She looks at him as if he’s dropped from the moon. Scientifically interesting. Once this might have meant something to her. But now she has only one interest: staying alive. When she loses that interest, nothing will help her.