A Woman of War Read online

  It was her nose that caught the coppery taint of birth blood, and not that of the second, shadowy guard.

  ‘You’ve had another one, then?’

  I walked forward, as I always did. The exchange had become a game I was almost certain to lose, but it never stopped me trying.

  ‘The baby’s only been born an hour,’ I lied. ‘It’s not long. Just a little more time. It won’t interfere with the count.’

  She scanned up and down the hut, the sixty or so sets of eyes upon her, Irena’s normally dull gaze the whitest I had ever seen. For a second, the guard looked as if she was considering a minor reprieve. Then, she sniffed and grunted, ‘You know the rules. I don’t make them. It’s time.’ The justification for ninety per cent of the degradation in the camp was the same – it’s not our fault, we’re only following orders. The other ten per cent was pure enjoyment.

  It was then Irena burst out of her own birth world, clutching the baby to her bare breast, springing off the bed and backing into the corner near the stove, a trickle of blood following her.

  ‘No, no please,’ she cried. ‘I can do anything. I will do anything, anything you want.’

  The guard’s granite reflection told Irena her bargaining power was worthless, so she turned on herself: ‘Take me instead. Take me now, but leave the baby.’ Irena aimed her frenzied voice at me. ‘Anke? You can care for the baby, can’t you? If I’m gone?’

  I nodded a yes, but in reality I couldn’t; the few non-Jews allowed to keep their babies had little enough milk for their own newborns, let alone another one scraping at the breast. The infants succumbed to malnutrition in a matter of weeks, and to glimpse a baby beyond a month was unusual. I wouldn’t even need to ask – not one of these desperate appeals had ever worked. We all held our breath for Irena, a scene we had witnessed too many times, but which never ceased to feel completely surreal. A mother having to beg for her baby’s life.

  The female guard sighed, boredom apparent. The next step was inevitable, but every mother, if they weren’t immobile or nearing an unconscious state, made the same unrealistic plea. It was a mother’s reflex: laying down your own life to save a new one.

  ‘Now come on,’ said the guard, moving towards Irena, ‘don’t make it harder. Don’t make me hurt you.’

  She made a grab for the cloth, and Irena backed herself further into the corner. The baby’s sudden howling almost masked the crack to Irena’s body, and the guard emerged from the scuffle with the cloth and tiny limbs loosely wrapped. She turned, eyes narrowing to match the thin line of her lips. The heavy boots clomped as she marched towards the door, while we immediately crowded around Irena, as a protective field; if she ran out in pursuit of the guard she would almost certainly be shot by snipers on the lookout posts. She lunged like the fiercest of grizzly bears out of the shadows, broken teeth bared, a tornado of desperation, and we caught her in our human net. The high, shrill screams would have filled the air outside, and I imagined the camp stopping for a second, knowing the deathly protocol was about to happen.

  Instantly, the women started up a song, a lament, the volume rising rapidly, as the group took on a unified swaying, with Irena at its core, a shield around her suffering. It was meant as comfort, but there was another purpose – to mask the sound of the baby hitting the barrel of water, as shocking as gunfire if you’ve ever heard it. Rosa caught my eye, nodded and was through the door in an instant, hoping to scoop up the pitiful body after the guard tossed it aside, in time to stop the rats and the guard dogs staking their claim. A placenta was one thing, but a human body – a person. It was unthinkable.

  After several moments, Irena’s shrieking died away, replaced with a low moan seeping from her heart’s core, a consistent braying that was beyond words. I had only ever heard such a sound during summers spent on my uncle’s farm in Bavaria, when the newborn calves were taken away to market. Their bereft mothers kept up a constant, needy calling throughout the day and well into the night, searching blindly for their offspring. I would lie in bed with my hands over my ears, desperate to block out the torturous mooing. As I got older, I always asked Uncle Dieter when it was time to take the calves to market and arranged my visits to avoid them.

  I cleared up as best I could, and then busied myself seeing to some of the other sick women in the hut, changing a few meagre dressings, giving them water and just holding them as they coughed uncontrollably. At those times, I thanked the automated nurse training I had been through, where doing menial tasks required little thinking. I didn’t want to give any thought to, or process, what had happened that morning, and many others besides.

  I stepped out twice, once for some air – the chill brought me round a little – and once to visit another hut for non-Jews, where two women had recently given birth. There was little I could do for them post-birth, as I had no equipment or drugs, but I could at least reassure them their blood loss was normal and their bodies recovering. The stronger women in their own hut did the fetching and carrying while they tried in vain to encourage milk into their breasts.

  My camp classification as ‘German political’, a red star instead of yellow stitched onto my armband, allowed movement around the huts as a nurse and midwife, since I was happy – as in peacetime – to attend any woman, regardless of culture or creed. The majority of women I cared for would arrive already pregnant, or somehow manifest a pregnancy once imprisoned. It was especially true of Jewish women, even though none of the guards were ever called to account. Rape was simply not in the camp vocabulary. It seemed ironic that a good portion of the babies born were half Aryan, and yet sacrificed in the name of the master race.

  Back in Hut 23, unofficially dubbed ‘the maternity hut’ by guards and inmates alike, Irena remained in her bunk by the dying fire for several hours, constantly held by one of the women in the singing circle. I checked her bleeding wasn’t excessive, and she opened her eyes briefly. They were swollen, blackened sacs beneath her wide pupils, crusted and completely wrung-out. She grabbed my hand as I drew it away from her belly.

  ‘Anke, what was the point?’ she pleaded, inky pupils piercing directly into mine, collapsing back in sobs of dry distress.

  I was at a loss to reply because I didn’t know what she meant. The point of what? Of pregnancy, of babies, this life … or life in general? There was simply no answer.

  2

  Exit

  Just the words caused me to shake visibly: ‘The Commandant wants to see you.’ Eyes widened amid the gloom of the hut, and all movement stopped. There was no sound, just a stale breath of fear rising above the stench of humans as animals: urine and excrement, feminine issue, and the shadow smell of birth. My hands were wet with pus, and the trooper looked at them with obvious disgust. I scouted for a cloth not yet sodden, and it took me a moment in the darkness.

  ‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘Don’t keep him waiting.’

  At that point, my thoughts were clear: I am going to die anyway, I might as well not hasten the event. No one was called before the Commandment for a friendly afternoon chat.

  Ironically, it was the icy wind whipping through the holes in my dress that stopped me shaking, my body’s remaining muscles tensing to keep in whatever warmth it could. Across the barren yard, more eyes settled on me, their gazes sketching my fate, as I struggled to keep up with the goose-step pace of the trooper. ‘Oh, we remember Anke,’ they would later say, in the dank of their own huts. ‘I remember the day she was called to the Commandant. We never saw her again.’ If lucky, I might be one of many such memories, a story to be told.

  The guard led me through the scrub of the sheds, and then up to the gate to the main house, shooing me inside with a gruff: ‘Go, go!’ I had never seen the door to the house, and slowed to marvel at the intricate carvings on the outside, of angels and nymphs, no doubt the work of Ira, the woodcarver and stonemason, who’d died of pneumonia the previous winter. His pride in his work showed through, even at the gates of the enemy, although I glimpsed a tiny gargoyle sa
ndwiched between two roses, a clear image of Nazi evil. His little slice of sedition gave me a hint of courage as I clumped up the steps towards the door.

  Inside, my cheeks burned with the sudden heat and my top lip sprouted small beads of moisture, which I licked off, enjoying the tincture of salt. In the wide, wooden-clad hallway, a fire roared in a grate, fuel stacked beside it that would have saved a dozen of the babies I had seen perish over these last months. I was neither surprised nor shocked, and I hated myself for the lack of emotion. We’d become used to rationing feelings to those that could accomplish something; rage was wasted energy, but irritation bred cunning and compromise, and saved lives.

  The trooper eyed my skeletal limbs, barking at me to wait by the fire, which I took as a small token of humanity. I stood outwards, letting it burn my bony rump through the threadbare dress, feeling it quickly sear my skin and almost enjoying the near pain. The trooper rapped noisily on a dark wooden door, there was a voice from inside and I was beckoned from the fireside to walk through.

  He had his back to me, hair almost white blond – an Aryan poster boy. The trooper clicked his heels like a Spanish dancer, and the head swivelled in his chair, revealing the model man Nazi; sharp cheekbones, taut and healthy, a rich diet colouring his flesh pink, like the tinted flamingos I remembered seeing at Berlin’s zoo with my father. Skin tones in the rest of the camp were variations on grey.

  He shuffled some papers and set his eyes on my feet. A sudden, hot shame washed over me at the obvious holes in my boots, then a swift anger at myself for even entertaining such guilt – he and his kind had engineered those holes, and the painful welts on my leathery soles. His gaze flicked upwards, ignoring the wreckage between feet and head.

  ‘Fräulein Hoff,’ he began. ‘You are well?’

  We might as well have been at a tea party, the way he said it, a passing comment to a maiden aunt or a pretty girl. Irritation rose again, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer. Absently, he’d already gone back to his papers, and it was only the silence that caused him to look up again.

  I thought: I have nothing to lose. ‘You can see how well I am,’ I said flatly.

  Strangely, there was no rage at my dissidence, and I realised then he had a task to carry out, a distasteful but necessary chore.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘You act as a camp midwife? Helping the women, all the women?’

  He looked at me with deep disdain, at my dark looks, which naturally straddled the German and Jewish worlds.

  ‘I do,’ I said, with a note of pride.

  ‘And you worked in the Berlin hospitals before the war? As a midwife?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Your reputation is a good one, by all accounts,’ he said, reading from sheets in front of him. ‘You were in charge of the labour ward, and rose to the rank of Sister.’

  ‘I did.’ I was beginning to be slightly bored by his lack of emotion; even anger was absent.

  ‘And my staff here tell me you have never lost a baby in your care during your time here?’

  ‘Not at birth,’ I said, this time with defiance. ‘Before and after is common.’

  ‘Yes, well …’ He skated over death as if waving away the offer of more tea or wine. ‘And your family?’

  This was where my pride and bloody-mindedness deserted me, falling to the level of my holey boots. A well of hurt caught deep in my throat and I swallowed it like hot coals.

  ‘I have a mother, father, sister and brother, possibly in the camps,’ I managed. ‘They may be dead.’

  ‘Well, I have some news of them,’ he said, accent shorn and clipped. ‘You come from a good German family by all accounts – but your father, he is not a supporter of the war, as you know, and your brother neither. They are, of course, in our care, and alive. They know of your status too.’ His eyes tacked briefly upwards to assess my reaction. When there was none, he turned back.

  ‘You should know this because of the proposal I am about to put to you.’ His tone suggested he was offering me a bank loan, rather than my life. At that moment, I pondered on whether he hugged his mother when they met, kissed her with meaning, had sobbed on her like a baby. Or had he been born a callous bastard? I speculated whether war had made him like this, a vacuum in uniform. I was amusing myself nicely, my bones finally warming from his own fiery grate. I might die feeling warmth, and not with blue, icy blood limping through my veins. I would bleed well all over his nice, scrubbed floor, and cause him some grief, more than mere inconvenience. I hoped his boots would slip and slide on my ruby issue, a stain sinking into the leather, forever present.

  ‘Fräulein?’ It wasn’t the urgency in his voice that roused me, but a single gunshot out in the yard, a crack slicing through the quiet of his office. One of several heard every day. He didn’t flinch. ‘Fräulein, did you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have been summoned, by the highest authority – the Führer’s office, no less.’ I expected a little trumpet fanfare to follow, the statement coated with such a gilded edge. ‘They have need of your services.’

  I said nothing, unsure how to react.

  ‘You will leave in one hour,’ he said, as a sign of dismissal.

  ‘And if I don’t want to go?’ It was out of my mouth before I realised, as if something other than me had formed the words.

  Now he was visibly annoyed, probably at his inability to shoot me, there and then in cold blood. As he had done many times before, so his reputation told us. The mere mention of the Führer’s office signalled I wouldn’t die here, not today, if I agreed to go. The Commandant’s jaw set, the cheekbones rigid like a rock face, eyes a steel grey.

  ‘Then I can’t guarantee your family’s safety or outcome in the present troubles.’

  So that was it. I would attend Nazi women and help give life, in exchange for avoiding a final death for my own family. There was nothing veiled in his meaning – we all knew where we stood.

  ‘And the women here?’ I said, ignoring his dismissal. ‘Who will see to them?’

  ‘They will manage,’ he said into his papers. ‘One hour, Fräulein. I advise you to be ready.’

  My body was immune to the wind chill again as I was marched back to Hut 23. Strangely, I felt nothing physical, not even the reprieve of emerging from the main house alive. My mind, instead, was churning – of the things I needed to pass on to Rosa, just eighteen, but to date my most competent helper. Rosa had been with me at almost every camp birth in the past nine months, soothing when needed, holding hands, cleaning debris and mopping tears when the babies were plucked from their mothers, as they so often were.

  No Jewish baby made it past twenty-four hours of birth at their mother’s side. The non-Jews were sometimes permitted to nurse their babes until the inevitable malnutrition or hypothermia took hold, but at least their mothers had closure. The Jewesses clutched only an empty void, their rhythmic sobs joining the whistling wind as it ripped through the sheds. Only one Jewish mother and baby had been ghosted out of the camp overnight, on the orders of a high-ranking officer, we suspected. We were divided on whether her fate was good or bad.

  In the hut, the women greeted me with relief, then sorrow at my leaving. I had no belongings to pack, so that precious hour was spent in a breathless rundown with Rosa of the checks needing to be made, where our meagre stash of supplies was hidden. In sixty all too brief minutes, I did my best to pass on the experience I had learnt over nine years as a midwife: when shoulders were stuck, compresses on vaginal tears, if a bottom came first instead of the head, action to stop a woman bleeding out, sticky placentas. I couldn’t think or talk fast enough to include it all. Luckily Rosa was a fast learner. The normal cases she had seen many a time, and we’d had few abnormal ones too. I took her face in my hands, parched skin stretched around her large, brown eyes.

  ‘When you make it out of here, then you must promise me one thing,’ I told her. ‘Do your training, be a midwife, at least witness the good side of mothers and bab
ies together. You’re a natural, Rosa. Make it through, and make a life for yourself.’

  She nodded silently. Her pupils were sprouting tears now, genuine I knew, because none of us wasted precious fluid unless it drew hard on our hearts. It was the best farewell she could have given me.

  A hammering on the shoddy door signalled the hour was up, and I had no time to return to my own hut. It would be empty anyway, Graunia and Kirsten – my human lifelines – on work detail. With no time allowed to seek them out, Rosa was charged with passing on my love and goodbyes. I hugged several on my way out, eyes down to disguise my own distress. I was getting out, but to what? A fate potentially worse than the ugliness of the camp. I couldn’t begin to contemplate what depth of my soul I might be expected to plunder.

  A large black car was waiting, the type only Nazi officials travelled in, with a driver and a young sergeant to accompany me. The sergeant sat poker-faced, in the opposite corner on the back seat, his distaste at my physical and moral stench apparent, as a German with no allegiance to the Fatherland. Reluctantly, he pushed a blanket towards me. I hunkered into the soft leather, warmed by the luxury of real wool against my skin and the rolling engine, closing my eyes and falling into a deep – though uneasy – sleep.

  Berlin, August 1939

  They called us in one by one, plucked from our duties on the labour ward, into Matron’s office. She stood, impassive, while a man in a black suit sat behind her desk, looking very comfortable. By my turn, he must have read out the same directive enough times to know it by heart, and he barely looked at the paper in front of him.

  ‘Sister Hoff,’ he began, in a monotone, ‘you know how much the Reich values and appreciates your profession as gatekeepers of our future population.’

  I looked solidly ahead.

  ‘Which is why we are so reliant on you and your colleagues to help us in maintaining the goal that we have, the goal of purity for the German nation.’