Chapter 9: Peenemunde
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There was blood under her fingernails, scars on her skin, but Sarah would not stop scratching. She’d been sick for over a week now, coughing, fever. And the rash that first appeared as a little white patch on her stomach was spreading over her entire torso. Esther was just thankful that it remained hidden under her clothes. If the other prisoners found out, they would surely inform the guards and then she would be placed in the cattle-car prison and left to rot.
The boxcars that Esther saw on her arrival had sat idle and full three days before the engine finally came to transport them to who-knows-where. In the day, they were silent, but at night, Esther could hear noises carrying through the camp like the ghostly wails of disembodied spirits. Esther would not allow her sister to suffer such a fate. She would do everything in her power to hide Sarah’s condition from the guards and her fellow prisoners, but Sarah would not stop scratching. It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed.
“Can you do anything for her?” Esther asked after the doctor had finished his examination. The doctor looked on sadly.
“I’m afraid your sister has contracted Semitic Dysentery.”
“What is that?”
“It is a new virus which only affects Jews. I’m surprised that you have not yet contracted it. It is highly contagious.”
A virus that only affects Jews? Esther had never heard of such a thing. Why would God create something that only killed Jews? Was this one final punishment for God’s people? One last humiliation before their final demise?
“I will continue her treatment but I’m afraid there’s no hope. Semitic Dysentery is 100% fatal.” The doctor picked up the syringe of yellow liquid and inserted it in Sarah’s arm. “She will have to be transferred.”
“No!” Esther was suddenly in a panic. She wasn’t surprised by the doctor’s prognosis. Sarah had been suffering for a long time and Esther somehow knew she wouldn’t live much longer. But to die in a crowded boxcar with no water or air, stacked like so much firewood? “Can’t she stay here—at least until the end?” Esther pleaded, but the doctor shook his head.
“If only she were five years younger,” he mused half to himself, snapping off his gloves and walking towards the children. The little hospital was no longer empty as it had been a weed ago when Esther and Sarah had first arrived at the camp. Since then, new people had arrived every day, many of them children.
The doctor’s new patients were an odd mixture of races, Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Slavs, Gypsies, Indians and Orientals. There were even a few dwarves. And all of them twins. Esther wondered where they’d come from and, more importantly, why they were here. The doctor took out a handful of caramel candies from his pocket and smiled broadly.
“Children, look what Doctor S has brought for you.”
The children sat up in their beds and cheered.
“But doctor, you must help her!” Esther grabbed the doctor’s arm. The doctor froze and his eyes locked on Esther’s hand as if it were a poisonous serpent. His broad grin quickly became a mask of terror. Esther let go immediately. “Please. What if she doesn’t have this disease? What if it is something else and she will get better?”
“Listen to me very carefully,” the doctor said, his voice low and suddenly menacing. “I have not made a mistake. I know better than God what is wrong with your sister because I did it to her.” He pointed to the empty syringe on the metal table. “I have been injecting the experimental virus SD 13 into your sister every day for the past two weeks. She has displayed all the symptoms of Semitic Dysentery. Your sister will not get better. She will die in a few days, and you will die in about a week, maybe two. Now do you understand? Guard!”
Esther looked at the empty syringe on the table. “What do you mean you injected her? I thought you were trying to help her.”
“Guard!”
The bull guard appeared in the doorway.
“No. I won’t go. You aren’t a doctor. You’re a murderer.”
“I am a patriot, something your inferior race can’t possibly understand. But soon you will be eradicated like smallpox.”
Esther sprang forward. She wanted nothing less than to scratch out the doctor’s eyes. But the guard was on her, laughing. He held her up over his head like a squirming fish.
“Still some life left in her, eh doc?”
“So it would seem.” The doctor took a step backwards just out of reach of her grasping fingernails. The children behind him were starting to cry.
Sarah was taken that night. Esther heard the guards coming and fought them with all of her might. By now, she was less than ninety pounds and weak from malnutrition. They tossed her aside like a straw doll. Sarah looked down at her sister crying on the floor and for the briefest second she seemed to snap out of her delirium.
“Esther,” she said in a child’s whisper, “it will be all right.” And then she was gone.
When the doors were opened in the morning, Esther ran outside to see that the oily boxcars were already gone. A train must have come for them in the night. She fell to her knees and sobbed.
Esther worked in silence the rest of the day, filling her bucket with jagged rocks and dumping them on the rubble pile. The tunnel had grown a hundred feet in the past two weeks, the grand product of a thousand pairs of hands, ten tons of dynamite and at least a dozen lives. Sarah’s absence would hardly be missed.
The bitter looks of the fellow prisoners were gone, but no one brought her a word of comfort either. They had all suffered the loss of loved ones and now they were alone in their grief. That night, Esther lay awake listening for the ghostly wails from the train cars, but all was silence. She would never hear the voice of her sister’s departing soul. There was some small comfort in this. She scratched her stomach where a white rash had just started to appear.