Lilac Girls

A prisoner with a purple triangle—a Bible girl, I later learned—pushed me back onto a table used to examine gynecological parts. She held my legs apart while a second prisoner shaved me with a straight razor, leaving me cut and scraped.

  When that was finished, they sent me on to the woman doctor, who said, “On the table,” and took a cold silver instrument, put it in me, and opened me up, all without even toweling it off! She spread me out for all the world to see and jabbed her rubber-gloved fingers inside me and felt around. She was not at all horrified by her job and might just as well have been washing a dish. She acted with no regard for the fact that I was young and she was violating me in a way that could never be undone.

  I had little time to mourn my lost virginity, for guards lined us up naked, five across, in the shower room. A shower attendant in white coveralls hit the women in front of us with a truncheon, leaving red welts on their backsides, as they ran to the showerheads. I stayed near Mrs. Mikelsky and braced for the sting of the rubber. She held baby Jagoda close to her, shivering so badly it was as if cold water were already running over her. A prisoner with a green badge on her sleeve came to Mrs. Mikelsky, put two hands around the baby’s skinny, naked body, and pulled. Mrs. Mikelsky held Jagoda tight.

  “Give it to me,” the prisoner-guard said.

  Mrs. Mikelsky only held tighter.

  “She’s a good baby,” I said to the guard.

  The guard pulled harder at the child. Would they tear her in two?

  “It can’t be helped,” the guard said. “Don’t make a scene.”

  The baby cried out, which caught the attention of the nasty head wardress, Dorothea Binz, who came, almost at a run, from the front of the building, a second guard close behind. The name Dorothea means “God’s gift,” and a name could not have been more wrong for a person.

  Binz came to a stop next to Mrs. Mikelsky and pointed her leather crop at little blond Jagoda.

  “Is the father German?”

  Mrs. Mikelsky glanced at me, her brow creased.

  “No, Polish,” she said.

  “Just take it,” Binz said with a wave of her crop.

  The guard who had come with Binz held Mrs. Mikelsky from behind while the first guard pried Jagoda from her mother’s arms.

  “I made a mistake,” Mrs. Mikelsky said. “Yes, actually the father is German…” She glanced at me.

  “From Berlin,” I said. “A real patriot.”

  The green badge held naked Jagoda to her shoulder and looked at Binz.

  “Just take it,” Binz said with a jerk of her head.

  The guard hiked the baby higher on her shoulder and walked back through the incoming crowd.

  Mrs. Mikelsky crumpled to the floor like a burning piece of paper as she watched her baby be taken away. “No, please, where are you taking her?”

  Binz poked her crop into Mrs. Mikelsky’s ribs and pushed her toward the showers.

  I folded my arms across my naked chest and stepped closer to Binz.

  “That child will die without her mother,” I said.

  Binz turned to me, her expression bringing to mind a bubbling teapot.

  “There is no greater cruelty,” I said.

  Binz raised her crop to me.

  “You Poles…”

  I closed my eyes, bracing myself, waiting for the sting of the leather. Where would the blows land?

  Suddenly I felt arms slide around me. Matka, her naked body smooth on mine.

  “Please, Madame Wardress,” she said in her prettiest German. “She is out of her head to speak to you this way. How sorry we are—”

  Was it my mother’s German that caused Binz to take a step back? Her gentle way?

  “You tell her to keep her mouth shut,” Binz said, shaking her crop in my direction. She retreated through the crowd.

  The guards shoved me dazed into a shower, my tears for poor Mrs. Mikelsky mixing with the sting of cold shower water.

  —

  THEY RELEASED US FROM quarantine two weeks later, with only our uniform shift and blouse, enormous wooden clogs, a toothbrush, a thin jacket, gray bloomers, a tin bowl and spoon, and a piece of soap we were told had to last two months. Two months? Surely we’d be home by then!

  Our new home, Block 32, was much larger than the quarantine block. Women, some in their uniform gray shirts and striped dresses, some naked from the shower, ran about dressing, squaring up their straw mattresses, and tucking in their blue and white checked sheets. There was a small washroom in the block with three showerheads and three long sinks, each filled by means of a spout. Women sat with no modesty atop a platform drilled with holes to send nature’s offerings to the putrid ground below.

  The block smelled like a chicken coop, rotten beets, and five hundred unwashed feet. All of the girls in the block spoke Polish, and most wore the red triangle of political prisoners. If there was any good thing about the camp, it was that so many of the prisoners were Polish—almost half—most there, like us, for what the Nazis called political crimes. After Poles, the next largest group was German women arrested for violating one of Hitler’s many rules or for criminal activity such as murder or theft.

  “Square your bed!” shouted Roza, the Blockova, a German woman with sleepy eyes. She was from Berlin and not much older than my mother. Later I learned she’d been arrested for sticking her tongue out at a German officer.

  “Attend your mess kit!”

  We quickly learned that survival at Ravensbrück revolved around one’s tin bowl, cup, and spoon and the ability to safeguard them. If one looked away for a moment, they might disappear, never to return. As a result we kept our kits tucked in the chests of our uniforms or, if one was lucky enough to acquire a piece of twine or string, made that into a belt and wore them strung on it at the waist.

  Luiza and Matka chose a top bunk, what the prisoners called the coconut palms, since it was high up. It was very close to the ceiling, so they could barely sit up, and in the winter icicles hung from above it, but it was more private up there. Zuzanna and I slept just opposite.

  I had to push down my jealousy at Luiza sleeping with my mother. I got Zuzanna, who shifted all night in her sleep, mumbling doctor talk. When she woke me up, I would spend the night fretting in the darkness, paralyzed with guilty thoughts. How could I have been so reckless to have gotten us all sent to this terrible place? To make things worse, the block was never quiet, always filled with the sounds of shrill voices of women tortured by nightmares or the itch of lice, night-shift workers returning home, sleepless women exchanging recipes, and calls for a basin for the sick who could not get to the washroom in time.

  I did find moments to be alone with Matka, though. That night I crawled into the bunk with her before dinner.

  “I am so sorry I got you here, Matka. If you hadn’t brought that sandwich, if I hadn’t—”

  “Don’t think that way,” she said. “In here, you have to concentrate all you have on being smarter than the Germans. I’m glad I’m here with you girls. This will all be fine.” She kissed my forehead.

  “But your ring—I hate them for taking it.”

  “It’s just a thing, Kasia. Don’t waste your energy on the hate. That will kill you sure as anything. Focus on keeping your strength. You’re resourceful. Find a way to outsmart them.”

  Blockova Roza strode in. She had a kind face but did not smile as she made announcements.

  “Work call is at eight A.M. Those without work assignments, report to the labor office next to the block where you were processed. That is where you will pick up your badge and number.”

  “She speaks only in German?” I whispered to Matka. “What about the girls who don’t understand?”

  “Say a prayer of thanks for Herr Speck’s German class. It may save your life.”

  She was right. I was lucky I spoke German, since all announcements were made in that language, no exceptions. The non-German speakers had a terrible disadvantage, since ignorance was no excuse for disregarding rules.

/>   —

  THE NEXT MORNING THE SIREN startled us awake. I’d just dozed off, dreaming about swimming with Pietrik in Lublin, when the lights in our block came on at 3:30 A.M. The worst part was that siren, a screech so loud and piercing it was as if it were from the bowels of hell. With this siren, Roza and her Stubova assistants came through the rows of beds. One Stubova banged on a tin pan, and one poked at sleepers with the leg of a stool, and Roza splashed ladles of water from a bucket onto sleeping women’s faces.

  “Get up! Hurry! Everyone up!” they called.

  This was a special kind of torture.

  Matka, Zuzanna, Luiza, and I made our way to the dining hall, the long room next to our sleeping quarters, and squeezed onto a bench at the end. Breakfast was the same as it had been in quarantine, lukewarm yellowish soup that was more like turnip water and a small piece of bread that tasted like sawdust. The soup hit my stomach and almost came back up.

  Roza read a list of new assignments.

  Matka was assigned to the bookbindery, one of the highly sought-after inside positions. It was much harder to work a prisoner to death when she was sitting at a desk.

  Luiza became an assistant to the Bible girls who processed Angora rabbit fur. The Angora rabbits lived at the far end of the camp in specially heated cages and were fed tender lettuce from the commandant’s greenhouse. Their fur was periodically shaved and sent to the tailor’s workshop, a massive complex of eight interconnected warehouses where prisoners assembled German army uniforms.

  Zuzanna, who did not reveal she was a medical doctor, ended up sorting the booty piles—the mounds of Hitler’s stolen plunder that came by train.

  I was assigned as an Available, a good and bad thing. Good since we lined up every day and, if not chosen to work, had that day to lie in the bunk. But bad since, if chosen, we were assigned some of the worst jobs, like latrine cleaner or road crew worker. Being assigned to the road crew and used like an animal to pull a heavy concrete roller could kill a person in one day.

  —

  OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS AT RAVENSBRÜCK was especially bad, for many of us had been certain we’d be home by then. Matka, Zuzanna, Luiza, and I had only been there for three months, but it felt like three years. We had received a few letters from Papa by then. They were written in German, per regulations, and mostly struck through with black marker, leaving only a few words and his last line, Your loving Papa. We wrote letters too, on single-paged camp stationery, limited by the censors to writing about the weather and vague positive thoughts.

  As the days grew shorter, Zuzanna warned us to keep our spirits up, for sadness was often a more potent killer than disease. Some just gave up, stopped eating, and died.

  Christmas morning started with a pane of glass shattering in the cold. The air rushed in, waking us all. Did this devil wind prying us from our beds on Christ’s day mean bad things for us?

  Every prisoner in camp shuffled out onto the platz, for Appell, a massive, group roll call. We then lined up ten abreast in the darkness next to the Revier, the only sound the stomping of hundreds of clogs echoing around the platz as we tried to ward off the cold. How I wished for a warm coat! The searchlights arced overhead. Surely Appell would be short and uneventful because of Christmas. Didn’t Germans celebrate Christ’s birth? Maybe Binz would take Christmas off? I tried not to look at the pile of bodies, stacked like firewood next to the linen shop, covered in a light dusting of snow. There the bodies waited for the man from town with his morgue car to come and slide each into one of his paper bags with frilly ends and drive them off.

  A young guard in training named Irma Grese, Binz’s star protégé, hurried down the rows counting us and marking numbers down on her clipboard. She stopped now and then to enjoy a cigarette, standing there wrapped in her thick black cloak. While Grese and Binz were like truant teenaged best friends, both blond and beautiful, there was no mistaking one for the other. Binz was tall with slightly coarser features and wore her hair in an Olympia roll, teased and rolled up from her forehead. Grese was petite and movie-star pretty, with almond-shaped blue eyes and naturally pink lips. Under her uniform cap, she wore her hair pulled back into two shining ringlets, like rolls of golden coins, one down each side of her neck. Unfortunately for us, Irma had no talent for numbers. Often her hasty head counts failed to match Binz’s, leading to three-and four-hour Appells.

  The sun breached the horizon, sending golden rays over the platz, and a collective moan of happiness went up in the crowd.

  “Quiet!” shouted Irma.

  Despite our best efforts to hang back and stand in the warmer, soft middle of the crowd, all five of us in our little camp family had ended up in the front row that morning. It was a dangerous place to be, since prisoners on the outer edges were more vulnerable, open to attacks from bored and sometimes volatile guards and their dogs. I stood next to Matka, Luiza on her other side. Mrs. Mikelsky, whom we’d all watched decline quickly after losing her baby, stood between Zuzanna and me. Zuzanna had diagnosed my teacher with dysentery and severe depression, a bad combination.

  It had been snowing off and on since early November. To help the time go by, I watched the birds shake snow from their wings, and was jealous of them for being able to come and go as they pleased. A bitter wind was slashing off the lake that morning, so we’d helped Mrs. Mikelsky slip two sheets of smuggled newspaper down the front of her thin cotton jacket for insulation. When Irma was not looking, we turned our backs and rubbed up against one another, trying to stay warm. The guards had erected a tall fir in a sturdy wooden base as a Christmas tree at the end of Beauty Road, and it swayed in the wind.

  Mrs. Mikelsky swayed as well, and I held her arm to steady her. Even through her cotton coat, I felt the bone of her elbow sharp against my palm. Was I already that emaciated too? Mrs. Mikelsky leaned into me, and the newspaper crinkled and peeped out over the neck of her shift.

  I tucked the paper down, out of sight. “You have to stand straight,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Kasia.”

  “Count in your head. That helps.”

  “Quiet,” Zuzanna said to me across Mrs. Mikelsky’s back. “Binz is coming.”

  A wave of dread washed through the crowd as Binz rode through the camp gates and across the platz on her blue bicycle. Had she overslept, warm in her bed with her married boyfriend, Edmund? At least he wasn’t there that morning, kissing her as a prisoner was whipped, their favorite pastime.

  As Binz rode, she strained against the wind, one hand on a handlebar, the other on her dog’s leash, her black wool cape fanned out behind her. She reached the Revier, leaned her bicycle against the wall, and navigated the cobblestones with her farm-girl stride, dog by her side, straining at its collar. As Binz walked, she waved her crop in the air like a child with a toy. It was a new crop, made of black leather, from the end of which sprouted a long braid of cellophane.

  Binz’s dog was named Adelige, which means “aristocratic lady,” and she was the most magnificent and most terrifying Alsatian of them all, black and tan with a thick shawl of fur around her chest, the type you could imagine a fine coat being made from. The dog responded to a series of commands, which Binz communicated by way of a green metal clicker.

  Binz walked straight to Mrs. Mikelsky and jabbed her out of line with the crop.

  “You. Out.”

  I tried to follow, but Matka held me back.

  “What were you talking about?” Binz asked, dog at her hip.

  “Nothing, Madame Wardress,” Mrs. Mikelsky said.

  Irma stepped to Binz’s side. “The tally is complete, Madame Wardress.”

  Binz didn’t answer, her gaze trained on Mrs. Mikelsky.

  “My baby Jagoda—” Mrs. Mikelsky began.

  “You have no baby. You have nothing. You are only a number.”

  Was Binz showing off for Irma?

  Mrs. Mikelsky held one hand out to Binz. “She’s a good baby—”

  Binz reached for the newspaper under Mrs.
Mikelsky’s shift and yanked it out in one motion.

  “Where did you get this?” Binz asked.

  Irma slid her clipboard under her arm and lit another cigarette.

  Mrs. Mikelsky stood taller. “I don’t know. I have nothing. I am only a number.”

  Even from five paces away, I could see Binz’s whole body tremble. “You’re right,” she said, then drew back her arm and sent her crop across Mrs. Mikelsky’s cheek.

  The cellophane slashed Mrs. Mikelsky’s cheekbone, and after a quick look at Irma, Binz bent at the waist and unleashed her dog. Adelige sat motionless at first, then at the chirp of Binz’s clicker lunged at Mrs. Mikelsky, ears pinned back, teeth bared. The dog clamped her mouth around Mrs. Mikelsky’s hand, shook it side to side, and pulled my teacher to her knees. The dog’s growls echoed around the square as she lunged and bit the neckline of Mrs. Mikelsky’s shift and brought her down onto the snow.

  Matka took my hand in hers.

  Mrs. Mikelsky rolled to her side and tried to sit but the dog clamped her jaws around her throat and shook its head back and forth.

  I held back the urge to retch as the dog dragged Mrs. Mikelsky away from us, like a wolf with a freshly killed deer, leaving a cherry stain along the snow.

  The chirp of Binz’s metal clicker echoed about the platz.

  “Adelige, release!” Binz called out.

  The dog sat back on her haunches and panted, her golden eyes trained on Binz.

  “Seven seven seven six!” Binz shouted.

  Irma tossed away her cigarette and let it lie there on the snow, a lazy blue spiral rising from it, as she wrote on her clipboard.

  The dog trotted to Binz, tail between her legs, and left Mrs. Mikelsky lying motionless.

  Binz turned and waved me out of line. I stepped one pace out.

  “Your friend?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes? How so?”

  “My math teacher, Madame Wardress.” Tears blurred my sight, but I held them back. Tears only inflamed Binz.

  Irma touched her fingers to her pretty mouth and smiled. “Polish math.”

  Binz tossed me a violet grease pen.

  “Write it,” she said.