Lilac Girls

  “She knows what to do, Marthe,” I said.

  The band played, and the young girls circled me, hands together, as my sister took the hairpins from Pietrik’s mother’s veil. My bad leg ached from standing so long, but how could I go sit with the old ladies on their folding chairs lined up against the wall? I’d dreamed of this wedding ritual since childhood.

  Zuzanna handed the veil to me and joined the circle. I covered my eyes with one hand and tossed the veil with my other, timing it perfectly for it to land in Zuzanna’s hands. God willing, she would be next.

  “Now married ladies assemble,” Marthe called to the crowd.

  She held the white cap in her hand. Where was Pietrik? He was missing it all.

  “Who will pin the cap?” I asked.

  “I will,” Marthe said.

  “But a married woman must do that.” The married women gathered about me in a circle, hands together.

  Marthe stepped closer. “Kasia, that’s just an old folk tradition.”

  The married women began circling around Marthe and me to the music. The smell of violet perfume and beet soup was overpowering. I grabbed a hand at random and pulled the tanner’s wife into the middle of the circle. “Mrs. Wiznowsky will pin my cap.”

  Marthe took my hand. “Kasia. Please let me do this.”

  One look at her brown eyes tearing up was all I needed. She had been good to me after all. Had fed Pietrik, Zuzanna, and me back to health. I let Marthe pin my cap and she burst out in a smile. You’ve never seen a happier person in your life.

  I broke out of the circle, the paper bills flapping as I walked. Where was Pietrik? He’d been so quiet all day. I stopped on my way to find him to let a friend of Papa’s pin another zloty note to my dress.

  I found Pietrik in Papa’s office, alone, slumped in the old leather desk chair, hands in his lap. The lamps were off, and a glint of light from a streetlamp hit the glass on a picture on the desk. It was Papa’s favorite, though my eyes were half-closed in it. The one with his arms around Zuzanna and me, taken by my mother.

  “Come and join the party.” I brushed the millet from Pietrik’s hair, still there from when guests had thrown it as we left the church. The millet Papa had buried that night so long ago. Dangerous as it was to call attention to the ceremony, I was happy some had not been able to let the tradition of throwing millet go.

  I knelt beside Pietrik.

  “You haven’t eaten a thing. The hunter’s stew’s almost gone, and they just brought more of those sausages you like. Plus they’re going to dance the kujawiak.”

  “Soon, Kasia.”

  Pietrik was a quiet person, but he had never been given to such brooding.

  “They are wondering where the groom is,” I said.

  He was quiet for a long minute, his face in shadows. “What a coward I am, Kasia. My old underground reports hiding in the woods eating grass while I’m here feasting.”

  The music in the other room reached a fever pitch.

  “It’s not your fault Papa wants to protect his son-in-law. We have our troubles too, you know—”

  “I am just thinking. About what my father would do if he were here. He was no coward.”

  Though Pietrik seldom spoke of it, more rumors had surfaced about Katyn Forest, and though the Russians blamed the Nazis, we all knew it was the Russian NKVD who’d murdered thousands of Polish intelligentsia there. Captain Bakoski had most likely been among those executed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I put my head in his lap and felt something cold and hard in his hand. As he pulled it away I saw a glint of light on silver.

  “Papa’s gun?” I said. “Are you—”

  “It makes me feel better to hold it,” Pietrik said.

  I eased the gun from his hand.

  “You’d better get back,” Pietrik said. “The bride can’t just disappear.”

  Simply touching that gun, smooth and heavy, made my whole body cold. “They want to see you as well,” I said.

  He made no effort to grab the gun back.

  I opened Papa’s desk drawer and placed it inside.

  “Oh, Pietrik,” I said, kneeling next to him.

  We stayed there in the dark together for some time and listened to the guests sing as the band played “Sto Lat.” One hundred years of happiness for the bride and groom.

  1947

  The so-called Doctors Trial at Nuremberg was a farce from beginning to end, and the trauma of it caused me a series of debilitating bronchial infections. The waiting. The reams of paper that could have been burned to keep good Germans from freezing. The 139 trial days, eighty-five witnesses, and endless defendant cross-examinations.

  Dr. Gebhardt’s testimony alone was three days long and especially difficult to watch. As he explained the operations in great detail, he only dragged Fritz and me down with him. Gebhardt even offered to have the same operation performed on himself to prove how harmless the procedures were, but his offer was ignored.

  And why did I ask my lawyer, Dr. Alfred Seidl, to tell me the fates of Binz and Marschall from the trial of Ravensbrück camp staff, the so-called Ravensbrück trial at Hamburg, on the day I was to testify? It only roused more fear about going on the stand that morning.

  “They took Elizabeth Marschall first,” Alfred said, “then Dorothea Binz. And Vilmer Hartman last. Ladies first, I suppose.”

  My abdominal muscles contracted as he indicated the picture in the newspaper. It showed Vilmer, hands fastened behind his back, neck broken at the fifth vertebra, his feet hanging there in their beautiful shoes. He had dropped well. The noose knot, placed under his left jaw, had broken the axis bone, which in turn severed the spinal cord. I scanned the pictures of the others, all hung like ducks on a hunter’s rack, and was convulsed with a terrible fear, which sent tremors to my hands. Many of them had turned to religion before they walked up the thirteen steps to the gallows. All were buried in nameless graves.

  That day’s events in court did nothing to calm me either. First up, a Rabbit from Ravensbrück on the witness stand.

  “Can you identify Dr. Herta Oberheuser?” Alexander Hardy, associate counsel for the prosecution, asked. He was a reasonably attractive man with a receding hairline.

  The Rabbit pointed to me. How could that be? They remembered me? I had no memory of them. They knew my name? We’d been so careful. Alfred had told me the Poles asked to have me extradited to Poland to stand trial. Only me. Had others not done much worse? Alfred had challenged this request and won.

  Soon it was my turn.

  “We call Herta Oberheuser to the stand,” Hardy said.

  Fritz gave me a look designed to instill courage. I took a deep breath, the blood pounding in my head. I made my way to the stand, the crowd a blur, and scanned the balcony for Mutti.

  “How could you participate in the sulfonamide experiments in good conscience, Herta Oberheuser?” Hardy asked.

  “Those prisoners were Polish women who were sentenced to death,” I said. “They were scheduled to die anyway. That research helped German soldiers. My blood.”

  I found Mutti in the balcony, fingers raised to her lips. No Gunther?

  Hardy waved a sheaf of papers in my direction. “Were any persons shot or executed after they had been subjected to these experiments?”

  “Yes, but they were political prisoners with—” The red lightbulb attached to the witness stand in front of me lit up. The interpreters were having trouble keeping up. I would have to slow down. “Political…prisoners with…death sentences.”

  “And in your affidavit in connection with lethal injections, you admit that you gave five or six lethal injections. Is that correct?”

  Why had I admitted that in my affidavit? Could I pretend not to understand the translator?

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you gave injections, and after such injections the persons died, did they not?”

  “Yes, but as I’ve said in previous examinations, it was a matt
er of medical aid to patients in their dying agony.”

  “And this medical aid resulted in death, did it not?” Hardy asked.

  I kept my gaze fixed on my hands in my lap. “No.”

  “I said, ‘And this medical aid resulted in death, did it not?’ ” Hardy said.

  My heart pounded as I studied my hands. “As I said, these patients were in their dying agony.”

  “Miss Oberheuser, were you ever given any awards or medals?”

  “I received the War Merit Cross, if I remember correctly.”

  “And for what reason did you receive that medal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hardy leaned on his podium. “Was it for your participation in the sulfonamide experiments?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

  Though evidence of American experiments similar to those we were charged with was presented and visibly shook the American judges, in the end, the verdicts hinged on the issue of whether the subjects of the experiments had been volunteers. All I could do was wander the orchard in the prison exercise yard and wait.

  Fritz seemed devastated by the trial. While some of the doctors took it in stride and tried to research their way out of convictions, Fritz became withdrawn. We were not allowed to talk while in the courtroom, but he once spoke to me as he entered the elevator down to our cells.

  “They may as well hang me now,” he said. “I’m finished.”

  Fritz was the only Doctors Trial defendant who was openly repentant, a fact that did not go unnoticed among the other doctors, the rest of whom stayed resolute to the end.

  The day of our sentencing, August 20, 1947, I wore a black, long-sleeved wool coatdress with a white bow collar provided by the court. My heart hammered at my sternum as I listened to my colleagues’ sentences announced one at a time in the great room. I waited my turn in the hallway behind the wooden courtroom door, a silent American guard at my side. I knew enough English by then to understand Dr. Gebhardt’s fate.

  “Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Military Tribunal One has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in an organization declared criminal by the judgment of the International Military Tribunal, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you. For your said crimes on which you have been and now stand convicted, Military Tribunal One sentences you, Karl Gebhardt, to death by hanging.”

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. When my turn came, the door slid open, I stepped into the courtroom, and put on my translation headphones. The room took on a vivid color, saturated and intense, as I searched the crowd for Mutti.

  “Herta Oberheuser, Military Tribunal One has found and adjudged you guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as charged under the indictment heretofore filed against you.”

  Once I heard the word “schuldig” in my translation headphones, I grabbed the railing.

  Guilty.

  Then came the sentence. I listened, numbed. “For your said crimes on which you have been and now stand convicted, Military Tribunal One sentences you, Herta Oberheuser, to imprisonment for a term of twenty years, to be served at such prison or prisons, or other appropriate place of confinement, as shall be determined by competent authority.”

  I was careful to show no trace of reaction to the sentence. Fritz was sentenced to life in prison, and many of the others were doomed to join Gebhardt at the gallows. I would be an old woman when released. In the one minute and forty seconds it took to sentence me, they stripped me of a lifetime of work.

  —

  ON JUNE 2, 1948, Dr. Gebhardt was hanged on one of the three portable gallows in the prison gymnasium. I read in the paper that the nooses they used that day were not adjusted properly and several of the defendants lingered, alive, for almost ten minutes. The Americans couldn’t even execute a death sentence properly. I was glad the Führer had taken his own life and had not been able to see that travesty. They soon bused me to War Criminal Prison Number 1 in Landsberg, Bavaria, to begin my sentence. The thought of not practicing medicine for all those years was debilitating, and I started my letter writing campaign.

  To the mayor of Stocksee went my first.

  1947

  I screamed most of Wednesday, March 25, 1947. At People’s Hospital in Lublin, we nurses were happy to hear such screams, for it meant a healthy mother. A quiet birth was often a sad one. I was pleased that my baby’s lung function was productive as well, for as a maternity nurse myself, I’d seen things go wrong in seconds. Breech births. Blue babies. Our doctors were excellent (including my sister), but it was the maternity division nurses who made it hum. I was lucky it was a routine labor, since pain medication and other drugs were in short supply.

  Pietrik stood next to my bed, swaddled baby in his arms, and every nurse on the floor gathered around him. He wore a white hospital smock over his factory coveralls and held her in a most natural way, not stiff and awkward like so many new fathers. As kind as my visitors were, I just wanted to be alone with the baby and get to know our girl.

  “Give her back, Pietrik,” I said, my vocal cords raw.

  Pietrik laid the baby back in my arms. I was soon sleepy, since it was warm for such a large ward—over fifty beds. My ward supervisor had reserved the best one for me, on the far wall away from the drafty windows, next to the radiator. I breathed the baby’s sweet-sour scent and watched the fontanel atop her head beat out a soft rhythm. She was as blond as Mrs. Mikelsky’s baby. Jagoda would have been how old by now? Eight? Should we name our baby Jagoda? That might be too sad. Maybe a name like Irenka.

  Hope.

  Pietrik lobbied for the name Halina, arguing my mother would have wanted that. But didn’t he see it would be too painful to say my dead mother’s name ten times a day?

  The series of bells signaling visitor time rang, and the nurses scattered. Marthe was first to arrive. She carried a plate of paczkis in one hand, napkins in the other.

  “We come bearing gifts,” she said. “Paczki for the mother?” Papa brought up the rear bearing Marthe’s purse.

  “No, thank you,” I said. I felt as round and fat as a paczki myself. When would Zuzanna be back to fend off Marthe? She’d assisted at the delivery but had been called away to set a fracture.

  Marthe placed a sugar-frosted paczki on a napkin and set it next to me. “This is no time for a slenderizing course.”

  I resisted sweets since I not only had baby fat to lose, but a cavity in my left canine tooth as well, a souvenir from Ravensbrück, and which stung when it met with sugar.

  My father kissed my hand, then my forehead and the baby’s too. “How are you, Kasia?”

  Pietrik lifted the baby from my arms, leaving me cold. He handed Papa the baby, Marthe’s purse still on Papa’s arm.

  “We are thinking of naming her Halina,” Pietrik said.

  “Well, I like the name Irenka,” I said. “It means hope—”

  “Halina, of course,” Papa said. “How nice.”

  Were those tears in his eyes?

  “She favors you, Pietrik,” Marthe said. “Will you christen her at home? Don’t even think about a church.”

  She was right. The Polish Workers’ Party no longer simply suggested a ban on religious ceremonies, including baptisms and weddings. It openly discouraged them and made life terribly difficult for those who disobeyed. Marthe and Papa were still not married, though many priests wed couples in secret.

  Marthe scooped the baby from Papa’s arms. “This may be hard for you, Kasia, with your bad leg once you come home. I will take care of the baby.”

  As Marthe cooed over the baby, a dark wave crashed over me. Why wasn’t my mother here? Matka would walk the ward with the baby and show her off. She would tell me stories of myself as a child and make me laugh about it all.

  All at once, my face was wet with tears. I’d helped hundreds of mothers fight baby blues, but it was harder than it appeared, like being
sucked down into a dark hole.

  “I need the baby back, please,” I said.

  Suddenly I wanted them all gone, Pietrik too. If I couldn’t have my mother, I wanted no one.

  Pietrik took the baby from Marthe, who looked pained to release her, and placed her back in my arms.

  “Kasia needs to rest,” he said.

  Marthe gathered her plate of paczkis. “We’ll be back tomorrow with pierogies.”

  “No thank you,” I said. “They feed us well here.”

  Once they left and Pietrik went back to the factory, the baby and I drifted in and out of sleep. When the radiator started hissing steam, I woke with a start thinking I was back on the train to Ravensbrück, the train’s whistle screaming as we came to the platform. My heart raced, but I calmed once I looked at the baby. She shifted in my arms.

  Halina? So she would have my mother’s name after all? As it was, I could barely look at my mother’s picture without falling to pieces. More terrifying, could the child’s name somehow cause her to follow Matka’s terrible path? To live a wonderful life, cut short? A shiver ran through me. Stranger things have happened.

  Once Pietrik and Papa started calling the baby Halina, I gave in and soon called her that myself. I needed to grow up after all. I was a mother now, with responsibilities, no longer a child. Plus, everyone said it was a beautiful name, and it suited the baby. It honored my mother, and she would have been pleased.

  But somehow I couldn’t shake the notion I should have named her Hope.

  1946–1947

  Once I found the child and arranged for her parents to fetch her, I stayed in Paris doing my best to avoid Paul. He was a father now, and I wanted no part in disrupting his family. It was easy to avoid him since they remained at Rena’s house in Rouen.

  You might think there is no better place to salve a wounded psyche than the City of Love, but that year, after the war ended, every park bench teemed with lovers kissing in public, some before breakfast, vivid reminders of my lost love. Even the news from home was grim, for Roger wrote that our elevator boy, Cuddy, had been killed in action in the Pacific.