The women cross into the men’s area of Frøslev only when they go to the dining hall. The men call this “the hormone hour.” Much information is exchanged at the hormone hour. At least two radios, illegal anywhere in Denmark if not set to the official government station, and especially inside a prison camp, have been organized. They are hidden under bunks, beneath trapdoors, the antennae concealed behind now a picture, now a shaving mirror. The radios come out for the BBC broadcasts after the Gestapo men and women have gone through the choke hole in the watchtower for their dinners on the other side. Maps of Europe have been drawn from memory, and the Allies’ progress is marked every night, the news quickly spreading from barracks to barracks. Dieppe is liberated. Brussels is liberated. The Allies have broken the Gothic Line in Italy. The British are in Greece. The British are in Athens and Rommel is dead.
Prisoners make calendars marking each day they survive, and look ahead to the still blank squares of November, January, March, wondering on which they will mark VICTORY—on which will they mark FREEDOM. If at all. If they live.
They have made tiny chess sets out of contraband, they have manufactured decks of playing cards. There is even one camera, with smuggled film, making a secret record of prison life. They are lucky to be here.
Nina misses home and her parents desperately. She saw Kaj twice when she was in Vestre prison in Copenhagen, and once, to her joy, got a tiny message from Laurus,which had been rolled up and hidden in a cigarette lighter in the compartment meant for flints. It was handed to her by a man she passed on grim echoing stairs as she was taken down from her cell for transport to Dagmarhus for more questioning. It meant more to her than anything could have, short of a personal visit from the king. Though the lighter was soon confiscated, she managed to keep the scrap of paper with her like a fetish until the delousing at Frøslev. The loss of it frightened her badly.
She has not been tortured; she doesn’t know why, except that it seems that many of the Germans in Denmark are lonely, and actually want the approval of the Danes, who are so beautiful, so Aryan, so like themselves. She has been asked over and over why she doesn’t admire the Reich and its dream of strength and order stretching into the future for a thousand years. They never give up the hope that she will decide she has been misled by the bullying British and tell them who her contacts were, how the transports work, what codes she knows. Always they would start her interrogations by putting an open pack of Chesterfield cigarettes on the table in front of her. If she picked it up, she was theirs. There was more than one moment when, tired, scared, and longing for comfort, with the craving for nicotine singing in her nerves,she thought she would do it. Once, her hand moved out onto the table on its own, like a swimmer on a cold morning, putting a toe into the water. She could smell the tobacco, even the paper. She could feel already the hot smoke moving into her chest,the feeling of relief and calm it would bring, the sting in her nose as she exhaled. Her questioner,in his handsome black uniform, started to smile. Nina’s brain deserted her hand and returned to her head; instead of grasping the pack, she flicked it with her finger and spun it off the table. It pleased her to see her inquisitor dive to the floor to retrieve it—no one under the peace and plenty of the Reich of 1944 was prepared to waste a pack of American cigarettes.
She didn’t know why they gave up and sent her to Horserød, except that the Resistance had grown far more active and violent since her capture, and the Germans had their hands full. Trains and their tracks kept blowing up. German ships were blown up by mines attached to their hulls below the waterline, by partisans swimming at night in the inky water of blacked-out Danish harbors. In Odense a warship was given its official launching photographs, taken with smiling Nazis in crisp uniforms posed alongside the Danish workmen, and then blown up by a bomb left in a worker’s lunchbox while the launching party went for schnapps and smørrebrød.
There were, too, accelerated retaliations for this sabotage. The beloved poet-preacher, Kaj Munk, had been murdered in January. The photograph of his corpse, on its back in a ditch, eyes closed and mouth open as if crying out, lived in Danish memories for decades. Through the spring of ’44,in payment for bombings of things the Germans needed, there were bombings of things the Danes loved, carried out by the Danish Nazis of the Schalburg Corps. “Schalburtage,” it was called. In June, patriots managed to blow up the heavily guarded Globus plant, which made replacement parts for German warplanes. Two weeks later they succeeded again, this time destroying the Dansk Riffelsyndikat,which supplied the Germans with small arms and artillery. In retaliation the Schalburg Corps burned down the Royal Danish Porcelain factory, and destroyed the student union at the University of Copenhagen. In late June the Tivoli Gardens themselves were bombed, a devastating wreckage the Germans said was necessary to stop good Aryan young people from dancing like Negroes in the dance halls of the place. Widespread striking and civil disobedience flared throughout the summer. On September 19 the Germans,finally provoked past endurance by its hindrance, inaction, and apparent inability to keep partisan prisoners from “escaping” out the back doors, attempted to arrest the entire Danish police force. Nina and the women watch from the windows of the laundry when several hundred policemen are brought into Frøslev, smiling and singing. And they watch when they are taken away again, bound for Buchenwald.
You can write one letter a month from Frøslev. You are allowed to write twenty lines,of not more than sixteen syllables each. Nina writes to Kaj. You are supposed to be allowed one visit a month, of ten minutes’ duration, with an interpreter present. On the day Kaj is to be with her,all visits are suddenly canceled, no explanation given. Nina learns after the war that Kaj waited in Padborg for two days hoping to be allowed in, but at last had to give up and go back to Copenhagen. Travel is very difficult,the trains crowded and unreliable, being subject to sudden stops and searches, long delays, and of course, sabotage. By the time Kaj can come again, Nina is gone.
In Frøslev you can receive a Red Cross package every six weeks. Nina gets hers the day before her birthday. It is a wonderful day. She washes with real soap, she shares her sausage with Ulla and the women in her room. On that same day, during the hormone hour,one of the girls is passed a copy of a song someone has written, the words set to music known to them all from the songbooks that are in every Danish household. After supper they sing it lustily, and can hear that in other barracks the men are singing, too. It wakens deep and soul-feeding memories of singing this melody with parents, with classmates, around bonfires on midsummer nights, or snugged in from the deep winter around parlor pianos,and in cafés and bars. Having known these songs by heart from childhood is part of what makes them all Danes together. Another part is that if you are German and do not perfectly understand the Danish sense of humor,it sounds respectful, and sweet,even about their German brothers. If you know, however,to listen only for every second line, the song is very rude indeed.
One day in late October,Ulla is taken out of the laundry during work detail, and she disappears. Nina is agitated until Ulla is with them again. She reappears in a fierce mood.
“What happened?” Nina asks when she can.
“Stupid questions,” says Ulla.
“Who was it?”
“The fat one with the walleye. I don’t think he enjoyed it much.”
“No?”
“No—I corrected his grammar. His German grammar.”
Nina laughs aloud.
“Poor Germany,” says Ulla. “In the hands of furious bricklayers and washerwomen.”
There is a new officer from General Pancke’s staff in the camp. Day after day, people are pulled out of work, out of meals,even out of bed, taken to the central watchtower house, and questioned. The week after Nina’s birthday, suddenly, several dozen of the men are seen standing in the cold, each with one bundle or valise, being loaded onto a bus. Then they are gone.
A week later, Nina, Ulla, and five other women in the laundry are called out one afternoon and told to pack their th
ings. Nina is so frightened her bowels start to rumble. They are loaded into the back of a truck equipped with wooden benches; it is already full of men with their overcoats on and their bundles between their feet. They sit in this truck under armed guard, without moving, for several hours,getting colder and colder,and Nina thinks maybe this is some witty new form of torture. Maybe in the end they will all pile out again and greet their friends and have supper.
Then a second man with a machine gun swings into the truck with them and pulls the gate shut behind him. He knocks on the back of the cab. The engine starts. The truck pulls out of the yard and stops at the gate. The gate opens, and the truck moves through. Nina feels the gears shift. Craning her neck to look out over the tailgate as they gather speed, she sees the gate to the prison yard being swung back in place and relocked, closing them out. In a matter of minutes they cross the border into Germany.
Hours later, in the blackness of a rail yard in Hamburg, they are ordered out of the truck. The men are formed up and marched away into darkness. The women are loaded into a freight car waiting on a siding, already crowded with women from prisons in France and stinking from the one inadequate half-drum in the corner that is serving them all as a toilet. When the door of the car slides closed, they are left in a darkness like a dirty black sock pulled over the face. It is hard to breathe, it is so dark, and there is no room to sit or lie down. Nina has lost Ulla. Around her, strangers stand stock-still, packed together, and wait. The women smell of sweat and rotting gums. Some swear, some weep, some pray aloud. One keeps keening “ma petite…ma belle, ma petite…” until someone tells her to shut up. Then they lurch like drunken livestock when the car begins to move. Nina can feel the breasts of the woman behind her push against her back, and the hard bony butt of the woman in front of her shoved against her ribs. The woman in front is well over six feet tall;it is hard to believe she is a woman at all. Where is Ulla? In the rattle and racket, someone close by her in the crushing dark snakes a hand into the pocket of Nina’s coat. Nina angrily jabs an elbow into the press of bodies. By accident she also steps hard on someone’s foot who cries out in turn. She doesn’t know if she has found the thief or hurt someone as bewildered as she, but the hand withdraws.
Her legs ache and she is woozy with headache and hunger when the car stops and the door is opened again. A faint gray light is beginning to show in the night sky. Outside standing on the frosted ground there are SS men, and some female overseers,two with large dogs. Nina is among the first to reach the door, moving along in the pack which is like one sorrowing beast with hundreds of legs. At the edge of the car,the beast breaks apart as it goes over the ledge and drops to earth. As she shuffles forward, through the open door she can see pine trees in the dim morning. They are in the country. What country? Where are her father and mother,which direction? What would they feel if they knew where she was?
She drops to the ground and her frozen feet feel as if they have shattered on the impact. Trying not to stagger,she obeys the order,barked in German, that they fall into formation, five abreast.“Weiter! Rasch! Rasch! Los! Los!” From her rank in one of the first rows, she hungrily breathes in the scent of pine and the gray light after the long odiferous blackness. She sees Ulla come to the door of the car. Ulla looks old, her skin gray. This night has been hard on her. Ulla looks down at the drop and hesitates.“Rasch!” yells the overseer. She jumps, crumples, and disappears from view. The SS men shout at the women who move to help her up, but in a moment Nina sees Ulla standing on her own.
When all who can have left the car,two guards climb into it and throw out the corpses left behind. Nina watches them land on the frozen ground, their eyes staring, their arms and legs at painful angles.“Marsch!” yells the young woman with the biggest dog. Not all of the women understand German, so their progress is ragged at first. The women who are confused are shouted at to obey;the women who try to translate for them are shouted at to shut up. As they march away from the railway into the silent village, Nina looks back to see the name on the front of the station.FÜRSTENBURG says the sign. They are still in Germany.
As they march through the silent village, it is stunning, after all these months,to be so near to people sleeping on sheets in their own beds,people who will wake to the sounds of the bells from their own church, and the voices of their own loved ones. Who are they? If they knew we were out here, would they try to help us?
They soon leave the village behind and walk into the countryside. There is a hole in Nina’s shoe and stones have gotten in. She is very cold. But the air smells of snow, and fir balsam; then there is a lake, lovely in the autumn morning. The walking is beginning to warm her. Nina watches the pale mauve colors of dawn on the slate gray water,and admires the little summer cottages standing shuttered here and there in the woods. And then, there are the walls of the camp. They are high and smooth, and there is barbed wire stretched along the tops. “Rasch!” bark the guards. Before them, the gates open. Their first view of Ravensbrück.
Inside, suddenly in a new world with only treetops visible beyond the walls,the women stand at the edge of what they will come to know as the Appelplatz, the roll-call place.
Roll call is in progress. Thousands of prisoners, all women, stand in ranks,ten abreast,eyes forward. Most wear striped prison dresses,but some wear oddly assorted street clothes. They are all ages and shapes and sizes. As the newcomers watch, the guards and trusties pace around the prisoners, counting, shouting, calling names. An old woman not far from them falls over and lies in the dirt. No one else moves. Very few eyes even shift to her when she falls. Nina gathers that the head counts are not right, that people are missing. For hours—how many, two?—the prisoners stand in silence, eyes forward, amid shouting and snarling, with trusties and guards going to the barracks and back, looking for the missing, until an order is given and the ranks break up into work details and are marched away.
Still, the newcomers stand where they are. Separated from them by a ribbon of barbed wire is a low building through whose windows they can see SS men and women eating, smoking, drinking coffee. Off to the left is the main “street” of the camp, flanked by rows of barracks. Across the Appelplatz Nina can see and smell what she correctly assumes to be the kitchen. It has been full daylight for many hours, and they have been told nothing, and given nothing to eat. The overseers come and go, and no one speaks to them, except to tell them to shut up and stand still. A woman near Nina with a hard cold snuffles and hawks and wipes her dripping nose with her hand. Finally a woman in SS uniform arrives and impatiently, as if they had kept her waiting, orders them to take off all their clothes.
SS men continue to come and go as the women obey. Soon Nina stands naked in the pale autumn sunlight with her belongings at her feet, angry and ashamed. For some of the older women it is even worse; they have not been naked in daylight before even closest family members since they were children. Let alone outdoors before strangers. She thinks of how her mother would feel. Plump maiden Faster Tofa, who plays the violin so gracefully.
Ulla stands in the row behind Nina, her bearing straight,her eyes still and focused far away. Her gray body hair is sparse, and her flesh hangs loose. She does not meet anyone’s eyes.
An SS woman looks them over and orders them to move in single file into the building before them, leaving belongings behind. They will never see these again, except in rare cases on the backs of more privileged prisoners. A scrap of pencil Nina brought from Frøslev, and her birthday card from her friends there, and a warm pair of socks from her last Red Cross bundle, all disappear. They are on their way to the “showers.” Showers. There have been rumors about these showers. In they march, their feet bare against wet scummy floors. There are rows of showerheads along a concrete wall. They crowd underneath them as ordered, and wait for water or death.
The water is actually warm, and while the soap is harsh, made with little fat and mostly lye, it is a surprise and relief to wash at all. When the water stops,they are herded off, stil
l wet,to be inspected for lice, while new arrivals take their places under the showers.
The lice inspectors are prisoners. They wear uniform striped dresses, aprons, kerchiefs, wooden shoes, and lavender triangles. Their prison numbers are in three digits; they have been here a long, long time. They are German Jehovah’s Witnesses, who could have gone home years before if they would only hail the Führer. They will not, because their Jehovah forbids acknowledging false gods,but this doesn’t mean they are gentle.
The lice hunters’ hands are horny, with dirty fingernails. Methodically they pick through each woman’s hair, on her head, in her armpits, at the crotch. If nits or bites are found, the woman’s head and body hair is shaved. When this happens,Nina can’t look in the direction of the weirdly bald creature, stripped and stripped, she is so filled with dread and horror. She waits for her turn, as already more dripping-wet naked women come from the showers. These women are speaking something Nina doesn’t understand, Czech or Hungarian, and some have children with them. Naked young boys and girls,bug-eyed with fear.
Nina holds her mind blank as a big stale-smelling woman with a goiter on her neck paws through the hair on her head and body. The woman wheezes as she works, as if some sort of untuned stringed instrument is stuck in her throat. Nina can hardly believe her relief when the inspector woman pushes her to move, get out of the way. She is done, and she still has hair. She follows the others out the door to the roll-call grounds again, where they stand naked, waiting for the doctor.
Nina passes the time watching brightly lit clouds form into mansions or cotton balls or piles of white peonies in the sky. There must be a lot of wind up there in the crystal blue; the clouds move fast across the dome of heaven. She makes bets with herself as to how long it will take a particular cloud to hit the sun, and counts out the seconds until the eye of the world blinks out. Then the seconds until it blinks on again.