I don’t remember being scared any more at that point. I was just sick of standing there and desperate for a glass of water.
Late in the afternoon the girl standing next to me whispered something without turning her head.
‘Vous êtes un pilote?’ – you’re a pilot?
I didn’t answer for a long time, checking around us for guards and guard dogs without moving my head either. Then, ‘Oui,’ I answered, also in a whisper.
I stole a glance at her. She was short and pretty, with untidy gold bangs that got in her eyes, and a long shiny scar down one side of her face. This was the first conversation I ever had with a French person in real life who wasn’t my French teacher – and also it was the first time I understood anyone since Womelsdorff handed me over to the guy with the motorbike yesterday. I had a pretty good idea what would happen if someone noticed us whispering. But it was such a relief to be able to talk to someone.
She whispered, ‘Vous êtes anglaise?’ Are you English?
‘Américaine.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in French.
‘Je ne sais pas,’ I hissed. ‘I don’t know. You?’
‘We all come from different prisons,’ she told me. ‘Arrested for Resistance activity – most of us are Résistantes. I’ve been in prison for nine months.’
I was confused, because if she’d already been in prison for nearly a year, why was she here now?
‘Where are we?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably Ravensbrück. It’s their big women’s concentration camp. They move us all the time – away from the Allied armies as they advance. I was in prison in Paris until May, then moved to Frankfurt, then to Berlin. Now here.’
Her name was Elodie Fabert.
You know, concentration camp translates pretty clearly in French – even in German. Camp de concentration, Konzentrationslager. But even though I knew what the words meant – it didn’t mean anything then. Not really. The name of the place didn’t mean anything to me. Over the heads of the four hundred Frenchwomen ahead of me I stared at the high concrete walls and the miles of electrified barbed wire, and I clung to my flight bag with its official Luftwaffe letter in it. The girl next to me had already been in prison for nine months and she obviously survived it. Our troops were practically over the Siegfried Line. It wouldn’t be for long. I wouldn’t cause trouble. I would be all right. If they ever let us sit down and have a drink, I would be all right.
The chambermaid has left. It’s OK – it was just being alone in the truck I didn’t like remembering by myself. Reading it over I noticed that I didn’t actually write down what I kept thinking then: What if no one ever opens that door? I’m done with it now – dry words on a page. The reality was much worse.
Also, I didn’t write that most of the SS people guarding us were women too. When I read over the part about being dragged out of the truck and into line it sounded like it was a man doing it, taking advantage of a poor dazed female. But it wasn’t – it was a girl not much older than me and a couple of inches shorter. She probably wasn’t any stronger either. She was just meaner.
I asked Fernande to ask someone to send me some more ink. I know I won’t ever catch up with that Red Cross unit. Now that I’ve glided down I haven’t got enough lift to get airborne again. I don’t have any clothes, and I still have this exhausting, rib-cracking cough. If I stand looking out the window for more than ten minutes, I get so tired I have to sit down. Out of an entire hotel menu I can’t keep down anything more exciting than unsweetened rice pudding or boiled macaroni with nothing on it. I want to go back out there. But I just can’t do anything more energetic than write or sleep, and even sleeping is exhausting. I tried to take a nap and dreamed I was sleeping alone in our barrack, with an icy wind howling through the broken windows, and everybody else had been gassed.
Which is probably a nightmare based on the fact that I am alone, and it’s my own fault. All I can do is pray Irina takes care of our stubborn little Róża. How how how did I lose them both, when we were already out ?
April 19, 1945
Paris
When the 6 p.m. siren let out its piercing howl, we nearly jumped out of our skin.
We had all fallen into a stupor of exhaustion and misery and you could see a ripple of attention race through our ranks as the noise shocked us wide awake. Not long after that they finally fed us. They did it outside, right where we were standing – like CAMP, hah. First they let us help ourselves to water from a row of spigots by the main gate, after about a year of standing in line to get there, and then they brought out two big oil drums of soup. It was absolutely chaotic – seemed chaotic anyway, the first time, 400 of us trying to get at two pots all at once. We had about one bowl between four of us to take turns with, which they took away again when we were done, since we hadn’t yet been issued official bowls of our own. You had to carry your bowl around with you all the time in a little bag or someone would steal it and then you wouldn’t get any soup. No bowl, no soup. Of all the unbelievable things about Ravensbrück, I think the Administration and Politics of Bowls must have been the battiest.
Now it just seems incredible that we got something to eat that day. We all got some soup, and we all got a piece of bread, and we ate it standing up. I ate mine, but I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t remember what the soup was – I mean, you never really knew what it was, but I don’t remember it being the worst soup I’d ever eaten. I do remember that I couldn’t eat the biggest chunks of whatever mystery root vegetable was in it, because they were completely raw. Inside a month I wouldn’t care, but what did I know at that point?
What I remember most about that first meal there is the filthy, crawling, skeletal beggars who fought over the raw chunks of potato or turnip or whatever it was in the soup that I couldn’t make myself eat. There was a camp word for those beggars, which I never did figure out how to say or spell, because it sounds so much to me like schmootzich – Mother’s nasty way of describing a girl who doesn’t take care of herself. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for filthy greasy.
They took any food you gave them. The first day, because I was still ignorant enough to be picky about what I ate, I tried to hand over my leftover chunks of raw vegetable to one of these desperate people. In seconds I was being clawed at by ten skeletal hands, grabbing at me anywhere they could to try to get in on the handout – five crawling creatures who had once been women snatching at my skirt, my arms, my hair. One of the guards had to beat them off. It left me shaking with shock. I never dared that kind of charity again.