Lilac Girls (38 page)

I blew on my free hand as I scanned the crowd for Pietrik. What I wouldn't give for two gloves! I had split a pair with Zuzanna after a dying woman had gifted it to her at the hospital. I had the right one; Zuzanna the left.

It was hard to imagine more than three hundred people buried there under that slope in the shadow of the great fortress. Family members stood along the base of the castle grounds where townspeople had hastily buried the murdered in that mass grave. Someone had pounded a great wooden cross into the heart of the hill, and six priests stood below it.

The priests blessed the grave site, and I made my way through the crowd looking for Pietrik. Would he be angry I came? Should I just give up on him? A girl could only take so much rejection.

I approached a group of nuns clustered at one end, prayer candles and cards in their hands, a few of them with wreaths draped over their arms. I spotted Pietrik off to the side of them. He stood alone, back straight, hands deep in his glassworks canvas coat pockets, eyes on the service. He was near the edge of a great pile of flowers that mourners had assembled there, a growing mound of reds and pinks and yellows. I inched down the slope to him, pain stabbing my leg with each step.

I shimmied through the group of nuns, lingering briefly in their warmth, swishing through the sea of black habits, rosary beads long at their waists. I emerged and walked toward Pietrik. If he saw me approach, he gave no sign of it. As I drew closer, I saw his face was splotched red about the eyes. I made my way to him and stood nearby. I fisted my naked hand and blew hot breath on it.

Pietrik turned to look at me, his eyelashes spiky with tears. I stepped to the mound of flowers and set my daisies atop it, then turned and walked back to him.

Should I stay? I'd left my flowers, had done what I'd come to do, paid my respects. He'd asked me not to come, after all.

Receiving no gesture from Pietrik, I turned to go and just then felt his hand on my arm. I almost could not believe it as I watched his fingers make their way around my wrist. He pulled me to him to stand by his side.

“Proud” is a word that is too commonly used, but that is how I felt there that day, listening to the choir sing to heaven. Such pride that Pietrik wanted me to share it all with him. The good and the bad.

He reached for my bare hand and held it, his warm fingers around mine, brought it to his lips to kiss, and tucked it in his pocket, the flannel warm inside.

T
he army arrived from all directions. Not since Hitler's blitzkrieg had there been such an organized onslaught. In flowered dresses and sensible shoes, they came, hauling pots and dishes, some still steaming, fresh from the oven. General Marthe coordinated the effort at the postal center, resulting in enough pierogies and beet soup and hunter's stew to feed six wedding parties.

You think a postal center an odd place for a wedding party? Maybe, but it served well for our purposes. It is a big, open space with a high ceiling, and you can kill two pheasants with one stone there: pick up your mail and dance with the bride. Not that the bride could dance, but guests pinned money to my dress anyway. I wore a pale pink dress, not my choice, for Marthe had surprised me with a product of her own sewing machine. I'd wanted white, but it was impossible to turn down this dress, for I was trying to be civil, for Papa. I just wanted it all to be over so I could be alone with Pietrik.

It had been a difficult morning for two reasons. One was that the Riskas had phoned to say Felka had died the day before. They'd found her on their front stoop one last time. We buried Felka in our back garden. Zuzanna and Papa came by and watched as Pietrik dug his spade into the earth, and I wrapped Felka in Nadia's blanket I'd brought her home in so many years ago. We all cried saying goodbye to our old girl, Papa harder than any of us.

I couldn't help think that Felka had been a loyal friend to Nadia, waiting for her till the end, unlike me, who'd moved on with my life, planning my wedding with barely a thought that Nadia would not be there. Some friend I was.

The other difficult thing on my wedding morning was the blessing by the mother of the bride. So important is this blessing at a Polish wedding that if the bride's mother is deceased the wedding party walks to the cemetery to visit her grave before going to the church. Of course we could not visit the lake at Ravensbrück, where Matka's ashes had probably gone. Marthe had prepared a long blessing, but I chose Zuzanna to give the blessing instead, causing the heat to rise in Marthe's face. Resigned as I was to making amends with Marthe, it was not always easy. Zuzanna came first in my life and always would.

The ceremony at the church was brief. Though free elections had still not taken place and the Stalinist authorities were not in official control, Moscow's Polish Workers' Party was becoming more entrenched by the day. They discouraged anything that distracted workers from the collective needs of the people, including church weddings. They considered them gaudy spectacles, so people were wary of being seen at them. As a result, only three of my nurse friends braved the ceremony, though it could have cost them their jobs. The few friends Pietrik had left from the underground were still hiding out in the forest. We all were careful, since just putting flowers on a former AK member's grave was cause for arrest.

Guests were not shy about celebrating at the postal center, though, for it was somewhat private there. As soon as I arrived, guests surrounded me and pinned paper money to my dress, my favorite tradition of all. Where had Marthe and her friends gotten such food? Cold cuts, sausages, salads. Tree cake and delicate pastry angel wings! Maybe the food came from
na lewo.
The black market.

“Come. It's time for
oczepiny,
” Marthe said.

Oczepiny
is the ritual of taking off the bride's veil and replacing it with a cap to show she is officially married. First the single women surround the bride and take her veil; then the married ones circle the bride and pin the cap.

Marthe clapped her hands above her head, and the single girls came around. “Zuzanna, remove the veil.”

“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.

T
he 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 matter 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.

O
N
J
UNE 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.