Lilac Girls (50 page)

“ ‘Just let me see my children one more time,' she said, which Suhren allowed…big of him, considering her betrayal. I had no idea we'd operated on you and your sister. Binz took her to where you both were sleeping. After that, she went quietly. Once Suhren met them at the wall, they got on with it. ‘Just do it,' Binz said to Otto, but his gun jammed. He was crying. She was crying. A
mess.
”

“And?” I asked.

“This is all so sordid,” Herta said.

Did I really want to know?

“Tell me,” I said.

“He finally did it.” Herta paused. It was so quiet there in her office, only the sound of children far off in a garden, playing.

“How?” I asked.
Just get through this, and you'll be back in the car on the way home soon.

Herta shifted in her chair, and the leather sighed. “When she wasn't expecting it.”

At long last, the story I'd waited to hear. I sat down, hollowed like a blown-out egg but strangely alive. Hard as it was, suddenly I wanted every crumb of it, for each detail seemed to penetrate and bring me back to life.

“Did she cry out? She was terrified of guns.”

“Her back was turned. She wasn't expecting it.” Herta wiped away a tear.

“How did you feel?”

“Me?” Herta asked. “I don't know.”

“You must have felt
something
once you found out
.
”

“I was very sad.” She plucked a tissue from the box. “Are you happy now? She was a good worker. Practically pure German. Suhren punished me for getting too close to her.”

“Were you?”

Herta shrugged. “We were somewhat friendly.”

I knew the doctor had liked Matka, but would my mother really have socialized with this criminal? Matka had surely only pretended to be friendly in order to organize supplies.

“If you'd known we were Halina's daughters, would you have taken us off the list?”

Herta laced her fingers and stared at her thumbs. We listened to the faraway hum of a lawnmower.

After several seconds, I stood.

“I see. Thank you for telling me the story.”

Why was I
thanking
her? It was all so surreal. Why couldn't I rail at her, tell her to go to hell?

I started toward the door and then turned back.

“Give me the ring,” I said.

She clasped her hands to her chest.

“Take it off now,” I said. “And put it on the desk.”

The thought of touching her made me queasy.

Herta sat still for a long second and then pulled at the ring.

“My fingers are swollen,” she said.

“Let me see,” I said as I took a deep breath and grasped her hand. I spat on the ring and worked the band back and forth. It released and revealed a narrow strip of white at the base of her finger.

“There,” Herta said, avoiding my eyes. “Are you happy? Go, now.”

She stood, walked to the window, and looked out over the garden. “And I expect you to keep your end of the bargain. You won't tell the newspapers? Do I have your word?”

I rubbed the ring on my skirt, wiped off every bit of Herta, and slipped it on my left ring finger. It felt cold and heavy there. A perfect fit.

Matka
.

I walked toward the door.

“You won't hear from me again,” I said.

Herta turned from the window. “Mrs. Bakoski.”

I stopped.

Herta stood there, one hand balled in a fist at her chest. “I…”

“What is it?”

“I just wanted to say that, well…”

The clock ticked.

“I would bring her back if I could.”

I looked at her for a long moment.

“Me too,” I said.

I stepped out of the office with a new lightness, leaving the door ajar, no longer craving the vibration of the slam.

I
WAS ABLE TO FIND
the Stocksee telegraph office and hurried in to send two short telegrams.

The first was to Pietrik and Halina:
I am fine. Be home soon.

The other was to Caroline in Connecticut:
Positively Herta Oberheuser. No doubt.

I ripped up the letter to the newspaper. Caroline would take care of Herta in due time. It was no longer important to me.

I drove to the Lübeck/Schlutup checkpoint and made it through with little difficulty. Though I hadn't slept, I felt awake and alive on the road home to Lublin. My mufflerless engine seemed powerful and revved with each press of the gas as I drove over the gentle hills toward home. The moonlight showed the way past vast, dark heaths, past blue and white cottages, past slivers of silver birch shining in the dark forest.

I relived my conversation with Herta, reveling in the idea my mother had said goodbye. I touched my forehead and smiled. The dream kiss had been real.

I cranked my window down and let the scent of autumn run around the inside of the dark car, the smell of fresh-mown hay taking me back to Deer Meadow, to thoughts of Pietrik warm beside me, to him holding baby Halina at the breakfast table, reading the newspaper with the bundle of her in his arms. Not letting her go. How easy it is to get tangled up in your own fishing net.

By the time I arrived at Lublin's outskirts, it was still dark, that time between when the streetlights turn off and dawn's first light when anything seems possible.

I coasted down the streets so as not to wake the city, past the silent milk women coming with their cows, bells clanging in the dark.

I passed the square under Lublin Castle where the ghetto once stood, now gone, demolished by forced laborers during the war, leaving only a brass plaque. Past our old pink sliver of a house where, at Felka's grave in the backyard, Caroline's lilacs had already taken root, on their way to growing into the prettiest, strongest plant. I rode down the street where Matka once walked me to school. I smiled at the memory of her, no longer a hot knife to the chest. I passed the new hospital and thought of Zuzanna with Caroline and hoped she was well. Maybe Halina and I would go to New York one day. She would like the art museums.

Once in the apartment, I slipped out of my shoes and padded down the hallway to Halina's room. I stood in the darkness and watched her chest rise and fall. Matka's ring sent gleams of light across the bed as my daughter rested there, her hair fanned out like liquid gold. She didn't stir as I slipped the red-flannel bundle of brushes under her pillow, tucked her in tight, and kissed the top of her head.

I went to Pietrik's bed, where he lay in the almost darkness, one arm across his eyes. I unbuttoned my dress, let it fall to the floor, and climbed under the sheets to meet the smoothness of him, breathing in his sweet scent of sweat and Russian cigarettes and home.

He pulled me close, and for the first time in so long, I felt the compact go
click.

L
ilac Girls
is based on a true story. Caroline Ferriday and Herta Oberheuser were real people, as were all the Ravensbrück staff mentioned, as well as Herta's parents and Caroline's mother and father, Eliza and Henry Ferriday. In bringing them to life as characters, I have done my best to represent all of them in the fairest, most realistic way possible. Through reading Caroline's letters, the Nuremberg Doctors Trial testimony, and testimony of the survivors themselves, I found clues to what their motivations might have been. The dialogue throughout is of my own making, but I used actual testimony when possible in the Doctors Trial chapter and some of Caroline's own words from letters and stories she wrote and the stories of those who knew her.

At Ravensbrück, Hitler's only major concentration camp exclusively for women, a prisoner's life depended on her relationships with other women. Even more than seventy years later, survivors still speak of their “sisters” in the camp, so I thought it fitting to use two sisters as the focus of my story. Kasia Kuzmerick and her sister Zuzanna are loosely based on Nina Iwanska and her physician sister Krystyna, both operated on at the camp. I shaped these characters from the qualities and experiences of the seventy-four Polish “Rabbits” I grew to love through the course of my research, and I hope they serve as exemplars of the spirit and courage every one of the women showed. Having two beloved sisters of my own, five sisters-in-law, and two daughters whose sisterly bond I've watched blossom over twenty-four years, it was impossible to remain unmoved by Nina and Krystyna's story.

I first learned of Caroline Ferriday through an article in
Victoria
magazine published in 1999, “Caroline's Incredible Lilacs.” The article showed photos of Caroline's white clapboard home in Bethlehem, Connecticut, which the family called The Hay, now known as the Bellamy-Ferriday House. There were also photographs of her garden, filled with antique roses and specimen lilacs. A longtime fan of all things lilac, I carried the article with me until it was worn smooth. With three young children, I had little spare time, but I visited the estate a few years later, unaware that that trip would lead to the novel you hold in your hands.

I drove up to Bethlehem one May Sunday and pulled into the gravel driveway. I was the only visitor that day, so I was able to breathe in the essence of the house, which remained as Caroline left it when she died in 1990: The faded wallpaper. Her canopy bed. Her mother Eliza's hand-sewn crewel draperies.

At the tour's conclusion, the guide paused on the landing outside the second-floor master bedroom to point out the desk, her typewriter, medals, and a photo of Charles de Gaulle all arranged there. The guide picked up a black-and-white photograph of smiling, middle-aged women huddled together, posed in three rows.

“These were the Polish women Caroline brought to America,” she said. “At Ravensbrück they were known as the Rabbits for two reasons. They hopped about the camp after they were operated on, and because they were the Nazis' experimental rabbits.”

As I drove home on the Taconic Parkway, with the lilac plant I bought, which had been propagated from Caroline's lilacs, filling the car with sweet perfume, the story pestered me. Caroline was a true hero with a fascinating life, a former debutante and Broadway actress who galvanized a jaded postwar America and dedicated her life to helping women others forgot. Strongly influenced by her staunchly abolitionist Woolsey ancestors, she'd also worked to help bring the first black bank to Harlem. Why did it seem no one knew about her?

I devoted my spare time to research on Caroline, Ravensbrück, and World War II. Any afternoon I could get away I spent in the cool root cellar under the ancient barn attached to The Hay, which today serves as the welcome center, paging through old rose books and letters, absorbed in Caroline's past. Once Connecticut Landmarks and their site administrator Kristin Havill cataloged it all and placed it safely in archival boxes, Kristin would lug them up and down the stairs for me to comb through. Caroline also left additional archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and at Nanterre, outside of Paris, a trail of clues I felt was calling me to follow.

As I discovered more about Caroline's life, it intersected with others' integral to the story, especially those of the Polish women subjected to operations at Ravensbrück. I began to discover their journeys through memoir and other accounts and learned how Caroline grew to love them as her own daughters. I taped photographs of all seventy-four Polish ladies around my office and planned to go to Poland to see Lublin, where many of the girls lived when they were arrested, for myself.

A third person kept coming up in my research on Ravensbrück, the only woman doctor in the all-female camp and the only woman doctor tried at Nuremberg, Dr. Herta Oberheuser. How could she have done what she did and especially to other women? I taped her photo up too, along with photos of the other Ravensbrück camp staff, but on a separate wall, and added Herta's to the stories I'd tell.

I moved from Connecticut to Atlanta in 2009 and began writing, at first sitting in the concrete and chain link dog kennel behind our home, hoping it would evoke what it was like to be imprisoned, to feel what the Ravensbrück Ladies felt. But as I read more firsthand accounts of the women's stories, I realized I didn't need to sit in a cage in order to feel their story. They brought me there all too well. The terrifying uncertainty. The rip of losing their friends and mothers and sisters. The starvation. I found myself eating constantly, trying to eat for them.

The following summer I traveled to Poland and Germany. With my seventeen-year-old son as my videographer, we landed in Warsaw on July 25, 2010, and set out for Lublin with Anna Sachanowicz, our lovely interpreter, a schoolteacher from a Warsaw suburb.

As we walked through Lublin seeing the places the survivors referenced in their memoirs, the story came alive. We walked through massive Lublin Castle, where the Ravensbrück Ladies were first imprisoned, and spent an afternoon at the incredible Museum “Under the Clock,” which still houses the cells where many Polish underground operatives were tortured and where you can see one of the secret letters the girls used to tell the world of the operations. I walked through Crakow Gate, which withstood Nazi bombs, and through the vast plaza at the foot of Lublin Castle where the Jewish ghetto once stood. It gave me new resolve to make sure the world remembered. Everywhere we went, Lubliners told us of their own experiences in the war years and about the Katyn Forest Massacre, the Stalinist years, and what life had been like behind the Iron Curtain.

In Warsaw I was lucky enough to interview a Ravensbrück survivor, Alicja Kubacka. Her story of her imprisonment at Ravensbrück provided incredible historical details, but her attitude of forgiveness toward her captors turned everything on its head. How could she not resent, even hate, the German people? How could she not only forgive them but also visit Germany every year at their request to aid in the healing?

My son and I decided to take a train route similar to that which the Rabbits took on the terrible day they were transported, in September 1941. Riding from Warsaw to Berlin, we watched the simple train stations of Poland give way to more modern
Bahnhofs
of Germany. By the time we reached the sleek Berlin Hauptbahnhof, a sophisticated marvel of engineering, it was clear Poland had been kept back by its years behind the Iron Curtain.

Once we stepped off the train at Fürstenberg onto the same platform the Ravensbrück Ladies had stepped onto, it was a surreal moment. As my son and I walked the same walk the prisoners were forced to take, the camp came into view, the metal gate at the camp entrance and rows of barracks gone but the massive wall still standing. The crematorium still stands today and the place where the gas chamber, a repurposed painter's shed, now demolished, once stood is still there. So is the shooting wall. The lake into which the prisoners' ashes were thrown. The commandant's house still overlooks the camp and the tailor's workshop, the massive complex of buildings where the Nazis sorted their plunder, remains as well.

Once back in the States, I wrote for more than three years, breaking to travel to Paris to sift through Caroline's archives at Nanterre. There, I sat with a French translator who read me every one of Caroline's letters, many between her and Anise Postel-Vinay, one of her partners in what she saw as a life dedicated to justice. Each night after riding back on the Métro from Nanterre, I returned to the grand Hôtel Lutetia and slept in one of the rooms that once served as a hospital room for those returning from the camps.

That same year I also spent time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where Caroline left her third archive, her papers devoted not only to her work with the Rabbits but also to her later work with her French friends in the ADIR, a French organization dedicated to the care of returning concentration camp deportees, helping them pursue Klaus Barbie.

My goal with all this research was to write a fictionalized account of the events that took place at Ravensbrück, to take readers to the places that the people involved in the story of the Rabbits passed through, and perhaps give some insight into what they might have been feeling in order to breathe new life into a story that had fallen from public view.

When I tell people the story of the Rabbits, many wonder what ultimately happened to Herta Oberheuser. She and Fritz Fischer escaped the hangman at Nuremberg. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but after five years was quietly released in 1952, her sentence commuted by the American government, perhaps to curry favor with the Germans as a result of pressure from the Cold War. She resumed the practice of medicine in Stocksee in northern Germany as a family doctor. Once Herta was recognized by a Ravensbrück survivor, Caroline and Anise Postel-Vinay urged a group of British doctors to pressure the German government to revoke Herta's license to practice medicine. Herta fought back with powerful friends of her own, but Caroline took to her typewriter, lobbying the press in America, Great Britain, and Germany, and in 1960 Herta's license was revoked, and Herta was forced to permanently close her doctor's surgery.

After a successful lobbying campaign by Caroline, together with Norman Cousins, Dr. Hitzig, and lawyer Benjamin Ferencz, on behalf of the Ravensbrück Ladies, the West German government finally granted the women reparations in 1964. It was one of Caroline's greatest triumphs, for it was a particularly harrowing process, since Poland was under Russian control and Bonn refused to recognize it as a country.

Through the years that followed, Caroline stayed in close touch with many of the Rabbits. She hosted them often at her home, and they came to see her as their godmother, often using that term as a salutation in their letters to her. She wrote that they felt like daughters to her.

One notable departure from real events is Caroline's relationship with Paul Rodierre, a character sprung from my imagination. I gave Caroline this relationship to give her more of a personal connection to France and to dramatize the events happening there. I like to think she wouldn't be too cross with me for giving her such a handsome literary partner.

Caroline died in 1990 and left her treasured home in the care of Connecticut Landmarks, which has kept it in lovely condition, just as Caroline wished. It is well worth a visit at any time, but in late May when the lilacs are blooming, you will understand why Caroline and her mother could not be away from their beloved garden for too long.

If my version of the story has inspired you to learn more about the events surrounding
Lilac Girls
and you would like to continue reading, there are many fine works of historical fiction and memoir that deal with the same topics, including
Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust,
edited and with an introduction by Vera Laska;
The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp,
by Rochelle G. Saidel; and
Ravensbrück,
by Sarah Helm.