Secrets She Kept (30 page)

LIESELOTTE KIRCHMANN

SEPTEMBER 1944

Our train headed north
 
—that’s all we knew, all that those nearest the small window could surmise. Whispers ran through the car. Women sat where their husbands had stood and clung to those they knew, those they trusted. Twice our train pulled to the side and waited
 
—once for an hour, perhaps, and another time for what seemed like several hours. The door did not open.

It must have been after midnight when we started again. The September night, already cold, penetrated the cattle car. Damp chill set into my bones. I needed to use the toilet, but there was only one bucket in the corner
 
—already filled and overflowing with urine and feces from earlier in the day. I could smell that others suffered the same plight.

We rattled on. Mutter Kirchmann and I leaned against each other’s shoulders, dozing, waking, starting with the jostle of the train.

Finally, we pulled to a stop. Doors slid open on their metal grooves in the cars ahead, orders were barked, dogs growled, alert.

Our door slammed open.
“Schnell! Schnell Machen! ’Raus!”
guards shouted.

We pulled feet beneath us, but they’d gone numb, and we groped for the woman before or behind to steady ourselves. Moving forward, women jumped from the train, reaching back for others. Guards grabbed and shoved. One woman, having fallen from the train, cried out that she’d twisted her ankle. The guard shouted obscenities, tried to raise her, but she stumbled again. He swore at her once more. A single shot rang out.

Mutter Kirchmann grabbed my arm, pulling me forward, weaving our way into the midst of the throng. A blinding light shone in our faces through the graying dawn. In that bizarre light they divided us into groups to march five abreast.

“Schnell! Schnell!”
The order was shouted again and again, as if we could walk any faster.

Over uneven ground, roughened by stones and exposed forest tree roots, we marched
 
—stumbled
 
—able to see only the five women in front, doing our best not to trample them or be trampled by those behind. Uphill we climbed, and climbed, finally reaching a narrow plateau that opened the vista before us.

Searchlights lit rows of gray buildings, long and narrow
 
—bunkers or barracks of a sort, penned by high fences heaped with roll upon roll of barbed wire. Guard towers surrounded the camp. A towering square building belched a line of steel-gray smoke against an already smoldering sky.

“Ravensbruk!” The single word passed from woman to woman.

Mutter Kirchmann and I clasped hands.

“Work camp,” said one woman.

“Death camp,” said another.

I knew the name
 
—as did every German on the street.
This can’t be happening
 
—can’t be real!

We marched downhill, trudging through a quagmire of black mud, so deep it oozed over the tops of our shoes, sucking them from our feet.
Steadying and pulling one another free only broke momentum and tripped us over one another. I remembered Lukas’s admonition about keeping shoes on our feet and stopped to pull them from the mud, caking my hands in sludge. Finally, we labored uphill again, our feet leaden weights and slipping in the squish of our shoes, until we reached looming iron gates. Across the top huge iron letters read
Arebeit Macht Frei
 
—“work makes you free.”

“Schnell! Schnell!”
the angry order came again.

We stumbled through. Posts with signs of skulls and crossbones stood as sentinels, indicating the deadly electric wiring that ran round the tops of high, concrete fences.

Someone spied outdoor spigots and shouted, “Water!” Groups of women in threes and fives broke ranks and surged forward, but they were cut off by the guards and beaten back with truncheons.

Herded to a large, open area
 
—like a giant flock of geese
 
—we trudged; then the order came:
“Anhalten!”

Guards surrounded our perimeter. An hour went by as we stood, frightened, exhausted from lack of sleep and worry, uncertain what might come next. Another hour passed, and tentatively, we sat down on the cindered ground, unbuttoning our coats and pulling off hats as the sun rose higher.

For the first time Mutter Kirchmann and I dared whisper, fairly certain no one else would hear. “You must tell them a mistake has been made, that you’re the daughter of an important Nazi Party member. Your father will get you out. I’m sure he will.”

“I won’t go without you.”

“There is nothing you can do for me here. As long as I know you and Marta are safe, I will be all right.”

I squeezed her hand. I would not leave the only woman who’d mothered me for years, who loved me as her daughter. And how could I face Lukas if I left his mother? What kind of person would that make me? Surely they couldn’t keep us penned like this forever.

Another hour and another, until the sun rose white-hot above us
 
—welcome and warming us through. But the dust in the area, the cinders that fell like snow from the great smokestack, dried our throats and thickened
our tongues
 
—and all the time those spigots in the distance. How easy it would be to fill a pail of water and pass it through the crowd of women!

“Achtung! Achtung!”
A deep voice blared over loudspeakers. We were roused and ordered into a line for a thin turnip soup and a roll, our first food or liquid in more than thirty hours. I gulped the soup down without looking, but the woman beside me vomited, swearing that hers was filled with worms.

Mutter Kirchmann closed her eyes, and I knew she was praying. I saw her murmur “Helmeuth” and “Lukas” and “Marta.” Then she whispered, “Lord, keep Lieselotte and me in the hollow of Your hand, in the center of Your will. Spread your wings over us. Let us see Your presence and the evidence of Your love even here.”

I could not say, “Amen.” If they did this to women, what was happening to Lukas, and to Vater Kirchmann? If God was watching over them as He watched over us perhaps we’d best change our prayer. But I could not utter such blasphemy aloud.

Mutter Kirchmann whispered to me, “Our circumstances don’t dictate our reality.”

I squeezed her hand, assuring her that I loved her and wanted to believe, wanted to understand.

From that moment we stood at ramrod attention in formation, in complete silence. Not a whisper allowed, and not a trip to the toilet
 
—which beckoned, though it was nothing more than a ditch in the open.

Night fell. My feet had long since gone numb with standing. I thought that if we could only sit down
 
—lie down
 
—sleeping right there on the ground in the open air would not be so very bad.

But an hour after dark the order came to form ranks again and follow. We marched into a long, low building. Sprawling open, like a warehouse, the room divided into sections. Groups of male guards with rifles stood at the entrance to the next room division. Women
 
—clerks, with boards and paper lists
 
—sat at long tables. Female guards marched the length of each formation, shouting orders to throw our hats and coats in separate heaps and return to our lines.

“Give your names
 
—last name first!”

If our line moved too slowly to match names against the seated clerk’s clipboard, a gun point pushed us forward.

“Mmm, such a pretty Fräulein to lighten our days.” One of the male guards stepped into line behind me, lifted my hair from my neck, drawing it to his nose.

I didn’t answer but, terrified, moved forward in line as quickly as possible.

“Does the cat have your tongue, little girl?” he teased, rubbing my hair against his cheek, his lips.

“Name!” the guard at the table barked.

I stepped forward, flustered, and said, “Sommer . . . Li
 
—” I coughed.

“Again!” The guard looked up.

“Excuse me. I’m Kirchmann
 
—Marta.”

“What is this? You don’t know your name?” the clerk bellowed.

The guard behind me smiled. “Do I make you nervous, pretty Fräulein?”

“
Ja
, check. Kirchmann, Marta. Next!” the seated woman shouted.

I turned to follow the line, but glanced back at the flirting guard, who’d stepped away and winked.

Two women guards stood at the top of the next line, one with a clipboard and one with a long pair of scissors. Without explanation, the woman with the sheers began chopping off the hair of the first woman in line
 
—one, two, three snips and a long sawing
 
—leaving tufts and spikes of hair on one side, and nothing much more than her victim’s scalp on the other. The shank of rich, dark hair was thrown to the floor, and the woman with the clipboard announced, “Brunette.”

Down the ranks they walked, desecrating the head of each woman, dividing the hair spoils by color into separate heaps on the floor.

Tears of pity welled in my eyes as they sawed Mutter Kirchmann’s rich auburn bun from her head, but some dread mixture of anger and fear and a desire for revenge filled me as they cut my hair
 
—thick, golden hair that Lukas had run his hands through two nights before, hair that had caressed his face, his lips.

Women could not, dared not look one another in the eyes. What could such a thing mean? Why had we been made to look so hideous
 
—not a haircut, but a rabid sheering?

Orders bled from one section into the next, so that it was hard to hear from the back what was said in each formation. But when the women in front of us began unbuttoning and pulling off their dresses, their shoes, their undergarments, their faces registering shame, my heart sank in horror and disbelief.

It wasn’t that I’d never changed clothes in front of other girls
 
—that had been routine in my gymnasium classes at school and even in the League of German Girls when we changed into our uniforms. But, not this. I’d just given my body to Lukas in our marriage bed, just two nights before shared the intimate uniting of our lives, our very souls
 
—all that made us “one flesh.” I belonged to him and he to me. I never again expected to so much as change my blouse before another human being.

“I can’t.” I shook my head. “I can’t. Lukas
 
—”

Mutter Kirchmann pulled my hands from before my heart. “Lukas wants you to live
 
—would insist that you live.”

The female guard prodded a hesitant young woman two rows ahead with her truncheon.
“Schnell!”

“Hurry!” Mutter Kirchmann whispered. “It’s a shower. They’re sending us to a shower.”

I unzipped my skirt and let it fall to the floor, unbuttoned my blouse, and stepped out of my shoes. Following the other women’s examples I folded everything into a neat bundle.

“Everything!” the guard shouted, staring at me.

“Tochter!” Mutter Kirchmann whispered.

“I can’t.”

“
Ja
, you can, and you must. We’re not the first ones and we won’t be the last. But we will live!”

I set down my bundle and pulled off my undergarments. Bent over, I grouped everything in a pile and stood, holding them before me, covering myself.

The female guard sneered, pointing to the floor. I looked around and realized the other women had set their entire bundles on the floor. I set mine down too. The way she looked at me
 
—how I hated her!

We were savagely shaved, then herded by the group of leering male guards toward the shower room. Three minutes of icy water poured from spigots in the ceiling, but I was too numb, too shaken, to appreciate anything. When the shower stopped, Mutter Kirchmann led me toward the entrance.

Back in the open room, prison dresses had been thrust into a pile on the floor. In that mad scramble I woke, desperate to find my skirt and blouse
 
—the last shred of my identity. But they were not our own clothes, and not dresses that fit our bodies or even the weather
 
—simply whatever we could grab from the heap or the hands of another, just as starving animals rip the food from the mouth of their opponent. I’d never fought like a tiger, but in that moment I learned and fought for Mutter Kirchmann and me, shivering in anger and desperation to cover ourselves.

Mutter Kirchmann must have pulled the dress over my head, or else I did it without thinking. Each dress had a large
X
sewn on the front and back. Only later did I realize how grateful I was to have grabbed thick woolen dresses
 
—the difference between freezing or not in the months ahead.

We were herded yet again through the line of S.S. guards, and they ran their hands over us
 
—up and down, front and back and on the sides, searching our bodies, lingering on and fingering some women more than others. What they thought we could have hidden was impossible to imagine. That they wanted to violate and humiliate us, to demean us, was clear. In that moment something of my nature returned, and I wanted desperately to kick them, to bite them, to spit in their faces.

Before I could form a plan, I was shoved forward and the moment passed. Marched through yet another line of female guards, we stopped before a table spread with colorful cloth triangles.

“Charge?” The clerk didn’t even look up.

“Criminal,” Mutter Kirchmann whispered, and I after her. We were, after all, “dangerous enemies of the state.”

“Sew it on. See the chart for placement.” The clerk handed us green triangles, and the next clerk doled out needles and thread.

How they expected us to sit on the cold, damp floor and sew with steady fingers after all we’d been through, I didn’t know. But sewing a patch on my right sleeve was the most normal thing I’d done in so many hours I could not count them.

Needles collected and counted, we were ordered to the exit door and found ourselves standing once again in the cold night air.