Secrets She Kept (34 page)

Still another week passed. Sometimes I prayed that the bombs we heard in the east might come and blow us all away.

Finally, in what must have been early April, at pre-dawn roll call, my number was read from the list. It took half a minute for me to realize, to understand that I must walk forward.

I passed through the processing center in a daze. There were no more checks, no inspections
 
—just a herding of us through the forest to a spot beside the railroad on the outskirts of town, far from fields or townspeople.

Surely they mean to shoot us in this deserted place, so no one will hear
 
—
my first thought. My second was to wrap my arms around my middle,
sorry that my baby, still barely a bump protruding from my abdomen, would know no life outside my womb, sorry that I would never know if my child was a boy or a girl, sorry that I’d never look in its face and hopefully see Lukas’s eyes or mouth or nose.

But then the train came, stopping right there, in the middle of the forest. A long metal ramp was shoved to the ground.

“
Schnell!
Get aboard!”

We fumbled and climbed into the cattle cars, pushing one another forward, too weak to pull ourselves up.

No checking of numbers from endless lists
 
—just more shouting and shoving. The only counting came when a guard barked, “One hundred!” and pushed the heavy door through its metal groove until it slammed, sealing us in the dark.

HANNAH STERLING

APRIL 1973

A week later, Carl stood beside me as I collected the urn with Grandfather’s ashes. Long ago, Grandfather had made arrangements for cremation. That, too, was a first for me. The whole idea of burning bodies brought horrific images to my imagination.

“It’s not the same thing as what they did in the camp,” Carl counseled quietly.

“I know. I just . . . just wish I could undo all of it. His whole life. What he did to my mother, to everyone he touched.”

“You cannot redeem another man’s sins. We cannot even redeem our own.”

I closed my eyes.

“But you can continue what you started.”

“I
 
—I don’t know if I can. No, I can’t. I can’t.”

“You will keep the remainder, then?”

“No, of course not. There must be someone
 
—those organizations that you mentioned that find people . . . perhaps they can return the items.”

“As long as it is not you; is that what you mean?”

“I didn’t steal them, Carl. I didn’t send people to their deaths. You know as well as I do that nothing I’ve returned has made anyone happy.”

“Happy,” Carl repeated. “Did you expect them to be happy?”

Maybe I did. Maybe I expected them to be glad to have their things returned. I thought, at least
 
—I don’t know . . . that they would know I was trying.
But that didn’t even sound right. It wasn’t about me. Why was I making it about me?

“Perhaps,” Carl said softly, “there is more of the journey important for you, if not for them. You still don’t know about your mother
 
—what happened to her after the camp, or about your father.”

“Grandfather’s dead. Your parents didn’t know. Who is there left to ask other than Dr. Peterson, who seems to have conveniently disappeared? I can’t see him being helpful, and I don’t know that I’d believe anything he told me.”

“Then we need to find someone who knew your mother or Frau Kirchmann in the camp.”

I nearly dropped Grandfather’s urn. “Is that possible? Can we find such a person?”

“A prisoner of Ravensbruk? That should not be impossible
 
—there are lists. But there is someone else we must find as well. And perhaps that person can lead us to the first.”

“You mean Lukas
 
—or Marta, the youngest Kirchmann.”

Carl smiled, nodding.

“But your parents said they’d gone
 
—moved away. All our searching has turned up nothing. We don’t even know if they’re still alive, or still living in Germany.”

“This is true.” He took the urn from me before I dropped it. “All it means is that we haven’t searched in the right place.”

It took three weeks of letter writing and phone calls, of Carl translating endless pages of questions and then translating my answers, of reassuring the powers that be that our motives were pure, that I was only trying to locate someone who remembered my mother.

Finally, Carl tracked down the barracks my mother and Frau Kirchmann had been assigned to, and in the process found the name of a woman who’d been incarcerated in Ravensbruk at the same time and assigned to the same barracks. He telephoned her and she agreed to see us on Saturday morning.

With a stop for luncheon, the drive to the outskirts of Cologne took just over four hours. “Helga Brunner . . . she’s seventy-seven now? Do you think she’ll remember my mother?”

“She’s likely to remember one of the Kirchmann women. Frau Kirchmann was more her age.”

“Yes, of course.” I drummed nails against my knee. I felt like I was going to meet my mother for the first time
 
—which was silly.
Please, God, please let me see her as she was. Help me understand the woman she was before life and Grandfather changed her.

We stood before the painted-black door and rang the bell. It took a few minutes
 
—minutes in which I almost despaired of anyone answering
 
—before we heard the slow but rhythmic tapping of a cane and the shuffling of slippered feet.

The door opened to reveal a woman who looked more than ninety.

“Frau Brunner?” Carl asked.

“
Ja?
I am Helga Brunner. You are . . .”

“Carl Schmidt, a friend and driver of Hannah Sterling, the daughter of the woman we wanted to talk with you about. Do you remember my telephone call?”

“I am old, young man, and a bit decrepit, not senile.”

“Forgive me, Frau Brunner, I
 
—”

“Never mind. You are young, as if that is an excuse. Come in, come in.”

“
Danke schön,
Frau Brunner.” I stepped through the door. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. There’s so much I want to know about my mother.” I followed her into her sitting room and bit my lip to stop my babbling.

She motioned us toward her settee while she sat down heavily in a straight-back chair and pushed her three-pronged cane aside, staring at me through thick glasses. “You don’t look much like your Mutter.”

“You remember her? Lieselotte Kirchmann?”

“Lieselotte?
Nein, nein!
I mean, I did not know her name, but she was the young one. There were two women together
 
—like mother and daughter, but not by birth.” She smiled softly. “So, our little mama finally got her answer.”

“Her answer? Anything you can tell me about my mother I would truly appreciate.”

“You say that now, but you may not appreciate all I have to tell, what I remember. Horrendous days. Truth is often hard to understand, sometimes harder to believe.”

“I’m not afraid to hear whatever you might say.”

She nodded, and her rheumy eye took my measure. “Perhaps. It is difficult
 
—very difficult
 
—to learn of violations to your mother, your grandmother.”

“My grandmother?” My throat constricted; I was certain she did not mean Elsa Sommer. “My mother never told me the name of my real father. She married someone after the war
 
—an American, who raised me as his own. I’ve only learned, since Mama’s death, that he could not have been my birth father. She didn’t know him then.”
The math wasn’t right. Oh, Aunt Lavinia, if you could see me now.

Frau Brunner’s eyes raised and she nodded slowly. “That war produced a great many orphans, and stories to explain their existence.”

I wasn’t sure I understood. “Please tell me anything you know, anything you even suspect from that time.”

Frau Brunner shifted in her seat, straightening her back. She closed her eyes and remembered aloud, “We told each other our stories
 
—a half dozen times, a dozen. We rehearsed lines of plays. We shared the tedious details of recipes, how to turn a collar, how to smock a dress, how to knit a particularly difficult pattern. We recited Scripture and poems and sang songs until our vocal chords could not contribute anything more. Starving and thirsty and beaten, but we talked on
 
—whenever we could get away with it.”

“You were a community of women.” I understood how important that could be, at least in theory.

“We did all to survive, to keep our sanity. The Nazis did everything to dehumanize us
 
—to steal our dignity. Talking about daily life, the life we’d left behind, reminded us of who we were.”

I remembered Herr Horowitz and bit my lip. “You were already there when my mother came?”

She nodded. “Such a pretty girl
 
—so frightened. She stuck like glue to her mother-in-law. But the older woman could not keep the guards away.”

“The guards?” I felt the sickening rumble of snares in my stomach.

“You are certain you want to hear?”

“Yes, please.” I held my breath.

“She’d been married such a short time.”

“Two days, when they arrested her, I think.”

“
Ja
, two days with her husband and his family. I did not know the full story, but I gathered that her father did not approve the marriage, that he denounced them, turned them in
 
—the entire family of her husband
 
—to the Gestapo.”

I nodded, swallowing.

“The older woman was rumored to be half Jewish, but some mix-up in the lists occurred and she was not sent to the Jew barracks
 
—which
assuredly saved her life. She and the young one, both convicted of harboring Jews
 
—a criminal offense
 
—were assigned to our barracks.

“The older woman encouraged the younger to tell the guard that there had been a great mistake, to contact her father
 
—an important Nazi who would surely reward him handsomely. But the girl refused to leave her
 
—like a daughter to her, and the older woman a mother. A Ruth and Naomi pairing, if I ever saw such. I think of them so.”

Thank You, God, that Mama had such a woman in her life as Frau Kirchmann. What would it be like to have a mother love me like that?

“When they had taken our clothes and shoes and shaved our hair, they stole even our names, that remnant of our identity. Numbers replaced them.”

“Did you know Frau Kirchmann’s name
 
—the older Frau Kirchmann?”

Frau Brunner opened her eyes and smiled sadly. “I remember all the numbers of the women in that barracks, shouted out in roll call day after day. The ones who walked out at the end and the ones who never walked out. But I did not know their names
 
—at least not most of their names.”

“I understand.”

“As I said . . .” Frau Brunner closed her eyes as if it helped her remember. “The young woman, so very beautiful
 
—I still see her golden hair. There was one guard in particular, very soon after the two women arrived . . . Something to do with a mixup in the names of the older woman’s daughter, and a search for the missing daughter of a Nazi Party member
 
—I don’t know how it happened that he knew.”

“Yes, Carl’s parents said that the day they were arrested, the youngest girl was away. They must have thought my mother was that girl, her sister-in-law
 
—at least that’s what we think.”

“Possibly. The older woman worried over her daughter, but was careful not to speak of it much. Informants in the barracks
 
—always. Information was exchanged for a slice of bread, a bit of potato, a needle and thread, old newspaper to line our clothes against the cold. If word
got out that there was a family member not arrested, they would surely go after her. If not, she might be safe.”

“The women turned on one another?”

Frau Brunner shrugged. “
Ja
, for favors. But not all. You must understand this. We were shouted at day and night, called bad names . . . no longer treated as human, and in time, we stopped thinking of ourselves as human. That is what they wanted, what they worked toward
 
—to dehumanize us, to make us compliant so we responded submissively, without thinking, without reasoning. Under such circumstances, it does not take long to behave as a mangy dog begging a bone
 
—to fight one another over bones.”

“Someone reported my mother?”

Frau Brunner shook her head. “This I do not know, but a guard learned that her father was a Nazi. One night, as we returned from work at the factory, the guard pulled the younger woman from our ranks. I don’t know all that happened, but I think she believed her father appeared
 
—that he rejected her.”

“Her father saw her there, and left?” Carl broke in.

“
Ja
, this is true
 
—so she thought. She believed she heard his voice.” Frau Brunner shrugged. “At any rate, she was not released.” She sighed as if the story had sapped her energy. “None of us chose Ravensbruk. We all suffered, some more than others.”

“Grandfather actually left her there. He was there, and he walked away, leaving his daughter.” I said the words, still trying to comprehend.

“
Ja.
But the guard was not through. He’d expected reward for his discovery and evidently received reprimand. He wanted revenge.”

“Revenge?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

Frau Brunner stared at me so long I thought she might have forgotten my question. “He raped her. And then he brought two others to rape her.”

The world dropped from beneath my feet.
Mama! Oh, Mama!

“She missed her monthly. But that was not unusual. So little food
and we were worked so hard that most women dried up. It didn’t take long.”

“She was preg
 
—”

“
Ja
, she was pregnant, and she kept the baby, though she risked her life to do so.” Frau Brunner smiled. “When were you born, Hannah?”

“June 5, 1945.”

“A miracle from Ravensbruk.”

I pulled away. “You’ve just told me my father was a Nazi
 
—a criminal guard.”

“Nein,”
she retorted. “This I did not say. I say only that your mother did not know the father of her baby, that she risked everything to carry her baby. Pregnant women were eliminated or experimented upon
 
—and yet here you are, alive.

“Two sisters
 
—such preachers they were. They and the older woman and perhaps a half dozen of we women in the barracks worked to help your mother carry you. We shared our food
 
—a crust of bread here and there, only
 
—but that was our ration, our thread to life. We kept the little mama warm at night and took turns doing what we could to make her load lighter in the day while we all worked, nearly to death.

“One of the Sisters died
 
—I don’t know her name. But I remember her as a bright light. That is all I can say
 
—she radiated light among us. And then the other sister, a Dutch woman, I think
 
—the one who has written the book about it all
 
—was released not so very long after.”