Heading back to my Block that day, I realized that if Stella had been in one of those cubicles, it shouldn’t shatter my hopes. It would be ridiculous to be jealous and forlorn if it meant her survival. But as I walked down the hall this time, to retrieve the body of a young woman who had slashed her wrists, my heart pounded again. When I saw the blonde stubble on the head of the teenage girl on the bed, I let out a silent sigh of relief.
The girl’s naked body was curled up on her side and her arms were drawn against her chest. Her mouth was slightly opened as if she were thinking about something to say. Most of the burlap mattress was black from her blood. Someone had strewn sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood that had pooled around the bed. A slight breeze drew my attention to the window that she had shattered. I didn’t want to imagine the pain she must have endured to slice open her wrists.
Easing her stiffening body prone, I noticed bite marks and hickeys on her neck and rashes from ringworm under her small breasts.
With her fixed green eyes staring at the ceiling, her pale, near transparent face seemed oddly serene. I kicked a bloody shard of glass under the bed as I began to roll her in a blanket. My hands became sticky with her blood. She had welts on her back and buttocks, no doubt the Blokowa’s signature.
Two women in their early twenties dressed in baggy “pajamas”
stood at the entrance of the cubicle, whispering in French.
“How long have you two been in this Block?” I asked.
“We came here from the main camp two weeks ago.”
“Did you see any other French girls over there?”
“No. But the day we arrived they sent a bunch of them to work at a camp with a textile mill.”
I finished wrapping the corpse. With her body covered and the five o’clock shadow on her head, she could have easily been mistaken for a boy.
“She must’ve desperately wanted to die,” I mumbled.
The more talkative of the two answered. “She was praying and preaching constantly to us and our dates. The Blokowa kept beating her bloody, and she still wouldn’t shut up. I guess God finally got pounded out of her. First she tried to hang herself.”
“Get out my way, you stupid bitches!” the Blokowa yelled.
The women scattered.
“What a bloody mess.” The Blokowa was boiling mad. “I’ll never have another one of those Bibelforscher in here. Lousy fanatic, I should have let her hang.”
German Bibelforscher (Jehovah’s Witnesses) were turned into purple triangle Häftlinge because of their singular devotion to Jesus, which left “the god with a moustache” in the cold. Any of them could easily have regained freedom by pledging allegiance to the Nazi Party. As a non-believer, I had difficulty comprehending their beliefs and their dedication, but I admired their resoluteness. With suicide being an affront to her God, how that girl must have agonized before she broke that window.
“Don’t steal the blanket or it will be your ass. The Krätzeblock can use it,” the Blokowa growled. “Not that those crud-infested pricks would care, but blood won’t show in kerosene.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll return it,” I promised.
I didn’t need the blanket, but why expose the girl’s naked body to the catcalls of the onlookers I knew were assembled outside? I had been raised to respect and look after the “weaker sex.” I cradled her body in my arms and headed for the door. None of the women in the cubicles gave even a passing glance as I walked by. The Blokowa stayed on my heels, spitting out obscenities about Jehovah’s Witnesses and other “Bible nuts.”
The jackals outside scattered once they saw that I had closed the curtain on their main attraction. I laid the girl’s body on my pushcart. Three corpses were more than enough for one Häftling to haul, so I took them to the truck. To blend with the rest of the load, I placed the girl on her belly. I was relieved that the Kapo wasn’t around. He would get a good laugh, seeing how protective I was of a whore’s bag of bones.
The Blokowa was in a more pleasant mood when I returned with the blanket. “You’re a good kid. If you ever feel the urge, I’ll let you tear off a piece without a voucher,” she promised.
After our 100-plus load was counted at the gate, we started on our way to the crematoriums. The Kapo was in the cab with the SS driver, and I bounced around in the back with the corpses. First, we passed by a Stalag[5] housing prisoners of the British Commonwealth. Many of them worked at the plant. Then we drove past a camp for female forced laborers. A group of kids waved to me from behind the barbed wire. I waved back. I had almost forgotten that children still existed on this planet.
I was surprised and somewhat confused when the truck veered off the paved road and ground to a halt below a bridge spanning a small river. The driver and Kapo jumped out. I took a deep breath, inhaling the musty smell of the water. It was intoxicating. Gone was the overwhelming, acrid stench of the plant. I almost felt free.
Almost…
“Unload that girl!” the Kapo barked.
I did as I was told. With her slung over my shoulder, I followed the Kapo and the driver, who had a gunnysack and length of rope squeezed under his arm, down to the river. Where the hell are we going with this girl, I wondered but didn’t dare ask. The driver stopped at the river’s edge and looked around. He pointed at a rope in the water that was tied to a tree. When the Kapo reeled in the rope, pulling out a bulging, muddy gunnysack that had been sub-merged in the reeds, I knew exactly what was going on. I had done something similar as a child to catch crayfish in the Brague River, but I had used a dead cat in a flour sack.
The driver hefted the heavy sack upright, and the Kapo lifted out the bluish white legs of a corpse. The bottom of the gunnysack was squirming with eels. The Kapo shook the man’s body, then dropped it onto the bank. His belly was sliced open and a couple of lucky eels sprang out of the guts and slithered back into the river.
The SS driver swore in Czech, and I realized that he was a Sudetendeutscher, the ethnic German minority in Czechoslovakia. They had complained about discrimination in 1938, which gave “the god with a moustache” his excuse to invade the country.
The Kapo yanked the girl off my shoulder. After they stuffed her into the fresh gunnysack, the driver reached in with his bayonet and gave her a cesarean. “You didn’t have to cut her open. Her hole is stretched out enough,” the Kapo chuckled.
“And let the eels catch the clap?”
The two men howled as they heaved the gunnysack into the water. I turned away, fighting back the urge to throw up. With dinner a long way off, I couldn’t afford to lose my breakfast. As the Kapo and I threw the man’s corpse onto the truck, a question occurred to me. Would I have to drag her body up the trail tomorrow?
5
The camp referred to, E715, wasn’t a Stalag but a subcamp of Stalag VIIB, the largest POW camp in Germany. E715 housed British and British Commonwealth soldiers.