Back on my bed, I put my hand on my neck. My scabbed-over wound was swollen and hot to the touch. I scrounged around the Block for something to use as disinfectant. To my surprise I found dirty, ragged dresses, skirts, and blouses. Obviously. Ravensbrück had been a women’s camp. I ventured into another Block. Most of the Häftlinge were lying motionless, and the few healthy ones were clowning with the women’s clothing that they had discovered. I came across the remnants of a make-up kit that must have belonged to the Blokowa. There was some toilet paper and a few drops of the famous German 4711 cologne in a lipstick-smeared bottle.
Dizzy from the slight exertion, I crawled back into my bed with a scarf of cologne-soaked toilet paper around my neck and blacked out. I spent close to the next four days prone in that bed. The Nazis didn’t bother us, which was fine except that they also didn’t feed us.
They also didn’t pick up the corpses, which made the camp a petri dish for an epidemic.
A rumor shot through my Block that Red Cross packages had arrived for us. This made me sit up. “C’est une blague!” (It’s a joke!) I laid back down and shut my eyes. A Parisian who was wearing a Greek mariner’s cap awakened me. Where he scrounged up that damn cap I will never know. “Get up. I need a partner to get a package. We have to split them up.”
I rolled onto my side and said, “Another joke? Leave me alone. I’m not getting up unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
He kept on insisting, but it wasn’t until other Häftlinge came in holding boxes with red crosses on them that I followed my “partner” outside. What a pair we made as we crossed the yard, him with his fishing cap and me with my flowing scarf of toilet paper. I followed him into a Block and was dumbfounded by the stacks of Red Cross boxes towering in front of us. With a contingent of German soldiers observing, members of the International Red Cross had us sign a ledger, then handed us each one of the cardboard boxes. A Gift from the American People was stenciled across the top. In German, Gift is “poison.” It took a lot of convincing to get some of the Häftlinge in my Block to believe that the boxes weren’t filled with Zyklon B, the poison used in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Examining our treasure at my bedside, my partner insisted we open all the tins at once and divide the contents. I told him he was an idiot. We had no means of keeping the food from spoiling. Either we would have to stuff ourselves or watch it rot.
“Let’s split a tin.”
“No.”
“Okay, you have the Spam, and I’ll eat those sardines.”
The fool wouldn’t hear of it, but after opening a couple of cans he yielded to my logic. I unwrapped a chocolate bar designed for U.S. paratroopers in the field. The label warned in English to consume only a small section a day because it was spiked with special drugs and vitamins. I dropped into a deep sleep after I ate some of the Spam and a small chunk of the chocolate bar.
I awoke to a familiar scene. All around me were dead and dying.
Our long starvation had caused many of my comrades to go at their food so voraciously that they had eaten themselves to death. Since most couldn’t read English, the chocolate bar became the coup de grace. Everywhere in the camp Häftlinge were losing their guts, some literally. There were some who were actually struggling to push their protruding intestines back inside. I opened one of the packs of Lucky Strike included with our tins of food, and blew the smoke of the American cigarette through my nose to mask the stench. Diarrhea would be a lethal scourge for days. Many men’s last thought had to be that their Red Cross package was a German Gift.
All the Häftlinge in Ravensbrück came from camps that had fallen to the Allies. Some of these men didn’t have triangles, others had only numbers, and most didn’t have a tattoo on their left arm.
Outside the wire stood the guards from these different camps, a mix of SS and their mercenaries. These mercenaries were real bastards.
With truncheon, rifle butt, jackboot, or fist, they were much more sadistic dealing out punishment than the boches. They had to prove themselves to earn their pay and the favor of their masters, but they also seemed to get an orgasm from it.. With Ravensbrück north of Berlin, it would be Soviet troops who would burst through the gate, and there was no doubt what they would do to those mercenaries, since the majority of them came from Ukraine, Hungary, and the Baltic states. I and many of my fellow Häftlinge believed we were entitled to front-row seats for that bloodletting.
Having no idea when we would be liberated, and with the Nazis not feeding us, that Red Cross food became treasures worth killing for. With safety in numbers, I talked my moron partner into banding with four fellow Frenchmen from Dora. I forged a true friendship with two in the group, Jean and Michel. They were in their twenties and single—construction workers from a small town in northern France—and they had been sent to Germany in a contingent of forced laborers. In an agreement between the Nazis and the Vichy government, they were classified as volunteers. For minor infractions like tardiness, absence without a medical excuse, or drunkenness, these “volunteers” would find themselves incarcer-ated in camps as black triangles. Because they were new arrivals in Dora, Jean and Michel were in better shape than the rest of us, and they would have been able to fight off any thief, but thankfully it never came to that. I valued Jean and Michel for their common sense and street smarts, and they were dependent on me because their German was limited to a couple basic phrases.
There were moments, sometimes, while we heated our food at one of the campfires in the yard or when, perched like swallows over the shit trench, the six of us found the strength to be optimistic and plan for the future. But planning brought on apprehensions about what we would find or not find when we arrived home. Since I had given the Nazis a false name, I wasn’t concerned about the Gestapo harassing or arresting my mother or father. It was the errant bomb or bullet that troubled me. I knew through the POWs in Auschwitz that Allied troops had invaded southern France shortly after D-Day. But, as strange as it might sound, I was more concerned about how angry my parents would be with me for being dumb enough to get arrested and giving them over a year of grief.
The knife wound in my neck had gotten infected, and the egg-sized boil was affecting my hearing. It was unfortunate that the knife had been thrown out of the train along with the Romanian because I could have used it to lance the abscess. The camp’s infirmary was locked up. The doctor had left with the women Häftlinge. I had to find Martin, a French Canadian POW who had come with us from Dora. He was a stocky blonde from Vancouver who had driven an ambulance before becoming a paratrooper medic.
The Germans had transferred him to Dora after his third escape attempt from a Stalag. Martin was also a homosexual with an insa-tiable sexual appetite. At Dora, he had a connection with a cook who provided him with boiled potatoes, and his many partners stuffed themselves with those morsels while he stuffed them.