But that night –
Oh God, that truck smelled so horrible. If there is a smell that goes with fear and despair, it is like that – sweat and dirty underpants and pee. I was already retching as they slammed the doors shut on me, and for a long time I just stood in the middle of the truck hugging myself and gagging.
There was no light. I braced myself in the dark because I thought they were going to take me somewhere any minute, and the truck would lurch into action and I’d fall over and have to touch whatever was on the evil floor. But nothing happened. Then I tried to get out, struggling with the doors until all my nails were broken – the sheets of metal interlocked and there wasn’t even a crack to feel air through. Near the front of the truck there were slatted air vents high up in the walls, but even if I’d been able to get the slats out, the opening was smaller than my head. Eventually I was so tired that I gritted my teeth and leaned in the corner below one of the air vents, where two walls propped me so I could still stand up. Then later I had to sit down.
Fernande is still here. She’s in the bathroom now. I couldn’t write about this if I were alone.
I took off my flying jacket and tucked up the edges carefully, so that only the leather of the back was touching the floor, and sat on that. It wasn’t very cold yet – still early September.
After a while I opened up my flight bag to count the papers that I’d handed over earlier and then shoved back in without looking – checking to feel that I still had my precious official letter of recommendation from the Luftwaffe, with its stamps and signatures – and beneath the pile of paper I found, mysteriously, two of my confiscated Hershey bars.
I am sure that Womelsdorff put them there.
I was starved enough to eat one, even in the grim stench of the transport truck – I didn’t dare eat both, because I didn’t know how long I’d be there. Finally I put my tunic back on and curled in my supportive corner as tightly as I could on the protective island of my flying jacket. I buried my nose in the silver paper that the chocolate had been wrapped in, sucking in the distant smell of Hershey and home to mask the stink, and managed to go to sleep.
I got woken up by the engine starting. Through the air vents high in the walls I could see that it was light. No one looked inside to see if I was even alive – I have always thought the truck driver didn’t actually know I was there.
We drove for about an hour and I couldn’t even tell what direction we were heading or how fast we were going. After the truck parked and the engine stopped, I sat in the dark for another hour. I didn’t know it, but the truck had gone through the gate, I was already inside.
I ate the last chocolate bar. We’d both travelled from the same place, me and that Hershey bar – I thought how incredible it was that we both ended up here together. I heard long, slow trains steaming and clunking past a short distance away, a comforting sound, like the freight line that goes past the lake at Conewago Grove. I heard other trucks coming and going, and orders shouted in German. I heard the siren and nearly jumped out of my skin.
We called it ‘the Screamer’. The first time I heard it I thought there must be an air raid going on. I scrunched myself up in a ball with my arms over my head – of course nothing happened. The next thing I heard, twenty minutes later, was the sound of hundreds of feet shuffling along at a weary jog, and a lot of shouting and dogs barking. I felt my way to the doors to try to find a crack to see out.
Then someone opened the doors. I clapped my hands over my eyes and stood teetering on the edge of the truck floor, completely blinded by sunny September brilliance. They didn’t give me five seconds. I hadn’t even opened my eyes before someone grabbed my skirt and yanked me off balance, and I crashed full length on to the cindered road surface. The fall took the skin right off both my knees and off the heels of both hands too. I rolled over and sat up, furious and stunned, rubbing my eyes with shaking, bloody hands. Within seconds I was surrounded by half a dozen frantic German shepherds straining at the end of their leashes, all barking their heads off while half a dozen voices behind them barked equally vicious and completely incomprehensible orders over my head.
I just cowered.
Finally, since obviously I wasn’t going to obey an order I didn’t have a hope of understanding, someone grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me to my feet. I ended up being dragged to stand at the back of a long line of women who all looked as bewildered and stunned as I was. They seemed to be civilians, most of them carrying small bags and suitcases. There must have been nearly four hundred of us – all packed five to a row – and I was the last one in the last row.
You know how you look around a new place to see what it’s like? I didn’t do that right away because my hands and knees were so sore. I bent down to look at my knees and cursed, ‘Gosh darn it!’ when I saw the humongous bloody holes in my stockings. ‘Gosh darn it, these are nylon!’
You know, it almost makes me laugh to write about it. What was the first thing you worried about when you found yourself a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Rosie? Gosh darn it, holes in my nylon hose!
One of the guards yanked me upright again, by my hair this time, and that is when I lost my cap, because they would not let me pick it up. I never saw it again.
We stood there until after it got dark.
I think it must have been six or seven hours. They weren’t punishing us that first day; I think they were just disorganised and there wasn’t any other place to put us yet. So we had to stand there, trying not to die of fear or boredom. But it was the first time. That made it harder.
This is what I thought about while I waited:
The walls. Twenty feet high and fenced with electric wire and skull-and-crossbones warning signs. There were a lot of empty trucks parked around us, but you could see the walls behind them. I still hadn’t figured out I was inside these walls – it was because I’d been locked blindly in the truck when I came through the gate. I kept looking at the walls and thinking, Gosh, I hope I don’t end up in there, whatever it is. Dreading that I probably would, and blissfully unaware that I already was.
The sky. It was the most pure, beautiful blue September sky I think I have ever seen, with frothy clouds floating in it lazily like whipped cream in an ice-cream soda at the Hide-a-way Fountain in Conewago Grove. We stood there so long you could pick out a single cloud and watch it travel right from one side of the sky to the other – and then do it again. And again. You could see a ridge of pine trees behind one of the walls too, but the trees just stood there – they were boring to watch. The sky changed.
And then the women who were going to Neubrandenburg came marching past us, five by five by five, to get into the row of waiting trucks.
Those 200 women had all been turned into drones. They were like rows of plastic dolls. They all wore tattered, grubby dresses that didn’t fit (I don’t think any one of the 50,000 people in that whole damn camp had a dress that fitted her) – and there were great big crosses cut out of the fabric across the front and back of their chests and filled in with some contrasting colour. They weren’t prison uniforms, but they looked like prison uniforms anyway. But the absolutely nightmare thing about these women was that none of them had any hair. We watched and stared as these scruffy, bald zombies were herded into the waiting trucks, packed so close they couldn’t even sit down – now I knew why that truck smelled the way it did.
Suddenly, at exactly the same moment, me and the girl next to me turned to stare at each other instead of at the awful robot women. We were looking at each other’s hair and thinking the same thing.
After that we stopped watching the other prisoners climbing into the trucks. We just stared at the long hair of the woman in front of us, thick and brown and uncombed, and full of tangled curls, like mine.
It got hot. By mid-afternoon my blouse was sticking to my back, but the guards kept patrolling up and down the lines and whacking people who tried to sit down or talk, and I didn’t dare to try to take my tunic off. I hadn’t had anything to drink or been to the toilet since I landed in Neubrandenburg the day before, and I’d eaten only chocolate since then; pretty soon I became consumed by thirst more than anything else. In my wildest nightmares I’d never imagined such simple torture – just to have to stand in one place forever and ever.
I don’t remember being scared any more at that point. I was just sick of standing there and desperate for a glass of water.
Late in the afternoon the girl standing next to me whispered something without turning her head.
‘Vous êtes un pilote?’ – you’re a pilot?
I didn’t answer for a long time, checking around us for guards and guard dogs without moving my head either. Then, ‘Oui,’ I answered, also in a whisper.
I stole a glance at her. She was short and pretty, with untidy gold bangs that got in her eyes, and a long shiny scar down one side of her face. This was the first conversation I ever had with a French person in real life who wasn’t my French teacher – and also it was the first time I understood anyone since Womelsdorff handed me over to the guy with the motorbike yesterday. I had a pretty good idea what would happen if someone noticed us whispering. But it was such a relief to be able to talk to someone.
She whispered, ‘Vous êtes anglaise?’ Are you English?
‘Américaine.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in French.
‘Je ne sais pas,’ I hissed. ‘I don’t know. You?’
‘We all come from different prisons,’ she told me. ‘Arrested for Resistance activity – most of us are Résistantes. I’ve been in prison for nine months.’
I was confused, because if she’d already been in prison for nearly a year, why was she here now?
‘Where are we?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably Ravensbrück. It’s their big women’s concentration camp. They move us all the time – away from the Allied armies as they advance. I was in prison in Paris until May, then moved to Frankfurt, then to Berlin. Now here.’
Her name was Elodie Fabert.
You know, concentration camp translates pretty clearly in French – even in German. Camp de concentration, Konzentrationslager. But even though I knew what the words meant – it didn’t mean anything then. Not really. The name of the place didn’t mean anything to me. Over the heads of the four hundred Frenchwomen ahead of me I stared at the high concrete walls and the miles of electrified barbed wire, and I clung to my flight bag with its official Luftwaffe letter in it. The girl next to me had already been in prison for nine months and she obviously survived it. Our troops were practically over the Siegfried Line. It wouldn’t be for long. I wouldn’t cause trouble. I would be all right. If they ever let us sit down and have a drink, I would be all right.
The chambermaid has left. It’s OK – it was just being alone in the truck I didn’t like remembering by myself. Reading it over I noticed that I didn’t actually write down what I kept thinking then: What if no one ever opens that door? I’m done with it now – dry words on a page. The reality was much worse.