Authors: Maja Haderlap
Give it to me, Grandmother says and pulls the book impatiently from my hands, I’ll show you the guards. She leafs through the book and shows me a group of women sitting in dock in a courtroom. She points at a young, blonde woman. She was the worst, Grandmother says. She had a dog that she set on prisoners when they collapsed during roll call. Grandmother can still see the bloodhound, how it pulls at the leash before crouching to leap onto an exhausted woman. A Polish woman from her block was bitten by that dog. She had real holes in her legs. A Polish doctor ordered the wounds washed in urine, it helped, they didn’t have anything else, no bandages, nothing at all.
It was this guard, Grandmother says, laying her index finger on the woman’s face, which disappeared beneath it. She was very young and very evil, very depraved. Good Lord, what people won’t do, Grandmother exclaims and spits on the photograph. Then she wipes the pages with her sleeve so they won’t stick together.
Sometimes she spits at the photograph of the SS camp doctor as a substitute for the SS doctors she came across when she was brought into the infirmary. The things these doctors did to the women,
čudno, čudno
, Grandmother says and, again, means
terrible
when she says
strange
.
She believes that, because of these books, no one will be able to accuse her of making up stories anymore. No one can call me a liar anymore, she says.
Every now and then she takes a stained red notebook out of the table drawer. My camp diary, she says and opens the notebook, look, on the inside cover I wrote
knjiga od zapora Maria H
., the prison book of Maria
H. A fellow prisoner gave her the notebook on the way home. That prisoner had been given the notebook by a French woman. She tore out a few pages. But look, Grandmother says, in Prenzlau, I started to make notes. On April 28th, they drove us out of the camp, the trip was amazing, she reads out loud,
čudovita
, because once again she can’t think of the Slovenian word for terrible. The SS forced them north along the front or in circles, she recounts. No one knew where they were heading. She can barely remember the first days because she was so weak, Gregorička had to carry her. One time, she can still remember they were marching through a forest that just would not end, the bodies of the dead and the exhausted were lying everywhere, along with gutted cars and munitions. Gregorička got hold of a wheelbarrow, put her in, and pushed it. Then the 1st of May came and the SS disappeared, they vanished on the spot. Thunder and gunfire all around them. The women wandered along the battle lines in groups. Her group spent the night in a pigsty. The Russians were going to shoot at the sty. Only when a woman in a striped camp uniform came out did the Russians realize concentration camp prisoners were in there. Then they slaughtered a pig for everyone to eat.
They moved on the next day, devastation everywhere, villages bombed out, the planes flew very low over them. They searched for food and clothing in the abandoned houses. A woman from Ljubljana led her group, they stayed with her because the Slovenians were supposed to be taken home as a group. The Slovenians waited until the middle of August to go home. The Austrians wanted to struggle home as soon as the fighting had stopped, Grandmother says.
As soon as Grandmother starts undressing, I do the same.
She sits on the bed in her undershirt and undoes her thin braid, which she wears wound into a bun on the back of her head. I kneel on the bed behind Grandmother and start combing her hair. Her thin, gray hair falls between her shoulder blades. She alternately lays her left or her right hand on the side of her head I am combing. Careful, she says, careful, and sometimes after a sigh she continues, it was the 13th of November, the day she arrived at the camp. The women who were marched there with her through Fürstenberg had to get undressed after they were admitted. There was an air-raid alarm in the very first hours. They had to wait, naked, for two hours until they were examined. Then their heads were shaved. As soon as she says shaved, she pushes my hand away as if I were touching her hair without permission. With a few quick flicks of her hands, she weaves a braid and winds it back into a bun. She sighs. She had to lie on a table, she says, and they injected something into her vagina and it burned beyond belief and that was probably due to women’s trouble. One woman had just gotten her period and it all ran down her legs. The uniformed men looked at her like she was a cow, she was one of the older ones. The younger ones had problems because of their looks, they were taken from block twelve, where they were locked up for four weeks and brought back completely destroyed. Every day, morning and evening, they had to stand through two-hour roll calls, complete confusion, tears, it took a long time until they were all counted, and the disparaging looks measuring what you were still worth and what kind of work you could do.
I catch myself scanning Grandmother for the looks that appraised her. I see strangers’ eyes covering her like a net and wonder if traces of horror were left on her skin. But there is no sign of the terror. It leaves no visible scars. Grandmother’s body is as angular as a skeleton, her horizontal collarbone, her shoulders, the protrusion of her lower cervical spine, her rib cage, her upper arm bones, over which her skin stretches like light gauze. She has no muscles anymore and no chest, look, she says, lifting her undershirt, my chest is a big wrinkle. I look reluctantly, but Grandmother purses her lips and says I shouldn’t shudder at the sight of old women. She’s seen a lot of naked women in her life and once you have, you stop being prim. She’s seen women in every possible condition, good Lord, she says, young and old, frail and beaten down, women with their skin hanging off them in tatters, dead women with skin like paper, like yellowish paper you could peel off their bones, she says. In the beginning she had to clean the latrines, you can’t imagine how it stank. The smell stuck to her, she couldn’t wash it off. Angela Piskernik, the professor from Eisenkappel, complained about the stink, but what was she supposed to do. Dirt is dirt and shit is shit, Grandmother says.
She rubs her hands along her thighs, which are covered with cotton underwear to her knees, and tries to straighten her back by pressing against her legs. She asks me to pull her woolen tights off. The garters leave marks on her lower legs. Grandmother says her legs swell badly since the camp. It all started in the camp, the heaviness and swelling in her legs, with such pain in her joints and bones that she could barely stand at times. She asks if I want to see her throbbing big toe. I bend over her feet.
Her big toenails look like barley sugar, I say and Grandmother laughs at the comparison. Like candy, she says, pleased, I didn’t know I have barley sugar on my feet! The skin below her knees has a bluish tinge, the capillaries hover over her calves and shins like webbing and cover her feet in a thicket that looks like a river delta.
Should we eat a few cookies before we lie down, Grandmother asks after a pause.
I nod and she gets a tin of wafers out of the kitchen sideboard. She prefers the crumbly ones that fall apart in your mouth right away, she says and unwraps her false teeth from the handkerchief she always keeps on her night table. Grandmother only uses her dentures to eat. She decided not to wear her dentures anymore once Grandfather died, why bother, she asks, she’s not going to get another man anyway. She keeps them in reach and often has them in her apron pocket. Most of the time, her false teeth feel superfluous, she claims.
When I’m stretched out on the bed and she sits near me, telling me about the camp, she likes to talk about her foster daughter, Mici. Oh, she sighs, oh, if you only knew how my Mici looked when I saw her in the roll-call square! Mici threw her arms around me, Grandmother says, she cried Mother, Mother what are you doing here! I couldn’t hold back my tears, Grandmother says, it made me so sad! Mici told her that on the day she left the house to register with the police in Eisenkappel because she’d been summoned, she stopped in at Šertev’s to ask if it wouldn’t be better to hide with the partisans. The partisans had a bunker near Šertev’s, Grandmother says. The partisans said there was nothing to worry about,
Mici told her, the police couldn’t prove anything, she was still very young and going to the partisans just as winter was setting in was very hard for women. As long as she wasn’t in immediate danger, she should wait and keep calm.
Mici went and registered with the police. They told her that others had sworn she worked for the partisans. She denied everything but the judgment stood. She was deported to the camp. Mici was filthy and disturbed, Grandmother recalled. She sensed Mici wouldn’t survive the camp and she’d given up. On that day, she sensed it would be the end of her foster daughter. Three months later Leni wrote that Mici’s ashes had been sent from Lublin. That was too much for me, Grandmother said. I wept the whole night through. The women in the barrack told me not to give in, because in camp strong feelings are heralds of death. Mici was gassed in Lublin, she was gassed in Lublin, Grandmother repeats as if trying, again, to grasp that fact. From that day on she was no good for outside work, she could barely stand on her own two feet, she continues. But before that, look, on May 10th, Grandmother says and leafs through her camp notebook, on May 10th, I saw a sign in the sky. I saw my brother Miklavž, Katrca’s husband, and I told Katrca, who was your grandfather’s sister. Katrca was already in the infirmary. I described the sign and told her it boded no good. Not long after that, Katrca heard that Miklavž had died in Dachau, Grandmother recounts. She lost her will to survive. She said she wanted to join her husband. She wrote more poems on her sickbed, she always wrote poems. It was a very dangerous thing to do.
A Russian woman was beaten to death for writing poems in the bunker, but Katrca wanted her poems to be smuggled to freedom. Grandmother tells me she doesn’t know if it worked. She visited Katrca, she always visited Katrca, even when she herself was in the infirmary and had to spend fourteen days in the ward with the dying. Those who died in the infirmary during the night were piled up in front of the baths, the emaciated bodies lay on the ground like sticks of wood and we tripped over them. Katrca had an abscessed back, Grandmother says and, lying on the bed, in my imagination Katrca’s back looks like a painted cloth, saturated with circle upon circle of red, mixed with wilted rose petals, covered with a pustulent crust. Lying behind my grandmother’s back, staring at the image of Katrca’s back, I float in the past as in a drop of time that circulates within my mind.
Grandmother breathes heavily and gasps for air. She stayed in the infirmary for fourteen days, she reports, then she recovered a bit. There were also Czech women doctors in the infirmary. They could speak German and they tried to help. The Czechs stuck together, she could sense it. The
Blockova
assigned her to inside work after she’d recovered. She had to wash the big cauldrons in the camp kitchen. That kept her alive, Grandmother says, because she could often steal what was thrown away and eat it. She stashed away what was left lying around and brought it to the other inmates. She could even save turnip or potato peelings for Katrca, now and again, and that was lucky because the food for the inmates was garbage that at home would have been given to the pigs or thrown away.
Katrca died on the 1st of July, on a Saturday afternoon. I went up to the window of the infirmary with a scrap of turnip in my hand, looked inside and saw that Katrca’s bed was empty, Grandmother says. A Czech woman told her Katrca had been taken away. Grandmother often remembered this and hoped that Katrca didn’t have to live through what happened to Jerči Vivoda from the Lobnik Valley. Jerči was still alive when they threw her on the pile of dead bodies. She managed to climb out of the stack of corpses and crawl back three times to block six. I prayed for Katrca’s death, Grandmother says, and hoped she didn’t go through what the young Jerči from Upper Lobnik did.
When Grandmother mentions food rations in the camp, she is overcome with a nervous hunger. She opens the tin of cookies again or takes a jar of apple compote from the cabinet in which she keeps several jars of preserves as reassurance rations.
If she places a glass of grape compote on the table, I know she is happy with the way the evening went. She takes a large spoon from the table drawer, the camp spoon for the top brass she stole from the camp kitchen, she says. Look, she says and points to the engraving on the back of the handle, RAD,
Reicharbeitdienst
. Then she dips the spoon into the grape compote, lifts a few grapes from the jar, and lets them slide into her mouth. The next spoonful is for me. I close my eyes and open my mouth. Grandmother carefully rolls a few grapes onto my tongue. Sometimes I choke because the spoon fills my mouth. Not so greedy, Grandmother laughs, not so greedy! She took her own camp spoon, too, a simple
aluminum spoon, she stores it with the documents, as a piece of evidence, she says, so it won’t get lost.
Now and again she pulls a gray box of photographs from the dresser. Where has Mici got to, she murmurs as she rummages through the black and white photographs, which are mostly of wedding parties. I look at the photographs she lays out on the bed for me as if from a great distance. Only Mici grabs me as a child, perhaps also Katrca’s melancholy gaze. What interest me most are the photographs of Grandmother as a girl my age. I remark that we look alike. After thinking about it for a long time, Grandmother says, maybe, maybe we do look alike, she’s not sure. The white dress she’s wearing in the confirmation picture is pretty, I say appreciatively and with her finger Grandmother caresses her girlish head adorned with a crown of white flowers. Then she starts to tell me about the worst times in the camp.
Early in 1945, more and more transports arrived in Ravensbrück. There was no more room in the barracks, the women had to sleep three or four to a bunk. Many women from Poland and Slovenia arrived, many city women from France, Belgium, Holland, good Lord, how those women fought for their dresses and furs, Grandmother says. They sat in the admission block and couldn’t believe their eyes. We were already deadened, Grandmother says, we’d already gotten used to a lot. She was completely emaciated that winter, there was less and less to eat, sometimes nothing for days. She saw women carted away in trucks and brought
back as corpses for the crematorium. In the spring, she was selected for the gas chamber at one roll call. For death, my God, I was lying on straw in the typhus ward, waiting to be transported to the gas, and praying, Grandmother says. Suddenly a woman from Vienna said to her, we Austrians have to stick together! We Austrians have to stick together! The woman from Vienna switched her camp number with one of the dead. She told Grandmother to hide and so Grandmother locked herself in the toilet before the transport. It was horrible, Grandmother recalls, there was banging on the door the whole time. It was unbearable. She would never do it again. From then on, she never went to any selection roll calls and hid in the barracks under the bunk bed, barricaded behind the packages that were sent to the women from home. She spent the final days in the camp as a dead person, illegally.