“Loafer! Lazy swine!”
The guard snatched Betsie's shovel from her hands and ran from group to group of the digging crew, exhibiting the handful of dirt that was all Betsie had been able to lift.
“Look what Madame Baroness is carrying! Surely she will overexert herself!”
The other guards and even some of the prisoners laughed. Encouraged, the guard threw herself into a parody of Betsie's faltering walk. A male guard was with our detail today and in the presence of a man the women guards were always animated.
As the laughter grew, I felt a murderous anger rise. The guard was young and well fedâwas it Betsie's fault that she was old and starving? But to my astonishment, Betsie too was laughing.
“That's me all right,” she admitted. “But you'd better let me totter along with my little spoonful, or I'll have to stop altogether.”
The guard's plump cheeks went crimson. “I'll decide who's to stop!” And snatching the leather crop from her belt, she slashed Betsie across the cheek and neck.
Without knowing I was doing it, I had seized my shovel and rushed at her.
Betsie stepped in front of me before anyone had seen. “Corrie!” she pleaded, dragging my arm to my side. “Corrie, keep working!” She tugged the shovel from my hand and dug it into the mud. Contemptuously the guard tossed Betsie's shovel toward us. I picked it up, still in a daze. A red stain appeared on Betsie's collar; a welt began to swell on her neck.
Betsie saw where I was looking and laid a bird-thin hand over the whip mark. “Don't look at it, Corrie. Look at Jesus only.” She drew away her hand: it was sticky with blood.
In mid-November the rains started in earnest, chilly, drenching day-long downpours that left beads of moisture even on the inside walls. The
Lagerstrasse
was never dry now; even when the rain let up, deep puddles stood in the road. We were not allowed to step around them as the ranks were formed: often we stood in water up to our ankles, and at night the barracks reeked with rotting shoe leather.
Betsie's cough began to bring up blood. We went to sick call at the hospital, but the thermometer registered only 102 degrees, not enough to admit her to the wards. Alas for my fantasies of a nurse and a dispensary in each barracks. This large bare room in the hospital was where all the sick in the camp had to assemble, often standing outside in the rain for hours just to get through the door.
I hated the dismal place full of sick and suffering women, but we had to go back, again and again, for Betsie's condition was growing worse. She was not repelled by the room as I was. To her it was simply a setting in which to talk about Jesusâas indeed was every place else. Wherever she was, at work, in the food line, in the dormitory, Betsie spoke to those around her about His nearness and His yearning to come into their lives. As her body grew weaker, her faith seemed to grow bolder. And sick call was “such an important place, Corrie! Some of these people are at the very threshold of heaven!”
At last one night Betsie's fever registered over the required 104 degrees. There was another long wait until a nurse appeared to lead her and half a dozen others into the hospital proper. I stayed with them as far as the door to the ward, then made my way slowly back to the barracks.
As usual, as I stood in the door of the dormitory, it reminded me most of an anthill. Some women were already asleep after the long workday, but most were stirring about, some waiting for a turn at the toilets, others picking lice off themselves and their neighbors. I twisted and squirmed through the crowded aisles to the rear where the prayer service was just ending. Nights when Betsie and I reported to sick call, we left the Bible with Mrs. Wielmaker, a saintly Roman Catholic woman from The Hague who could render the Dutch words in German, French, Latin, or Greek. Women crowded around me, asking after Betsie. How was she? How long would she have to stay?
Lights-out blew and the scramble into the bunks began. I hoisted myself to the middle tier and crawled across those already in place. What a difference since Betsie had come to this room! Where before this had been the moment for scuffles and cursing, tonight the huge dormitory buzzed with “Sorry!” “Excuse me!” And “No harm done!”
I found our section in the dark and squeezed into a spot in the middle. From the doorway a searchlight swept the room, lingering on blocks where anything stirred. Someone's elbow dug into my back, another woman's feet were two inches from my face. How was it possible, packed so close, to be so utterly and miserably alone?
I
n the morning a cold wet mist hung over the
Lagerstrasse
. I was grateful that Betsie did not have to stand outside.
All day the blanketing fog hung over Ravensbruck, an eerie day when sound was muffled and the sun never rose. I was on potato detail, one of a crew hauling baskets of potatoes to long trenches to be covered with dirt against the freezing weather ahead. I was glad of the hard physical work that drove some of the damp from my bones and for the occasional bite of raw potato when guards were not watching.
Next day when the white pall still lay over the camp, my loneliness for Betsie became too much to bear. As soon as roll call was dismissed, I did a desperate thing. Mien had told me a way to get to the hospital without passing the guardpost inside the door. The latrine at the rear, she said, had a very large window too warped to close tight. Since no visiting was permitted in the hospital, relatives of patients often took this way of getting inside.
In the dense fog it was easy to get to the window unseen. I hoisted myself through it, then clapped my hand to my nose against the stinging odor. A row of lidless, doorless toilets stretched along one wall in the pool of their overflow. I dashed for the door, then stopped, my flesh crawling. Against this opposite wall a dozen naked corpses lay side by side on their backs. Some of the eyes were open and seemed to stare unblinkingly at the ceiling.
I was standing there, lead-footed with horror, when two men pushed through the door carrying a sheet-wrapped bundle between them. They did not even glance at me and I realized they took me for a patient. I ducked round them into the hall and stood a moment, stomach knotting with the sight I had seen. After a while I started aimlessly off to the left.
The hospital was a maze of halls and doors. Already I was not sure of the way back to the latrine. What if the potato crew left before I got back? And then a corridor looked familiar. I hurried, almost running from door to door. At last, the ward where I had left Betsie! No hospital personnel was in sight: I walked eagerly down the aisles of cots looking from face to face.
“Corrie!”
Betsie was sitting up in a cot near the window. She looked stronger, eyes bright, a touch of color in her sunken cheeks. No nurse or doctor had seen her yet, she said, but the chance to lie still and stay indoors had already made a difference.
Three days afterward, Betsie returned to Barracks 28. She still had received no examination or medicine of any kind and her forehead felt feverish to my touch. But the joy of having her back outweighed my anxiety.
Best of all, as a result of her hospitalization, she was given a permanent assignment to the “knitting brigade,” the women we had seen the very first day seated about the tables in the center room. This work was reserved for the weakest prisoners, and now overflowed into the dormitories as well.
Those working in the sleeping rooms received far less supervision than those at the tables, and Betsie found herself with most of the day in which to minister to those around her. She was a lightning knitter who completed her quota of socks long before noon. She kept our Bible with her and spent hours each day reading aloud from it, moving from platform to platform.
One evening I got back to the barracks late from a wood-âgathering foray outside the walls. A light snow lay on the ground and it was hard to find the sticks and twigs with which a small stove was kept going in each room. Betsie was waiting for me, as always, so that we could wait through the food line together. Her eyes were twinkling.
“You're looking extraordinarily pleased with yourself,” I told her.
“You know we've never understood why we had so much freedom in the big room,” she said. “WellâI've found out.”
That afternoon, she said, there'd been confusion in her knitting group about sock sizes and they'd asked the supervisor to come and settle it.
“But she wouldn't. She wouldn't step through the door and neither would the guards. And you know why?”
Betsie could not keep the triumph from her voice: “Because of the fleas! That's what she said, âThat place is crawling with fleas!'”
My mind rushed back to our first hour in this place. I remembered Betsie's bowed head, remembered her thanks to God for creatures I could see no use for.
T
HOUGH BETSIE
was now spared heavy outdoor labor, she still had to stand the twice-daily roll call. As December temperatures fell, the roll calls became true endurance tests and many did not survive. One dark morning when ice was forming a halo around each street lamp, a feeble-minded girl two rows ahead of us suddenly soiled herself. A guard rushed at her, swinging her thick leather crop while the girl shrieked in pain and terror. It was always more terrible when one of these innocent ones was beaten. Still the
Aufseherin
continued to whip her. It was the guard we had nicknamed “The Snake” because of the shiny dress she wore. I could see it now beneath her long wool cape, glittering in the light of the lamp as she raised her arm. I was grateful when the screaming girl at last lay still on the cinder street.
“Betsie,” I whispered when The Snake was far enough away, “what can we do for these people? Afterward I mean. Can't we make a home for them and care for them and love them?”
“Corrie, I pray every day that we will be allowed to do this! To show them that love is greater!”
And it wasn't until I was gathering twigs later in the morning that I realized that I had been thinking of the feeble-minded, and Betsie of their persecutors.
S
EVERAL DAYS LATER
my entire work crew was ordered to the hospital for medical inspection. I dropped my dress onto the pile just inside the door and joined the file of naked women. Ahead of us, to my surprise, a doctor was using a stethoscope with all the deliberateness of a real examination.
“What is this for?” I whispered to the woman ahead of me.
“Transport inspection,” she hissed back, not moving her head.
“Munitions work.”
Transport! But they couldn't! They mustn't send me away!
Dear
God, don't let them take me away from Betsie!
But to my terror I passed one station after anotherâheart, lungs, scalp, throatâand still I was in the line. Many were pulled out along the way, but those who remained looked hardly stronger. Swollen stomachs, hollow chests, spindly legs: how desperate for manpower Germany must be!
I halted before a woman in a soiled white coat. She turned me around to face a chart on the wall, her hand cold on my bare shoulder. “Read the lowest line you can.”
“IâI can't seem to read any of them.”
Lord forgive me!
“Just the top letter. That big
E
.” The top letter was an
F
.
The woman seemed to see me for the first time. “You can see better than that! Do you want to be rejected?”
At Ravensbruck, munitions transport was considered a privilege; food and living conditions in the factories were said to be far better than here in the camp.
“Oh yes, Doctor! My sister's here at Ravensbruck! She's not well! I can't leave her!”
The doctor sat down at her table and scrawled something on a piece of paper. “Come back tomorrow to be fitted for glasses.”
Catching up to the line, I unfolded the small blue slip of paper. Prisoner 66730 was instructed to report for an optical fitting at 6:30 the following morning. Six-thirty was the time the transport convoys were loaded.
And so as the huge vans rumbled down the
Lagerstrasse
the next day, I was standing in a corridor of the hospital waiting my turn at the eye clinic. The young man in charge was perhaps a qualified eye doctor, but his entire equipment consisted of a box of framed glasses, from gold-rimmed bifocals to a plastic-framed child's pair. I found none that fitted and at last was ordered back to my work detail.
But, of course, I had no work assignment, having been marked down for transport. I walked back uncertainly toward Barracks 28. I stepped into the center room. The supervisor looked up over the heads of the knitting crew.
“Number?” she said.
I gave it and she wrote it in a black-covered book. “Pick up your yarn and a pattern sheet,” she went on. “You'll have to find a place on one of the beds, there's no room here.” And she turned back to the pile of finished socks on the table.
I stood blinking in the center of the room. Then grabbing a skein of the dark gray wool, I dashed through the dormitory door. And thus began the closest, most joyous weeks of all the time in Ravensbruck. Side by side, in the sanctuary of God's fleas, Betsie and I ministered the Word of God to all in the room. We sat by deathbeds that became doorways of heaven. We watched women who had lost everything grow rich in hope. The knitters of Barracks 28 became the praying heart of the vast diseased body that was Ravensbruck, interceding for all in the campâguards, under Betsie's prodding, as well as prisoners. We prayed beyond the concrete walls for the healing of Germany, of Europe, of the worldâas Mama had once done from the prison of a crippled body.
And as we prayed, God spoke to us about the world after the war. It was extraordinary; in this place where whistles and loudspeakers took the place of decisions, God asked us what we were going to do in the years ahead.
Betsie was always very clear about the answer for her and me. We were to have a house, a large oneâmuch larger than the Bejeâto which people who had been damaged by concentration-camp life would come until they felt ready to live again in the normal world.