The Secret of the Blue Trunk (10 page)

I certainly didn’t want the girls to lecture me. I had my pride, after all. But something else drove me to keep what was happening secret. There was this strange small fire that had just flared up within me.

I asked myself lots of questions and had trouble falling asleep. What could he have found so interesting in me that he chose me to chat with? It wasn’t the first time a soldier tried to communicate with prisoners. In Besançon, when I distributed medicines at night with the nun from my congregation, I often encountered soldiers on guard duty who tried to talk to us. They, too, must have wanted to tell us that not all Germans were bastards, and they were only obeying orders.

Franz made me look for the first time at the other side of the picture. I had never wondered since my arrest if, among the soldiers we saw every day, there might be any who hated their situation. There were bound to be. Franz was probably not alone. I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and thought to myself there had to be some Germans who disagreed, as he did, with what was happening. The soldiers also had mothers and women who loved them, who feared for their lives and worried about them, like all women the world over. I came to the conclusion that there is a bit of humanity in people from every country.

When Franz told me he had been watching me for a while, I was thrown into confusion. It seemed hard to believe. Try as I might, I couldn’t recall a single instance of him observing me or his eyes meeting mine, even for a moment. I thought I would have remembered his bright blue eyes.

I was perfectly aware that a bond was forming, but why should I have felt guilty? It was just a friendly conversation, after all. For me, this contact was balm on the concentration camp’s ugliness and suffering. Gradually my mind filled with pleasant memories that helped me chase away the atrocities I had seen since I came to the camp. I was baffled by how quickly extreme cruelty could give way to hope.

All this soul-searching prevented me from falling asleep, although the day’s work had been exhausting. I actually no longer felt tired.

That evening, Simone, Iréna, and I stayed awake for a good part of the night. Mathilde hadn’t joined us on the mattress yet. It was the second time this happened. The first time, she merely told us not to worry, everything was fine. But there was such coldness in her explanation that we didn’t dare ask questions. Perhaps she would tell us the reason for her absence later.

I finally stopped worrying about Mathilde and started to endlessly go over the past day in my mind. The night suddenly seemed too long to me and I was anxious for dawn to come so I could see Franz again.

I
hadn’t seen Franz for two days now and I was worried. Had he been seen talking to me? Had something serious happened to him? While I worked, I constantly watched the entrance stairway in hopes of seeing him appear. I couldn’t make sense of the way I felt about someone I had only met twice and, what’s more, who was in the enemy camp. It was totally absurd. He was a German soldier whom I didn’t know and couldn’t trust. And yet I felt a great void, as though I had just lost a new friend, someone I would have wanted to know everything about and converse with as long as possible.

What had caused me to become so wrapped up in him? These feelings also seemed complicated to me because there was something other than mere friendship in what I felt for him. I knew nothing about the attraction between a man and a woman. Would I have had the same feelings for another man who would have paid as much attention to me as Franz? In any event, it wasn’t really the right time to experience something like this.

I tried to dismiss Franz from my thoughts. I had great difficulty concentrating on my work. Yet I needed to. I couldn’t afford a single mistake. A week or two before, a bullet had exploded in the face of a girl who was performing the same task because she hadn’t fastened it properly to the machine-gun belt. It was awful. She was completely disfigured. A few girls tried to help her, but we only had dirty cloths. She was screaming and we were powerless to do anything for her. The soldiers took her to the hospital and we never saw that girl again.

Some women told us the infection had spread quickly. The girl was unconscious. The soldiers then transported her to some other location to kill her. For a long time I remembered that girl with the disfigured face, and I was always afraid of suffering the same fate.

I worked half-heartedly; I was absorbed in my inner struggle, telling myself over and over that I shouldn’t be affected by Franz. To convince myself, I impressed upon my mind that I couldn’t become attached to someone I would never see again. Before I knew him, I was only just beginning to get used to the idea that I would be imprisoned for a long time and would need a great deal of courage and, above all, energy to keep my hatred strong. I didn’t want to relent before the enemy, especially as the other soldiers were totally unlike him.

I wanted to hold on to my fighting spirit so that one day I would be able to spit in their faces and shout, “You won’t get me. I am going to come out of this place alive!”

I wondered if Franz was an exception to this whole abomination, the proof that a human being can be fundamentally good. If so, that would be a ray of hope for me, and I needed it to endure the confinement. If by chance I never saw him again, I would still at the very least have my memory of him, while waiting for the day when I would be free.

I absolutely didn’t want my friends to notice my melancholy mood, so I was very careful when I joined them at bedtime. I nonetheless spent part of the night probing my feelings for Franz.

One evening an unusual event kept me awake. Krystina, a Polish woman, occupied the mattress next to ours. She had been arrested for some obscure reason, like all the other girls at the camp, and arrived here at the same time as her husband. He had been taken to the men’s section.

Seven months pregnant, Krystina was doubled up with pain, but it was too early to give birth to the baby. For Simone, who often assisted her mother, a midwife, it was almost normal that labour had already started because of the harsh living conditions at the camp. She had also lost a lot of weight. For the past two months or so, we had taken turns at doing her work so she could rest as much as possible. In spite of our efforts there were complications. She was racked by strong contractions. One after the other, we tried to warm her up and comfort her. We didn’t want to send her to the infirmary too soon, since she would be alone there. Simone wrapped Krystina in an old woollen jacket she had stolen from the kitchens.

We kept Krystina with us as long as we could. Then, in the middle of the night, we helped her along to the infirmary. Simone stayed with her until she gave birth a few minutes later to a beautiful little girl, called Inga, in honour of her best Polish friend.

We were worn out. It was only about half an hour before wake-up time and I felt sad, dejected. So I began my day in an utterly exhausted state. I walked to the spot where I worked, hanging my head listlessly. Franz’s absence for the past few days made me feel even worse.

I avoided glancing around for fear of being disappointed once more, and concentrated on my machine. Then, at a certain point, unexpectedly, my eyes met Franz’s. My tiredness vanished instantly. I had been so afraid I would never see him again that I decided that day to speak to him. Franz seemed happy to see me, too. He told me he had been asked to translate some texts and had worked in the headquarters’ offices for two days.

Before making up my mind to talk to him, I performed one last examination of conscience, like any good nun. Well, for what remained of the nun in me. Was my intuition right? Was this a good man? Since he first spoke to me, I had never felt he was lying. Even though I hadn’t associated with many human beings in my young convent life, I thought I had a talent for sensing if someone was good or bad. The nuns had often congratulated me on my instinct, in fact.

I knew all about the risk I ran, but could the penalty be any more atrocious than what I had been going through since I arrived at this camp? I realized that my bedmates would disagree with what I was about to do. In their opinion, the Germans were hypocrites and we shouldn’t put our trust in them. I was stubborn, though, which often drove me to do the opposite of what was expected of me. I wanted to find out more about Franz’s life. I wanted him to tell me about his country, his ambitions and his plans. I also needed to believe in the goodness of the world. “Come what may,” I said to myself.

So I asked him my first question, the one that had preyed on my mind from the start: “Why me?”

He stood gaping at me for a few seconds and then whispered, “What did you say?”

“Why did you choose me to chat with? There are so many people here you could have talked to. You told me, the first time, that you had been observing me for a few days. What makes me so different from the others?”

He hesitated for a few more seconds before answering. I wondered if he really trusted me, because I, too, could very well have denounced him to earn a few favours from the senior officers.

He gently explained that he had noticed right away how I looked the soldiers in the eye when they gave me an order. My candid gaze had impressed him greatly. He mentioned my posture, always straight, never that of a victim, and added that I radiated a strength that, to him, bordered on provocation.

He also said he found me interesting and wanted me to have a good opinion of him. He stressed he wasn’t a torturer nor a heartless person, that he was human, with weaknesses and feelings.

“I’m not the least bit interested in this conflict,” he admitted. “Before it began, my only wish was to be a journalist and travel the world. Since the war broke out, I have thanked God every day for not being forced to carry out cruel orders. I managed to get out of it by doing a lot of translation and administrative work. I know, though, that very soon I’ll be sent to the front because we have lost far more soldiers than expected.”

He suddenly fell silent and resumed his patrol to make sure no one had seen or heard him speaking to me. I needed a few moments to recover from what he just said about me. I wasn’t expecting so much interest and so many compliments from someone I was supposed to hate with a vengeance. Was he being honest? I sensed he was sincere and meant what he said.

At the same time, I wondered why I felt so excited whenever I saw him and he spoke to me, why my heart began to beat faster. Although I was choked with emotion and wanted to cry, I had to control myself so as not to attract attention. The comparison might seem far-fetched, but I felt like a child in an orphanage that had just been chosen and instantly fell in love with its new parents. Who could tell me what was happening within me? I couldn’t confide in anyone and that added to my confusion.

I was about to ask him another question when we heard quick footsteps on the large staircase. Two soldiers came to get a woman. We never saw her again, of course. She was French. No doubt she was a member of the Resistance and they wanted to make her talk. That happened often. Later, in the evening, Mathilde would confirm my fears. That woman was the wife of a very active Resistance fighter and she had often mentioned her husband’s exploits to her bedmates.

When the midday siren sounded, Franz’s shift ended. We stole glances at each other that seemed to say, “What a pity. See you soon perhaps!”

The rest of the day flew by. I floated through it as though on a cloud. This new friendship was changing me. I observed the women around me, thin, without hair, gaunt faces, and realized I must look just like them. I tried to understand why Franz took an interest in me while I had never been as ugly in all my life. Did he have something at the back of his mind, something he meant to ask me? What did I have to offer him?

In the end I convinced myself that our conversations were purely of a friendly nature, since, for my part, I didn’t have a single attribute resembling those of a woman at that time. But can friendship cause so much inner turmoil? I felt like talking it over with Simone and having her explain what was happening inside me, except I was afraid of her anger. It was still too early to share my secret, or too late. My mind was in a muddle.

In the evening, when I returned to our mattress, I noticed that Iréna was more feverish than the day before. The previous night, she had snuggled up closer against my back than usual because she was shivering. Her temperature hadn’t dropped; I had no idea how she had even managed to finish her day’s work. Half an hour after the evening ration, which she hadn’t been able to get down, her temperature was so high she became delirious. Simone was beside herself. She asked me what we should do, but I didn’t know.

Although Mathilde hadn’t come back from her shift yet, we decided to take Iréna to the infirmary even though we had sworn to each other we would never take a decision without the consent of all four of us. We really had no choice because we didn’t know where Mathilde was.

I went to get the soldier on guard duty and motioned him to follow me. He looked at Iréna, without touching her of course, and came back with two soldiers in charge of the infirmary. Simone and I helped them to put her on the stretcher and they carried her away. When we lifted her up, we noticed that she was very thin and fragile. We both wondered if she was going to pull through. We cried a lot. I prayed as hard as I could, while realizing at the same time that I had been praying less and less.

When Mathilde returned, we told her what had happened. She got angry. She reminded us we did take an oath. She had good reason to believe that Iréna would never come back to us, especially if at the infirmary they discovered the tattoo on her arm. We tried to reassure her. With such a fever, we told her, no one would dare touch her because they would be afraid she might be infectious.

Mathilde went on criticizing us for our decision. She could have done something, she said. Yet Simone and I had tried everything to help our friend and didn’t see what more we could have done. We asked Mathilde how she would have acted in our place and she snapped back that she would have been able to find medication. To prove her point, she pulled out a small package wrapped in a towel, which she had hidden under her dress, and threw it on the mattress. The package contained a sausage to be shared at bedtime. Simone hurriedly covered it up so no one would see it and ordered Mathilde to calm down.

“I don’t wish to know where you got that meat,” she told her. “I’ll wait until you are ready to explain where you have been when you come back late. For now, you have no right to blame us for making a decision without you. You weren’t here and we were worried. I don’t want Armande and me to be punished because you are shouting at the top of your voice. Will you change your tone, please?”