Necessary Lies(79)
And tomorrow the whole world
Some of the wounded men lay with their eyes closed, breathing hard. Some trailed us with their eyes as we walked through the ward. They begged us for anaesthetics.”
Johann Erben. Frau Strauss can still remember his name. Their first serious case. It was obvious by then that there were not enough nurses and even the Red Cross volunteers were allowed to do more than they should have. Two legs crushed, pieces of bones still popping out of his massacred flesh. Tibia and fibula, they had learned the names of the bones only the day before. The matron cast a suspicious glance at their white hands, their breasts that would not flatten under the apron. She, Ulrike, felt faint, but K?the took a pair of tweezers and began taking the shreds of bone out, piece by piece. The matron thought K?the, too, would become queasy, that she would not stand it. But K?the could concentrate on the hard pieces of bones. Her hands deftly picked up the shreds, fast, efficient. When she had finished, the matron didn’t say anything, but gave her a long look, and from that time on she would put K?the on duty with the badly wounded.
“Not me,” Frau Strauss says. “I was still emptying bedpans.”
So many of the soldiers didn’t even know they were dying. They just stared at the ceiling, or at the window. Those who knew it was the end cried for their mothers, girlfriends. They cried for their wives, for God. “We gave them champagne and special food if they requested it — and if we had any.”
“Then,” Frau Strauss says. “The hospital was bombed. It was still burning when I arrived in the morning, flames shooting out of the windows. I could smell gas everywhere and the air was filled with heavy black smoke. You could hang an axe in this air. “But I work there,” I said, stupidly, and the Kommando guard shrugged his shoulders. “Not any more.”
“We left Breslau together. K?the, Greta — her nanny — and Willi. For Hauptbahnhof. I just closed the door of my house, where I thought I would live with Johann, and put the key under the mat. We all had sturdy rucksacks with wide straps. Willi had one, too. With sweaters and clean underwear. Food, as much as we could carry. K?the told me to bake cakes with all the flour and eggs I still had. They came out hard, but good to chew on the way. We sewed money and jewellery into the linings of our clothes. Anything that was small and could be sold or exchanged for food and shelter. Willi was so awkward then, in his coat and sweaters. Poor thing. He kept saying he was too hot.
“The Hauptbahnhof was so crowded we couldn’t even get to the platform. There were people everywhere, spilling into the hall, the side tunnels. People said there would be no more trains. I remember a woman with a baby, screaming, ‘Where can we go?’ The guard told her to go to Opperau-Kanth. ‘Trains are waiting there,’ he said. ‘There will be enough space for everybody.’ He kept saying we should all go there. That it was safer for the trains. ‘Mothers don’t forget to take Spiritus cookers to boil the milk for your children,’ that’s what we heard from the loudspeakers.
“We didn’t go to Kanth. A good thing we didn’t. Later, I heard it called ‘Kanth Death March.’ Eighteen thousand women and children, they said, froze to death. Minus twenty Celsius and icy, bone freezing wind. Babies wrapped up in pillows and blankets. Mothers were afraid to look, afraid to check if the children were still alive. And in the end there were no trains.
“I don’t know what happened to Greta. She was separated from us right at the start, swallowed by a wave of refugees. K?the never found her. She wrote to Red Cross, to refugee camps. Nothing, not a word. Most of the women and children from Breslau went to Dresden we were told. That’s where they died, in the bombings. Mitzi went there, too, K?the found out, from her father’s old driver. She just disappeared in the ruins. Burnt to cinders.”
Frau Strauss tells Anna of a succession of cold school gyms, peasant barns. Of cabbage soup so hot she could hardly swallow it. A woman let them sleep in her bed. “It’s still warm,” she said. “Go fast.” Of Willi’s dirty face streaked with tears. Ditches everywhere were filled with belongings, cast off, too heavy to carry. Books, china, cutlery, plates, Frau Strauss even saw a pair of brass candelabras. Ditches littered with clothes, bundles of clothes. K?the dug into these bundles like a fiend to find clean underwear for Willi.
“There were so many children. Children with frightened faces, running noses, hands clinging to the handles of sledges and prams. The young and the old always die first, nein? The bodies of the dead joined the cast off possessions, frozen until the spring would free them from ice.”
Frau Strauss is clearing her throat. She wants Anna to know about K?the. The way she really was then, in these horrible times. Fate itself willed it that Anna should know everything. “If I don’t tell you,” she says, “K?the will take her pain with her, to her grave. Let me tell you about revenge.”
“The cellars are dark and damp, and when you huddle in them time stands still. The bodies around you shake, like aspen leaves in the wind. You think of different things. Silly things. How you used to swipe sweet dough from the bowl with your finger in the kitchen. How a mouse hid in a cardboard box and the farmer hit it with a stick and then threw it by the tail into the compost heap. How you heard that the Russians steal watches and wedding rings, and how all will be fine for you don’t have any.
“The door of the cellar opens. You can see that the men who stand at the entrance are drunk and they smell of tobacco and vodka and something else, something sharp, acidic, but you don’t know what it is. They are Russian, they are Polish. They have bulls-eye lanterns and they cry loud, Davai suda! and Woman come!