The Rabbit Girls(25)

My heart is breaking – I do not know if you are being treated better, but I fear for the worst. You do not deserve this. I do not know if you are alive, if you are suffering. The thought of you suffering makes my skin crawl worse than the lice that torment me.

Maybe you didn’t get on the train, maybe it wasn’t you I saw, maybe you escaped and are with Emilie and happy together. Maybe you got over the border, maybe you are . . .

The sentence is left unfinished.

Emilie. The letter mentions Mum. Miriam’s heart sprints and soars. She couldn’t have been there. Escaped. Happy together . . . The world feels like it is spinning on an axis, about to career off on its own. But Dad has a tattoo. He couldn’t have escaped. She reads on. The words now written in pen, faded grey.

This thought of you together fills me with hope, yet it tears me apart that you do not think of me, or want me. That I am here and you are happy. I am torturing myself with thoughts while the camp is torturing my body, my spirit.

I knew going home was a bad idea. I ran to you that day. I knew to help you and Emilie escape you’d need something to barter with. I feared for the future. As soon as you had the ring and the diamonds I had taken from my mother, you and Emilie would be free to leave.

Once you left I would not see you, you would not need me. You would be gone, safe, but not with me. I would be left behind and as every footstep moved me to you, fearing the stomp of marching boots at my back, I knew whatever happened we would be apart.

I do not know if I stalled, I like to think I didn’t, but maybe I did. Stayed at my mother’s, imprisoned by glass whereas now I am imprisoned by a brick wall, electric fences and barbed wire.

I wonder if we would have been, had there not been a war.

Did the war create us or ruin us?

When you didn’t open on my knock, I feared I was too late, I had led the wolves to your door. But Emilie answered. She opened the door and told me to leave. I was so jealous, fuelled by sadness and loss, at her beauty, her simplicity and more than anything, how she had you first. I barged my shoulder into the door and knocked her into the room.

We all stood there breathing fast and shallow. It’s amazing how quiet fury can be.

I placed the diamonds in Emilie’s hand. I tried to convey so much to her, but she looked at me as if I was going to rob her.

‘Leave.’ That was all I could say, so out of breath, so emblazoned with emotion it was all I had. I fear she took this the wrong way. But she saw me looking at you and took the diamonds and vanished. She knew what this meant. I am sure she was as relieved as I was devastated.

Then the knock came at the door.

This isn’t Mum’s, and the relief is buoyant in Miriam. Maybe Mum did escape? But the fact these letters and the dress itself exist means that someone else loved Dad when he was with Mum, and somehow Mum had the dress. The headiness makes her legs shake.

What has she found? And did Mum know?

Her eye is drawn to the mantelpiece and the large, silver-framed photograph of her parents on their wedding day standing outside the Church of the Redeemer, arm in arm, looking happy. The church must be derelict now, having stood in the death strip between East and West. When she had planned her wedding, she had wanted it there, the same church as her parents. But with a river on one side and the death strip the other, it was inaccessible. She chose a smaller church nearer the outskirts of town instead.

With pillars and arched doors, the Church of the Redeemer was beautiful and sat on the riverbank like a stranded ship.

Was anything she knew true?

She takes the framed photograph and piles of letters back to his room. His breathing is ragged and his hands and arms tremor slightly.

‘Don’t leave me, Dad. I’ve found letters. They are to you, but . . .’ With no other information than that to tell him she hastily picks up another letter, written on a triangle slip of yellowing paper ripped from a larger pad.

Henryk, I am in Ravensbrück –

‘Ravensbrück,’ she says aloud. She says it a few times, seeing if he has any reaction at all. She then looks back at the paper and continues.

The salt in the air is from the lake, not the sea as I had supposed. I am sure I lived close by in Fürstenburg during the holidays when I was a child. Louisa’s grave is up on the hill overlooking it. I feel better in some way that I have found my bearings – I do know where I am, but there is no escape from here. I cannot shake the feeling that I am so far away from everything. The women are cold and hard. They close off, shut down to survive. I know this, yet I cannot do the same; if I lose heart then I lose everything.

I have a red triangle on my dress, it depicts ‘Political Prisoner’. I even have a red cross striped in paint on the back of the old coat they have allocated me. None of the clothes fit. I have no idea why I could not have kept my clothes.

I feel like a walking target. They are free to kill without cause or warning.

A young woman, older than me yet not old, was attacked by the Blockova’s dog so badly, the Blockova shot her. In the head, just like that. The woman did nothing I did not do.

I cannot understand it.

I do not even know her name, nobody will.

‘The brutality,’ she says to her father’s sleeping form and reads the last two lines again. ‘Who are these from?’

She places the letters together with the four she has been able to read. She paces the room, comes back to them time and time again, as though the movement of her body will help her mind focus. ‘This is by a woman . . . is this Frieda?’ Now instead of relief, she cannot understand who and why and how and the thoughts rattle around, more confused and with more questions than before.