The Rabbit Girls(34)

This is Ravensbrück.

Miriam looks up from the paper and shivers, not from cold. The voice from the letters is haunting and she cannot help but wonder if this voice is coming from someone long dead.

She takes the coffee table from the living room into her father’s room, bashing her knuckles on the door frame. She sets the letters down in order as the words repeat themselves unbidden and Miriam can hear the internal workings of this poor woman. She’s in Miriam’s head and there is nothing she can do about it.

‘She didn’t fight, there was no one for her to trust,’ she says to her father. ‘Should I have fought back?’

The question feels heavy, a black stone in her stomach. ‘No one would believe me even if I did.’ The truth stings her eyes.

She sees the image of the irate toddler in the pushchair and of herself pushing and pushing against something just as unyielding. Only not a pushchair, but a man, restraining her with arms and legs and worse. He held her with the force of what he could and would do to her if she broke free. And who would believe her if she spoke out? Who could she trust?

We cannot trust anyone.

‘He’s back,’ she says.

She picks up the next letter in sequence, it is in German, but so difficult to read, written around text in writing as light as dust, Miriam stops and starts, rereads sentences and tries to puzzle her way through it. And the thoughts that slice through the text drag her back to a reality she cannot bear to face.

Henryk,

The holding block was just a tent, its sides battered by wind and rain, blown open, its roof capsized and dripping water. We had no bowls, just two spoons. We placed our spoons under the drips and drank rainwater. Tiny spoons of rainwater. It took two long days to steal a bowl so we could eat.

Everyone stealing and hurting and vicious, all looking for space. Our currency. Once you have space you don’t give it up.

The soup is water, rarely vegetables or anything I can recognise. We get bread, which is like a pebble, and ‘coffee’ too. The soup and coffee are pretty much the same, although we are more accepting of there being bits in the soup than we are in the coffee. I mush the bread in my mouth then give it to Hani, her mouth is so sore and without teeth, she is still struggling to eat.

I’ve been here a month. Today is my birthday: twenty-one. And yet I fear there may not be a twenty-two.

The routine so familiar now I do not have to think, I pass through each day, my body moving to the beat of the camp. My mind and heart elsewhere. With you.

I am almost there, transitioning into one of them. A walking zombie. I do not eat without a guard telling me to, I do not move, I do not rest or sleep or talk without a guard telling me to. I have no mind of my own.

I miss you

Love, Frieda.

‘Frieda!’ Miriam reads it again and moves closer to her father, picking up his hand and wiping her other gently across his face. She looks at her father’s thick, white hair, liver spots that freckle his face, his broad nose, thin lips. She studies him, drinking in the last of him.

‘Dad, can you hear me?’ She takes a deep breath. ‘These letters are from Frieda.’

When he says nothing for a few minutes, she kisses the back of his hand ‘I’ll find out what happened to her for you, I promise,’ she says, and knowing this means reading the terrifying words makes her hands tremble, yet she continues. For him.





HENRYK

I left the apartment, I left Emilie there sobbing and raging at me and I went to Frieda. But every footstep judged me. I stopped on every corner. Should I go back? I turned, walked a few steps, then stopped again. For a wanted man, pacing the same street in a frenzy of indecision didn’t exactly make me inconspicuous.

Emilie was right. I was married to her. She was in danger because of me already. Yet she stayed. She knew about Frieda and yet she stayed. The guilt was bile, raw acid, and it burned in my throat. Who was I? What kind of man does that to a wife he adores?

And yet . . .

I loved Frieda. In ways that I had never experienced before, and it was because I loved her as much as I did that I knew I couldn’t do this to her too.

No more.

Emilie was right. Frieda would be okay without me, better in fact. Much, much better. That thought made me panic. And the panic made me run, drawing yet more attention to myself. My heartbeat pushed me further, the wind soared in my ears, breath ragged and pulsing in my chest.

I had to let Frieda go; she needed to be free from me. And then I would leave with Emilie. Try and do better for her, at least.

Waiting for Frieda to open the door, I was cold and slick with nerves. This was the right thing. It was the right thing and the only way . . .

Frieda opened the door, and the resolve to end things froze solid in my chest. And in that pause, Frieda greeted me with her lips on mine and then her hands, her fingers on my skin.

She pulled me into the apartment and shut the door. And although my heart held an unwanted tick, and the knot in the pit of my stomach made me feel sick, the decision I had made only moments before seemed a distant echo.

I left it all behind and melted into Frieda, willing to lose myself in her touch.

‘I missed you,’ she muttered, the rich cadence of her voice deepened. With her lips on mine, she pulled me on to the bed.





MIRIAM

In text that seems to be pressed harder into the page, Miriam reads: