The Rabbit Girls(76)

Stella.

Her blonde hair was dark with dirt, twisted and knotted. In her skinny arms, she held something. I couldn’t see what it was. She was singing it a lullaby, the tune to ‘Silent Night’, but the childish lyrics unrecognisable.

Slowly she lifted her head as I watched her. She saw me and smiled. She held out her bundle, covered in a blanket, towards me. She looked elated, her eyes shone. Bright as buttons.

‘Dolly,’ she said.

It wasn’t a dolly.

It was a baby’s dead body.

Miriam folds the paper back into its creases and places it down on the table.

She remembers the eyelashes, so long and dark. The fingernails, a deep purple, but long, the tiny mop of dark hair. The weight of him heavy, but not enough. Not enough to breathe his first breath, or for her to see his mouth open. Or to see his eyes.

It takes a long time for the words to make sense in the next letter. Her mind flits and flutters back to that night, then draws her back just as fast.

Henryk,

I want to write about Wanda, but I don’t know how. After I found Stella with the dead baby, Wanda became lost. Hani helped Stella, she led her by the hand and they dug a small hole to lay the baby to rest.

Wanda started muttering, she mumbled, she lost her bowl. She did not talk to us anymore. She went to Block 22 each day and she cared for the babies.

Wanda smuggled out babies, almost dead babies. Shallow breathing, glassy eyes, floppy, skull fusions visible through paper-thin skin. She tried to mash bread in her mouth and mix it with water to give to them. This did not work. Every morning we had another dead baby to bury.

Eugenia and Wanda had an enormous row. We tried to stop it, the women in the block tried to stop it, the Blockova failed to stop them. The guard hit them both with the butt of a rifle. They were both dazed, but even that didn’t stop them.

Wanda kept bringing the babies home. She placed them on her naked chest and covered them with her clothes. She explained to us that the warmth from her heart would help them. It was no good. By morning they were gone.

Eugenia gave Wanda an ultimatum, stop or she would tell the Kommandant. ‘The mothers of the babies have a right to see them for the last time, to say goodbye,’ Eugenia said. ‘By stealing them you are denying them this right.’

Wanda stopped bringing the babies home.

Wanda stopped returning to the block at all.

Wanda was lost.

I tried to speak with her, to help her see sense.

The guards designed Block 22 as a death block for the newborns. The conditions enforced by them would kill the babies. Wanda now knew this, as Eugenia had all along. No access to their mothers, only feeding from famished women twice a day, cold and alone at night.

Wanda spoke of rats and vermin on the babies when they opened the block in the morning. The newborns freezing without blankets or clothes. Dead in their beds. Ten in a row like sardines. Wanda and another prisoner would go through each one of them in the morning, looking for life.

Half of them died, but by noon more babies had arrived, pink and chubby, fresh from their mothers’ wombs.

The mothers leaving their newborns in a postpartum fog. A miracle to survive the birth and deliver a healthy child, yet immediate separation caused despair as nothing I have ever heard.

This separation was as good as death for the infants. Yet Wanda continued to go, to hold the babies. Hani is the only one she lets near her. They walk together.

The next letter rolls up and Miriam struggles to keep it flat.

I had a dream that all was lost. I was strapped to a bed, the baby pulled from me. Dead or alive I do not know, just gone. Whisked away. Never to see its face. Never to see your face.

Wanda died yesterday.

She threw herself into the electric fence. We found her there in the morning. The guards were taking pot shots at her back. Her lifeless body hanging by the threads of her uniform.

We couldn’t retrieve her for fear of electrocution ourselves. At evening roll call she was still there. We shielded Stella’s eyes and walked on. But this morning she was gone. Eugenia is silent, Bunny is silent. Hani and I sit in silence. Stella cries into Bunny and will not eat.

What will become of us?

We sang for Wanda. That is all we can do.

All her family lost before her, all the memories she has of them, dead. And now she has gone and taken her memories with her. With Wanda’s death comes the end of any legacy her family had. Wiped clean away.

A chosen death here is an all too painful reminder of where we are all heading.





31





MIRIAM


She writes out the German letters long into the next day and collects them beside the French ones. Knowing she can read them to her father, so he can know. Really know what happened to Frieda.

When she arrives, the hospice is quiet and calm, her father pale.

‘He had a visitor today,’ Sue comes up behind her.

‘Who?’

‘Your husband.’

‘What?’ Miriam is shocked and she leans back against the wall as Sue speaks.

‘Yes, your father was not very happy, he had a partial seizure. His left side, arm and leg, shook for a few minutes. We got in quite quickly with the midazolam and it’s wearing off now. He’s okay, but I suggested to your husband . . . Axel, was it?’

Miriam nods.

‘I suggested he not come back unless you are here too.’