The Rabbit Girls(93)

The showers had smoked twice that day so the Kommandant was all puffed out, proud as a peacock. Standing too close, I could smell his half-smoked cigarette and the heat stung my frozen nose. He moved in to me. He was so close I heard the leather of his uniform strain as he bent over, lowering himself to my eyeline. Then he turned to Hani.

‘Zigeunerin,’ was all he said. ‘Gypsy.’ A fact, but poison from his lips.

I held rigid as the cigarette sighed, extinguished into the pallid coolness of her forehead. The pockmarks of burns grew like acne. He flicked the butt in her face and with a wave of his hand we were dismissed and rushed back into the blocks, dogs at our heels, insults in our ears. I grieved the heat of the cigarette as the stench of life returned. I reached out for Hani’s hand as we fumbled our way, sliding around and against each other. She snatched it back and moved forward with the crowd.

I remember stopping at pressure all the way across my stomach. My bump grew like rising dough and hardened beneath my hands. My breath caught.

It was time.

I found my way to the bunk, but got in at the bottom. Lying down with some caution, as a pain grew from my lower abdomen, all the way up to my chest, and ebbed away.

Despite exhausted limbs, empty stomach and a battered soul, I was not able to rest.

The camp slept and peace replaced hate, the world righted itself a bit. Pressing my fingers at the upper right side where I normally could find a foot, I waited, pressure of feet against my fingers, I smiled and did it again. There was no alarm, baby was fine.

Pressure grew and my stomach hardened beneath my hands.

The rats started to retire, bored of eating dead bodies by day, they looked to chew on the living at night. As my stomach softened I rolled on my side and watched them. Another tightening. My belly held life and love. Every day it reminded me what love can do.

The scrat of rats were on the hunt, their long claws clacking, sharp from plying flesh off bone. Hani launched herself in front of me from the bunk above. Placing her freezing arm around me she sighed into the warmth of my body. Taking heat but not giving any in return.

I pulled her arm closer and nestled her slight figure into my chest, careful to move my bump away, as usual. There were lots of big bellies in Auschwitz, from malnutrition, no one knew I was pregnant.

‘I am so . . . so . . . humiliated, I hate this.’ Hani said. I knew where this was going, the same monologue in its varying forms. ‘These people are evil . . . Why nobody is doing anything to stop this? We cannot be vanished from the face of earth. Never am I going to leave. I’d rather they got it over now, liquefied me now, than torture me as they do.’ Nothing changed, the test of time was how many burns Hani could accumulate before her suffering ended.

I squeezed her arm, rubbing the chill out of her skin. The baby gave an almighty kick as a large wave hit and a small cry escaped my lips. Hani placed her hand to my stomach and as powerful as an electric shock pushed my arm away so hard I almost toppled over the side of the cot.

‘What is this?’ Pure terror distorted her voice. ‘You are pregnant?’ Another wave so strong took over my body and even if I had wanted to, I could not reply. I focused on my breathing, like Matka had said to the young girl.

‘What is happening? How?’ I could feel her eyes looking at me. I was pleased the searchlights were moving over another block. The emotion in her voice was enough, I did not need to see it too.

‘A child? Here?’ The fear was in her voice. I struggled with a lump in my throat.

‘What you are going to do?’ She touched my face to bring me back to reality. The wayward thought of the barrel and Sister Klara drowning my little angel brought a whole different kind of shiver through my body.

I placed my lips to the top of Hani’s head as she processed all the new information, knowing this would hurt her, but feeling so much lighter that she finally knew.

Hani placed a hand on my stomach and the ripping, stinging, tearing she must have been going through repelled her body from mine. A hand touching an open stove, feeling the flames lick skin, but holding it there anyway. Finally, I felt her relax as she felt my body perform something unique, muscles flexing and relaxing without any conscious effort.

I found myself singing to Hani in a whisper, as I breathed to my baby’s rhythm.

Hani cried, I cried. It felt like the end, and it really was.

That night we swayed, Hani by my side, breathing and moving in the small spaces between bunks, her hands in contact with mine. The searchlights, our rising sun, and a crack of a bullet fired at a rat, a woman, a shadow.

The day was tucked up in a blanket of dark. A deep guttural noise escaped my lips, causing panic: noise was exposure.

‘Shall I get Matka?’ Hani asked, bending down to dry my face with my shirt as I moved on to all fours. A straw mattress on the ground. A huge rise in panic as I realised this journey would soon be over. My child would be born and everything would change. I grabbed her hand and forced her to look at me.

‘No, Hani. My baby cannot be taken from me.’

Hani said, so gently, ‘But Frieda – if not then is stillborn.’ The word was there to shock me.

No one can understand how a baby so helpless can cling to life so hard, submerged in water. Gurgled and burbled until drowned, causing everyone who can hear it to rip apart, the depths of a wound that will never, ever heal.

I grabbed Hani’s arm, she looked away. ‘I will die before that happens, you look at me and see.’ I pulled her even closer. ‘It. Will. Never. Happen.’ The words between contractions, feral.