Like my father, Alma also had a weakness for plants. “It’s the only good thing I got out of Ravensbrück: learning how to take care of them,” she once told me. Sitting in the Hauterive garden, she occasionally talked about her job in the gardening kommando. Even though, every once in a while, they would give them a harder task, like scattering sand beneath the new barrack huts, their work assignment was one of the most tolerable. It allowed them to move about the camp with relative freedom and even go outside to care for the gardens at the SS officers’ homes, where they could get a glimpse, with anger and envy, of snippets of the normal life they had been excluded from: a child on a swing, the sound of a piano, someone getting ready for a tennis match. . But Alma’s favorite spot of all was the garden that surrounded the crematorium, where she grew pansies and sage bushes, two of the plants that, despite the bad memories they evoked, also filled the parterres at Hauterive. She liked them so much that she had to include them. She especially liked the velvety touch of the sage leaves. And its taste, ever since she discovered that rubbing it on her gums relieved the inflammation from scurvy. “And, as if that weren’t enough, they’re perfectly harmless,” she told me once as she was watering them.“Unlike dogs.” She never got over her fear of the German shepherds that accompanied the guards, which she’d often seen attack defenseless prisoners. That was why at Hauterive we only had a cat.
According to Alma, the hardest thing about life at Ravensbrück wasn’t getting used to the cold or the hunger, or the exhaustion, or the turnip soup filled with lice, or the inevitable threat of dysentery and scarlet fever, or the incessant shouting from the SS and the shrill sinister shrieks of the crows. It was finding a way to face up to the arbitrary routine without going insane and without lowering your guard. “What was white one day was black the next. It all depended on absurd, contradictory rules. You never knew how to behave to keep from getting beaten,” she told me on more than one occasion. Exhausting. . I imagine it was exhausting. Somehow finding strength when there’s none to be found, the strength to keep from giving up, to maintain your dignity, to fight against the filth and the slovenliness, to not fall into the daydreaming trance that makes you lose your sense of reality. It was the same in the trench, but without the constant underlying danger of the disciplinary bunker or being sent to the gas chamber. Although there was Sergeant Forkel.
There is one or more Sergeant Forkel in every life. Alma’s was named Dorothea Binz or “The Binz” as the prisoners called her. From the photographs I’ve seen, she confirmed my father’s firm belief that appearances are deceiving, because it’s hard to associate the childlike face of The Binz in her early twenties with the merciless cruelty she wielded as the head guard. Accompanied by a dog and playing with a switch, she was able to turn the endless recounting of the prisoners into a macabre form of torture.“When she looked at you, you had the feeling you were worth less than the lumps of sugar she gave her dog as a reward for biting prisoners,” said Alma. She normally went after the weakest, most vulnerable women, but also the ones she didn’t like, for whatever reason. Because of their face or their bearing. Or an accent that wasn’t very German. It was impossible to predict what would set her off. In the last image Alma has of her, her face was blackened by soot. Shortly before joining one of the last evacuation marches out of Ravensbrück, she saw the commandant and The Binz hauling off bundles of papers and burning them in a big bonfire. Catching her like that, so close to defeat, running all around destroying incriminating documents, was somewhat of a mitigation of everything she’d had to go through.“In the end, that showed me she was as fragile as we were. Or more,” said Alma.
Sooner or later everything ends. But first, Alma had to suffer The Binz’s terrible temper. Some prisoners used their scant free time to secretly set up cultural activities, such as lectures, literature or history classes, and poetry recitals, to keep from being pummeled by the routine and to keep the despair and moral confusion at bay. Continuing the idea of the oral newspapers, in which a group of prisoners would read political messages, information about the camp, rumors, and jokes, Alma and some of her fellow prisoners created a pretend radio with news, sketches, and monologues. Actually it was very similar to the satirical and engaged spirit of the cabaret that had turned her into an outlaw. For the first “broadcast,” Alma wrote lyrics about The Binz and adapted it to the music of the Habanera from the opera Carmen. From what she told me, it was a huge hit.
But the day after the first “broadcast,” during the morning recount, The Binz stopped in front of Alma and, her gaze running straight through her, said nonchalantly, “I hear you like opera.” And a few hours later, while she was working in the garden by the crematorium, they asked her to show up at the bunker and, after waiting for a while in the basement hallway, they had her enter a room. In it were the commandant, the doctor, The Binz, and a prisoner with a rod in her hand. “Sing,” The Binz simply ordered. Alma said she didn’t understand. Then The Binz came over and struck her face with the switch. “Sing,” she repeated. Alma, in a trembling voice, intoned the Habanera from Carmen with the original lyrics, but The Binz interrupted her with another whiplash. “No, with your words,” she insisted. “I hear they’re hilarious.” Screwing up her courage, Alma sang her radio version. When she’d finished, The Binz shrugged and said she didn’t see the humor in it. Alma only had a vague image of what happened next, once she was tied to the rack, with her dress rolled up and her panties at her ankles. She remembered that, after the first blows, The Binz snatched the rod from the prisoner’s hands — she wasn’t hitting hard enough — and took her place. Alma counted out loud as she had been ordered to, but could only get to eleven. After that, everything blurred together. She had a vague notion that The Binz had continued to twenty-five, then someone had taken her pulse, and she had come to in the barrack’s bunk bed with her butt cheeks skinless and raw.
Alma never found out who had told on her. Nor did she know who was behind her arrest shortly after arriving in Prague to visit her dying father. They had only seen each other once since she’d left home at seventeen. That was at her mother’s burial. She had tried, but reconciling with him was impossible because he refused to listen to her.“It’s your fault your mother is dead. She couldn’t take all the bad shocks. .” he told her. That was all. Alma knew that it wasn’t true, because she and her mother had met up in secret, and she’d never blamed her for anything, but her father’s accusation hurt her more than she could have ever imagined. But when a family friend warned her that he didn’t have long to live, she didn’t think twice and headed to Prague. Deep down, she felt bad that she had never been able to overcome the rift between them. And, even though without her mother as the “lightning rod” it was more of an uphill climb, she didn’t want to miss that last opportunity.
When her father saw her enter the room, he turned his eyes to the wall. Alma sat by his side and took his hand. They remained like that for quite some time. Without speaking. Confronting the severity of their feelings. Until her father looked at her with tears in his eyes. “Was it really necessary?” he asked. Alma didn’t know what to say. The truth? A lie? In fact, she was no longer sure why she had gone there to see him. She didn’t say anything. Neither did her father. The next day, before facing up to him again, she brought some flowers to her mother’s grave. She spent half of the morning at the cemetery, delving into her emotions to find the appropriate answer. Or a way to forgive. If that was even possible, after all that had happened. When she went back to the house, two plainclothes officers were waiting for her on the street. They shoved her into a car and took her straight to the Petschek Palace, the Gestapo headquarters. On the way there, flummoxed, there was only one question in her mind: who? Over and over again. Who? Curiously, she never believed that her father would have been capable of betraying her. Alma said that it’s one thing to write someone off and quite another to push them into the wolf ’s jaws. I don’t know. After a few months in the Pankrác Prison, with occasional interrogations in the Petschek Palace, they took her to the station and jammed her into a train with a crowd of women. Without any explanation.