Throughout the night, troop trains and trains carrying war material roared east. And in the opposite direction came long trains carrying wounded men, bits of booty and damaged heavy weapons. They fought their way through snow, blizzards and artillery fire. The rails were bending. Ruby sparks swished through the darkness and the snow.
On Tuesday a Mercedes with its escort arrived with a new girl from Festung Breslau.
The girl addressed the guard at the gate in passable German.
“My name is Debilia. I fuck like a tigress.”
The guard liked her guttural “r”. She had been in an institution from the age of eleven to fourteen and believed herself to be a cat. After her discharge, no school or training college would accept her. When the first soldier entered the cubicle she had inherited from Tight-Lips, she sat on his lap, spat, miaowed and purred, and then licked his nose. At dinner she said that she liked everything and then proceeded loudly to list all the things she didn’t eat. At roll-call she got her first three strokes with a cane.
“In China,” the Oberführer said, “the mandarins used to dish out 30 strokes and nobody thought it out of place.”
Debilia squealed, so he ordered more strokes. After five he ordered that she be given 25. At the eighth fall of the cane she stopped yelling. After the twenty-first they carried her away. The Oberführer ordered the other prostitutes to sing. He was going to demand a replacement for her from the Wehrkreis, he said. It would be no bad thing if they started to send German girls.
“It’s up to you to make sure the word ‘woman’ has no bad flavour. Remember, there are two kinds of girl. The first kind were born into the right bed, the second climbed into it. Don’t think that what’s bad for the Germans is good for you,” Madam Kulikowa told them later.
They should not behave like a bad innkeeper who drove her guests away instead of welcoming them. Or who simply waited for a guest to put his money on the table and leave. They had something to display — youth, hair, breasts, a feast for the troops. They saw the men at their most vulnerable moment. A girl was like a doctor in some respects. She had to discover the best in everyone.
Was Skinny Jewish? Or Estelle? The Madam sometimes wondered. If the cards had been dealt the other way round, would the Jews behave like the Germans and the Germans like the Jews? You couldn’t tell anything from a girl’s crotch. What could she have in common with the troops who came here for an advance on their home life? The cemetery was nearer for her.
After supper a messenger on a motorbike with a sidecar brought a parcel for Skinny. A couple of pounds each of sugar and lentils, a chunk of salted beef and some pork crackling in a jam jar. A twopound bag of millet. And a visiting card from Captain Daniel August Hentschel.
“The Germans are still gentlemen,” observed Madam Kulikowa. “Knights without fear and blemish. They know how to share even what they steal.”
Skinny shared her parcel with the rest of the girls. The Madam took the salted beef.
Twelve: Karl Meissner, Hans Bellow, Anton Bruckner, Frank Epp, Hermann Fegelein, Fritz Albert Klausen, Gustav Kriebel, Rainer Maria Hilger, Donar Hörbiger, Alex Neurath, Uwe Schmidt, Kurt Witzig.
Estelle held Skinny by her hand.
“I’d never been with anyone before. I didn’t have it off with him; he had it off with me. He told me I was nice and if I weren’t a whore he’d marry me. He waited for me to moan. So I moaned. He wanted me to open my legs; to put them on his shoulders. I heard myself croaking. I was gasping for air. He said it was so good. It hurt me, and I was covered in cold sweat. He slapped my bottom — as a reward. Out of sheer fear I smiled at him. Then he fell asleep. He was no longer interested in me. No-one was ever interested in me afterwards.”
She didn’t mention those two soldiers, brothers perhaps or cousins, who it was rumoured she was interested in.
The sky, frosty, deep blue and clear, was filling with stars. The Madam announced that it was Christmas Day.
“Do you also imagine God as a shiny fish?” Estelle asked. She looked at Skinny.
“Were you really in a camp? Like the Madam? She was in the Aryan section.”
The wolves were howling outside the windows.
Behind their words self-denial was hiding; that secret life no-one knows about, that life which had deformed them, but in which there was still a grain of hope.
“When I lie next to you, things come back to me,” Estelle said. “I’m walking in the park with my mother. She was raven-haired, like I am. I run ahead, stop in front of her and face her, so she has to stop too. And I say to her ‘Mummy, you’re walking too fast’. And then I do it again and say ‘Mummy, your breasts are wobbling too much’. My mother stares ahead, as if she’s lost in thought. Am I really there? I say ‘Mummy, why are you looking so odd?’”
Skinny did not tell Estelle that they were killing people at Auschwitz-Birkenau from morning to night and from night to morning, killing on a conveyor belt. She said nothing about the prisoners who were grinding the bones of the dead into fertilizer that was taken away by rail in open wagons. About the mass murders which had become commonplace. About the women waiting their turn in snow and ice and rain, powerless and emaciated. They were no longer being moved by trucks; fuel had to be saved. They had to trudge along, step after step. She remained silent about the things the Germans had thought up in order to cleanse the planet of the inferior race. About the sick bay where experiments were carried out on human beings.
About the killing of children and the sick, as well as the healthy for punishment, simply to make room for the next transportées. About what seemed normal to the S S men in their service to Germany; about what, after a few weeks, no longer seemed insane to her because it was being repeated every day. That was what she had escaped to save herself.
It occurred to her, as it had before, that Estelle might not believe her. She would not have believed it herself if she hadn’t been there. And she only knew a fraction of it, the general picture, the taste of damp ash, the choking smell of charred bones like the smell of boiled glue.
“I ran away so I didn’t have to go to a camp as you did,” Estelle said. Skinny remained silent. Estelle turned over in bed and caught hold of her with both hands. She was not the only one to have run away and ended up here. Perhaps she’d just had a different reason. That unknown reason was a bond between them.
“I don’t have to see killing first-hand. What’s here is quite enough for me — what they did to Big Belly and Krikri, and maybe Maria-Giselle.”
“They don’t give you a choice,” Skinny said.
“Is it the same there as here?”
“No, it’s not. Except that neither there nor here can you get out.”
Skinny wondered why the camp had such a fascination for Estelle. Why was she thinking about it so much?
“What did you do there?”
“I assisted the doctor.”
“Would they have sterilized me?”
“They sterilized all the girls.”
“Did you have any of your family there?”
“Did you?”
“My grandfather.” She let go of Skinny’s hands.
For a while they were both silent.
“Is it a sin to want to die?”