“Schämst du dich nicht?” Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
Skinny shook her head at the nurse.
“She’s not one of us,” the nurse said.
“She passed my screening,” Oberführer S chimmelpfennig intervened. “She has Aryan blood.”
At least I hope so, he added to himself. In the chaos of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Festung Breslau the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.
“Jawohl, Herr Oberführer” the matron said.
The Frog hung up an acetylene lamp by the gate. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the gilded tin eagle. A truckload of army engineers pulled up. They had come for sex, but the truck did not even enter the estate. Operations were suspended. The men could dismount, the truck would stay. They could wait in the waiting room. Was it warm in there? Yes, warm and there was music.
The Oberführer took the matron on a tour of the estate. He showed her the latrines, the kitchen, the guards’ dormitories, and where she would find drinking water. Skinny helped her until nine in the morning. She could scarcely stand. Finally Obersturmbannführer Kemnitz allowed her to go and lie down. The dormitory was full of soldiers. She stretched out in Cubicle 16 and fell instantly asleep. She dreamt that she was a Brown Nurse and that her train had been derailed. When a Hitlerjugend boy saw her blood he shouted that she was a Jewess. Her blood turned to water. Rats were crowding round her. She screamed when the heat from the fire got under her skirt. Her heels were burning, she was afraid she might lose her legs. Her stomach was aching. She tried to fight off the rats with her hands.
She was woken by the matron, who had heard her scream. The woman gave her a plate of tapioca pudding with a scattering of sugar and chocolate and a topping of raspberry juice. She put a little jug of milk before her. The first thing Skinny was aware of was diarrhoea. Was that why she’d had a bellyache in her dream? She ate faster than she wanted to in front of the matron.
“What are you afraid of? Do you have diarrhoea?”
“Sometimes.”
“From the food or from the cold?”
“I don’t know.”
“No wonder, in these conditions. All of us have it, out east.”
Then she said: “It happened so suddenly, in a matter of seconds. A colossal bang. Cases were flung about, people screamed. We were thrown from our bunks and seats, hitting other bodies. There was shattered glass everywhere. People were pushing and stumbling, stepping on each other. And at last the train came to a halt. We were lucky it didn’t happen on the bridge. Perhaps we were moving too fast. If it had happened on the bridge we would all have been drowned in the icy water.” She paused. “We came to the east to bring them civilization,” she continued. “To teach them German, get them used to German laws.”
Her voice broke. She watched Skinny eat, licking her plate clean and drinking the milk in big gulps. It was the first milk she had had for three years.
“No-one’s going to take it away from you,” the matron said. “And look what they’ve done,” she went on. “We were on our way to the front. They ought to shoot anyone getting close to the track. Surely the Ostbahn is ours? Who’s going to make up the loss? Doesn’t anyone guard the track? Where are our aircraft?”
“I am full of misgivings,” the matron said.
She raised her eyes to Skinny: “So few like us.”
Skinny needed to belch.
“It is Germany’s fate,” the matron said. Her neck wrinkled into folds that seemed to Skinny like a many-stringed necklace. Lines appeared on her forehead. In spite of her ample figure she was a good-looking woman.
Then she added: “Would you want it to happen all over again, seeing that you’re not German?”
After a while she asked, with her eyes on the ground: “How many?”
Skinny did not understand. Her short hair was stuck to her neck with sweat. She felt different now to how she had at the beginning of the night, more like an uninvited guest at someone’s feast. Or someone’s wake. She was aware of the pudding and milk in her stomach. Small amounts rose now and again to her mouth. It was pleasant, reminding her of food and of being full.
“How many soldiers each day?” the matron asked, explaining her question. “Those poor boys. My name’s Mathilde — Sister Mathilde or Frau Mathilde. On duty they call me Obersturmbannführer Mathilde.”
Her voice and gaze echoed the numberless sick, wounded and dying she had seen.
“Twelve,” Skinny said.
“Twelve?” Sister Mathilde repeated.
“Sometimes more.”
“Every day?”
“Except Sunday. But sometimes on Sunday too. Not today.”
“I saw the troops arrive. Will you have to catch up?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.”
The matron reflected on the different lives that people were born to, how their fates differed. Her mother had also been a matron, just as her mother’s mother was before her. The Kemnitz matrons. It was a family tradition, a dynasty.
She looked at Skinny. Might she have become a nurse? She did not wish to know how a 15-year-old had become a whore in Germany.
“I wouldn’t have the stomach for it.” Then she asked: “Didn’t the Lebensborn organization have this place before?”
“So they say.”
It seemed to Skinny that there was distaste in the matron’s well-fed voice. And Skinny was right, the matron had a rather bourgeois view of fallen girls and of marital fidelity. She would not allow a man other than her husband to have anything to do with her body.
“You must have started early. You look very young. Fifteen?”
“Eighteen,” Skinny said. “Getting on for 19.”
“You did a good job,” said the matron.
Skinny didn’t answer.
Skinny had gulped her food down like a sick animal, afraid that someone might snatch it away. This aroused both suspicion and compassion in Obersturmbannführer Mathilde Kemnitz. And when, earlier on, she had kicked off her blanket and screamed in her sleep, the matron had noticed a festering sore on her bottom. For a moment she considered enrolling the girl in the Brown Nurses. Was she in the brothel as a punishment?
“Lie down on your tummy,” she ordered.
With her fingertips she probed the wound.
“Has the doctor seen this?”
“He gave me some sticking plaster.”
“It’s not healing too well in this cold. How long have you had it?”
“A few days.”
“A couple of weeks?”
“About that.”
“Do they beat you?”
“Only as a punishment.”
“Punishment for what?”
“For a complaint.”
The matron squeezed the pus out of the wound. With skilled movements she covered it with a piece of sterile gauze. She said something about how helpful the prostitutes had been during the night. For a while she looked into the girl’s eyes. This young army whore had the same green eyes that she herself had had in her youth.
Twelve
Twelve: Kurt Vischel, Norbert Peltz, Helmuth Brünnich, Kax Joachim Klein, Bruno Bartels, Ottofeld Bader, Pritz Urban, Hans Markvart, Hans Feldmann, Sutr Johannes Schulhof, Anton Kahler, Alex Roubal.
The girls got up at 4.30 a.m. They shared their reveille with the guards, and then the cook struck his iron bar. The guards had their roll-call, morning exercises and breakfast, and then began their duty. The first shift ran until 8 p.m., the second from 8 p.m. until 8.00 a.m. the next morning. In the evening they had Party lectures on racial hygiene. Every day they had an air-raid practice, in which The Frog included the girls, though not all at once. For the slightest infringement of discipline the guards got three days of severe-regime imprisonment. The essence of the Waffen-S S was discipline. It was sufficient for a guard to be caught wearing a scarf in the blizzard for him to end up in the “glasshouse”. They learned to patrol around the estate with their chins pressed against their throats so that the wind did not blow down their collar. In a blizzard they wore motoring goggles with green-tinted glass. Any infringement was a disgrace for the whole of the Waffen-SS. For a second disciplinary punishment an S S man was sent to the front. But some of the guards had had their application for transfer to the front rejected.