A Woman of War: A new voice in historical fiction for 2018, for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Mandy Robotham
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this particular one had worked in hospitals before the war, possibly as a midwife; she looked at me with deep suspicion, a grimy furrow to her large brow, particularly when I was with the Jewish women, as if she could not contemplate even touching them. She had no qualms, however, about employing the butt of her cosh, a target she perfected in the base of their wizened skeletons to cause maximum pain. She also had a second, more sinister, speciality.
It was her nose that caught the coppery taint of birth blood, and not that of the second, shadowy guard.
‘You’ve had another one, then?’
I walked forward, as I always did. The exchange had become a game I was almost certain to lose, but it never stopped me trying.
‘The baby’s only been born an hour,’ I lied. ‘It’s not long. Just a little more time. It won’t interfere with the count.’
She scanned up and down the hut, the sixty or so sets of eyes upon her, Irena’s normally dull gaze the whitest I had ever seen. For a second, the guard looked as if she was considering a minor reprieve. Then, she sniffed and grunted, ‘You know the rules. I don’t make them. It’s time.’ The justification for ninety per cent of the degradation in the camp was the same – it’s not our fault, we’re only following orders. The other ten per cent was pure enjoyment.
It was then Irena burst out of her own birth world, clutching the baby to her bare breast, springing off the bed and backing into the corner near the stove, a trickle of blood following her.
‘No, no please,’ she cried. ‘I can do anything. I will do anything, anything you want.’
The guard’s granite reflection told Irena her bargaining power was worthless, so she turned on herself: ‘Take me instead. Take me now, but leave the baby.’ Irena aimed her frenzied voice at me. ‘Anke? You can care for the baby, can’t you? If I’m gone?’
I nodded a yes, but in reality I couldn’t; the few non-Jews allowed to keep their babies had little enough milk for their own newborns, let alone another one scraping at the breast. The infants succumbed to malnutrition in a matter of weeks, and to glimpse a baby beyond a month was unusual. I wouldn’t even need to ask – not one of these desperate appeals had ever worked. We all held our breath for Irena, a scene we had witnessed too many times, but which never ceased to feel completely surreal. A mother having to beg for her baby’s life.
The female guard sighed, boredom apparent. The next step was inevitable, but every mother, if they weren’t immobile or nearing an unconscious state, made the same unrealistic plea. It was a mother’s reflex: laying down your own life to save a new one.
‘Now come on,’ said the guard, moving towards Irena, ‘don’t make it harder. Don’t make me hurt you.’
She made a grab for the cloth, and Irena backed herself further into the corner. The baby’s sudden howling almost masked the crack to Irena’s body, and the guard emerged from the scuffle with the cloth and tiny limbs loosely wrapped. She turned, eyes narrowing to match the thin line of her lips. The heavy boots clomped as she marched towards the door, while we immediately crowded around Irena, as a protective field; if she ran out in pursuit of the guard she would almost certainly be shot by snipers on the lookout posts. She lunged like the fiercest of grizzly bears out of the shadows, broken teeth bared, a tornado of desperation, and we caught her in our human net. The high, shrill screams would have filled the air outside, and I imagined the camp stopping for a second, knowing the deathly protocol was about to happen.
Instantly, the women started up a song, a lament, the volume rising rapidly, as the group took on a unified swaying, with Irena at its core, a shield around her suffering. It was meant as comfort, but there was another purpose – to mask the sound of the baby hitting the barrel of water, as shocking as gunfire if you’ve ever heard it. Rosa caught my eye, nodded and was through the door in an instant, hoping to scoop up the pitiful body after the guard tossed it aside, in time to stop the rats and the guard dogs staking their claim. A placenta was one thing, but a human body – a person. It was unthinkable.
After several moments, Irena’s shrieking died away, replaced with a low moan seeping from her heart’s core, a consistent braying that was beyond words. I had only ever heard such a sound during summers spent on my uncle’s farm in Bavaria, when the newborn calves were taken away to market. Their bereft mothers kept up a constant, needy calling throughout the day and well into the night, searching blindly for their offspring. I would lie in bed with my hands over my ears, desperate to block out the torturous mooing. As I got older, I always asked Uncle Dieter when it was time to take the calves to market and arranged my visits to avoid them.
I cleared up as best I could, and then busied myself seeing to some of the other sick women in the hut, changing a few meagre dressings, giving them water and just holding them as they coughed uncontrollably. At those times, I thanked the automated nurse training I had been through, where doing menial tasks required little thinking. I didn’t want to give any thought to, or process, what had happened that morning, and many others besides.
I stepped out twice, once for some air – the chill brought me round a little – and once to visit another hut for non-Jews, where two women had recently given birth. There was little I could do for them post-birth, as I had no equipment or drugs, but I could at least reassure them their blood loss was normal and their bodies recovering. The stronger women in their own hut did the fetching and carrying while they tried in vain to encourage milk into their breasts.
My camp classification as ‘German political’, a red star instead of yellow stitched onto my armband, allowed movement around the huts as a nurse and midwife, since I was happy – as in peacetime – to attend any woman, regardless of culture or creed. The majority of women I cared for would arrive already pregnant, or somehow manifest a pregnancy once imprisoned. It was especially true of Jewish women, even though none of the guards were ever called to account. Rape was simply not in the camp vocabulary. It seemed ironic that a good portion of the babies born were half Aryan, and yet sacrificed in the name of the master race.
Back in Hut 23, unofficially dubbed ‘the maternity hut’ by guards and inmates alike, Irena remained in her bunk by the dying fire for several hours, constantly held by one of the women in the singing circle. I checked her bleeding wasn’t excessive, and she opened her eyes briefly. They were swollen, blackened sacs beneath her wide pupils, crusted and completely wrung-out. She grabbed my hand as I drew it away from her belly.
‘Anke, what was the point?’ she pleaded, inky pupils piercing directly into mine, collapsing back in sobs of dry distress.
I was at a loss to reply because I didn’t know what she meant. The point of what? Of pregnancy, of babies, this life … or life in general? There was simply no answer.
Just the words caused me to shake visibly: ‘The Commandant wants to see you.’ Eyes widened amid the gloom of the hut, and all movement stopped. There was no sound, just a stale breath of fear rising above the stench of humans as animals: urine and excrement, feminine issue, and the shadow smell of birth. My hands were wet with pus, and the trooper looked at them with obvious disgust. I scouted for a cloth not yet sodden, and it took me a moment in the darkness.
‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘Don’t keep him waiting.’
At that point, my thoughts were clear: I am going to die anyway, I might as well not hasten the event. No one was called before the Commandment for a friendly afternoon chat.
Ironically, it was the icy wind whipping through the holes in my dress that stopped me shaking, my body’s remaining muscles tensing to keep in whatever warmth it could. Across the barren yard, more eyes settled on me, their gazes sketching my fate, as I struggled to keep up with the goose-step pace of the trooper. ‘Oh, we remember Anke,’ they would later say, in the dank of their own huts. ‘I remember