Chapter Twenty-Nine Aletta
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Aletta
Aletta had never wished to be back working in the factory more than she did today.
She tied her make-shift scarf tighter around her face, trying to block out the stench around her in the main camp, but it was impossible.
Usually on Sundays, the factory workers were sent to do physical gardening work around the SS commandant’s house or the guards’ cabins, but today they’d selected countless women to do the work that no one wanted to be called up for.
The guards were keeping to themselves in small groups, and as far as she was aware, no one had been put on gardening duty.
She saw one of the little girls she taught standing in the doorway to her barracks, her sunken cheeks stark as she made a face at the smell. Aletta went straight over to her, ripping a piece from her own shirt so that she could tie it around the girl’s nose and mouth.
‘Thank you,’ the little girl whispered, and Aletta was relieved not to see her dry-chapped lips and red raw nose any longer. Seeing other women looking so alarmingly thin and bedraggled was one thing, but when it was children, it broke her heart.
‘You’re welcome,’ she murmured back, bending to hold the child in a warm hug.
Aletta’s back hurt so much she wondered if she’d be able to straighten, but after a long moment she rose, using her thumb to brush away the girl’s tears.
‘Your mother?’ Aletta asked, not wanting to hear the answer, but knowing she wouldn’t forgive herself for not asking.
‘She has the sick,’ the girl replied, standing aside and letting Aletta see past her.
There was a lump on the mattress, on the bottom bunk, that Aletta realised was the girl’s mother.
She heard a raspy cough and then another, telling her that she wasn’t the only woman in there sick.
Soon, it would take every last one of them.
Usually everyone would be sent outside and the bunkrooms would be turned over and cleaned, but not today.
‘She doesn’t want to go to the doctor?’ Aletta asked.
The little girl shook her head. ‘She says no one comes back from there.’
Aletta nodded and gently touched the girl’s hair. ‘Maybe I’ll come and sit here with you later, we can recite some poems together.’ She paused. ‘Do you know a girl called Else?’
The girl nodded.
‘She’s still here? She doesn’t have the sick?’
The girl shook her head, and Aletta forced herself to walk away before it became too hard, as she thought of how many girls they’d lost, until she could barely stand to teach the new children, for fear of knowing how much it would hurt when they didn’t make it.
Of how she’d give her own life if it meant getting Else out of the camp and to safety.
‘Beeil dich!’ a guard yelled, waving his hand at her.
Aletta moved as fast as her legs would take her, which she imagined was much slower than it actually felt, back to the group.
Sundays were supposed to be their day off, but the work she was doing today was of the very worst kind.
Her mother’s office job seemed to give her a higher status within the camp, not to mention access to paper that she took whenever she could for Chloe, but Aletta had drawn the short straw, and she just wanted to get it over with.
Other women lined up on either side of her, all of them with their faces covered, and Aletta bent at the knees and reached down to take hold of an ankle of one of the dead. There were piles of them everywhere; some of them shot, some starved to death, and the others killed by the gas.
Aletta refused to look at the woman’s face, not wanting the ghoulish skull to haunt her, and it took four of them to drag the body all the way to the furnace, where the fires had been burning for days without stopping.
Only a week earlier, hundreds of women had arrived from another camp, somewhere called Auschwitz, all even dirtier than the women around Aletta in their tatty clothing, and even hungrier than the women from Ravensbrück.
And it was those women whom she was lifting now; women who’d probably hoped to be coming somewhere better, only to be killed within days.
She didn’t understand why they had bothered to transport them if they were only going to kill them.
Aletta coughed, sucking back the cloth over her mouth, which only made her cough all the more as she fought for breath. But at least she wasn’t inhaling any of the thick ash in the air that was making everything look tinged with grey.
But as she bent over to cough again, a large box marked with a red cross caught her eye from behind a low fence. She glanced over her shoulder, seeing the guards busy talking, and purposely stumbled a few steps so she could see better.
It wasn’t just one box. There was a pile of packages beyond that, all marked with a red cross.
Aletta’s heart beat a little faster as she wondered what was in there. If the Red Cross had sent them, they had to be packages full of provisions, surely? They had to have been sent for the prisoners?
‘What are you looking at?’
Aletta jumped, but it was only one of the other prisoner women.
She inclined her head, at the same time holding up one finger to her lips.
The other woman’s eyes widened but they both stayed silent, instinctively knowing the guards mustn’t see them looking.
There was a reason all those parcels and boxes were behind a fence.
‘What do you suppose is in there?’ the other woman asked.
‘Food?’ Aletta whispered. ‘Maybe sanitary items? Medical supplies?’ She imagined it might be full of provisions that could be useful, simple things that would seem like luxuries after barely getting by for so long.
Aletta ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling how grimy they were, and noticed that two of her back molars had started to come loose. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to use a toothbrush or have a comb for her hair, to clean her skin and soak in a bath.
She touched the woman on the shoulder as they went back to move more bodies and, despite the ache in her back, she kept working, moving closer each time to the guards.
They were all so exhausted that the only sounds coming from any of the women were grunts and groans, which meant she could hear a lot of what the guards said.
Especially now that she was better versed in German and could keep up with much of their conversation.
‘They told us to burn it,’ one of them said.
‘We have enough bodies to burn without adding all of those. Why not just take it for ourselves?’
Aletta gritted her teeth as she walked past them, struggling to carry the weight as she kept listening, straining not to miss anything.
‘If we give it to them, they’ll only start to get greedy and want more. They might guess what’s happening.’
If she’d been braver, she would have stopped and spat on the boots of the guard who’d said that. But she was determined to live, and one glance at their guns told her she’d have a bullet through her brain before she could turn and run.
‘We need to just shoot them all while we can, before anyone finds out what we’ve done in this hellhole.’
She stopped walking and one of the women bumped into her, cursing Aletta as she made her trip. But she ignored her and kept listening, her heart thudding as she realised they didn’t expect any of the prisoners to be listening or to understand them. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.
‘Did you hear about those other camps?’
Most of the guards were silent then as they listened to whoever was talking, and Aletta hurried to place the body before turning around to retrieve the next one, walking as slowly as she could without drawing attention. She missed part of what was said.
‘. . . dismantling the camps and freeing all the prisoners.’
‘At least the guards got out of there before they came. We need to make sure nothing is left here before they get to this one.’
Aletta fell to the ground then, her wrists aching as she pushed herself up and received a kick to the stomach for her efforts.
The guards laughed, and she took her time getting up, needing to hear more, needing to know what was happening elsewhere.
Did this mean the Allies were winning? Was that why the parcels had arrived?
Was that what they didn’t want the prisoners to know?
‘If they catch us, we just say we’re only women. We tell them that we were forced to treat them like this.’
‘We just have to pick the best of them to send when the buses come,’ one of the guards said, looking over and scowling at Aletta as she spoke, clearly not thinking she could understand them. ‘They’ve negotiated for most of the French ones to leave this time.’
Aletta couldn’t delay any longer, unless she wanted to be kicked again, so she slowly limped off.
For the first time in forever, she felt a lightness rising inside her.
Two things were clear to her: there was a chance the Allies would arrive before the last of them perished in this godforsaken place, and she would fight until her dying breath to tell the world how willingly the guards had gone about their jobs.
That whatever excuses they claimed were nothing but barefaced lies.
She only wished it was closer to nightfall, so she could tell her mother and Chloe all that she’d learnt. And if it was true that they were going to be releasing French prisoners, there was a chance that Chloe would be leaving soon, so one of them was going to make it out alive.
When Aletta finally found Chloe, her heart sank.
She was used to seeing every single woman who’d been in the camp for months or years looking thin and tired, but Chloe had been there longer than most, and it showed.
The dark circles beneath her eyes, the hollowness of her cheeks, the slow, almost painful way she moved, as if her joints ached beyond belief – it broke Aletta’s heart to see her like that.
Herr Weber had kept them alive with his extra rations of food, but now that he’d left the Siemens factory, they were no better off than anyone else. Which meant they didn’t have long.
Aletta found the energy to hurry over to them, taking Chloe and her mother by the arms and walking them away from the other women. They were both clutching their tin cups waiting to have them filled, but she didn’t want everyone else to hear what she had to say, not until she knew more.
‘You look happy,’ her mother said. ‘Why are you smiling?’
Chloe frowned, glancing back at the soup line. It might be revolting, but none of them ever wanted to miss out.
‘I overhead the guards today. The Allies are liberating other camps,’ she whispered. ‘They must be losing the war.’
Chloe’s eyebrows lifted then, her frown gone. ‘You’re certain you heard that correctly?’
Aletta nodded. ‘They have Red Cross packages that have been sent here, and they’re stockpiling them behind the crematorium. But there’s more,’ she said, glancing to check they weren’t being watched. ‘I heard them say that French prisoners are to be released.’
Her mother’s gaze met hers, and her eyes widened. ‘That means that Chloe . . .’
‘Could be saved,’ Aletta said, reaching for Chloe’s hand. ‘We just have to keep you well enough until they arrive. They don’t want anyone knowing how badly they’ve starved us.’
‘I’m not leaving without you,’ Chloe said, looking between them. ‘I don’t care what happens, I couldn’t, I—’
‘If you can leave, you leave,’ Aletta said firmly. ‘You can fight for us on the outside, but you do not miss an opportunity to get out of here. Do you hear me?’
In the beginning, it had been Chloe who showed them how to stay alive, who’d fought for them when they needed her, had looked after Aletta when she was sick, but now it was her turn to look out for her friend.
It was as if the tiniest ember of fire had sparked inside Aletta, after so many months of feeling nothing.
‘We said we were together, that we were all going to—’
‘We said we were going to stay alive, Chloe,’ Emma interrupted. ‘Maybe we don’t all leave at once, but it doesn’t change that we’re all going to make it. But Aletta’s right. If you get the chance to leave, you leave. It might be your only chance.’
Aletta took a deep breath, her lungs shuddering, her cough making her almost bend over double. But she rose as soon as she could, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist. ‘We just have to live long enough for this place to be liberated. You can wait for us on the other side.’
There was a shout behind them and they all jumped, shuffling back into the line before they were reprimanded.
‘But we have to be careful,’ Aletta murmured, leaning in close. ‘I think, well, I heard them say that they want to get rid of the evidence. I don’t think they’ll let anyone see how bad it is here.’
‘We need to find somewhere to hide, is that what you’re saying?’ her mother asked. ‘You think they might . . .’
Aletta swallowed, meeting her mother’s stare.
‘I think that we need to do everything we can to keep our heads down, and we need to stay alert. We need to be careful.’ Just like we’ve always been, she thought.
We need to keep an eye out for each other, listen to the guards, find out what’s happening.
Right now, she was focused on Chloe leaving the camp. She would worry about getting herself and her mother out once they knew Chloe was safe.