Hanna
I nodded, picturing his face in the crowd at the harbor in Oslo.
“I can’t forget him. But I know the things he was doing were very dangerous.
He may have been killed. And even if he survived, perhaps he’s forgotten me.
” I gazed at my sister, seeing my mirror image in her sunken face, in the dirty, tattered clothes she wore and the sores on her emaciated body.
He wouldn’t even recognize me if he could see me now, I thought.
Not after everything I’d been through since he caught that last glimpse of me…
She wouldn’t let me give in to my despair, though. She took hold of my hand, anchoring me as I drifted on an ocean of sorrow. “Tell me about home. About what we’ll do when we’re free.”
I smiled and squeezed her fingers gently. Even that small gesture was an effort that sapped what little strength I still had.
“We’ll go back to the hut,” I whispered, “and it will be summer there. We’ll take the boat out among the skerries and gather berries on the islands, more than we can eat.
And the storm petrels will return, filling the midnight dusk with their magic.
We’ll catch crayfish, and we’ll hike to the lake in the hills and fish for trout.
We’ll make pies and jam. And we’ll swim in the sea, beneath the midnight sun…
” My words trailed off as I felt myself drifting again on waves of longing.
I saw our parents’ faces, yearned to be with them again…
and I thought how easy it would be to give in…
Liv let go of my hand, and I could sense her determination as she swung her legs over the edge of the bunk and climbed down.
I turned on my side, watching her. By then, every movement was an effort for each of us.
She reached into the pocket of her coat and placed something on the window ledge.
Then she struck a match, her face illuminated in the sudden flare, and I saw she’d set a candle stub there.
She held the match to the wick, coaxing it to catch, before climbing back into the bed beside me.
“Look,” she whispered, her voice as fragile and soft as goose down.
The little flame wavered and guttered, but for a few minutes, before it burned out, it cast its faint glow across the snowy ground into the darkness, holding it at bay. Its flickering light held back the darkness within me, too, and was the last thing I saw as I fell asleep.
*
Something was different when we awoke the next morning. It took me a while to work out what it was as I surfaced from my troubled dreams. And then I realized. It was the absence of the usual sounds: the shouts; the crunch of marching boots; the dogs barking. In their place, there was silence.
With an effort, I eased myself painfully from my bed, wincing, and hobbled to the door of the hut, stepping out into the snow.
A few other prisoners were moving about cautiously, but the Nazi guards had all gone.
I drew my thin coat around me and walked over to the fence separating the twins’ area and the laboratory block from the rest of the camp.
There were no guards there, either. Tentatively, I stepped through the opening, expecting a shout and a volley of savage barking at any moment, but none came.
Instead, I heard a most unexpected sound: the laughter of prisoners, rejoicing as they discovered they were free.
Just then, Marta and Zygmunt appeared, carrying bulky sacks.
She set hers down and grabbed me by the shoulders, grinning broadly.
“They’ve gone! Hanna, the Germans have fled.
There are rumors that the Russians are advancing and will be here any day.
And, look, we managed to get into the officer’s mess—they left in such a hurry, the door was wide open.
We have food! Proper food, not the usual slop. ”
Zygmunt held aloft the sack he carried like a trophy and blushed as she flung her arms around his thin waist, hugging and kissing him. “Come,” he said. “The children need a proper breakfast.”
We all crowded around as they emptied the sacks, exclaiming over the softness of the bread, the sights of a block of butter and a wedge of cheese.
We hadn’t seen treasure like that in months, and some of the younger children probably didn’t remember ever having such a feast. Marta shared everything among us, and we nibbled morsels of the food, our stomachs gurgling at the unaccustomed richness.
At my urging, Liv tried to swallow hers, but her body couldn’t take the fattiness of the cheese, and she vomited it into the bank of dirty snow alongside the barracks.
“Go slowly,” Marta warned us. “Just a little at a time.”
“What do we do now?” I asked, once we’d finished the meal.
“We wait,” she replied. “It’s too risky to leave the camp and, anyway, where would we go? Hopefully, help is on the way.”
Just then a series of explosions shook the ground beneath our feet, making some of the children scream in terror. “It’s all right; look, it’s away over there.” Marta pointed to a plume of grey smoke rising into the air at the neighboring camp.
“Is it the Russians?” asked Liv.
Zygmunt shook his head. “They’re blowing up the chimneys, I think. That will be the Nazis, trying to destroy the evidence of what’s been going on.”
We ushered the children back into their huts. Then Marta said, “Can a couple of you come with me? We need to see if we can go into the women’s hospital and get some more supplies for the sick.”
Liv and I followed her to the brick building that had held such horror for us both.
The guards who usually stood at the entrance had disappeared, and it was unlocked.
We walked down the corridor, doors standing ajar.
When we came to the doctor’s room, we hesitated, and Liv grabbed my hand and held it tightly.
I stepped across the threshold and stood in the empty office, where hundreds of pairs of terrified eyes stared out from the wall behind his desk.
“What on earth…?” exclaimed Marta, unnerved by the sight.
“This is where he pinned the photographs taken of the eyes of all of us who were his guinea pigs,” I told her. “He was obsessed with eye color. Somewhere among those photos are my eyes and Liv’s.”
She grimaced. “I knew he was deranged, but what kind of a madman would do this?”
I shrugged. “It was just one of his grotesque experiments as he attempted to find ways to create a pure Aryan race.” Liv squeezed my hand even more tightly, and I could feel her trembling uncontrollably. We knew all too well what some of those experiments entailed.
“Come on,” I said, turning away. “It’s behind us now.” As if in emphasis, I pulled the door firmly shut, and we continued along the corridor to the laboratories.
We found Nurse Olga there, pulling dressings and bottles of medicine from a cupboard. “Here,” she said, piling supplies into our arms. “Take what you need.” She hurried up the stairs to the rooms above.
“What’s up there?” Marta asked.
“That’s where they keep the women when they’re doing the experiments,” Liv said. Her voice was a strangled whisper, hoarse with emotion. “There’s a room where they keep the twins they’re treating and another for the ones who’re being used as the controls.”
I turned my back on the staircase, refusing to remember. “Come on,” I said again. “Olga will help those who are still up there. We must get back. There are others who need these supplies, too.”
An air of elation pervaded the camp for the next twenty-four hours, which passed in a blur as we tried to help those in our barracks who needed it most. By the end of that first day, we climbed back into our bunks, exhausted, buzzing with the strange mixture of exhilaration and trepidation at what might come next as we waited for rescuers to arrive.
Our ordeal was not yet over, though. The next day, our hearts sank when we heard familiar sounds. The Germans had returned. Outside the hospital block, a fire blazed as they burned piles of documents, hurrying back and forth to bring armfuls of papers and files out of the laboratories.
They rounded us up and marched us through the snow to the main camp.
If anyone hesitated or fell, they were shot.
We chivvied the children along, helped by Marta, Zygmunt, and Zvi, the Twins’ Father from the boys’ hut.
Behind us, the sky was red with flames from the buildings we’d just left as they burned the camp.
In front of us, a pall of smoke hung over the second camp as they herded us through its gates.
This next camp—at once strange and familiar, with its rows of warehouses and barracks—terrified us.
We didn’t know what fate awaited us there: it could well be the place where they lined us up and killed us.
Buildings were burning there, too, and the stench of death was stronger than ever.
I tensed, anticipating what might come next.
But then the guards disappeared again. With a screeching of jeep tires and a lurching of trucks, they sped away, leaving us there.
We waited, silent and trembling with exhaustion from the forced march through the snow. And then, after a while when no one came, Marta said, “Let’s try to get the children into one of the huts.”
We picked our way through a scene from Hell.
Desperate people, skeletons dressed in rags, just like us, drifted through the smoke between the buildings, and we passed a tangled heap of corpses left lying outside one of the barracks.
Zygmunt grabbed the arm of one man and asked him in German what was going on.
“They made most people leave a while back. Those of us who are left are the ones who were too weak for the march, but who they couldn’t be bothered wasting a bullet on.
They’ve blown up the crematoriums, so there was no way of getting rid of us, I suppose.
” He pointed toward an empty hut. “You can get the children in there. And then you two come with me,” he told Zygmunt and Zvi. “I know where we can get food.”
We gathered the children into the hut, listening to the sound of distant gunfire that seemed to ebb and flow in different directions.
Zvi and Zygmunt returned after a while, carrying some loaves of bread, a few jars of sauerkraut and jam.
We ate the lot, all mixed up together, wolfing it down.
Then we did our best to make up beds for the children with the tattered blankets and discarded items of ragged clothing we managed to find.
As darkness fell, we lay in our bunks and tried to sleep. The sporadic sounds of gunfire were closer now and continued late into the night. But I awoke the next morning to another blanket of silence.
And then, suddenly, I heard a woman’s voice. “They are coming!” she shouted. “They are here!”
We scrambled up and ran to the fence at the edge of the camp, huddling along the barbed wire.
In the light of dawn, we saw an army of white-uniformed men approaching.
For a moment, I thought they were Norwegians, wearing the camouflaged cold-weather smocks our boys used to wear.
But then someone said, “They’re Russian. ”
Those battle-hardened Soviet soldiers wept when they saw us, our emaciated bodies and fear-filled eyes moving them to tears.
They were kind. They gave us food—miraculous things like chocolate and sweet biscuits.
They lit a campfire in front of the barracks, and someone produced a bottle of vodka.
One of the soldiers played a harmonica, and a prisoner brought out a violin that he’d found in the guards’ mess hall.
The music floated on the night air, punctuated by sparks from the fire, as I watched the shadows play over the thin, drawn faces gathered in the circle of light.
We had no home left to us; no family, either.
The other prisoners and the children had become our family now, bound by all we’d been through, all we’d endured together.
We’d managed to survive by sticking together, just as Sylvia and the others had shown us how to do in the first camps.
It had taken luck, too, and several twists of Fate.
But, somehow, we’d done it. We were victors in the grotesque lottery that had brought us to this place where the world had ended for so many.
One of the Russians turned to me as I sat by the fire, immersed in my thoughts as I warmed my frozen fingers. “Will you dance?” he asked, in stilted German, the only language we shared. And we did. Marta and Zygmunt joined in, then Liv, dancing with another prisoner, and even some of the children.
In Hell, we who’d survived danced a waltz at the end of the world.