Hanna
After Liv died, I’d lost my anchor. I drifted further and further into despair, turning my face to the wall and giving in to the hopelessness that overwhelmed me.
It had been a struggle for so many years, but I’d always had her to live for.
Now she was gone, taking half of me with her.
The half of me that was left behind couldn’t survive.
I had no appetite for the nourishing meals Marta brought me and could scarcely lift my head from the pillow to sip the drink made from supplemented powdered milk, which seemed the only thing my body could tolerate.
I felt my life ebbing from me, but it was easier to allow the tide to carry me away than to try to swim against it.
I’d known when I made it that I couldn’t keep my promise to Liv, to live for us both.
I slipped in and out of sleep, not wanting to face the day, but one morning Marta shook me awake and I opened my eyes to find her standing at my bedside with another woman, who carried an official-looking clipboard.
“This is Basia,” she said. “She’s a Red Cross worker.
I told her about the shawl you and Liv made, with the names sewn into it. She’d like to see it.”
I reached under the pillow and drew it out. My hand was as shriveled as a seabird’s claw as I passed it over.
The woman examined it closely. “May I take this?” she asked.
“So many records have been lost or destroyed…it could help some of the families find their loved ones, especially the children.” She traced the petals of a daisy sewn alongside one of the names.
“Or at least it could give them the knowledge that there’s no longer any need to keep searching. ”
I nodded, past caring. After all, the only thing left to do with it would be to sew a flower alongside my own name soon.
Basia asked me a few more questions about some of the names on the shawl, scribbling notes onto her clipboard.
“And how is it that you are still here?” she asked.
“The Swedish Red Cross came several weeks ago with their white buses. They collected all the Scandinavian prisoners from the camps and took them home.”
“They wouldn’t have known about Liv and me. We were Nacht und Nebel prisoners, lost behind a smokescreen of night and fog.”
She patted my hand. “I’ll let the authorities know you’re here. Don’t worry, you’ll be going home soon.”
Home. I had no home anymore. Because they say home is where the heart is, and mine had been broken into a thousand pieces.
Somehow—I don’t know how—it stubbornly refused to stop beating, though.
I turned my face to the wall again and waited for the end to come, my heart ticking down the hours, like an unwound clock running out of time.
What I hadn’t reckoned with was Marta’s determination.
She now applied the same instinct she’d had for her own survival to everyone else in her care.
Against my will, she made me continue to take the nourishment provided in the hospital ward, she washed my face and combed my hair as if I were a child again, and she refused to allow me to die.
She reported to me daily on the progress of some of the children, the way the lucky ones had been reclaimed by family members.
So many had lost their parents in the camps, but they still had families, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, who came looking for them.
And Liv had helped that happen in a few cases, through the names she’d sewn into the shawl.
Then one day I was strong enough to get out of bed and walk, with Marta’s assistance, down a corridor and out of the hospital doors into the open air.
We sat on a bench in the summer sunshine, and I lifted my face to its warmth. “They are making the arrangements to take you home, to Norway,” she told me.
“You don’t want me here anymore?” I asked. It surprised me that the muscles of my face could remember how to smile, but the warmth of the sunshine seemed to have thawed them a little.
“Certainly not! You don’t belong in this place. No one should stay here unless they have to.”
“What about you and Zygmunt, then? Surely you should be thinking of going home too, starting your new life together properly?”
She shook her head. “We do have to be here. Somebody needs to tell the world about what happened, and make sure the camps aren’t simply erased from history. We’re going to stay until the whole world knows the truth, and make sure those who no longer have a voice have their stories told.”
Marta came to help me get ready on the day of my departure. Not that there was much to pack, just the few things from the Red Cross, along with the wedding dress and a silver-handled brush and comb set that Marta said Zygmunt had “organized” for me.
“Old habits die hard,” I said, with a smile. “But are you sure you don’t want to keep the wedding dress?” It was all I had left of Liv, but I knew how much it must mean to Marta, too.
She shook her head. “It’s yours. And, anyway, you still have a promise to keep, don’t you?”
I shrugged but was secretly relieved she hadn’t taken me up on the offer.
Then it was time to go. Marta and I clung together and shed a few tears as Basia appeared in the doorway to take me to the waiting transport. We’d been through so much. Survived so much. “Thank you,” was all I could say, even though those words hardly covered all she had done for me.
“Go on, now,” she said, gently pushing me away. “It’s time to go home.”
“I’ll keep in touch,” I promised. “I’ll never forget you.” And then I climbed into the white bus, with a red cross painted on its side, and heard other people speaking Norwegian for the first time in nearly a year.
*
It took time to be repatriated. There was paperwork to be sorted out in Oslo and more medical treatment in the hospital there, healing a few more of the wounds I carried. My broken body was mending, but my broken heart and mind would take far longer. I still wasn’t sure a cure for them existed.
My hospital bed was surrounded by a curtain, giving me a little privacy on the ward. One afternoon, a nurse popped her head through it, saying, “You have a visitor.”
And then he was standing there. Euan. He’d survived the bitter North Sea crossings and the commando raids, after all, and he’d never forgotten me.
He sank onto his knees at my bedside, taking my hands in his, and neither of us could speak for a while through the tears we wept for each other. He traced the numbers on my arm, and I saw the anguish written in his eyes as he took some of my pain from me, sharing the burden.
That was the moment when the half of me that had gone began to be replaced by something else.
No one could ever take Liv’s place, of course, but I learned that when your heart breaks wide open, it makes space for other things.
You will never be the same. But you can find new ways to go on.
With him, I saw at last that I could keep my promise to Liv.
He was the one who offered me the gift of a new life.
When we could speak once more, he told me how he’d searched for me when he’d heard Liv and I had been arrested in Narvik.
“Your friend Nina took over the role of wireless operator after you’d gone.
She was determined to get the news out of what had happened to you. The priest at the church helped her.”
He said it had been relatively easy to track us to the camp in Grini, and then through his contacts, he’d heard we were to be among the transport of prisoners to camps in Germany.
Although it went against his orders, he’d risked everything to come and stand on the quayside that day and watch the ship leave, just to get one last glimpse.
And I told him how the sight of his face in the crowd had helped give me the strength to carry on in my darkest moments.
Now that he could, he talked more about the raids he’d been part of.
“Individually, they may not sound like much,” he said, “but the Norwegian resistance, with a little help from us, managed to make enough trouble to keep more than three hundred thousand German troops stuck here. They had to defend Norway at all costs, and that meant stationing men and equipment and their biggest battleships along the coast. It was our joint efforts that kept them here. Just imagine the difference it could have made to the course of the war if that hadn’t been the case. ”
He told me, too, how he’d kept searching for me, although the veil of night and fog had made the task almost impossible. The first concrete news he’d had was only when the Norwegian prisoners at Ravensbrück had been brought home in the white buses.
“Your friend Sylvia Salvesen had continued to find ways to keep records and to smuggle information out of the camp. She was the one who said you’d been taken to Auschwitz. And then another prisoner, Kirsten Brunvoll, said she’d last seen you and Liv at the selection ramp in the camp.”
“Kirsten! She survived!”
He nodded. “Against all the odds, like you. She was eventually forced to march back to Ravensbrück from Auschwitz and was reunited with the others there. But she thought you couldn’t have survived, given her experiences in the camp. She and Sylvia will be so glad to hear you made it home.”
Once I was finally well enough to be discharged from the hospital, Euan borrowed a car from a friend in the embassy, and we drove back to Narvik. We made frequent stops along the way, taking our time.