The Prize (53 page)

‘Do you still want to tell me?’

‘I don’t know, except it is now all that matters again. It has never stopped mattering. I suppose if you know the truth about that, you will know me and have some understanding—of why I treated you the way I did that first night we met in the palace, of—of the way I’ve been withdrawn and strange, I’m sure you’ve seen that—of the real reason I sent you away.’ She paused. ‘It wasn’t Lilly, you see. It was me.’ Her green eyes studied his features for long silent seconds. ‘And finally—finally—it’s why I cannot marry you or see you again.’

‘Emily—’

‘I want to talk,’ she persisted tiredly, and her speech had thickened. ‘I have to, sooner or later, so that you’ll know why this is our last time together. You deserve to know, because of what you’ve expected of me. And besides—I guess—my poor brain—I’m so lightheaded now—besides, I think, for once I’m drugged enough to be uninhibited.’

‘Emily, I’d rather you rest, and then—’

‘Now, Andrew, it’s got to be now. It is more important to me than anything in the world.’

‘All right, Emily,’ he said, and he pondered what might come, and for some unknown reason he felt fear.

‘You won’t mind if I don’t look at you while I talk?’ For a moment, she was quiet again, as if rummaging through her opiate-scattered brain. ‘Ravensbruck,’ she said, ‘that is where it began and ended. They called it, in German, the woman’s hell, but it was not nearly so pleasant as that.’

Her thoughts had wandered again, but her determination was strong, and she went on. ‘My mother and I were sent there, you know, fifty miles north of Berlin, and were to be kept alive as long as my father and Uncle Max worked for the government in Berlin.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen in Ravensbruck. When I was first put there, I was a scrawny girl just out of puberty, but the next year I began to mature, and before my fifteenth birthday, I was a woman—much more attractive than I am today—a woman with a serious child’s head. We lived like animals, deprived, ragged, filthy, and always in our fear of being Jews. But no one whipped or beat us or made us stand in the naked inspections, my mother and myself, because of my father and Uncle Max. And for me, most of the first two years, it was not such hell, because I had only then become a woman, and before I had been a child, and so this was almost the only life I knew well, and I had no real standard I would allow myself to compare it with. It seemed natural to me—as if it had always been—to wear a stinking and vermin-covered dress and underwear and to wear wooden shoes, to wake at five-thirty and have one cup of ersatz coffee for breakfast, and one tin can of cabbage soup for lunch, and one more for dinner, and to steal potato peelings from the garbage, to work eleven hours every day digging a road, to use a four-gallon drum for a toilet, to sleep with lice and my mother and one other on straw with one blanket for all three of us. I repeat, I refused to remember any other life, so I managed. It was my mother who suffered worse, but no matter about that. The real horror of the camp was not so much the indignities and punishments and suffering we saw—but the worse things we did not see. As the veterans in the Atlanta hospital where I work are often saying, there were constant latrine rumours. Some I could even verify, because I knew the French women and the Czech women. Our friends disappeared, and we knew it was true that fifty women a day were shot in the back of the neck and cremated. To speed up the liquidation, many of our friends were pressed to build a gas chamber, so we knew that existed. Then there were the scientific experiments, medical experiments— ;’

Craig thought of Dr. Farelli at Dachau, and then he listened again, still puzzled.

‘—and one experiment I knew about,’ said Emily, words dragging, ‘was done on the Polish female prisoners among us—by Dr. Karl Gebhardt, a surgeon from the University of Berlin, and Dr. Schidlausky, our senior medical officer. They were trying to prove something about sulphur drugs—and instead of white mice they used the Polish women. They infected them in their legs—cut their legs and put tetanus germs, sometimes with ground glass, or made artificial gangrene in the incisions—to study the results. Most of the girls died in anguish. But that is not my story. My first time—’

Her eyes held absently on the hotel window, and after an interval, she continued.

‘The Nazis were worried about their airmen who ditched in the water or navy sailors who had to jump in the water, when it was cold, in winter, and so they began experiments in freezing and heating of human beings. I don’t know much about this, except what I saw and what happened. It was a bad winter night, and we were all huddled around the stove in the barracks after seven or eight, after the cabbage soup, and the highest woman supervisor, the
Aufseherin
, who was under Colonel Schneider, the commandant—her name was Frau Hencke—she came in with two men guards. She was wearing her grey uniform, with the holster and pistol, and black boots, and carrying the whip.

‘She ordered all of us to stand in a line, and then went down the line grumbling, flicking the whip, shaking her head, complaining of our dirtiness and ugliness and dead eyes, and when she came to me, she looked me over, up and down, and said, “
Ja
, this is the one—this one will do nicely.” Immediately, my mother was terrified and wanted to know what they would do with me, and Frau Hencke said it was to be an honour for me, to give assistance—I think she said clerical assistance—to their doctors in the scientific experiments. I would be busy, she said, tonight and in the morning, but I could rest the next day.’ Emily sighed. ‘The beginning,’ she said.

For a while, she lay still, and then, slowly, she resumed.

‘It was ten below zero that night. It is hard now to remember how cold it was. I wore my sweater and my mother’s coat and a shawl someone loaned me, and I went with Frau Hencke and the guards—the ground was like iron and there were icicles from all the barracks buildings—and I thought we were going to the
Revier
, the huts that were our hospital, but we went past it, and on and on, until we came to a small brick building I had never seen, and Frau Hencke said this was the science experiment building and infirmary.

‘When we came near the entrance, I heard, over the wind, a man crying—it is wrenching to hear the sound of a man crying—and then a physician met us—Dr. Voegler, the assistant medical officer to Dr. Schidlausky—and he said that he would show me the experiment. They led me around the building to the side, and the man’s crying was louder. Do you know what they showed me? A young Polish prisoner—a thin Jewish boy with curly black hair. He was on a stretcher on the hard ground, and he was all naked—and it was ten below zero.

‘I wanted to run. I had never seen a grown man all naked, that was one thing, but the main thing was the bestiality—his wrists and ankles tied—helpless and naked on a stretcher. And then in front of me a guard poured a pail of ice water over him—and he screamed and cried. Dr. Voegler and Frau Hencke took me inside the infirmary and said that this was their freezing experiment, and it would be followed by a warming experiment. The idea was to see how frozen a subject could become and still be saved. They told me they must learn how they could save the glorious aviators of the Luftwaffe who went down in the Channel. And now they said I had been chosen to help them prove that someone frozen like that boy could be saved. I remember I said, “I will do anything to help that poor boy live.” And the doctor said, “I am glad you are co-operative. You will have your chance in a few hours.”

‘Frau Hencke took me into an empty room—it had windows around like a hospital nursery, but they were draped. There was nothing in the room but a double bed and a chair. Frau Hencke was friendly and said she would get me hot milk and rolls—I had not had such luxury in two years—and then I must nap, and they would wake me when it was time to work. I took my milk and rolls, and then took off my shoes and rested on the bed, with the lights off, but I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking of that poor freezing Jewish boy on the stretcher in that weather. Maybe I dozed off. I can no longer remember. But I suppose some hours passed, and suddenly the lights in the room were on and I was sitting up, and Dr. Voegler and Frau Hencke were standing there.

‘Dr. Voegler said, “Fr
ن
ulein Stratman, now it is time. Our heating experiment begins. We are bringing in the test person—the boy you want to help—and now we want to find out if he can be unfrozen and warmed up with animal heat—the heat of the human body.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “Take off your clothes, Fr
ن
ulein,” he commanded. I wanted to know how much to take off, and he said every stitch, and I was not yet fifteen and ashamed of the size of my breasts, and how I was a woman, and I refused. The doctor then said the experiment could only be made by two people, one cold like the boy, and one warm like myself, and I was to nestle close to him, embrace him on the bed, to transmit my heat to him and see if it would bring him back to normal. I screamed that I couldn’t, and then the doctor said that if I would not co-operate, they would go and bring my mother in my place, and I would watch. And so then I did not resist. Frau Hencke took off my patched sweater and the wool skirt, and she took off my cotton brassière and pulled down my pants, and I was naked, and I did what they told me. I stretched out on the bed, with one hand trying to cover my breasts and the other hand below. Then Dr. Voegler and Frau Hencke went out, and they carried in the poor, naked Jewish boy, unconscious, numbed like metal by the cold, and they threw him on the bed next to me. They left on one light in the room, and parted the drapes of a window halfway. The doctor demanded that I take the boy in my arms and hug him, and press him against my breasts and belly, and caress him, to see if this would revive him. The doctor said the boy’s life was in my hands. And they would be watching, with others, from the window to see that I did what I must do.

‘At first, alone with the boy, I was repelled—remember my age. I had never touched a man or seen one like this—but then I kept seeing they were watching me, and I looked at the boy, so unconscious, so suffering, and he was alive, I could tell, and then I didn’t care, I only wanted him to live. I turned him sideways towards me—and pressed against his limp icy body—and I hugged him and stroked him. How can I tell you the rest? The witnesses knew it would happen—they had done this for weeks before—but I did not know. In an hour he was conscious, the boy, but weak, not knowing where he was or what was going on—and then Dr. Voegler came in and took his temperature, and it was eighty-four degrees—and then the doctor left, and the boy began to revive as I hugged him and ran my hands over him. And then he opened his eyes and kept looking at me, at my breasts, and suddenly—I can’t tell you—he had an erection—and he was between my legs before I could prevent it, he was like some alley dog, and he broke my virginity and I was bleeding, and he sobbed that he was sorry, sorry, but he couldn’t control himself, and he kept on until it was over, and then he fell back and slept. I had never known such a thing and was sickened, but Dr. Voegler and two other physicians and Frau Hencke came in and examined him and then congratulated me. They said his temperature had jumped to normal in coitus, faster than by any other means known except a hot bath, and that I would be rewarded with a fine breakfast, and he would live. I couldn’t eat the breakfast, I had lost everything, but I told myself at least this was for something—to save a poor Polish boy’s life.

‘In the morning, I told my mother a lie about clerical work, and tried to live with myself, and a few days later, I found it was all a waste anyway. They had taken the same boy from his barracks and put him in a vat of ice water outside the infirmary, when it snowed, and then carried him in and put him between two naked French-women, but he died there between them.’

She lay inert, gazing off, still not meeting his eyes.

He wanted to touch her. He wanted to take her to him and make her forget all that was dead in the past but so alive in her. But he knew that he could not.

He said, ‘And that was what happened in Ravensbruck?’

‘The beginning,’ she said, ‘only the beginning, I told you. I will make less of the rest that followed, because that was the most of it. A week after the experiment—’

She faltered, briefly.

‘Emily,’ he said, ‘I—’

‘A week after,’ she persisted, ‘Frau Hencke, the woman supervisor, sent for me in her private quarters. It was dark, before dinner. I rapped on her door, and she called to come in. She was lying on the sofa of her small living room, covered to the neck with a blanket. She was a husky woman, not stout but big-boned, a woman of maybe thirty-five, with a deep voice that frightened all the inmates. She was a power in the camp. She told me to lock the door, and I did, and she told me to come to her, and I did. She asked me how old I was, and I said fifteen in a few weeks. She said she had been impressed with my behaviour and courage the night of the experiment, and she had thought about me every day since. “When I undressed you,” she said, “I must admit I never saw a girl with a more wonderful figure.” I was scared, but I thanked her. She said she had suffered to see me on the bed letting that Jewish boy make love to me. If it had been in her hands, she would not have allowed any man to despoil such a lovely virgin. “But we will forget that,” she said “because I have good news for you.” She told me that, aside from Colonel Schneider, she was the most important person in Ravensbruck. She was in a position to save lives, make life agreeable with comforts. She was prepared now to do this for my mother and myself. She would take me under her wing. I would be her protégée. But in a week I had become older, and I was suspicious. “Why do you do this?” I wanted to know. And she said, “Because Emily, I am a foolish woman to have fallen in love with you.” ’