Torgau to make ammunition, but many of us refused. The Geneva convention forbade us to make ammunition. So in retaliation we were sent to another work Kommando in Koenigsberg. Torgau and Koenigsberg were satellites of Ravensbrück. Ravensbrück was Heinrich Himmler’s baby! His pet project, you might say. He would sell the women’s services to factories all over Germany.”
Once again Annette stopped speaking. She seemed to summon up courage before continuing. “This is difficult,” she said.
“Do you want to wait?”
“No. Please listen.”
Marshall visualized the young girl Annette at his hiding place in Paris. He remembered seeing her as she bent her head to flip her hair forward, positioned a hair ribbon, then lifted her head and tied the ribbon on top. She shook her hair so that it fell into place, her head beribboned like a package. That memory made him ache.
“We were sent to Koenigsberg-sur-Oder, across the border in Occupied Poland, where we leveled an airstrip for the Luftwaffe. The hangars were disguised so the Allies wouldn’t see them from the air. We worked on a plateau, in fierce wind and snow. All I had to wear was a thin cotton dress, no gloves or coat or hat, and it was the coldest winter I had ever known. Oh, but perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. It is no matter. As you want. After the first snow they gave us coats. Some were nice and some were ragged. You can comprehend how they collected such garments. Each morning I stuffed my clothing with the straw from my mattress.
“The appel began each morning outside the barracks at four and then again after work. They had to make sure no one had escaped, and they would call the roll again and again. But there was no guard tower there, for it was too cold to escape. We had to stand still in the cold for the appel. We tried to stand as closely together as possible. During the appel we had to be sure to stand straight. If you weren’t strong enough to work, you might be shot. We don’t know why we weren’t shot. There were five hundred women, half of whom were French. At Ravensbrück where there were so many women, the appel went on for hours. The appel was smaller, so we didn’t have to stand for so long, but sometimes they made us stand naked, and they turned the water hose on us. It was the winter. They made us stand there while the water froze on our bodies.”
“My God, Annette. How did you survive?” Marshall blurted.
She didn’t answer that. “The work Kommando—the airstrip,” she said. “We cut out large blocks of frozen sod and lifted it into wagons that ran on rails. The rails were short, and from time to time we had to move them with our hands and then lift the wagons to fit onto the rails. We were moving the sod from one place to another. We were cows!
“We tried to work crowded together, for warmth. We took turns shielding each other from the wind. We hugged and huddled. As our hands began to freeze, we thrust them into each other’s clothing to thaw. We fashioned a system for keeping our blood warm. We blew warm breath on each other and rubbed each other. If someone began to whimper or fall behind, we quickly surrounded her and circulated our meager warmth around her. Our model was the herd animal, the clustering that keeps deer and cattle alive in the winter.
“A truck arrived with soup at midday, and we scrambled to fill our bowls. Sometimes it was hot, but unless you managed to be first in line, the soup quickly became cold. It was watery, just a few scraps of potato or rutabaga. At night there was a piece of bread and sometimes a bit of ersatz cheese. In the morning we had something they called coffee. It wasn’t coffee. It was watery and tasteless. We suspected it was soaking water from old leather.
“The women were all thin and hungry. In our miserable section of the barracks there was a little fire where we could cook what food we could find—that is, if we could find wood or coal. Sometimes we burned our own bed slats. One day Jacqueline smuggled to us a goose egg one of the kitchen workers had let her have. We hunched over the little stove, and we boiled it so we wouldn’t spill any. But when we cracked and peeled it,