Mother stepped to the door. “Close this, Caroline. For goodness sakes, what is wrong with you?”
“It’s from Paul. He’s at…”
“At where, dear?”
“The Hôtel Lutetia.”
“Why didn’t you say so, Caroline?” she said, handing the witch hazel back to Mr. Merrill. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
After all, our bags had been packed for months.
1945
Beauty Road was no longer beautiful come February 1945. The Germans used the window boxes and many of the linden trees for firewood. The road’s black slag was covered with frozen slush, and snow was still piled high about the camp, a layer of ash collected atop it—fallout from the furnaces. The cage of exotic animals was long gone.
I dodged groups of women out braving the cold, some in gangs, some wandering alone. On Sundays, Beauty Road teemed with a rowdy jumble of women of all nationalities, some carrying a rinsed pair of bloomers or a uniform shift between them, airing it out to dry. The camp had become impossibly crowded as the Red Army pushed west across Poland and transports of prisoners the Germans evacuated from concentration camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek arrived hourly. We soon had prisoners from twenty-two countries. Poles were still by far the largest group, but we now had among us British prisoners, Chinese, Americans. Everyone knew Himmler kept many of his Prominente, special prisoners, in the bunker, including an American pilot who’d been found near Ravensbrück, having parachuted from his failing plane.
Though most of us wore the same blue and gray striped uniforms, we could guess a prisoner’s nationality by the way she wore hers. You could always tell a French girl. Each tied her kerchief in a unique, charming way, and they all sewed chic little bags called bautli from organized scraps to hold their mess kits. Some even stitched little white collars onto their uniform shifts and made lovely bows from rags. The Russian prisoners, many of them Red Army nurses and doctors captured on the battlefield, were unmistakable as well. They were a disciplined group and all wore their camp uniforms in exactly the same way. Each had kept her Russian-issued leather army boots and wore the camp head scarf tied in a perfect square knot at the nape of her neck.
It was easy to recognize newly arrived prisoners to the camp. Once camp authorities ran out of uniforms, new prisoners wore a crazy assortment of mismatched clothing taken from the booty piles. They looked like exotic birds in their parrot frocks, as we called them, a gaudy mix of ruffled skirts and bright blouses. Some were lucky enough to find warm men’s jackets, all chalked by camp staff with a big white Saint Andrew’s cross across the back in case the wearer escaped.
Two Russian girls stood at their makeshift store between Blocks 29 and 31, where one could buy a sweater or stockings or a comb, for the price of a bread ration. Their lookout stood close by, alert for signs of Binz.
Rumor was, Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of New York City’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was our fellow prisoner. A group of female British paratroopers captured by the SS in France too. Charles de Gaulle’s niece Geneviève. And everyone knew Himmler’s own sister had been a Ravensbrück prisoner, arrested for race defilement—relations with a Polish man. The girls in the front office said even she was not spared the twenty-five lashes that came with her sentence.
Binz turned up the music that was playing throughout the camp even higher and pelted us with war songs and marches. I looked to the sky as three planes flew overhead—German. I could tell by the sound of the engines and the lack of an air-raid siren.
The previous summer we’d heard about the Normandy invasion thanks to Herr Fenstermacher, but no one needed to tell us Germany was rapidly losing the war. The signs were everywhere. Daily air raids. Shorter Appells. Fewer work details.
The Nazis were giving up.
They did not give up killing us, though. The windowless black transport buses came to the blocks with new urgency. Fat Dr. Winkelmann in his long leather coat and his partner old Nurse Marschall prowled the camp, looking for sick prisoners to mark down for the buses.
Sick women hid everywhere to escape: under the blocks, above the ceilings, behind the coal bins. Zuzanna invented a method of scraping the arms of women arriving from evacuated Auschwitz to cause their tattooed