five across, in the shower room. A shower attendant in white coveralls hit the women in front of us with a truncheon, leaving red welts on their backsides, as they ran to the showerheads. I stayed near Mrs. Mikelsky and braced for the sting of the rubber. She held baby Jagoda close to her, shivering so badly it was as if cold water were already running over her. A prisoner with a green badge on her sleeve came to Mrs. Mikelsky, put two hands around the baby’s skinny, naked body, and pulled. Mrs. Mikelsky held Jagoda tight.
“Give it to me,” the prisoner-guard said.
Mrs. Mikelsky only held tighter.
“She’s a good baby,” I said to the guard.
The guard pulled harder at the child. Would they tear her in two?
“It can’t be helped,” the guard said. “Don’t make a scene.”
The baby cried out, which caught the attention of the nasty head wardress, Dorothea Binz, who came, almost at a run, from the front of the building, a second guard close behind. The name Dorothea means “God’s gift,” and a name could not have been more wrong for a person.
Binz came to a stop next to Mrs. Mikelsky and pointed her leather crop at little blond Jagoda.
“Is the father German?”
Mrs. Mikelsky glanced at me, her brow creased.
“No, Polish,” she said.
“Just take it,” Binz said with a wave of her crop.
The guard who had come with Binz held Mrs. Mikelsky from behind while the first guard pried Jagoda from her mother’s arms.
“I made a mistake,” Mrs. Mikelsky said. “Yes, actually the father is German…” She glanced at me.
“From Berlin,” I said. “A real patriot.”
The green badge held naked Jagoda to her shoulder and looked at Binz.
“Just take it,” Binz said with a jerk of her head.
The guard hiked the baby higher on her shoulder and walked back through the incoming crowd.
Mrs. Mikelsky crumpled to the floor like a burning piece of paper as she watched her baby be taken away. “No, please, where are you taking her?”
Binz poked her crop into Mrs. Mikelsky’s ribs and pushed her toward the showers.
I folded my arms across my naked chest and stepped closer to Binz.
“That child will die without her mother,” I said.
Binz turned to me, her expression bringing to mind a bubbling teapot.
“There is no greater cruelty,” I said.
Binz raised her crop to me.
“You Poles…”
I closed my eyes, bracing myself, waiting for the sting of the leather. Where would the blows land?
Suddenly I felt arms slide around me. Matka, her naked body smooth on mine.
“Please, Madame Wardress,” she said in her prettiest German. “She is out of her head to speak to you this way. How sorry we are—”
Was it my mother’s German that caused Binz to take a step back? Her gentle way?
“You tell her to keep her mouth shut,” Binz said, shaking her crop in my direction. She retreated through the crowd.
The guards shoved me dazed into a shower, my tears for poor Mrs. Mikelsky mixing with the sting of cold shower water.
—
THEY RELEASED US FROM quarantine two weeks later, with only our uniform shift and blouse, enormous wooden clogs, a toothbrush, a thin jacket, gray bloomers, a tin bowl and spoon, and a piece of soap we were told had to last two months. Two months? Surely we’d be home by then!
Our new home, Block 32, was much larger than the quarantine block. Women, some in their uniform gray shirts and striped dresses, some naked from the shower, ran about dressing, squaring up their straw mattresses, and tucking in their blue and white checked sheets. There was a small washroom in the block with three showerheads and three long sinks, each filled by means of a spout. Women sat with no modesty atop a platform drilled with holes to send nature’s offerings to the putrid ground below.
The block smelled like a chicken coop, rotten beets, and five hundred unwashed feet. All of the girls in the block spoke Polish, and most wore the red triangle of political prisoners. If there was any good thing about the camp, it was that so many of the prisoners were Polish—almost half—most there, like us, for what the Nazis called political crimes. After Poles, the next largest group was German women arrested for violating one of Hitler’s many rules or for criminal activity such as murder or theft.
“Square your bed!” shouted Roza, the Blockova, a German woman with sleepy eyes. She was from Berlin and not much older than my mother. Later I learned she’d been arrested for