She staggered to the door and pushed it open, blinking in the April sunlight. Her legs felt so weak that she could scarcely stand, but she knew she needed to go and find someone who could help Vivi. Every minute counted. Holding on to the walls of the hut for support, she made her way to the open space of the square in front of the rows of barracks.
From force of habit, she glanced up nervously at the nearest watchtower in the fence that enclosed the camp. But instead of the silhouette of a Nazi soldier with a machine gun trained on the camp interior, an empty square of sky was framed beyond the abandoned tower. Leaning against the side of a hut for support, she stumbled towards the central square.
It was the smell that hit her first. Overlying the background stink of death and decay, the usual wisp of acrid, grey smoke still hung in the air above the brick chimney behind her. But as she neared the square a more pungent stench filled her nostrils. As she rounded the corner of the last hut, she choked as a thick pall of smoke enveloped her, eddying around her on a gust of breeze. As it cleared, she could make out a smouldering heap of what looked like railway sleepers in the middle of the parade ground. A charred hand reached from the top of the pile, pointing towards a heaven that she no longer believed could exist, as her numbed senses told her that this was a hastily assembled funeral pyre. The crematorium was too slow: the camp staff had tried to burn as many bodies as possible before the camp was liberated, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of what had gone on there.
Lined up on the parade ground, where once they had forced the prisoners to stand for hours on end in all weathers as headcounts were made or punishments meted out, were some of those same camp guards. American troops, wearing rounded helmets and khaki uniforms, held them at gunpoint. A prisoner staggered on to the square, his legs barely able to hold him up, and launched himself forward, trying to attack one of the SS guards. He screamed as he did so, uttering inarticulate, agonised cries, giving voice to the outrage that the guards’ inhuman treatment of so many innocent people for so many years warranted. His weakness made his attack ineffectual, though, and two of the American soldiers caught him and held him off the SS personnel, gently helping him away.
Relinquishing the support of the hut wall, Claire stumbled across to where a soldier wearing a white armband emblazoned with a red cross was stooping over the body of a collapsed prisoner. ‘S’il vous plaît’ – she clutched at his sleeve – ‘my friend. You have to help her. Please.’
The medic straightened up, realising that the prisoner on the ground was beyond help. She tugged on the sleeve of his jacket again. ‘Please, come with me.’
His voice was kind, even though she couldn’t understand the words he said. He tried to make her sit down but she found the strength to resist, to pull him towards the hut. Realising her intent, he went with her, following her in through the door and over to the corner of the bunk that she and Vivi shared.
Claire knelt down and seized her friend’s hand. ‘Vivi, help is here!’ she cried.
But there was no answering squeeze of her fingers, no flutter of eyelids opening to display a pair of clear hazel eyes.
And then she realised that the rattle of Vivi’s breathing had fallen silent and the blue and white striped shirt hung in motionless folds over her heart.
A heart that had been so filled with courage and strength.
A heart that beat no more.
The medic laid a tender hand on Claire’s emaciated shoulders as she knelt by the wooden bed.
She sobbed into the soft halo of Vivi’s copper-coloured hair, lit by a shaft of sunlight which crept though the dirty windows to illuminate the two women huddled together in the empty hut.
Harriet
I’d never even heard of Flossenbürg, so I go online to research it. I’m horrified to find that there were hundreds of so-called work camps like it scattered across Nazi-occupied Europe, from France in the west to Russia in the east. The numbers are horrendous, a grotesque record of what happened in the concentration camps. I discover that Claire and Vivi