Claire would lie listening to the labouring of Vivi’s breath, the faint rattle of her lungs mingling with the sound of the wind as it scoured the walls of the hut, and she would quietly pull the edge of her blanket over her friend, trying to will back her strength and protect her from the life-sapping harshness of the reality that surrounded them.
When they were roused from their bunk by the day shift workers who’d returned for the evening, the block senior made Vivi and Claire carry out the bodies of those who hadn’t made it to another night shift. They would add them to the piles on the wooden carts which did the rounds of the camp each morning and each evening, delivering stacks of corpses to the crematorium.
At last, the day came when the sun climbed a little higher above the razor wire surrounding the electrified perimeter of the camp, and patches of bare mud began to show through the snow covering the ground. As they trudged to their shift in the munitions factory one evening, Claire whispered to Vivi that they had done it: they’d survived the Dachau winter. Surely there wouldn’t be another one, she told her friend – the war would end and they’d be free by the time the next snows fell on the camp. Vivi had smiled and nodded but couldn’t speak, as a coughing fit seized her and convulsed her bones, rattling them like the bare branches of the trees outside the gates of the camp that shook and shivered in the wind.
New prisoners continued to arrive at Dachau, in greater numbers than ever. Some of the trains that pulled up alongside the camp pulled open-topped trucks filled with rubble and coal and raw materials for the factories. But others drew long chains of those wooden-sided cattle-cars, and when the guards drew back the bolts that fastened the sliding doors another human cargo was discharged. In the barracks, the new arrivals would tell of the head-high piles of dead bodies, which had to be unloaded from the train and stacked beside the tracks. Some of the prisoners said they had been brought to Dachau from other camps which were being evacuated as the Allies advanced. Wherever they came from, they all had stories to tell of torture and murder and starvation and slave labour. And every one of those camps seemed to have a tall chimney at its centre which breathed the stench of death into the skies over Europe.
The new arrivals also brought with them fresh outbreaks of lice and fleas and disease that spread quickly in the already squalid barracks. The women did their best to help each other, cleaning one another’s heads, offering water and tending the sick as best they could. But survival was becoming an impossible challenge. As the population grew, dysentery filled the barracks with its sickening stench and the milder winds of spring brought with them a resurgence of the deadly kiss of typhus.
It was April. Still cold enough to cause a frost to form on the roofs of the barracks overnight and to freeze Claire’s hands and feet as she and Vivi walked back to their block after another night shift in the armaments factory. Every bone in her body ached with cold, exhaustion and hunger, the Holy Trinity of the concentration camp. The sky beyond the watchtower glowed red as another dawn broke over Dachau, but the column of grey smoke rising from the tall brick chimney in the centre of the camp stained the beauty of the sunrise with its grim pall.
Vivi’s cough was dry and painful-sounding as she lowered herself wearily on to the bunk. Claire brought her a tin cup filled with water, but Vivi had already sunk into a deep sleep by the time she came back from the tap, so she set it carefully beneath the bed for later. She drew the edge of her blanket over her friend’s wasted, angular body, noticing a rash of dark bites on her chest where the blue and white striped over-shirt hung loose from the concavity beneath her collarbones.
Later that day, as Claire drifted in and out of a troubled slumber, a sudden commotion in the hut forced her fully awake.
Some of the women who were supposed to be out working the day shift had returned to the barracks and the noise of their boots hurrying back and forth across the floorboards made the hut walls reverberate.