Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,101
coat. She’ll wear what they give her,” Frau Haffner said. “When she gets there.”
A car came for Anna. She was driven to a building in Berlin, an office, where documents were produced, and a woman sitting at a desk entered her name on the documents and stamped each page with the date and added her signature and Anna was taken outside, and she waited on the pavement with a woman in uniform until a car pulled up, and then she was driven to a camp near Hanover. Not far from the camp there were homes with nice gardens and fenced fields, and it all looked tranquil and untouched by the war, and she thought—this odd idea came to her—that she was being taken out of the war and sent to a distant country she had not known existed. Then she saw the concentration camp. Barbed wire, dark earth. Low, mean-looking buildings. Huts with small windows. And the people she saw moving between the huts were SS or Gestapo guards. Or they were prisoners.
She saw corpses heaped up outside the huts. They were just bones with some skin on them. Anna looked away, but everywhere it was the same, and inside the hut it was almost the same, except that some of the corpses were still living. The hut was overcrowded, and yet every day more prisoners were forced in the door. These people, the newcomers, were being moved from camps in the east, just ahead of the advancing Russian army. Anna saw sickness in the feverish, sunken faces around her. The floor was covered in mud and excrement. Some women sat in it or even lay down in it, having no strength to do anything else. Anna stood, her back to the wall, arms behind her, fingernails digging into the damp wood. In this hut a baby was born. It made no sound; someone took it away. Later, Anna climbed into an empty bunk. When she woke, a woman took her to a place where they were handing out food, partly cooked potatoes, one half to each prisoner, and she took her half and ate it, shoving it into her mouth, trying not to gag.
* * *
In April 1945 the British army came and liberated the camp. Anna heard the soldiers shouting: Sie sind frei. Sie sind frei. You are free.
When the soldiers entered the camp, they said no one should be afraid, everyone was going to be helped. Anna heard the soldiers also saying to each other, Fuck it. Fucking hell.
The worst jobs, cleaning out the huts, for example, the British ordered the SS guards to do, without gloves, without overalls. The British stood over the SS guards with guns and said, Work harder, put your back into it. They made the SS guards carry the dead to a huge grave dug with tractors.
The British gave the prisoners army rations. Some of the prisoners ate ravenously and got sicker, and some died because their bodies were too frail and desiccated to take that kind of nourishment. Many were ill with dysentery and typhus. Medical personnel arrived, British doctors and nurses. They prescribed special diets, invalid food. Anna understood English, and some of the doctors spoke a little German. To her, they looked like angels. She didn’t want to know what she looked like to them. Her head was shaved because of the lice. She had sores on her mouth, and she hadn’t eaten for days, but she wasn’t sick; she had been vaccinated against typhus, she told the soldiers. One of the soldiers spoke Czech. She repeated to him that she had been vaccinated against typhus. My mother was a doctor, she said. She liked the British nurses and watched with interest as they tended to people. They asked if she would like to help them. They sent her from one ward to another in search of a roll of bandages or a tube of ointment. The camp’s hospital had been built by the Nazis specifically for men in the Panzer brigades who’d been wounded in battle. It provided the British medical staff with modern equipment, surgical instruments, beds, everything needed to care for the liberated prisoners.
Sometimes she looked at these people, these survivors of atrocities, almost with antipathy. They were so sick, so pathetic, so noisy in their suffering, some of them. She felt impatient and tried to atone by saying, Let me find you another pillow. Let me help you to sit up.