share of fresh meat. Months before, there had been cross words among the women about feeding the rats in this way, since they could only get bigger, but these creatures were relentless in their quest for food. If they had none, they turned towards us, nibbling at the skin of women too sick to move, too lifeless to realise. If the creatures were distracted, or satiated, at least we had some respite from their prowling. I hated the vermin, but at the same time, I could admire their survival instinct. Vermin or human, we were all simply trying to live.
Rosa and I cleaned around Irena with whatever we could find, she enjoying skin-to-skin time with her baby – we had no clothes to dress him in anyway. He fed hungrily at her papery breast, his little cheeks sucking for dear life on almost dry flesh. The hormone release caused more cramping in her tired belly, but you could tell she almost enjoyed the draw on her body. Rosa brewed some nettle tea from the leaves we had saved, and Irena’s face was pure joy for an hour or so. But as the dark diminished and daylight began licking through the cracks in the walls, the atmosphere in the hut became edgy. Time for Irena and her baby was limited.
Some of the women moved towards her, a low hum gathering as they encircled her bed, forming into a welcome song for the baby. In the real world, they would have brought gifts, food or flowers. Here, they had nothing to give, except the love squirrelled away in a protected corner of their hearts, some hope they occasionally let flutter; so many had already lost children, been parted, ached in every way possible for the smell of their babies’ wet heads, siblings, nieces, nephews. They were all part of the longing. One woman offered up a blessing, in the absence of a rabbi, and they accepted the baby as one of their own. His mother named him Jonas, after her husband, and smiled as he became part of history, recognised.
Rosa and I sat in the corner, me as the only non-Jew in the hut, taking stock of the beautiful sound. I had one ear out for the camp waking up, the guards shouting their orders, the constant clumping of their boots on the hard, frosted ground outside. It was only a matter of time before they entered our domain. Hiding the child was pointless. We had tried as much once before – a newborn’s constant, mewling hunger cries were impossible to muffle. That time, it had resulted in the loss of both mother and baby in the coldest, cruellest way possible. If we could save at least one, it counted as something. Irena had children she may well find again. Unlikely, but always possible.
In the end, Irena managed almost three hours of precious contact with her newborn. At seven, the door was thrown open, a fierce wind whipping as the guards came in to make their roll call. This hut had been excused an outside count only because so many of the women were bed-bound and the guards grew dangerously irritated if they fell during the long wait. I had appealed to the camp Commandant for an inside count and been successful – a surprising and rare concession on their part.
It was the first guard who sensed the new arrival. I was almost sure this particular one had worked in hospitals before the war, possibly as a midwife; she looked at me with deep suspicion, a grimy furrow to her large brow, particularly when I was with the Jewish women, as if she could not contemplate even touching them. She had no qualms, however, about employing the butt of her cosh, a target she perfected in the base of their wizened skeletons to cause maximum pain. She also had a second, more sinister, speciality.
It was her nose that caught the coppery taint of birth blood, and not that of the second, shadowy guard.
‘You’ve had another one, then?’
I walked forward, as I always did. The exchange had become a game I was almost certain to lose, but it never stopped me trying.
‘The baby’s only been born an hour,’ I lied. ‘It’s not long. Just a little more time. It won’t interfere with the count.’
She scanned up and down the hut, the sixty or so sets of eyes upon her, Irena’s normally dull gaze the whitest I had ever seen. For a second, the guard looked as if she was considering a minor reprieve. Then, she sniffed and grunted, ‘You know the rules. I don’t make them. It’s time.’ The justification for ninety per cent of the degradation in the camp was the same – it’s not our fault, we’re only following orders. The other ten per cent was pure enjoyment.
It was then Irena burst out of her own birth world, clutching the baby to her bare breast, springing off the bed and backing into the corner near the stove, a trickle of blood following her.
‘No, no please,’ she cried. ‘I can do anything. I will do anything, anything you want.’
The guard’s granite reflection told Irena her bargaining power was worthless, so she turned on herself: ‘Take me instead. Take me now, but leave the baby.’ Irena aimed her frenzied voice at me. ‘Anke? You can care for the baby, can’t you? If I’m gone?’
I nodded a yes, but in reality I couldn’t; the few non-Jews allowed to keep their babies had little enough milk for their own newborns, let alone another one scraping at the breast. The infants succumbed to malnutrition in a matter of weeks, and to glimpse a baby beyond a month was unusual. I wouldn’t even need to ask – not one of these desperate appeals had ever worked. We all held our breath for Irena, a scene we had witnessed too many times, but which never ceased to feel completely surreal. A mother having to beg for her baby’s life.
The female guard sighed, boredom apparent. The next step was inevitable, but every mother, if they weren’t immobile or nearing an unconscious state, made the same unrealistic plea. It was a mother’s reflex: laying down your own life to save a new one.
‘Now come on,’ said the guard, moving towards Irena, ‘don’t make it harder. Don’t make me hurt you.’
She made a grab for the cloth, and Irena backed herself further into the corner. The baby’s sudden howling almost masked the crack to Irena’s body, and the guard emerged from the scuffle with the cloth and tiny limbs loosely wrapped. She turned, eyes narrowing to match the thin line of her lips. The heavy boots clomped as she marched towards the door, while we immediately crowded around Irena, as a protective field; if she ran out in pursuit of the guard she would almost certainly be shot by snipers on the lookout posts. She lunged like the fiercest of grizzly bears out of the shadows, broken teeth bared, a tornado of desperation, and we caught her in our human net. The high, shrill screams would have filled the air outside, and I imagined the camp stopping for a second, knowing the deathly protocol was about to happen.
Instantly, the women started up a song, a lament, the volume rising rapidly, as the group took on a unified swaying, with Irena at its core, a shield around her suffering. It was meant as comfort, but there was another purpose – to mask the sound of the baby hitting the barrel of water, as shocking as gunfire if you’ve ever heard it. Rosa caught my eye, nodded and was through the door in an instant, hoping to scoop up the pitiful body after the guard tossed it aside, in time to stop the rats and the guard dogs staking their claim. A placenta was one thing, but a human body – a person. It was unthinkable.
After several moments, Irena’s shrieking died away, replaced with a low moan seeping from her heart’s core, a consistent braying that was beyond words. I had only ever heard such a sound during summers spent on my uncle’s farm in Bavaria, when the newborn calves were taken away to market. Their bereft mothers kept up a constant, needy calling throughout the day and well into the night, searching blindly for their offspring. I would lie in bed with my hands over my ears, desperate to block out the torturous mooing. As I got older, I always asked Uncle Dieter when it was time to take the calves to market and arranged my visits to avoid them.
I cleared up as best I could, and then busied myself seeing to some of the other sick women in the hut, changing a few meagre dressings, giving them water and just holding them as they coughed uncontrollably. At those times, I thanked the automated nurse training I had been through, where doing menial tasks required little thinking. I didn’t want to
