Among Enemies: A Young Woman's Fight for Survival in Nazi Germany

27

I thought it might be May. The sun was warm and the nights milder.

Like most of the prisoners, I had diarrhea, and eventually I became weak. My hair was matted and crawling with lice. I had had no warm water for weeks and no soap. My clothing was caked to my body, and the chafing and itching became unbearable. We were all so infested with vermin that our skin was raw. Sunshine made it itch worse, so now I had to sit in the shade.

The long nights were cruel. Pain, itching, hunger, and cold kept me awake. On those nights, I dug deep into my memory, prowling over the things I had learned from my tutors. I tried to recite poems and do difficult mathematical problems. I began to build a house in my mind, and spent long hours pondering linear footage, their conversion into board feet, sizes and length of lumber, type of lumber, and quantity of nails. When I grew tired, I would doze off. Little did I realize then that by keeping my mind occupied, I was safeguarding my most precious belonging, hope. By so closely imagining a life after the war, I was granting myself a future. I remember being angry with myself for falling asleep just as I was visualizing the fireplace I would one day build in my dream house. It would be a fireplace that would keep me warm, behind a door that I could lock. Such fantasies were the only thing that sustained me.

There was another mental game I liked to play. In this one, I imagined myself in a roomful of foreigners where I alone was the sole interpreter. I answered questions in one tongue and then translated the discussion into another, scouring my brain for long-forgotten phrases and grammatical constructions that were once so familiar to me but that I had no opportunity to use anymore. If I could create a mental life of my own, one impenetrable to my captors, then I could at least have something they could never take from me. In this particular game, I gave myself the crucial advantage of understanding others while strictly controlling what they could understand of me.

Then one day, a toothless old guard approached me carrying a jar of fruit. He held it up for me, and I could see that he had brought blueberries. The German way of preserving fruit had made the berries rise to the top of the jar, leaving the juices on the bottom. At first, I thought that the fruit was a treat for me, then realized that he meant the gift to be medicinal. Peasants believed that the dry blueberries at the top would stop diarrhea. I didn’t know if it were true, but this unexpected kindness brought tears to my eyes. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a spoon. He unsnapped the rubber ring between the jar and the glass top and began feeding the top layer of blueberries to me. His hand was grimy, but I didn’t care. I opened my mouth like a bird receiving a worm, happy for the rare gift of wholesome food.

While he fed me, he crooned about what a poor child I was and how terrible he felt for me, a girl among all these men. In his sing-song way, as though talking to himself, he went on about Siberia where all the prisoners were headed, and how he too would have to go, though all he wanted was to return home to his wife and children. He also muttered about the watch guards who patrolled the compound along the fence, roughly describing the pattern of their movements back and forth, back and forth. The gentle, childlike rhythm of his talk had the lulling quality of a fairy tale, and it took me several minutes to understand that his words were deadly serious. He was giving me critical information to help me escape. He was telling me how to get out, and warning me that if I didn’t get out soon, I would end up with the others, in the far frozen east of Russia, in one of the gigantic labor camps there.

When the blueberries were finally gone, the old man left me. I shifted my gaze to the guards, watching as they came into view and then disappeared again. I had never bothered to time their comings and goings, but now, counting seconds as they became minutes, I saw that they vanished for long intervals. I watched a while longer, calculating. Finally, working up my courage, I waited for them to disappear once more, then ran to the segment of fence directly in front of me. I knelt down and started to dig and claw. The ground was soft now, and I counted as I dug. When I knew they were on their way back, I ran back to the barracks wall and sat. I repeated this same maneuver for hours. No one had paid the slightest attention to me. So far my luck had held, but the bigger the hole got, the greater the risk the guards would discover it. I had to act quickly. At dusk, I scurried up to the fence one last time. Taking a quick look to each side, I squeezed through the hole I had dug and ran into the surrounding woods. I would not be missed until “soup time” about two hours away.

I had no shoes, yet I ran and ran. When my lungs began to ache, I slowed down a little, then speeded up again as soon as I could bear it. I never encountered a soul and assumed the front line had advanced many kilometers by now. The fighting would be far ahead of me, and the last of the civilians and German deserters had been rounded up. It was eerily quiet. There was only me, wandering alone, looking for somewhere I could be safe.