A Woman of War: A new voice in historical fiction for 2018, for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Mandy Robotham
led me through the scrub of the sheds, and then up to the gate to the main house, shooing me inside with a gruff: ‘Go, go!’ I had never seen the door to the house, and slowed to marvel at the intricate carvings on the outside, of angels and nymphs, no doubt the work of Ira, the woodcarver and stonemason, who’d died of pneumonia the previous winter. His pride in his work showed through, even at the gates of the enemy, although I glimpsed a tiny gargoyle sandwiched between two roses, a clear image of Nazi evil. His little slice of sedition gave me a hint of courage as I clumped up the steps towards the door.
Inside, my cheeks burned with the sudden heat and my top lip sprouted small beads of moisture, which I licked off, enjoying the tincture of salt. In the wide, wooden-clad hallway, a fire roared in a grate, fuel stacked beside it that would have saved a dozen of the babies I had seen perish over these last months. I was neither surprised nor shocked, and I hated myself for the lack of emotion. We’d become used to rationing feelings to those that could accomplish something; rage was wasted energy, but irritation bred cunning and compromise, and saved lives.
The trooper eyed my skeletal limbs, barking at me to wait by the fire, which I took as a small token of humanity. I stood outwards, letting it burn my bony rump through the threadbare dress, feeling it quickly sear my skin and almost enjoying the near pain. The trooper rapped noisily on a dark wooden door, there was a voice from inside and I was beckoned from the fireside to walk through.
He had his back to me, hair almost white blond – an Aryan poster boy. The trooper clicked his heels like a Spanish dancer, and the head swivelled in his chair, revealing the model man Nazi; sharp cheekbones, taut and healthy, a rich diet colouring his flesh pink, like the tinted flamingos I remembered seeing at Berlin’s zoo with my father. Skin tones in the rest of the camp were variations on grey.
He shuffled some papers and set his eyes on my feet. A sudden, hot shame washed over me at the obvious holes in my boots, then a swift anger at myself for even entertaining such guilt – he and his kind had engineered those holes, and the painful welts on my leathery soles. His gaze flicked upwards, ignoring the wreckage between feet and head.
‘Fräulein Hoff,’ he began. ‘You are well?’
We might as well have been at a tea party, the way he said it, a passing comment to a maiden aunt or a pretty girl. Irritation rose again, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer. Absently, he’d already gone back to his papers, and it was only the silence that caused him to look up again.
I thought: I have nothing to lose. ‘You can see how well I am,’ I said flatly.
Strangely, there was no rage at my dissidence, and I realised then he had a task to carry out, a distasteful but necessary chore.
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘You act as a camp midwife? Helping the women, all the women?’
He looked at me with deep disdain, at my dark looks, which naturally straddled the German and Jewish worlds.
‘I do,’ I said, with a note of pride.
‘And you worked in the Berlin hospitals before the war? As a midwife?’
‘I did.’
‘Your reputation is a good one, by all accounts,’ he said, reading from sheets in front of him. ‘You were in charge of the labour ward, and rose to the rank of Sister.’
‘I did.’ I was beginning to be slightly bored by his lack of emotion; even anger was absent.
‘And my staff here tell me you have never lost a baby in your care during your time here?’
‘Not at birth,’ I said, this time with defiance. ‘Before and after is common.’
‘Yes, well …’ He skated over death as if waving away the offer of more tea or wine. ‘And your family?’
This was where my pride and bloody-mindedness deserted me, falling to the level of my holey boots. A well of hurt caught deep in my throat and I swallowed it like hot coals.
‘I have a mother, father, sister and brother, possibly in the camps,’ I managed. ‘They may be dead.’
‘Well, I have some news of them,’ he said, accent shorn and clipped. ‘You come from a good German family by all accounts – but your father, he is not a supporter of the war, as you know, and your brother neither. They are, of course, in our care, and alive. They know of your status too.’ His eyes tacked briefly upwards to assess my reaction. When there was none, he turned back.
‘You should know this because of the proposal I am about to put to you.’ His tone suggested he was offering me a bank loan, rather than my life. At that moment, I pondered on whether he hugged his mother when they met, kissed her with meaning, had sobbed on her like a baby. Or had he been born a callous bastard? I speculated whether war had made him like this, a vacuum in uniform. I was amusing myself nicely, my bones finally warming from his own fiery grate. I might die feeling warmth, and not with blue, icy blood limping through my veins. I would bleed well all over his nice, scrubbed floor, and cause him some grief, more than mere inconvenience. I hoped his boots would slip and slide on my ruby issue, a stain sinking into the leather, forever present.
‘Fräulein?’ It wasn’t the urgency in his voice that roused me, but a single gunshot out in the yard, a crack slicing through the quiet of his office. One of several heard every day. He didn’t flinch. ‘Fräulein, did you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have been summoned, by the highest authority – the Führer’s office, no less.’ I expected a little trumpet fanfare to follow, the statement coated with such a gilded edge. ‘They have need of your services.’
I said nothing, unsure how to react.
‘You will leave in one hour,’ he said, as a sign of dismissal.
‘And if I don’t want to go?’ It was out of my mouth before I realised, as if something other than me had formed the words.
Now he was visibly annoyed, probably at his inability to shoot me, there and then in cold blood. As he had done many times before, so his reputation told us. The mere mention of the Führer’s office signalled I wouldn’t die here, not today, if I agreed to go. The Commandant’s jaw set, the cheekbones rigid like a rock face, eyes a steel grey.
‘Then I can’t guarantee your family’s safety or outcome in the present troubles.’
So that was it. I would attend Nazi women and help give life, in exchange for avoiding a final death for my own family. There was nothing veiled in his meaning – we all knew where we stood.
‘And the women here?’ I said, ignoring his dismissal. ‘Who will see to them?’
‘They will manage,’ he said into his papers. ‘One hour, Fräulein. I advise you to be ready.’
My body was immune to the wind chill again as I was marched back to Hut 23. Strangely, I felt nothing physical, not even the reprieve of emerging from the main house alive. My mind, instead, was churning – of the things I needed to pass on to Rosa, just eighteen, but to date my most competent helper. Rosa had been with me at almost every camp birth in the past nine months, soothing when needed, holding hands, cleaning debris and mopping tears when the babies were plucked from their mothers, as they so often were.
No Jewish baby made it past twenty-four hours of birth at their mother’s side. The non-Jews were sometimes permitted to nurse their babes until the inevitable malnutrition or hypothermia took hold, but at least their mothers had closure. The Jewesses clutched only an empty void, their rhythmic sobs joining the whistling wind as it ripped through the sheds. Only one Jewish mother and baby had been ghosted out of the camp overnight, on the orders of a high-ranking officer, we suspected. We were divided on whether her fate was good or bad.
In the hut, the women greeted me with relief, then sorrow at my leaving. I had no belongings to pack, so that precious hour was spent in a breathless rundown with Rosa of the checks needing to be made, where our meagre stash of supplies was hidden. In sixty all too brief minutes, I did