In the next room I manage to put on a dress, and help Mommy put on hers, and join the lines of women shivering in the cold dark September night. “Leave it there.” Mommy’s voice is an agonized whimper of resignation. “Mommy, wait.” I stagger toward the puddle and pick up the small, soggy rag. In a puddle in the middle of the room I notice a dismal looking little cloth. Slowly I limp out of the damp compartment. There is a very sharp pain in my left side. Blood is trickling from my nose and mouth. I roll on my abdomen and slowly pull myself up. The noise in the adjacent compartment has subsided. I have committed the unthinkable, the unforgivable. Cold drops of water keep falling on my face from somewhere.Ī thought formulates somehow-I’m alive! I taste blood. Then the door slams and I’m lying flat on the cold, slick floor. A kick in the back sends me rolling across the floor toward the exit. The black boots gleam and my blood splashes thinly on the wet floor. She is kicking me in the face, in the chest, in the abdomen. A second punch knocks me to the slippery floor. The towering buxom figure in the dreaded SS uniform swings around.
“Leave my mother alone! Don’t you see you are going to break her arm?” I jump at the tall, husky woman and shove her against the wall. I remember only that Mommy’s arm is paralyzed, that she is ill and very weak, and that the SS woman is going to break her arm. The SS woman leaps at her, grabs her arm, and in a rage begins to twist it. She is oblivious to everything except the impossible task of maneuvering the handkerchief around her foot with paralyzed hands. “Du, blöde Hund! Hurry and get to the other room!”īut Mommy does not hear. Mommy is sitting on the wet floor clumsily trying to wrap the handkerchief about her foot. The tall, husky SS woman supervisor is standing in the doorway, driving the last few girls into the next compartment. By the time I am ready to help Mommy with hers, the room is almost empty. “Los! Los! Blöde Hunde.” Move it! Idiotic bitches.
The rush of cold water from holes in the ceiling lasts less than five minutes.
We are driven into the shower compartment in a frantic haste. I help Mommy get undressed, and tuck the handkerchief in her shoe. She wears it in her shoe, wrapped around her foot. It’s a small handkerchief with her initials embroidered in one corner. It is in the shoes you hide things you hope to keep, like a small memento from home.
You have to leave your prison dress in a pile before entering the shower, and pick up a disinfected one from another pile at the exit. It is in shoes you conceal your possessions.
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