45
May 1945
The hospital wewere brought to was a haven compared to where we had just been. Clean and bright and sterile. Not that I noticed much of it, my body and mind so weary and weakened, I was only able to stay awake for a couple hours at a time as fluids were pumped into me through an IV, Willa in a small bed beside me with her own bag of fluids.
I missed her nestling against me constantly. But the nurses reassured me as I stared down at her downy hair and pale skin, the pink returning slowly to her cheeks, that she was fine and that I needed to rest and regain my strength for the both of us.
At first we’d all been frightened to get on the trucks that had been brought in to transport us. We didn’t trust anyone. Not the soldiers who brought us clean water and small portions of food, not the nurses and doctors who greeted us when we arrived.
We clung to our possessions, meager as they were, not wanting to hand over the uniforms we wore or the tiny trinkets we’d managed to hang on to. It was all we had in the world anymore. Giving them up was letting go of the last things we owned. But they were filthy, bug-ridden, and in the end, it was almost a relief to let them go. A last reminder of what we’d endured, gathered and burned and forgotten.
“Wait!” I said, reaching for the little dress Paulina had made my daughter out of fabric I’d worn as a girl. I held it to me, my fingers digging into the soft material. “Not this. Please.”
The days were a blur. I was often confused, unsure whether it was day or night. Sometimes I didn’t recognize my roommates, even Jelena who was in the bed next to me. Sometimes I forgot who I was, where I’d been, and where I needed to go. My mind had been plagued by the distraction of starvation, my body using whatever it could just to stay alive—so that I could keep Willa alive. I hadn’t even realized how much I had changed until I was helped to the restroom and saw my reflection in the mirror, and then my legs as I pulled my gown up to use the toilet.
I was skin and bones, any evidence that I’d been pregnant only a month and a half before now gone, my stomach concave, my once full breasts depleted but still aching with the want to feed my child.
As the hours became days, and the days became weeks, I was taken on walks in a wheelchair into the fresh air. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Jelena limping beside me, Willa swaddled against my chest. Eventually, I began to take short walks without the wheelchair, visiting with the other women I’d survived with, Jelena and Willa and I forming what the nurses caring for us called a happy little tribe.
It was during a rare walk alone that I wandered past an open door and heard someone call my name, the voice familiar. I stopped and turned, my gaze meeting another across the threshold.
“Brigitte?” I said, my breath catching in my throat.
We began to cry at the same time as I moved as fast as my legs could carry me to her bed, my arms wrapping around her thin body as she wept.
“What happened to you?” I asked, sitting in the chair beside her.
She shook her head, her eyes haunted.
“They made us walk. Forever. No stopping. If we stopped we were shot.” She looked away for a moment, gathering herself before she continued. “No food. No bathroom breaks. We were to just walk...until we couldn’t anymore. They were walking us until we died. Women would just stop suddenly, one minute standing, the next on the ground. It was only if the guards stopped that we could, but we had to stay standing. If they caught someone kneeling...” She shook her head. “It went on for days. And then one day...they left. We were in the middle of nowhere, no town in sight. A trail of women dead behind us. We didn’t know where to go or what to do. Some of us had just decided we’d go on ahead and try to find a town or a house...anything. And then the Red Army arrived.”
“Agata?” I asked, but she shook her head.
I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer for my old bunkmate, remembering the sweet doll she’d made for Willa that I’d had to give up when I got to the hospital.
“I wonder what they’ll do with us now,” Brigitte said. “Once we’re healthy enough to leave. Are we free? Do we get to go home? How do we get there? What if there’s no one left?”
It was something I’d only just begun to think of myself, now that I was able to concentrate on more than my daughter and just making it through the day alive. How would I explain I wasn’t the woman they had listed. That I wasn’t German. Except that I was. If I said I was American, would they think me a spy? Would that hinder my ability to get home? To get in touch with my aunt and uncle?
I remembered the letter I’d written. Had it ever been mailed? And if so, had they received it? Were they looking for me? Had they figured out my hidden messages? And William...how did I find him now? Was he still based in France? Was he in England? Had he gone home to Seattle? Was he looking for me...wondering what had become of me when the letters stopped? Was he...alive?
I sighed and shook my head, squeezing Brigitte’s hand.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all we have now is each other.”
She asked about the baby then and I told her I’d bring her with me the next time I visited.
Two weeks later we began to meet outside, Brigitte brought out in a wheelchair, me under my own steam, Willa in my arms, Jelena charging ahead. The four of us would sit in the shade while Willa fed from my breast, dreaming of what our lives would be like once we left. Brigitte would go back to France, find her sister and parents, meet a nice man and fall in love. Jelena was desperate to get back to Yugoslavia.
“And you, Lena?” Brigitte asked.
“Home,” I said, closing my eyes. “And William.”
They thought by “home” I meant Hamburg. They’d asked once how William and I had met and I’d had to scramble to come up with a vague lie.
“Oh, you know,” I’d said, waving a hand as if it wasn’t that special. “He was a soldier stationed nearby my home. I thought he was handsome.”
They didn’t ask me to elaborate, it was a story told over and over again round the world. And they didn’t ask what I’d do if I found out he hadn’t survived the war, letting me keep my fantasy alive. Instead, they imagined having their own daughters, and got excited at the idea that maybe they’d become friends one day.
