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I was stripping one of the beds later that morning when Lina strode up to me. “I thought I recognized you. You’re Gisela Wolff. Why did the matron call you by a different name?”
“I-I go by Ella Maes now.”
“But why?”
If I had been able to think more quickly, I could have lied and said Maes was my married name and Ella was short for Gisela, but her question took me by surprise. And in that moment of hesitation, I saw her eyes widen with comprehension.
“I remember now! You’re Jewish! You had a yellow star on your sweater.” I glanced around, hoping no one had overheard her. “You used to come to school with those two other Jewish girls. What were their names? And your accent. It isn’t really Swiss, is it?”
I pulled Lina off to the side, my heart racing out of control. “If you know I’m Jewish,” I said quietly, “then you know why I moved away and changed my name. No one else here knows the truth, Lina. It would help me a lot if you didn’t tell anyone. And please, call me Ella now.” She gave me a phony smile in return. She didn’t promise to keep my secret.
Lina had never liked me. I avoided her as much as I could after that, hoping she would forget all about me. I was relieved when she was assigned to the night shift so we never worked together. I managed to push her from my mind.
* * *
One Friday morning in July, I arrived at work and was checking my patient’s vital signs when I noticed that her IV bottle was empty. It should have been exchanged for a new one by her last attending nurse. I checked the clipboard to see if the doctor’s orders had changed. They hadn’t. The patient’s treatment was overdue. It was a sloppy, dangerous mistake. And Lina Renard had been the attending nurse.
I debated whether or not to tell the head nurse or to simply cover up Lina’s mistake. But I debated too long. The head nurse must have seen me standing there, trying to decide what to do, and she approached. “Is something wrong, Nurse Maes?”
I had to tell her. She stormed off to confront Lina, who was still filling out reports before going home. Everyone on the floor could hear the matron chastising her for her mistake.
I thought Lina had gone home after things quieted down, but she strode back onto the ward with her coat on, looking for me. “You always thought you were better than everyone else, didn’t you? Just like all the other filthy Jews.”
My heart raced. “I didn’t report you, Lina, I swear. I was about to change the IV bottle myself when the supervisor came over and—”
“You expect me to believe that? You were always too good to hang around with us or go to a dance now and then or have a laugh. No, you were too busy kissing Sister Veronica’s ring and trying to impress our teachers with your hard work. You graduated head of the class—la-di-da! And I see that you’re still kissing rings and thinking you’re better than everyone else.”
“I wasn’t going to report you, Lina—”
“Jew!” She spit on the front of my uniform, then turned and walked away.
My shift had just begun, so I had to finish. I was sick with dread all day. I hurried back to my room as soon as the long afternoon finally ended. I needed to write to Sister Veronica immediately. She needed to help me transfer to a different hospital, change my name again, find a new place to hide. But a letter would take too long. I needed to act now. It was too close to curfew to risk leaving today, but I would pack my things tonight and take the first train to Antwerp tomorrow morning and never look back.
I was leaving the rooming house with my suitcase as soon as the curfew ended the next day when I noticed two men standing by the curb out front. Their uniforms bore the twin lightning bolts of the dreaded SS.
My heart thrashed against my ribs. Should I turn around and hurry back inside as if I’d forgotten something? Should I bolt and run through the back lanes and try to hide somewhere? Or should I pretend to ignore them and walk calmly past them? I didn’t have a chance to do any of those things. As soon as the men saw me, they started walking toward me.
One of them held out his hand. “Identification, please.” I fumbled for it in my bag with trembling fingers and nearly dropped it. The officer looked it over and said, “You must come with us.” He spoke in German. They each gripped one of my arms and we started walking in the direction of the train station. I couldn’t draw a deep breath. My body felt like it belonged to someone else, refusing my command to break free and run. They propelled me all the way to the train station, and we boarded a train. The other passengers averted their eyes as the men shoved me into a seat between them. I knew there was no point in praying. The train was headed south, to the city of Mechelen and the deportation prison where all of Belgium’s other Jews had been taken. We arrived much too soon. The transit camp couldn’t have been a secret in Belgium because the former military barracks sat in a populated area of Mechelen, close to the train station and a major rail hub. Surely people had noticed the boxcars filled with Jews who were being transported east to labor camps week after week. They must have heard the rumors that they were being sent to Nazi-occupied countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The huge three-story brick building had been built in a square with an open plaza in the center. A transport truck with a canvas roof arrived in the plaza at the same time that I did, and I watched men, women, and children spilling out of the back of it, clinging to their suitcases and to each other. They were Jews. Like me. I scanned their faces for a familiar one—Sam’s or one of his brothers’ or his mother’s—hoping I wouldn’t see them. Hoping they weren’t here, that they never had been here.
The prison officials spoke in German as they processed the new arrivals. I overheard them saying most of these people were bound for a labor camp called Auschwitz in Poland. When my turn came, they seemed to know all about me, that I was a German Jew and that I was a nurse. I would be sent to Buchenwald, they decided, where nurses were needed for the medical experiments Nazi doctors were conducting there. They said all of these things to each other, not to me. I might have been invisible. I didn’t know anything about Auschwitz, but I knew from Vati’s descriptions what I would face in Buchenwald.
* * *
I spent a week in Mechelen, crowded together with too many other women in a cramped cell. Animals were treated better than we were. I could see a river from the window of our cell and smell it when we were forced to assemble outside in the plaza for a few minutes each day. I tried to remember what Sam looked like and what it had felt like to be held in his arms, but I couldn’t. It seemed like only a dream I’d once had.
Then the day came when I was taken down to the enclosed plaza and loaded into the back of a truck with dozens of others. After a short drive, we reached the railroad station where armed SS officers with snarling dogs herded us into a wooden boxcar. It quickly filled to capacity with prisoners, but the soldiers shoved even more prisoners inside until we could barely move or breathe. I was one of the very few women. The bolt slammed shut with a terrible sound as we were locked inside. Hours passed until the train began to move. We had no food. It was just as well. The stench of filth inside the boxcar made me too nauseated to eat. There was one bucket of water for all of us to share, another bucket to use as a toilet. I thought of my gentle, elegant mother, and for the first time, I was grateful that my parents had chosen the path they had. They wouldn’t have to endure this.
The journey took several days, measured only by the slivers of sunlight or darkness that were visible between the boards of the boxcar. My mind wandered into dark places as I remembered and grieved for everything we had lost. I recalled how we’d emptied our apartment, whittling away our precious furnishings and possessions to raise money for our escape. Now I had no possessions at all—and I hadn’t escaped. My faith had been pared to the bone as well. I had grown up reading the tale of Queen Esther every Purim and how the wicked Haman, like Hitler, made plans to exterminate every Jew in the world. Yet God had intervened. We had been saved. Jews around the world also celebrated God’s miraculous delivery from slavery every year at Passover, and we remembered how the Red Sea had parted and we’d been set free. Had those stories been mere fairy tales? Where was our deliverance now?
I thought about how life could turn on a hinge of fate. If Vati hadn’t run out to save the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, he wouldn’t have been arrested and sent to Buchenwald. He wouldn’t have become ill with tuberculosis. He and Mutti might have escaped together instead of dying together. If the St.Louis had been allowed to dock in Havana and if the Cubans hadn’t rejected our landing permits, my family and Sam’s would be living safely in Cuba. If the United States had offered us refuge or if we had been accepted by the English representative instead of the Belgian one, we might all be alive and still together. And if Lina Renard had gone to work at a different hospital or if she had remembered to attach the patient’s IV bottle or if she’d never seen the yellow star on my sweater, I wouldn’t be on this train on my way to Buchenwald. There had been so many chances for fate to take a different path, but it hadn’t. The Nazis had chased my family and me across an ocean and back, and they’d captured me at last.
We arrived in Buchenwald on a warm August morning, just after dawn. A breeze raised the layer of gritty gray ash that seemed to have settled on every surface and swirled it into the air like snow. The stench of decay and burning flesh that hovered above the massive camp overwhelmed me. I was herded together with the other women and made to strip naked. They shaved my head and tattooed a number on my arm. I was given a striped uniform several sizes too large for me and assigned to a barracks that already overflowed with women. I was the envy of all the others when I was put to work in the camp infirmary instead of in one of the camp workshops. But the others didn’t know what went on in that infirmary.
I soon learned that the Nazi doctors were testing their experimental vaccines on prisoners, vaccines that were supposed to prevent contagious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria. Our patients usually became gravely ill. I did what I could to ease their suffering, but most of them died horribly. Sam had once said there was a reason why I had become a nurse, but surely this couldn’t be it.
“You’re wondering if you’re going to survive, aren’t you?” a nurse named Ada asked me one afternoon about a month after I had arrived. Four of our patients had died that day, and Ada, myself, and another nurse named Lotti had all stepped outside the infirmary for a moment as we waited for the cart that would carry the bodies to the crematorium. By then, I had been in this place long enough to know what went on behind Buchenwald’s walls and gates and barbed wire fences. “Everyone wonders the same thing when they first arrive,” Ada said.
