Aleksandar Tišma - The Use of Man

A premonition of death, of no return to this oppressive home weighed down with lies and mistakes, a home that, even so, he experiences as the last solid ground before the plunge from a high crag into a chasm. Tomorrow he will step into the street with a haversack over his shoulder, taking with him his mother and his daughter, whose protector he ought to be, in obedience to an order that is illegal by the laws of humanity, the product of a deranged mind. Obeying instead of rebelling, as Gerhard did. Gerhard was right. Kroner acknowledges it once again, and with bitterness feels rising in him his son’s passion for survival, which he once disparaged and condemned. To live in the present, for the moment, while one is still master of one’s actions, and after so many years he wants once again that red-haired woman whom he took for her body, but who now is leaving him for another man.

“Don’t you know better?” he shouts at her, sweeping the clumsy bundles to the kitchen floor, where they fall apart like dead frogs. He replaces them with foods he has selected: bacon, cubes of sugar, bars of chocolate. “Wrap that up!” In exasperation he pushes her back to the table, surreptitiously feeling her arm, thigh, buttock, and his eyes fix hungrily on her neck, on her calves. She is still desirable and warm, and he ought to get her into his room, in the evening when everyone retires after a long day, and take her like a whore one last time. But he is too afraid now even for that. He stands there, the sweat of fear and humiliation pouring down his face.

Vera sees this unseemly lusting, the way her father’s eyes play over her mother’s body, and is revolted. Ah, to escape! That’s what she has always wanted to do, but escape is impossible now by virtue of her birth and the fact that she will be carted off to a place created for her, another prison. But perhaps — she isn’t sure— it will be a better place; perhaps, in some lower, half-animal, day-to-day existence, such as accounts of the camps promise, unprecedented peace awaits her.

Her support is her grandmother, not her father, whose desire for life has flared up so inappropriately. For food, which he shovels into his thin body or wraps into small packages with the precision of a shop assistant, and for his wife, her mother, around whom he prowls like a tomcat. Her grandmother does nothing; she prays. Aloud, on her knees, banging her head against the floor, in words dredged up from a remembered language rich in guttural consonants. Vera takes lunch and dinner to her — her last — in her part of the house and pushes the food into the old lady, who, like a sick animal, distractedly and reluctantly chews at it with broken teeth, letting whole mouthfuls drop into her lap. Vera sees a model for herself in this distraction and abasement, and when the moment of departure comes, she takes her grandmother’s bundle along with her own. Keeping at a distance from her father, bidding a tearless farewell to her mother, who stands at the gate trying to press superfluous things on them and offering ridiculous advice (they should write, they should try not to catch cold), Vera sets off at a slow pace, suited to the old lady, to the synagogue, from where they will all be detailed, so they have been told, and assigned work to redeem their crime of being Jewish.

Vera’s departure will influence the way Milinko Božić leaves home. He watches from a distance, long since removed from the stage and powerless to help, disarmed, in this collision of fire-breathing dragons which, roaring, consume their victims. Six months later, when only memories remain of those taken away, one of the dragons suddenly pushes its furious head forward and offers Milinko a ride. Join the people’s army, drive the Germans out: such is the exhortation on the posters in newly liberated Novi Sad, bustling with public speaking and peasants’ carts.

Milinko has no use for those overheated promises and passions; they remind him, as have all other excesses, of his father’s drunken boasting, whose outcome he had experienced. Milinko’s model is still the quiet wisdom he encountered in the Kroner household during those evenings he spent sitting with his host surrounded by books, knowing that Vera was nearby, Vera, whom he would win through his own quiet wisdom. Now he considers it his duty to revenge the defilement and annihilation of what he held most precious.

That it should be by the violent means the enemy employs saddens him, of course. The thought of doing violence to someone’s body, someone’s thoughts, someone’s will horrifies him. And he dreads pain, which also seems a deviation from dignity and reason. But now he must go to meet chance bullets, throw himself among explosions, expose his throat and belly to the jabs of sharpened metal. He does not feel equal to this ordeal, nor does he believe that he will come through it unharmed; he is more like a nonswimmer who plunges into the water to save a drowning man.

When Milinko first started visiting Vera’s house, Kroner lent him a German novel about the First World War, in which, of all the horrible episodes, he was most affected by a short description of the death of a secondary character in whom he immediately recognized himself: a soldier who does not see the sense of fighting, of killing in order not to be killed, and so lacks the instinct common to hunter and hunted, which turns yesterday’s civilian into a wild beast which crawls, hides in ambush, fires, and finds cover. The character perishes clumsily, absent-mindedly; knowing that he will die, he moves like a sleepwalker toward that inevitability from the very first battle. Reading the book, Milinko was certain that if he was forced to fight, he would share that fate, and felt the character’s wounds in his own flesh. The identification was so strong that it acquired the force of prophecy.

His mother, too, because she lost her husband from a bullet, because Milinko is all she has, and because he is so good, has a presentiment of doom and tries to mobilize her contacts, not highly placed but numerous, to find her son a position that will shelter him from immediate danger. But just as the brother-in-law of one of her old customers, a Partisan commander, Veselin Djurašković, moves in with her and promises to find Milinko employment in a military warehouse not far from town, Milinko enlists as a volunteer for the front. When he tells his mother what he has done and hears, among her lamentations, of the opportunity now missed, he feels drained of blood, seeing this as a sign that his fate has been decided. He will take nothing with him, not a change of underwear, not even a book to read, for he is certain that he is descending, despite his high principles, into an abyss of savagery and blood.

They kept us in the synagogue three days, from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-eighth of April. On the fourth day, at dawn, they woke us, ordered us to gather our belongings for a journey, but not to make noise, because the town was still asleep. We hurriedly collected our bags and tied them securely, then filed out into the street, where the guards formed us into ranks and marched us down the middle of the road to the station. It was still dark. Those who wept were told to be quiet, those who could not control themselves were silenced with rifle butts. Outside the station, on a siding, was a long line of freight cars with doors open and guards all around. They ordered us to get in. The cars quickly filled, but the guards forced more and more people to climb in, hitting them with their rifles. Finally, when we were all in, they shut and bolted the doors. In the darkness there was shouting, confusion. Some called for help because they were injured, some cried out for air, children screamed as their mothers tried to hush them. On each side of the car was a small window strung with barbed wire, and everyone pressed to get near them. Those who could not stand any longer sat on their luggage, but that encroached on the space of others, so there were quarrels. We seated our grandmother on our bags, and my father and I stayed next to her. Gradually people grew quiet from sheer weariness. Outside, it was getting light. When would we leave? Where would we go? No one knew. We listened to the voices of the guards outside, and the people standing by the windows reported on what they could see. Hours passed. Suddenly the train jerked into motion, and some began to weep again. Whenever the train stopped, those standing by the windows read out loud the names of the stations. We were moving north. Sometime in the afternoon we by-passed Subotica and stopped in an open field. The guards were shouting, banging, and our door opened with a crash. Out! We grabbed our bags and stumbled out, glad to be in the fresh air, filled with the hope that perhaps this was the end of our ordeal. In the front of the train the guards formed us into a column, led us across the rails to a road, and in about half an hour we reached an empty mill, in which we were shut up. Inside the mill were several thousand people from Subotica and the surrounding area. There was not enough room for them, and now we climbed over them with our baggage, trying to make space for ourselves. There was almost nowhere to sit or lie down. The floor was concrete. We had brought two blankets with us and now spread one of them for my grandmother, covered her with the other, and huddled close to her, my father and I, sitting in our coats. The people from Subotica told us we wouldn’t be staying there, we were all going on to Germany. At night the children — there were hundreds in our room — took turns crying, and those who had to go to the bathroom trampled over the rest of us. There was only one toilet, two taps. Wherever you went, you had to get permission and be escorted by guards, and for everything you waited in line. So we saw the dawn arrive. In the morning, we were given boiled chicory, and during the day we ate what we had brought with us, which was soon consumed. We spent two weeks in that place. One morning, they told us to pack our bags and formed us into ranks. We waited until the afternoon, the stronger among us standing, the older and weaker sitting or lying on the ground, without water, because no one was allowed to leave the ranks. Finally they took us to the train. Once again, the loading, the crush in the car, the heading north. The train passed Baja, and again we stopped in an open field. When the door opened, the sky was dark, though it was still daytime. The wind hurled dust, the clouds rolled above us, cold and heavy. The guards, agitated, ordered the old people and children to one side, ordered us to put our bags down. People rushed to one another, said their good-byes, redistributed their packages, shared comforting lies. The guards, angry, struck with their rifle butts indiscriminately. Finally we started, and as the storm neared and the wind turned icy, we were harried along at a trot. When the camp came in sight — a barbed-wire fence in front of two large wooden barracks — it began to pour. Prodded and cursed, we rushed through the camp entrance and straight for the closer barrack. It had an earth floor that hadn’t been watered down, so our feet raised a thick cloud of dust that made us choke and cough. Somebody screamed that it was a gas chamber, and for a moment we all believed that. More people pushed in behind us, soaking wet, raising new waves of dust, until the barrack was packed with people coughing. Outside, it continued to pour. The roof began to leak, and water fell on us, so we took off our coats to cover our heads, but the water came down in streams and soon covered the earth floor, covered our shoes. We spent the night standing in mud. In the morning, they herded us out of the barrack, and we were not allowed to go back until evening. The old people and children they drove out of the other barrack; we saw them staggering, heard them weeping, but were not allowed to go near them. We sat on the ground and tried to figure out what was going to happen. After the storm it became hot. There was no shade, no grass, and the blankets we could have used to shelter ourselves had been taken away when we left the train. We gathered odd pieces of wood, stuck them in the ground, spread our coats over them like tents. We were hungry, thirsty. The guards brought soup in huge cauldrons but we had no cups or plates, they were in the bags that had been taken away from us. We went back and forth, begging, borrowing, the guards relaxing the harsh discipline somewhat. In the early evening, I sneaked across to the other barrack to look for my grandmother, but couldn’t find her in the crowd. I returned quickly for fear I would be found out and punished. They herded us back into the barrack, into the mud, and ordered each of us to occupy a sleeping space of forty-five centimeters. People measured with their feet, with their hands, but there was not enough room. Then the guards rushed in and ordered us to lie down as we were, and they said that anyone who made a noise or moved would be killed. We squatted through the night. The next day, they again drove us outside. Again I managed to get across to the other barrack without being seen. Pushing my way through a mob of people, I saw my grandmother sitting half-conscious, her arms around a concrete pillar. She must have clutched it before sliding to the ground. I begged for some water, obtained a few drops with great difficulty, sprinkled her face, got her on her feet, and smuggled her across to our group. Somehow we managed to hide my grandmother, keeping her with us for all the ten days we were at Baja. She listened to us, suffered patiently, almost as if unaware, and only occasionally moved her lips in prayer. But my father found the disorder, the hunger and thirst unbearable, and particularly the crowding in the evening, when quarrels broke out in the barrack and the guards, with blows, made us huddle in a heap. He became irritable, cursed our neighbors, then would hold his head in his hands in remorse. During our last night in the barrack, I woke up and heard him weeping, but said nothing, thinking it better for him to be alone with his trouble. In the morning, when the command to move was given and we rose and lined up, my father spread his coat on the ground and lay down on his back with his eyes closed. I ran over to him in a panic and begged him to stand up. Not opening his eyes, he told me to leave him. He couldn’t go on, he said, couldn’t take it. The soldiers noticed us, pushed me back. I joined my grandmother, who did not know what was happening, and the column continued on its way, walking around my father. Leading my grandmother by the hand, I looked back and saw guards gathered around my father, who still lay on the ground. I heard two shots, and then we were outside the camp. We were marched back to the railroad track, where a train was waiting. The day was hot, the cars like an oven from standing in the sun, the windows no longer strung with wire but boarded up. Our car was filled, but the guards kept loading in more people, until we were packed solid. The doors were shut. We thought we would all be suffocated, that this was indeed the end we had all feared from the guards’ threats and the whispers of our prophets of doom. Sweat poured from us. The children, again with us, cried for water. Feeling along the bottom of the car, someone came across buckets of lukewarm water. There was fighting, pushing, shouting. One of the women suggested that the children be given sleeping pills, which some had brought along. Each child was given half a tablet, and finally they grew quiet. The train did not move until the evening. It traveled all that night and the following day, and not once were the doors opened. Again the children cried, and the old people fell from exhaustion, making the already cramped space more cramped. There was some air in the car while the train moved, but people needed to relieve themselves. One of the buckets, which we had emptied, was used for that purpose. The car stank. Someone covered the bucket with a coat, but people were going to it all the time, until it became too full and excrement flooded the floor. We had no more water. Hardly any food. All I had left in my pocket were a few lumps of sugar and one small piece of bacon. My grandmother and I took turns chewing it, saying nothing. On the evening of the second day, the train stopped. The car door was opened, but our attempts to jump out were met by Hungarian policemen’s threats and bayonets. An officer told us that we had reached the frontier and would now be handed over to the Germans. “Up to now you’ve had it good, you dirty Yids, but that’s all over. So anyone who has anything of value, gold, rings, bracelets, anything you’ve hidden, cough it up. If the Germans find that someone’s held on to the smallest trinket, they’ll kill the whole carload without mercy.” He hurried off down the length of the train. There was urgent whispering. Although our bags were taken from us at Baja, we all had managed to hide a small thing of value, in case there was the possibility later of buying something with it. Some people thought it was dangerous to hand over anything, because that would be proof of our deception, but others said it was dangerous not to obey the order. Finally, we collected several articles of gold in an old man’s hat and gave that to the police. They seized the hat and, right there in front of the car, before our eyes, distributed the gold among them, then pulled the door shut on us. After perhaps an hour, the door scraped open again. Now German soldiers stood in front of our car with flashlights fastened to their chests. Two or three of us cried out in German, begging for water and to be allowed out of the car to go to the bathroom. “Shut your mouths!” was their answer. One of them announced that we would be searched, and if even one of us was found to have anything of value, everyone in the car would be shot. It was our last chance, he said, to surrender what we had hidden. Someone dared to reply that we had given all our remaining possessions to the Hungarians. At this, the Germans swore, but did not let up in their demands: “Collect what you have, scum, or we’ll search you one by one, and then you’re done for.” Again, reluctantly, several gold objects fell into a handkerchief, and I gave up the ring I had sewn into the hem of my grandmother’s dress. The door was shut; the train moved on. From weariness and hunger, our legs gave way, and we would have collapsed if we had not been held upright by other bodies pressed against us. The old and the sick fainted, raved, prayed, and the children whimpered with fatigue. We guessed that we had passed through Austria, though it no longer mattered. We would have exchanged our state for any other. On the third day, we stopped. The door of the car was opened, and we heard shouts of “Los! Los!” Outside, the daylight was blinding, the air sharp as we poured out of the car and, pushing or carrying the weak, fell on the ground. Dogs barked, German shepherds on leashes held by healthy young pink-faced German soldiers, and we, like refuse, crawled at their feet, gasping for air and rest. But we were ordered to stand up. “Los! Los!” And the men had to go to the left, the women and children to the right. There were farewells, weeping, my grandmother and I made our way with the women to the right. They pushed us forward, I held my grandmother around the waist, because she could hardly move her legs, until we reached a tall officer who was separating the women left and right with a thin stick. He lowered the stick between me and my grandmother, she slipped off to the side, to the ground. I bent to help her, but the officer’s stick pushed me to the other side, and the guards herded other women after me. That’s how I left my grandmother. I didn’t have time to look back, and I never saw her again. We were arranged into ranks of five, and I found myself with four strange women. Marching along a path lined with soldiers and dogs, we came to a high barbed-wire fence; behind it were hundreds of people the like of which I had never seen in my life — emaciated, gray, with huge, bulging eyes and hairless heads. Waving rags in their shrunken hands. “Madmen!” someone whispered, and for a moment we believed that. The guards opened the gate, and we entered among those apparitions, who now made incomprehensible signs or pointed with their thin, dirty fingers to their mouths. We passed them, and passed prisoners using the brief time they had after washing themselves to dry whatever clothing they had washed, too, surreptitiously, by walking back and forth, which we would do ourselves the following day. Then we were in front of a large brick building. Two well-dressed women in German military caps came out and ordered us to strip for a bath. We left our clothes in separate little piles and waited, naked, holding our shoes in our hands, until we were let into the building. After showers, which sprinkled us with only a few drops of lukewarm water, the German women pushed us into the next place, where we were received by men in striped prison clothes, watched over by a soldier. They shaved our heads and bodies, sprayed a stinging liquid between our legs, and pushed us on to the next place, where we were given clothing from a heap — oversized, bedraggled, torn, so that for a moment we looked like a band of revelers. They quickly lined us up and marched us to a barrack. There were three rows of double bunks, no blankets, only bare boards. We had to lie down five to a bed and could hardly move. In the evening, they took us out for roll call, counted us, recorded us, but gave us nothing to eat. We complained of hunger, but the trusty of our barrack, a young Slovak woman, told us that we would get no food tomorrow either, we were not on the provisions list until the day after. We lay down on our cramped beds, our stomachs aching, delirious from the desire for food. In the morning, we were awakened at two-thirty — it was to be the same every day — and given half an hour to relieve ourselves and wash, but since there were only two latrines for all the thirty-two barracks, and only one wash basin, people were still pushing and shoving when the order for roll call was given. We had to stand in place until late morning, when the Lagerälteste arrived to inspect us, a woman in uniform escorted by SS men and dogs. Before she came, some of the women fainted, and the trusty hit with a stick anyone who tried to help them. After the roll call, we all collapsed in exhaustion. We were not allowed back in the barrack, and so spent the day lying on the ground, twisted with hunger. In the evening, roll call again, until late into the night. Now there were dozens of women unconscious. We were ordered to drag them to the roll call and lay them out in rows of five. After the roll call we had to drag them back into the barrack. The next day, we got up in the dark again, again ran to the latrine and the wash basin, and went to roll call. Then our first breakfast, a soup of pine needles. We had no spoons, no dishes; we drank the sickeningly sweet but warm liquid from a single mess tin, passing it after each mouthful. In the afternoon, turnip soup and a piece of bread. In the evening, a little marmalade, a slice of brawn. The minute we swallowed the food, our hunger, unsatisfied, would gnaw at our stomachs worse than before, but then it would go away while we stood, half-asleep, half-unconscious, at roll call. We grew weak, we could hardly move. But we knew what awaited us if the last of our strength went; we saw what had happened to the camp inmates before us. One day, they herded several hundred women into the barrack next door, all skeletons who had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. In the evening, after roll call and after we had just got to sleep, we were awakened by shouting, barking, screaming. We went to the windows and saw closed black trucks in front of the other barrack and German soldiers forcing the skeleton women into them. The women resisted, they yelled at the top of their lungs that they didn’t want to go to the ovens, they were still strong, they could work, and their fear gave them new strength, they clutched convulsively at the door frames, the windows, at anything they could, and some even climbed on the roof of the barrack. But the searchlights from the guard towers located them, and the soldiers and dogs pulled them down and threw them into the trucks, which took them away. The following day, we began to be sorted for the ovens. Two SS men came into the barrack with a woman doctor in a white coat and the trusty. They set out narrow planks in the middle of the floor and, stripped naked, we had to run the length of them, from end to end. If anyone stumbled, lost her balance, touched the floor with her foot, the doctor made a tired movement with his hand, and the SS men grabbed her like a sack and tossed her, no matter how much she struggled, outside, where the black truck was waiting. I didn’t stumble, but something else happened. The SS sergeant, Handke — we tried to avoid him, because he enjoyed hitting us at roll call for no reason — was there, and when I ran across the planks, he beckoned me over with his finger. He looked me up and down, pinched my arm to see how quickly the flesh recovered, then repeated the test on my breasts and thighs. He told me to wait by the door. He did the same thing a little later with Klara, a girl from Užgorod. After the inspection was over and the black truck was on its way, the trusty took our numbers, gave us dresses, and Handke, with the other SS men, escorted us out of the barrack. He took us to be bathed and disinfected, just the two of us, then through the camp and to a fence that separated the camp from the administration building. The soldier at the gate stood at attention. We passed the Kommandantur, the workshops, and went as far as the hospital, on the other side. There, they handed us over to prisoner nurses. We were told to undress and were given clean hospital gowns. They took us into a room with a row of cubicles, put each of us in a separate one, and told us to lie down. A strong light was shining. Two nurses came in, told me to spread my legs wide, then gave me an injection there that hurt terribly. Soon I went numb. They came in again, helped me to my feet, and dragged me past the cubicles into the operating room. Klara was already on one of the tables. They strapped my legs to a metal frame, tied my hands to my body, and a doctor wearing a mask and rubber gloves came in. They all bent over me. I saw a long drill-like needle that ended in a corkscrew, then felt a burning between my legs and, despite the numbness, a sharp pain deep inside, in the womb, as if it were being pulled out. They withdrew the needle and untied me. I was bleeding heavily, and they packed cotton wool in me and carried me back to the cubicle on a stretcher. I asked what had been done to me. One of the nurses hissed through his teeth: “It’s so you won’t have a baby, stupid.” I was feverish. But in the evening they brought me food, a soup much thicker and tastier than anything I had had so far in the camp. The next day, while I was being bandaged, a nurse pulled the gown off my shoulder and tattooed something across my left breast. This time I didn’t even bother to ask what it was. I was half-delirious. Later, when I felt better, I read it. My convalescence lasted about a week. The bleeding stopped, and Handke came to fetch me. He brought a dress for me, which I had to put on right there in front of him. He motioned to me to follow him. We went out of the hospital and to a building nearby, which was called the “house of pleasure.” It was a long room with cubicles like those Klara and I had been in at the hospital, except that each cubicle was closed off by a white curtain. Each had a bed. Klara was not yet there, but there were women in the other cubicles. We were eighteen in all. We could sit or lie down, but were not allowed to leave the cubicle except three times a day and all together. The commandant of the house of pleasure, Gisela, was a German woman who had been found guilty of poisoning her sister. Her cubicle, the last, had a door instead of a curtain. She wore a uniform, boots, and had a whip attached to her right forearm. When the soldiers came, from either our camp or a nearby garrison, or from units passing through on their way to the front, Gisela would shout, “Everyone out!” We would stand, each in front of her curtain, and the soldiers would look us over and choose. The girl chosen was supposed to go into her cubicle, take off her clothes, and make herself available. Gisela warned us that we must be nice to our visitors, satisfy their every wish, and that any girl who did not would be beaten to death. One by one she called us into her cubicle, undressed us, and showed us, herself undressed, what we had to do with the soldiers, but at the same time it was her way of getting her own pleasure. We had more food than in the camp, almost enough food, we were cleanly dressed, we showered every day, our heads were no longer shaved. But we were terrified at every visit, because we knew that we would not be able to defend ourselves against any accusation that we had not satisfied. Klara and I, in fact, replaced two girls who had been punished — that was what my neighbor, a Czech Jewess, whispered to me across the cubicle partition. I myself witnessed one such punishment. The victims were two sisters, Leah and Tzinna, brought into the camp from a Polish ghetto, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen, still undeveloped, and always terrified. Perhaps they didn’t know what to do in bed to satisfy the soldiers, perhaps Gisela just decided that they were not suitable or not to her liking as women. One morning, we were ordered into the circle in front of the administration building, and from the other side of the camp they brought hundreds of inmates right up to the fence, all of them stumbling skeletons, just as we had been before we came to the house of pleasure. Then the Germans emerged from the administration building, from the storerooms and guard posts, their uniforms unbuttoned, without their weapons, to watch the spectacle. Handke carried out the punishment. Two wooden horses were brought out, like those used in gymnastics but without the padded top. Gisela led the two girls up to them. The girls were holding each other by the hand, weeping. Handke, almost gently, separated them, suddenly ripped the dress off one and then the other, and deftly tied them tight to the horses, each arm and leg separately. A soldier handed him a stick, perhaps a meter long, and thick. Handke stood behind Leah and with all his might hit her on the leg below the knee. She screamed, but we could hear the crack of the bone breaking. Then he hit her on the other leg. Then on both her legs above the knees. Leah was still screaming. Then he stepped to one side and hit her across the base of her spine, so hard that her body, even though tied down, bounced. The next blow was to the middle of the back. Her head was now hanging — she had lost consciousness — but Handke kept hitting until he smashed her head in. After that, he stuck his stick under his arm, unbuttoned his jacket, and lit a cigarette. We watched him smoke and walk up and down the row of us, looking at us with a smile on his face. Tzinna, too, watched him, followed him with bulging, glassy eyes. He went up to her. He did the same with her. Then, brandishing the stick, he walked to the administration building with measured strides, and the Germans, as he went past, clapped him on the back. They led us back into the house of pleasure while some of the prisoners came with handcarts to take Leah and Tzinna to the ovens. Eventually Handke killed and replaced all the women except Regina, a girl from Košice, my neighbor Helena, and me. He had already told us that we would suffer the same fate if Germany lost the war, that we had no hope of living to see it. But we still hoped, each to herself, although when together we repeated Handke’s threats. There were frequent alerts because of Allied planes flying overhead, but we couldn’t leave the building. Gisela locked the doors from the outside and took shelter at the Kommandantur. It was at those times that we could make our plans. But we were careful, for Gisela had the habit of questioning us separately about what the others were saying. The only one I trusted was Helena, and during the alerts she came into my cubicle or I went into hers, and we plotted how to stay alive when the Russians or the Americans arrived. We talked nonsense: We would attack Gisela, tie her up, and use her as a hostage; or we would seize the weapons from the nearest guard post. But when the moment of liberation came, we had no chance to do anything heroic. The Germans emptied the camp in stages: They took the surviving prisoners into a field, where they mowed them down with machine guns and set fire to them, because the ovens couldn’t handle such a large number of bodies. Meanwhile, they themselves were leaving — the storeroom people, followed by the hospital people and the administration, until only the guards were left. No one visited us anymore, and we were given hardly any food. Gisela stuck a revolver in her belt. One morning, after we were allowed to go to the latrine, we heard hurried orders, a guard rushed up and shouted to Gisela, and she shouted to us to get back into the house of pleasure at once. Instinctively, I didn’t obey. I heard the women’s footsteps leaving the latrine, but then realized that they would find me missing and come to look for me. So I left the latrine, sneaked around the building, and lay on the ground behind a wall. I heard agitated orders, men running, shooting. I pressed my head to the ground and waited, determined not to move, to wait for my death there. The shots grew more frequent; whole bursts of gunfire could be heard, and the sound of men running. Then silence, then running feet again, the clatter of weapons, shooting. Suddenly, in the distance, the sound of many voices in a long shout that sounded like a shout of triumph. I didn’t dare believe my ears, I stayed where I was. The noise got nearer, then petered away. I heard something being broken nearby — it had to be the windows of the administration building. Again silence. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I raised my head and crawled out. There was no one around. I went into the latrine. Then I thought that a German left behind might find me there, so I went out again. Where should I go? I didn’t dare go into the administration building or the storeroom. The door of our house of pleasure was wide open. Inside, everything was smashed, the curtains were torn and bloodstained, and the women were dead in their cubicles, in pools of blood. I heard a groan. It was Regina, she crawled out from behind her bed and collapsed at my feet. I turned her over; she had a wound in her neck. I tore off a piece of curtain and bandaged it. She said, “It was Handke,” and pointed to her legs, which were wounded, too. I tried to drag her out by the shoulders, but she groaned, so I put her down and ran outside. There I came upon two prisoners, who were carrying bloodstained shovels. I asked them to help me carry the girl into the abandoned Kommandantur. I stayed there with Regina and took care of her until the Soviet army arrived, fed us, and arranged for our transport home.