The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [107]
“A truck arrived with soup at midday, and we scrambled to fill our bowls. Sometimes it was hot, but unless you managed to be first in line, the soup quickly became cold. It was watery, just a few scraps of potato or rutabaga. At night there was a piece of bread and sometimes a bit of ersatz cheese. In the morning we had something they called coffee. It wasn’t coffee. It was watery and tasteless. We suspected it was soaking water from old leather.
“The women were all thin and hungry. In our miserable section of the barracks there was a little fire where we could cook what food we could find—that is, if we could find wood or coal. Sometimes we burned our own bed slats. One day Jacqueline smuggled to us a goose egg one of the kitchen workers had let her have. We hunched over the little stove, and we boiled it so we wouldn’t spill any. But when we cracked and peeled it, we found a little goose inside, formed perfectly, boiled alive. For only a second we retched in horror, but then we tore at the food, sharing it equally among the five of us. It was a delicacy!
“The water was usually frozen, so we had little for cooking. We couldn’t wash ourselves. As each day went by, we weakened. We were growing too weak to be useful as labor. We saw so many people die. In their beds during the night, or in the snow on the plateau. My mother fell ill and was allowed to stay in the infirmary for two nights, and two of our friends shared their food with her. She was returned to the plateau during a heavy snowstorm. We found that the snow acted as insulation. We pushed it up to make a little fort that shielded us from the wind.
“After several weeks of this enfer, the commandant asked for volunteers to work in the woods. We could see the forest in the distance. It would be farther to walk, and the work would be more difficult, but the trees would shield us from the wind. It was five kilometers in the direction of Gdánsk. My mother and I and some of our friends trudged to the forest, and our work there was to dig out stumps. The Germans had forced some Russian prisoners of war to cut down trees to make a road through the forest. We dug the stumps out. We had the wagons and the rails, and we had to dig trenches for the rails, cutting through the roots. The ground was frozen, and we hacked and hacked. We had only shovels and axes.”
Marshall laid his arm around her shoulder, a brief embrace. She went on, “It is not a sequence in time. It is a collection of sensations. Time blurred; it was like sleep. When you have only a scrap for sustenance and you must labor until the dark, then you are already almost dead. My mother, who could hardly walk because of vitamin sores, labored alongside me, and she tried to conceal her sufferings from me, until there was a time when she could not continue. She breathed in sharply and lowered her head and closed her eyes. She clutched her hoe and said, ‘Don’t lose heart, Annette.’
“On the plateau, the gardiens watched us like those birds that feed on the dead. When a woman collapsed, the gardiens ran to grab her and throw her onto a cart. We were being worked to death. Our numbers diminished, and the bodies disappeared. There was no four-crématoire at Koenigsberg. I could not let my mother fall. I had to keep her upright until we could reach the infirmary.
“From the beginning, my mother was my strength. I had the hantise, or—how do you say it?—the anxiety to be separated from my mother. We were close, so physically close, her arms around me as if I were still balled—roulé en boule!—inside her. And in time, it was reversed, when I had to hold her, when she curled up in her weakness, the loss of strength, and the illness of which she was surely dying. In the infirmary I kept her warm. I gave her my soup. I mashed the bread into a little gruel, a panade. Bread and water heated on a fire felt so much more nourishing—to have something warm in our stomachs.