Black Cross

“Hey!” barked a gravelly voice. “Don’t you know why everyone is staring at you?”

Rachel lashed out blindly with her right hand and blinked her eyelids. She had fallen asleep just long enough for the big Slav to cross to her bunk. “Leave us alone!” she snarled.

The coarse-featured woman towering above her did not back away. She squatted down and jabbed a stubby finger at Benjamin Jansen. She wore leather-soled shoes, Rachel noticed, the only pair in the barracks.

“They’re staring because of him,” the woman said in a thick Polish accent. “This is the Jewish Women’s Block. He can’t stay here. The SS tolerate a certain amount of movement between the women’s and the children’s blocks. Helps to keep mischief down. But no men are allowed in the women’s block. The old goat can listen to what I have to say, then he has to go.”

Rachel looked at her father-in-law to make sure he understood.

“You’ve never been in a camp before, have you?” the woman asked. “None of you.”

“We passed through Auschwitz,” Rachel answered, “but only for an hour. I’m afraid this is all quite new to us.”

“It shows.”

“How, exactly?”

The woman wrinkled her wide, flat-boned face in scorn. “A hundred ways. But that doesn’t matter. Now that your rich husband has gone through the back gate, maybe you’re not too good to socialize with us, eh? Or maybe you want to be transferred to the Prominents’ Block?”

“No, no. We want no special treatment.”

“Good. Because there is no Prominents’ Block here. That’s Buchenwald. In Totenhausen everyone is equal.”

The woman seemed to take great satisfaction from this statement. Rachel extended her hand. “I am Rachel Jansen. I am honored to meet you.”

Rachel’s formal manners brought a sneer to the woman’s face. “I’m Frau Hagan,” she announced. “I am Block Leader. I am also a Pole and a Communist.” Frau Hagan said this as if it were a challenge to the devil. “I am kapo of Jewish women prisoners. Because I understand Yiddish, of course. Not everyone in this camp is Jewish, you know. There are Christian Poles, Russians, Latvians, Estonians, gypsies, Ukrainians … even Germans. More Communists, too. A whole world behind an electric fence.”

Frau Hagan frowned again at Benjamin Jansen. “I came over to tell you the facts of life—camp life—before your ignorance gets you and others killed.”

Rachel nodded quickly. “We appreciate your kindness.”

Frau Hagan snorted. “The first thing I tell you is this: whatever you were outside, forget it. The sooner the better. The higher up the ladder you were, the harder it will be for you to get used to the camp. What were you? What did your husband do?”

“He was a lawyer. A very good one.”

Frau Hagan turned up her heavy hands in mock despair. “You see? That’s terrible. Another spoiled princess.”

“My father was a carpenter,” Rachel added quickly.

“That’s a little better. I was a washerwoman on the outside. A maid to a German businessman’s family. Yet here I am Block Leader.”

“That’s very impressive,” Rachel said carefully.

Frau Hagan stared at Rachel, trying to see if she was being made fun of. She decided she wasn’t. “Now, the badges. Your children are wearing the plain yellow star. Jood. That means Jew in Dutch, eh? Some language. Well, a Jew is a Jew, no matter what the letters. Yellow triangles mark them all. But there are other colors, you’ll see. People here have been brought from many camps, but in general the badges are based on the Auschwitz system. Knowing the badge colors can mean life or death for you here.”

Rachel looked down at the cloth badge sewn onto the left breast of her tunic. It was made of two triangles, one superimposed upon the other to form the Star of David. The top triangle, which was red and pointed up, bore a large “N” on its center. Beneath this was a bright yellow triangle pointing down.

“The red triangle,” Frau Hagan explained, “means Political Prisoner. It’s nothing to do with anything you’ve done, it’s just a convenient tag for the Germans. They think they have to label everything in sight or it doesn’t exist. The big capital letter marks your country of origin. Same with all foreigners. Yours is ‘N’ for Netherlands, see? Mine is ‘P’.”

“I see.”

“You’ll see a lot of green triangles, too. Green marks the criminals, people who were actually convicted of crimes before they got here. Not all the greens are bad, but don’t cross any of them. They stick together.” Frau Hagan scowled suddenly. “Keep your boy away from the pink triangles. Pink marks the homosexuals. Keep him away from any man who gets too close. There are pederasts here, Dutch girl, and they aren’t required to wear badges.”

As Rachel absorbed the import of Frau Hagan’s words, Hannah began to stir. Her movements woke Jan, the three-year-old, who reached into his pocket and took out a small wooden dreidl. Rachel had managed to smuggle the top all the way from Holland. Neither child could really spin it yet, but the dreidl was a reminder of a safer place and time. She started a game where the children slid it back and forth between them. Frau Hagan glanced at them.

“You haven’t told them what last night meant?”

“No,” Rachel whispered. “Their father told them he was going on a long trip. To work. There is nothing to be gained by telling them otherwise.”

Frau Hagan seemed to agree with this judgment. “I’m surprised they let you keep your son,” she mused. “Young as he is, and blond. It’s a miracle he wasn’t taken away to be Aryanized.”

Rachel shivered in horror. “Marcus’s grandfather was blond,” she said. “A Gentile.”

Frau Hagan had already forgotten the children. She silently counted off badge classifications on her fingertips. “Black,” she said. “Black marks the asocials. Don’t trust them. You’ll also see an armband with the word Blöd. It’s worn by the feeble-minded. Retards. They’re generally harmless. Jehovah’s Witnesses wear purple triangles. They’re kind, but don’t make friends with them. They don’t last long in here. They’re too hardheaded.” Frau Hagan sighed. “There are other badges and colors, but you can’t learn them all in a day.”

The big Polish woman fell silent at a sudden rapping on the barracks wall. The other women scrambled for their bunks. Frau Hagan pointed at Benjamin Jansen. “Under the bunk!”

The old man rolled under Rachel’s bed and tried to conceal himself as best he could. An inmate at the window whispered, “It’s all right! It’s only Anna!”

Rachel heard a collective sigh of relief. A half dozen voices murmured, Nurse Kaas! like a speaking round. Rachel watched in fascination as a small group of prisoners—almost like a delegation, with Frau Hagan at their head—lined up to receive the revered visitor. There was no knock. The door was simply thrust open and left that way despite the winter wind. A tall, shapely blonde woman wearing a white uniform with blue trim stepped inside and pulled a small parcel from beneath her skirt.

“We thank you most humbly, Fraulein Kaas,” Frau Hagan said, taking the package and passing it to another inmate.

Rachel was shocked by this formal speech from the woman who had only moments ago ridiculed her own courtesy.

The blonde nurse looked slightly embarrassed. “How is Frau Buhle today?”

Frau Hagan shook her head. “No better, I’m afraid. But she holds on. If you could possibly take time to examine her—”

“Not today. We’re quite busy in the hospital.”

“Of course.”

Rachel stared at the two women. The physical differences between them were startling. Next to the blonde nurse, Frau Hagan’s skin looked gray and dry as a dustrag. It suddenly dawned on her that Nurse Kaas was German. She was part of the camp staff!

The nurse glanced anxiously at the open door behind her. “Perhaps just a quick look,” she said.

Frau Hagan led her to a bunk at the far end of the barracks. Camp veterans melted away before them, as if yielding a path for an earthly saint, then closed in behind. When the nurse knelt down, Rachel lost sight of her.

Rachel was curious about the nurse, but she remained beside her own bunk. Better not to interfere. She took advantage of this break to rest her eyes a bit. The last seven days had been a blur of withering terror and unspeakable indignity. The cattle car had been the worst. Endless hours sitting without heat or food on frozen railroad sidings, Marcus fighting like a dog for a handful of water for the children. Both of them sleeping standing up in the press of filthy bodies as the train crossed into Poland, each with a child in their arms. Holding Hannah naked and feverish over an overflowing bucket while she emptied her roiling bowels, then squatting herself in the filth. And finally, choosing a space among the dead for her family, not bothering with the bucket or anything else anymore, but only with breathing and keeping away those who had lost their reason.

The stop at Auschwitz had been a merciful deliverance. A silent man in a business suit pulled them out of a glassy-eyed throng queuing before a doctor and loaded them into an open truck which carried them to another train. That train hauled them northwest for three days, back into Germany, and finally disgorged them in a bomb-shattered marshaling yard in Rostock. And from there by truck to this place—Totenhausen—the place where Marcus died.

So I am a widow, she thought with a strange detachment. The idea did not seem difficult to grasp, considering the totality of transformation she had been forced to endure in the last thirty hours. She could still feel the bite of the shears as they scissored her hair to the skull. She remembered the last feeble protest of her dignity as she was forced to strip naked in the snow beside a barbed-wire fence and parade before snickering SS troops who called the dehumanizing procedure a “medical inspection.” Then in rapid succession came delousing, the tattooing of her inner forearm, the distribution of striped uniforms and wooden shoes, the application of badges to the uniforms, and the taking of a detailed medical history. And now—with seeming inevitability—widowhood. The tears had stopped a little while ago, and Rachel had vowed not to let them return. She had to force herself to think, to concentrate on one thing only. Survival.

It was a skill she had learned while very young. As a German Jewish child orphaned during the Great War, she had been sent to Amsterdam to live for a while with a childless Jewish couple. She had grown to love them, but more importantly, she had made sure they grew to love her. Even at four, she knew she never wanted to be hungry again. She quickly mastered the Dutch language and manners, and when the time came for her to return to Germany, the couple had adopted her. Her marriage to Marcus Jansen—a native Dutch Jew—had completed her transformation from German orphan into Dutch wife.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, and her family was forced to go into hiding, she adapted to the attic room above the Christian family’s shop with such grace that her whole family was able to follow her example. She had actually given birth to Hannah in that attic. But the events of the last week—beginning with the bloodcurdling sound of the Gestapo beating down the door of their hiding place—had stretched her adaptive capacity near to breaking.