A prisoner nurse approached, her striped dress hanging loose from sharp shoulders. Her head had been shaved some time ago, leaving a faint shadow. Her eyes flickered with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.

  “You are the new doctor,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  The nurse nodded toward a small table at the far end of the room. “Your place is there. We have no medicine. Sometimes they give us aspirin. Water must be boiled in tins when we can find fuel. We have rags from old clothes. No proper bandages.”

  Her voice carried no accusation, only information worn thin by repetition.

  Gisella walked to the table. It wobbled slightly when she touched it. The surface was scarred. A few instruments lay in a metal tray, their edges dull, their handles spotted. A cracked mirror hung on the wall above, reflecting a fractured image of the room.

  She washed her hands in a basin of cold water, then shook them dry. There was no towel.

  “Who needs the most attention?” she asked.

  The nurse pointed. “That one. And that one. The girl with the swollen leg. The older woman who cannot stop coughing.”

  The first patient lay curled on her side, hands pressed to her belly. Her skin shone with sweat. She flinched when Gisella touched her shoulder, then relaxed when she saw the calm in her face.

  Gisella examined her gently. Fever. Infection in a wound that had not been properly cleaned. The wound itself was small, the edges angry. It might have been a simple case, once, in another place. Here it threatened to consume her.

  She boiled water in an empty tin can over a small brick stove at the corner of the room. The flame came from scraps of wood and a piece of cloth twisted and soaked in fat. The fire smoked, filling the room with a harsh scent, but it heated the water enough to scald.

  Her touch was slow and steady as she cleaned the wound as best she could. The woman hissed with pain but did not pull away. When Gisella finished, she wrapped the area with a strip torn from a cleaner section of cloth. She tied the knot carefully, aware that this piece might need to last far longer than it should.

  “Rest,” she said.

  The woman nodded, eyes half closed.

  She moved from bed to bed. Infections. Lice. Rashes. Malnutrition. Bruises in places that told their own quiet stories. She listened to chests, counted breaths, pressed fingers to swollen glands. She took in each case quickly, knowing she could do little more than support the body’s failing attempts to repair itself.

  Occasionally a woman gripped her wrist and held on for a moment longer than necessary. A silent plea. A silent thank you. She met their eyes briefly before moving on. There was no time for comfort in words.

  At midday, a guard entered with a clipboard. His boots left damp marks on the floor. He looked around with practised disinterest.

  “Pregnant women,” he said. “Names.”

  The room seemed to tighten.

  The nurse glanced at Gisella.

  She felt several pairs of eyes on her. Some full of hope, some full of fear. Hands moved instinctively to cover bellies, whether there was something to hide or not. Gisella had already noticed signs. A girl whose abdomen had just begun to swell. A woman who tried to position herself in shadow. Another who vomited quietly into a bucket, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Her training told her to identify. Her orders required it. Her instincts screamed against it.

  She walked to the nurse’s table, picked up the stub of a pencil, and wrote the first name on the paper. Her hand remained steady, though it felt as if she were tracing the outline of something vast.

  The guard watched with impatience.

  She added a second name. A third. The pencil scratched softly against the page. She did not look at the women as she wrote. She could not.

  The guard glanced at it at the list when she handed it to him, folded the paper, then left.

  The room exhaled in a faint rustle of breath and cloth.

  One of the pregnant women stared at Gisella, her lips pressed tightly together. There was no accusation in her gaze. Only bewilderment. As if she were trying to puzzle out the meaning of a rule written in a language she did not know.

  Later, when the guard had gone, whispers began at the edges of the room. Rumours drifted. That those who left the infirmary at certain hours did not return. That sometimes cries were heard from a separate block, then nothing. That smoke from a particular chimney thickened on those days.

  Gisella listened without appearing to listen. The stories came in fragments, contradicted one another, then aligned again in a pattern that she could not ignore. The pregnant women she had listed that morning were gone by evening.

  No one told her where they had been taken.

  In the corridor outside, she passed a cleaning inmate with a pail and rag. The woman avoided her eyes. The rag left faint smears on the boards, spreading the dirt rather than lifting it. The smell in the hall grew worse, not better.

  When Gisella reported to the office, the atmosphere changed. The rooms on that side of the building smelled of starch and ink. The floors were cleaner. Shelves held bottles and instruments arranged in precise rows. Light fell more generously through the windows. It touched white coats, polished metal, photographs in frames.

  An orderly handed her a form to sign. Another made a note in a ledger. She stood while they worked, feeling the strangeness of her position. Here she belonged enough to handle papers, to speak in measured tones. Back in the barracks she belonged enough to change dressings on infected wounds. Between the two worlds, she felt stretched thin.

  “Any complications?” an SS doctor asked, not looking up.

  “Several infections,” she replied. “We need more soap.”

  “If supplies are available, they will be provided,” he said. The sentence sounded like a recital.

  “And the pregnancies?” he added.

  “I reported them,” she said.

  He made a mark on the page. There were no further questions.

  She walked back to the infirmary as evening approached. The light outside had turned the colour of watered milk. A cold wind moved through the camp, lifting dust and carrying it in small eddies along the paths.

  Inside Block Ten, the air felt warmer, but not in a way that comforted. The smell of bodies and illness wrapped itself around her at once. She moved through the rows again, checking bandages, listening to breath, adjusting blankets. A girl with lice scratched until her skin bled. Gisella held her wrists gently and cleaned the sores with a soft cloth.

  A woman on the top bunk shivered despite the warmth of the building. Her eyes were glassy. When Gisella touched her forehead, heat pulsed beneath her fingers. Typhus, perhaps. Or some other fever that would run its course unchecked.

  She sat with the woman for a while, counting each breath. The pattern was uneven. The woman’s fingers twitched toward her, then fell back. When she finally looked at Gisella, her gaze held for a moment. A silent connection. Then her eyes wandered again, unfocused.

  The prisoners began to rely on her in small ways. Someone would tug at her sleeve when a neighbour’s cough worsened. Another would whisper about a hidden wound. They did not call her Doctor out loud when guards were near. They used no title at all. But the way they watched her as she moved through the ward told its own story.

  At the same time, she felt their caution. They knew she spoke to the officers. They knew she carried names from their world into that other one. Their trust came in slight, careful strands, offered in moments of need, withdrawn when footsteps approached the door.

  That night, as she prepared to leave the infirmary for the barracks, she stood alone for a moment at the doorway. The ward had settled into a restless quiet. Women shifted under blankets. Someone muttered in her sleep. A distant moan rose, then faded.

  Outside, the wind had dropped.

  From somewhere beyond the infirmary, through walls and corridors, a sound reached her. Very faint. A shout that cut off too quickly. A door slammed. Silence followed.

  She did not know which room it had come from. It might have belonged to any of the blocks with locked doors and shuttered windows. Yet something in the quality of the silence afterward, the way it seemed to press its weight into the boards beneath her feet, spoke of finality.

  She closed the infirmary door gently. The latch settled with a dull click.

  Block Ten stood in the dimness, its windows blind. Inside, breath and sickness and whispers continued. Beyond its walls, the sound that had been cut short left an absence that felt like a warning, hanging in the air between what she obeyed and what she had not yet allowed herself to name.

  9

  Night settled over the camp without softness. It arrived as a slow suffocation of light; the sky drained of colour until it became a long strip of grey pressed against the earth. The barracks dimmed into silhouettes. Only the smoke continued to rise, steady and unbroken, drifting through the windless air in long threads that clung to the rafters and the fences and the lungs of anyone who breathed it.

  Inside the infirmary, the day had ended with the same quiet despair in which it had begun. Women lay in rows; their bodies entwined in discomfort. Feverish breaths rattled. A low moan drifted from the far side of the room. A basin tipped when someone shifted, spilling cloudy water onto the floor. The smell of illness and sweat had grown heavier as evening deepened.

  Gisella finished checking the final patient and stood for a moment near the doorway. It had been another gruelling day and her legs ached. Her fingers had stiffened from the cold that lingered inside even when the air stagnated with heat from bodies. Her back burned with exhaustion. She longed for rest but knew it would not come, not in this place.

  Behind her, an inmate nurse whispered a faint goodnight. The word carried no warmth, only recognition that another twenty-four hours had passed.

  Gisella stepped outside. She inhaled once, letting the cold settle in her chest. She looked up at the sky. No stars were visible. Only smoke. She turned toward her barracks, intending to return, but her body resisted the movement. Something held her in place. A feeling like pressure behind the ribs, an insistence that she needed to stay. She stood still, listening.

  Voices drifted from the infirmary window. Two inmate orderlies spoke in low tones, careful and hurried.

  “Another transfer tonight,” one whispered.

  “Which block?”

  “Block Twelve. They took three from the infirmary yesterday. They said it was for treatment.”

  A quiet pause.

  “They never came back.”

  Gisella stayed motionless. The voices pulsed faintly through the boards.

  “Do you think she knows?” the first asked.

  “Who could know anything in this place?” the second replied. “But she reported them.”

  A silence followed, heavy as ash.

  “They said the smoke was thicker after they left.”

  The words hovered between them like fragile glass. Something the speakers did not wish to touch yet could not deny.

  Gisella felt her heart shift in her chest, a small tightening. She had heard rumours before, murmured under blankets, exchanged in lines, spoken by trembling lips, dismissed as delirium or malice or the fever of fear. Smoke. Transfers. Special treatment.

  Nothing had connected. Until now.

  She exhaled, the breath pale in the cold. She waited until the voices faded, then stepped away from the infirmary and walked slowly, not toward her barracks, but in the opposite direction, following an impulse she did not understand. The ground felt uneven beneath her shoes. Frost crackled faintly under each step. Her feet moved almost without thought, as if guided by something older than reason.

  She reached the narrow passage behind the infirmary, where shadows thickened and the night gathered itself close. The space felt tighter, more intimate. A sliver of moonlight managed to slip between the roofs, illuminating the metal piping along the wall. Her breath floated white before her.

  The camp beyond this point was not fully visible, but she sensed its shape. The ordered lines. The fences. The hidden places where light glowed after dark.

  A faint sound reached her.

  It was not loud. A low hum, almost mechanical, almost like the steady beat of something working behind a wall. It came from the left. She turned her head toward it. Smoke drifted above the roofs. The smell that accompanied it was familiar in its unfamiliarity. Something burnt. Like charred flesh. It clung inside her nose and sat against the back of her throat.

  She walked toward it.

  At first, she moved carefully, aware of guards who patrolled at irregular intervals. The wind shifted, carrying the smell more strongly. Her stomach tightened in a slow, involuntary coil. She had tried for weeks not to think about the chimneys, the constant smoke, the unusual stench of it. She had dismissed it as industrial work, as fuel burning, as any of a thousand explanations the mind created to protect itself.

  But the rumour had curled into her thoughts now and refused to leave.

  She approached a low fence behind the infirmary. Beyond it lay a stretch of open ground leading toward another set of buildings. Their roofs were lower. Their walls darker. A soft orange glow flickered against one of them, as if light were leaking through cracks in the structure.

  A group of prisoners stood near the building, accompanied by guards with rifles. The prisoners held something. Small bundled shapes, wrapped tightly. At first, she could not see clearly.

  She stepped closer, remaining within the shadows.

  She squinted. The bundles were small enough to be held in the crook of an arm. Quiet enough that no sound came from them. The prisoners looked down at the ground, not at what they carried. A guard gestured toward a door. A prisoner hesitated. Another guard stepped forward, raising his rifle slightly. The prisoner stiffened and moved ahead.

  A sudden gust of wind lifted a loose flap of cloth on the nearest bundle.

  Gisella froze.

  The cloth fell away for a heartbeat. Pale skin. A tiny foot. Lifeless.

  Her mind moved slowly, refusing to understand what her eyes had seen. Her breath stalled. Her hand rose an inch from her side before falling again. She felt cold spread outward from a single point inside her ribs.

  She looked again at the prisoners and recognised one of them. A woman from the infirmary. Someone she had noted in her ledger two days before. Someone who had met her eyes with a mix of hope and terror. Someone who had asked no questions when Gisella measured her pulse, pressed her abdomen, wrote her name.

  The woman carried a bundle too.

  Gisella waited for her to reemerge.

  She did not.

  A new sound reached her. The heavy metal clang of a door being pulled shut. The faint hum from earlier deepened. Smoke thickened above the roof. A guard shouted. Another answered.

  Her legs trembled.

  She stepped backward instinctively, as though the ground before her had opened. The cold beneath her feet felt sharper. Her breath came in a thin rasp.

  She placed a hand over her mouth. Not to silence any cry she might make, but because her face had gone numb, and she needed the pressure of touch to know she still lived in her own body.

  The smoke rose.

  The woman she had recognised did not return.

  Gisella’s mind folded inward. It refused images. It refused words. It refused the shape of the conclusion forming in the dark.

  She turned away.

  She walked until her legs gave out and she sank to the ground behind the infirmary, where the soil was cold enough to bite through her skirt. She drew her knees to her chest and rested her forehead against them. Thoughts came as fragments. A breath. A hand. A foot. Smoke. Cloth lifting. Silence. That woman’s face. The list she had written. Her own hand moving across the page.

  Hours slipped past her without form. The sky shifted from black to grey. A guard walked by at a distance, but she remained unnoticed, small and still behind the infirmary wall. The wind grew colder, scraping across the ground. Ash drifted down in tiny specks that dissolved against her skin.

  Still, she did not move.

  Inside her, something shifted. A slow, aching movement like the settling of earth over a grave. A realisation that no words could hold. A collapse of the world she had carried within her.

  She had not known. But now she did.

  Near dawn, the first pale light touched the yard. The sky had softened from charcoal to dull silver. Smoke still rose behind the buildings, steady and constant.

  Gisella lifted her head. Her muscles protested. Her face felt stiff. Her hands were nearly numb. She placed them on the ground carefully, as if they belonged to someone else, and pushed herself upright.

  The world around her remained unchanged. The barracks. The fences. The chimneys. The patrols. The wind that carried the same smell as before. But something inside her had changed.

  Her clothes hung loosely around her when she stood. Ash settled on her sleeves. She brushed it off with one motion, gentle and final.

  She looked once toward the source of the smoke. Then she turned away and walked back toward the infirmary with a stillness that was new. Not resignation. Something colder. Something clearer.

  There would be no more names given. No more lists. No more obedience in that one command.

  The dawn light caught the side of her face as she reached the door of the building. Her breath rose pale in the cold air. She placed her hand on the wooden frame and stood there for a moment, letting the last of the night settle behind her.

  When she stepped inside, her heart had already crossed the threshold.

  Gisella would not be the woman she had been yesterday. She never would again.

  10

  The rain began before midnight. It tapped against the roof of the infirmary in uneven rhythms, sometimes soft, sometimes insistent, as if testing the strength of the boards. The sound moved through the room like a restless breath. Water gathered in the cracks above and slipped down the walls in thin threads. The air grew colder as the night deepened. Women huddled beneath blankets that held little warmth.

 

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