The angel of auschwitz, p.7
The Angel of Auschwitz, page 7
Gisella stood near the doorway, her hands pressed against the wood, feeling the faint vibration of the rain on the other side. Her muscles ached with exhaustion. The day had stretched without break, a long procession of sickness and fear. Her mind felt as though it was wrapped in cloth that muffled every thought.
A candle flickered on a crate behind her. The flame was small, smuggled in by a prisoner who had risked punishment to bring it. It cast an uneven glow over the women who lay in the narrow beds, their faces shadowed, their breaths shallow.
A soft movement caught Gisella’s attention.
In the far corner, a young woman shifted in her bunk, pulling the blanket higher around her shoulders. She was small, barely more than a girl, with dark hair that had lost its shine, clinging to her temples in thin strands. Her hands, clasped over her belly, trembled.
Gisella’s felt a slow tightening in her chest.
The girl had been quiet during the day. Too quiet. She had avoided standing in the lines. She had flinched when a guard passed the window and folded her arms across her front.
Now, in the dimness, the truth showed itself: a slight swell beneath the blanket. Barely visible. But undeniable.
The girl’s breath quickened as Gisella approached. She shifted again, pulling the course blanket closer as if to hide what her body could no longer conceal. Her eyes lifted for a moment, wide, frightened, reflecting the candle’s faint glow.
Gisella knelt beside the bunk and placed one hand lightly on the blanket.
The girl shook her head in a quick, desperate motion. Her lips parted in a whisper so faint it seemed more like a breath than a word. “Please.”
Gisella did not speak. She simply held the girl’s gaze.
Behind them, another woman stirred. She watched in silence, understanding without asking. Her face was pale with hunger, but her eyes were alert. She shifted to the edge of her bed and leaned forward slightly, a gesture of readiness rather than curiosity.
The room felt smaller. A draft passed under the door, brushing against Gisella’s ankles.
Mengele’s inspection would come soon. The rumour had passed through the barracks that afternoon, carried in quick whispers, confirmed by the patrolling guards who had walked with more purpose than usual. His visit always meant scrutiny. His eyes moved quickly. Nothing escaped him.
Pregnant women were taken away.
The memory of the night before rose unbidden. Smoke lifting in steady curls. The bundle in a prisoner’s arms. The lift of cloth revealing a pale foot.
Gisella felt a sharp pressure in her throat. She swallowed once, slowly.
The girl’s hands tightened over her belly. She looked as though she wanted to disappear into the straw.
Gisella reached forward and lifted the blanket.
The swell was slight, no more than the curve of early months, but it was enough. Enough to condemn. Enough to send her to the place where smoke rose. Enough to erase her in the quiet, brutal efficiency of the camp.
The girl let out a small sound, a whimper caught in her throat.
Gisella placed a hand on her shoulder, a gesture that held neither comfort nor reassurance, only steadiness. The girl’s breath shuddered beneath it.
A soft scrape sounded at the door.
The other woman in the corner rose from her bunk and moved quietly toward it. She pressed her ear to the wood, listening. Her hand hovered near the latch.
Footsteps passed outside. The rhythm was unmistakable. The boots of a guard. They paused. The woman stiffened. Gisella froze, her hand still on the girl’s shoulder.
The footsteps moved on.
Only when the sound had fully faded did the woman step back. She did not return to her bunk. She stayed by the door, standing watch.
Gisella turned her attention back to the girl. The candle quivered, its light thinning and stretching across the wall. There was no time for talk. No time to weigh the choice. There was no choice at all.
If she did nothing, the girl and the baby would die. If she acted, she might kill the tiny life inside her to save the mother. A life for a life. A cost carved into the dark with no witnesses but the rain and the silence.
Decision made, Gisella stood and moved to the far end of the room. She reached under the bed where she kept a small collection of scraps. Cloth torn from her own dress. A piece of soap worn to slivers. A tin cup. A broken spoon. Nothing meant for surgery. Nothing meant for safety. She gathered what she needed.
The girl watched her with wide eyes that glistened in the dim light. Her breath came in short, frantic pulses.
Gisella sat beside her again and placed the cloth on the floor. “You must stay quiet,” she whispered.
The girl nodded, tears slipping silently down her cheeks.
The woman at the door shifted her weight, listening for footsteps outside. Rain continued to patter against the roof. A faint drip echoed in the corner.
Gisella guided the girl down gently, helping her lie flat on the narrow mattress. The straw beneath rustled softly. The girl clutched the blanket until Gisella eased it from her hands and folded it aside.
Her belly rose slightly with each tremulous breath.
Gisella placed one hand there, feeling the faint warmth of early pregnancy. Her fingers trembled for a moment, then stilled. She had attended births in every condition imaginable. She had saved mothers who bled, who screamed, who fought for life. She had held newborns slick with the warmth of arrival. She had delivered children into the world with hope wrapped around them like blankets.
Here, in this place, she was being asked to end a life before it could begin. No one asked her aloud. No one needed to.
She breathed once, then began. Her hands worked with a steady slowness born of necessity. The cold bit at her fingers. The girl whimpered, clutching the straw. The rain provided a strange rhythm, steady and tense. Gisella whispered instructions, her voice barely audible, each word shaped with care to keep panic from rising.
A sudden patter of footsteps outside made the lookout woman lift her hand sharply. Gisella froze mid-movement. The girl held her breath.
The footsteps passed. Gisella continued.
There were no instruments to guide her. Only her knowledge, her fingers, and the grim clarity that this must be done. The girl’s face twisted in pain, yet she did not scream. She bit her lip until it bled and pressed her head back against the mattress. Her hair was damp from sweat and fear.
The work was slow. It demanded stillness in a place where stillness did not exist. It demanded care in a place designed for suffering. It demanded strength from a body that had been starved, beaten, humiliated.
Gisella’s own breath grew shallow. Her hands numbed. Her knees ached from the cold of the floor. The candlelight danced over the girl’s skin, highlighting the trembling muscle near her jaw.
Finally, the girl’s body shuddered once, a long tremor from head to toe. Then it was done.
The girl went limp, her breath thin and uneven. Sweat clung to her neck. Her hands relaxed slightly. Tears continued to fall, not from sorrow alone, but from the long, unbearable tension that had finally released.
Gisella worked quickly to clean what she could. She wrapped the small traces in cloth, careful not to let the fabric slip. The woman on lookout opened the door a crack, peering out into the night.
Gisella carried the bundle discreetly to the waste pit behind the infirmary. The rain fell harder now, and she knelt in the mud, her knees sinking into the wet earth. She buried the bundle beneath the refuse, covering it with layers of old scraps. She pressed a hand against the ground, letting the cold seep into her skin to steady her.
When she returned inside, the girl was wrapped in the thin blanket again, her body shaking from the shock and pain. The woman who had stood guard sat beside her, stroking her hair with a trembling hand.
“She will live,” Gisella whispered.
The woman nodded slowly. She did not thank her. Gratitude was too dangerous, too fragile. Instead, she looked at Gisella with a depth of understanding that felt heavier than words.
Gisella changed out of her uniform. It was stained. Damp from sweat. Marked by the night’s work. She lifted it and held it near the small stove where prisoners sometimes heated water, then knelt and fed the soiled cloth into the flame, piece by piece. It curled and darkened, then disappeared. The smell of burning fabric rose into the air. She watched it dissolve, her face expressionless.
This was the ritual she had not known she would perform. This was the erasure of evidence, the hiding of truth, the protection of a life not yet regained.
The final scrap had burned to ash; she stood and poured cold water into a basin. Her hands trembled as she dipped them in. The water stung her skin as she scrubbed her fingers slowly, one by one. She washed her wrists. Her palms. She lifted her face and let a few droplets fall across her cheeks.
Behind her, the girl slept in shallow breaths. The woman who had stood guard remained close, watching over her with a vigilance born of desperation.
Gisella gripped the basin’s edge until her knuckles whitened. Her body shivered uncontrollably. The candle guttered beside her, the flame thinning, flickering, stretching toward the last of its wick.
She stood alone in the dimness, not speaking, not praying. She did not name what she had done. But something had shifted inside her with the steady force of a tide.
She had crossed a threshold. There would be no return.
Under the leaking roof, in the faint glow of a dying candle, she understood that her life now existed in silence, in secrecy, in the cold basin where she washed blood from her fingers.
And she would not turn back.
11
Morning arrived in Block Ten with a grey light that seemed to seep from the wood itself rather than from the sky. Gisella moved between the beds with the quiet familiarity of someone who had learned to tread softly in a place where any sound might call the wrong attention. Her feet knew the warped planks that creaked. Her hands knew which blankets to lift with caution, which women to touch gently, which to leave sleeping because waking them would bring more pain than comfort.
She checked a bandage, listened to a chest, tightened a scarf around a thin neck. Tiny details that would once have felt routine, almost invisible. Here, each gesture felt like a small act of defiance against the design of the camp.
As she straightened from the bedside of a feverish woman, she saw her.
Hannah, the midwife, stood near the end of the row, her back against the wall, her hands tucked in the folds of her striped dress. She looked like any other prisoner at first glance. Head shaved. Cheeks hollow. Eyes wary. Yet there was something in the way she watched the room, the way her gaze lingered on the narrow rise and fall of the women’s chests, that marked her as different.
Gisella had noticed her before, months ago. The way she had steadied a labouring woman in the early days of the ghetto. The way her hands had moved: sure, practised.
Now, in the infirmary, Hannah lifted a cup of thin soup to a woman’s lips with the same professional care, supporting the head just enough, not too much. She wiped the dribble clean with a corner of a cloth. Her movements were precise. They belonged to someone who knew the body from the inside, not from instruction alone.
Their eyes met across the room. The connection held for a moment, quiet and deliberate.
Later, when the morning round of counts had been completed and the guards had moved on to the next block, Gisella found her near the water basin. Hannah rinsed a cloth, wringing it with slow force, her fingers red from the cold.
“You trained as a midwife,” Gisella said. It was not a question.
Hannah glanced once toward the door, then back. “Yes.” Her voice carried a trace of something older, a confidence that had not yet been completely erased.
“In a hospital?” Gisella asked.
“In a small town,” she replied. “But many births.”
They stood close enough for their words to travel only the short distance between them. The water in the basin reflected a pale strip of the window.
Gisella dipped her hands into the water and washed slowly. “We will need your help.”
Hannah did not answer. Her eyes shifted briefly to the beds, then back to Gisella’s face. A small nod, barely noticeable, moved through her shoulders rather than her head. It was enough.
That evening, as the barracks settled into restless murmurs and coughs, Bina approached Gisella’s bunk. She was one of the prisoner nurses who had already been working in Block Ten when Gisella arrived. A woman with narrow wrists and a jaw that clenched whenever a guard entered. She spoke while pretending to adjust the blanket. “I saw what you did for the girl,” she murmured.
Gisella did not answer.
“You will need someone to watch the door again,” Bina continued. “And someone to find cloth that is not crawling with filth. I work in the infirmary. I can help.” Her eyes did not meet Gisella’s. She spoke as if reciting a list of supplies.
Gisella studied her profile. The tension in the jaw had shifted, softened into resolve.
“Then you will stand at the door,” Gisella said. “And you will listen.”
The nurse nodded once and moved away, her posture unchanged, but something in her step steadier.
The third appeared from an unexpected corner of the camp.
Gisella met Abigail near the latrines, a patch of ground that most prisoners avoided when they could. The area behind them was shielded by a sagging section of fence and the angle of two barracks. It was not private, but less exposed. Smell kept the guards from lingering.
The kitchen worker stood with a bucket in her hands, rinsing it with grim efficiency. Her hands were chapped, knuckles cracked, nails broken. A faint smell of cabbage and fat clung to her clothes. Gisella had noticed her in the food line, how she sometimes slipped an extra sliver of carrot to those who looked ready to collapse, how she never lingered long enough to be caught. She moved like someone who understood the edges of danger.
“You can reach the kitchen stores?” Gisella said quietly.
Abigail did not look at her. She scrubbed the inside of the bucket with a rag that had already lost its colour. “Sometimes,” she said.
“We need clean cloth,” Gisella continued. “Not much. Small pieces. And sometimes water that’s not already cloudy. Soap if you find it.”
Her mouth tightened. “If they see me take it, they will beat me.”
“If they see you, do nothing,” Gisella said. “This is only if you can.”
Abigail paused. Her shoulders rose and fell once, a small, contained sigh. “They will not see me,” she said.
A few days later, a bundle appeared under Gisella’s thin mattress. Strips of cloth, offcuts from sacks that had not yet touched dirty hands. A small piece of hard soap wrapped in paper. No note. No explanation.
When Gisella looked up, she saw Abigail passing the doorway with her bucket. Their eyes met for a moment. The woman looked away at once, but the corner of her mouth twitched, just enough to acknowledge what had passed between them.
The network did not begin with declarations. It began with hands. The midwife’s steady grip. The nurse’s watchful stance at the door. The kitchen worker’s fingers slipping cloth under a mattress.
They slowly developed signals. A scratch on the doorframe, three lines faintly carved with a nail. One meant inspection in the morning. Two meant patrols in the corridor. Three meant immediate danger, hide everything.
A phrase spoken with an odd inflection passed between them during rounds. “The water is colder today.” It meant that an SS nurse had been seen walking near Block Ten, her shoes too polished, her gaze too sharp.
A bucket knocked over in the yard signalled a guard approaching faster than usual.
Sometimes one of the women hummed a short fragment of a song as she crossed the room. The melody stopped on a certain note when everything was clear and on another when everything was not. To anyone else it sounded like habit. To them it carried warning.
Treatment happened at night.
After curfew, when the barracks had been locked and the guards’ footsteps had settled into predictable routes, when the coughing had quieted and the sobbing had given way to exhausted silence, the work began.
A woman with a late period. Another with a small but terrifying suspicion. A third whose own body betrayed her with morning nausea and the faint tightening under her ribs.
They came in ones and twos, wrapped in thin blankets, moving like shadows toward the rear of the infirmary where a curtain had been hung to create an illusion of separation. Hannah stood by the makeshift pallet on the floor. Bina took her position at the door, ear tuned to the corridor. Abigail, when she could, slipped in with a small mug of boiled water, steam rising faintly in the dark.
Gisella worked with the same quiet intensity as on that first night. No raised voices. No cries. Only strained breathing, muffled whimpers, the rustle of cloth, the soft clink of metal when an improvised tool brushed a basin.
The rain came and went. Sometimes the wind howled against the walls, hiding their movements. Sometimes the night lay so still that every creak seemed amplified.
They buried traces in the pit behind the building, always under the cover of some other task. Emptying chamber pots. Carrying rubbish. No one outside their small circle saw more than bent backs and lowered eyes.
Word spread.
Not quickly. Not in any way that could be traced. It travelled from bunk to bunk in murmured fragments. A woman leaned close to her neighbour and whispered of the girl whose belly had flattened again and who still breathed beside her. Another spoke, eyes fixed on the ceiling, of the doctor who had looked at her and seen more than her prisoner number.
They called her that now. The doctor. No name. Names slipped away in the camp, eroded by numbers and shorn hair and striped cloth. The title was enough.
