leashes, all barking their heads off while half a dozen voices behind them barked equally vicious and completely incomprehensible orders over my head.
I just cowered.
Finally, since obviously I wasn’t going to obey an order I didn’t have a hope of understanding, someone grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me to my feet. I ended up being dragged to stand at the back of a long line of women who all looked as bewildered and stunned as I was. They seemed to be civilians, most of them carrying small bags and suitcases. There must have been nearly four hundred of us – all packed five to a row – and I was the last one in the last row.
You know how you look around a new place to see what it’s like? I didn’t do that right away because my hands and knees were so sore. I bent down to look at my knees and cursed, ‘
Gosh darn it!
’ when I saw the humongous bloody holes in my stockings. ‘Gosh darn it, these are
nylon
!’
You know, it almost makes me laugh to write about it. What was the first thing you worried about when you found yourself a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Rosie? Gosh darn it, holes in my nylon hose!
One of the guards yanked me upright again, by my hair this time, and that is when I lost my cap, because they would not let me pick it up. I never saw it again.
We stood there until after it got dark.
I think it must have been six or seven hours. They weren’t punishing us that first day; I think they were just disorganised and there wasn’t any other place to put us yet. So we had to stand there, trying not to die of fear or boredom. But it was the first time. That made it harder.
This is what I thought about while I waited:
The walls. Twenty feet high and fenced with electric wire and skull-and-crossbones warning signs. There were a lot of empty trucks parked around us, but you could see the walls behind them. I still hadn’t figured out I was
inside
these walls – it was because I’d been locked blindly in the truck when I came through the gate. I kept looking at the walls and thinking,
Gosh, I hope I don’t end up in
there,
whatever it is.
Dreading that I probably would, and blissfully unaware that I already
was.
The sky. It was the most pure, beautiful blue September sky I think I have ever seen, with frothy clouds floating in it lazily like whipped cream in an ice-cream soda at the Hide-a-way Fountain in Conewago Grove. We stood there so long you could pick out a single cloud and watch it travel right from one side of the sky to the other – and then do it again. And again. You could see a ridge of pine trees behind one of the walls too, but the trees just stood there – they were boring to watch. The sky changed.
And then the women who were going to Neubrandenburg came marching past us, five by five by five, to get into the row of waiting trucks.
Those 200 women had all been turned into drones. They were like rows of plastic dolls. They all wore tattered, grubby dresses that didn’t fit (I don’t think any one of the 50,000 people in that whole damn camp had a dress that fitted her) – and there were great big crosses cut out of the fabric across the front and back of their chests and filled in with some contrasting colour. They weren’t prison uniforms, but they looked like prison uniforms anyway. But the absolutely nightmare thing about these women was that none of them had any hair. We watched and stared as these scruffy, bald zombies were herded into the waiting trucks, packed so close they couldn’t even sit down – now I knew why that truck smelled the way it did.
Suddenly, at exactly the same moment, me and the girl next to me turned to stare at each other instead of at the awful robot women. We were looking at each other’s hair and thinking the same thing.
After that we stopped watching the other prisoners climbing into the trucks. We just stared at the long hair of the woman in front of us, thick and brown and uncombed, and full of tangled curls,
I just cowered.
Finally, since obviously I wasn’t going to obey an order I didn’t have a hope of understanding, someone grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me to my feet. I ended up being dragged to stand at the back of a long line of women who all looked as bewildered and stunned as I was. They seemed to be civilians, most of them carrying small bags and suitcases. There must have been nearly four hundred of us – all packed five to a row – and I was the last one in the last row.
You know how you look around a new place to see what it’s like? I didn’t do that right away because my hands and knees were so sore. I bent down to look at my knees and cursed, ‘
Gosh darn it!
’ when I saw the humongous bloody holes in my stockings. ‘Gosh darn it, these are
nylon
!’
You know, it almost makes me laugh to write about it. What was the first thing you worried about when you found yourself a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Rosie? Gosh darn it, holes in my nylon hose!
One of the guards yanked me upright again, by my hair this time, and that is when I lost my cap, because they would not let me pick it up. I never saw it again.
We stood there until after it got dark.
I think it must have been six or seven hours. They weren’t punishing us that first day; I think they were just disorganised and there wasn’t any other place to put us yet. So we had to stand there, trying not to die of fear or boredom. But it was the first time. That made it harder.
This is what I thought about while I waited:
The walls. Twenty feet high and fenced with electric wire and skull-and-crossbones warning signs. There were a lot of empty trucks parked around us, but you could see the walls behind them. I still hadn’t figured out I was
inside
these walls – it was because I’d been locked blindly in the truck when I came through the gate. I kept looking at the walls and thinking,
Gosh, I hope I don’t end up in
there,
whatever it is.
Dreading that I probably would, and blissfully unaware that I already
was.
The sky. It was the most pure, beautiful blue September sky I think I have ever seen, with frothy clouds floating in it lazily like whipped cream in an ice-cream soda at the Hide-a-way Fountain in Conewago Grove. We stood there so long you could pick out a single cloud and watch it travel right from one side of the sky to the other – and then do it again. And again. You could see a ridge of pine trees behind one of the walls too, but the trees just stood there – they were boring to watch. The sky changed.
And then the women who were going to Neubrandenburg came marching past us, five by five by five, to get into the row of waiting trucks.
Those 200 women had all been turned into drones. They were like rows of plastic dolls. They all wore tattered, grubby dresses that didn’t fit (I don’t think any one of the 50,000 people in that whole damn camp had a dress that fitted her) – and there were great big crosses cut out of the fabric across the front and back of their chests and filled in with some contrasting colour. They weren’t prison uniforms, but they looked like prison uniforms anyway. But the absolutely nightmare thing about these women was that none of them had any hair. We watched and stared as these scruffy, bald zombies were herded into the waiting trucks, packed so close they couldn’t even sit down – now I knew why that truck smelled the way it did.
Suddenly, at exactly the same moment, me and the girl next to me turned to stare at each other instead of at the awful robot women. We were looking at each other’s hair and thinking the same thing.
After that we stopped watching the other prisoners climbing into the trucks. We just stared at the long hair of the woman in front of us, thick and brown and uncombed, and full of tangled curls,
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