‘When you make it out of here, then you must promise me one thing,’ I told her. ‘Do your training, be a midwife, at least witness the good side of mothers and babies together. You’re a natural, Rosa. Make it through, and make a life for yourself.’
She nodded silently. Her pupils were sprouting tears now, genuine I knew, because none of us wasted precious fluid unless it drew hard on our hearts. It was the best farewell she could have given me.
A hammering on the shoddy door signalled the hour was up, and I had no time to return to my own hut. It would be empty anyway, Graunia and Kirsten – my human lifelines – on work detail. With no time allowed to seek them out, Rosa was charged with passing on my love and goodbyes. I hugged several on my way out, eyes down to disguise my own distress. I was getting out, but to what? A fate potentially worse than the ugliness of the camp. I couldn’t begin to contemplate what depth of my soul I might be expected to plunder.
A large black car was waiting, the type only Nazi officials travelled in, with a driver and a young sergeant to accompany me. The sergeant sat poker-faced, in the opposite corner on the back seat, his distaste at my physical and moral stench apparent, as a German with no allegiance to the Fatherland. Reluctantly, he pushed a blanket towards me. I hunkered into the soft leather, warmed by the luxury of real wool against my skin and the rolling engine, closing my eyes and falling into a deep – though uneasy – sleep.
Berlin, August 1939
They called us in one by one, plucked from our duties on the labour ward, into Matron’s office. She stood, impassive, while a man in a black suit sat behind her desk, looking very comfortable. By my turn, he must have read out the same directive enough times to know it by heart, and he barely looked at the paper in front of him.
‘Sister Hoff,’ he began, in a monotone, ‘you know how much the Reich values and appreciates your profession as gatekeepers of our future population.’
I looked solidly ahead.
‘Which is why we are so reliant on you and your colleagues to help us in maintaining the goal that we have, the goal of purity for the German nation.’
I’d been forced to sit through enough lectures on racial purity to know exactly what he meant, however much the language shrouded the obvious. The Nuremberg Laws had made marriage illegal between Jews and Aryans for several years and we’d seen a real decline in ‘mixed’ newborns in the hospital. Now that Jews were excluded from the welfare system, we barely came into contact with Jewish mothers any more, unless they were both rich and brave.
He went on. ‘Sister, I am here to share news of a new directive that will now become part of your existing role, effective immediately. We require that you report to us – via your superiors – all children either born, or that you come into contact with, where disability of any nature is suspected.’ Here he looked down at his list.
‘These conditions include: idiocy, mongolism, hydrocephaly, microcephaly, limb malformation—’ he took a bored breath ‘—paralysis and spastic condition, blindness and deafness. This list is, of course, not exhaustive, but acts as a guide only. We rely on your knowledge and discretion.’
Speech over, he looked at me directly. I continued staring somewhere between his temple and his oiled hairline while his eyes crawled over my face. I hoped beyond anything he wouldn’t ask me for a decision.
‘Do you understand that this is a directive, and not a request, Sister?’ he said.
‘I do.’ In that, I could be honest.
‘Then I am relying on your professionalism in working towards a Greater Germany. The Führer himself recognises your vital role in this task, and ensures your … protection in law.’ He weighted the last words purposefully, and then continued lightly. ‘However, we do understand it is a drain on your time and knowledge, and there will be an appreciation payment of two Reich marks for every case reported, payable by the hospital.’ He smiled dutifully, at the generosity of such an offer, and to signal we were finished.
I wanted to howl inside, to take my too-short nails and gouge them deep into his tiny eyes set in too much flesh, made pinker and fatter by numerous trips to the bierkeller – sitting alongside his Nazi cronies, quaffing beer and laughing about ‘filthy scum Jews’. I wanted to hurt him, for presuming we were all as dirty and disgusting – as inhuman – as he had become. But I said and did nothing, just like Papa had told me. ‘Anke, there is diversity in defiance,’ my wise father advised. ‘Be clever in your deceit.’
The Nazi shuffled his papers and I saw Matron’s skirts shift from the corner of my eye. I knew her thoughts. ‘Keep calm, Anke, and, above all, keep quiet,’ she would be willing me.
‘Thank you, Sister Hoff,’ she said smartly, and piloted me swiftly out.
I went back to the ward – in my short absence, a woman’s fourth labour had progressed rapidly, and within the hour she was cradling her newest child, counting her fingers and toes and completely unaware that the efficient Reich would readily sacrifice her beautiful daughter if one such finger or toe were out of place. There was no mention of what would happen after we – as dutiful citizens – reported any disability, but it wasn’t a great stretch of the mind to foresee. I had no doubt it was not to build and provide excellent care facilities for such ‘unfortunates’. But in guessing their fate? I really didn’t want to delve too far into my own imagination. The increasing numbers of Hitler’s Brownshirts on the streets, and their open violence towards Jews, told us the boundaries were already breached. It was simple enough: to the Reich, there were no limits. No one – man, woman or child – was safe.
Every midwife, nurse and doctor had been spoken to, creating a strange conspiracy of silence. People were polite to each other – too polite – as if we already weeding out the dissidents, the non-committals among us. The labour ward was steady, but each birth brought a new question. Where once it was: ‘Boy or girl? How much do they weigh?’ now it was: ‘Everything all right?’ We were playing Russian roulette with an unknown number of chambers in the barrel – and no one wanted to be the first.
I thought back to a birth I’d attended a few years before, at the home of a Slovakian couple. The labour had been unusually long for a second baby, and the pushing stage exhausting. As I watched the baby’s head come through, the reason became obvious – a larger than average crown, which pulled on every ounce of the woman’s anatomy and spirit to birth. With the baby girl finally in her mother’s arms, we all saw why: a disproportionately swollen head, with eyes bulging from a heavy-set brow, one eye ghostly and opaque, unseeing, the other eye turned inwards, likely blind as well. The body was scrawny by comparison, as if the head had swallowed all the energy the mother had poured into the pregnancy. And all she said was: ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ The grandmother, too, cooing over the new life, content with what God had given them.
Beauty was never fixed so firmly in the eye of the beholder, as in that birth. I could only guess the mother might have shed private tears about the lost future of her beautiful daughter, or speculate about how long the baby survived. But I was even more certain that all babies are precious to someone, that we did not have the right to play judge, jury or God. Ever. I resolved firmly I would not be complicit. In the event it happened, I would find a way – I just didn’t know how.
Just one month later, Germany was at war with Europe, and the fabric of a whole nation was swiftly put to the test.