The Linz Tattoo Read Online Free PDF Page B

to
keep from being swept into oblivion when the Germans came looking
for people to work to death or shoot in batches or send to the
ovens. For five years she had prayed for the war to end, but this
time there would be no American soldiers in strange uniforms to
hand out rice and milk and tell everyone it was safe to think of
going home. No one was going to drive the Russians out.
    But perhaps it was only her own wickedness
that made prison so impossible to bear—it was wicked to think that
anything could be worse than the camps. At Chelmno her mother and
father had been gassed, and at Waldenburg there had been
Hagemann.
    Esther lay in her bunk, her eyes closed,
waiting for the sound of footsteps. One never knew the time here
except by the orders one heard—five-thirty a. m., wake up and wash;
ten a.m., assemble for first meal; six p.m., assemble for second
meal; sometime between eleven and midnight, go to bed. The rest was
filled with roll calls, work, punishment, roll calls,
interrogations, roll calls. . . It was an endless treadmill.
    And always there was the guard. Sometimes he
was gone for hours, even days at a time, but always he came back.
Sometimes he would merely watch her—she could feel his eyes on her
everywhere—and sometimes, quite suddenly, he would be beside her,
talking in that low, insinuating, faintly threatening voice of his.
And sometimes he was not content merely to talk. She could put up
with being mauled, but of course it wouldn’t end there. He was just
nerving himself up for the inevitable. She knew perfectly well
where it would end.
    But at least this one was no Hagemann to
strip her clothes off in handfuls and shoot at her with his pistol
as she tried to run away. She could still hear the smack of the
bullets hitting the trees, spattering her with pieces of pitchy
bark. Once he had found an abandoned quarry and she had cut and
bruised her feet until she could hardly stand, but each time she
stopped scrambling over the broken stone Hagemann would open fire,
the bullets burying themselves in the ground between her legs or
ricocheting off unpredictably. And finally, when none of that
mattered anymore, when she was too exhausted even to be afraid,
when she would have liked to die, she would look up and there he
would be, standing over her, laughing.
    “I love to see you willing to be reasonable,
Esther,” he would say. And, with the pistol still in his hand, he
would begin unbuttoning his trousers.
    And when he was finished, and she was allowed
to limp back to the camp, she would wonder why it had to be this
way. Why did she have to be hunted down and shot at and frightened
to the verge of madness before he would allow her to yield to
him?
    Nothing could be worse than that. This was
like death, this prison, but death must be worse. And the discovery
that one is capable of anything if only it will keep death off,
that was the worst of all. The Russians could turn life into death,
but nothing they would do could match the horror of what Hagemann
had made of her at Waldenburg.
    But now the morning was close at hand—or what
passed for morning in this place. The guards would come soon. A
shout and the sound of a truncheon banging against the door frame,
and everyone would scramble numbly to attention in their cotton
nightdresses. They would stand there like that, half awake,
blinking stupidly, their feet bare against the icy floor, for
perhaps three quarters of an hour while the roll was taken and
retaken. It was the invariable routine of the place, its purpose
unknown, it having perhaps become a purpose in itself.
    If one listened, it was possible to hear the
guards’ boots outside on the tile corridor. It was better to be
awake and listen, so as not to be caught completely by surprise. It
was horrible to be jarred out of sleep by the barking guards—it was
like awakening into a nightmare.
    All the guards here were men. It was a
women’s prison, but the guards were men. The first officer of