Audrey read the most recent missive aloud to Wen as she nibbled on her potato. It was full of stories of domestic life and a cryptic reference to the recent bombings in Berlin that Audrey had heard the guards talking about.
“Daniel is doing mathematics!” Wen exclaimed when Audrey finished. “It feels like just yesterday he was learning to feed himself, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, folding up Ilse’s letter. “And no.”
She considered the weight of the intervening years.
Most days, she felt as though she had always lived in this prison, so eternal was the sense of captivity. In the first year, Wen had tried to plan their escape, but couldn’t find a crack to wedge open. She thought the prison director, a Reich government employee but a reasonable enough woman, might be bribed. There were rumours that her son was killed on the Eastern front when the USSR turned its coat; others whispered that she was Jewish, which was a possibility, Audrey thought, remembering Friedrich’s own duplicity. Though there were no Jewish prisoners here, as far as she could tell. From the stories that trickled in, Audrey had pieced together the truth about the deportations, the purpose of the camps in Germany and Poland. She’d never had much hope for Ruth and Ephraim’s safe return, but the flicker of optimism she’d tried to shield from the storm had long since been snuffed out.
It felt sometimes like they had been at Vechta for a century, but Ilse’s updates about Daniel’s rapid growth had a way of revealing how quickly time actually moved.
The women sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the cement wall across from them for a long while.
“You still love her, don’t you?” Wen asked.
Audrey nodded. “Oh, yes. Do you still love Henrik?”
Wen sighed. “Yes. I believe I will forever. Isn’t that absurd? I have nothing to live for on the outside. I keep on going here for… what? The memory of a dead man.”
“How is it absurd to live for Henrik’s memory?” Audrey asked gently. “Keeping yourself alive means keeping him alive, too, Wen. He would only be truly gone if you weren’t here to remember him.”
Wen was quiet. Some women shouted down the hall; a metal door slammed.
“We knew what we were getting into,” Wen said. “We did. I think we just always thought we’d survive it. Isn’t that foolish?”
Audrey gave Wen a squeeze. “No. I think it was hopeful.”
Wen scoffed through a stuffed nose. “Hope makes fools of us all, doesn’t it?”
Audrey thought of Ilse’s continued insistence to remain in the house in case her mother and brother returned. Of the men firing bullets and bombs at one another on land, at sea, and in the air. Of the women, the nurses, secretaries, and factory workers. They were all fighting, right at this very moment, to ensure there was something left of the world for those who came after. The entire war was about hope that the future could bring something better. The beat of their pounding, fearful, courageous hearts would echo down through the generations.
Hope would be the world’s inheritance at the end of all the bloodshed.
“Perhaps,” Audrey said. “But what would we be without it?”
In March, Audrey and Wen—along with twenty or so other prisoners—were tasked with splicing wires for bomb igniters. It was painfully tedious, and Audrey’s fingers made it difficult. She had to set the wires at a strange angle for the small, blunt knife that was her stripping tool. It wasn’t sharp enough to do much damage to a person, but the guards had nevertheless chosen the work group carefully. Looking around, Audrey realized the group was mostly full of inmates who never caused trouble, and those like Wen whose spirits had been broken long ago.
They were lined up at the long tables in the mess hall, backs hunched over their work, which was lit poorly by a few barred windows and a handful of bare lightbulbs. Talking was permitted so long as they were reasonably quiet, but many of the women had said all there was to say to one another years ago. There were a few newer prisoners though; Audrey could identify them immediately as they still had fat on their bones, and they were the chattiest.
Audrey had no idea how much time had passed as they worked. There were no clocks anywhere; the inmates were simply told where to go in the moment it was demanded of them. As Audrey worked, she allowed her mind to drift to Ilse’s theme. She’d finished it during the thousands of hours of labour over the past few years. She missed all music, but at least was able to keep this piece with her wherever she went. Though she knew she could never play it again herself, she had some hope that someday she could write it down and hire someone to play it for Ilse. Some unshattered pianist who could finish what she’d started.
The voice of a new inmate broke through the music in her mind. The woman was telling the group about her sister, who lived near the Polish border, where there were a number of ghettos. Audrey tried to tune her out, but when she described the Nazi purge of the encampments, Audrey turned to Wen.
“Why would they be purging the ghettos?” she whispered, setting aside a blue wire and picking up a red one.
“I was just thinking the same,” Wen muttered. “Must mean something’s changed, anyway. Berlin is being bombed. Maybe Germany’s retreating from Poland?”
Audrey reached now for the yellow wire, the longest of the three.
“Made the children dig their own graves,” the woman was saying in a distraught tone that carried down the table. “Little ones, not ten years old, mind. Just buried them straight alive, poor souls. Klara said the earth atop the pit moved for three days before it finally stopped.”
Audrey’s hands froze. She was grateful, in that moment, that her stomach was always empty, because otherwise she would have vomited.
Beside her, Wen shuddered. “Good God.”
Audrey’s ears were ringing, eyes itching with the threat of tears. She stared down at the multicoloured wires in front of her. She was still holding the yellow one, the one that needed to be twisted together with the end of the red one and then folded over, securing the pieces together.
Words from the White Rose leaflet came rushing back in a gale of awareness.
Crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure…
She held the wire and knife as her body buzzed with a sensation she’d nearly forgotten: the compulsion to act. She’d been in prison for six years—physically, emotionally, and psychologically reduced to a faded version of herself. But beneath the crust of exhaustion and despair, she recalled the version who’d thrown herself in Weber’s licentious path, who brought Daniel home, who didn’t break, as her fingers had, during interrogation in the basement of the Gestapo headquarters. That version of Audrey still had something left to give, some ounce of resistance remaining.
So she began to splice the wires wrong. Maybe she could ensure some German bombs didn’t detonate. Maybe she could still save someone from this seat on the long wooden bench in the middle of the Vechta prison mess hall.
Wen glanced over at her hands. “Do you need help?” she muttered.
“No.”
“But you’re doing it wrong. You need to secure the—”
“I know.”
Chapter 37
Audrey
