eva and ania

My eyes grew weary, could no longer blink away sadness. The corpses that the Ukrainian guards brought back from Zimma Street and dumped outside Herr Doktor’s office were not Eva or Ania. It felt like it was me lying there. Ruth pinched my arm because I was crying too much and Herr Doktor was watching me over the top of his spectacles.

‘Our mother and father are gone,’ she whispered, hugging me briefly. ‘Our brothers and sisters are gone. Our friends are gone,’ she looked down at the corpses of Eva and Ania, ‘we have to live’.

‘Enough of this blubbering,’ said Herr Doktor in High German, so that the Ukrainians didn’t understand, and Ruth didn’t understand. Only I understood, but couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop crying.

Nulah shrugged, as if to say what can we do, I warned them. She moved away. Her hands were shaking as she lit a cigarette, not willing to look, to be caught in the floundering sweep of death; moving behind her blanket wall, blinkering herself, screening us out.

The corpses couldn’t have said anything, but spoke to me of human cruelty and hate. All the pretty colours of life were gone. In their place were the primary colours of death, the black bruising where blood has pooled and the white cheese of human skin that would no longer hold sunshine, and the blue of the lips that would become black, then white as all blood-pigment drained away. Their hands were tied. Rope cut deep into the skin of their wrists, leaving slug tracks of the push and pull of their last moments. Their mouths were full of white cement. A gag against crying out; digesting what was happening to them. Their nipples had been cut off and what smelled like petrol filled rags inserted into their vaginas and set alight. Whatever language was spoken it was a lesson in manners, do not run and do not try and escape, or this too will happen to you.

The Ukrainian guards slouched on their rifles. One of them wore an ordinary Wehrmacht uniform. There were no lightning bars of the SS insignia on it and that made him seem less threatening; innocent even. They smoked and talked cheerfully in their own dialect as they waited to take the remains of Eva and Ania away for burial in some unmarked hole in the ground where corpses would find kinship with their own kind.

Herr Doktor pulled on a pair of his cotton gloves, the kind that he used for examining patients and prisoners. He tweaked his fingers as if testing their fit, or playing the piano. His status established, he straightened up, and became the tallest man in the room, before plunging down on one clicking knee, and settling himself on his haunches, beside the twin corpses.

He pried Eva’s vagina open with his long cotton bud digits, and rubbed the burnt secretions between his thumb, middle and index fingers.

‘No good,’ he said, over his left shoulder, to the soldiers that were watching him.

He shifted on his haunches, shuffling forward without rising, like some kind of subterranean creature, and inserted the cotton digits of his fingers inside Ania’s vagina. She was the less burnt of the two, possibly may have died before their fun was completed.

‘Ah,’ said Herr Doktor.

The two guards craned their necks to see what he had discovered. The Jews were notorious for hiding things. He went through the same procedure rolling the residue from Ania’s vagina on his glove, but this time he sniffed it, his nostrils dilating like a dachshund.

‘This one’s still good,’ he laughed.

‘See,’ he said, holding up his fingers, ‘still firm and moist. I’m sure you men can still use her.

The two soldiers’ eyes swivelled to Herr Doktor, the corpses, then to each other. They spoke too quickly in their own dialect for me to understand. But they both nodded and painted on smiles as if signalling to a child that it was a great joke.

Herr Doktor straightened up. ‘Take them away,’ he said tersely to the guards.

Each of them grabbed an ankle. One had Eva; the other Ania. They dragged their heavy bodies along the school corridor, bumping their heads against doorframes and chair on the way out. They exchanged fraternal greetings and nods with their fellow guards at the door and marked each stair with a bump, bump, bump on their way down into the main quadrangle.

I watched out of the blacked out and broken windows as they dropped the corpses, an unwanted load, outside a truck. They took a breather, lighting a cigarette. They dropped the tailgate. Other white limbs, arms and legs poked out crying for attention. But with their fags set at a jaunty angle in their mouths I could almost hear the childishly counting: One, Two, Three, as they stretched out Eva’s arms and leg as a package between them and swung her carcase up onto the truck. Ania followed in death as she did in her short life. They gunned the engine like old pros as they drove away.

Herr Doktor was waiting for me in the office, filing in his endless forms to requisition the basic necessities of life, with his prized possession, an American biro pen.

He looked up at me as he wrote. ‘What did those soldiers say about me?’ he asked.

My thoughts tended towards the destructive, to try and drive a wedge between them, but quickly settled on something more prosaic in case it backfired. ‘They said you are a lot of fun.’ No smile stretched my lips. He dismissed me with a shooing wave of his hand without looking up from his paperwork, but I could see that he was pleased with his handiwork.