Between Two Oceans - Book 2

Chapter 6

October 1941

Three weeks. We were locked up for three damn weeks. Three endless weeks of being hungry and cold. To be thirsty too sometimes. Depriving us of water for bad behavior became our Aufseherin's favorite game by the end of the first week.

Bad behavior meant that we hadn't been quick enough to get out, that we had "danced" or that we had jumped around as much as our strength allowed us to warm up, because we smelled bad or because it was a bad day, because there had been too many deaths during the night.

How not to stink in this confinement where there was only one toilet behind a curtain that most could not reach in time. Some whose the new diet gave them terrible intestinal cramps relieved themselves on the spot, sometimes sharing the benefits with a friend who had knelt on the ground. There was no sink, no water and vermin quickly took hold. We were infested with lice at an extraordinary speed. Every evening during our quarantine Elisheba made sure to check my hair because the slightest louse found on an inmate who had not been shaved promised her that she would be shorn after having been beaten. During the day I hid my hair in a kerchief that Hosanna, Mahalia's mother, had given me after I had once again suffered the jealousy of my companions during a turbulent night during which a collective fight had taken place.

"Hide them, it will arouse less malice among envious people." she told me.

With the lack of hygiene came the first dysentery and the first infected wounds. Josianne was not spared. As my knee deflated and returned to a more or less normal color, her finger began to burn her. The wound was festering. I managed to remove the pus two or three times but to no avail, it was always worse the next day. We had nothing but the filthy tape we had swapped at the start of our quarantine and no more sanitizer.

"Piss on it." Elisheba had suggested.

Josianne had refrained from doing so, thank you very much.

When we left the quarantine block, we were again treated to a shower, this time hot. As I am small, I managed to get stuck between two giants and be spared from serious burns, but not everyone was so lucky.

Quarantine was also an opportunity for our jailers to carry out an initial sorting in their own words. Many died from the cold, beatings and food deprivation. The "sporty" afternoon of the second week was the most fatal with no less than twelve dead, nine ladies of a certain age even if she must have been less than sixty years old, two women in their thirties upon their arrival but who looked like they had grown thirty years older in a week and a last one who had succumbed to a heart attack to the laughter of our guards who watched her die for almost an hour.

The sport had consisted of an endless afternoon of torture under a particularly scorching sun, making us run, hop, roll and other inventions of our torturers who lounged in the shade with cold drinks while we were literally sweating and dying of thirst. We had to indulge in this macabre game without being allowed the slightest drop of water or break under penalty of being beaten. The bravest who had tried to resist by refusing to submit to this new abuse were sent to the management office to receive their sentence. Of the three, only one returned to the quarantine block. The punishments in question were blows with sticks administered to the buttocks. As a follower, she had received fifty and came back in a bad state, unable to stand she had been dragged to the ground and thrown in front of our door. The other two, the ringleaders, were sentenced to seventy-five lashes.

"I think they are dead." she told us a little later. "They were screaming so loud that I'm sure you could hear them."

We had not heard them, but I imagined with what harshness the blows must have been administered if the punished had not been able to escape.