The Parade of Martyrs

THE PARADE OF MARTYRS / Ian MacMillan EASTERN GERMANY, January, 1945 I IWALK BEHIND THE WHORES, who are now too exhausted to complain. Next to me walk two French women who do not talk to me. They are as thin as I am but I am PoUsh thin and they are French thin, and anyway, we don't know each other's languages. Perhaps even our lice are now separated this way. Theirs are French fat Uce and mine are PoUsh fat Uce. Far ahead I can see SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kuttner's half-track swaying in the frozen mud of the snaking country road. For the moment we are safe from Kuttner, whose drunkenness has wasted him into a kind of sitting corpse whose head wobbles and jerks with the unevenness of the road. It is mid-morning, and we have walked since four a.m. This is our third day marching. AU the women hate the whores. But I still cannot take my eyes off their plump legs and pretty hair. My hair was like that once. They walk hugging themselves with fur stoles and expensive looking coats, while the six hundred of us are dressed in filthy, lice-ridden rags. AU around are the bare trees and stretches of brittle, dirty snow, and the sky is low and gray, the sun weak and the air moist and bitingly cold. I feel the lice suck. They are tiny and translucent, and shaped like loaves of bread, each with a perfect star of legs at one end. My smock is spotted with little explosions of dried blood, from my pinching the lice. I feel them on my scalp. I look once more at the whores, at the swaying buttocks that even their heavy coats cannot hide. Five of the six are Ukrainian, one is Polish. They are Kuttner's harem. When we stop he sometimes takes one to his half-track and then erects a tarpaulin hood over the back. II Twenty meters ahead an old woman yaws off the path and falls face down into the snow. She is so limp that I see her head rebound off it, as if bouncing like a ball. No one helps her. No one 200 · The Missouri Review is aUowed to stop walking. I don't want to see this. The whores whisper, looking at one another. Then they crowd to the left a Uttle. They are unused to casual death. One of Kuttner's guards and a taU, fat Aufseherin named Greta stand and look down at her, breath vapor curling away behind them. The Aufseherin kicks the old woman, who moves, trying to close herself up. I am almost there. The guard puUs out his pistol, and in a motion so rapid that it startles me, he shoots her in the side of the head behind the ear, making her head snap violently. We are past her, walking. Kuttner stall bobs in the front seat of his half-track, which we used to transport stones and tree stumps at our airfield. We never finished it. Each day we worked from darkness into Ught and back into darkness again. The Aufseherinnen watched us, and whipped us when we slowed down. There was no past or future, because the war was six years old. I was eleven when it started, fifteen when I was arrested and shipped to Ravensbruck. My parents were taken away. I was sixteen when they shipped me back to Poland to buUd the airfield. The war is six years old and I am an old woman now. At the airfield there were only the rocks and the stumps and the long grey wet cold days. Then the whisper of Uberation. The Russians were—over there somewhere. Already past Poznan. The east, of course. But the Germans wanted us. Covered with filth and Uce and scabies and sores and fecal stains from dysentery. They stall want us. They wül save us from the Russians. They wül herd us west, into Germany, to another camp annex. We must be valuable to them, dying one by one, letting go and losing our wül, or falling face down into the...