The Great Altruist

by

Z. D. Robinson

Copyright 2011
Altruist (al-
troo
-
ist
)

n. a person unselfishly concerned for or devoted to

the welfare of others.

Part 1

Chapter 1

Jadzia sat on the ground with her knees drawn to her chest and tried to keep warm against the chill in the air. The wool blanket the Russian soldier gave her was damp, heavy, and had holes but it was better than just her bare skin underneath. Mud covered her face. Streaks of someone else’s blood ran down her cheek. Beneath the clumps of mud in her hair, her deep, brown eyes darted about the camp, examining the women around her.

Most of her fellow prisoners were sent to Sweden a few weeks earlier. She was one of only two thousand women left behind at Ravensbrück - left to worry if she would ever taste freedom again. Jadzia, at only nineteen years of age, was left behind with the others to an uncertain fate. The other girls her age were selected for the death march a few days ago.

Gunshots echoed against the wooden walls of the barracks. The Russian army announced over loudspeakers that Adolf Hitler was dead and the war was over. Jadzia watched the women celebrate their liberation and wave and blow kisses to the tanks that rolled by. She was overjoyed by her new-found freedom as much as the others, but her fever worsened during the night and she feared that her illness would make liberation short-lived. She and the other sick women were sprawled beside the road and waited for the doctor to examine them. Their coughs and groans were so plentiful that between the cries for help and the distant gunfire, there was never a moment of silence.

“What is your name, love?” a nurse asked in Polish with a Russian accent.

“Jadzia Konik.”

“Let me look at you,” the nurse said. Jadzia opened the blanket discreetly and allowed the nurse to check her heartbeat and lungs. “Have you had this long?”

Jadzia glanced at the rash of rose-colored dots on her bare chest and nodded.

“Doctor?” The nurse waved to a man a few paces away.

The doctor excused himself from another prisoner and smiled warmly at Jadzia as he approached. He examined the rash and grimaced. “Another typhoid case. See that she is taken to the hospital immediately.”

The nurse nodded, bundled the blanket tight around Jadzia, and supported her as she climbed into a waiting army truck on the other side of the road. She sat on the floor of the truck and waited as more sick patients boarded.

High above the commotion, atop the roof of a barrack, a young woman crouched behind a short smokestack and enshrouded herself in its smoke. She was no taller than a large flower and was completely naked, though she seemed indifferent to this fact. Her eyes were the color of fresh green grass after a rainstorm. They scoured the landscape as though searching for something precious. The warfare in the distance, with all of its gunfire and shell explosions, did not faze the girl at all. Whatever she was searching for had her complete focus.

She stepped away from the billowing smoke and inched forward to get a closer looks at the women gathered on the road. Several women huddled together near the Russian tanks and waited for their ration of food and blankets from the soldiers. Not far from one of the barracks waited another group of women – many of them sick and unable to move. A doctor and team of nurses worked quickly to tend to the girls; a great number of them were too far gone.

Amid the chaos of sorting the needy from the broken and the condemned criminals from the survivors, a few young women showed unusual poise and displayed no frustration or angst. Two of the women held hands and prayed. Another sat alone on the floor of an army truck, waiting to be taken to the hospital. The woman on the rooftop watched all of them eagerly. She didn’t know if they were too faithful to be daunted by distress or if they had simply resigned their survival as lost. She didn’t care.
 
Satisfied with the groups of three women under her surveillance, she floated gracefully into the sky and languished over the camp. Without wings or any observable man-made method of flight at her disposal, she flew high into the sky and disappeared behind the clouds.

A hundred meters away from the army truck where Jadzia waited, the Russian soldiers led a group of German civilians, men and women, through the camp and forced them to look at the piles of corpses. The captured SS guards surrounded the ditches at gunpoint and prepared the bodies for burial.

“Look at what they’ve done!” a Russian soldier shouted in German.

“We had no idea,” a German man answered.

The army truck coughed and sputtered alive. Smoke from its tailpipe spat into the air in great plumes, and the truck carried the small band of surviving women away from the camp;
hopefully forever
, thought Jadzia. She watched the crowd of German women weep, all of them afraid for their lives and ashamed of what they saw. She covered her ears to block out the cries and buried her head between her knees and chest. Behind her, a woman began to sing softly. Soon another woman joined along. Jadzia strained to hear the German words the women sang:

“Fest und bestimmt in dieser Zeit des Endes, zubereitet sind Gottes Diener der guten Nachricht zu verteidigen. Obwohl Satan gegen sie hat gepriesenen, in Gottes Kraft halten sie unverdrossen.”

“The Bibelforscher,” a German woman whispered to Jadzia and rolled her eyes.

“Who?” Jadzia asked.

“Jehovah’s Witnesses,” another woman said. “They never stop singing.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” said a young girl.

Jadzia lifted her head and listened as the singing continued all the way to the hospital. She never learned what the words meant; it didn’t matter: for the first time in six years, she felt a tinge of hope, albeit fleeting.

As they arrived at the make-shift hospital on the edge of camp, a team of Russian doctors and nurses helped them get out of the truck and looked them over to prioritize their conditions. Jadzia modestly exposed the rash of red dots on her chest to a female nurse and was instantly whisked away. She was taken to a dimly-lit and dank room where nurses gently bathed her and gave her fresh clothes.

“Rest now,” a nurse said in Russian as the women helped her into bed. “The doctor will be here shortly.”

Jadzia understood little but it was enough to comfort her. She dropped her head to the pillow and dreamed of life with her family in Poland. The pleasant thoughts never lasted long though. Images of her recent nightmares flooded her mind and washed away the happy memories of her childhood. Every faint whisper of a laughter her mind conjured was juxtaposed with a frightful cry of despair from recent memory. The cries of joy and of pain echoed together in perfect, yet chaotic harmony. She worried she would never be able to remember her old life without the years in Ravensbrück muddying her memories.

As she drifted in and out of sleep, her rescue from the Nazis played like a broken record in her mind. When word reached the camp that the Russians had broken the camp’s meager defenses, the guards tried to burn the camp. They seemed desperate to destroy any evidence of their atrocities. Chaos reigned for hours as the guards executed many of the prisoners who were left behind. Jadzia was dragged from her bed and stripped naked. Forced to her knees with ten other women, guards began executing them. The girls fell over as the guns were fired. The other girls filled the barrack with their cries while they waited to die. Jadzia closed her eyes and held her breath as she prepared for death. It never came. Four Russian soldiers kicked open the door and killed the guards before they got to her. The Russians quickly ran to the next barrack where more shots were fired.

Naked and frightened, Jadzia covered her eyes and ears while the camp descended into turmoil. Outside the barrack, the SS guards were chased down: some of them fell into the hands of the prisoners who used their wooden shoes to beat their oppressors to death; others were followed into the forest and dragged by ropes to the camp where the Russians forced them to dig the massive ditches that would be used for graves. Jadzia saw none of this, but was curled into a ball on the ground, dirt and blood caked to her bare and pale skin. As the hours passed, calm set in and the freed women rejoiced, but Jadzia remained shaking and alone. Soldiers discovered her and covered her with a blanket. Two of the men helped her to her feet and to the roadside where she waited with the other survivors for a doctor.

           
Events from the day of her rescue soon faded as she stirred from sleep. A doctor hovered over her and gently spoke so as to not cause alarm. The doctor then conferred with the nurses in Russian. He leaned forward and said in very broken Polish: “You have typhoid fever. The delirium won’t last long, but your fever is high. We’re going to give you some medicine that will help you sleep. You should be fine in a couple of weeks.”

Jadzia nodded and managed a faint smile. The doctor smiled back and left with the nurses. She fell fast asleep, and again tried to force every dark thought from her mind and dream of her parents and the last time she saw them.

When she awoke a few hours later, there was a small candle near her bed and some gruel. It had the consistency of pudding and was flavorless, but it was more than she was used to and easy to digest. A nurse came in to check on her from time to time, but after eating as much of the gruel as the nurses would allow, sleep overtook her again.

By morning, her health had not improved. Her fever remained high and she hallucinated often. More girls were brought into the room and examined. Two of them were unconscious and another too weak to speak. She, too, had typhoid fever but was not expected to live long. One girl, Kamila, was full of life and tried her best to boost the spirits of the other patients, even despite their best efforts to avoid her. The nurses loved her as well and the laughter was welcomed by almost everyone.

Kamila had a strange ritual she performed every morning. She climbed out of bed and stretched her tiny frame for several minutes, first arching her back forward and back, then side to side, and taking deep, heavy breaths while groaning softly. She then gathered her blond hair behind her ears, tied it in a knot, and filled her lungs with air. Then, as she contorted her body into the shape of an S, pushing her chest out and lifting her entire body onto her toes, she sang. The songs were often folk songs from her native Poland but sometimes she would entertain the other women with an aria or even a popular song from America. The patients still asleep throughout the hospital never complained of being so violently awoken. The young girl’s voice pierced the walls and made the doctors, nurses, soldiers, and patients alike forget – even for a moment – that they were in a hospital, many of them never to leave.