The Great Altruist Read online

  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 p
risoners 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.

  When the song finished and the nurses and doctors dutifully back to work, Kamila's ritual resumed the same as the other typhoid patients. Almost as soon as she sung her last note, she often sighed heavily and scurried away to the bathroom. Upon her return, she climbed into bed and whispered to Jadzia the same reminder: “From one hell to another, huh?”

  “The hospital’s not so bad,” Jadzia said.

  “I meant the bathroom,” Kamila laughed.

  “A lot better than the camp at least.”

  “Well, if it weren’t for the camp, none of us would be here," she said. She pulled the bed sheet up to her neck and took in a deep breath. "It’s strange, isn’t it?” Kamila wondered aloud, “but when I was left behind, I thought my life was over. I thought I’d surely die at the hands of the guards or by whatever army stumbled upon us. But now, I feel overwhelmed by all the opportunity.”

  Jadzia looked away from Kamila and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t.”

  “Why not?” Kamila asked. “The war is over now. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  Jadzia said nothing.

  “So where will you go when you leave here?”

  “Where will any of us go?” she wondered aloud.

  “I heard a lot of the prisoners are still living in the camp.”

  “I’d rather die than go back there.”

  “Then where will you go?” she asked.

  “I want to know what happened to my parents. And I’ll spend my whole life finding them.”

  Kamila’s countenance grew sadder. “Then at least you have hope. I already know where my parents are.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jadzia said. “Will you go back to Poland then?”

  “I have nothing left there. A friend of mine was part of the resistance when the Germans invaded. He managed to escape. Before he left, we agreed that if we survived, we would go to America together. I suppose that’s as good a plan as any, right?”

  “To have anyone to go to is a good plan.”

  Kamila nodded in agreement as a tear came to her eye. Afraid to let anyone see her cry, she turned away and buried her head beneath the sheet.

  Jadzia did the same.

  Throughout the day, she drifted in and out of sleep. She tried to focus her mind on memories of her mother and father but sudden images of life inside the camp interfered like a period of complete silence broken by an explosion. No matter how she tried, sleep lasted just a few minutes. And when she did fall into a deep sleep, she later wished she hadn’t: visions of the gruesome tortures carried out by the prison guards invaded her dreams and produced catastrophic nightmares filled with unspeakable cruelty and molestation.

  Then, as the long hours of sleep continued, the real nightmares began. They never included the long hours of work endured at the hands of shameful men whose appetite for barbarism knew no bounds. Nor of the dreadful sights of women being gathered together for execution, stripped of all their clothing, and led into a barrack where panic and then death awaited them. Nor even the awful cries of the dying she heard over the truck engines. Jadzia hoped one day these memories might disappear, maybe even dissipate from her mind like a dream upon waking. She could never get rid of the memory of her greatest regret – a mistake that may have cost her parents their lives. It fueled all her nightmares in the camp.

  In the years before the war, Jadzia had a life of superb joy with her parents and grandparents in Poznan, a city in her native Poland. Then the Nazis invaded. Poznan was overrun and renamed; the Germans forced her father’s shop to close. Soon, neighbors disappeared. Her grandparents, considered too old to be useful, were led away with hundreds of other elderly people into the forest where none of them were heard from again. Her family was arrested and all their belongings destroyed. Her father and mother were separated and sent off to the camps, but since Jadzia was still young, she was sent to a facility to be Germanized. She was later sent to an orphanage until she was sixteen when she was sent to Ravensbrück to work. In the six years since the war began, Jadzia longed for word of her parents’ fate. Now that the war was over, she hoped one day to see them again. If they were still alive.

  Not far from the hospital room where Jadzia slept, a small bomb fell from the sky and shook the earth. With the war’s end in sight, the sounds of warfare were slowly fading from the minds of the survivors. Jadzia was tortured by regret and slept soundly through the commotion. On the windowsill, staring at the explosion in the distance, sat a small, naked woman. She looked over her shoulder and watched the women sleep. With tremendous grace, the woman floated from the window and landed softly on the bed of the woman beside Jadzia. She placed the palm of her hand against the woman’s temple and closed her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered but then she frowned and pulled her hand from the woman’s face. She flew to another bed and grimaced as she read Kamila’s mind. She pulled her hand away in displeasure. Finally, she floated to Jadzia’s side and put her hand on her head. The woman smiled instantly and whispered: “You’re it.” In a flash of blue light, the woman disappeared.

  The next few weeks went by faster than Jadzia imagined. Her friendship with Kamila grew closer and she was eventually strong enough to eat solid food again. Within a month
of her arrival at the hospital barracks, her health had improved. Patients were being released daily to make room for new arrivals. Most were dismissed with no place to go.

  As the time for Jadzia’s release approached, she tried to imagine her own future. Nurses and the other patients often asked where she was going. She never had an answer for them. At night, when conversation diminished and she had time to think, curled into a ball and wondered if she would (or could) recover from the nightmare of the last six years, if she would ever have a family of her own, if her body would be strong enough one day to bear children. Alone and afraid, she forced her eyes shut, pulled the sheet over her head to block the still, cold air, and struggled to block the fear from her heart. A nagging thought persisted: Will I see my parents again – and will they ever forgive me?

  Before she could conjure an answer from her imagination, she heard a whispered voice say: “Yes.”

  She opened her eyes and looked around but there was no one there. Kamila and the other women had fallen asleep. She was completely unaware of the tiny, naked redhead who sat perched on the cross above Jadzia’s bed. In a flash, the young woman disappeared.

  Hours before her release the following morning, a nurse approached her. “Do you have somewhere to go?” the nurse said.

  “No,” Jadzia replied.

  “A lot of the patients well enough to leave are going back to the camp,” the nurse suggested. “The barracks are a lot more comfortable than before.”

  Jadzia shook her head vigorously. “That’s okay. I’d rather take my chances in town.”

  The nurse smiled. “Of course. There’s a transport that goes to Furstenburg tomorrow, but I don’t know where you’d go from there; life is far from normal.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Kamila said. “Does it pass Berlin?”

  “Yes,” the nurse said.

  “But what of your friend in Sweden?” Jadzia asked.