Naomi's Gift (A Point in Time collection) by Martha Hall Kelly

Author:Martha Hall Kelly [Hall Kelly, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2022-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In my upcoming novel The Golden Doves, about two friends, one French and one American, who survive the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the French woman arrives at the camp with a one-year-old child. I already knew about the horrible practices the Nazi camp staff had with respect to pregnant women and children who arrived at the camp, which I’d come across while researching my first novel, Lilac Girls, and pulled out my storage bin of notes from visiting the Ravensbrück Memorial in Fürstenberg twice for research. As hard as it is to write about the victims of Ravensbrück, reliving the horror of that place, researching what happened to the children is the hardest. It is impossible to forget a dusty leather-bound ledger I’d seen while researching there in which a camp staffer had written in perfect script the name of every child born at the camp, their mother’s name and nationality, a simple black X next to every name. I’d also researched the inhumane treatment the Jewish women suffered at the hands of the Ravensbrück guards and thought both subjects needed to be told, so I combined both in Naomi’s Gift.

Many prisoners arrived with children and in varying stages of pregnancy at Ravensbrück, Hitler’s only major all-female concentration camp. During the six years the camp operated, the Nazi policy concerning the children born there changed. At first, Ravensbrück staff followed Hitler’s rule that no child could be born at a camp, and the children were quickly killed by medical personnel including former midwife Gerda Quernheim, a prisoner nurse. Later in the camp life, Commandant Suhren established a maternity block called the Kinderzimmer, where prisoners lived with their babies in better conditions, with down comforters on the beds, and where the babies were looked after while the women went off to work, the goal being making more productive workers out of the new mothers. Finally, as Germany lost the war and the camp spiraled into chaos, more children and infants arrived, too many to manage, and to this day there are many adults who were born or raised at Ravensbrück, saved by that chaos.

The infant Aldona I write about here is fictional, a composite of the Ravensbrück babies I know of, for in the course of my research I’ve met several adults who were born at Ravensbrück or came as children, many eager to tell their stories. A Catholic priest. A mother of two grown sons. The French infant I reference in this story—Guy Poirot, born of a French mother, Raymonde Poirot, as she labored in the Ravensbrück laundry—survived, smuggled out on one of the famous Swedish White Buses, and taught school in Paris for many years before recently retiring.

Just as the last of the people who survived the Holocaust are now passing away, the children of the Holocaust are getting older, and soon their stories will be gone, making it critical to hear them while we can. As Ruth tells Zina, hate won’t solve anything. But it’s Zina’s words that I hope resonate most.

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