The Secret Midwife by Lane Soraya M

Author:Lane, Soraya M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

The infectious diseases block at Auschwitz was like nothing Aleksy had ever witnessed before, although he was immensely grateful for the other prisoner-doctors who’d already begun to set up Block 24. Where they couldn’t have rooms they had the area segregated by condition, which meant they kept diarrhoea patients well away from those who weren’t suffering from that yet, and the same for those with coughs.

‘Thank you,’ he said on his second day to a nurse, who had just completed the arduous task of sweeping the dirt floor and then emptying the latrine buckets.

She smiled and nodded. They were all grateful to one another, especially the patients. Without their prisoner-doctors, they all knew what would have happened to them; they would have been left to die.

‘Doctor, come and see what they’re doing in the women’s camp.’

They were alone in the hospital, the guards didn’t bother to stand watch over them any more, and Aleksy followed two of the nurses outside, not certain what he was going to be looking at.

‘What is it?’ he asked, as he followed the nurses closer to the wire fence.

She adjusted her scarf on her head. ‘I heard some of the guards have caught typhus.’

Aleksy’s eyebrows shot up. It didn’t surprise him. The conditions were so unhygienic, and the guards were around them all day. Lice were everywhere, there were as many resident rats as humans, and everyone was filthy – they had no proper facilities to wash in.

Women were standing, naked, at least fifty of them, huddled outside the hospital barracks that he’d once been put in charge of. Their spindly arms were wrapped around their bodies as other prisoners appeared to go inside, carrying buckets.

‘What are they doing to them?’ one nurse asked.

He shook his head, wishing he could do something to help them, to shake some common sense into the guards. But of course they didn’t care about common sense, because their efforts were not designed to save those in their care.

‘They’re washing them,’ he said, as he watched the first woman step into a tub. ‘I’d say it’s full of disinfectant.’ He could also see that their heads had been freshy shaved. ‘They’ve realised it’s the lice that’s spreading the typhus. They didn’t care before, so you must be right about the guards contracting it. I think they’re trying to kill the insects.’

Woman after woman went into the water as guards stood by, at a distance. Eventually they had all bathed, and now they were huddled once more, only this time they were dripping wet. If they weren’t already sick, they were at risk now, their skinny bodies berated by the wind. It appeared their clothes were also being washed, and they were given back to them dripping wet.

The women were eventually pointed back in the direction of the barracks.

‘You know, back in my village,’ one of the nurses said, her gaze fixed on the group of women, ‘I had someone ask me why we couldn’t see the horns on the Jewish children.

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