The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

80 Rose Blood 1944

I was restless. I wouldn’t give up. I would save this man and take him to the warm shelter of Iceland, go home on the MS Gullfoss, covered in SS kisses, with the most handsome man in history on my arm. It wasn’t just the Jews who had to be saved from Hitler’s Holocaust.

I discussed the issue with Czerwony. He was as negative as always but pointed out that Jacek the farmer was the most skilled horse castrator in the district, as he himself had experienced firsthand, and he still had all the equipment required to squeeze the testicles out of a beast. I enlisted the services of the horse doctor, told Jacek all about my daring plan in the sixteen words of Polish I knew. Hartmut came in to me in the evening with a small folder crammed with letters and documents.

‘These are letters from my mother and other things.’

‘No, you keep those. Tomorrow we’ll escape.’

‘Tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘I’d still like you to have these, if—’

‘Don’t say if. History wasn’t built on ifs, Mum says.’

The following morning I slipped into Karl’s room, where he was still asleep with his big nose in a bed of dry sweat. He woke up to the smell of chloroform that immediately put him back to sleep again. For certainty I rubbed the cloth into his face. What a daredevil I was. Down in the yard, Hartmut approached Second Karl with the same substance from behind. The soldier immediately crumbled. We made a run for it, heading north, straight towards the field, me in front, dragging him out towards love and freedom, until a gunshot pulled him away from me. He lay there, face-down in the wet mud as blood spurted out of a small orifice in his back. I looked back and saw Jacek standing at the corner of the stable with a haggard face, as he lowered his rifle.

I threw my arms into the air. How naive I’d been. How stupid. Yes, a fourteen-year-old Icelandic idiot. Shoot me, shoot me, I thought, and I prayed to the Almighty Farmer Above to make his Polish colleague send me a bullet across the meadow, which wasn’t actually a meadow but just a field. But my prayer fell on deaf ears. They were too busy dispatching other souls to heaven. Inside the walls of the farm, two other shots were heard. And there was no doubt that each of the shots contained the scream of a soul.

I dropped my arms and managed to shift the attention away from my small life to the death of a bigger man. Or perhaps he wasn’t dead? With great effort, I managed to turn him on his back. His face was more beautiful than ever before, even though it was smudged with mud. A glistening black ant scuttled across his forehead. I’d seen a man blow life into a suffocated woman in an underground shelter once. And that is what I tried to do now. Like Juliet to Romeo. And when I could not manage to blow life into him, he blew his soul into me. I gave up and swallowed. His face now looked like marble, white and cold, sculpted by Michelangelo. Oh, why did such beauty have to disappear? Oh, my first and only. Groping through his breast pocket, I found the little folder. Like buns that were still warm on an extinguished fire, these papers lay on a heart that had ceased to beat. I opened the bundle and skimmed through a folded sheet of paper marked with skulls, swastikas and ‘SS’:

Till darkness brought me rest. Hartmut Herzfeld (1913–1944).

The war tourist continued on her way. The SS bride cried across the fields and into the woods. And sent a sad farewell to Czerwony. While the Nazi whore mourned her scheme, the island girl thought of home, and of Mum and Dad, wherever they were, with their lonely hearts. On one of the pages in the folder, I could read my father’s name: Hans Henrik Björnsson, 100/1010 G4. 17. Bat. Leicht. Inf. Gross Deutschland, Div. Süd, G. Kursk. Written in Hartmut’s handwriting.

I had told him about Dad. He had promised to make inquiries about where this Icelander had ended up in the war. They had a telegraph transmitter in one of the rooms. But Hartmut had said there was no definite information. What did that word mean then? Kursk. Was that a code word for ‘presumed dead’?

I swallowed the lump in my throat and crouched under a tree and called on the wild boars, wolves and bears to come and feast on sorrow-marinated girlie shanks. That bed of pine needles gave off a good smell. And now I pull that sweet and sad tree fragrance from the depths of my buried being, like a thread of gold out of a heap of dung.

The war is probably best described as follows: you experience what is called the ‘worst moment of your life’ about five times a day.

That night I called on a middle-aged country couple. The man with a Polish-sausage paunch sniffed the Nazi scent on me and sent me to the sty. Then he showed up in the night with a thirst for revenge and lust for virgin flesh. I immediately sensed where he was going but managed to prevent it by turning his assault into my handiwork, something a woman in Erfurt had taught me. I will spare the reader the details, and the story of my winter. It was a long, cold nightmare, but not as bad as the summer that followed, not bad enough to be recounted.