Terror in the Death Camp
She was eighteen, and still a young eighteen, even for 1970. Here in the death camp for the first time. In the terrifying lounge. The room next to the guards' watch-station. They called themselves nurses, but she knew the reality of it. Why could she not walk out if this was any kind of hospital?
Seats around the edge of this room were special. There were eight chairs on three sides of this square; just six on the side that ran by the windows of the guards' room. They were special because she always had to be on the correct one. Sometimes she knew she had chosen wrong and had to dash across to the proper one. Sometimes another inmate was in 'her' chair. That meant the other was working for the enemy, the guards, and could not be trusted. Worst of all some days, she did not know which was the correct chair for her, and just tried to curl up underneath one of them, just pretend not to be there really. Then the guards would come and cajole her into getting off the floor, or pull her by the arm, or shout until she was frightened. She knew she had to comply, else they would kill her.
She heard the tanks outside. Heard them shelling this death camp. All day long, every day except Sundays, and sometimes Saturday afternoons were quiet too. She could not understand why the lounge was never hit. She guessed they were just building up the fear, the terror. It was working.
The windowsills were well supplied with plants. Geraniums mainly. They had a smell about them. Some days it was strong and she knew that this was the smell of death. Those days the shells would land very close to the lounge. Those days she tried to get under the chairs as much as she could. There were some other plants too; she did not know what they were called. They were pretty and very colourful. She had never seen them before. She wondered why there was such beauty in this waiting room for death.
After she was discharged, she discovered the brightly striped plants were called coleus. She understood that the tanks were the bulldozers and pile-drivers building new parts of the hospital She learned that the guards were nurses after all, though far more brutal than any she had encountered before. She never worked out how to chose the right chair. And geraniums always had the smell of death to them, even after they were renamed pelargoniums, even now she was almost sixty years old, and a keen plantswoman.
* Andrew Hughes says “I live in Norfolk with my partner. I also love to write and to garden.”
