Bitterly cold, two women -- both young, shorn of hair, and severely emaciated -- attending one of their own about to give birth to her first baby, periodically shoved their hands under their arm pits in an attempt to regain some feeling in their fingers.  Half-naked, the expectant mother shivered to the point her skin was pocked by horripilation.

 

Snow had been falling for ten days straight. Gigantic drifts were piled up against the two-story wooden infirmary. Long, thick icicles hung from the eaves of the building, and ice coated both the inner and outer sides of the thin glass windows.

 

The two women, their countenances stricken with stress as they fretted that they and the expectant mother and her baby might be discovered by the SS who made periodic rounds of all the barracks and outbuildings, glanced nervously at the staircase.  It helped somewhat that they were on the second floor as the heavy steps of the SS guards’ boots usually resounded on the hard boards of the staircase.

 

Should they be caught bringing a new Jewish life into the world, they knew that the likely result would be the gas chamber – not only for themselves, but the mother and the baby as well. Either that or a bullet in the head, for each of them. They had a battered pail of water nearby.

 

The right hand of the taller of the two attendants hovered over the mouth of the young pregnant woman, ready to tightly clamp down to terminate any moan, groan or scream. The two women didn’t know it yet, but they were in for an extraordinarily long night.  They had no idea that the expectant mother and the baby in her womb were already engaged in a battle royal.

 

As the baby began to crown, her mother fought feverishly to not only prevent the baby from being born, but to literally pull the baby back into the womb in the hope that it would die there. As for the baby, she clawed and pulled with her tiny hands and pushed and shoved with her little legs and feet in an effort to enter the world.

 

The mother, her face contorted in a paroxysm of pain, began to scream, but the hand hovering over her mouth quickly muffled the sound. Feeling as if she were being suffocated, the mother squirmed and fought and bit at the hand in order to gulp a breath of air.

 

When it was beyond guesswork that the expectant mother desperately needed a breath of air, the attendee removed her hand.

 

Gasping for breath, the mother almost immediately inhaled with all her might in a last-ditch effort to reverse the direction of the baby. Furiously fighting against the contractions that were pushing the baby out into a Nazified world that hated both of them, the mother’s face flushed with the effort.  When she could no longer hold her breath, her mouth exploded open in another effort to inhale as much air as possible.

 

Continuing her Herculean effort, she slowly began to alter the dilation of her cervix, from a full ten centimeters to nine and then eight and then seven, where it remained for over an hour.  Whenever she felt the baby making headway, she intensified her own effort.

 

Back and forth, again and again, they went. The baby, having no notion as to why her mother was doing everything in her power to prevent her from entering the world, continued to furiously claw and scratch in order to exit the womb.

 

Each time there was a verbal eruption by the mother, it was stifled immediately. As the pregnant woman began to feel as if she were suffocating, the baby automatically sensed it was time for making major headway and would redouble its effort.

 

And so it went for the next seven and a half hours, exhaustion wearing away the mother and baby, each caught up in a battle not of her own making, each intent on winning what would prove to be a pyrrhic victory, a battle on an uneven battlefield in a deathly cold world.