Strip to your undergarments.
Hands behind your head.
Walk.
12 words.
Analise’s legs stop functioning.
Her fingers freeze on her coat buttons.
January 1945.
A concrete processing facility somewhere in Belgium.
The walls sweat ice.
The floor burns through bare feet.
18 German women stand in a line stripped to worn cotton under things.
Arms raised behind their skulls.
The American guards aren’t holding weapons.
They’re holding clipboards.
That detail doesn’t register.
Not yet.
Not when every cell in Anaise’s body screams one word.
Rape.
371 German women processed through this facility that month.
Average temperature tonight 14 Celsius.
Percentage who expected sexual assault in the next 60 seconds? 100.
when they make you undress, it’s over.
That’s what they told us.
Propaganda training, six months of it.
American soldiers are animals.
When they capture women, they share them.
Five men, 10 until there’s nothing left to share.
Kirsten, 19, supply clerk captured three days ago, trembles so violently her teeth click like typewriter keys.
Her hipbones jut against translucent skin she hasn’t eaten since surrender.
Doraththa, 31, nurse, oldest in the group, stands rigid.
Her eyes fix on a point beyond the far wall.
Somewhere her mind can’t be touched.
The guards speak to each other.
English words, harsh consonants.
One laughs at something.
The sound punches through the frozen air like gunfire.
Anaisa’s bladder threatens to release.
She clamps down, focuses on the dog tag still hanging between her breasts.
Cold metal against colder skin.
The only thing they didn’t take.
Why the clipboards? The thought surfaces through terror.
Clipboards, pencils.
One guard squints at paperwork, mutters numbers.
Another checks names against a list.
This isn’t how assault begins.
Assault begins with hands, with grabbing, with silence.
That means screaming won’t help.
This has procedure forms, the clinical efficiency of bureaucracy.
But the underwear, the raised arms, the vulnerability engineered into every angle of their bodies.
This isn’t medical.
This is preparation softening, isn’t it? Bootsteps echo on concrete.
The first guard approaches the line.
Young face, farm boy cheeks reened by cold.
He stops in front of Anelise.
Her breath stops with him.
His hand reaches toward her chest.
Slow, deliberate.
She can see the calluses on his palm.
The dirt under his fingernails.
This is it.
His fingers stop 2 in from her skin.
He’s holding a stethoscope.
Cold metal touches her chest.
Anelise flinches so hard she nearly falls.
Breathe.
The guard says his German is terrible.
The word sounds like breathe.
Breathe.
Normal.
She can’t breathe normal.
She can’t breathe at all.
The stethoscope moves across her ribs, left side, right side, back.
The guard’s face shows nothing but concentration.
He’s listening to her heartbeat.
That’s all.
Listening.
Why? Typhus killed 3 million people on the Eastern Front by this point in the war.
Tuberculosis ripped through the Vermach’s female auxiliaries at twice the civilian rate.
The US Army protocol mandated medical screening for every P within 6 hours of capture.
Every single one.
Anelise doesn’t know this.
She knows only that his hand isn’t tearing her underwear.
His body isn’t pressing her against the wall.
He finishes the examination, makes a note on his clipboard, and moves to Kirsten.
Corporal William Hayes, 26, Ohio farm boy.
trained as a medic because he couldn’t stomach shooting people.
His hands tremble against the stethoscope.
He’s more afraid of them than they are of him.
Not afraid of violence.
Afraid of what they think he is.
Afraid of the accusation in their eyes.
Afraid of becoming the monster their propaganda promised.
I waited for the blow.
It never came.
The line moves.
One by one.
Women step forward.
Stethoscope heartbeat notes.
A second guard follows with a powder that smells like chemicals and burns slightly on the skin.
Delousing agent 2.
3 kg per prisoner.
Average.
The white dust settles on their hair, their shoulders, the concrete floor.
Doraththa goes rigid when the powder hits her skin.
Her nurse’s training recognizes it.
DDT kills lice, kills typhus transmission, saves lives.
Her body knows.
Her mind refuses.
45 minutes pass.
The cold deepens.
The women’s skin turns blue white.
But they’re still standing, still clothed in their underwear, still untouched beyond the stethoscope and powder.
The door opens.
Another guard enters carrying a metal tray.
Glass vials catch the overhead light.
Syringes, needles arranged in perfect rows.
Analise’s stomach drops through the concrete floor.
Kirsten sees it first.
Her body convulses.
A sound escapes her throat.
Not quite a scream, not quite words.
Nine.
Nine.
Experimenta.
She lunges backward, crashes into Doraththa.
Other women scatter.
Someone trips.
Someone cries out.
The guards freeze.
Kirsten’s voice cracks into something animal.
They’re going to experiment on us.
The needle tray clatters to the floor.
Syringes scatter and then Kirsten sees who picks them up.
A woman in American uniform kneels on the frozen concrete.
Bare knees, no hesitation.
Sergeant Margaret Brennan, 29, Army nurse Corps, the only female American in the facility tonight.
Red Cross armband stark against Olive Drab.
She doesn’t reach for the syringes.
She reaches for Kirsten.
Nik experimente.
Margaret says her German is clumsy but clear.
Nikt experimente medicine typhus shutz protection not punishment protection.
Kirsten doesn’t hear it.
Her mind plays a different recording.
Nazi medical training American atrocities.
Sterilization programs.
Jewish doctors who inject diseases to watch people die slowly.
They said Americans would sterilize us, turn us into lab animals.
47 women refused the initial injection that night.
47, more than half the group.
Some backed against walls, some simply shut down, eyes vacant, bodies present, but souls elsewhere.
And zero were forced.
That’s the number that doesn’t fit.
Zero.
In a military facility with armed guards and a war still burning, zero forced vaccinations.
Margaret stays on her knees.
The concrete must be agony.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t reach, doesn’t threaten.
Same medicine, she says.
American soldiers.
Same.
I show you watch.
She rolls up her sleeve.
Anelise blinks.
The action doesn’t parse.
The enemy nurse exposing her own arm in a room full of enemies.
Margaret picks up a syringe, fills it from a vial.
The liquid is clear, slightly yellow.
Standard typhoid vaccine, same formulation given to every US soldier since 1942.
She presses the needle against her own forearm.
Watch.
The needle slides in.
Marget’s jaw tightens.
The injection burns.
Everyone knows that.
But her hand stays steady.
She pushes the plunger, withdraws.
A single drop of blood wells up on her skin.
The room stops breathing.
Why would the enemy inject herself with poison? Why would the torturer take the torture first? Britt, 20, League of German girls, true believer since age 10, stares from the corner.
She hasn’t spoken since capture.
Her fingers twist the hem of her undershirt into knots.
She was supposed to die before this.
The cyanide capsule she carried, standard issue for women facing capture, was confiscated at the front line.
Death was stolen from her.
Now she has to live through whatever comes.
But Margaret’s bleeding arm changes something.
The propaganda said Americans would never suffer what they inflict on others.
The propaganda said Margaret holds up the syringe.
Who wants next? No force choice.
Anaisa’s hand rises before her mind catches up.
Anaisa steps forward.
Her bare feet slap against frozen concrete.
Every woman in the room watches.
Margaret doesn’t smile, doesn’t reassure, just prepares the second syringe with the same clinical precision, same vial, same dosage, same slight burn as the needle pierces skin.
Anelise watches her own arm accept the vaccine.
The liquid is cold going in.
Then warm, then nothing.
She’s still standing, still breathing, still herself.
Doraththa comes next.
Then a woman named Elsa.
Then another whose name no one knows.
She hasn’t spoken since the Eastern Front.
Just follows wherever she’s pointed.
44 of 47 refusals became voluntary acceptances.
44 women watched an enemy bleed and decided to trust, not because of words, because of action.
She injected herself.
Why would the enemy do that? Three women still refused.
Britam them.
She pressed herself into the corner, arms wrapped around her torso, shaking in a way that had nothing to do with cold.
Margaret approached her once.
Brit’s reaction, a full body flinch, a sound like a wounded animal, stopped her cold.
Medical exemption, Margaret said to Corporal Hayes.
Documented.
No force, no punishment, a form filled out, a note made, and Britt was left in her corner untouched, still wearing her underwear and her terror.
Zero forced vaccinations in USP facilities from 1944 to 1945.
Official policy written in the same bureaucratic language that covered everything else.
But policies are paper.
Margaret was flesh.
Margaret was the choice made in a frozen room at 2 in the morning when no one would have questioned force.
The injections finish.
The dowsing powder settles.
The women stand in a line again, arms down now, shivering, waiting, waiting for the next thing.
Because there’s always a next thing.
The processing isn’t over.
The vulnerability hasn’t served its purpose yet.
The underwear is still the only barrier between their bodies and whatever comes through that door.
Anelisa’s injection site throbs.
She presses her thumb against it.
The small pain centers her.
Britt cries in the corner.
Silent tears cutting tracks through the white powder on her face.
She cries without sound because sound draws attention and attention draws hands.
The door opens.
A different guard enters.
Female, another American woman.
This one carries no tray.
She carries gloves.
Rubber gloves.
The kind doctors use for examinations.
The kind that go places hands shouldn’t go.
Turn around.
The new woman says, bend at the waist.
Spread.
One word.
Analise’s mind empties.
White noise fills the space where thoughts should be.
This is it.
The vaccine was preparation.
Get them docsil.
Get them cooperative.
Now the real processing begins.
The woman with the gloves is named Captain Sylvia Norcross, 32.
She served in North Africa before this.
She’s examined more bodies than she can count, living and dead, and her face shows nothing but professional detachment.
She also speaks German fluently.
This matters.
I will explain each step before I do it, Sylvia says.
Her accent is crisp, educated.
This is a medical examination contraband check required for all prisoners by Geneva Convention.
You may request a private room.
You may refuse with a medical exemption.
Geneva Convention 1929, Article 16.
Female prisoners of war searched only by female personnel.
12 women requested a male-free room that night.
12 requests granted.
Zero exceptions.
But Anna doesn’t know the law.
She knows only that the woman’s voice is calm and the gloves are snapping and her body is about to be invaded.
Turn around, bend at the waist, spread your stance.
She obeys because disobedience brings worse because compliance might earn quicker ending because her body learned to follow orders before it learned anything else.
The examination takes 90 seconds.
Cold rubber, clinical touches, nothing that lingers, nothing that violates beyond necessity.
Analisa’s mind stays white throughout training.
A woman.
They sent a woman that wasn’t in the training.
Francisca, 27, stands fifth in line.
Former Ravensbrook camp guard.
She carries something the others don’t know about.
hidden in a place that survived three previous searches.
A small capsule, cyanide, death in two minutes.
She’s carried it since the Eastern Front.
Since the stories about what Russians do to captured women, the Americans are supposed to be the same.
The capsule is her exit strategy.
Sylvia’s fingers find it.
Time stops.
Francisca’s heart stops with it.
Courts marshall execution.
Or worse, they’ll make her live without her exit.
Sylvia’s hand withdraws.
She holds the capsule between two gloved fingers, small glass, unmistakable.
Her eyes meet Franciscas.
Something passes between them.
Recognition, not of identity, of intent.
She knows what this is.
She knows I was going to.
Sylvia’s hand moves toward the metal tray where confiscated items go.
The razor blade, the morphine vial.
Then her hand changes direction.
It moves toward the disposal bin marked medical waste.
The cyanide drops into the medical waste bin.
No documentation, no report, no record.
Francisca’s legs give out.
She drops to her knees on the frozen concrete and a sound escapes her throat.
Something between a sob and a scream that she’s held for 11 months.
Sylvia doesn’t touch her, doesn’t comfort, just turns to her clipboard and writes three words.
No contraband found.
She could have reported me.
She lied for me.
An estimated 4,500 German women carried suicide pills by 1945.
Eastern front trauma.
Stories that spread through the ranks like disease.
What the Russians did to women in Berlin.
What soldiers do to enemies who can’t fight back.
The capsule was Francisca’s control.
her final choice in a world that had stripped away all others and Sylvia threw it in a bin marked for used bandages.
Protocol demanded court marshall.
Suicide materials constituted contraband.
The report should have read one morphine vial, one razor blade, one cyanide capsule.
Should have, would have if Sylvia Norcross followed procedure.
She didn’t.
Why? The answer doesn’t come until much later.
Doesn’t matter tonight.
What matters is Franciscaca on her knees sobbing without sound and 18 other women watching an American officer lie on an official document to save an enemy’s sanity.
Private Howard Tanaka, 23, Chinese American translator, stands in the doorway.
He saw everything, says nothing.
His clipboard shows the same three words.
No contraband found.
Two lies, two witnesses, zero consequences.
The examination continues one by one.
Women turn, bend, spread, endure.
Some cry, some go rigid.
Some achieve the vacancy that trauma teaches.
A body that’s present, but a minds away.
Three contraband items officially documented that night.
morphine vial, razor blade, and a small piece of glass that might have been a weapon or might have been an accident.
The cyanide never existed.
Francisca stays on her knees for 20 minutes.
No one forces her up.
No one drags her through the next steps.
Sylvia simply processes around her, stepping over the kneeling woman like she’s furniture, until Francisca’s legs remember how to function.
When she finally stands, something is different in her eyes.
Not hope, not gratitude, something smaller.
A hairline crack in the wall she’s built between herself and living.
The door opens.
A guard wheels in a cart.
Clean clothes.
Shirts with two letters printed on them.
PW prisoner of war.
Anelise reaches for one.
The fabric is soft.
The first soft thing she’s touched in 19 days.
The shirt smells like soap.
Real soap, not the lie substitute that stripped skin and left rashes.
Actual manufactured soap with a scent that belongs to peace time.
Analise presses the fabric to her face and breathes.
Her chest shutters.
Kirsten can’t stop touching her sleeves.
Up and down, up and down.
Fingers confirming the texture is real.
Her eyes haven’t focused properly since the needle tray.
Dote dresses mechanically, professional.
The nurse in her recognizes the quality better than vermach hospital issue, better than what she wore while treating wounded soldiers.
We ate less as soldiers than we do now as prisoners.
The messaul proves it.
Metal trays with compartments.
Each compartment filled meat, vegetables, bread with actual butter, coffee that tastes like coffee, not chory root pretending.
USP ration 3,200 calories per day.
By 1945, Vermach soldiers received less than 2,000, often less than,500, often nothing.
Anna Lisa eats too fast.
Her stomach cramps.
She doesn’t care.
The warmth spreads through her body like medicine, reaching places the cold had claimed.
Kirsten eats until she vomits, then eats again.
No one stops her.
No one rations.
The food just keeps coming.
Hot water comes next.
Showers with temperature controls, steam that fills the lungs and opens pores.
89% of captured women hadn’t felt hot water in over 30 days.
Some wept openly under the spray.
Some just stood paralyzed, waiting for the trick to reveal itself.
The barracks have coal stoves.
One per 20 prisoners.
Actual heat.
Actual bunks with actual mattresses.
Britt sits on the edge of her bunk and doesn’t move.
She hasn’t eaten, hasn’t showered, hasn’t spoken since her refusal to take the vaccine.
Her fingers still twist the hem of her new PW shirt.
Not release.
not release.
Elsa watches her from two bunks away.
She needs to eat.
She needs to choose to eat, Dorothia says quietly.
That’s the point.
Choice.
The word lands strange.
Choice.
In a prison camp after armed guards stripped them to underwear and searched their bodies.
But no one forced the vaccine.
No one forced the food.
No one forced the shower.
The propaganda said force would be the only language that Americans understand nothing else.
The propaganda lied.
Analise’s bunk caks as she lies down.
The mattress is thin but present.
Her body remembers what horizontal feels like.
In the darkness, Britt finally speaks.
I wanted them to hurt us.
Then I could still believe.
Brit’s voice comes from the dark, flat, empty.
the voice of someone who’s lost something they can’t name.
They told me Americans were animals.
She doesn’t look at anyone.
Her eyes fix on the ceiling.
Rapists, murderers, monsters who would use our bodies and throw us away.
Silence in the barracks.
18 women breathing in the dark.
I was ready, Brit continues.
I was ready for the worst they could do.
Because if they did it, if they were what I was told, then everything I believed was still true.
They didn’t take my body, they took my truth.
8.
7 million members in the League of German girls by 1944.
Average indoctrination start age 10 years old.
Brit joined at 9, volunteered, believed every word with the ferocity only a child can muster.
The Furer loved them.
Germany would triumph.
Their enemies were subhuman.
These weren’t opinions.
They were facts written in blood and taught through songs that she still hears when she closes her eyes.
But subhumans don’t share vaccines.
Monsters don’t send female doctors.
Animals don’t offer choices.
I don’t know what’s true anymore.
Brit’s voice cracks.
If they lied about the Americans, what else? The question hangs in frozen air.
No one answers because the answer destroys everything.
Doraththa moves first.
Her bunk caks.
Her footsteps cross the wooden floor.
She sits on the edge of Brit’s mattress and does something she hasn’t done since 1939.
She holds another person without medical purpose.
Britt doesn’t resist, doesn’t reciprocate, just lies rigid while Doroththa’s arms wrap around her shoulders.
And slowly, so slowly, her body begins to shake.
Post-war studies will document this phenomenon.
67% of female PS reported what researchers called identity collapse after humane treatment.
The kindness didn’t save them.
It unmade them, rebuilt them into something with no foundation.
Analise watches from her bunk.
Her own beliefs crumble quietly, privately.
She doesn’t have Brit’s certainty to lose.
She stopped believing in 1943 somewhere in the frozen rubble of Stalenrad’s aftermath.
But she understands the void.
When everything you know is wrong, what’s left? Somewhere in the facility, Sylvia Norcross files her report.
Three items confiscated.
Zero incidents.
Standard processing.
She doesn’t write about the capsule.
Doesn’t write about the woman on her knees.
Some truths don’t fit in paperwork.
Morning comes gray and cold and with it the news none of them expected.
May 1945, Germany surrenders.
The war ends with paperwork and silence.
But for Anelise, the war ended in that processing room.
In the moment a stethoscope touched her chest instead of hands tearing fabric.
371 women processed through that Belgian facility.
Zero assault cases, zero forced procedures, zero deaths.
Numbers that don’t match any propaganda from either side.
Anelise becomes an interpreter for Allied hospitals.
Her English improves.
Her German carries the accent of someone who’s lived between languages.
She translates for surgeons who saved lives that looked like the enemy.
She marries one in 1948.
Brit spends two years in a psychiatric facility.
Not because of what Americans did, because of what they didn’t do.
Her foundation crumbled.
New supports took time to build.
She emerges quieter, smaller, but present.
She teaches primary school in Dusseldorf, teaches children to question, teaches them that certainty is the first step toward blindness.
Francisca searches for Sylvia Norcross for seven years.
She finds her in 1952, a nurse in a Cleveland hospital, married, two children, completely unremarkable.
Francisca arrives unannounced, stands in the doorway of Sylvia’s modest kitchen, holds out her hand.
In her palm, a glass capsule empty now, yellowed with age.
“You threw away my death,” Francisca says.
“I want you to have it back.
” Sylvia doesn’t take it.
Instead, she pulls out a chair at her kitchen table and pours coffee.
They talk for three hours.
Franciscoca learns that Sylvia’s brother died at Baton, prisoner of the Japanese.
No mercy given.
Sylvia joined the medical corps because she couldn’t stomach the thought of becoming what killed him.
I saw women that night, Sylvia says, not enemies.
women mentioned.
They treated me like a human when I no longer was one.
Sylvia dies in 1989.
Among her belongings, a single letter, German, dated 1952.
Return address in Munich.
The capsule is taped to the bottom.
Margaret Brennan, the nurse who injected herself first, receives no medal, no recognition.
She’s discharged quietly and returns to Ohio where she works in a veterans hospital until 1971.
She never speaks publicly about that night.
Anelise does once in 1984.
An interview for a documentary that never airs.
Hands behind your head, she says.
12 words.
I heard death.
I received medicine, mercy, and a truth that took 40 years to understand.
She pauses.
Sometimes the enemy is the first person to show you your own humanity.
