Number 13

Buchenwald, 1943

They always came in the evenings.

Fifteen minutes at most, sometimes less.

They never stayed longer than that. Then the next one would be standing in the doorway, eyes averted, hands shaking, and the routine would begin again.

Margarete Neelen—Prisoner Number 13 in this particular ledger—learned to measure time by footsteps in the corridor and the scrape of the key in the lock.

She was twenty-five, from Güstrow, a small northern town where the loudest sounds before the war had been church bells and children shouting in cobblestone streets. Her parents had owned a bakery. She’d grown up smelling yeast and cinnamon, not coal smoke and fear.

By 1943, the only thing that smelled like bread where she lived was the charred crust on the thin slices they handed out at roll call.

Her world now was brick walls, barbed wire, and the word Buchenwald burned into a wooden sign.

Before this, before they’d selected her, she’d been just another woman in the camp—one of hundreds shuffled to work in factories, cutting, carrying, sorting, until her hands bled and her back ached.

Then one day, a list had gone up.

Sixteen names.

Women from Ravensbrück and other camps. “Volunteers,” the SS man had called them, smirking.

Volunteers.

She’d stood in front of the posted paper, the names blurring as her stomach clenched.

It was true that no one had grabbed her out of the line.

No one had dragged her by the hair.

They didn’t have to.

They made an offer.

Better food.

Regular medical checks.

Protection from beatings and the hardest labor details.

And a promise whispered like a bribe: Six months here, and you will be released.

Margarete had looked at her hands, the skin stretched thin over bone, the bruises that never quite faded.

She’d thought of the backbreaking work in the quarry, of the women who simply didn’t wake up some mornings, of the way the SS guards looked at them in the yard.

She’d thought of survival.

Then she’d signed.

People would say, later, that they had volunteered.

They did not know what kind of choices existed inside fences.

The building was separate from the rest of the camp, near the workshop but set back enough that the noise of drills and hammers didn’t quite reach.

It had once been something else—a staff barracks, perhaps. The walls were clean. The floors swept.

There were beds.

Real beds. Mattresses that weren’t just straw sacks crawling with vermin. Sheets that got washed regularly.

The first days, they kept the sixteen women apart from the others.

Quarantine, they called it.

Doctors examined them with a thoroughness Margarete had never experienced in the camp before. First the camp physician. Then another, from an institute with a long German name and a reputation she’d never heard but could feel in the way the SS men stood straighter when he passed.

They tested blood.

Swabbed throats.

Checked for “impurities,” both medical and imaginary.

They fed them.

Porridge that actually had milk in it.

Bread that wasn’t half sawdust.

Soup with identifiable vegetables.

Margarete’s body, conditioned to scarcity, rebelled at first. Then it soaked it in ravenously.

For a brief, delusional moment, she thought, Maybe the promise is real. Six months. Then out.

Then the first man arrived.

He was not in a black SS uniform.

He wore prisoner stripes.

He handed a slip of paper to the block leader without looking at any of the women.

The number on it matched Margarete’s bed.

They called her name.

“Number 13,” the block leader said. “You’re up.”

It wasn’t how she’d imagined her first time would be, the fifteen-year-old version of herself who’d daydreamed on the bakery’s back steps about boys from school and dances and kisses behind the church.

It wasn’t how she’d imagined anything would be.

She went anyway.

Because that was the deal.

Because when the camp creates hell and then offers you one of the cooler corners of it, you’re supposed to say thank you.

The men who came were not monsters.

They were thin.

They had numbers on their chests and triangles on their jackets—green for common criminals, red for politicals, black for “asocials.”

Some had physician’s hands. Some had hands broken by work.

They were allowed to come only if they’d earned enough “camp money”—coupons paid for high productivity. Two marks per visit, the rumor said, though currency here was as much fantasy as anything.

At first, most of the ones who came were “green triangles”—professional criminals, as the SS liked to call them. Men who had survived in this system by bending it just enough to not break.

They came into the room with a kind of swagger that felt brittle.

They left quickly.

Later, the block leader told the women bitterly that political prisoners refused to come, claiming they would not “collaborate,” as if refusing them was some great moral victory achieved at no cost to themselves.

“They get to refuse,” she said. “We get to live.”

The women understood.

The men understood too, in their own ways.

Sometimes, after, a man would sit on the edge of the bed a moment longer than allowed, his head in his hands, shoulders shaking in a way that had nothing to do with physical exertion.

“I’m sorry,” one whispered once, in a Polish accent, eyes red. “I just wanted… to remember what it felt like to be a man and not a number.”

“You’re still a number,” Margarete replied quietly. “So am I.”

He laughed once, harshly, and left.

The brothel, they called it, as if giving it a civilian name made it less a cog in a machine.

To the SS, it was an experiment.

If they dangled this “privilege” in front of prisoners, would they work harder? Produce more? Carry more bricks, sew more uniforms, dig more trenches?

They could have just given everyone more food.

They chose this instead.

It wasn’t enough, apparently, to grind the inmates down physically. They wanted to tangle them up in each other’s humiliation, too.

When Himmler wrote his order in March 1942, he’d couched it in bureaucratic language—“to increase productivity, I consider it necessary…”—but the intent threaded through every word:

Break them.

Make them complicit.

Make them share our guilt.

For Margarete and the others, survival still meant compromise.

They were shielded from the worst of the beatings. The block leader had a certain authority, able to snap at a passing SS man that “her girls” were needed.

They worked fewer hours hauling cement.

They slept in beds without lice.

Their bellies, while never full, stopped gnawing at themselves quite so loudly.

But they were never truly safe.

The promises of release after six months evaporated as quickly as they had been spoken.

Years blurred.

The evenings stayed the same.

Fifteen minutes per man.

Then the next.

The numbers of women never climbed much beyond a few hundred across all camps—Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Neuengamme, others with names that would become synonyms for hell.

It was a small percentage of the millions who passed through.

But the weight of their experience was not measured in numbers.

It was measured in silence.

After the war, Margarete found out what hadn’t happened while she was there.

No one had mentioned them in Nuremberg.

No prosecutor had stood up and said, “There were brothels in the camps. There were women coerced into serving as ‘comfort’ for prisoners, under the SS’s watchful eyes.”

It wasn’t that people didn’t know.

The men who’d visited remembered.

So did the women.

But shame made poor witness.

The women feared that if they talked, people would hear the word “voluntary” and stop listening. They would miss the context—that “volunteering” to be a forced prostitute in exchange for a slice of bread and a beating that didn’t land was not the same choice as picking between jobs in a free world.

The men feared that if they admitted they’d gone, some would call them collaborators, or worse.

So the topic slid into the cracks.

Historians grazed past it, uncomfortable.

A novelist or two mentioned it obliquely in a scene, a hint.

Only in the 1990s did eyes begin to turn fully toward that part of the camps’ machinery.

By then, many of the women were gone.

Margarete wasn’t.

She was in her seventies when she finally agreed to sit in a quiet room with a tape recorder on the table and tell her story.

Her hands were still capable, even with age spots—solvent as they’d been coaxing dough to rise in her parents’ bakery.

Her eyes had seen too much.

“They came in the evenings,” she said, voice steady. “For fifteen minutes. They never stayed longer. Then the next one came. That was… my work.”

She described how she’d signed up, how “voluntary” had meant choosing between one form of exploitation and another in a closed system, how the SS had leaned on women they suspected of having had relationships with Jews or Poles or Russians to join the brothel as punishment disguised as choice.

“They said we would be free after six months,” she said with a wry smile. “They lied. But then, lying was their language.”

She talked about the quarantine, the way they’d fattened the women up a little before putting them on display, not because they cared about their health, but because a sick slave was a useless investment.

She talked about the men.

About the green triangles who came most often, about the one political prisoner who’d shown up once, eyes blazing with a hatred she couldn’t tell was directed at her or at himself.

She did not dwell on specifics.

She didn’t have to.

The weight of what she didn’t say hung in the air between her and the historian, between the tape and the future listeners.

“At least,” she said, “we lived.”

The historian nodded.

“Almost all,” he agreed. “Of the women forced into the brothels, most survived the camps. Statistically, your group had fewer deaths than others.”

“Statistics,” she said quietly, “don’t count nights.”

He looked down at his notes.

He’d written words like “productivity,” “incentive,” “humiliation strategy.”

He underlined “humiliation.”

“Our SS guard,” she added, “told us once that we should be grateful. That we were privileged. He said we were lucky to be chosen.”

She shrugged.

“Maybe in some twisted way, he was right. I am alive. Many are not. But he said it the way a man might say it to an animal he feeds in a cage and then kicks when it does not perform.”

She paused.

“The worst part,” she said, “was not them. We expected nothing from them. The worst part was the way some of the prisoners looked at us. As if we had… stepped over a line they would never cross.” She smiled sadly. “It is easy to be pure when no one offers you a slice of bread and a place to sleep.”

The historian made a note of that, too.

Margarete’s claim for compensation in 1966 had been rejected.

“Statute of limitations,” the letter had said.

As if there were a time limit on certain kinds of hurt.

She hadn’t been surprised.

She’d done it mostly on principle, at a friend’s urging.

“They should at least have to write you back,” the friend had said. “With their official stamp on the envelope. Let them look at your file.”

She had.

They had.

The stamp hadn’t meant much in the long run.

But the telling did.

When she finally broke her silence, others followed.

Small numbers. A few hundred women in all, spread across countries, languages, social classes.

Their testimonies painted a picture that no SS report had intended: that the brothels had not “rewarded” prisoners so much as implicated them, smearing guilt sideways, turning victims into participants in others’ victimization.

You could increase productivity by feeding people.

By letting them sleep.

By not beating them.

Himmler had chosen instead to dangle human beings as treats and call it efficiency.

“That,” one historian would write later, “was perhaps the most twisted part of the whole design—not the brothels themselves, though they were obscene, but the way they turned survival into a moral trap.”

In the end, Margarete did not get a plaque.

No memorial listed her name specifically.

When people visited the sites of the camps, they walked past the buildings where she had lived and worked and did not know what had happened in those walls, beyond the general category of unspeakable things.

That was all right, in a way.

She did not want her grandchildren to picture her as she had been then.

She wanted them to picture the bakery.

Still, when she sat on her balcony in the summer, watching pigeons fight over crumbs, she found herself thinking about the girls she’d known in that special block.

Liesel, who could make up songs about anything.

Anna, who had eyes like a winter sky and a laugh that sounded like breaking glass.

They had all made the same impossible choice.

Some would have judged them for it.

She did not.

She remembered the hunger.

The way your body, under enough stress, stopped caring about the future and focused only on the next hour.

“There are things,” she told her granddaughter once, when the girl was old enough to understand that life was not a neat series of good and bad choices, “that people will ask you to judge without having walked where you stand.”

Her granddaughter tilted her head.

“Like what?” she asked.

Margarete thought of block doors. Lists. Food.

“Like times when every door you can see leads to harm,” she said. “And you pick the one that hurts least. It is still harm. But you live. And sometimes, surviving is all the resistance you have left.”

Her granddaughter frowned, chewing her lip.

“Did you… have to do that?” she asked.

Margarete looked at her.

“Yes,” she said. “And no. That is the problem. I chose. But the choices were made by other people long before I stood in front of that paper.”

The girl nodded slowly, not fully understanding.

That was fine.

Some truths you grew into.

Some you hoped the next generation would never have to.

The brothels were a small part of the camp system, in terms of numbers.

A few hundred women out of millions.

Yet their existence exposed something important about the regime that built them—that it did not merely want to work people to death or exterminate them efficiently.

It wanted to strip them of every shred of dignity along the way.

To make survival itself feel like a moral compromise.

In the end, those women did survive, in disproportionate numbers.

That fact alone made their story worth telling.

Not because survival validates the system that offered it as a poisoned gift.

Because it underscored what they had been willing to endure to stay alive.

It took almost fifty years for their voices to reach beyond the walls of those buildings.

By then, many had gone to their graves with their secrets.

The ones who spoke did so knowing they risked being misunderstood.

Margarete spoke anyway.

“People say, sometimes, ‘Why did you not… just refuse?’” she told one interviewer. “I say, ‘Come live for one month in that place, with that ration and that fear, and then we talk about what “just refuse” looks like.’”

She smiled, thin and fierce.

“Yes, I did what I had to do to live,” she said. “And because I did, I am here. I had children. Grandchildren. I can tell you this story. That, for me, is enough answer.”

For a long time, almost no one had wanted to hear it.

Now, belatedly, the world began to listen.

Not to sensationalize.

Not to wallow.

But to understand one more facet of what it meant when a state decided that certain people’s bodies could be turned into just another resource.

And to honor women whose survival had come at a price they’d been forced to pay in silence.

THE END