She Was the “Enemy” Until the Bandages Came Off: After U.S. Medics Saved a Burned German Prisoner, She Leaned Close and Whispered “My Skin Hurt”—a chilling clue that sent one American doctor hunting for the hidden story behind her scars.
“My Skin Hurt” — A Wartime Story
They brought her in at dusk, when the sky had the flat, bruised color that winter makes when it’s tired of being cold.
The war had taught us to read trucks the way farmers read clouds. This one rolled through the ruined street with a slow, careful lurch, the driver choosing potholes like stepping-stones. In the bed, bundled figures sat in a rigid row, hands folded, heads down. Prisoners. The guards walked beside the wheels, rifles held like they were part of their arms.
I was twenty-six and already felt older than my father.
Inside the schoolhouse we’d turned into an aid station, the air smelled of damp wool, soap that never quite won, and something metallic that clung to everything no matter how many times we wiped a table down. Our “ward” was a hallway lined with desks shoved to the walls. The chalkboard still had arithmetic on it, half-erased, as if a child might return and finish the lesson once the shooting stopped.
A nurse—Corinne, from Ohio—pushed her way to the door before the first man even stepped inside.
“We got another batch?” she asked. She didn’t sound angry. She sounded tired.
“Not a batch,” the guard answered. “One of them’s in bad shape.”
They carried her in on a stretcher that looked borrowed from a time before war. Two American soldiers held the handles, and between them walked a third, a boy with freckles and the cautious eyes of someone who had seen a gun go off too close to his face. He kept glancing down as if afraid she might vanish.
The patient wasn’t a boy. That was the first surprise.
She was young—early twenties, maybe—but she had the thinness of someone who had eaten fear more than food for months. A gray blanket covered most of her. What I could see was a dark braid, undone and tangled, and a pale cheek smeared with ash. Her lashes were clotted from dried tears or smoke, and her mouth had an odd, determined set to it.
She wore a German uniform jacket, too large for her shoulders, the insignia stripped away. Someone had been careful—or someone had been ashamed.
“Burns,” the freckled soldier said quickly, as if explaining could erase the awkwardness of why she was here. “Happened before we picked ’em up.”
“Where?” I asked.
He hesitated, then pointed to the blanket, to the places where it rose and fell unevenly. “Arms. Shoulder. Neck. Some on her side. She… she won’t stop shaking.”
Corinne peeled back the blanket with the gentleness of someone who knew a sudden movement could break more than skin. The air shifted. Not a dramatic wave, not a stench that made men turn away like in the stories—just the faint, sharp smell of smoke and singed cloth, and underneath it the clean, sour note of fear-sweat.
Her left forearm was wrapped in a strip of fabric that had once been a shirt. It was soaked through. The edges were stuck to her.
Corinne met my eyes. She didn’t need to say anything. I had already seen enough to know: this wasn’t minor.
We rolled her into a classroom that used to belong to a teacher who loved geography. A cracked map still hung above the blackboard, oceans faded into a gray-blue haze. The corner where Europe should have been was torn.
I set my medical bag on the desk and tried to remember the part of training where the instructor told us what to do when the patient is someone your friends have been taught to hate.
Of course, there wasn’t such a lesson. There was only the same rule we repeated like a prayer: treat the one in front of you.
The girl’s eyes flicked open as we moved her. Gray-green, startlingly clear. They scanned the room—windows nailed shut, lantern light, American uniforms. Her gaze stopped on my collar insignia, then slid away, as if she refused to grant me the privilege of being recognized.
Corinne spoke softly. “We’re going to help you.”
The girl didn’t answer. Her lips trembled once, but no words came out.
“Do you speak English?” I asked, slower than usual.
Her eyes moved toward my mouth, as if watching how the sounds formed.
A tiny nod.
I wasn’t sure if she meant yes or if she meant she understood the question. Sometimes those were different.
“Name?” I asked.
She stared at the ceiling.
Corinne gave me a look that said, Don’t push. Corinne had a talent for reading the invisible bruises people carried.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll do the important part first.”
The fabric stuck to her arm like a bad promise. The only way to remove it was to soak it and lift it slowly, millimeter by millimeter, letting warm water do what force would ruin.
As we worked, she watched us with a steady, wary attention—like a trapped animal who knows the hands reaching in could be kind or cruel, and has no safe way to tell which.
I asked Corinne for water, and she brought a pot warmed on the stove in the hall. We didn’t have much—nothing like a proper hospital—but we had clean cloth, soap, saline, and what mattered most: time bought with distance from the front.
The guards stayed outside the door. I could feel them there, their presence a weight in the hallway. They didn’t like this part. They liked bandaging American boys. They liked stitching up friends. They didn’t like the idea that compassion had no uniform.
As the soaked fabric loosened, a breath escaped her—a sharp, involuntary sound she tried to swallow.
“You’re doing well,” Corinne murmured.
The girl’s fingers clenched at her side. Her knuckles were white. I caught a glimpse of a small object near her palm—a locket, brass and dented, on a thin chain. She held it like a talisman.
When the last strip of fabric came free, I saw the injury properly. Not the theatrical horror that imagination invents, but the real thing: skin angry and swollen in places, delicate and damaged in others, a clear boundary where the fire had kissed her and moved on. It looked like a map of pain drawn by a careless hand.
I kept my face neutral. A medic learns quickly that the first battlefield is your own expression. If you flinch, the patient feels it like a second blow.
She noticed anyway. Her eyes tightened.
“It will heal,” I said, choosing the words like stepping around broken glass. “Not overnight. But it will.”
Her gaze softened by a fraction—not trust, not yet, but something close to disbelief.
We cleaned the area carefully. Corinne handed me the sulfa powder we were using on burns. It was a precious thing, measured like gold. I sprinkled it lightly, then laid clean dressings over her arm and shoulder.
When the bandage touched her skin, she jerked—not violently, but with a sudden sharpness that made her breath catch. Then, just as quickly, she went still. Her jaw tightened as if she had decided pain would not get another victory.
I leaned closer. “I can give you something,” I said. “For the discomfort.”
Her eyes locked onto mine. In them I saw something I didn’t expect: not a plea, but a kind of refusal. The wordless insistence of someone who had learned that dulling sensation could be dangerous.
“No,” she said, the syllable barely audible.
“Why?” The question slipped out before I could stop it.
Her throat bobbed. She swallowed. “Need… to know,” she whispered in careful English, each word an effort. “Need to know… I am… here.”
Corinne’s hand paused mid-reach, her face suddenly tender.
“All right,” I said softly. “We’ll go without.”
We finished wrapping her, layering cloth like building a shelter. When it was done, she looked smaller, encased in white. Only her face remained exposed, pale against the blanket, her braid dark and messy.
I expected her to sag with relief. Instead, she kept staring at her bandaged arm as if it belonged to someone else now.
Then she spoke, so quietly I almost missed it.
“My skin… hurt.”
Not it hurts, not I’m hurting. Past tense. Like she was reporting on something that had already happened, something she had survived but could not yet believe was over.
The words landed in the room with a weight heavier than they should have had.
Corinne blinked rapidly and looked down at her hands.
I forced myself to ask the practical question. “Where did this happen?”
The girl’s eyes flicked to the door. A glance, quick and fearful.
“In a house,” she said.
“That’s all?” I asked.
She shook her head, then stopped, as if shaking itself was too much.
“A house,” she repeated, and the way she said it made it sound like a lie someone had made her practice.
I glanced at Corinne, and she gave a tiny shake of her head. Again: Don’t push.
So I did what medics learn to do when there’s more story than time. I backed away and let quiet do its work.
We moved her to a cot in the corner and hung a sheet for privacy. Corinne placed a cup of warm water near her hand. The girl stared at it suspiciously, then took a small sip as if expecting it to turn into something else.
Outside, the wind pushed against the boards on the windows. Somewhere in the building, a man coughed in his sleep. The war went on being the war, indifferent to our small attempts to make it less cruel.
I should have walked away then. I had other patients, other tasks. But the phrase stayed with me—My skin hurt—as if she had whispered it not only to me but to something in the room that needed to hear it.
That night, after the shift changed and the lanterns were turned low, I checked on her again.
She was awake.
In the dim light, her eyes reflected the lantern flame, making them look almost luminous. She wasn’t staring at the ceiling anymore. She was staring at the locket in her hand.
“You can sleep,” I said, keeping my voice calm.
She didn’t look up. “No sleep.”
“Bad dreams?”
A pause. Then: “If sleep, then… I am back.”
Back where? I didn’t ask. I already knew the answer would be something the war had written into her, something she would not be able to explain without reliving it.
I pointed gently. “May I?”
She hesitated, then opened her hand.
The locket was small and oval, the kind a mother might give a daughter before a long journey. The clasp was bent. The surface was scratched as if it had been rubbed against stone.
Inside, a picture had once been there. Now it was gone.
“She took it,” the girl said suddenly, and there was a crack in her voice that made her sound younger. “She took it to burn.”
“Who?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed, searching my face for traps. “The woman. In the house.”
The house again.
I sat on the edge of the chair near her cot, careful not to crowd her. “Was it your house?”
She made a sound that might have been a laugh, except it had no humor. “No. Nothing… is mine.”
In the quiet, those words felt like the truest thing I’d heard all week.
“What is your name?” I asked, softer this time, without the crisp tone of an interrogator.
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she said, “Marta.”
It might have been true. It might have been a borrowed name. But it was a name, and names are a kind of doorway.
“All right, Marta,” I said. “I’m Daniel.”
She repeated it carefully. “Dan-ny-el.”
“Close enough,” I said, and for the first time, the corner of her mouth moved—almost a smile, but not quite. More like a memory of one.
I stood to leave, but her hand shot out and caught my sleeve—not hard, but urgent.
I froze. “What is it?”
She swallowed, eyes darting to the door again. “Do not tell… them.”
“Tell who what?” I asked.
Her grip tightened. “The men with guns.”
I lowered my voice. “I’m not here to tell stories. I’m here to keep people alive.”
She studied me, then slowly released my sleeve.
When I left, I found the freckled soldier waiting in the hallway.
He looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight. “Doc,” he said, “the lieutenant wants to know if she’s gonna make it.”
“She’s going to live,” I answered.
He exhaled, relief loosening his shoulders. “Good,” he said. Then, after a beat, he added, “She ain’t like the others.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “When we picked ’em up, she was carrying something. Wouldn’t let go. Sergeant pried it out. It’s… it’s in the office.”
My stomach tightened. “What was it?”
He glanced around, then lowered his voice. “A little book. Like a diary. But not like… feelings and poems. More like lists. Names.”
That night, after the patients were settled and the hallway quieted into a cold hush, I went to the office—a classroom where the teacher’s desk had become headquarters for forms and maps and the occasional cigarette smoked too close to a stack of gauze.
The book sat on the desk, small enough to fit in a pocket. The cover was dark, the pages warped from heat.
I opened it carefully.
At first, it looked like nonsense: columns of letters and numbers, written in a neat hand. Not the loose, panicked scrawl of a prisoner, but the tidy script of someone who had learned to write as if mistakes were punishable.
Then I recognized one thing that made my breath stall.
American names.
Not many. Maybe a dozen.
Some had dates beside them. Some had a single word: alive.
I turned the page.
More names. Some with locations—villages, crossroads, a river.
It took me a moment to understand what I was holding.
This wasn’t a list of enemies.
It was a record. A secret accounting of people who should have disappeared, who hadn’t.
The door creaked, and I snapped the book shut instinctively.
Corinne stood there, her face pale in the dim light. “You found it,” she said quietly.
“You knew?” I asked.
She stepped in and closed the door gently behind her. “The guards were talking. I heard.”
I held the book like it might burn me. “What is this?”
Corinne’s eyes flicked to it, then back to me. “It’s trouble,” she said.
“It’s also something else,” I replied. “It’s… evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” she asked.
I didn’t have the answer. Not yet.
I waited until morning, when the sun made the cracked windows look less like wounds.
Marta was awake again. She had hardly slept. Dark circles sat under her eyes like shadows that refused to leave.
I sat beside her cot, the small book hidden under my jacket.
Her gaze darted to it immediately, sharp as a needle.
“You took,” she said.
“It was taken,” I corrected gently. “I found it.”
Her mouth tightened. “Give.”
“First,” I said, “tell me what it is.”
She stared at her bandaged arm as if the answer were written there.
“It is… a promise,” she said finally.
“To whom?” I asked.
She swallowed. “To people.”
“That’s vague,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice.
Her eyes snapped up, anger flashing. “Because if I say… then it becomes real. And real things… get burned.”
The words hit harder than any confession. I glanced at her locket, empty inside. She took it to burn.
I softened my tone. “I’m not trying to trap you. I’m trying to understand. Those names—Americans. Were they prisoners?”
Her shoulders stiffened. “Not prisoners.”
“Then what?”
She hesitated, then spoke in a rush, as if speed could outrun fear.
“Plane fell,” she said. “In the woods. Men came out. Not… all. Two alive. One… not. They were hurt. I was on road with the unit. We stopped. The officer wanted to… finish.”
Her voice broke on the last word, and she looked away.
Corinne, standing nearby, pressed her lips together and said nothing.
Marta continued, forcing each sentence into English like pushing stones uphill. “I said, we can take them. For questions. He laughed. He said, why ask dead men.”
I felt something tight in my chest. “What did you do?” I asked quietly.
Her eyes flicked to mine, and for a moment, the fear in them gave way to something else—stubbornness, maybe. Or courage. Or whatever sits in the human heart when it decides, for a single moment, not to obey.
“I lied,” she said. “I said… the officer wants them alive. I said… orders.”
“You had authority?” I asked.
A bitter half-smile. “I had a voice. Sometimes that is enough.”
“And they believed you?”
“Not all,” she whispered. “But enough.”
She breathed carefully, as if speaking cost her physical effort.
“I hid them,” she continued. “In a cellar. In the house.”
The house again. The same word, now unfolding its meaning.
“The woman there,” Marta said, eyes distant. “She saw the uniforms. She thought… I bring danger. She wanted to send them away. I begged. I said, they are boys like your boy. She said, my boy is gone.”
Marta’s fingers tightened around the blanket.
“The night after,” she said, “there were footsteps. Men searching. Someone told. Maybe the woman. Maybe another. They came with lanterns.”
Her breath shook.
“I tried to move them,” she whispered. “But one could not walk. The cellar door stuck. I pushed. I pushed until my hands—”
She stopped abruptly, eyes closing as if she could still feel it.
Corinne stepped closer, her voice soft. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”
“Yes,” Marta said, opening her eyes again. “I have to.”
She swallowed. “They poured fuel,” she said, voice barely above air. “To smoke them out. I screamed. I said, no one is there. They did not listen.”
I pictured it without wanting to: lantern light, a cold night, men impatient and cruel because impatience is safer than doubt.
“What happened?” I asked, though my throat tightened around the words.
“The fire,” she said. “It climbed. Fast. The woman’s curtains. The wood. Everything. I pulled one man out. He fell in the snow. I dragged him. The other… I could not reach. The heat—”
Her eyes flashed to her bandaged arm.
“I ran back,” she whispered. “Because if I do not, then I live with—” She stopped, shaking her head. “I ran back.”
“And that’s when you were burned,” I said.
Marta nodded once, small and sharp.
“And the book?” I asked.
“I wrote names,” she said, voice steadying. “So someone will know. So if I die, then… it is not only smoke.”
I took the small book from under my jacket and held it out.
Her eyes locked onto it, hungry and afraid.
I didn’t hand it to her immediately. “Marta,” I said, “those men—did they survive?”
Her gaze dropped. A long pause.
“One,” she whispered. “One lived. He said… if you ever see Americans, tell them. Tell them he is alive.”
“What was his name?” I asked.
She glanced at the book, then back at me. “James,” she said softly. “James Kelly.”
The name hit me with a strange jolt—not because I knew him, but because it sounded so ordinary. Not a hero name. Not a legend. Just a name you might see on a mailbox back home.
I placed the book gently on the blanket near her hand. She didn’t grab it. She touched it like it might disappear.
“Why didn’t you tell the guards?” I asked.
Her laugh came out like a broken sigh. “Because they hear only one story,” she said. “And in their story, I am the enemy.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say, Not all of us. But I had walked past too many jeers, heard too many cruel jokes, watched too many men use hatred as a bandage for their own fear.
So instead I said, “In this room, you’re a patient.”
Marta’s eyes filled suddenly, and she blinked hard, refusing to let tears fall.
“That is why,” she whispered, “when you touch my skin… it hurt.”
I frowned. “That’s normal,” I said carefully. “It means the nerves are waking up. The sensation is returning.”
She shook her head slowly. “No,” she said. “Before, it was… nothing. I was nothing. Like wood. Like ash.”
She placed her fingers on the bandage, pressing lightly as if testing reality.
“Now,” she whispered, “I feel. So I know I am not gone.”
Corinne turned away abruptly, pretending to busy herself with the water cup.
I sat in the silence with Marta’s words, feeling something shift inside me that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the war’s quiet thefts.
Later that afternoon, I found the lieutenant. He was a hard man, the kind who treated kindness like a weakness that might spread.
“What’s this about a notebook?” he asked.
I kept my voice even. “It belongs to the prisoner.”
His eyes narrowed. “Prisoner,” he repeated, as if tasting the word. “She’s German.”
“She’s also injured,” I said.
He stared at me for a moment, then snorted. “We got wounded boys out there who’d like your sympathy.”
“They’re getting it,” I replied. “And so is she.”
He studied me, and for a second I thought he might push. But then his gaze shifted, calculating.
“You think it’s intelligence,” he said finally.
“I think it’s a list of Americans,” I said. “Names. Maybe locations.”
That got his attention.
“Bring it,” he ordered.
I didn’t move. “Not without her consent.”
His face hardened. “Doctor, you don’t decide—”
“I decide what happens in my ward,” I said quietly. “And if you want cooperation, you can start by treating her like a human being.”
For a moment, the room felt dangerously small.
Then the lieutenant exhaled through his nose. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll do it your way. But if that book helps us find our men, you’ll wish you hadn’t played nursemaid.”
I walked back to Marta with a strange mixture of relief and dread.
When I told her what the lieutenant wanted, her hands trembled around the book.
“They will take it,” she whispered.
“Only if you allow it,” I said. “But if those names are real, if those locations mean something… it could bring men home.”
Marta stared at the blank wall for a long time.
Then she opened the book and turned to a page near the middle.
She pointed to a line.
I read it aloud: “Kelly, James — alive — near—” The place name was smudged, half-burned.
“Is that where he is?” I asked.
Marta nodded.
I looked at her. “If we act on this, they’ll ask questions.”
She met my gaze with the exhausted steadiness of someone who had already answered harder questions for herself. “They can ask,” she said. “I will not lie again. I am tired of lies.”
That evening, the lieutenant copied the names. Marta watched every stroke of pencil like a hawk, as if afraid the truth would be stolen. When it was done, she closed the book and tucked it under the blanket, keeping it near her heart.
The lieutenant left without a word of thanks.
Afterward, Corinne sat beside Marta and brushed a strand of hair from her face. Marta flinched at first, then didn’t.
In the days that followed, I treated her wounds and watched her return—slowly, painfully—to herself. Each time we changed the bandages, she gripped her empty locket in her hand. Each time, she whispered that same phrase once, like an anchor she threw into the world so she wouldn’t drift away.
“My skin hurt.”
The first time I heard it, it sounded like despair.
The last time, it sounded like proof.
On the fifth day, a runner arrived with a message. The lieutenant burst into the ward with a piece of paper in his hand, his expression strange—half victory, half disbelief.
He didn’t address Marta directly. He addressed the room, as if speaking to the ceiling made it easier.
“We found one,” he said. “Down near a crossroads—injured, cold as hell, but alive. Name’s Kelly.”
Marta’s eyes closed.
A single tear slid down her cheek, clean and silent.
Corinne squeezed her hand.
The lieutenant cleared his throat, uncomfortable with emotion. “That’s… that’s all,” he muttered, and left.
I watched Marta for a long moment.
When she opened her eyes again, they were clearer than I’d ever seen them.
“You see?” she whispered. “Not smoke.”
I nodded. “Not smoke,” I agreed.
She looked at her bandaged arm, then at her empty locket.
“Maybe,” she said, voice barely there, “one day… there is picture again.”
“That day will come,” Corinne said softly.
Marta’s mouth trembled. This time, the hint of a smile made it all the way into existence.
And I—Daniel, doctor, soldier—felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in months: the quiet, stubborn belief that the war, for all its power, did not own every ending.
Years later, long after the uniforms were folded away and the maps had been replaced by clean streets and grocery lists, I would still remember her in that classroom with the torn map of Europe.
Not because she was German.
Not because she was a prisoner.
But because she reminded me that pain and mercy can share the same room, and that sometimes the smallest words—whispered after a bandage, after a fire, after a night that should have erased her—can carry a truth stronger than any flag.
“My skin hurt,” she had said.
And in that hurt, she had found her way back.
