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The Red Ribbon

Page 19

by Lucy Adlington


  “Rosalind?” As we approached, the cleaning lady at the dress shop shielded her eyes against the sun with her yellow mitts.

  Rose and I burst out laughing. “That’s not how you polish a floor!” we both said together.

  “Mama, this is Ella!” cried Rose. “For real, and forever! Ella, this is my mother.”

  Rose’s mama flung off her mitts and untied her apron. “Ella, come in! You are so very, very welcome. Perhaps now my daughter will stop telling me today is the day you’ll arrive.”

  Later, after pink iced buns and lemonade, there was time for sharing news and questions. It was all so jumbled up. I heard how Rose had devoured the medicine I’d gotten for her, how that kept her alive to survive the journey out of Birchwood. “You’d be proud of me — I didn’t share more than half of the vitamins,” she boasted.

  Rose had been transported in railway coal wagons to another prison camp . . . and another and another, each one more overcrowded and chaotic than the last, until the final camp was eventually liberated.

  “With tanks and flags and everything,” Rose said. “I tried to kiss the nearest soldier to thank him. He wrinkled his nose, poor soul — I was inches thick with filth — but he let me do it. Can you imagine how it felt to be given real clothes after those horrible stripes? Of course you can. I still can’t get used to having a bra again. My straps keep falling down. But . . . enough about my adventures! What about you?”

  “I haven’t been kissing any soldiers!” I said, pretending to be offended.

  Rose’s mama declared there should be a statue to honor the farmer who’d saved me from death in the snow.

  “I’ll put your Flora in my next book!” she declared, waving her lemonade glass in the air as a salute. “The world needs more stories of real heroes. Especially ones who know one end of a cow from another. I certainly don’t.”

  I laughed. “I never believed the stories Rose told, but it turns out you really are a writer, and Rose really is a countess, and you did actually live in a palace?”

  Rose’s mama looked a little offended. “But of course, my dear. Why would anyone think otherwise?”

  Rose said, “Ella hasn’t quite got the hang of stories, Mama. We’ll have to work on her.”

  “Oh, don’t talk about work,” said her mama. “Have you seen the state of this place? We’ve been scrubbing and painting for an eternity to get it looking this good. What do you think?”

  “Yes,” cried Rose, springing to her feet. “What do you think, Ella? This front room will be the showroom eventually, with all the best gowns in the window display. In the meantime, I thought it would be nice to bring our tables in here, so people can watch us work as they go past. Mama’s seen a secondhand sewing machine at the market. We’ll all go together and buy it.”

  I smiled. “Another Betty?”

  “Another Betty!”

  Rose turned serious. “Have you heard anything about your grandparents?”

  “Not yet. They weren’t at home. I’ve been asking everywhere I go. I’ll keep looking.”

  “And we’ll help,” Rose’s mama said. “We’ll scour the known world for news of your family. I still have some connections. If your grandparents can be found, we will find them — I promise.”

  Rose glanced at her mama and said nothing. I knew then that her papa had not been found. We weren’t done with lists. We would scan lists every day, at train stations, synagogues, and refugee centers. We would scour the lists of survivors, even if Rose’s father and my grandparents would never be found.

  It was almost overwhelming, sitting in the empty shop, weaving a future from words, embroidered with dreams. The day dwindled and the street lamps were lit, their glow so much softer than the watchtower lamps at Birchwood.

  Rose’s mother watched me. “Your first commission is to make me a copy of that divine pink dress you’re wearing. Where did you buy it?”

  “I made it,” I answered proudly, even though I was sharply conscious of all its faults. Every so often I imagined a prickle of mattress straw.

  Rose smiled. “I told you she was good, Mama.”

  I said, “If we can get the fabric, I’ll do a run of outfits for spring. Then everyone can have their own Liberation Dress — that’s what I call this one.” Something occurred to me, and I turned to Rose’s mama. “If you don’t mind my asking, how can you afford to rent this place? It’s a lovely location, and in a really nice part of town.”

  “Oh we don’t rent,” she answered. “It’s ours. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the places we owned before the War. They were taken over by the military when my husband and I were arrested. The summer palace is gone for good, and the town houses and the cottage by the sea. This is the only one of the shop properties I have been able to claw back so far. And who cares, my darlings? You girls will sew and I’ll scribble every hour night and day. And if we all wear outfits designed by you, Ella, all the fine ladies who see us will soon be clamoring to order some for themselves.”

  “Not forgetting the ring,” said Rose.

  “What ring?” I asked.

  “The one you left for me at the Hospital . . .”

  “That ring? I was sure Nurse Duck would’ve sold it straightaway and pocketed the cash. She really handed it over?”

  “Of course. There wasn’t time to barter it before the Hospital was cleared, so Duckie gave it to me, in case we got separated.”

  “Don’t hold out any hope of getting a good price for the ring,” I confessed. “It’s a fake.”

  “Excuse me!” interrupted Rose’s mama. “Are you calling that diamond a fake?”

  “A really nice fake. It’s just glass, I’m afraid.”

  Rose’s mama held up one hand. “My dear, I’ve worn more diamonds than you’ve had hot dinners. I think I know the real thing when I see it.”

  Rose leaned close and whispered, “Plus we had it appraised at the jeweler’s around the corner. It’s real.”

  “And you don’t mind using it, even though it was stolen?” I was still feeling a little guilty about using the money found in my Department Store coat.

  Rose’s mama frowned. “We’ll never know who wore it first, or what’s happened to them. If that ring can buy us a chance to live and work and love, so be it.”

  The upstairs room of the dress shop, with bare floorboards, bare bulb, and bare windows, was a veritable palace that evening. Rose and I shared one of the two mattresses, just as we had back at Birchwood. It was a million times more comfortable. We lay there, holding hands and grinning at each other.

  “Tell me a dress to go with this place,” Rose demanded, just like she used to.

  “I can’t. It would be a ball gown so dazzling it would blind you.”

  “I’d wear sunglasses.”

  There was a pause. I took a moment to appreciate exactly where I was and who I was with.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered suddenly.

  Rose brushed a strand of new-growing hair from my face. “Sorry for what?”

  “For . . . for being so horrible lots of the time. Bossy. Mean.”

  “I don’t remember any of that!” she said with a laugh. “You were strong. You kept me going.”

  I shook my head. “No, it was you kept me going.” Then, even more quietly than before —“How did you know I would come? How did you even know I’d survive?”

  Equally quiet, Rose replied, “Because to think otherwise was unbearable.”

  Two days later I went up a stepladder to start painting the sign above our shop window. We’d argued and argued over what it should say. I wanted Rose and Ella. Rose wanted Ella and Rose. In the end we settled on a lovely scrolling design that said: THE RED RIBBON.

  The Red Ribbon is a story. Like Rose’s tales, it is a mixture of truth and fiction. The truth is that Birchwood once existed for real. It was the vast labor and extermination camp complex called Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland.

  Birkenau is a German word. I’ve translated it as “birch
wood.” During the Second World War, under the organization of the Nazi regime — and with the help and support of tens of thousands of ordinary people — millions suffered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and at many hundreds of other camps and subcamps. This systematic degradation, displacement, and mass murder is now collectively known as the Holocaust. Victims were those considered “subhuman” by the Nazis. The death toll of those who died of starvation, disease, execution, and gassing with poison is horrifically high, estimated at 11 million, including 1.1 million children. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, well over a million people were murdered.

  In the middle of this horror, the Auschwitz commandant’s wife, Hedwig Höss (my Madam H.) truly did employ prisoners to work on her wardrobe. She began with seamstresses in a room of her house (a lovely villa built alongside the camp), then in 1943 she set up a camp workshop with twenty-three dressmakers, so that other officers’ wives and female guards could wear the nicest fashions too. This workshop was first in a cellar, then in an abandoned factory building. It was called the Upper Tailoring Studio.

  Mrs. Höss described her life in the house next door to Auschwitz as “paradise.” She did indeed employ prisoners as household staff. She did also take one of her young sons with her to dress fittings, until a seamstress frightened him by looping a tape measure around his neck like a gallows noose when his mother wasn’t looking.

  After the war Hedwig Höss was captured with her children. Her husband Rudolf was convicted of war crimes and executed at Auschwitz. (One of the Höss daughters — not quite a teenager during the war — later worked for a Jewish fashion boutique in America, after a few years with the designer Balenciaga.)

  For the sake of the story I’ve simplified the geography of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. I’ve tried to write clearly about the atrocities, selecting true incidents and scenarios, but my words don’t come close to describing the full horror of the violence, the degradation, and the suffering.

  The Red Ribbon is loosely set in 1944–1945. The summer of 1944 saw staggering numbers of people transported from German-occupied territories and from Germany’s allies all the way across Europe to Birkenau by train to be gassed. There was an uprising in October 1944 that was quickly suppressed. In January 1945, remaining prisoners were herded out of the camp complex on foot and dispersed to other killing zones in Europe. Their journeys were literally death marches. A few thousand remained in the camp, which was eventually liberated on January 27, 1945.

  Descriptions in my novel of the Department Store (in reality known as “Canada,” the land of plenty) are not an exaggeration. Mountains of shoes and other possessions are still on display in the Auschwitz museum. They are only a fraction of the plunder amassed. All were stolen from victims arriving at the Auschwitz complex. They survived the deliberate burnings at the end of the camp’s existence. Even in the very last days, facing inevitable defeat, the Nazis wanted to hide evidence of their crimes.

  Ella, Rose, Marta, and Carla might well have existed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but they are all my own inventions. By coincidence, after writing the story I discovered that the real-life “boss” of the Upper Tailoring Studio was indeed named Marta, but survivors remember the real Marta as a kind and capable woman — so there is absolutely no association with my fictional character.

  Each girl in The Red Ribbon highlights possible moral choices about surviving and thriving. They are choices we all make on some level, in humdrum day-to-day life as well as in extreme circumstances. In Auschwitz each person reacted as best they could. Sometimes their best was outstanding. Sometimes it was appalling. It can be dangerous to judge other people’s behavior without knowing why they do what they do, and what pressures they were under. That said, I believe we all have to take responsibility for our actions, good and bad.

  I have deliberately chosen not to dwell on specific countries, regimes, or religions in the story. This in no way devalues the reality that particular peoples were targeted for humiliation and genocide. The camps were designed to punish and annihilate specific groups of people. These included: enemies of the Nazi ideology; all Jewish people (regardless of nationality or faith practices); LGBTQ people; Romany communities; Jehovah’s Witnesses; people with mental and physical disabilities; and others.

  The majority of people murdered in Auschwitz were Jews. This must never be forgotten. Far from wanting to deny the historical truth of the Holocaust, I have spent many years reading wartime sources and survivor testimonies. I have long been haunted by the memoirs of women who actually labored in the workshops of the Auschwitz complex. I was even fortunate enough to talk with Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s stepsister, who worked in the clothing stores of “Canada.” I was humbled and awestruck to look into Eva’s eyes and to know that here was someone who’d experienced as life what the rest of us call history.

  In The Red Ribbon my heartfelt aim has been to revisit a time in our past that clearly and categorically happened, but also to lift the stories out of historical specifics in order to show universal experiences. Hate crime, sadly, is not a thing of the past. It is preached as a policy, and also practiced in tiny everyday ways by people who ought to know better. You, me, anyone — when we divide the world into us and them we sow the seeds of hate. Hate blooms into violence. Violence kills us all, one way or another.

  If we can see acts of kindness as acts of heroism, we can counter both the hatred and the violence.

  I hope.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 by Lucy Adlington

  Cover illustrations copyright © 2018 by CSA Images/Printstock Collection/Getty Images (dress); korhankaracan/Getty Images (barbed wire)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First U.S. electronic edition 2018

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending

  Candlewick Press

  99 Dover Street

  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com

 

 

 


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