Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Someone came in and gave me a cup of fake coffee and something a lot like a bologna sandwich, which I would have eaten if I had realised it was the last bologna sandwich I was ever going to see. But I just couldn’t eat. I have had dreams about that sandwich.

  After a while people began to file into the office and filled it up. One was a Luftwaffe interrogator, I think, but he didn’t talk to me directly. The man who talked to me was just another pilot. They got him to come in because he spoke very good English. There was also a girl in uniform who took notes.

  The first thing they did was spread my passport and license and authorisation card across the steel desk, and then dump out my confiscated Camp LA groceries next to the ID. The translator made a sweeping gesture at the pile of Hershey bars. He said seriously, ‘You see, you are in a lot of trouble.’

  I had to clamp a hand over my mouth. It was all I could do not to fall apart with hysteria – it was so funny! Terrible, but so funny. What were they accusing me of – chocolate smuggling?

  I nodded mutely, because really I did agree with him – I knew I was in trouble. But I had to gulp back squeaks of hilarity. The way he pointed to that candy! He was about Daddy’s age – tired-looking, tall and thin, with a wide mouth and a nice smile. He looked like the Fire Chief in Conewago Grove. He sat across from me, peering earnestly into my face with his hands on his knees, as though he were cross-examining his own daughter over something that had disappointed him.

  ‘You are American?’

  I could only nod. I didn’t trust myself to try to talk.

  ‘In a British plane?’

  ‘I am –’ I got the hysterics under control and sat on my hands to keep them away from my mouth.

  ‘Why is an American flying a British plane?’ the translator asked patiently.

  ‘I was – I was only delivering it,’ I squeaked.

  ‘You are a courier?’ the translator asked.

  I nodded, because I thought he meant ‘delivery girl’ – then immediately panicked and shook my head violently to take it back. Aren’t couriers some kind of intelligence agents?

  ‘No – no! I’m a ferry pilot. Air Transport Auxiliary – I deliver planes for the Royal Air Force.’

  ‘What variety is your Spitfire?’

  ‘Mark 14.’

  The translator looked over his shoulder at the others and told them what I’d said, and they all nodded and muttered to one another. Then the translator asked me, ‘The plane has a radio device?’

  ‘Yes –’

  The stenographer looked up sharply. She stared at me with a face full of awe and suspicion, as though she wanted to see what kind of person would have the gall to fly a plane equipped with a ‘radio device’. I don’t know how much English she understood, but she must have understood everything the interrogator and the translator had just said to each other.

  What were they after? Maybe they didn’t mean a radio. Maybe ‘radio device’ was an attempt to translate something else. I asked, ‘Do you mean radar?’ Radar would make it a surveillance aircraft – a spy plane. And suddenly I was more frightened than I’d been before.

  ‘I mean, no! There’s no radar on that plane –’

  I stopped abruptly, shaking my head and sucking in a gasp of air. I didn’t know if there was a radar set on that plane. I didn’t think there was – I knew the real thing takes up a lot of space but I wasn’t sure. That Spitfire was new this year and was about to be modified for reconnaissance.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘You were orbiting when you were intercepted – why? Taking pictures?’

  ‘No! There’s no radar and no cameras – I don’t think there are –’

  I didn’t know that either. I didn’t know anything about what that plane might be carrying in its wings, other than fuel – cameras, cannon, spy equipment, plastic explosive – who knows? I don’t think there was anything like that on board, but who knows?

  It just went downhill from there – everybody as polite as possible, and me not knowing the answer to anything they asked me. ‘But I was in France!’ I pointed out miserably. ‘I wasn’t even over your territory!’

  ‘It was ours last week,’ the translator said calmly.

  None of this actually took very long. All the administration was done that day – the telephone calls after they finished questioning me, and the decision from some command centre in Berlin, and the paperwork – all magically completed in less than two hours. I don’t think the Luftwaffe pilots knew where I’d end up. They just did what they were told to do with me.

  The translator was a transport pilot too. He was delivering a small communications aircraft to its new home base. It wasn’t far from a place where they held a lot of women who were political prisoners, and I was supposed to go along with him so he could drop me there.

  The little plane looked like a flying lawnmower with awnings. ‘It is a Storch,’ the pilot told me. ‘Fieseler Fi-156. Stork, in English. Bird with long legs!’

  I tried to smile at the lame joke.

  ‘Don’t be frightened. You will be safe where they send you. The papers we have given you state that you are a transport pilot and that you were intercepted without weapons – you will have to remain in custody here, but you will be fed and clothed and housed –’ He hesitated a little. ‘And given work to do. They will find work for you at a skilled level. Don’t lose the written statement our commander gave you – it explains how you came here, and it is important that you show the Luftwaffe stamp and signature, for you won’t always be able to find another English-speaker as fluent as I to give you assistance.’

  We finished the outside aircraft checks and the pilot opened the door for me to climb into the rear seat.

  ‘I am Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff,’ he said.

  ‘I am Third Officer Rose Justice,’ I told him. ‘My little brother is named Karl too.’

  ‘Why this German name for an American boy?’

  ‘My mother’s family is from Germany,’ I said. ‘Two hundred years ago they came to America from right around here, from Pfaltz. A lot of people in Pennsylvania come from south-west Germany.’

  Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff glanced at me with a tight, sad smile as he climbed into the pilot’s seat ahead of me.

  ‘Now you are back,’ he said.

  Holy smoke, that plane. How did I ever fly that plane?

  ‘You will fly the Storch,’ Oberleutnant Womelsdorff told me. I don’t think he meant it to sound so much like a command. It was a present, a wonderful secret between us, one pilot to another, and a very generous present too, considering I was a prisoner of war or whatever.

  Compared with the morning’s high-speed chase in the Spitfire, it was like being on a bicycle. We didn’t go very high, staying out of the way of planes that might be faster than us – or planes that might try to shoot us down. It was a mercy to be flying, to be focused on the unfamiliar aircraft and the heading and being too close for comfort to the treetops and just to be in control.

  In the officers’ restroom at Köthen, where we stopped to refuel, I sat with my head against my knees and cried for five minutes. It was like digging myself deeper and deeper into a pit that I’d never be able to climb out of. I was halfway across Germany now and I still didn’t know where I was going to end up.

  When we took off from Köthen, Womelsdorff let me sit in the front.

  ‘What if someone sees me in the pilot’s seat when we land? Won’t you be in trouble?’

  He shrugged and laughed. ‘Why should I be, if we land in the right place? We’ll say you are the American cousin of Hanna Reitsch. You know of Hanna Reitsch? Germany’s most daring test pilot is a woman! As long as there are two of us in the plane, they will not accuse me of wasting fuel we do not have.’ I didn’t dare to answer. I am pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to tell me that the Luftwaffe is low on fuel.

  The last stage of the trip was cloudier and bumpier, and Womelsdorff made me stay even lower, to avoid being bombed.
Once we saw a flight of Allied aircraft crossing the sky ahead of us – high, dozens of them, steady black spots speckling the clouds like a swarm of gnats – heading, no doubt, for Berlin.

  We puttered along far below them, slow and out of sight against the ground.

  ‘Daylight raid,’ commented my guard and guide. ‘Is this arrogance or desperation?’

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. But now I think the answer wasn’t either of those – it was really just persistence. Persistence is what kept me alive all winter. And persistence will win the war.

  Half an hour south of Neubrandenburg we flew almost directly over a pretty town surrounded by serene lakes. We were so low over the biggest lake I could see the reflection of our wings below us in its glassy surface. On the far side of the lake was a gigantic complex of long sheds and wide open gritted yards, all in the middle of a complicated railway junction – everything surrounded by concrete walls and what looked like miles and miles of wire fences.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Fürstenberg industrial area,’ Womelsdorff answered. ‘You’ll only ever see it from the air – the maps show only the town and the lakes. What they make there is a state secret. Impossible to miss from the air, so it makes an excellent pinpoint. That is a pilot’s secret.’

  It was my first sight of Ravensbrück.

  I saw it for the first time from the air. I have spent a long time – mostly during roll calls – trying to put together my first view of it from a thousand feet overhead with the view from the parade ground in front of Block 32. I just can’t justify in my head that I must have been looking at the same sky in both places. From the air it was forbidding, but not menacing. It looked sterile. It was just a place. It didn’t even look inhabited – of course, it was the middle of the afternoon and everyone must have been at work, so the grounds were relatively empty. I wish I’d known – I wish I could remember the detail of what it looked like from the air. Was there smoke coming from the crematorium chimney? Were they loading or unloading transports? Was a train arriving? It was so still, so empty, so impersonal – so distant. It was an ordinary industrial site in the middle of an ordinary day. It didn’t mean anything to me, it wasn’t significant or ominous, and the detail is gone. A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.

  April 18, 1945

  Paris

  I shocked the chambermaid. Or whatever they are called in France! I forgot to hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door – Ne pas déranger – and she came in a while ago to make the bed and clean the bathroom. I was sitting at the little vanity table, which I pulled over so it is in front of the big window, and I was writing with not a stitch on. I did have that incredible silk bedspread thing wrapped round me, but it slipped right off when I turned around to see who had come in.

  Oh God, we were both SO EMBARRASSED. I look like a corpse. The Red Cross did a good job of delousing me and getting the scabies under control, but you can still see the rash all over my breasts and arms, and if those scales and Bob Ernst’s metric conversion are right, I have lost forty-five pounds in the last seven months. (Amazing, because I am still heavier than Irina, who is taller than me. But she was there longer.) I saw myself in the mirror over the dresser when I was taking my clothes off yesterday, and I am so horrible I had to cover the stupid mirror with a sheet so I don’t scare myself by accident.

  ‘Come back! Come back!’ I mewed pathetically after the chambermaid as she backed out – I got the right word in French, but used the familiar form by accident because we did all winter (‘Reviens!’) – trying to pull the bedspread up and to remember how to say ‘Don’t go’ politely. She left anyway, shutting the door softly behind her, and I put my head down on the table and cried. I am so lonely. I should get dressed and go back to the Embassy and see if I can find some way to get back to the Swedish Red Cross people. But I don’t even know their unit name or number or where they were headed next. ‘Sweden’ is not very specific.

  The chambermaid came back ten minutes later with coffee and rolls for me on a silver tray. Real coffee. She plunked it down on the vanity table and told me her name and rushed away to make the bed.

  Her name is Fernande. She doesn’t speak English. She is busy with the bed now – she has even brought up a new spread so I can stay wrapped in this one. She hasn’t started on the bathroom and that will take her some time, because the one thing I did do last night was take a two-hour bath in that gigantic tub. The only reason I didn’t make it last longer is because they shut the hot water off at 9 p.m. I am going to write as fast as I can while she’s here. I’ve been putting off remembering what that night on the ground was like, and I don’t want to think about it when I’m by myself.

  They let me use the pilots’ restroom at Neubrandenburg also, but they took away all my pilot’s gear except my flight bag. Womelsdorff turned me over to a grouchy mechanic who took me on the back of his motorbike to this so-called women’s prison. There is a women’s prison camp outside Neubrandenburg – it is one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. But you were supposed to be processed through the main camp first. I was in the wrong place, I wasn’t on their radar, and they didn’t know what to do with me when the mechanic turned me over to them.

  I remember standing uncomfortably in a drab office somewhere, standing very straight and trying to look more official than I felt – I’d even slapped my uniform cap back on when I handed them my papers. They passed my papers around and argued for half an hour while I just stood there waiting. Then, as it was getting dark, they took me outside at gunpoint and locked me in the back of an empty armoured truck. I had no idea I was in the wrong place – I had no idea why they’d put me in the truck (for a few horrible minutes I thought they were just going to shoot me right there). I didn’t understand anything anyone said. I know now what was going on – I know that the truck was just an empty transport and was returning to Ravensbrück the next day for another load of prisoners, and that they were going to drop me off before loading up again.

  But that night –

  Oh God, that truck smelled so horrible. If there is a smell that goes with fear and despair, it is like that – sweat and dirty underpants and pee. I was already retching as they slammed the doors shut on me, and for a long time I just stood in the middle of the truck hugging myself and gagging.

  There was no light. I braced myself in the dark because I thought they were going to take me somewhere any minute, and the truck would lurch into action and I’d fall over and have to touch whatever was on the evil floor. But nothing happened. Then I tried to get out, struggling with the doors until all my nails were broken – the sheets of metal interlocked and there wasn’t even a crack to feel air through. Near the front of the truck there were slatted air vents high up in the walls, but even if I’d been able to get the slats out, the opening was smaller than my head. Eventually I was so tired that I gritted my teeth and leaned in the corner below one of the air vents, where two walls propped me so I could still stand up. Then later I had to sit down.

  Fernande is still here. She’s in the bathroom now. I couldn’t write about this if I were alone.

  I took off my flying jacket and tucked up the edges carefully, so that only the leather of the back was touching the floor, and sat on that. It wasn’t very cold yet – still early September.

  After a while I opened up my flight bag to count the papers that I’d handed over earlier and then shoved back in without looking – checking to feel that I still had my precious official letter of recommendation from the Luftwaffe, with its stamps and signatures – and beneath the pile of paper I found, mysteriously, two of my confiscated Hershey bars.

  I am sure that Womelsdorff put them there.

  I was starved enough to eat one, even in the grim stench of the transport truck – I didn’t dare eat both, because I didn’t know how long I’d be there. Finally I put my tunic back on and curled in my supportive corner as tightly as I could on the protective island of my flying jacket. I buried my nose in the
silver paper that the chocolate had been wrapped in, sucking in the distant smell of Hershey and home to mask the stink, and managed to go to sleep.

  I got woken up by the engine starting. Through the air vents high in the walls I could see that it was light. No one looked inside to see if I was even alive – I have always thought the truck driver didn’t actually know I was there.

  We drove for about an hour and I couldn’t even tell what direction we were heading or how fast we were going. After the truck parked and the engine stopped, I sat in the dark for another hour. I didn’t know it, but the truck had gone through the gate, I was already inside.

  I ate the last chocolate bar. We’d both travelled from the same place, me and that Hershey bar – I thought how incredible it was that we both ended up here together. I heard long, slow trains steaming and clunking past a short distance away, a comforting sound, like the freight line that goes past the lake at Conewago Grove. I heard other trucks coming and going, and orders shouted in German. I heard the siren and nearly jumped out of my skin.

  We called it ‘the Screamer’. The first time I heard it I thought there must be an air raid going on. I scrunched myself up in a ball with my arms over my head – of course nothing happened. The next thing I heard, twenty minutes later, was the sound of hundreds of feet shuffling along at a weary jog, and a lot of shouting and dogs barking. I felt my way to the doors to try to find a crack to see out.

  Then someone opened the doors. I clapped my hands over my eyes and stood teetering on the edge of the truck floor, completely blinded by sunny September brilliance. They didn’t give me five seconds. I hadn’t even opened my eyes before someone grabbed my skirt and yanked me off balance, and I crashed full length on to the cindered road surface. The fall took the skin right off both my knees and off the heels of both hands too. I rolled over and sat up, furious and stunned, rubbing my eyes with shaking, bloody hands. Within seconds I was surrounded by half a dozen frantic German shepherds straining at the end of their leashes, all barking their heads off while half a dozen voices behind them barked equally vicious and completely incomprehensible orders over my head.