Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  I just cowered.

  Finally, since obviously I wasn’t going to obey an order I didn’t have a hope of understanding, someone grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me to my feet. I ended up being dragged to stand at the back of a long line of women who all looked as bewildered and stunned as I was. They seemed to be civilians, most of them carrying small bags and suitcases. There must have been nearly four hundred of us – all packed five to a row – and I was the last one in the last row.

  You know how you look around a new place to see what it’s like? I didn’t do that right away because my hands and knees were so sore. I bent down to look at my knees and cursed, ‘Gosh darn it!’ when I saw the humongous bloody holes in my stockings. ‘Gosh darn it, these are nylon!’

  You know, it almost makes me laugh to write about it. What was the first thing you worried about when you found yourself a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Rosie? Gosh darn it, holes in my nylon hose!

  One of the guards yanked me upright again, by my hair this time, and that is when I lost my cap, because they would not let me pick it up. I never saw it again.

  We stood there until after it got dark.

  I think it must have been six or seven hours. They weren’t punishing us that first day; I think they were just disorganised and there wasn’t any other place to put us yet. So we had to stand there, trying not to die of fear or boredom. But it was the first time. That made it harder.

  This is what I thought about while I waited:

  The walls. Twenty feet high and fenced with electric wire and skull-and-crossbones warning signs. There were a lot of empty trucks parked around us, but you could see the walls behind them. I still hadn’t figured out I was inside these walls – it was because I’d been locked blindly in the truck when I came through the gate. I kept looking at the walls and thinking, Gosh, I hope I don’t end up in there, whatever it is. Dreading that I probably would, and blissfully unaware that I already was.

  The sky. It was the most pure, beautiful blue September sky I think I have ever seen, with frothy clouds floating in it lazily like whipped cream in an ice-cream soda at the Hide-a-way Fountain in Conewago Grove. We stood there so long you could pick out a single cloud and watch it travel right from one side of the sky to the other – and then do it again. And again. You could see a ridge of pine trees behind one of the walls too, but the trees just stood there – they were boring to watch. The sky changed.

  And then the women who were going to Neubrandenburg came marching past us, five by five by five, to get into the row of waiting trucks.

  Those 200 women had all been turned into drones. They were like rows of plastic dolls. They all wore tattered, grubby dresses that didn’t fit (I don’t think any one of the 50,000 people in that whole damn camp had a dress that fitted her) – and there were great big crosses cut out of the fabric across the front and back of their chests and filled in with some contrasting colour. They weren’t prison uniforms, but they looked like prison uniforms anyway. But the absolutely nightmare thing about these women was that none of them had any hair. We watched and stared as these scruffy, bald zombies were herded into the waiting trucks, packed so close they couldn’t even sit down – now I knew why that truck smelled the way it did.

  Suddenly, at exactly the same moment, me and the girl next to me turned to stare at each other instead of at the awful robot women. We were looking at each other’s hair and thinking the same thing.

  After that we stopped watching the other prisoners climbing into the trucks. We just stared at the long hair of the woman in front of us, thick and brown and uncombed, and full of tangled curls, like mine.

  It got hot. By mid-afternoon my blouse was sticking to my back, but the guards kept patrolling up and down the lines and whacking people who tried to sit down or talk, and I didn’t dare to try to take my tunic off. I hadn’t had anything to drink or been to the toilet since I landed in Neubrandenburg the day before, and I’d eaten only chocolate since then; pretty soon I became consumed by thirst more than anything else. In my wildest nightmares I’d never imagined such simple torture – just to have to stand in one place forever and ever.

  I don’t remember being scared any more at that point. I was just sick of standing there and desperate for a glass of water.

  Late in the afternoon the girl standing next to me whispered something without turning her head.

  ‘Vous êtes un pilote?’ – you’re a pilot?

  I didn’t answer for a long time, checking around us for guards and guard dogs without moving my head either. Then, ‘Oui,’ I answered, also in a whisper.

  I stole a glance at her. She was short and pretty, with untidy gold bangs that got in her eyes, and a long shiny scar down one side of her face. This was the first conversation I ever had with a French person in real life who wasn’t my French teacher – and also it was the first time I understood anyone since Womelsdorff handed me over to the guy with the motorbike yesterday. I had a pretty good idea what would happen if someone noticed us whispering. But it was such a relief to be able to talk to someone.

  She whispered, ‘Vous êtes anglaise?’ Are you English?

  ‘Américaine.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in French.

  ‘Je ne sais pas,’ I hissed. ‘I don’t know. You?’

  ‘We all come from different prisons,’ she told me. ‘Arrested for Resistance activity – most of us are Résistantes. I’ve been in prison for nine months.’

  I was confused, because if she’d already been in prison for nearly a year, why was she here now?

  ‘Where are we?’

  She shrugged. ‘Probably Ravensbrück. It’s their big women’s concentration camp. They move us all the time – away from the Allied armies as they advance. I was in prison in Paris until May, then moved to Frankfurt, then to Berlin. Now here.’

  Her name was Elodie Fabert.

  You know, concentration camp translates pretty clearly in French – even in German. Camp de concentration, Konzentrationslager. But even though I knew what the words meant – it didn’t mean anything then. Not really. The name of the place didn’t mean anything to me. Over the heads of the four hundred Frenchwomen ahead of me I stared at the high concrete walls and the miles of electrified barbed wire, and I clung to my flight bag with its official Luftwaffe letter in it. The girl next to me had already been in prison for nine months and she obviously survived it. Our troops were practically over the Siegfried Line. It wouldn’t be for long. I wouldn’t cause trouble. I would be all right. If they ever let us sit down and have a drink, I would be all right.

  The chambermaid has left. It’s OK – it was just being alone in the truck I didn’t like remembering by myself. Reading it over I noticed that I didn’t actually write down what I kept thinking then: What if no one ever opens that door? I’m done with it now – dry words on a page. The reality was much worse.

  Also, I didn’t write that most of the SS people guarding us were women too. When I read over the part about being dragged out of the truck and into line it sounded like it was a man doing it, taking advantage of a poor dazed female. But it wasn’t – it was a girl not much older than me and a couple of inches shorter. She probably wasn’t any stronger either. She was just meaner.

  I asked Fernande to ask someone to send me some more ink. I know I won’t ever catch up with that Red Cross unit. Now that I’ve glided down I haven’t got enough lift to get airborne again. I don’t have any clothes, and I still have this exhausting, rib-cracking cough. If I stand looking out the window for more than ten minutes, I get so tired I have to sit down. Out of an entire hotel menu I can’t keep down anything more exciting than unsweetened rice pudding or boiled macaroni with nothing on it. I want to go back out there. But I just can’t do anything more energetic than write or sleep, and even sleeping is exhausting. I tried to take a nap and dreamed I was sleeping alone in our barrack, with an icy wind howling through the broken windows, and everybody else had been ga
ssed.

  Which is probably a nightmare based on the fact that I am alone, and it’s my own fault. All I can do is pray Irina takes care of our stubborn little Róża. How how how did I lose them both, when we were already out ?

  April 19, 1945

  Paris

  When the 6 p.m. siren let out its piercing howl, we nearly jumped out of our skin.

  We had all fallen into a stupor of exhaustion and misery and you could see a ripple of attention race through our ranks as the noise shocked us wide awake. Not long after that they finally fed us. They did it outside, right where we were standing – like CAMP, hah. First they let us help ourselves to water from a row of spigots by the main gate, after about a year of standing in line to get there, and then they brought out two big oil drums of soup. It was absolutely chaotic – seemed chaotic anyway, the first time, 400 of us trying to get at two pots all at once. We had about one bowl between four of us to take turns with, which they took away again when we were done, since we hadn’t yet been issued official bowls of our own. You had to carry your bowl around with you all the time in a little bag or someone would steal it and then you wouldn’t get any soup. No bowl, no soup. Of all the unbelievable things about Ravensbrück, I think the Administration and Politics of Bowls must have been the battiest.

  Now it just seems incredible that we got something to eat that day. We all got some soup, and we all got a piece of bread, and we ate it standing up. I ate mine, but I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t remember what the soup was – I mean, you never really knew what it was, but I don’t remember it being the worst soup I’d ever eaten. I do remember that I couldn’t eat the biggest chunks of whatever mystery root vegetable was in it, because they were completely raw. Inside a month I wouldn’t care, but what did I know at that point?

  What I remember most about that first meal there is the filthy, crawling, skeletal beggars who fought over the raw chunks of potato or turnip or whatever it was in the soup that I couldn’t make myself eat. There was a camp word for those beggars, which I never did figure out how to say or spell, because it sounds so much to me like schmootzich – Mother’s nasty way of describing a girl who doesn’t take care of herself. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for filthy greasy.

  They took any food you gave them. The first day, because I was still ignorant enough to be picky about what I ate, I tried to hand over my leftover chunks of raw vegetable to one of these desperate people. In seconds I was being clawed at by ten skeletal hands, grabbing at me anywhere they could to try to get in on the handout – five crawling creatures who had once been women snatching at my skirt, my arms, my hair. One of the guards had to beat them off. It left me shaking with shock. I never dared that kind of charity again.

  You could drop a breadcrust on the ground and the schmootzichs would fight over it. If you dropped a breadcrust and stepped on it, or a guard spat on it, they still fought over it. They were like seagulls. Like seagulls going after garbage. They were so far from being human that at first it didn’t even occur to me then that they could be fellow prisoners – I thought they must be hoboes or something who’d crawled in off the train tracks. God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn’t want to believe something.

  After we ate, the guards pointed us in the direction of a ditch we could use for a latrine. I kept telling myself, it’s like camp. It’s a camp; I’m at camp.

  God knows what I thought I was telling myself.

  We got herded into a harshly lit factory shed to be registered and examined and given prison clothes. Elodie and I were somehow always the last in line, and by the time our turn came for anything, we got the absolute worst of it. But on the other hand, by the time you’d stood in line for an hour or three or four, you knew what was going on. We were able to do a lot more whispering in the administration building than we’d been able to do standing under guard all afternoon, and most information was highly refined by the time it reached me and Elodie. We knew before we got to the line of desks where they processed us that, like all new prisoners, we were in ‘quarantine’ – being ‘decontaminated’ to prevent the spread of typhoid. That sounded plausible, and a good thing, but it was clearly a complete joke – the schmootzichs had had their filthy, oozing hands all over us.

  My ATA pilot’s uniform was like a rallying flag. Everybody was ravenously starved for encouraging news from the Front, and only one day ago I’d been a free woman flying over a free Paris. ‘Caen is ours,’ I whispered. ‘And Brussels and Antwerp, and Le Havre just yesterday! I heard before I took off! We’re past Reims in France now. We’ve got most of France and a big part of Belgium. The push is north to Holland and west to the German border. We haven’t got all the French ports – we’re still fighting for Boulogne, but it’ll be any day. And the Luftwaffe –’

  Womelsdorff had been cursing his own military for wasting resources.

  ‘They’ve got spectacular new jets, but no fuel.’

  People relayed the news to one another in nearly silent whispers. The guards wouldn’t let us talk, but they couldn’t keep their eyes on all 400 of us at once. The news flew around the shed.

  Other prisoners were already packing everybody’s things up and carting them away to be sorted by the time I had to dump out my flight bag on one of the dozens of administrators’ desks lined up across the shed. I bit my lip, my stomach churning with worry while the administrator squinted at my papers, because I knew they were going to keep my passport and Luftwaffe letter of reference and leave me without any ID except for whatever they assigned me.

  Finally the administrator called someone else over – both of them SS guards, both of them women, maybe five years older than me. They talked to each other in German, studying my American passport. One of them rolled her eyes at the other and made a face. She’d noticed my middle name – Rose Moyer Justice. The other glanced at me, pointed at her friend and told me drily, ‘Das ist Effi Moyer.’

  Effi Moyer wasn’t happy about it at all. She grabbed hold of the lapel of my tunic and gave it a demanding yank. I took the tunic off and handed it to her. She started to go through my pockets with brisk efficiency and found the wrappers from my chocolate bars.

  I’d folded the silver foil and brown paper very carefully, wrapped it in my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy and pushed it deep into the corner of my tunic pocket. I wanted to keep it because it smelled so overwhelmingly of Pennsylvania, of home, of flying over Hershey and the fields of Jericho County.

  When Effi Moyer found the brown and silver paper, she passed it to her friend – they both unfolded the scraps with deep and interested suspicion, as though they expected lumps of gold to drop out. Effi held the silver foil up to her nose exactly the way I’d done in the truck the night before and took a deep breath.

  ‘Schokolade,’ she said, and passed the empty candy wrapper to her colleague, who also took a deep breath.

  They made a fierce, disappointing search through the rest of my pockets, and checked my bag again, and then they divided up the paper between them – each of them got one full wrapper.

  I watched the whole performance biting my lip, trying to kill another terrible, terrible urge to laugh. And also feeling a new kind of fear taking hold of my stomach and tying it in knots. These were the prison guards confiscating my empty candy bar wrappers as if they were hundred-dollar bills. If that’s how hard up the guards were . . .

  Effi tossed my tunic to the woman standing a couple of desks down from her, and it got lost in the pile of hundreds of other abandoned jackets and blouses and skirts. Then I had to take off the rest of my clothes. It wouldn’t have been so bad if you didn’t have to do it in front of men too – SS officers and guards who were directing and pushing people and just standing around watching. But everyone else had already had to strip. I was the last.

  There was a little office room like a clinic where you had to sit on a table while a couple of people in rubber gloves put you through an unspeakable body search with tongue depressor
s and a flashlight. When they were done with the search, Effi barked an order at the doctors or whatever they were, and I had to sit backwards on a chair (holding on to the back of it) while they sheared my hair off. They really did shear it – with a scissors up against my scalp, not close enough to my head to count as shaving it off, but so close there was nothing left. If I was going to do that to anyone, I’d time it that way too – addle her brain with shame and discomfort and then quickly get her hair before she came to her senses. The shock of losing my hair didn’t hit me till later. The tongue depressors and flashlights seemed much more terrible at the time – even though that only lasted a couple of minutes, and I was stuck with my hair. Without it, I mean.

  Finally I got smacked on my bare backside with someone’s clipboard because I hesitated going into the slimy, dark shower room.

  Nothing that happened to me that day made me cry. Some of it scared me; but most of it just made me SO MAD.

  I’d lost Elodie. The room with the showers was badly lit and murky with mildew – it reminded me of the abandoned bathhouse by the old pool at Conewago Park, which they haven’t used since before the Great War. Me and the other summer kids used to explore all the old park buildings, but not the bathhouse – it was just too creepy. Here in Ravensbrück I hesitated in the doorway, smarting, but unable to take another step over the slimy, red clay tiles towards those black, trickling overhead spigots and the dozens of white, skinny, bald women shivering beneath them.

  ‘La femme pilote américaine! Mon amie américaine!’

  ‘Ici!’ I yelled. ‘Here!’

  Elodie and I got slapped simultaneously on opposite sides of the shower room. But I knew where she was now, and we managed to get back together.