Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  I got to 8 and after that I thought I couldn’t speak. They kept going and I was still counting in my head, in English, because I knew that when I got to 25 it would be over, and counting was the only thing I could do to move things along. I lost count at 15. I must have been unconscious by 20. At any rate I don’t remember how it ended or what happened after.

  I woke up lying on my stomach on another bare wood slab in an acre of endless, empty, stinking plank bunks – there wasn’t one above me, but the ceiling was so close I couldn’t have sat upright if I’d wanted to, and the closeness made it so dark you couldn’t see where the bunks ended. It was grey twilight and that was because somewhere in the room, below me, there were windows, and it was still light out. I didn’t know where I was or how I’d got there, though it was obviously another part of the same Godawful prison complex.

  It was quiet and I couldn’t move, even though I was awake. I just lay blinking and breathing – not really thinking. Not even feeling sorry for myself.

  I’d more or less forgotten who I was.

  So then a voice near my head commanded in English: ‘Say your poem.’

  The command made no sense and I didn’t even try to answer.

  ‘Say your poem,’ the voice insisted. ‘Say the counting-out rhyme.’

  Counting – that made more sense. The last thing I could remember was being told to count, and the last thing I could remember doing was trying to count aloud, so I kind of assumed we were picking up where we’d left off. I felt certain that whether or not I obeyed I’d eventually wind up unconscious again, if not dead. But maybe if I cooperated we’d get it over with quickly. And so a poem called ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’ began to spill abruptly out of me.

  ‘Silver bark of beech, and sallow

  Bark of yellow birch and yellow

  Twig of willow.’

  I said it very slowly.

  While I was speaking, a strange thing happened. I began picturing the springtime woods of Pennsylvania, each branch and twig, as I said its name. I had to stop after the first verse – just three lines – because it was exhausting.

  ‘Go on,’ said the nearby voice.

  After a moment of despair, I pulled myself together and went on.

  ‘Stripe of green in moosewood maple,

  Colour seen in leaf of apple,

  Bark of popple.’

  And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these words, to remember that these things existed – the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the leaves.

  Incredible to think these same spring leaves are uncurling there now.

  ‘Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,

  Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,

  Wood of hornbeam.’

  It was MAGICAL to say their names. It was a blessing. It was holy.

  ‘Silver bark of beech, and hollow

  Stem of elder, tall and yellow

  Twig of willow.’

  I was finished. That is the whole poem. There was a pause.

  ‘Is that your poem?’

  ‘No. It’s by Edna St Vincent Millay.’

  ‘Do you know more?’

  ‘Dozens,’ I croaked. ‘She’s my favourite poet.’

  Oh, what a lot she’s got to answer for, Edna St Vincent Millay, whipping the youth of America into action in Europe. I’m sure she didn’t mean for me to end up in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany when she signed my copy of Make Bright the Arrows in that lecture hall at Jericho Valley College last spring, and shook my hand and wished me good luck ferrying planes in England.

  ‘Is that the poem you said when they were beating you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They told you to count and you said it was a counting-out rhyme. They stopped halfway through so they could call in Gitte, our Blockova, to watch and to translate, because you knew so much about munitions they decided they would have to put you in high security – here, Block 32. With the Soviet Red Army women soldiers and the Polish experimental Rabbits and the French Night and Fog spies. And when they brought you here, our Blockova Gitte told me to ask you to tell me your poem, because I am trying to learn poetry in English for my exams.’

  My interrogator was Polish. Her heavily accented English was just like Felicyta’s, though the voice was different – higher, soprano instead of alto. And younger. I could tell.

  ‘Blockova?’

  ‘Block leader. You might as well learn Blockova, because no one ever calls them anything else. It’s a Polish word, not German. The Blockovas are prisoners too. Most of the group leaders are prisoners. The German criminals are the worst. Look out for them; they’ve got green triangles to show they’re criminals and red armbands to show they’re forewomen. They’ll report you for smiling if they don’t like your face. Gitte’s all right; she’s a political prisoner, a German communist. Handed out one too many anti-Nazi leaflets!’

  I can’t really write her accent or her idioms without making her sound stupid, and she never did sound stupid. Anyway, I can’t remember them. I always understood her. So I am just going to write it the way I understood it, not the way she said it.

  ‘You’re learning poetry for your exams?’ I repeated, completely bewildered.

  ‘Yes, they pulled a lot of us out of school when they arrested us, along with half the professional scholars in Poland – all the ones they didn’t just murder right away. So we students are trying to earn our diplomas with the professors. Oh well, it’s a good thing to pretend anyway – that the war will end before we’re all shot or starved to death, and that I will need a diploma. Like you reciting poetry while they beat you.’

  ‘I don’t remember –’

  I began to say it, and then suddenly I did remember.

  ‘Oh!’

  This is what I’d done: I’d continued my instinctive effort to save my sanity that began when they first took away my relays for the bomb fuses. When I stopped counting during the second beating, I started muttering aloud the poem I’d been making up for the past two weeks – the words I’d had in my head as I stood swaying with exhaustion in the Siemens factory, the words I’d whispered to myself in the dark in the cold, cramped cell in the Bunker.

  So now I remembered my sanity-saving poem, but I didn’t move. I was still lying flat on my face.

  ‘Go on,’ the Polish student prompted me.

  I remembered the whole thing.

  I wrote a few words of it in England last summer – I think it is in this notebook, but I haven’t got the heart to look back at anything I wrote last summer. This will be the first time I’ve ever written down the finished poem.

  Counting-out Rhyme

  (by Rose Justice)

  Silver tube of fuse and hollow

  cylinder of detonator

  cap and gyro.

  Toppled gyro forcing action,

  copper wire to spark ignition,

  pulse jet engine.

  Amatol before explosion,

  Bosch and Siemens, Argus, Fieseler,

  in production.

  Shining fragile fuse and hollow

  warhead fuselage awaiting

  detonation.

  ‘Is that by your favourite poet as well?’ the Polish girl asked. ‘Edna Millay?’

  ‘No, that’s by me. I made it up.’

  ‘What is it about? Not trees this time.’

  ‘Flying bombs. It’s about making them. Or not making them – that’s why they punished me.’

  ‘I will give you one slice of bread for every poem you make me. I can do it. I’m one of the camp Rabbits, the Króliki, and people take care of me. Every time you make me a new poem I’ll get you an extra slice of bread.’

  I didn’t know it then. But I know it now and I’m sure of it. My counting-out rhyme saved me from starving to death this winter.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m Polish Political Pris
oner 7705,’ she reeled off, glib and bitter. ‘I’m a Rabbit.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  I don’t know how I knew I could talk to her like that. I hadn’t even looked at her yet.

  ‘My name is Róża Czajkowska,’ she said.

  In my ears it sounded like a meaningless babble of foreign sound. Very humbly, and worried that she would go away if I offended her, I asked her to spell it.

  ‘Oh, I can’t do English letters out loud,’ she answered with deep scorn. ‘Róża. How difficult is that? It means rose in English.’

  I turned my head for the first time since I’d woken up. It was exhausting. But I could see her now.

  She was – she is – seventeen. She was the tiniest seventeen-year-old I’d ever seen – I thought she was about eleven when I first saw her, the thinnest, most starved-looking kid alive. Being starved-looking was the only thing I noticed about her at first, her only distinguishing feature – it still hadn’t dawned on me that this wasn’t a distinguishing feature at Ravensbrück, and that Róża had other, more significant peculiarities. She had long hair – a lot of the long-term prisoners did – but it was hidden beneath a headscarf, and her dress was one of the old-style grey-and-blue striped uniforms.

  ‘Rose!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Róża,’ she corrected. ‘People call me Różyczka sometimes, little Rose, because I am so little.’

  ‘Little Rose – like Rosie? How do you say it?’

  ‘Say “Ro-shij-ka”. Różyczka!’

  ‘Różyczka!’

  ‘It is my pleasure to meet you, English-speaking French Political Prisoner 51498. What’s your name?’

  ‘Rose Justice,’ I said, remembering who I was. ‘Rose. Or Rosie. Same as yours.’

  She gave a shrill, maniacal howl of laughter.

  At the other end of the narrow aisle that led between the rows of bunks, there came the sound of footsteps. After a moment the footsteps stopped – another turbaned head appeared (it was Gitte, our extremely wonderful German Blockova). I couldn’t have begun to guess Gitte’s age when I first saw her face that afternoon – honestly, she could have been anywhere between twenty-five and a hundred. She said something sharply to Róża in German. Róża patted me on the head like a dog. She said to Gitte in English, ‘Look – Justice has come to Ravensbrück!’ and let out another cackling peal of laughter.

  Then Róża patted a thin cotton blanket which was folded near my head.

  ‘Listen, English-speaking French Political Prisoner with the same name as me. I have to go back to work. There’s a blanket here if you want it now, but you have to give it back to the others later and no one will thank you if she has to wash blood out of it, so keep it off your backside. I’ll bring your supper here, but you’ll have to get up to come to the 6.30 roll call.’ She giggled again before she added, ‘I’ll help you if you can’t walk.’

  Gitte gave an indulgent sigh. She assured me in English, ‘Someone else will help.’

  She reached towards Róża to help her down from the bunk. At first I thought it was just because Róża was so little. She put her arms around Gitte’s neck like a monkey and let herself be lifted to the murky floor. Then I saw the back of her legs and I understood why she needed help climbing down, and why her offer of support to me was such a joke.

  Both her legs had been split in half. That’s what it looked like – from knee to ankle in the back of her calves were long clefts so deep you could poke your finger in them up to the second knuckle.

  I gasped aloud in horror. It shook me physically – I actually flinched backwards, away from Róża’s awful legs, and then I gasped again in pain because it hurt so much to move.

  Róża’s injuries weren’t new – her legs had healed that way. They were as good as they were going to get. When Gitte put Róża down and she turned round to face me, I could see a trio of sunken, dented scars in the front of her right leg, half an inch deep, where bone should have been.

  It looked like her legs had been split with a butcher’s knife and then she’d been shot at close range.

  She picked up a makeshift crutch – a Y-shaped stick padded with more of the striped prison cloth – and tucked it beneath her right arm.

  ‘Can you knit?’ she demanded.

  ‘Sort of.’

  She pulled a face and mimicked, ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You’re an “Available”,’ Gitte told me. ‘Verfügbar. That means you’re not assigned to any special work.’

  ‘You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you,’ Róża elaborated. ‘Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do.’

  I blinked down at her, still lying flat, too much of a wreck to lift my head. A skilled job. Well, I’d had my chance.

  ‘Hey, don’t cry. We’ll keep you inside the block for a few days – till you can sit down anyway. Gitte’s going to say she needs another knitter to keep the quota up this week, since Zosia and Genca were shot.’

  Then Róża disappeared into the twilit aisle between the bunks, escorted by the ageless block leader. I was too high up to see them go. But I could hear Róża’s progress as her wooden clogs clomped against the dank concrete floor, punctuated by the thump of her crutch.

  After about thirty seconds, the clomping and thumping stopped suddenly. She yelled back at me, in English, ‘One piece of bread per poem!’

  Until November we had two evening roll calls – that was the way they’d always done it, one at 6.30 and one at 9 p.m. Eventually they stopped the 6.30 one because there were so many of us it was taking up to three hours three times a day to count us all. But the week I came to Block 32 they were still doing both evening roll calls, and I went to both. I have no memory of either one, or of climbing up and down out of the top bunk. The population of Block 32 was really, really good at propping people up.

  In between the roll calls I am pretty sure I did nothing but lie on my face. I was all burny with a light fever and I didn’t want to eat anything, and Róża, for whatever reason, didn’t follow through with her promise to bring me supper – to be fair, there wasn’t a notice up saying ‘Feed the New Girl in the Top Bunk’ and I was still nothing more to any of them than just the unknown person who’d be making up the murdered Zosia and Genca’s knitting quota.

  Gosh, I was dazed.

  What I do remember is that suddenly on this plank where I’d been sprawled flat on my face all afternoon, there were three other people trying to make themselves comfortable. We struck a kind of bargain where I got to stay sprawled and the rest of them got the blanket, only they had to sleep sitting up. Or as near upright as you can get when the ceiling is three feet above your head and you are asleep.

  We slept that way for five hours, maybe, and then the 4 a.m. Screamer went, and it was a scramble to the horrible toilet ditches before the 4.30 roll call. And that was me back on my feet.

  I said my counting-out rhyme saved my life and it’s true, because that’s what made Gitte notice me and give me to Lisette to take care of. You were dead if you didn’t have someone looking out for you. But I never had to worry about finding a teammate. I was so lucky. Lisette’s bunkmates in Block 32 weren’t just a team – we were a proper Camp Family, with Lisette in the role of Lagermutter, Camp Mother.

  It took me some time to notice Lisette was there, because Róża acted like she ruled the roost and Lisette was so quiet. Lisette was older than Daddy, but she didn’t really look it, partly because she’d been such a beauty. I like to think she will be again. It was a game I played during roll calls, trying to picture everybody in real life. Lisette Romilly, possibly France’s most popular detective novelist, Jazz Age flapper who drank cocktails with F Scott Fitzgerald in Paris, then surprised everybody by marrying the principal cellist of the Lublin Philharmonic and uprooting herself to move to Poland. She had three boys all as handsome and talented as their parents, she became an archivist at the Catholic University in Lublin, she learned to play the bas
s violin at the age of thirty-two and within two years she became so good they let her join the orchestra.

  Her husband was Jewish. He and her three boys – the oldest was two years younger than me – were all swept up in 1939 and marched out of the city and shot on the road. They didn’t even take them to a camp. Lisette got thrown out of their apartment and there she was, widowed, her children dead, owning nothing, in a foreign country at war. She had no work because the Germans had closed down all the Polish universities. She tried to go back to France and got arrested at the train station. When it first happened, she thought it was for carrying a cello without a licence or something like that. But actually, they arrested practically anyone who was connected with the Polish universities. I think they shot most of them.

  I loved Lisette. We all loved Lisette.

  Lisette Waits

  (by Rose Justice)

  Her suitcases are full. But after all

  she leaves them standing lifeless in the hall

  and takes the cello – for its golden voice

  sings back to life her murdered love and boys.

  She leaves behind her mother’s silver service,

  linen and pearls and books. The railway office

  demands she buy two tickets; so she does.

  The cello’s all she has and ever was.

  The piercing whistle tells the tracks are clear.

  She strains to glimpse the plume of steam draw near

  and sees the uniforms, a distant gun

  aimed at her breast. The cello cannot run.

  She pulls it to her heart, fearing the worst,

  still praying for the train to reach them first.