Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Róża’s high voice pitched in suddenly at my other ear in fluent French. ‘Taran is a Polish word.’

  ‘I know! My friend Felicyta told me about it! Aerial ramming!’ And in an agony of excitement I punched a fist at the sky.

  Taran. It is the same word in Polish and Russian. There is a technique to it, which Irina showed me – her hands became planes, wings spread and rigid, above our faces in the sky.

  Irina had the most beautiful hands!

  Triolet for Irina

  (by Rose Justice)

  Rigidly spread, like taut wings, fly

  her open hands. Above her head

  mute ruthless fingers slice the sky

  rigidly spread like taut wings, fly

  while forty thousand women lie

  in frozen cinders, blind with dread,

  rigidly spread. Like taut wings fly

  her open hands above her head.

  (I am amazed I remembered the rhyme scheme for a triolet. Mr Wagner would be proud of me.)

  These are your weapons, Irina’s hands told me – pointing with the left, demonstrating with the right. Propeller, fuselage, wing. Go for the enemy wing or rudder, clip it with your own wing or prop.

  All around us people were weeping in fear, face down in the dirt, while Irina’s hands flew over our heads. She showed me how she rammed her last kill. Then I showed her how I tipped my V-1 flying bomb.

  When the air raid began, anyone who was Camp Police like Karolina had been hustled off to the perimeter ditches to haul sandbags and drag the anti-aircraft guns into position; but Róża and Lisette were both watching, and helping along the conversation which was now going on in four languages. I made my hands chase each other in slow motion. My left hand crept up on the right, passed it, slowed down again as the right caught up, four times. Finally thumb to thumb, wing tip to wing tip, a sliver of space between them, until the slight triumphant moment when the wings caress –

  And I dropped my right hand like a falling bomb.

  ‘Again,’ Irina said. ‘There was no touch – no contact?’

  I showed her how I’d made the other aircraft stall, filling in English words when I didn’t know the French. Lisette helped in Russian.

  Róża suddenly interrupted in a hiss of a whisper, ‘51498! You told us they arrested you because you landed in the wrong place! Now you’re saying it was because you knocked down a Luftwaffe plane in a taran attack?’

  ‘Well – I got caught because I was lost. And I got lost because I went chasing after a flying bomb.’

  ‘You knocked down a flying bomb and you landed in one piece on a runway afterwards?’

  ‘Well –’ I held my hands up against the sky. ‘It was the wrong runway.’

  ‘Think she’s a liar?’ Róża asked of no one in particular.

  ‘A good one, if she is,’ Irina said mildly. ‘The hands know what they are talking about.’

  ‘Maybe you’re a liar too, Russian Bat Girl.’

  ‘Maybe I am, Polish Rabbit. What do you care? I think I have met another taran pilot.’

  Two things happened – another wave of American bombers began to whine past overhead, and one of the watchtowers on the concrete walls exploded with machine gun fire, followed by distant screams.

  The guns were aimed at us. Or – not at us personally – at some of the other prisoners. ‘Karolina!’ Lisette gasped in horror.

  Instinctively I snatched my hands out of the air and held them tight against my chest. Instinctively Róża grabbed me. Instinctively, on the other side of me, Irina gripped my other hand.

  ‘It’s not Karolina,’ Róża insisted, fiercely reassuring. ‘They’re screaming on the Appelplatz, not in the ditches.’ The Appelplatz was the big open square where the camp gathered for work details. I don’t know what the prisoners there had done to deserve getting fired at with machine guns. We clung to one another, cowering beneath the invading aircraft and the guns and the sounds of agony on the Appelplatz.

  Then Irina let go of my hand and held her spread fingers a little bit over our faces, the silhouette of a plane in the dark, and rocked her hand as though she were rocking the wings of an aircraft at me. ‘Taran,’ she whispered.

  Like Elodie whispering, ‘La victoire!’ A secret sign of hope, of the slow inevitable end to this NEVER-ENDING WAR.

  I rocked my own hand above our faces in the dark for a silent reply.

  ‘Taran,’ I whispered back.

  Irina invaded our bunk. There wasn’t even much of a fight. Some of the Russian prisoners had been put on night work and it was less crowded in the bunks than it had been – at least, in ours there were only me and Lisette and Róża before Irina turned up.

  ‘What’s the ugly Russian Bat Girl doing here?’ Karolina asked, crawling back in exhausted ten minutes after the rest of us. (She asked it in Polish, but I know that’s more or less what she said.)

  ‘She’s Rose’s friend,’ said Róża. ‘They’re both aerial combat Aces. And I am the prima ballerina of the Warsaw Ballet. Let her stay – she’ll protect you from the other Russian pigs.’

  Do you know what I ended up with stuck in my head?

  Make new friends

  But keep the old,

  One is silver

  And the other gold.

  *

  Six hours later the clear sky was gone, and I stood for roll call in the pouring rain, eaten up with anxiety over the thought of all those young American bomber pilots having to fly home through such spectacularly horrible weather. I wasn’t paying any attention to the SS guard screaming incomprehensible numbers in German.

  ‘Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig! Die Verfügbar!’ she yelled. She advanced on our row like a turkey buzzard, red in the face with rain streaming from her black cape. Her awful dog tried unsuccessfully to shake itself dry all over our entire row.

  ‘That’s you, my dear,’ Lisette whispered from the other side of Irina. ‘She wants an “Available”. Verfügbar.’

  No one else looked up. No one else even said anything, not daring to risk the narrowest chance of punishment with the dog standing there grinning savagely at us.

  ‘Verfügbar!’ the buzzard-woman screeched again. ‘Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’

  Róża gave me a little push. ‘Available 51498.’ I stepped out of line feeling like I was going to my doom. Róża’s words from my first day in Block 32 rattled in my head: ‘You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you. Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do.’

  The guard looked me over, then glanced at Irina standing there next to my empty place in line, her gaunt six-foot frame towering over tiny Róża. The guard beckoned to Irina with a regal shake of her head. Irina tried to protest – she wasn’t an Available. She was supposed to work in the power plant with a bunch of other Russian girls.

  The guard couldn’t have cared less what Irina was supposed to be doing. She slapped Irina in the face for protesting and herded her out of line to join me. Then she drove us both ahead of her through the gate in the chain-link fence that separated our block from the rest of the camp. Standing woefully soaked and miserable out there was a group of a dozen other Availables, waiting for me and Irina to join them in some unknown back-breaking and nasty work assignment.

  The guard turned us over to our group leader, a German Kolonka (Kolonka is a Ravensbrück word, short for something I can’t remember, but basically means forewoman) – the Kolonka wasn’t an SS guard, but a German prisoner. She wore a green triangle and a red armband. The red armband showed she was a forewoman and let her go anywhere she wanted. The green triangle showed she was a criminal. One of the very first things Róża had told me was how a German criminal with a red armband was exactly the worst combination of work leader, and to my utter terror this one homed in on me right away.

  She was nearly as tall as Irina. She had the stub of an
unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of her mouth, and she barked orders around it like a gangster. I stood quivering as she pinpointed me to question on the first day I turned up in her work crew. Right there in the pouring rain she pointed to the letters Elodie had embroidered in my sleeve patch. ‘USA?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘Ich bin Amerikanerin,’ I explained.

  In perfect, almost unaccented English, she asked, ‘Why are you here?’ She had intense pale green eyes the exact colour of a Coca-Cola bottle. I didn’t answer, and she shrugged a little. ‘Just wondering. I don’t give a shit why you’re here. I went to college in America. But you’re the first American I’ve seen in Ravensbrück.’ Then she began firing these weird, casual, ordinary questions at me. ‘Have you ever been to Chicago?’

  I swallowed, at sea as to where this was going. I gave her terse, suspicious answers.

  ‘I stayed overnight once.’

  ‘Who’s your favourite band leader?’

  ‘Um – Tommy Dorsey?’

  ‘Do you know a recipe for Boston Cream Pie?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Too bad!’ She twisted her mouth in disappointment. ‘I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie. Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you for being American. If you don’t understand anything I say in German, just ask. Now I’m going to shout at you all to straighten up and get moving, OK? French morons.’

  And she did, just launched into a long tirade of orders in German.

  French morons? I wondered.

  Irina, who was Russian, was in line next to me. I stole a glance at the girl walking ahead of her, whose left sleeve I could see pretty well. Her red triangle had a defiant black letter ‘F’ embroidered in it the way Elodie had embroidered hers, and I could just make out the number above her political prisoner patch – 51444. She was from my original French transport.

  Then I tried to check the other women around me. I could see the numbers of the two ahead of me – we were all from the same transport. None of them was Elodie, but they were from Elodie’s transport.

  Elodie! I thought, my heart lifting in the ridiculous way it did at any faint promise of hope – a tattered kite soaring and going nowhere. Elodie, my comrade-in-arms from the first three weeks in quarantine! Maybe I could get a message to Elodie!

  Our German Kolonka barked another incomprehensible order at us, then unexpectedly followed up with a quiet translation first in French and then in English. ‘Stay over this side. Don’t go near the tent. Don’t look.’

  We tried not to look. But the tent was between us and wherever we were going, and we couldn’t help seeing.

  It was as big as a circus tent and had been put up while I was still in quarantine, in an open place too marshy to build on, as a temporary shelter for the new prisoners who were pouring into Ravensbrück every day – thousands of civilians from beaten Warsaw, from Auschwitz as they started to evacuate it before the Red Army got there, and from a ton of other camps and prisons closer to the front as they moved people around. You could see the tent from inside the fence around Block 32, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it while I’d been working with the knitters. Today there were more guards and dogs than usual all around the tent perimeter, keeping people inside, and the reason everyone in there was trying to get out in the rain was because they were dying of thirst.

  Really dying of it, I think.

  Hands and arms and heads stuck out anywhere there was a gap – cupped hands collecting rainwater, some holding bowls or even just a piece of cloth to collect moisture – I saw one woman lying on her back with her hair in the black cinder mud at the tent’s edge, her mouth open, letting a rivulet of water stream down the canvas and into her mouth.

  You know, it set you at war with yourself.

  A back-of-my-mind part of me wanted to help – the Lutheran-church-bred Girl Scout in me wanted to race back and forth with buckets of water for everybody.

  But another back-of-my-mind part of me, cowed and self-centred, was going, Thank GOD I am in Block 32. Thank GOD I am not in that tent.

  And the front of my mind – the biggest part of me – was just screaming over and over in denial and disbelief: WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

  ‘Don’t look,’ the German Kolonka advised again, and then her voice suddenly went hard and flat. ‘Oh, what the hell, go ahead and look. If they throw any bodies out of the tent, we’ll probably have to pick them up. But stay on this side just now!’

  There were twelve of us, all with numbers in the 51000s except for Irina and the Kolonka, and when we got to work, I realised that what we had in common was our height – all of us were tall. That’s why the guard had pulled Irina out of line on a whim when she’d come to get me that morning.

  The Kolonka wasn’t kidding about picking up bodies. We got marched down the main street of the camp, the Lagerstrasse, to a depot. There we collected half a dozen handcarts, and then our very first job was clearing the top bunks in the Revier, the sickbay, which shorter women couldn’t see or reach as easily as we could. We left the carts standing at the back door of the Revier and lined up to go in. The Kolonka pulled the neck of her dress up over her nose like a gas mask, yelled another order at us through the blue-and-grey striped cloth, and we marched inside like we were going to war. The stench was unbelievable. Within seconds we all had our dresses pulled up over our noses.

  And I do not remember what we did.

  I know what we did, of course, and I remember doing the same thing later – we moved hundreds of corpses this winter. We lifted them out of the bunks and undressed them. We stacked them in rows on the floor of the mortuary. We carried them out to our handcarts and hauled them to the crematorium and unloaded them again. But I don’t remember the first time I did it. It was worse doing it for the first time. And I have blocked it out.

  This is what I do remember about that first day of work as an Available: just before we marched back to our blocks for the 6 o’clock roll call, our Kolonka assembled us in the washroom of the Revier and gave us each a vitamin C tablet out of a green triangular package.

  ‘These are from the Swiss Red Cross, and yes, they’re stolen. Take them now – nothing leaves this room. Any of you breathe a word and I’ll get you transferred to the Punishment Block. Not the Bunker – don’t expect a cosy private cell with nothing to do all day. You’ll be digging toilet pits and hauling road rollers.’

  She didn’t have to threaten us again. Even I knew already what the Punishment Block was, and it wasn’t the extra hard and filthy work people dreaded about being sent there. The women in the Punishment Block were known for being the nastiest people in the camp. Probably with good reason, but you didn’t want to have to fight for sleeping space or food with someone who’d kick you under the bunks and steal your bowl and make you buy it back with your bread ration for the entire week.

  The Kolonka watched us all closely while we swallowed the vitamins, her pale green eyes narrow with suspicion. Suddenly she advanced on Irina. She seized hold of Irina’s jaw and rammed her head back against the tiled wall, pinching her nostrils closed and holding a hand over her mouth.

  ‘Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ the Kolonka rapped out over her shoulder. Prisoner 51498! – me. I stepped forward fearfully.

  ‘Does this bitch understand anything but Russian?’

  ‘A little French,’ I gulped.

  ‘Swallow!’ The Kolonka ordered Irina in French, punctuating her command by bashing the back of Irina’s skull against the wall. Irina choked and spluttered and finally swallowed.

  The German girl turned round and told us, ‘No hiding stolen vitamin pills under your tongue to take to your friends back in your block. I’m not being nice or doing you a favour. I’m taking care of myself. No one on my team gets scurvy. Line up!’

  We lined up meekly.

  ‘My name’s Anna,’ she growled at us. It seemed like an odd thing to finish up with. I think it was the closest she could come to an apo
logy.

  ‘So what did they make you do?’ Róża asked cheerfully as we scrambled to get our tepid soup that evening.

  My hands were shaking. Karolina put her own hand under my bowl so I didn’t spill anything.

  ‘We were working in the Revier. Irina tried to organise vitamins for you,’ I told Róża. ‘She got bashed in the head for it.’

  ‘For me? Really, Russian Bat Girl?’

  Irina shrugged. ‘No, not for you, Rabbit. If I got away with it I would have sold them.’

  ‘Can you get calcium tablets?’ Lisette asked.

  Irina shot me a warning glance which said clearly, Shut up or Anna will get you transferred to the Punishment Block. But Lisette wouldn’t let it go, and after we’d all squeezed into our spot under the end of the table and she’d said her grace in Polish, she said to me again, ‘Calcium tablets.’

  ‘Why calcium?’ I asked.

  ‘For the Rabbits who have had bone operations. For Róża, so she doesn’t break her leg walking on the damaged bone. It can happen. Calcium helps make bones stronger.’

  I thought about it for a minute. Anna was like a guard dog – trained to be vicious, but maybe if you handled her the right way . . . I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie, she’d said.

  Irina caught my eye and raised two fingers to her lips, miming smoking.

  She was right – I was ready to bet Anna could be bribed with cigarettes. Except for Irina, the other girls on my work team were all from my original transport. If they were still sharing bunks with Elodie, if they were still in the same block with her and she was still alive, maybe one of them could carry a message to her – I felt sure Elodie was capable of organising cigarettes for me to give to Anna.

  ‘We’ll work on it,’ I said.

  The next morning Irina and I joined the tall French girls again and marched through the mud past the tent, with Anna marching next to our column where she could keep an eye on us. Irina stood between me and Anna to hide the fact that I had a whole day’s bread ration hidden in the blouse of my dress, about a quarter of a loaf. That was the standard unit of camp currency, a day’s bread ration, and we’d scraped it together in anticipation of our great calcium caper.