Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Hope – you think of hope as a bright thing, a strong thing, sustaining. But it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s simply this: lumps of stale bread stuck down your shirt. Stale grey bread eked out with ground fish bones, which you won’t eat because you’re going to give it away, and maybe you’ll get a message through to your friend. That’s all you need.

  God, I was hungry.

  I don’t mean I was more hungry that day than I’d been the day before. I mean I was constantly, hopelessly, stupefyingly hungry. I said earlier, I can’t remember when I first felt that way – though I know I wasn’t able to eat much right after I got out of the Bunker, I don’t remember ever not being hungry. The thing is, when you’re that hungry, it’s almost impossible to think about anything else. You know you ought to, and you want to, and sometimes you’re forced to. Calcium and cigarettes. Air raids. Feeling sorry for the people who are dying of thirst and the half-human schmootzich beggars licking spilled soup off the kitchen steps. But it takes an effort.

  We got marched past the tent, past the Bunker and the sickbay and kitchens and out through the main gate, but without our handcarts this time. Then we went around the walls towards the crematorium, the path we’d taken with the corpses yesterday, and I had a bad moment thinking they’d make us work at the incinerator ovens today. But we passed the crematorium and ended up in the building next to it, a long shed with a sort of huge garage door entrance. It was being used as a storage area for building and maintenance equipment. Our team of Tall Strong Amazons was supposed to clear it out.

  The shed was full of tools, shovels, long lengths of rail, stuff like that. I don’t think I could ever in a million years describe what it was like for me and three other underfed girls to pick up a steel rail – two of us on each end – and carry it on our shoulders to a pile by the train tracks. If any one of us had dropped her end, or stumbled, our feet would have all been crushed.

  Irina and I worked together, but on our third rail we somehow got swapped around with a couple of the French girls, and I ended up next to Prisoner 51444.

  ‘I have some of your things,’ she muttered suddenly. ‘Your friend Elodie sent them.’

  We were at the unloading point and let our end of the rail come thundering down into the muddy ground. We had to shift the rail over to line it up, and the girl hissed in my ear as we worked, ‘Wait till we’re back in the shed. I’ll hand them over.’

  Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you’re being lifted you don’t worry about plummeting.

  ‘I have bread for you to give Elodie,’ I whispered back. ‘Can she get me some cigarettes?’

  51444 gave a panicked, explosive laugh. ‘What if I eat the bread myself?’

  I hissed in her ear, ‘You won’t. You just said you’re Elodie’s messenger.’ I hazarded wildly, ‘You can have half.’

  ‘I’m Micheline,’ she said.

  Later on she stumbled against me and grabbed at my arm for support, and suddenly I was holding something soft and silky balled up in the palm of my hand.

  I stuffed the silky wad into the neck of my dress, and gave her the bread.

  I didn’t know what she’d pressed into my hand until I got back to Block 32 that night and had a chance to look. It turned out to be my hose. Elodie had sent me my stockings! They were actually little socks that she’d made out of my hose. She’d been put to work in one of the workshops where they re-purposed everybody’s clothes, and she’d got hold of my torn nylons and cut them into pieces and made me three little pairs of socks – they just slipped over your feet so they’d be hidden by your shoes. I hope she kept a few pairs back for herself.

  And – this is so Elodie – she’d embroidered a tiny rosebud on the instep of each one. The thread was from my own dress, the one I was still wearing, from the same ball of thread we’d unravelled from the torn collar when we were together in quarantine. A little blue rose on each foot.

  Oh, wonderful Elodie!

  Three pairs of nylon socks. If I’d worn all three on top of each other my feet would have still been cold – but of course I gave a pair to Róża. And another to Lisette. I passed them round under the table when we’d finished eating. Lisette tried to give hers to Karolina – Karolina wouldn’t take them. They had a fight over them. Or rather, Karolina refused heatedly. Lisette just kept calmly insisting, ‘I won’t wear this newfangled nylon, my dear, so you may as well have them.’

  ‘Idiots!’ Róża blazed. ‘Give them all to me if you’re going to be stupid!’

  ‘Take turns,’ Irina suggested as though she couldn’t care less.

  I am almost ashamed to write this down, but it never occurred to me I could have given away all three pairs. Not till this minute. I gave a pair to Róża because she couldn’t walk. I gave a pair to Lisette because she was the mother of our Camp Family, and I’d been told to treat her like my mother. And I kept one for myself because they were mine and my feet were cold. Irina, I figured, was perfectly capable of organising socks for herself, and Karolina – well, Karolina kept insisting she wasn’t a cripple and I didn’t want to offend her.

  And anyway, she was just so delighted by my fire-engine-red toenails when I put on the little nylon slipper socks for the first time that she didn’t care about her own feet.

  ‘Nail varnish!’ Karolina hissed in delight. ‘You are a painted woman! No wonder they slapped you with a French prisoner’s triangle!’

  It is true. The nail polish for my date with Nick still hadn’t come off. My toenails had grown out a bit, so there was a bare gap between the nail bed and the enamel, but if you didn’t look too closely and you didn’t look at the skin of my blistered feet, my toenails were still pretty.

  Róża rolled her eyes. ‘Karolina is the vainest creature in the world. Last time she tried to grow her hair out they made her wear a sign that said, “I have violated camp rules by curling my hair.”’

  ‘Shut up, Różyczka. What’s the colour called? The colour of the varnish?’

  ‘Cherry Soda,’ I said. ‘It was a little bottle I brought with me from America.’

  Karolina and Róża both sighed in ecstasy.

  ‘Cherry Soda! No wonder your toes look like balls of candy.’

  ‘My mother never let me wear make-up – ever,’ Róża vowed with vivid envy.

  ‘You were fourteen when you were arrested!’ I protested. ‘My mother didn’t let me wear make-up either when I was fourteen!’

  ‘Did you paint them yourself or was it done by a beauty specialist? How long does it last? What shoes did you wear with it? Were they open-toed – could you see your toenails with your shoes on?’

  ‘Sandals. It was for a date with my boyfriend, Nick.’

  ‘Did he like them?’

  I shrugged and looked away. I don’t think he’d noticed them. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of Nick, and the thought of him always made me ache. What would he think if he could see me now? There wasn’t any way I could ever be mistaken for anything but a concentration camp prisoner, hairless, in my torn dress with its missing collar and big mismatched fabric X’s and the brown striped bloodstains across my backside. Early on I used to dream about him, though I stopped dreaming about anything but food after a while – I dreamed he was touching my head and asking, ‘Where is your hair?’

  Karolina stifled a giggle. ‘Let’s name your toes. That’d be a hilarious little cartoon, a row of dancing toes like the Rockettes! Each a different flavour. Cherry! Peppermint!’

  ‘Redcurrant!’ said Lisette.

  ‘Beetroot,’ said Irina.

  ‘Beetroot!’ Róża sneered.

  ‘It is sweet. And red.’

  They coaxed me into putting the rhymes together.

  ‘Strawberry, cranberry –’

  ‘– grenadine, raspberry!’

  And I made a rhyme about painted toes. It is a sort of insanely starved person’s version of ‘This Little Piggy’.

 
No penny candy

  so stubbornly sweet

  as plops of red sugar

  adorning my feet –

  strawberry, cinnamon,

  redcurrant, cranberry,

  peppermint, sugarbeet,

  grenadine, raspberry,

  cherry and mulberry –

  come look at Rose

  and join in the feast

  of my lollipop toes!

  Of course, it was not just the illicit beauty of my toes that everyone admired – it was also, and in a big way, the fact that they looked so edible.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d been scavenging that day. Irina turned out to have an entire newspaper hidden in her shirt. She must have picked it up in the maintenance shed we’d been working in, though I hadn’t noticed a thing at the time (she was fantastic at organising paper, it turned out). As we were climbing into the bunks, just before the lights went out, she pressed most of the paper thin and hid it wedged between the bunk slats and frame. But one last piece she twitched in front of Róża’s nose, and when she’d got Róża’s attention, folded the scrap of paper while we watched.

  It was only about as wide as her palm. Her hands moved so quickly you couldn’t follow what she was doing. Oh, Irina’s hands were pretty! And suddenly she’d transformed a yellowed corner of a stolen Nazi newspaper into a little paper airplane with short, broad wings. She held it out to Róża.

  ‘Fly this,’ Irina said. She mimed the action of throwing a dart.

  Róża lifted the paper plane towards the ceiling and pitched it across the bunks. She didn’t even throw it very hard, but it glided away into the gloom, and after a moment someone threw it back with a sharp cautionary warning in Polish. It flew better than any paper airplane I had ever seen.

  ‘I like to fly them over the walls,’ Irina said. ‘When no one is looking.’

  You know how I stood in roll calls making up poems to keep from going crazy with fear and boredom? Irina made up aircraft.

  That was a good day, nylon socks and painted toes and Irina’s first paper airplane. Some of the ones she made later Karolina decorated – she’d put Nick as the pilot, though of course she didn’t know what he looked like. He was our hero – I whispered stories about Nick to Karolina and Róża after lights-out, where he’d come to rescue us, sneaking into the power plant with wire-cutters and disabling the electric fences, carrying a knapsack full of chocolate bars. Karolina made him look like Clark Gable. Or she’d draw caricatures of us on Irina’s planes, with Irina and me in the cockpit, and Karolina and Róża and Lisette as our passengers. They were very funny and she could do them so fast – sometimes, when we were standing in a roll call, she’d make doodles of the turkey buzzard guards with her toes in the cinders at our feet. Just a couple of broad swipes and you’d see it and you’d have to pretend to sneeze so you didn’t burst out laughing. And then she’d kick it into dust before she got caught.

  Oh God, dry words on a page. How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about was death and imaginary strawberries?

  ‘Rose, let’s make a book,’ Róża whispered to me as we lay sleepless and shivering and scratching in the restless dark. ‘I want to do something like your poems. Karolina makes moving pictures, Irina makes planes – I want to make something. So you could write the poems in English and I could translate them into Polish – a kind of memory book –’

  ‘We could get everybody to do her own memory!’

  ‘A page for each of us, for each of the Rabbits –’

  ‘Your whole transport. The whole Lublin Transport.’

  ‘Yes, the ones who have been murdered, too. We’ll have photos of them as civilians – you’ll have to track those down after you get out, OK?’

  ‘We’ll need paper.’

  ‘And recipes! We can get a recipe from everybody!’

  ‘Paper.’

  ‘Irina can organise some paper for us. It will be better than just a list of names – it will be about people.’

  Our Blockova Gitte came crashing through the evening soup squabble, like a speedboat ploughing up waves in the Arctic, tagging people. Karolina Salska was one of them.

  ‘You’re on tomorrow’s list.’ Half a dozen of us heard the icy whisper. There was no reason I should know what she meant, but I knew. I knew intuitively, along with everybody else who had experience of what it meant, and the hair stood up all down my spine.

  ‘No!’ Lisette gasped fiercely. ‘They’re not going to execute any more Rabbits.’

  ‘That’s why I’m telling you now,’ Gitte said. ‘There are seven from my block on the list. We’ll hide you all in the tent with the transfer prisoners.’

  Block 32 was tucked away in a southern spur of the camp, in a corner, which gave us a sort of ‘back to the wall’ advantage sometimes – we always knew when anyone was coming for us because they could only approach from one direction. And it was right next to the tent. I hadn’t ever thought about that being an advantage.

  When Gitte said about hiding in the tent, Lisette went white. And then her face closed down. ‘They’ll miss us at roll call. They pull you out of the morning roll call. They’ll pull someone else out instead.’

  ‘They’ll know we’re hiding people, but what else can we do? We’ve got to show them we’re not going to give you up without another fight. They don’t like it when we fight back. Too many people find out.’

  Karolina, also white, asked, ‘How will we get in the tent?’

  ‘The fence gate’s still open. I’ll let you out now.’

  The Block 32 numbers didn’t come out right in that night’s roll call – no surprise. They shouted and hustled the dogs around us and checked our numbers about a hundred times. We had to stand there with our arms at our sides, looking straight ahead.

  They made us stand there for a solid day.

  When they made you stand there for hours and hours like that as punishment, they called it Strafstehen, ‘punishment standing’. But this time it was different. It was the worst Strafstehen of the whole time I was there, the longest and the hungriest; but it didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like a battle.

  All night, all the next day, and past lights-out the next night – with nothing to eat and nothing to drink. It wasn’t the coldest day we ever had to stand out there for hours and hours, but it was November now and it was darned cold. It snowed for most of the afternoon, squally, blowing flurries that didn’t stick. They let us march in place because the one thing they couldn’t stop us doing was shuffling our feet to keep warm. I held my breath and let it out slowly, watching how it made a little cloud in front of my face, amazed there was enough warmth somewhere deep inside my body that the air in me could condense into cloud on its way out.

  People started to collapse. Róża collapsed. Irina and I pulled her to her feet. Róża tried to fall over again on purpose, throwing her full weight into it, but she weighed nothing. We linked our arms through hers to keep her up. Lisette gave a sob and Irina risked hissing a command in Russian at Róża to get her to behave – none of us wanted an SS guard to notice us.

  But it was different. We had a purpose – we had a mission. We were standing there because we were fighting. Maybe if we’d given up the seven hiding in the tent they’d have let us go earlier. But none of us gave up anybody.

  At midday, in the snow flurries, we heard the gunshots over the walls – they always took people outside the camp to shoot them. Three. There were supposed to be ten. Our seven didn’t get shot.

  They let us go, I think, because they’d grown sick of guarding us. We staggered in a wild rush for the faucets in the washroom and handed out water to each other in bowls and buckets and tin cups, all of us crazed with thirst. Lisette stripped off her messed-up pants and ran water through them and put them back on wet. We piled into the bunks, hundreds of us climbing
over one another in the dark, and collapsed in gasping, clinging bundles of misery. The snow turned into rain again, pattering on the wooden roof. It sounded just like the rain on the sleeping porch.

  ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,’ Róża chanted in my ear, under her breath. ‘We won, we won, we won. Don’t cry.’

  ‘We won?’ I echoed, stupefied.

  ‘We won. Not like last time, when they shut us all in the block for three days in August with the windows closed and we nearly suffocated and then they threw us into the Bunker and operated on us there instead of in the Revier. Oh – Lisette – which was worse, standing in the snow till you turned into a block of ice, or being slowly roasted alive? Remember that day we had one cup of water between the five of us till it got dark and you made us share it out by dipping our fingers in it?’

  ‘Holy Mary, you stupid Rabbit, shut up and go to sleep,’ Irina yawned. ‘They will get us up again in three hours.’

  ‘We won,’ Róża rasped in my ear, and it was the last thing I heard, and then I was unconscious.

  ‘No coffee this morning.’

  Róża collapsed in mirth. ‘No coffee! That’s one hell of a punishment. Wow, what did we get yesterday? I don’t remember any coffee. What did we get the day before, was that coffee?’

  Our daily dose of ‘coffee’ at 6 a.m. was brown and lukewarm and tasted of nothing. It was the idea of coffee though, brown and lukewarm. We’d stood in the snow for over twenty-four hours, we’d slept for three hours, we’d stood in the drizzling, freezing dark for another two hours, and then we had no coffee. And then they sent us all back to work, even though that morning’s roll call hadn’t come out right either.

  The real miracle is that we didn’t all kill one another that morning and save them the trouble of their executions.

  The whole week that Karolina and the six other condemned Rabbits were hiding, Irina and I had to go back each day to our weird work crew of tall girls, doing jobs that shorter people couldn’t do as easily as we could – dismantling shelves, boarding up broken windows, carrying stacks of boxes – clearing top bunks of people who’d died in the night, especially in the Revier, where people were too sick to do it themselves.