Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Anna, the Kolonka with the green badge and green eyes, was contemptuously familiar with the Revier because she’d worked in it before. She took over the back washroom to use as a temporary morgue because the real one was always too full. She’d stand guard at the door by the sinks to make sure we had the place to ourselves, and get a conversation going with me in English so she could pretend not to see if some of us sneaked a dead woman’s wooden comb or a pair of socks down our blouses. I never took anybody’s clothes. I couldn’t bear the thought of wearing some dead girl’s socks fresh off her dead feet. I had other things to think about anyway: Elodie had managed to smuggle me five tiny cigarettes via Micheline, something that looked like tobacco rolled in thin airmail paper, and I was waiting for my moment to try to bargain with Anna for the calcium.

  The only thing Anna ever wanted to talk about with me was American food. Popcorn and root beer and hot dogs with mustard and relish and sauerkraut (she’d been to a ball game once). Gosh knows what I will eat when I get home – anything I talked about in the shower room with Anna will taste like sawdust and fill me with nausea.

  ‘Do you have pork barbecue in Pennsylvania?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘When I was in Chicago there was a diner we used to go to after the lab shut, and they had these fluffy white bread rolls that they baked themselves, and they’d pile the meat in with an ice-cream scoop –’

  She broke off with a sob and suddenly we were both crying over pork barbecue. Abruptly we turned our backs on each other at exactly the same moment. I stopped crying first. I spun around and said, ‘Calcium. I’ll write you out a pork barbecue recipe if you can get me calcium tablets.’

  ‘Calcium!’

  ‘Isn’t that good for bones? My friend had her bones broken here.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The German Kolonka went tight-lipped. She thought about it for a moment.

  ‘Not tablets. She’ll need injections – calcium gluconate. You’re friends with the Rabbits, huh?’

  Anna had a guilty secret – before she’d been sent to Ravensbrück as a prisoner, she’d worked at Ravensbrück as an employee.

  After a lot of wheeling and dealing, I got the dirty story and the calcium out of her in exchange for the cigarettes, the promise of two more bread rations and Mother’s Fasnacht recipe. I tempted her into that one by mentioning how Mother and I had spent two days making deep-fried doughnuts for the church sale for Fasnacht Day, the last day before Lent. Anna let me sit on one of the filthy sinks in the converted washroom-turned-mortuary for a couple of minutes before I started to take the clothes off that day’s corpses so the rest of my crew could cart them off to the incinerator. For a few seconds she watched me writing my recipe against the tiled wall with a stolen pencil stub, and then she just suddenly began talking.

  ‘You might as well know because if your Rabbits ever find out who I am, they’ll never trust you again,’ she said, leaning against the other sink and smoking furiously. ‘I’m a pharmacist. I got a job here in 1941, requisitioning drugs and bandages – antiseptic, aspirin, glucose, things for the sickbay. Just stocktaking really, because I’m not a nurse. I was here in 1942 when they did the first operations on the Polish girls. I saw what they did. I wasn’t involved at first, I just tiptoed around behind the scenes making sure there was fresh plaster for the casts, and that the knives were sharp. It was my job.’

  My hand faltered in the middle of a sentence that began, ‘The day before you’re going to cook, wash and peel a bushel of potatoes, then –’

  I couldn’t write the word ‘cut’. I think I left it out. Actually, the writing had now become an excuse so I didn’t have to look at her.

  ‘So I did my job,’ she went on. ‘At first I didn’t have to go near the – um, the patients – I got my backside pinched by the doctors now and then, because I was a pretty German patriot and not a Polish Special Transport Ravensbrück scarecrow condemned to death and good for nothing but scientific experimentation, but I didn’t enjoy knowing what was going on, you know? I didn’t feel proud to be advancing medical research and I didn’t believe we were anyway. They were sloppy about monitoring the experiments and sometimes they never followed up on them. And I didn’t like my work enough to want to do it well myself.’ She let out a gasp of smoke. ‘You wouldn’t believe the shitty jobs I’ve had to do in the last three years. This –’ She waved her cigarette at the bony corpses stacked against the wall in the unused shower stalls. ‘This is harmless. Stripping dead bodies – not much fun, but harmless. Sharpening knives that you know are going to be used to carve up some kid’s tibia and fibula so they can swap pieces of them around – that’s hard to justify.’

  She asked suddenly, ‘Are you listening?’

  The scrap of paper slid out from beneath my pencil stub and fluttered into the sink. ‘Of course I’m listening.’

  ‘They’d give the girls ether before they operated on them, and inject them with Evipan to knock them out. One day the usual nurse assistant wasn’t there for some reason and they got me to step in for her. Those poor kids knew by then what was going to happen to them, but they really were like rabbits – just so glad to get a bath and clean sheets to sleep in, so it must be OK, right? Afterwards, after they woke up and the anaesthetic wore off and the fever and infection set in and they couldn’t even see what had happened because they were up to their hips in plaster, they’d lie there screaming or sobbing or begging for lemonade – lemonade!’ She gave a hoarse bark of laughter. ‘I stole morphine for them. I’d go around injecting them when no one was looking. They called me the Angel of Sleep. I didn’t try to talk to them – they all hated me like poison because they knew I’d helped put some of them under for the operations. But they took the morphine when I could get it.’

  Anna took another drag on her cigarette. It was nearly done. We could only risk another minute or two – maybe less, if someone brought another body in.

  ‘So, well, then I got transferred to an office job for the Occupation army in France for a while, because they needed a pharmacist and a driver and a translator and they got all three for the price of one by hiring me. I thought that job would be better, but it turned out worse, so then I got transferred back to Berlin, and my new boss got mad at me because I wouldn’t fuck him. So he gave me a choice – take my pants off for him or go back to Ravensbrück, as a prisoner this time. He thought he had a sure winner with that one, seeing as I’d been to Ravensbrück and knew what I was getting into, but actually I was fed up with playing their game by then. I’d seen a lot of . . . things I didn’t like. And I didn’t want to spread my legs for him at all, ever, and I knew that I’d be a Kolonka or a Blockova here – and also, when I’d been here before, it was run like a soldiers’ camp, much cleaner and more orderly – we used to show it off to the Red Cross, none of these schmootzichs grabbing at your bread, no shithole tent full of evacuees from other camps, only two to a bunk and enough blankets and toilets that worked. So, yeah, that was my choice.’

  There wasn’t a thing left of her cigarette but a damp shred of stolen onion-skin typing paper, which she spat into the sink.

  ‘The bastard raped me anyway before he arrested me. The fucking bastard. He had to get help from a bunch of his pals, because I fought back. I got convicted of assaulting my boss.’ She pointed to her green triangle. ‘German criminal, right? So I’m back in the Revier at Ravensbrück, where I started. OK, I’ll get you some calcium injections. But don’t you ever tell anybody who you get them from. Much better they don’t know I’m a fellow prisoner now.’

  I nodded. I held up the crumpled scrap of paper with the half-finished Fasnacht recipe.

  ‘I’m not done.’

  ‘Do it next time.’

  We hid the recipe in the quarter-inch gap between the wall and the sink.

  Karolina and the other condemned Rabbits were still hiding, and Gitte bargained for them with the camp authorities. ‘Take these seven off the list and the whole Lublin Special Transport will cooperate with
you – they’ll line up for you in perfect order – they’ll testify that they’ve been treated well – they’ll sign their names as testimony.’

  The Lublin Special Transport refused to do that in the past, and no one really believed they were going to do it now.

  In desperation Gitte threatened, ‘The whole camp knows. The whole camp knows what happened to the Rabbits. Their names got out before and they’ll get out again. If you kill any more of them, someone is going to tell the world.’

  It doesn’t sound like much of a threat, does it? Someone is going to tell the world. But when the war is over, that stinking commander and those soulless doctors will all have to get real jobs again, and who will want Drs Fischer and Gebhardt cutting up their legs after what they did to Róża’s? They knew what the reaction would be when people found out, when the Allied soldiers found the camps. When people started to ask them to explain, to account for what they’d done. They knew. And they were scared.

  ‘You need to learn our names,’ Róża whispered as we all struggled to get comfortable in our crowded bunk.

  ‘I know your names.’

  ‘All our names. You need to learn the list of Rabbits’ names. Then if you get out, you can tell everyone about us. You might be released back to your Air Force or the Red Cross might come for you. But that won’t happen to any of us because we’re all condemned. Special Transport. So if you survive the war, you have to tell everyone our names, our full names. All seventy-four of us, the living and dead.’

  ‘There were more than that, darling,’ Lisette reminded her. ‘Also the German Bible Student and the Ukrainian girl. And the others whose legs they amputated.’

  ‘Never mind the amputees,’ Róża said heartlessly. ‘They’re all dead and no one remembers their names anyway. There are no witnesses and there’s no evidence.’

  ‘God!’ I exclaimed. ‘They amputated people’s legs?’

  ‘Those girls were mentally ill to start with – no one will ever know who they were. Anyway, you’ve seen us. You know what happened. You know it was real.’

  ‘Oh, Róża, how can I remember all your names?’ I wailed. ‘I can’t even spell your name!’

  ‘In a poem,’ said Lisette. ‘Make a poem for a mnemonic. Make yourself another counting-out rhyme.’

  I know the list by heart now too, their real names. But I started just the way Lisette suggested, by making myself a counting-out rhyme out of all their given names. Some of them had the same first name, so I only used each name once in the rhyme to keep it simple. I whispered it to myself in roll call and recited it in my head as I shivered between Róża and Irina in the bunks, my head and stomach aching with hunger, my frozen feet too numb to feel my painted toes.

  Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,

  Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,

  Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,

  Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,

  Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,

  Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,

  Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,

  Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia.

  *

  The seven Rabbits’ names came off the list of people they were going to execute. We were pretty sure it was just a postponement so they could catch us off guard later.

  Karolina staggered back to us after nearly a week in the tent, more ravenous than we were and full of news. She’d been talking to the Jewish women in the tent who’d been transferred from Auschwitz.

  ‘They were killing tens of – tens of thousands of people there every day this summer,’ Karolina stuttered. ‘TENS OF THOUSANDS. Gassing them and burning the bodies, or just – just burying them in piles when the incinerators got behind – if Fischer hadn’t infected me with gangrene on purpose, for no reason at all, I wouldn’t believe the numbers either. TENS OF THOUSANDS EVERY – EVERY DAY –’

  What a meaningless number. It would have wiped out Ravensbrück in a couple of days, and Ravensbrück was enormous. No wonder Karolina was stuttering.

  ‘Ten thousand a day in your dreams,’ Róża challenged bitterly. ‘Who was doing the counting? How big is Auschwitz?’

  ‘Bigger than Ravensbrück.’ Karolina took a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. ‘Listen, 7705, your number has not come up on the death list yet and you haven’t spent a week in that hellhole under the tent. Oh, I want a bath, I want to wash my hair! They pile the corpses at one end if no one comes to take them out. They dig gravel and mud out of the ground with their hands to try to cover them up. They have no toilets and they can’t go outside. They catch rainwater and snow in the tent flaps or they’d all be dead of thirst. And that is only the ones who are still capable of doing more than rocking back and forth and wailing and trying to eat their own hands –’

  Lisette put a gentle arm round Karolina’s waist.

  ‘I saw a woman doing that,’ Karolina said, shuddering. She shook Lisette off and lowered her voice. ‘Listen, just before they started evacuating Auschwitz so the Soviets won’t be able to liberate it, there was a prisoner rebellion there. In October. The prisoners destroyed one of the crematoriums – they tried to blow up the gas chambers. They killed guards with hammers.’

  ‘Where did they get explosive?’ Irina asked quietly.

  ‘The women in the munitions factories smuggled gunpowder out to them. It took them months. Hundreds of them escaped – they escaped –’ Karolina made a funny noise, a cross between a sob and a laugh. ‘Of course everybody got caught and they were all shot, two hundred of them in a day. Except the ones who’d planned it, and the women. They were all slammed into the Auschwitz Bunker. You can imagine what’s going on there now.’ She gave that gulping laugh again. ‘They say the men gave out the women’s names. But – but the women aren’t giving them anything.’

  Lisette was listening with twenty kinds of horror – horror at what had happened, at what was still happening back in Poland, at what was happening under the tent, and mainly at what had happened to Karolina and at the half-crazed way she was telling her stuttering story. But Irina and Róża were listening with ambition and admiration. I could tell. They’d stopped thinking about food for a minute and were thinking about rebellion.

  A couple of mornings later the camp authorities distributed coats, and that made everyone’s hopes soar too, because we were sure they wouldn’t waste winter coats on people they were about to execute. The coats got dumped in big piles outside the chain-link fence around our block, arranged by nationality, with numbers and prisoner patches already sewn on. You were out of luck if your coat didn’t fit. Lisette, who was used to dropping her status as honourary Pole whenever they made us line up in national groups, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the French pile of coats along with the spies and Resistance couriers in their beetroot rouge.

  Not surprisingly, these garments had all seen better days; their linings had all been ripped out, and every coat had had one sleeve ripped off and another sleeve of a wildly contrasting colour sewn back in its place, to make them obviously prison coats. We tossed them back and forth, trying to find our own numbers, and suddenly Lisette burst out laughing. She shoved a lightweight pale green wool at me – it had a velvet collar so moth-eaten that no one had bothered to salvage it.

  ‘Come on!’ Lisette pulled at my arm again. ‘Back in line!’

  I started to pull on the coat she’d given me and suddenly recognised the navy contrasting sleeve.

  It was from my ATA tunic. My ‘USA’ flash was still in place on the shoulder. That was what had made Lisette laugh.

  Wonderful Elodie!

  Later, when I had a chance to check out the coat more closely, I discovered that Elodie had tucked my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy into a pocket hidden on the inside. With the blue thread from the collar of my dress she’d embroidered another rose on the hanky in the corner opposite Aunt Rainy’s, and on either side of it she’d put our initials, with a little French flag under the ‘
EF’ and a little American flag under the ‘RJ’.

  And she’d also hidden cigarettes in the hem of the coat, and a couple of threaded needles, and three sugar cubes wrapped in paper (worth more than their weight in gold in terms of bribing the insatiable Anna). Hope, hope, soaring like a kite! We were clinging to anything we could. A coat without a lining, full of hidden pencil stubs! What treasure! It was already so cold in November.

  We had a regular supply of calcium for Róża by then too. She screamed and carried on the first time we tried to inject her, until Irina threatened to tie her down and gag her like the SS did when they operated on her in the Bunker. Who do you think Róża finally let give her the jabs? NO ONE. She did it herself. She’d rather do it herself than let anyone else poke a needle into her.

  Thorny little Różyczka.

  Thanksgiving

  (by Rose Justice)

  From the steaming kitchen it’s a quarter-mile

  across the crowded wasteland to the patchwork barrack,

  and we two get to haul the drum of soup

  heavier than we are. The challenge is

  not to let go. It’s a race against time (it will be cold,

  already it’s cooled down), a race against

  the several thousand grasping hands and gulping mouths

  we have to pass before we eat.

  (Thank you for the gold November sky,

  the warm steel kissing my cold hands, no mud today.)

  But first we have to get it down the steps.

  We stop to rest outside the kitchen door –

  the barrel still is gently hot between us,

  steaming like a bath. One second’s pause