Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  to take a breath, gather the strength to lift

  and then to drag ourselves and the drum of soup

  the endless quarter-mile over the cinders.

  One second too long on the steps.

  Behind us blows and screams (we are too slow),

  and in the square a hundred hungry scarecrows

  race towards us ready to lighten our load.

  Trapped between buzzards and gaping beaks

  we fight like the mutts we are – I won’t let go –

  I’ll fight with teeth and feet, I’ll bite the girl

  who tries to scoop a bowlful under my clinging fist –

  but when we kick it’s our mistake.

  The careful balance goes. The whole thing tips.

  (Thank you for the hands that caught the heavy drum

  and those who saved what spilled in bowls of soup

  and cups of dirt and their cupped palms,

  and those who sponged it up with bread

  and those who licked the thirsty earth –

  Thank you for the chagrin that let us go

  with no one begging more, thank you

  that now our load was lighter for the long walk back.)

  April 28, 1945

  Paris

  Guess what – I am dressed.

  I have been sitting here writing or pacing around this room stark naked for over a week, and now Fernande has taken me quietly in hand. It started with the extra quilt and now she has moved on to clothing. She brought me a pile of panties and camisoles and a couple of skirts and blouses. She’s built a lot like me, tall and bony. Not as bony as I am now, of course, but she’s built like I ought to be. I don’t think the clothes are hers though – I think they are her daughter’s. She wouldn’t say they were, but she did tell me her daughter had been put in prison and she doesn’t know what happened to her. I am probably wearing another dead woman’s clothes. But it is easier to wear these than the clothes Elodie organised for us, because these have been lovingly looked after in the hope that their owner might come back for them some day.

  And maybe Fernande’s daughter will come back. But I doubt it.

  This is what’s so heartbreaking: the fact that I am here, alive, has no doubt given Fernande some grain of hope for her daughter. But the fact that I was there makes me sure there isn’t any.

  My hair is not too bad now – softer, the curl coming back. It’s very short. I have been taking ridiculous long baths and stuffing myself with French cream – I eat it in spoonfuls, like soup, separately from the coffee. It is wonderful just on its own, mixed up with a little sugar (I mix margarine and sugar and eat that too). Fat mixed with sugar is the richest thing I have eaten since forever and I just crave it. My hair likes it too.

  And I have been able to sleep a little longer each night. I don’t jerk awake at 4 a.m. expecting the Screamer any more. But I still have the dream about the cold wind in the empty bunks. Funny how my Ravensbrück nightmare is about the bunks being empty, because by the end they were never empty. The whole camp was so overcrowded we had to sleep in shifts, even during the day.

  I have got to keep writing. I can’t talk about it at all; not to Mother or Aunt Edie over the telephone; not to Fernande in broken French. It would break her heart, I think, if I told her about it. I keep wishing I could talk to Nick, but how could I explain any of it to him? How could I possibly make Nick understand?

  I wrote him a poem for a Christmas present, though of course I knew I couldn’t give it to him then. I still feel the way I do in the poem. Apart from the clean clothes, I am still a walking ghost. I don’t know how I can possibly explain to him what’s happened to me. There won’t be anything to say.

  Love Song & Self Portrait

  (by Rose Justice)

  At first I dreamed that you

  offered warm arms of comfort and strength,

  pulling me close,

  your soft lips brushing and kissing my bare head,

  all of you loving me,

  the nightmare over and the dream come true –

  Now I only dream that you

  offer me bread.

  My dreams still produce you

  out of habit, but the sweet

  longing for your touch is gone.

  I long for nothing from you any more

  but something to eat.

  And if I did come back,

  what in return could I offer to you,

  who used to make so free

  with my softness and kisses and verse

  as if it were your due?

  Imagine me

  on your doorstep – would you laugh in the old way

  and greet me lovingly:

  Hello, it’s been a long time,

  how are you today?

  I would offer you myself

  in mismatched shoes and blood-soaked rags,

  shaved scalp all scabs

  and face gone grey,

  no old woman but a walking ghost

  on a skeleton’s frame –

  And you would be forced to look away.

  There won’t be anything to say.

  *

  If it was a clear night during a roll call, we’d get a whispered astronomy lesson from one of the imprisoned university professors. The astronomy lessons drove me crazy because they were in Polish.

  ‘What did she say?’ I whispered, getting frustrated, because I really loved learning the names of the stars – except for languages, astronomy was the one class we could do practically, and I couldn’t understand the Polish astronomy teacher.

  Karolina whispered, ‘She said it is December, and we won’t see Arcturus in the evening until spring. When we see Arcturus again the war will be over!’

  I gasped. ‘It’s December! My gosh – I’m nineteen! I forgot my birthday!’

  ‘Forgot your birthday!’ Róża snickered with scorn. ‘You’ve missed your name day too. Yours is the same as mine, Rose, September 4th, and I never forget. We have a party every year, and my sixteenth, last year, was so special. Zosia and Genca were on firewood-gathering duty in the pine forest, and they made me a flower wreath. And Gitte brought me a cake. A cake, honestly, a centimetre thick and as big around as the palm of my hand, with jam and margarine. They stole it from the infirmary – I’d just been operated on for the fifth time and I was too sick to eat the cake, but I wore the wreath.’ Róża knew perfectly well how utterly pathetic this sounded, and poked me slyly. ‘Tell us about your sixteenth. Did you have a cake with roses made out of pink frosting?’

  ‘I did!’ I exclaimed in astonishment. ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Your name is Rose.’

  Irina shook with silent laughter.

  ‘Was there champagne?’ Lisette asked.

  ‘No, Mother wouldn’t let us. We had Shirley Temple cocktails – ginger ale and grenadine. And Daddy hired a dance band. The party was in the hangar at Justice Field, and we spent the whole day before it moving planes out on to the field to get the hangar ready, and then we decorated it with dozens of coloured paper lanterns shaped like owls –’

  Crushing, black embarrassment kicked me in the head at this point and I clammed up.

  ‘It’s not a crime you weren’t in prison on your sixteenth birthday, darling,’ Lisette said gently.

  Róża let out one of her insane giggles. ‘Have you ever committed a crime, Rosie?’

  ‘Shut up, 7705!’ Karolina hissed. ‘I don’t want to hear about her criminal activities. I want to hear about her pink cake and Shirley Temple cocktails.’

  I know why I forgot my birthday. It was sometime while I was in the Bunker. I had entirely forgotten who I was by the end of that two weeks. I lost count long before nineteen.

  The camp authorities shot our Blockova Gitte next. We didn’t see that coming, but we should have, shouldn’t we? Since they didn’t shoot the Rabbits? We should have known we weren’t going to get away with our desperate war of passive defiance. But we thought they’d take it out
on us, not on Gitte. Although, of course, murdering Gitte and replacing her with the demon Blockova Nadine Lutz was taking it out on us.

  After Nadine arrived, there was no talking while we ate, no talking while the knitters worked, no talking in the bunks – we were allowed to talk outside on Sunday afternoons only. Most of our communication happened while we were going to the toilet, because Nadine wouldn’t come near the waste ditches when everyone else was going. But she’d dole out soup herself for the sheer pleasure of smacking you on the head with the empty ladle afterwards. She brought reinforcement guards with their dogs inside the barrack, even at night. It didn’t stop us trying to whisper, but it made every word we said to each other weighted with terror. One night she set a couple of dogs loose in the bunks. Gosh, we hated those dogs. The most common injury people turned up with in the sickbay, according to Anna, was dog bites.

  I can’t describe how desperate we were to fly below the Demon Nadine’s radar – to fool her, to go behind her back. We did crazy things. We’d be standing in a never-ending roll call and I’d inch one foot out of the mismatched shoe that was a little too big, so slowly you couldn’t see me moving, and then I’d nudge Róża in the ribcage and she’d turn her head and glance down at my toes and stifle a giggle. You could still see the nail polish, disappearing into a thin ruby crescent as my toenails grew out, like the waning moon. Róża would poke Karolina in her ribs and hiss, ‘Candy store’s open.’ And Karolina would poke Irina, and we’d all stand there poking each other and snorting with stifled mirth until Lisette exclaimed, ‘Shhh!’ as Nadine looked in our direction, and I’d ram my foot back into the muddy shoe and stare vacantly at the back of the woman in front of me.

  Playing Statues

  (by Rose Justice)

  If I sigh my shoulders rise and fall.

  It counts as movement. I won’t sigh. I’ll blink.

  I’ll count how many blinks it takes before

  the shadow of the smokestack hits the wall.

  But if I blink I’ll fall asleep. I’ve closed my eyes before

  standing in line; it’s dangerous to blink.

  I’ll watch the sky.

  I’ll count how many crows

  touch the long cloud behind the trees.

  Oh God, but then I’ll cry.

  Wings in the pine boughs always make me think

  of freedom. I won’t count or blink or sigh.

  I’ll think of food. I’ll think of bread and meat,

  pretend that when we’re told to go

  there will be pepper pot

  thick with tripe chunks, spicy and faintly sweet,

  like Mrs Kessler sells on Union Street.

  God no, and no, and no! Of all things, not

  Union Street: Don’t think of Union Street!

  Don’t think of home.

  Anything else but that. I’ll throw

  myself on the electric wire. I’ll wiggle my toes.

  I’ll sprint to the end of the row

  and sock that pretty dog handler in the nose.

  That makes me smile and clench my fist.

  I’m out. She sees me move. Now I

  can blink and sigh and sob.

  She’ll make me count the blows.

  *

  My work team of Tall Girls got sent back to the maintenance shed we’d cleared out earlier.

  Since we’d been there some prisoners from the men’s camp had boarded up the windows and the big garage doors of the shed, and replaced them with just a normal-sized set of wooden doors. Now we had to paint the interior walls black as high as we could reach. Once the guards made us understand what they wanted, they locked us in – Anna was allowed to make herself a little camp outside the new door of the building, with a crate for a chair and a coffee can or something for a stove with a fire in it like a hobo. Where she got the coal and how she got away with burning it right out there in the open, I will never know. But she was a red armband. She could get away with a lot.

  And because we had Anna for a guard, we could get away with little acts of rebellion while she wasn’t looking. Inside the shed, Irina scavenged in the corners – nails, scraps of thin copper wire like they used in Siemens, wood splinters. French Political Prisoner 51444, otherwise known as Micheline, got busy painting Allied defiance all over the walls in letters three feet tall: VIVE LA FRANCE! VIVENT LES ALLIÉS! MORT AUX NAZIS! and a token GOD BLESS AMERICA! Her friend 51350 followed behind frantically covering everything up so they wouldn’t get caught.

  ‘You’ll get us into so much trouble!’

  ‘You should have seen what I got up to when I worked in the post office,’ Micheline said. ‘We’d put big black censor stamps all over instructions being sent to German officers, or we’d steam open envelopes and swap letters around so they went to the wrong people, or steam off stamps so there was postage due – and anything that came from Paris with a German name on it we’d return to sender. Every now and then we’d send off a mailbag with a burning cigarette butt tied up inside it. My God, I miss the thrill of being a civil servant!’

  We all laughed. Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.

  We sure did drag out that paint job as long as we could. It was wonderful to be able to talk to each other for a little while without having to whisper or worry that someone would hit us.

  I also painted words on the walls. It was such a relief to be able to write down what I was thinking instead of having to memorise it. It is true that I had to obliterate everything I’d written, but I think it is much easier to write a poem when you can write it down. I couldn’t have written ‘The Subtle Briar’ without that paint job. I spent three days slapping black paint on the walls of a disused warehouse and refining the most complex and ambitious poem I’ve ever written.

  When we’d caked the entire interior of the building in black about three quarters of the way to the ceiling, they turned out all the lights and shut us in so we could paint over the places where cracks of light came in through the boarded windows and around the newly built front wall.

  Try standing on a ladder in pitch-darkness with a bucket of black paint and not get any on yourself or the girl who’s on the ladder beneath you. When they let us out as it was getting dark, in time to eat, all of us were covered head to foot in black paint. I had paint in my ears. We stood blinking blindly in the harsh street lights, but of course we didn’t get any time to readjust to reality – just got shoved back into our fives and marched back to camp.

  ‘What the hell are they making you do?’ Róża demanded.

  Our shed-clearing-and-painting job was a fierce discussion topic whenever we were allowed, or able, to talk. Lined up along the ditches in the dark at 4 a.m. usually.

  ‘They’re repurposing a maintenance shed.’

  ‘By boarding up and blacking out the windows? Why does it have to be so dark? What are they going to put inside it?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a new quarantine block – someplace to process new prisoners,’ Lisette said.

  ‘You know what it’s for,’ Karolina accused quietly. ‘You know it. You won’t say it, but you know it. They have all these prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and nothing to feed them. They are building a gas chamber.’

  ‘They are building two,’ said Irina. ‘A new building is going up outside the north wall. The men’s camp is building it.’

  Hope is treacherous. Lisette insisted, ‘That is a laundry, my dear. Ravensbrück is a work camp, not a death camp – an ordinary camp!’

  ‘They don’t dare shoot us in handfuls,’ said Karolina. ‘They’re going to kill us all at once.’

  The Subtle Briar

  (by Rose Justice)

  When you cut down the hybrid rose,

  its blackened stump below the graft

  spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.

  It claws at life, weaving a raft

>   of suckering roots to pierce the earth.

  The first thin shoot is fierce and green,

  a pliant whip of furious briar

  splitting the soil, gulping the light.

  You hack it down. It skulks between

  the flagstones of the garden path

  to nurse a hungry spur in shade

  against the porch. With iron spade

  you dig and drag it from the gravel

  and toss it living on the fire.

  It claws up towards the light again

  hidden from view, avoiding battle

  beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,

  unloved, unfed, it clings and grows

  in the wild hedge. The subtle briar

  armours itself with desperate thorns

  and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher,

  unquenchable, it now adorns

  itself with blossom, till the stalk

  is crowned with beauty, papery white

  fine petals thin as chips of chalk

  or shaven bone, drinking the light.

  When you cut down the hybrid rose

  to cull and plough its tender bed,

  trust there is life beneath your blade:

  the suckering briar below the graft,

  the wildflower stock of strength and thorn

  whose subtle roots are never dead.

  *

  It took me a long time to write ‘The Subtle Briar’, but it was translated into three languages in a day. Every time it got passed on I got another bread ration. Oh God, we needed something to cling to. We were scared.

  They shot half a dozen Red Army women from our block, and six more from the Lublin Transport, though not Rabbits. No one knew anything about it ahead of time. It was a week before Christmas, and I’m sure of the timing, because Karolina wasn’t there with us for roll call that day. Nadine had caught Karolina showing off a little paper tree with tiny pop-out birds that she’d made for Lisette for a Christmas present, and had sent her to the Bunker for Fünfundzwanzig. We were standing in the early morning roll call – before breakfast, hearts aching for Karolina – when they just pulled the girls right out of line and made them take their coats off and hand them over to someone. That’s how we knew they wouldn’t be coming back.