Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  That one girl’s face, looking back at us in defiance as they led her away, bleak and desperate, biting her lip. She went shivering to her death in the dark, in the flowered summer dress she’d been wearing when I got here. One of the other girls tried to take her hand, and the guards wouldn’t let her – they had to walk alone to their execution. We stood in silence for another half an hour while they counted us, but all I could think of was when I’d hear the shots and I’d know they were dead.

  No one would ever know what happened to them.

  The distant claps of sound made me jump half out of my skin when they finally came.

  Lisette gave a single, angry sob. But the executed Polish and Russian girls hadn’t cried as they’d walked away, so I bit my lip like the one in the flowered dress, bit my lip until it was bruised and bleeding, and I didn’t cry either.

  They booted Karolina back into Block 32 as soon as they’d finished with her. She was at work later that day, knitting socks until she was well enough to go back to her patrol.

  Being lashed in the Bunker turned her into a spluttering wreck. We had to let her lie on the edge of the bunk so she could have her back to the narrow aisle. She clung to me like a monkey, and I held her hands so she wouldn’t fall off. Her mouth was so close to my ear that she could speak to me in almost less than a whisper. ‘Do you think the scars will be as bad as yours? I don’t want scars like yours! It’s not fair, it’s not fair, they ruined my leg and now they’ve destroyed my back! I want to go to the Venice film festival awards wearing a Chanel evening gown, I want to wear a red bathing suit and sunbathe on the beach at the Lido –’

  Róża didn’t tease her. Actually, I don’t think Róża could hear her. But even if she could, you didn’t make fun of someone who got Fünfundzwanzig.

  ‘You had twice five and twenty,’ Karolina whispered to me in wonder. ‘Twice in a week. I only had one round and I can’t stand up and I can’t sit down and I have to go back into the anti-aircraft ditches tomorrow. How did you bear it when they beat you the second time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I really don’t. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t want people to see the scars!’

  ‘Who cares about the scars! I’ll wear a red bathing suit anyway. I don’t care who sees my scars! Not me – I can’t see them! I’ll wear a two-piece!’

  ‘Your Nick will like you in a red two-piece,’ Karolina whispered. ‘Tell me a Nick Story.’

  The Nick Stories were evolving from fabulous rescue fantasies into rhapsodies about food which often had nothing to do with Nick – I couldn’t stop myself. But it was dreamily distracting to make them up.

  This one was just for Karolina. I didn’t dare whisper loudly enough for the others to hear, but Karolina needed distracting. My lips barely moved against her ear.

  ‘OK. It’s just after supper and there was meat in the soup, chunks of sausage, so you’re feeling strong. You and me are carrying the empty barrel back to the kitchens. And there’s a full moon, everything is light, all silver, and the Appelplatz and the Lagerstrasse are empty, they haven’t started the evening roll call yet. And then you hear this clattering old-fashioned airplane engine. It’s a German plane, with ugly long wheel struts like a stork – actually it is a Stork, Nick’s stolen a German Stork so the anti-aircraft guns won’t shoot at him because it’s a German plane. And Nick lands right in the middle of the empty Appelplatz. You and I drop our empty soup pot and run, and Nick opens the door, and we jam ourselves into the back seat – you can sit on my lap. And he flies us back to –’

  Here I stalled, brutal reality kicking in. Where would we go?

  ‘The Lido,’ Karolina whispered back. ‘Let’s go to the beach on the beautiful Adriatic Sea. Red bathing suits for both of us in the back seat.’

  I wonder where Nick is now, what he’s doing. If he’s still alive. Oh, I hope so – I hope so.

  April 30, 1945

  Paris

  I had a phone call today from Aunt Edie, but the line was very bad and she was in a hurry – I didn’t ask about Nick. Edie is coming to get me this weekend. I am panicking about that now – having to see Aunt Edie and be polite. I can hardly bear to think of the shock on her face when she sees me. It’s one thing to fool Mother on a transatlantic phone call, but I won’t be able to fool Aunt Edie face to face.

  I don’t understand why I don’t want to go home. How can it be possible for me to feel more desolate than I did on Christmas Day?

  Christmas presents – poems and feathers and bracelets made of string or paper. Elodie sent me a minuscule tea set made out of tinfoil and I tore my rose hanky in half diagonally to make two little triangular ones, and gave Elodie the side with Aunt Rainy’s pretty embroidery. Karolina made me the most wonderful tiny flipbook that played a two-second cartoon she’d drawn, of me in my Spitfire ramming the flying bomb. The bomb exploded into stars in the last frame.

  There was a Christmas tree set up in the Lagerstrasse – with lights – cross my heart. They played German carols over the loudspeakers, ‘Oh, Christmas Tree’ and ‘Silent Night’. And gave us jam and margarine with our bread. The SS guards got blotto, staggering drunk. In Block 32 we were allowed to sing carols, mostly in French and Polish and Russian so I couldn’t join in – but I told a ton of fantastic stories. Nick performed a series of daring rescues and we all ended up skating on the Conewago Grove Lake, and then there was a rambling Hotel Hershey story involving sleds and a sumptuous Pennsylvania Dutch smörgåsbord buffet.

  I mostly gave everybody poems for Christmas, but I made another for Lisette, after our Christmas Day disaster. Actually, it was for thorny little Różyczka. But neither one of us ever told her about this one.

  It had been my idea to do the Christmas bread, and Karolina who did the artwork – we were so excited about surprising the others. We cut our entire ration into squares an inch wide, like Fliss did back in Hamble, and we decorated them with stars, a scraping of margarine and a tiny star-shaped blob of red jam on each square.

  Holiday Grace (for Lisette)

  (by Rose Justice)

  ‘Now we’ll give thanks,’ you said, ‘and bless this food.’

  Smiling, you passed around the Christmas feast –

  a loaf sliced small in diamond panes and spread

  with stars of glittering jam, bright tinsel treats

  to put us in a festive mood.

  We took the pretty stars and you, devout and pleased,

  wished us ‘Joyeux Noel!’ and gratefully blessed the food.

  Irony turned your frail adopted daughter

  into a sneering brute.

  ‘Bless what ?’ she snarled, wild with angry laughter.

  ‘Why, are these holy wafers? Call this food ?

  Tasteless stale bread, a smear of sour fruit!

  Call it Christ’s body and his blood!

  The Host can double as our Christmas treat –

  now we can take communion as we eat!’

  The tinsel turned to dust. All of us looked away

  in shock and shame, stunned not so much

  by her coarse, bitter blasphemy as that she’d say

  something so cruel to you on Christmas Day –

  you, who so love us all without condition.

  You told her quietly,

  ‘Sit by yourself. Give thanks alone. We’ll wait

  for you before we start.’ No indication

  of how she’d speared your childless, pious heart.

  We didn’t eat. She sulked for half an hour

  on the dark boards alone. After another

  of us began to cry she crept back to your side,

  and you were full of love and joy, because you always are.

  She whispered quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’

  – Though you are not her mother, only she

  who once, some time ago and in a different hell,

  covered her tearful face and sang to her

  while others dragged her mother’s b
ody from your overcrowded cell

  so that she would not see.

  Sandwiched in between Róża and Irina that night I thought about Christmas in Pennsylvania. Not about past Christmases – I was thinking about this Christmas. I thought about my mother, and Daddy and Karl and Kurt and Mawmaw and Grampa, and how they’d be sitting round the table for Christmas dinner – maybe they were doing it now, this very moment – sitting at the cherry table with Mother’s Limoges china from out of the corner cupboard, and the poinsettia tablecloth and the brass and china candelabra with the tall red candles on it, and Daddy starting to carve the turkey. Mawmaw would be trying to say funny things to make the boys laugh and Grampa would be starting on his third bourbon. Suddenly Mother would leap up from the table and run into the dark living room, lit only by the low fire and the red and blue and green lights on the Christmas tree, and she’d curl on the sofa and sob.

  She’d be doing it right now. I could see it so clearly, as though I were looking in the living-room window from the front porch.

  She’d know I was missing – she’d have known that for months. And she hoped and hoped I was still alive, but she didn’t really believe it.

  And the worst thing was that even though I was alive, I would never be able to tell her – and even if I could tell her, if I could have come through the feathers of frost on the windowpane and whispered in her ear, ‘Your Rosie is still alive,’ what hope could I have given her when I told her where I was? That I was starving and freezing and covered with lice and scabies and would probably be dead of typhoid or shot for stealing a turnip before the war ended?

  Well, anyway, I started to cry again.

  After a while Róża wiped my face with her sleeve.

  ‘You are thinking about Pennsylvania now, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am thinking about my mother.’

  ‘You idiot. I never think about my mother. I’d rather pinch the holes in my leg until they’re black and blue than think about my mother.’

  I could understand that – it was probably less painful for her never to think about her mother. But it didn’t help me.

  ‘My mother will never know what happened to me,’ I said. ‘At least your name is out there on the BBC. Your legs are in those photographs. I’m just French Political Prisoner 51498. They don’t even have my nationality right. No one will ever know. And I bet they’ll incinerate all their precious prisoner records anyway, when the Allies come. They won’t want anyone to find out what’s going on here, just like they don’t want anyone to find out what happened at Auschwitz last summer.’

  ‘Don’t think about your mother. Think about the food she’s eating,’ Róża advised cheerfully. ‘You have a special meal on Christmas Day, like the Germans, right? What do you have for Christmas dinner in Pennsylvania?’

  How she could be cheerful about food after what she did to Lisette I do not know. But we had the Christmas dinner discussion anyway. I won’t bother to write the rest of the conversation, because it was boring.

  But now I am longing again for Cope’s Dried Corn, boiled for two hours in milk and butter and sugar and salt. I am daydreaming about a tablespoon heaped with golden milky corn – just one spoonful.

  On New Year’s Day they made us line up for a special roll call, and the stinking commander gave a speech over the loudspeakers.

  It is one of the things I have nightmares about – that tinny voice droning on and on all around me, in words I can’t make head nor tail of, on and on and on. In my dreams I don’t understand the words, but at the same time I know exactly what the voice is saying.

  That’s because while we were standing there, in real life, Lisette was translating a mile a minute on one side of me and Karolina on the other, a sort of madwoman’s stereo speaker set up. So I had to listen to it all twice, Karolina a little behind Lisette.

  ‘He says, You’ll never get out alive –’

  ‘He’ll never let us out alive.’

  ‘They won’t let the Allies get near us –’

  ‘He’ll kill us all before the Allies get here.’

  ‘They’ll dismantle the camp –’

  ‘He’ll mine the camp, rig it with bombs, blow up the whole thing with us in it –’

  ‘– And one of the gas chambers is working now –’

  ‘And the first selections for gassing will be tomorrow.’

  This was the same stinking commander who liked to come and watch people get their backsides beaten raw every Friday. It could have been his idea of a joke: see if I can make all 50,000 of them cry on New Year’s Day. It was hard to know whether to take him seriously.

  Róża didn’t. I could see her shoulders shaking as she tried desperately not to laugh.

  ‘Oh God,’ she cackled, ‘he must have really hit the New Year with a bang last night!’

  He might have been kidding about the mines. He wasn’t kidding about the gas chambers though.

  They started with the old and the injured and the sick, and they’d just pick you out of roll call. They tricked people into volunteering for it by telling them they’d be taken to a ‘rest camp’. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on. The Lublin Special Transport reckoned they were doomed: most of them limping, all of them condemned to death more than three years ago.

  When it rained, when hail rattled on the roof, when the wind howled, when a train came clattering by, when the planes roared overhead or the air raid sirens wailed, when the anti-aircraft guns thumped and the demon Blockova Nadine Lutz couldn’t hear us, we all burst into a frenzy of whispered plots and panic.

  Irina hadn’t let Nadine stop her from scavenging. She carried the copper wire from the shed wrapped round her waist like a belt. It was thin and flexible and she’d get it out under the table or over the ditches, sometimes even working at it lying blindly in the dark bunks with her hands held up over her head. Then she’d twist what she’d built carefully round her waist again and get it out later. Eventually she had to hide it in the roof behind the ceiling panels.

  ‘Are you making a bomb?’ Róża whispered in an agony of delight and curiosity, as we all balanced ourselves outside in the dark over the stinking sewer. ‘Like they did at Auschwitz?’

  ‘Kite!’ Karolina guessed, more sensibly.

  ‘It’s a plane,’ I said.

  I’d been watching Irina shape the wings, the long and narrow wings of a glider. I could see where she was planning to reinforce the fuselage with her stolen strips of wood. It would be too heavy for a kite. But it might glide like a model plane, if she got a chance to cover it with her stolen paper. In the right wind it might soar for miles.

  Róża choked back one of her insane giggles. ‘That’s not going to be big enough for all the Rabbits.’

  ‘Big enough for all your names though. Another escape for the Rabbits’ names!’

  ‘You have to write in piss so it’s invisible,’ Róża said knowingly. ‘That’s how we got the letter to the Pope.’

  It was getting harder and harder for the guards to keep track of what we did – we couldn’t get out of the camp, but the whole place was so crowded and filthy that it was easier to hide sabotage and thievery, if you weren’t too sick to move.

  ‘It will need a hell of a wind,’ Irina said. ‘If we could be ready to launch – find a place to hide it –’

  ‘I can launch it!’ Karolina said. ‘I can launch it from the air raid ditches. I can hide it in the sandbags till we get the right wind. You can sneak it out to us in one of your Corpse Crew carts!’

  ‘Corpse Crew’ – more and more, that’s what they were using my team for. During the winter, as everyone started collapsing with cold and starvation and a million diseases, that’s all we did – they stopped giving us other jobs and we were just one of a dozen Corpse Crews. They gave up on us boarding up broken windows, and concentrated on clearing the bunks in the Revier and the other sickbay blocks (they kept adding extra ones, trying to keep the typhoid and tuberculosis cases separated from ever
yone else). There were always dead bodies piled outside the tent in the morning, and there were usually a few from our own block with so many new people coming in – the incinerator in the crematorium was always working, greasy black soot splattering the daylight sky and red cinders spattering the sky at night.

  I carried so many dead women this winter that I am – I don’t know how to put this. I want to say it’s like typhoid – I have been inoculated. I am immune. After the first couple of weeks, it stopped being appalling and became ordinary. It was better than if I’d been put to work in the crematorium. Wasn’t it?

  It was better. I didn’t do anything I’m ashamed of. Some of it was too fearsomely gruesome to write about, even to think about any more, and my mind skips lightly over it, the same way I can’t remember the week between my beatings. There was that time we had to pick up one of the schmootzichs and it turned out she wasn’t dead – this pathetic bundle of bones and rags lying in the Lagerstrasse, still breathing. The guard who’d found her made us load her up anyway, but we managed to sneak her into the washroom in the Revier on our way out to the crematorium. She was dead when we got back.

  I made the place a little cleaner, a little less of a hellhole. Not much less, but what can one living girl do when there are two dozen dead women she has to move in a day? What can one starving girl on her feet do to help out a couple of hundred others who can’t get up? Especially if you don’t want to catch typhoid yourself.

  I kept telling myself: I’ve been inoculated. I’ve had the ‘jabs’.