Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

I was the only one of my work team who didn’t get sick this winter, but none of us ever got admitted to the Revier ourselves. We lived in horror of it, partly because of what we saw there several times a week – for me it was also because I knew in much too much detail what had happened to the Rabbits there. For a while Micheline had a fever high enough that she could have begged off work and got herself into the sickbay – you had to have a fever of 102 before they’d let you in – but instead she hid for three days in one of the blocked-up toilet cubicles in her barrack. None of the guards ever went in the broken toilets. Micheline was such a genius at pretending to follow rules that the whole time she was sick she didn’t miss a single roll call.

  We never launched Irina’s glider. We did get it hidden in the sandbags, but we never got the right wind or a moment when we wouldn’t be spotted trying to hurl a model airplane an open-arm-span wide over the twenty-foot-high walls. Who knows what happened to it, whether anyone found it, whether the names scribbled all over the fuselage were still legible? But dreaming about the potential success of our air mail service, doing it all in secret, kept us alive. When you lost hope, you turned into a schmootzich, one of the mindless beggars who were the bottom-crawlers of that entire scummy camp, or you died.

  Kite Flying

  (by Rose Justice)

  Hope has no feathers.

  Hope takes flight

  tethered with twine

  like a tattered kite,

  slave to the wind’s

  capricious drift,

  eager to soar

  but needing lift.

  Hope waits stubbornly,

  watching the sky

  for turmoil, feeding on

  things that fly:

  crows, ashes, newspapers,

  dry leaves in flight

  all suggest wind

  that could lift a kite.

  Hope sails and plunges,

  firmly caught

  at the end of her string –

  fallen slack, pulling taut,

  ragged and featherless.

  Hope never flies

  but doggedly watches

  for windy skies.

  *

  Lisette had bigger plans than paper airplanes.

  ‘There are transports leaving every day for Ravensbrück’s satellite camps,’ she directed. ‘We need to get the Rabbits out of here. We need to be organised. We’ll start with the youngest – all the Rabbits under twenty-one, the schoolgirls. Smuggle one or two at a time into the evacuation transports as they leave. Now listen, my darlings, the next time they try to pull any more Rabbits out of a roll call, we’re going to have to be brave. We’re going to have to disrupt things so violently they can’t count us. Everyone switch numbers – something like that. And every one of the girls who gets out will take the list with her – the names from the Lublin Transport, everybody who was operated on. We are going to tell the world.’

  Lisette got dragged out of line the next morning without warning and we thought she was dead. I marched off to my hideous work snivelling like a two-year-old. I sobbed quietly to myself all day – Micheline worked beside me and Irina without asking what was going on. It wasn’t the first time one of us had sobbed quietly to herself all day. But Anna got so fed up with me that she smacked me with someone’s empty shoe.

  And it turned out Lisette wasn’t dead anyway. Because she was an archivist she’d been hand-picked to do some secretarial work in the record office. She came back unbelievably excited. She whispered her news to us in the evening roll call.

  ‘There’s a radio in the record office – a radio! It’s always on! We’ve pushed the German army back!’

  ‘Really?’ Karolina gasped. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, back to where they were in December – everyone is fighting up to their hips in snow.’

  We groaned. It was the end of January, and the best we could do was beat the Germans back to their December starting point?

  ‘What about France?’ Róża and Karolina clamoured together. ‘What about Belgium? Have the Allies crossed the Rhine yet?’

  ‘No, no. Look, darlings, forget about the Western Allies! The Soviets are going to get here first. Yesterday they liberated Auschwitz!’

  It was all I could do not to yell. We stamped our feet wildly in the black slush, a little defiant dance of triumph.

  ‘Shit,’ Irina said. ‘I will go straight from a Fascist prison camp to a Soviet one.’

  ‘Why? You’re a double Ace! A decorated Hero of the Soviet Union! You spent four months being interrogated by the enemy and didn’t tell them anything!’

  ‘When a person spends four months being interrogated by the enemy and is still alive at the end, the Soviet Union calls her a traitor, not a hero. No, thank you. I would rather hang myself than go home.’

  She sounded like she meant it, too, which kind of put a damper on our excitement about being rescued by the Soviets.

  Anna caught me in the horrible converted washroom and handed me a list of numbers written on a strip of grey paper a quarter of an inch wide.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s list.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s death list? But –’

  There were dozens and dozens of numbers there. I started to read them, and realised that I knew almost every one of them. I associated faces with most of them. 7705 especially – Róża. Karolina too. Every single one of the Rabbits was on that list, and a few others, including Lisette.

  ‘They’re going to shoot eighty people in a day?’ I gasped.

  ‘Just tell everyone you see. That’s what I’m going to do. Maybe . . .’

  I was reeling. Except Irina, my whole family was on that list.

  ‘They can’t execute all of them!’ I burst out, and the German girl laughed at me.

  ‘Of course they can. They can do whatever they fucking want. And what they’re doing now is burning the evidence.’

  She pointed to the last number on the list – 32131 – a lot higher in sequence than the others. Also a familiar number.

  ‘You too!’

  ‘I’m a witness,’ she said, with bitter irony. ‘My God. I never thought I’d end up shovelled into the Ravensbrück incinerator with that pathetic bunch of Poles.’ She suddenly took the unlit cigarette butt out of her mouth and tucked it down the front of her dress. She looked away. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tell me how to tell people in German!’ I gasped. ‘Tell me how to say, “They’re killing the Rabbits.” If I tell people in German, everyone will pass it on.’

  She wasn’t even listening.

  ‘They’ll gas us,’ she said, gripping the sides of the dry sink and staring at the stained tiles. ‘That many at once – they won’t waste the ammunition. They’ll do it all at once, now they’ve got that gas chamber operational. It hurts. If you stand by the wall near the crematorium you can hear them screaming. Ach –’

  She swore in German and let out a sob.

  ‘Listen, Anna,’ I said fiercely. ‘It won’t happen! OK? No one in this whole camp will let it happen. Last time they tried to execute any of the Rabbits, we hid them. They killed our block leader because she wouldn’t give them up. But that was just us, fighting back on our own. You’ve got to tell everybody this time.’

  She looked up at me with wild, wet eyes, and gave a croak of a laugh. ‘You really believe we can do something, don’t you, kid?’

  ‘We can try!’

  Anna stared at the wall, avoiding looking at any of the bodies piled at our feet. Two more of my team came in, carrying another. I hadn’t started undressing any of them yet.

  ‘Anna’s on the list,’ I cried, holding it up.

  Anna, grey-faced, added indifferently, ‘So are all the Kaninchen.’

  ‘Les Lapins!’ the French girls exploded in outrage. ‘The Rabbits? The KRÓLIKI? All of them? No. Never!’

  ‘Hide them!’ Micheline exclaimed. ‘Hide every one of them tonight! All of Ravensbrück will fight for the Rabbits. People a
re waiting for a chance to fight for the Rabbits.’

  ‘Karolina?’ Irina asked me. ‘Róża?’

  ‘All of them. The whole Lublin Transport. Lisette too.’

  Unlike me, Irina didn’t panic.

  ‘Let me have your armband,’ she said to Anna. ‘And one hour. I can do something.’

  ‘Where will you go?’ Anna asked sharply.

  ‘To talk to my friend in the power plant – we were electricians in the Moscow Metro together, before I flew. I think she can switch off the lights. She will do it in roll call tomorrow morning. They will find no one.’

  Anna moved slowly and cautiously, like a person with a migraine. She peeled off her red Kolonka’s armband and held it out to Irina. Irina slid it over her own sleeve and stalked out, her shock of white hair catching the gleam of the bare electric bulb overhead as she turned to go.

  ‘You’d better hide too, Anna,’ I said in English.

  ‘Who’ll hide me?’ she scoffed with bleak fatalism, her pale eyes bright and wild. ‘You could break my leg maybe, make me look like a Rabbit. See if the disguise fools anyone.’

  We all looked at her in pity, and looked away. I sure couldn’t invite her to hide with my Block 32 Camp Family – and even for twenty loaves of bread the Auschwitz evacuees in the tent wouldn’t hide a German criminal. I thought about offering to swap coats with her, to swap our numbers. I really did. It is the Girl Scout in me, always wanting to help. She was an OK group leader and now she just seemed so grim and crazed – so afraid. But I couldn’t come up with a good reason to sacrifice my life for her.

  Micheline saw me thinking about it. She shook her head at me to stop me opening my mouth.

  ‘No one will notice another body here tomorrow morning,’ Micheline suggested to Anna brutally. ‘No one counts the corpses more than once. If we get the chaos the Soviet electricians promise, hide in here.’

  For Anna

  (by Rose Justice)

  Your sullen sneer,

  thin lips and

  unlit cigarette

  have disappeared

  without a trace

  and no one cares

  and we’ll forget.

  I don’t care either

  but I saw

  desperate and raw

  fear in your face –

  you said you’d hide.

  I wonder now

  how hard you tried –

  and if you lived

  or if you died,

  I wonder how.

  *

  Block 32 that night was a prison all on its own, swarming with guards and dogs, the wire gate locked, the door to the barrack barred. It was almost surprising they let the rest of us back in, but they did, and we got our soup ration as usual. We even fought over it sort of as usual:

  ‘Here, take mine, you need all the energy you can get tonight.’

  Or more realistically, ‘Look, just give me yours, ’cause you won’t need it if they kill you tomorrow morning anyway.’

  Karolina had the same fierce, dazed gleam of insanity in her eyes as our German Kolonka Anna – the look of crazed disbelief at the UNFAIRNESS of it.

  Lisette just looked like Lisette. Róża was a pain in the neck.

  ‘What do you think I’ll look like when I go up in smoke from the crematorium chimney, Rosie? As sexy as Karolina, slinking across the sky?’

  ‘Will you shut up!’

  She wasn’t trying to be funny. She was trying to be brave, Różyczka-style. But it was making Karolina cry.

  Irina took hold of my hand and pressed it against her waist. Tied inside her dress was a pair of wire-cutters. The hard line of her mouth was set in the ghost of a grin. She spread her palm and rocked her hand at me. Still a combat pilot.

  The thing was, so many people were sobbing and crying and praying that night, that neither the guards nor Nadine could hear us as the Rabbits made their escape. I crawled with Róża and Karolina over the infested bare boards that counted as our bunks – people moved out of our way. Everybody helped. When one of the guards shouted or the dogs started growling, we lay flat and sobbed loud and genuine sobs of fear and frustration. It was easy.

  Irina and a couple of the other Russians got out first, and they did the dirty and dangerous work of cutting a hole in the wire that fenced off Block 32 from the rest of the camp. Then we spent most of the night hoisting all the Lublin Special Transport girls out a couple of the broken windows. I had an easy job – I had to keep stuffing wads of newspaper over the jagged glass around the edges of the window frame.

  The tricky part was crossing the yard between the barrack and the fence without being seen, and getting through the fence. I didn’t have to do it myself, but it still makes me shiver to think about it. Nobody got caught, but my gosh we worked slowly – though after the first dozen Rabbits had made it through the fence we got good at it.

  It took two of us on one side of the window and two on the other to lift one person out efficiently. Then, one by one in the dark, Irina and her Red Army friends escorted all the Lublin Transport Rabbits through the fence into the main camp. After that they were on their own – on crutches or limping or clinging to each other.

  Irina caught Róża herself when it was her turn.

  ‘The tent is the nearest place to hide,’ Irina whispered.

  ‘I’m not going back there,’ Karolina fired down at her, next in line to sneak out.

  But Róża couldn’t walk – not really, not in the dark – and Karolina was stuck with her.

  ‘If we don’t come back, Rose knows all our names,’ Róża said in ringing tones of menace, a little too loud.

  ‘Shut up, you stupid little girl!’ Karolina gasped hysterically. ‘Or they’ll kill Rose too, and there will be NO ONE who gets out of here alive to tell anyone!’

  ‘The whole camp knows. Everybody knows. Rose will tell the world.’ Róża growled orders at me. ‘You are to tell the world, Rose, you hear me?’

  ‘I will! I promise!’

  Irina took her under her arm to help her scuttle limping towards the hole in the fence.

  Sometime before the 4 a.m. Screamer, Irina and I crept back to our own bunk in the pitch-black, and that hellhole was so darn overcrowded that when we got to our spots, there were new prisoners sleeping soundly in place of Lisette and Karolina and Róża – I don’t know who they were.

  We lined up for roll call at 4.30 a.m. in what felt like a crowd of strangers, Irina and I at sea without our Camp Family. It felt like the whole Lublin Transport was missing.

  ‘Think they’ll kill us instead?’ Irina whispered.

  ‘Maybe,’ I gulped, thinking of Anna’s relentless description of poison gas, and my impossible promise to make sure that everybody knew everything when it was all over.

  Irina tilted her hand at me. ‘Taran. We go down fighting.’

  They read the list of numbers in German. It was like listening to a swarm of droning hornets.

  ‘Siebentausendsiebenhundertzwei, Siebenstausendsiebenhundertdrei, Siebentausendsiebenhundertvier . . .’

  I looked down at the cinders, scuffling my feet nervously, trying to keep warm. A small black pool of slush and dirt formed beneath me.

  Siebentausendsiebenhundertfünf. That was Róża, 7705. They called Karolina’s number, and Lisette’s. I glanced at Irina, but she was staring straight ahead.

  The messenger doing the announcement was an SS woman, in one of their grim black rain capes over her uniform. She came to the end of her long list of numbers and paused. Then she barked an order in German. She paced from one end of our first row to the other, her cape flapping shadows in the dark as she peered at the numbers on people’s sleeves. It was pretty quiet, except for the usual coughing and sniffling. The turkey buzzard messenger yelled at us again. No one moved. She hadn’t called our numbers.

  She barked an order at the guards. They’d sent extras, expecting a fight. She took hold of a dog’s leash and started prowling among the first rows of silent, stubbor
n language professors and music teachers and widowed mothers and orphaned daughters, and projectionists and spies and bartenders and cleaning ladies and Resistance agents and Red Army soldiers and Girl Scout saboteurs. And taran pilots.

  And, in our first real moment of glory, the lights went out.

  I think, if there could be anything I am glad I was there for, it is that moment.

  We let out a ragged roar of sheer excitement, all 50,000 of us at once. I swear, it was all of us at once, and this time they couldn’t control anything. We had nowhere to go, of course – we still couldn’t get out – we were all too starved to overpower anyone, and we couldn’t see who we were fighting anyway, but BY GOD, we weren’t going to let them count us. They weren’t going to count anybody that morning.

  ‘Line up for work! Work details!’ we all shouted ridiculously – like we were trying to get organised, when in fact we were hurling handfuls of gravel.

  I felt the flat of Irina’s hand against my shoulder. She rocked her palm. Taran. She did it against my shoulder because we couldn’t see each other in the dark.

  Maybe it wasn’t really fighting back – maybe it was just pathetic passive resistance. The lights go out and everybody runs around in the dark, throwing dirt and screaming. But it felt like we were fighting back. There’s only so much fighting you can do in one day on a slice of bread mostly made of bonemeal and two bowls of lukewarm turnip broth.

  I wish I would stop sidetracking on to food. Even now, when I am not hungry, I can’t stop thinking about what it was like to be starving.

  It is true though – we got tired. Some of the women actually just went back to bed, climbing back through the broken windows of the block to snatch another hour of sleep. That also made it hard to count us! By the time it was light we were so disorganised that they gave up on the roll call – they also half-heartedly tried to stop Block 32 from getting our morning ‘coffee’ (there I go again), but a group of Polish prisoners from another block came running over with a couple of the big saucepans from the kitchen and passed us a desperate breakfast through the chain-link fence.