Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  And there weren’t even any Rabbits in there with us at that point. That’s how determined everyone was.

  The lights went out again at the evening roll call. Irina and I stood pressed close to each other, our shoulders touching, standing still amid the chaos.

  ‘How many times will she get away with it?’ I whispered. I was worried about Irina’s friend from the Moscow Metro, the Russian technician responsible for the lights going out. Irina didn’t answer; I hadn’t really expected an answer anyway.

  The lights went out at every roll call for a week.

  ‘Rose! Rose Justice! Rosie!’

  Through the never-ending background of coughs and groans and creaking bunk slats I heard my name, low and tuneful, coaxing me in my sleep. The Demon Nadine, asleep on her mat by the small stove in the knitters’ workroom, would never have been able to hear it. I sat bolt upright and banged my head against the ceiling. Irina grabbed me by the arm to steady me, instantly awake like a soldier.

  ‘Outside the window,’ Irina said.

  We climbed down to the level below us and crawled over people to the broken window. There was a sort of human-shaped bundle of rags standing there in the black slush, tapping for attention on the window frame with a stick while simultaneously trying to hang on to the side of the building and avoid the filth that was smeared all over the wooden wall from the ground to about three feet up – that was where we all went to the bathroom now.

  ‘It’s one of those schmootzichs begging to get in,’ I whispered. ‘Oh God, they’re so creepy. How do they get away with wandering around the camp like this? How did she figure out how to get through the Block 32 fence? Nadine will kill us if we let a schmootzich into the bunks.’

  I do not like to admit how much the schmootzichs scared me. Ever since that first day, when they swarmed over me with their starved claws, I had been scared of them. I was scared of them touching me and I was scared of becoming one of them.

  ‘Rosie, that is not like you! She would sleep under the bunks if we let her in,’ Irina suggested. ‘The schmootzichs do not care about the mess.’

  ‘You fucking morons!’ the schmootzich hissed. ‘I’m Róża!’

  The stick she’d been tapping on the window frame was her crutch. Irina climbed out the window and hoisted Róża up to me and I hauled her in, using my coat to pad the frame this time (we all slept in our coats by then, and they let us because there were so few blankets left).

  ‘What are you doing here, Róża? You’ve got to hide!’ We scolded her in several languages.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Róża snarled. ‘I’m sick of hiding.’

  ‘But Block 32 is the first place they’ll look for you! Are you hungry?’ They’d cut Block 32’s food back by ten loaves and a barrel of soup to try to coerce us into turning over the Rabbits. A bunch of us kept trying to save bread to sneak out to the people hiding, but it was just impossible with the rations down – people would snatch it out of your mouth if you weren’t fast enough.

  Róża shook with suppressed laughter at my question and hissed, ‘Do you think we get five-course meals in the tent? Of course I’m hungry. You’re hungry, Irina’s hungry, everybody’s hungry. We’re all fucking starving. I didn’t leave because I’m hungry! I’m bored. You thought I was a schmootzich! That’s a fabulous disguise. I can go around pretending to be a camp beggar. I can carry messages!’

  ‘You can’t WALK.’

  ‘I’ll ride in your wheelbarrow.’

  She’d ripped off her Ravensbrück sleeve patches. She’d managed to get some dead woman’s number inked on her wrist like an Auschwitz prisoner’s tattoo. Carefully darned woollen hose from Elodie covered up her maimed legs. And in fact Róża could walk without her crutch, but it was this impossible crablike, lurching, gimpy series of dives and landings – she wouldn’t put weight on the leg that was missing pieces of bone, because one of the girls who’d had the same operation had snapped her tibia in half trying to walk on it, and died of the infection that came raging in afterwards. And without Anna our calcium supply had dried up.

  ‘What messages will you take?’ Irina said. ‘Translation for the dead?’

  ‘I’ve got a message for you, smart-aleck. Lisette and Karolina are coming out tomorrow, in broad daylight, because they’re not going to hide any more either. They’re going to be our delegation to the commander.’

  ‘Are they crazy?’ I whispered back.

  ‘No, we’ve done it before. We really did! We took a petition to the commander before this one, saying we refused to be operated on again. He didn’t pay any attention, but this one is such a weasel he always pretends to be polite – he makes a show of negotiating with us so he’ll look good to the Red Cross. And yesterday Lisette got six of us out! There were three trucks transferring people to other camps, and she got six other Rabbits to sneak on board – we cut all their numbers apart so that only the symmetrical ones were left, and then we mixed them up and sewed them on upside down and backwards. They’ll get more of us out today – they take hundreds of people to the satellite camps every day because there’s no damn room here. Lisette wanted me to go too, but Karolina wouldn’t let me because of my legs – it has to be people who can walk without looking like they’re dancing.’ She giggled. ‘Karolina wants me to go, but she wants to go with me – I need taking care of, right?’

  ‘Like fun!’

  But of course, little Różyczka did need taking care of. She couldn’t go without help. I lay awake with my emotions whirling like the beaters on an electric mixer, feeling stupidly envious of Karolina’s bravery, elated that we’d got people out, fearful that they might have climbed into the wrong truck – the transfer trucks were usually closed in and the gas chamber trucks were usually open-topped, but you never, never really knew.

  ‘Elodie,’ Micheline uttered under her breath to me as we got dragged off to work as usual.

  ‘Elodie?’

  She clamped her lips together, because a caped turkey buzzard with a dog was keeping an eye on us.

  They’d closed the camp streets and put guards and roadblocks at all the intersections as they tried to catch the women who were hiding. By now, the second week of February, there were nearly twice as many women in the camp as when I got there. Hundreds of people came in and hundreds of others got taken away again every day. We had extra roll calls so they could try to count us – daylight roll calls, six in a day once – in my head every single one of them takes place in a snowstorm, but that wasn’t true, because I can also remember watching planes going over against a sky as blue as a summer day at the lake, and I remember just longing to be up there with my hand lightly on the control column, just longing to be back in my other half-remembered existence.

  Every day me and Irina and our Corpse Crew of a dozen tall French girls still had to go around making our collection with carts and wheelbarrows up and down the Lagerstrasse. It still had to be done – it couldn’t go more than a couple of days without being done. We had a new Kolonka who didn’t speak English and didn’t like to come too close to us – she did a lot of screaming at us, but as long as we did our job she didn’t smack us. We never saw Anna again. I don’t have any idea if she managed to save her own skin. I still don’t know.

  And now Micheline was mumbling Elodie’s name without telling me anything else and I was frantic with worry.

  ‘Elodie gives,’ Micheline muttered as we loaded the dead into the incinerator-bound trucks waiting by the main gate. We weren’t allowed outside the gate any more – prisoners from the men’s camp had to do the unloading on the other side.

  That’s all she said. Elodie gives. Then Micheline went white-faced and tight-lipped again as we got herded aside and slapped and kicked until we took our clothes off. The guards weren’t supposed to let us through the various blockades unless they searched the carts first. But that was such a repugnant job that a lot of the time they’d just search us instead – make us strip and stand quivering with cold and embarrassment, star
k naked with our arms at our sides, while they paced around us looking suspicious. The less cooperative we were, the longer they made us stand there. So we got in the habit of being almost unbelievably meek and mild when we were working, and this included hardly daring to breathe a word to each other.

  And really, sometimes you didn’t feel like talking. That day the guards didn’t even bother to tell us we could get dressed again – they just walked off to pester someone else and left us standing there at attention in our stunningly unattractive birthday suits until, after a quarter of an hour, Irina got mad and risked dragging her clothes back on without getting anyone’s permission.

  ‘Clothes,’ Micheline muttered as we pulled our ragged dresses over our heads.

  I sighed. ‘Clothes,’ I agreed.

  Later, as we carried a body together through a narrow aisle between befouled bunks, she grunted, ‘For the Rabbits.’ She gave me a look as we lowered the poor thing on to the pile, like she wanted me to answer her somehow.

  I frowned at her, not daring to say anything. Micheline held my eyes with hers – she had gorgeous eyes, a clear, yellow-brown hazel with dark brown flecks.

  I thought back over the handful of words she’d sprinkled me with that day, like a puzzle or a radio serial, and came up with:

  ‘Elodie gives clothes for the Rabbits.’

  ‘Yes,’ I hissed. ‘Oui.’ Just to let her know I understood.

  This is what she meant: the women who sorted the clothes taken from the new prisoners were organising civilian outfits for all the remaining Rabbits. Civilian clothes were the first thing you needed if you were going to escape. Not that anyone really escaped – there was that Gypsy girl they caught in the woods and her own block beat her to death because they’d had three days’ Strafstehen while the guards hunted for her. Everyone knew about her. But it didn’t stop you thinking about escaping.

  Just getting people out of Ravensbrück, even on a truck bound for another camp, counted. Hundreds of the newest prisoners were transferred in or out without being put in quarantine or even getting issued with prison clothes, and civilian clothes would help the Rabbits blend in with them. We had the clothes now, and my team was good at organising false numbers from the bodies we picked up. Even if the Rabbits couldn’t get out, they could hide in the other blocks, replacing the dead.

  Lisette and Karolina had diplomatic immunity – that’s the right term. They were the only contact the camp officials had with the Rabbits. That incredibly slippery character the camp commander wanted to negotiate with them. This is the same stinker who on New Year’s Day told us over the loudspeakers that he was going to blow us all up. Here’s what he tried to get the Rabbits to do for him now:

  ‘Please sign a form saying you hurt your leg in an industrial accident.’

  ‘Please, when the Soviets get here and turn this place inside out, could you tell them how well you’ve all been treated, since it was the previous camp administration who authorised the first operations and the current administration who kept you alive.’

  ‘Please, all of you come forward and we will send you together to another, more comfortable, camp.’

  That was the best one. We knew the camp they named had already been shut down, so . . . Did he really think people were all going to climb meekly into a lot of empty trucks specially designated for the doomed Lublin Transport and let them drive everybody out the gates towards – where? Around and around the outside walls of Ravensbrück till they got back to the gas chamber? As if we had no idea what happened to the people they loaded into trucks and drove around the walls every day? You could hear them going around. You could hear them stopping at the warehouse we had to paint black on the inside. You could hear the sobbing and yelling when they made people get out of the trucks on the other side of the wall. And then their worn and lice-ridden clothes would come back inside and Elodie had to sort them.

  We knew what would happen when they loaded 200 of us into open trucks before breakfast.

  ‘The commander’s a stinking weasel,’ Karolina said. ‘He’s scared and he’s desperate. The Nazis are beaten and they know it, but they just won’t stop. It’s like – it’s like Róża when she’s angry at something – she just gets nastier and nastier even though she knows everyone will end up crying. The commander wants signed statements from us all, so he can prove to General Eisenhower how generous and humanitarian he is when the Americans get here, but when he’s got his signed statements, then he can safely kill us and pretend it was an administrative error.’

  ‘The Rabbits are safe, my dear,’ Lisette vowed, ‘because no one will sign anything. We will agree to nothing.’

  ‘No one is safe. You and I could be sentenced to execution any time – they’re only letting us come and go because we’re still wearing our numbers and can be counted. The others are only safe till someone finds them,’ Karolina retorted grimly.

  Kaninchen Króliki Lapins Králíci

  Králíci is Czech. I don’t know how to write ‘rabbits’ in Russian, but it sounds the same as in Polish. By the end of February everybody in the camp knew all the words for rabbit in every language of every nationality at Ravensbrück, because the Rabbit Hunt was the one thing that united us.

  The Rabbits sometimes called themselves something else. They used the word król. I would not have figured this out except that Karolina made a lot of caricature portraits for people showing them as rabbits wearing little crowns, and Lisette explained it to me, because she knew I love the subtleties of words as much as she does. Król is a rare Polish word for rabbit. But it also means king.

  There is a rare English word for rabbit, coney, which also sounds a little like the German word for king – König. It’s also like the Dutch word for rabbit, konijn. I’d turn all this into a poem if only I could find a connection that wasn’t a coincidence, or if it worked better in English. The Kings of Ravensbrück.

  Because, in a crazy way, they ruled the place.

  I want so desperately to remember it. Hiding the Rabbits gave us back our lives. But so many of the things we did to save them were unspeakable and I don’t think I can write about it. Róża hitching rides with me and Irina as we worked – as though we were hauling turnips? Filling in the missing people at roll call with bodies stolen from the Revier, so that our numbers always came out right when they counted us, no matter who wasn’t there? Only in Block 32. I said before that we were really good at propping people up.

  It’s not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible – the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else.

  But it’s not civilised. There is something indecent about it – really foully indecent. The civilised Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. And I can’t write about it.

  I did make up a poem about it, ‘Service of the Dead’, but I just can’t write it down.

  I think it is the most terrible thing that was done to me – that I have become so indifferent about the dead. I would be able to do a human anatomy course without ever feeling faint, do surgery with steady hands, clean up anything and not be sick and never mind the blood.

  Maybe I could be a doctor.

  A real one – go to medical school –

  Maybe I could! I could be a poet and a doctor – like William Carlos Williams! A new direction – a new world – I could help fix things now. How does his poem go, ‘Spring and All’ –

  THEY ENTER THE NEW WORLD NAKED,

  COLD, UNCERTAIN OF ALL

  SAVE THAT THEY ENTER. ALL ABOUT THEM

  THE COLD, FAMILIAR WIND –

  A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could.

  This is the first I have thought of it. Maybe I could.

  May 3, 1945

  Paris

  There were five dozen people from the Lublin Special Transport in hi
ding. That’s a lot of people to hide. Worse than that, it’s a lot of people to feed when there isn’t any food.

  We had to keep moving people around, and sometimes they spotted us doing it. They’d corner people and we were just so desperate we’d do anything to get away – a couple of girls picked up another prisoner and threw her at the guards who were after them. Stand-offs with dogs. Climbing in and out of broken windows, hiding in the bunks in the tuberculosis block with dying women so horribly contagious that the guards wouldn’t come in. Irina’s wire-cutters got passed around, because you never knew who’d need a weapon. Most of the girls weren’t strong enough to do anything with them anyway, but it made you feel brave just to carry a pair of stolen wire-cutters. They always came back.

  They saved a dozen lives when Irina and Róża and I got caught by SS guards with guns, cornered against the fence around the Revier.

  It was a Sunday. On Sunday, theoretically, you were allowed to walk up and down the Lagerstrasse for a couple of hours chatting with a friend and drying your underpants, if you had any – you could wash them under a spigot, but you couldn’t hang them anywhere or someone would steal them, so you just paced up and down holding them out in front of you and flapping them around. That Sunday we weren’t drying underwear. We were shifting a bunch of Rabbits from one hiding place to another. You weren’t supposed to walk with more than one or two other people on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d followed that rule. But we were more or less together just because the street was so crowded, and the guards were on the lookout for people who limped. That day there were too many Rabbits together in the same place.

  It happened fast. They rounded us up and backed us against the fence. I think it was partly our own fault, because we were so used to being herded that it took us a moment to realise the guards had spotted our Rabbits, and weren’t just trying to clear a path for some high-ranking official or a transport truck.