Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Irina threw Róża under the nearest truck and dived in after her. So did I.

  For another minute or two we lay there panting. Running fifty feet had just about killed us. We were still so close to the fence that we could see the riot in the parking lot.

  ‘Come on –’ Irina gasped, and we crawled beneath the trucks, moving slowly from one to another, until we were a little further away and we felt safe enough to rest again.

  We were also lucky the ground was frozen. We didn’t get coated head to foot in mud or slush. I shrugged off my coat and gave it to Irina. She pushed it away and I threw it back at her insistently, too fearful to talk. I wasn’t being noble – I was being sneaky.

  ‘Put on the coat, you stupid Bat Girl,’ Róża snarled. ‘You look like a schmootzich. We don’t have a hope in hell out here with you in stripes. Cover up! As soon as we stand up we have to look like normal people –’

  I’d caught what was usually Róża’s disease: inappropriate hysterical laughter. I lay on my face on a sheet of oily ice under a German munitions truck, smothering myself and shaking with mirth.

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Róża swore. ‘I’m surrounded by lunatics!’ She began to giggle too. Irina did not, but she quietly put my coat on and then lay next to me with her arm over my back.

  ‘You threw away all our bread,’ I pointed out to Róża. ‘Talk about lunatics!’

  And we both broke into muffled hysterics again.

  Irina took hold of my ear and twisted it hard. I shut up.

  ‘We have no papers,’ she said. ‘We speak no German. What is our story when someone stops us?’

  Róża improvised wildly, ‘We are French –’

  ‘French!’

  ‘French servants. We have to be French – it’s our only common language. You and Rose are cooks! And I am your sister. Only I speak German. We are servants for a German officer – I do all his sewing and cleaning –’

  ‘I bet you do,’ Irina snickered.

  We lay quietly for a few minutes, feeling falsely secure. It was cold, but no colder than standing in a roll call in the dark.

  ‘We better move,’ said Róża. ‘If they notice the Bat Girl’s gone, they’ll look for her.’

  We crawled for half an hour. We crawled underneath the entire row of trucks. When there weren’t any more we had to stand up and walk, vulnerable and obvious, along a barren stretch of road outside the camp and factory complex. We could see the town in the distance, church spire and silhouettes of buildings, and there wasn’t the faintest question that we could go that way.

  ‘Maybe we should try to get into the woods,’ I said. A lot of the landscape around us was the same sandy tracts of pine and birch that surrounded Ravensbrück.

  ‘We’d just freeze to death. We should go into town and walk down the middle of the street,’ Róża countered. ‘Right down the middle, like we belong there. Slowly.’ She turned and gave me a witchy grin. ‘Smiling at everyone.’

  ‘Gee whiz, not smiling like that.’

  ‘You look almost human in that skirt and sweater, Rosie,’ she said critically. ‘Like an SS secretary, almost human. The kerchief is the best part.’

  ‘Shut up, Rabbit.’ The kerchief was ridiculous. But I was more ridiculous without it. I’d had my head shorn again very recently, as punishment for annoying the Demon Nadine with nervous humming.

  ‘Dark in a few hours,’ Irina said to me.

  ‘We can’t stop here. But – I know! There were farms on the other side of the airfield – I saw them as we were landing. This is the road they brought me in on. We’ll go back past the airfield. Maybe hide in a barn – find some turnips or potatoes –’

  ‘A cow!’ Róża improvised wildly.

  ‘Maybe a cow! Maybe send you into someone’s kitchen to organise a loaf of bread. Maybe –’ Now I was thinking about what I’d find in the summer kitchen of the Mennonite farm just on the other side of Justice Field – succotash and applesauce and smoked sausage and shoofly pie. Talking like this was just going to lead to fantasies about Fasnachts and bologna. ‘Anyway, we’ll be safer on the other side of the airfield. Come on, girls!’

  And we walked down that road in broad daylight, Róża lurching between us tucked beneath our arms. There was no one else walking there and we were careful to cower in the weed-filled ditch at the road’s edge, gritting our teeth among last year’s dead stinging nettles, whenever traffic passed. We kept chattering to one another, insulting one another, discussing the weather – anything, like walking through a den of lazy lions and praying they won’t get up. If they raise their heads and keep an eye on you as you pass, that’s a little disconcerting. But as long as they don’t come after you, you’re safe. You know you better not run. Well, we couldn’t run. We had to stop and rest about every quarter of a mile. It was probably a four-mile walk to the airfield.

  ‘How is Lisette?’ Irina asked.

  ‘Brave,’ I said.

  Róża asked conversationally, ‘What is the officer’s name?’

  ‘Which officer?’

  ‘The one we all work for. In case someone asks.’

  ‘Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff,’ I answered.

  ‘Wow, that was fast! Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff! I thought you didn’t speak any German, French Political Prisoner Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig. You must have a devious streak after all.’

  May 4, 1945

  Still at the Ritz

  Except that I feel like I have never lived anywhere else but this big room and its gorgeous bathroom, this could have happened yesterday. I think it is partly the reason I haven’t even ventured out to find a dining room. The terror of that first day in the open, with the treacherous future yawning in front of us like the Grand Canyon – on foot with no food and no money and no papers in the middle of Germany, eternally at war, probably with people hunting for us – although I’m pretty sure now that if they had been, they’d have already found us for sure. But you don’t think every thing through logically when you have no real future except to plummet over the edge of the Grand Canyon.

  We didn’t make it past the airfield. I guess it is a miracle we made it that far. The ground crew who caught us were very kind. They were all airmen and mechanics, not SS guards. Maybe this isn’t fair of me, but I actually think they were smarter than the SS guards – I mean, they were doing skilled jobs, not siccing dogs on starving women. Seems like that must automatically make you a nicer kind of person. Not necessarily, I guess, but it’s a good start.

  These guys knew perfectly well what we were and where we’d come from. Irina was still in prison uniform beneath the threadbare coat; Róża couldn’t walk; I had no hair beneath my bandanna. And only Róża spoke any German.

  We got stopped along the barbed-wire fence by the airfield perimeter. There wasn’t any place to hide. It was an unarmed man on a bicycle who caught us – he pulled up alongside Irina and laid a hand on her arm. I saw her assess him, recognise that she couldn’t take him on, and her shoulders sagged. She didn’t try to shake him off. I didn’t run. Róża couldn’t, and Irina was caught. There was nowhere to go anyway.

  Róża tried to feed him a line. I don’t know what she said, but I swear I have never seen her be so charming. When was the last time she sweet-talked anyone – maybe the Gestapo officer who made her watch while they beat her mother to a pulp? Anyway, she was like Snow White convincing the huntsman not to kill her – heart-melting. As well as being the only one of us who could speak German, Róża was the only one of us who was actually dressed inconspicuously, since I’d given my coat to Irina. Lisette had combed and braided Róża’s hair and twisted it up before we left. If you could look past Róża being filthy and skeletal and crawling with bugs, she was lovely, really, in a waif-like, Orphan Annie kind of way.

  I remember worrying about how close we were standing to the wire fence, thinking it was probably electrified.

  The mechanic on the bicycle didn’t threaten us. He got off his bi
ke so he could walk alongside us, and escorted us back to the main gate and on to the airfield. Over Róża’s head, Irina shot me an agonised glance. I spread my hand into a plane and rocked the wings at her. Irina’s mouth cracked into a small, sad, ironic grin and she briefly rocked her own hand back at me.

  All right, they are really going to shoot me this time, I thought. And I have completely failed to get Róża out safely. Idiot! What was she THINKING? But at least if they kill me with Irina, as a prisoner on a Luftwaffe airfield, I will have died as a combat pilot. My father was a combat pilot and so is Irina and so am I. We are soldiers and I am not going to make a fool of myself.

  At the big vehicle gate, the guard in the sentry box made a telephone call, and after a minute a couple of other people came out to meet us. One of them took my arm the way the mechanic had Irina’s. They still let us support Róża between us.

  They frogmarched us to a bleak, cold maintenance room in the hangar. One side of the room was crowded with a million paint cans and tubs of dope for lacquering fabric aircraft wings, and the rest of the room was stacked with empty buckets and brooms and mops. They took the brooms and mops away in case we might try to use them as weapons, then locked us in and went away. The mechanic whom Róża had been charming earlier left her a small canvas bag, like a gas mask bag, that turned out to contain two margarine sandwiches and a thermos of watery beef broth.

  We fell on this unexpected feast like turkey buzzards. My gosh, food – or lack of it – makes you stupid. We couldn’t do a thing until we finished eating, and it never occurred to us to save any of it.

  Afterwards Róża stood staring out the window across the acres of Luftwaffe concrete and wire that surrounded us again. After a moment, she said matter-of-factly, ‘We’re fucked.’

  Irina and I glanced at each other. Irina nodded once in grim agreement.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Róża said.

  We went and stood next to her at the window. Róża licked a smear of leftover margarine from the back of her hand and repeated sadly, ‘We’ve had it. I really thought we might win. I’m sorry.’

  I thought so too. I think we all did.

  We stood quietly staring across the airfield with her.

  Standing on the apron, only about thirty yards away and gathering a crown of snow like icing sugar, stood a familiar, ungainly Luftwaffe plane with a black iron cross painted on its side and a black swastika painted on its tail.

  ‘That is a Storch,’ Irina murmured.

  ‘A stork!’ Róża translated, and let out one of her mirthless giggles. ‘A sign of spring, right? Of new life! Good luck in the coming year! We had one nesting on our chimney the year I was arrested.’

  ‘It’s a German liaison aircraft,’ I said. ‘Um, for communications. And they use it for ambulance work.’

  ‘Pffff.’ Róża gave a dismissive snort and turned away.

  ‘Controls for two pilots? Room for three?’ Irina asked quietly.

  We were both forming the same desperate, insane idea.

  We knew Róża was right. We knew we’d had it. We were locked in a building inside an electrified perimeter fence with dogs patrolling it – a more comfortable prison than the one we’d just come from, but nearly as secure, and in maybe less than an hour they’d send someone to collect us. And if they didn’t shoot us on the spot, they’d haul us back where we’d come from like they did with the Gypsy girl who tried to escape, and after they were done with the dogs and the beating, we’d probably be too dead to execute.

  So Irina and I had a quiet little discussion about the plane, without speaking our crazy idea out loud, because we didn’t want to get Róża excited. She’d already decided we didn’t stand a chance and was dealing with it in her own way. She wasn’t listening to us any more; she was making her own last desperate statement. She’d begun ransacking the shelves and paint tins and was leaving behind her a good-sized trail of destruction.

  ‘Flight controls front and back,’ I told Irina. ‘But you can only control the flaps and throttle from the front seat.’

  She gave me a funny look. ‘Have you flown a Stork?’

  ‘I’ve flown that Stork,’ I whispered.

  Her white eyebrows soared into her hairline. She grinned. ‘Rosie, you are full of surprises.’

  ‘That’s the plane I came in on. But of course I haven’t flown for six months.’

  ‘Who gives a damn?’

  I shrugged. I didn’t think I could do it – I didn’t think I was strong enough to do it, but I didn’t like to say so. We’d no other chance. Irina hadn’t flown for two years.

  ‘I haven’t flown in the dark. Or in snow, much.’

  ‘Controls for two, I can help you. You have flown this plane, and I have flown at night in snow. We can do it together. If we go down burning, we will take another Fascist aircraft with us, yes, Rose Justice? Taran!’

  ‘Taran!’

  We didn’t need to say another word. We both began to assess the window. There was iron mesh pressed between the glass, not prison bars but like chicken wire, and even if we smashed the glass, we’d still have to cut the wire somehow – Irina’s wire-cutters had not gone with her to the Punishment Block. The main window was just a sheet of plate glass like a shop window, but there was a narrow transom at the top which slotted open with a lever to let in air.

  ‘Little Różyczka will fit,’ Irina said.

  ‘And then?’

  Irina shrugged. ‘She can take the hinges off the door.’

  ‘Break it down,’ I improved.

  It was just as likely. Róża’s starved hands would never be strong enough to unscrew the steel door that shut us in, even if she had the right tools.

  ‘Give her a hammer and she will break the lock –’

  ‘– She’ll find a blowtorch!’

  We laughed together mirthlessly and turned away from the window to look at our pet Rabbit.

  This is what Róża was doing: she’d found an open bucket of black paint, and she was covering the walls with graffiti, just like me and my doomed French work team had done last November. Róża hadn’t wasted any time. In letters six inches high she was writing out the list of Rabbits’ names, as far up as she could reach, all seventy-four of them, dead and alive. She was covering the walls with names in black paint beneath a thick black heading in German which said something complicated and accusing like, ‘Polish women used illegally as medical specimens in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp at Fürstenberg’ – a great big shout of defiant witness which they’d have to scrape off the walls with a razor blade if they wanted to hide it – or paint over it, of course.

  We wasted a few minutes helping her complete the list.

  ‘Różyczka, we want you to climb out the transom window.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll run to Berlin and get a job as a showgirl,’ she said. We’d finished the list, but she’d started again, slapping paint on the shelves and counters, which would be a darn sight harder for anyone to scrape clean than the walls.

  ‘Be sensible. We want you to find a way to get us out. Find some wire-cutters, a screwdriver, a crowbar – hand us in some tools and maybe we can break out of here.’

  ‘I’ll get eaten by dogs!’

  ‘If we see them coming, we’ll throw paint pots at them. Come on, Rabbit, earn your keep! Get up there and get out of here.’

  We hoisted her up to the transom. She stood on Irina’s shoulders and clung to the window frame, and then somehow the three of us managed to push her feet first through the narrow opening. She giggled maniacally, leaning over the transom back into the room, looking down at us from above.

  ‘Oh hell, it’s cold out here, this is SO UNFAIR –’ Róża wriggled her way out and lowered herself down. We watched her collapse in a heap of bones and threadbare wool on the concrete wasteland just outside the window. At least the snow wasn’t sticking, except on the plane.

  Róża pulled herself to her feet and banged on the glass.

  ‘Keep pai
nting!’

  Then she scuttled off in her lopsided, lurching bunny-hop, supporting herself against the side of the building.

  There wasn’t anything else useful for us to do while we waited, so we obeyed Róża’s last order. We covered the windows with names. And the steel door. And the floor. We’d begun on the ceiling when the bolts in the lock on the door started to click.

  I froze. Irina leaped down from the counter and positioned herself beside the door, armed with a paintbrush.

  But it was only Róża coming back. Irina let out a soft whistle.

  ‘They left the key in the door!’ Róża said. ‘To make it easy for whoever they send for us. We’re dead anyway. We’ll never get through the fence – it’s all patrolled and they’ve shut the gate. The only thing we can do is hide, and that’ll just make them madder when they find us. Actually, it’ll make them use the dogs to find us.’ Suddenly she sounded defeated. ‘I’m not going to hide.’

  ‘Neither are we,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Dogs!’ Róża protested.

  ‘Just come on.’

  We locked the door behind us, to confuse things and maybe buy us a minute or two of extra time. The Stork wasn’t guarded. There wasn’t any reason for it to be guarded. It never occurred to anyone we might try to steal a plane. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone on that airfield, in a million years, that two of us were pilots. Probably, when I got out of that Stork six months ago, it didn’t occur to anyone on that airfield that I was a pilot.

  In the back of my mind I began thinking about Karl Womelsdorff – I wondered if he were still alive, or shot down by enemy aircraft – our aircraft. Or if, like me, he’d been taken prisoner.