Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  The church bells didn’t wake me, but the sound was in my ears and head when I woke up again – all the bells in Paris. The official announcement wasn’t supposed to come till 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Nobody cared. The war was over and all the bells were already ringing.

  Maddie had gone back to her own room and shut the communicating door behind her, so I got dressed in the worn, neat skirt and blouse the pitying chambermaid had given me – her missing daughter’s clothes – and knocked on Maddie’s door. She opened it almost immediately and this time we threw our arms around each other. And this time both of us began to cry.

  ‘Come on!’ Maddie said. ‘Come on, we’re going out.’

  I shook my head, but she had me by the arm, and took advantage of me being easy to bully. It was stupidly easy to bully me then – I would follow directions meekly, without tears, cowering. That is how the chambermaid finally forced me to get dressed after my first two weeks of hermit-like so-called ‘freedom’.

  Hanging on to my arm, Maddie stuffed her flight bag with chunks of French bread off the breakfast tray they’d grown used to sending me (she’d taken it in earlier), then grabbed her Air Transport Auxiliary uniform tunic and forced me into it.

  ‘No no no, I’m not a First Officer –’

  ‘No one will know or care. You are an ATA pilot and you are going to look like one.’

  She gave me her side cap.

  ‘Wizard. You look perfect.’

  Then she pulled on her leather flight jacket over her blouse and straightened her tie. ‘One uniform between the pair of us – that’ll do! We both look the part, right?’

  I nodded, trying to smile. Her tunic was a little too short and a little too broad for me, but she belted it tight round my middle and it probably looked OK. Actually, it probably disguised how thin I was. We both wiped our eyes at the same time.

  ‘Let’s go. I’m taking you flying.’

  Maddie tucked her arm in mine. I didn’t need propping up, but I needed someone hanging on to me, as though I were blind and couldn’t see where I was going and had to be led. Out through the sumptuous lobby, which I took in as though I were seeing it for the first time, and into the May sunlight in the Place Vendôme. It was already full of people – kids sitting on shoulders, waving paper flags and wearing paper hats that people were selling out of buckets and boxes like they’d been saving them up for weeks, everybody so dressed up.

  Maddie was shameless. I think she started out heading for the Metro, but we didn’t make it across the square before she’d hitched a ride on a truck crowded with American pilots all waving and holding up two fingers in a ‘V’ for ‘Victory’.

  ‘Le Bourget!’ Maddie cried. ‘We want to get to Le Bourget!’

  The ATA uniform worked its magic – even though we were sharing it.

  ‘Come on up, sister!’ They pulled us in with them.

  For one long moment the world seemed hideous. The smell of engine exhaust and sweat, the bodies so close together –

  Maddie, who’d been up most of the night reading about the prison where I’d spent the winter, held tight to my arm and cried out, ‘Let’s ride on the roof!’ And they boosted us up on top of the cab like a couple of figureheads. It was precarious, but it was nothing like being in a prison transport truck, and I could breathe again.

  It took us hours to get through the crowded main thoroughfares. But it was fun and like nothing I’d ever done before, sitting on the roof of a slow-moving military truck, clinging to my borrowed ATA cap – with my friend’s arm secure around my shoulders and an enormous bundle of lilacs in my lap (where did those come from?), and our brave boys blowing kisses at everyone and trying to learn the words to the French national anthem.

  At Le Bourget there was a line of Dakotas taking off and landing. They were giving people rides. For the past month they’d been shuttling all over Europe – hospital supplies, social workers, bringing home prisoners of war and ‘civilian hostages’ – thousands of people like me who’d been sent to concentration camps in the far corners of the continent and were trying to come home now. Maddie and I lined up with the other joyriders, and our shared uniform got us boosted up front with the flight crew. And off we went – low over the teeming streets of Paris, so low you could see the flags flying – so much red, white and blue! The French Tricolour, the Union Jack and the good old Star-spangled Banner. There were Soviet flags in there too. We sailed in stately flight up the Champs-Élysées, so low we could see the crowd waving as we passed overhead.

  ‘Ever buzzed the Eiffel Tower?’ the pilot shouted lazily over the whine of the engine.

  ‘Rose did last year,’ Maddie yelled. ‘Flying an Oxford. Two weeks after Paris was liberated!’

  ‘Flying it herself ?’

  ‘Of course!’

  The pilot glanced at me.

  It’s hard to describe what I looked like. I’m not even sure what I looked like; I covered up the mirror in my room when I got there, and that had been three weeks earlier. No doubt starved; no doubt exhausted, because I still had a lot of trouble sleeping. Probably haunted. My hair was only a little longer than the pilot’s crew cut.

  ‘I wanted to fly under it, but the plane wasn’t really small enough,’ I said.

  The pilot laughed, and asked me in his casual drawl, ‘Ever flown a C-47?’

  ‘Gosh, no, just light twin engines!’

  ‘Well, you better give it a try then,’ he said. ‘I reckon if you’re smart enough not to fly under the Eiffel Tower in an Oxford, you won’t risk it in this baby either.’

  That is how I got to buzz the Eiffel Tower for the second time in the biggest plane I’ve ever flown.

  We had to take the Metro back. I slept on my feet, lulled by the rhythm of the train and clinging to a strap hanging from the ceiling. I was used to dozing standing up, a skill acquired during interminable Ravensbrück roll calls.

  It was dark by the time we got back to the Place Vendôme, Arcturus blazing above us. But now Paris too was blazing, lights everywhere, yellow light gleaming in open windows and strings of Christmas lights in balconies and in the trees. It was spring and the war was officially over. Maddie pulled me, half awake, into the glittering, leafy night of the Ritz’s private inner courtyard and found a single chair for us to share.

  We held hands. I knew she was thinking about her best friend, who was killed in France a little over a year ago. But it was nice to be there with Maddie – this half-stranger who knew me so well, who didn’t have to be told anything about me.

  She said suddenly, ‘Julie would have died there. I read what you wrote. She’d never have made it. She’d have died there.’

  She squeezed my hand. ‘But you didn’t.’

  Within five minutes a young American civilian presented us with a bottle of champagne. I nearly fell off the chair with shock. It was Bob Ernst, the man who’d driven me to Paris last month.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Rose Justice,’ Bob said, grinning from ear to ear and holding out his hand. He shook hands with me warmly. ‘Who’s your friend?’

  I gulped, and remembered how to be polite. ‘This is Maddie Beaufort-Stuart. She flew with me in the ATA.’

  ‘You’re a pilot too, Maddie!’ he exclaimed. ‘Never met a flygirl in my whole life, and Rosie knows ’em all.’ He poured and handed out glasses.

  ‘Victory!’

  ‘Victory!’

  I took a sip – the first sip was awful. The contrast with the months of turnip soup was so extreme, and the last time I had champagne was on a date with the boy who’d got married to someone else while I was in prison – I’d only found this out a couple of days ago. With the first sip my anger at that thoughtless betrayal hit me again like a kick in the ribs, and I made a face like I’d never drunk champagne in my life.

  Bob laughed. ‘It’s the idea of the thing.’ He didn’t have a chair. The place was packed. He squatted down next to us.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. Bob had picked me up
at a refugee centre in Belgium, with Irina Korsakova and Róża Czajkowska, the prisoners who had escaped with me.

  ‘Looking for you, Rose,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ve been looking for you ever since I waved goodbye to you at the Embassy. I thought I’d never forgive myself for not making sure you were safe.’

  I put my glass down on the crowded table we were sharing with about a dozen other people. I stared at Bob.

  ‘Looking for me?’

  ‘I knew you were here at the Ritz, and you hadn’t checked out,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t tell me what room you were in – fair enough – and I would have felt pretty underhanded watching the lobby to catch you going in and out. So I thought I’d sit in the bar in the evening, and maybe you’d come down one night. As long as you were still checked in, you might come down. So I waited. And you did.’

  I didn’t say anything at first. Finally I asked the only thing that mattered. ‘Did you look for my friends?’

  Because that was what I was most upset about: losing Irina and Róża. It was mostly my own fault. But a little part of me blamed it on Bob, for taking me away from them without me realising they weren’t travelling with us in the back of our convoy.

  ‘I did look for your friends,’ he said. ‘I managed to get the unit details of the Red Cross folks we camped with. One of the wounded GIs remembered it. But I don’t know where they are now. Probably still on their way back to Sweden – I think it’ll take them a while because they were stopping along the way to set up field clinics, like the one we camped with. They’re off the US Army’s beat, that’s for sure. I tried contacting their HQ in Stockholm, but I always get blindsided by the girl on the switchboard. And I don’t know your friends’ last names, or how to spell their first names – how are they going to find Russian Irene and Polish Rosie among tens of thousands of refugees they’re relocating? When things settle down we might have better luck. It’s been making me crazy. They can’t just disappear.’

  We had their unit details.

  It was a start.

  Maybe Bob thought I was upset with him, because he added quickly, ‘The real reason I’m in Paris is that I’m on an assignment for my paper – I think I told you that. But I’ve got a sort of more creative personal project I’m working on now too – it’s a story for a literary journal out of Olympia University in Ohio, about people coming home. I got the idea after I dropped you off. I couldn’t stop thinking about you and your team. So since then I’ve started talking to others like you.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘You said you’d been in prison in Germany, but you were in a camp, right? You weren’t a prisoner-of-war. You’re a civilian. So I guessed you must have been in a concentration camp. There are plenty of camp survivors in Paris, on their way home, men and women both. You get an eye for spotting them.’

  ‘We’re all skeletons,’ I said, and looked away, my face burning.

  ‘No,’ Maddie suddenly interjected. ‘It’s summat in the eyes. You look like you’re in shock.’

  Bob slapped the table and everyone’s glasses tinkled. ‘That’s it exactly. The POWs from the military prison camps are skinny too, but anyone who’s been in the concentration camps – they all look a little crazy.’ He bit his lip and reddened. ‘Sorry. Not you.’

  ‘It’s OK. I bet I do. I bet that’s how you figured it out.’

  I felt a little crazy.

  ‘Well,’ Bob said, leaning back on his heels, ‘I’m telling you this because you said you wrote poetry, and I thought you might want to send something to the poetry editor at my magazine. It’s quarterly, and they’re doing a special issue focused on the war – social issues, how the war’s affected education, things like that. There’s a story about the massacre of university staff in Poland and a story about the past five years of Hollywood films, so you get some idea how flexible they’re being. If you wrote anything this year –’

  Maddie leaned across me and coolly accepted the offer on my behalf, as though she were my literary agent. ‘She’ll take your card.’

  He had it ready and waiting in his breast pocket. I felt a little bit like a starlet being discovered by a director. I nodded. I didn’t smile, but I let him know I’d consider it. Maybe this was the way I could tell people about it – without having to say anything, just the way I’d given my notebook to Maddie.

  ‘I’ve got a few new poems,’ I said cautiously. I wasn’t convinced any of them were good enough to be published in a literary magazine. I wasn’t convinced any of them would even make sense, outside Ravensbrück.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Bob said, and refilled our glasses.

  I picked mine up again, and took a tentative sip of victory champagne. I remembered now I’d drunk champagne at Maddie’s wedding too, and it tasted better when I was prepared for it. It wasn’t sweet but exciting – new and exotic and sparkling, but dry and cold too – like everything that day, joy mixed with agony.

  ‘Thank you!’ I said, and held my glass to Bob and Maddie and the light. ‘Thank you for waiting.’

  There are four forces which work together if you want to put something into the sky and have it stay there. One of these is lift.

  Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing. Then the wing gets pushed upwards. That’s how birds fly. That’s how kites fly – a kite is basically just a solitary wing. That’s how airplanes fly.

  But people need lift too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up.

  There’s nowhere else in the world I’d have rather been to celebrate victory in Europe than in Paris on VE Day, but I don’t know if I’d feel the same if it hadn’t been for my friends Maddie and Bob generating lift for me – buoying me up at the heavy ebb of my life.

  2. Weight

  Each force in flight is balanced by an opposing force. The opposite of lift is weight. Weight is always trying to pull an object back to earth, so to get something to stay up, lift has to be greater than weight.

  You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive – like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach – there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite.

  Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks. So did the US Air Force pilot who let me take over the controls of his C-47 so I could fly it in long, lazy circles around the Eiffel Tower over the cheering crowds on VE Day.

  My dad sends me an allowance and pays for me to rent a plane from time to time at a civilian flying club outside Edinburgh. I can’t find work as a pilot – there are so many of us cooling our heels with nothing to do now that the war is over. Plenty of women with more experience than me get turned down for the few instructor and air taxi jobs available. The new commercial airlines aren’t interested in women except as hostesses. But my dad, who taught me to fly, wants to make sure I don’t get rusty.

  I can’t work as a pilot anyway, because the university is taking most of my time and a huge amount of effort too. And I like Edinburgh, except for the weather. I already had friends in Scotland when I moved here, and now I have more. I am healing. I have scars that show and scars that don’t. Even when you’re flying high and steady, the weight doesn’t go away – it’s just balanced by lift. I have worked pretty hard over the past year and a half to keep my life in balance. But the weight’s still there, waiting for an increase in gravity to pull me earthwards again.

  There was one factor of weight last year that was sometimes so heavy it made me curl on the floor in front of the tiny coa
l fire in my tiny student bed-sitting room and sob. A year after escaping from Ravensbrück I still hadn’t found my friend Róża. Or anybody I’d known at Ravensbrück. Half of the people I’d loved and fought beside in the concentration camp were dead, and I knew that, but I hadn’t managed to find any of those I’d last seen alive either.

  In the end, they found me. I was, after all, the one who broadcast the distress signal – the one who fired the flares.

  Lisette Romilly tracked me down. Lisette is also a writer, a much more successful and talented writer than me. About two months ago Lisette’s editor at Les Éditions de Minuit in Paris handed her the Spring 1946 edition of the Olympia Review. He thought Bob’s concentration camp survivor story, ‘Half-Remembered Faces’, would interest her – and also the young American poet Rose Justice’s ‘Ravensbrück Poems’.

  Here is her letter to me:

  22 October 1946

  Happy birthday, my dear Rose!

  How astonished I was to see on the printed page your poems which I only know by heart! The biographical note at the end suggests you are well. You will understand both my delight and my anguish at finding you.

  You may know that Róża is now working at the Polish Research Institute in Lund, Sweden, helping to translate and catalogue witness testimony as evidence in trials like the International Military Tribunal recently held at Nuremberg, where the high-ranking Nazi leaders were indicted, and the trials held elsewhere to convict those responsible for individual concentration camps. Trials for Ravensbrück staff are currently being organised by the British in Hamburg, and you may also be aware that three of the Ravensbrück doctors responsible for the medical experiments forced on the Lublin Special Transport will be tried with other Nazi doctors by an American court in Nuremberg in December.

  I have suggested Róża go as a witness to Nuremberg with a number of other girls who were experimental ‘Rabbits’ and who will be appearing at this American tribunal indicting the Nazi doctors. I myself am going to appear as a witness at the first of the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, so will miss the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg. Perhaps you will be able to go to Nuremberg yourself and see Róża there. I have also suggested that the organisers of the Hamburg trials contact you as a potential reliable and articulate witness to the atrocities committed at Ravensbrück.