Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  It was my turn to feel like I’d been punched in the stomach and she saw it in my face. Róża let out one of her familiar, maniacal cackles. ‘You won’t even have to take your clothes off!’

  ‘I’ve already said no,’ I said faintly.

  ‘Bah. Bribe the judges.’

  Which is exactly what Anna had said.

  And suddenly it became like so many decisions I’d made during the war: I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it whether I wanted to or not. Not just for Karolina, who was dead, but also for Anna, who was still alive and had no one to defend her.

  You only fly straight and level in balance.

  Anna and Róża are the opposing forces that perfectly balance each other to keep me in the air.

  It was harder to get the words out this time than the easy promise I’d made to Anna in the washroom in the Palace of Justice.

  ‘You’ve got a deal,’ I gasped.

  Róża and I got up at the crack of dawn and shared a car with a couple of BBC reporters who were heading out that day with a lot of equipment. They wouldn’t let us help them carry anything, and one of them actually went out of his way to take Róża’s arm and help her across the churned slush to the makeshift Operations building at the airfield, which meant he had to do two trips – but sometimes you have to just give up being independent and graciously accept the kindness that’s offered you. And anyway, this was without a doubt the sorriest excuse for an airfield I have ever seen, even counting the one they knocked up at Camp Los Angeles right after Reims was liberated. I guess that is our own fault for bombing Nuremberg’s real airfield to smithereens.

  I’m painting a scene of gloom, but in fact it was a glorious, glorious day – crystal clear and breezy. There had been another inch or so of snow overnight so folks were frantically clearing a very narrow path up the runway. Chuck produced flight suits for us, which for some reason made Róża laugh her head off – her real laugh, which I’d hardly ever heard in all the time I’d known her, bubbly as champagne. ‘Are we going to go skiing?’ she asked.

  ‘Why skiing?’

  ‘My mother used to put me in this awful snowsuit – baggy legs just like this, four sizes too big for me, and it was purple. She’d roll up the legs and hold them in place with rubber bands.’

  I’d never heard her talk about her mother either.

  There weren’t any passenger seats in the plane – just benches along one side and plenty of room for cargo. Róża clutched my hand as we approached the plane. Dakotas are big.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ I told her. ‘It’s like getting in a bus. You’ve never flown in daylight, but it really is beautiful in the air. If you close your eyes while we’re taking off –’ I stopped abruptly, remembering Polly’s reaction to the same words.

  ‘I’m not a baby,’ Róża snapped, holding her head up, her china doll cheeks rosy with the brisk December wind. ‘I said I’d do it and I’m doing it with my eyes open. Are you going to close your eyes in Hamburg?’

  ‘You really are the world’s worst pain in the neck,’ I complained. But my heart ached for her bravery.

  I hadn’t actually thought about our route when I’d set up the trip. I’d thought we’d see a lot of bomb-damaged cities – I’d seen so much bomb damage from the air. I’d wondered, briefly, when I first got the idea of taking Róża flying, if I could find someone who’d fly us over Ravensbrück. After I’d hung up talking to Chuck the night before, I’d had to go hide in the ladies’ powder room and sob for a while. Oh, Karolina.

  But I hadn’t actually realised that this flight was going to give both me and Róża our first sight of the Alps.

  The first part of the trip was mostly just snowy fields and forest, gleaming swathes of white and increasingly huge tracts of black-green pine. Then, as we made our way further south, the landscape grew rockier and steeper and we could see the crags of the Austrian Alps climbing ahead of us. They don’t pressurise the C-47s and they didn’t have oxygen hooked up in the back, so the highest we flew was about 10,000 feet. That meant that there were moments when we were flying between mountain peaks. Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain, was blinding in the midwinter’s day sunlight, glittering white and gold and rising 2,000 feet higher than we were flying. It was like flying over another planet – over another world, Oz or Wonderland or the moon.

  Honestly – there were moments, many of them, when we were between peaks, with snowbound crags and rock all around us, when Róża really was so enchanted that she forgot to be scared. We were surrounded, as far as we could see, by our world’s sheer unspoiled majesty. It was unspeakably, indescribably beautiful. It wasn’t even barren. We could see glimpses of valleys and farms; there far below a touch of green where it hadn’t snowed yet; there a river; there a fairy-tale village.

  We were both pressed to the windows on opposite sides of the empty cargo plane.

  ‘Did you know?’ Róża gasped. ‘Did you know it would look like this?’

  ‘I didn’t even think about it! We just got lucky!’

  ‘Even without the beach it is worth it. I won’t mind so much getting work sewing on laundry tags if I remind myself about this.’

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that driblet of self-pity.

  I asked cautiously, ‘Róża, what are you doing for Christmas?’

  ‘There’s a party at the Institute. It was fun last year – Poles and Swedes all mixed up. I don’t know how much fun it’ll be this year though, since the funding is finished and nobody has work in 1947.’

  ‘Do you actually have a real possibility of spending the next few years sewing on laundry tags?’

  ‘No. I haven’t looked for that job yet.’

  ‘For the love of Pete.’

  No wonder she seemed so beaten.

  ‘What are you doing for Christmas, Rose?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to Pennsylvania?’

  ‘How could I? It takes a week. I’d be on the boat on Christmas Day!’

  Róża gave one of her raucous hoots of laughter. ‘Fly. Did you go last year?’

  ‘No, I had an awful Christmas with my Aunt Edie and Uncle Roger in England. I did nothing but cry all Christmas Day. It was worse than the year before. All of you were gone. And the next day, the 26th, they have this big annual party and there were about a hundred people in the house and I just felt like a freak. So this year –’

  Throughout this entire conversation we’d had our backs turned to each other, standing on opposite sides of the bowels of the plane, glued to the small windows. There was frost on the rivets and the grey ribs of the plane’s interior walls. But outside it was fairyland.

  I said, ‘Róża, come back to Scotland with me on Monday. I’m going to stay with my friend Maddie for a week with her husband’s family. Maddie told me to bring my friends. I know I promised you the Hotel Hershey, but I swear that Craig Castle will be just as nice.’

  ‘Oh, how could I!’

  ‘Easy! The place is always full of orphans and soldiers with missing arms – they won’t notice you. I mean –’

  She giggled evilly. ‘The soldiers will, I bet.’

  ‘Yes, they definitely will, but I meant that one more –’

  ‘– One more crippled orphan.’

  ‘Oh, STOP. You know what I mean.’ I drew a shaking breath. ‘And anyway, we are in the same family. That won’t change.’

  Ahead of us, the mountains dropped away and the black-green forest gave way to duller and brighter green ahead. The Italian fields were tiny and patchwork – you could tell you were in another country. Far, far away on the horizon was an astonishing stripe of sapphire that we knew, but couldn’t quite believe, must be the Adriatic Sea.

  ‘There is a medical school at the University in Edinburgh which they teach entirely in Polish,’ I said. ‘They started it in the middle of the war. I could take you to meet my tutor and we could ask about it. You could do your high school exams in Edinburgh and maybe try the university course next fall –’

 
; ‘We could share an apartment?’

  ‘Of course! And Róża –’ I choked a little, because it felt like we were making up another rescue fantasy. It felt like we couldn’t possibly be planning something that would really happen. ‘Róża, we can write our book.’

  And honestly, why not?

  Why not? We were free and independent. We were grown-ups. Even if she wasn’t working to begin with, little Różyczka wouldn’t be very expensive to feed. We might need more space than my bed-sitting room offered. But not much. We wouldn’t need much. We’d shared a lot less.

  Now she didn’t even say anything. She just came over to share my window with me and took my hand and squeezed it hard. And I knew it wasn’t just another Nick Story, another impossible rescue fantasy. We were really going to do it. She’d come with me to Scotland on Monday.

  She’d probably come with me to Hamburg in January.

  We could see the coast as we landed, green flat fields arching lazily towards Yugoslavia, the docks of Monfalcone crowded with US Navy ships, the narrow strip of sand at the edge of the marsh across the bay. That was where we were going. It wasn’t a resort – it wasn’t the Lido. But it was a beach on the Adriatic. It really was.

  Róża let go of my hand as we landed. She watched out the window, unflinching, the whole way down. She’d made up her mind she wasn’t scared. I could believe she’d delivered plastic explosive for the Polish Resistance on her bicycle when she was in ninth grade. I could believe she’d told the SS camp commander she’d rather be executed than be experimented on again.

  She climbed out of the plane without letting anybody help her.

  Ronchi dei Legionari wasn’t exactly tropical. That part of the Adriatic Sea is actually the most northern coast of anything connected to the Mediterranean. You can still see the Alps, blue in the near distance. The sun was shining, but the stiff breeze was chilly. It smelled like the ocean. It felt like spring.

  I caught my breath in panic all of a sudden. If only we had something to do, I thought. I don’t want to stand on a strange beach feeling blue about Karolina. We need sand pails and shovels to distract us. Something to collect shells in. Fishing nets –

  Róża turned to me and said, ‘Remember Irina’s paper planes? Remember the glider? My sister and I used to make kites out of newspaper. You think they’d let us have some paper and string?’

  *

  They did better than that. They gave us silk maps. The airfield had been a materiel supply depot since Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943 and, among other things, they still had a big box of unused aircrew escape maps of all of southern Europe sitting in a corner of their radio room. Everybody on the airfield got involved – actually, I think everyone fell a little in love with Róża, swamped in her enormous flight suit with its rolled-up cuffs, with her fluffy caramel hair shining in the dusty sunlight streaming through windows still crossed with peeling tape so they wouldn’t shatter in an air raid. Someone found a reel of fishing line and balsam strips to make a frame with. The gum-cracking receptionist cut us a strip of the silver tinsel Christmas garland she’d draped round the door for us to use as a tail. She made us pose with her for a snapshot.

  ‘You gals are nuts,’ she said approvingly. ‘Gosh, I wish I could come with you. It’s mighty boring sitting here waiting for phone calls and watching the planes come and go. I don’t speak Italian so I’m too scared to go out by myself when I’m done – gotta wait for one of the boys to come along and escort me! Have fun!’

  Sitting in the back of an American military jeep next to Róża, as one of the mechanics drove us along a muddy track through a pine swamp and we struggled to keep our silk kite from taking off on its own before we got anywhere, I felt very smug and lucky.

  It is nice to feel that way.

  ‘What does “nuts” mean?’

  ‘She meant we’re crazy.’

  ‘We are.’

  We’d walked right up to the water’s edge, knee-high rippling waves that were a colour I’d never imagined – an opaque, pale green, like mint sugar wafers. You could see the big steamers and Navy ships across the bay, the way you could from the little village of Hamble, just outside Southampton, where I’d been stationed when I was an ATA pilot. The sky was a pure, piercing blue, utterly without any cloud in it anywhere.

  ‘Remember the sky at Ravensbrück?’ Róża said.

  ‘Yes, always beautiful, even when it was snowing.’

  ‘Remember the sunset the night you and Karolina spilled half a drum of soup on the kitchen steps?’

  ‘Oh, I wrote a poem about that – clouds like flaming rubies and fireworks, and all of us sobbing over the horrible soup. The irony! What about the shooting stars that night in November, in the early-morning roll call!’

  ‘The Leonids!’ Róża remembered. ‘And what about the rainbow? The full double rainbow? Lisette started to cry!’

  ‘I longed to be in the sky,’ I said. ‘When it was windy like this, I just watched the clouds or leaves or birds racing overhead and I longed to be up there with them. It hurt.’

  ‘Here we are,’ she answered softly. ‘Free in the wind!’

  Suddenly she launched into my kite poem.

  ‘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.’

  I stared at the brilliant sky, listening to Róża softly chanting my own words.

  ‘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.’

  She paused. The first thing I’d ever said to her was a poem, so after a moment I finished this one for her, softly.

  ‘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.’

  She was quiet then. The last verse isn’t really very hopeful. Poor ragged kite, always waiting for a wind that never comes.

  Finally Róża took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s windy now,’ she said.

  She put down her walking stick to take the spool of fishing line. She played out about six feet and let go. The wind was fierce and steady and the kite lifted like a bird. We both stared up at it, and it was like looking at a landscape from the air, the silk map bright with green and yellow and brown and blue. The tinsel tail snapped and flashed blindingly. After a second our beautiful improvised kite did exactly what the one does in the poem, and plunged earthward – I grabbed it by the fragile frame before it nosedived into the sand.

  ‘It needs thrust,’ I said. ‘You have to run with it. Can you run?’

  She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over her shoulder, letting out line as I held the kite above my head.

  ‘Run with me, Rose,’ she cried.

  by Rose Justice

  Craig Castle, Castle Craig

  December 31, 1946

  Afterword

  Declaration of Causes

  Primo Levi, the author of possibly the most moving descriptions of Auschwitz in print, felt that the true witnesses to the atrocities of the concentration camps were the dead. Survivors like himself, he felt, could only give partial testimony. Memories become fixed or simplified or distorted as they are told over and over, making living testimony inaccurate. This was one of the themes we discussed at length at the 8th European Summer School at Ravensbrück in August 2012 – how memory itself is a construction, particularly as it becomes more and more dist
anced in time from actual events.

  Rose’s testimony is even further removed because I made it up. In Rose’s story, I have constructed an imitation of a survivor’s account. It has become a false memory of my own – Rose’s dream of the icy wind in the empty bunks is my dream, the single vivid nightmare I had while sleeping in the former SS barracks at Ravensbrück during the week I spent at the Summer School. My book is fiction, but it is based on the real memories of other people. In the end, like Rose, I am doing what I can to carry out the last instruction of the true witnesses – those who went to their death crying out: Tell the world.

  What I’d really like to pound into the reader’s head, if there’s any lesson to be learned here, is that I didn’t make up Ravensbrück. I didn’t make up anything about Ravensbrück. Often I have had to fill in the blanks – when the toilets stopped working, how thick the mattresses were, how you might improvise a sanitary pad. The little things. The terrible and the unbelievable, the gas chambers and the medical experiments and the twenty-five lashes, propping up the dead to make the roll call count come out right, the filth and the dog bites and the curl hunts and the administration and politics of bowls, I did not make up. It was real. It really happened to 150,000 women. And that is just one camp.

  I did simplify some things in order to keep the pace going. I kept the Rabbits in Block 32 for the whole story, when technically they got moved into different blocks a couple of times during the winter of 1945. I left out the fact that between being selected and being gassed prisoners got taken to another camp, about a mile away, where they were locked in unheated barracks without food or blankets and left to starve or freeze to death to make it easier on the limited capacity of Ravensbrück’s makeshift gas chamber. I didn’t explain that the female ‘SS guards’ were technically auxiliary to the SS, which was all male. I didn’t translate every one of Rose’s conversations into three different languages before she could understand it.