Rose Under Fire (19 page)

On the other side of me Irina asked in a bored voice, ‘What did the fucking Rabbit say about me?’

‘She told me not to talk to you.’

They had a brief argument in Russian (I think), spitting and hissing like a pair of cats.

‘Fucking Poles,’ Irina said to me in French.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say? What did she say?’

‘Fucking Russians,’ Ró
ż
a half-translated. (Ró
ż
a taught me to swear like a sailor in about half a dozen European languages. The Polish students from Lublin spoke
everything.
It made me feel so stupid sometimes, this uneducated American who could only speak English and barely scrape by in French.)

‘Go ahead and talk to her,’ Ró
ż
a sneered permission. ‘Witch. That’s what the Germans call those Soviet girl pilots –
Nacht Hexen.
Night witches. Go ahead and listen to her propaganda.’

I couldn’t imagine what kind of propaganda I was going to get from a girl who’d been in prison so long it had turned her hair white. In all the time I knew Irina, I never heard her say the words ‘communist’ or ‘party’ without turning away from me and spitting. But most of the Russian women at Ravensbrück were Red Army soldiers. Irina was a little different.

Her lanky height and hollowed face and white crew cut gave her the look of a grim, battle-worn king – Macbeth, maybe – someone competent and ruthless and experienced.

‘I’m not a Night Witch,’ Irina murmured low in my ear. ‘I never flew those tired old sewing machines except when I was training students. I am in Soviet Air Force 296 Regiment, based at Stalingrad. Men and a few women, flying Yaks, chasing together.’

‘Chasing together?’ I pictured a school dance, everyone running around after other people’s partners. ‘Chasing what?’

‘Chasing the Fascists.’ She always said ‘the Fascists’ when she was talking about the Germans. ‘Chasing Fascist aircraft.’

The French word doesn’t mean chasing – it means
hunting.
Irina was a hunter pilot. In English we say fighter, not hunter.

She was a combat pilot.

I was so thrilled it took my breath away. It was like meeting Amelia Earhart. Irina was a woman, and a
fighter pilot.

‘What’s your score?’ I asked breathlessly.

She hesitated, trying to think of the right word. ‘Eleven?’

‘
Eleven?
’

That couldn’t be right. Shooting down five enemy aircraft makes you an official Ace. She’d said eleven – a
double Ace.

She held her hands up so they were silhouetted black against the bright moonlit sky – ten fingers. Then one more, shaken for emphasis. ‘Eleven kills. Decorated Hero of the Soviet Union. Have you many kills?’ she added casually, as if we were comparing notes. She called them
kills
– a hunter bringing down prey.

‘No, I’m a transport pilot.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I was –’ I didn’t know the French for
intercepted.
‘I was caught – caught in the air by Luftwaffe jets. Jets? Fast planes. I had no guns.’

‘When my guns were empty, I made a
taran.
Straight into a Fascist bomber, a fast dive from above. They did not know what hit them. Lost my –’ She didn’t know the French for propeller – she sketched a tight, fast spinning circle in the air above our faces. ‘Forced to land in Poland, and Fascist soldiers picked me up with a face full of glass and half my ribs broken.’

‘You made a
taran
!’

She must have thought I didn’t know what she meant. She smacked the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. ‘In the air. Like this –’

Ró
ż
a’s high voice pitched in suddenly at my other ear in fluent French. ‘
Taran
is a Polish word.’

‘I know! My friend Felicyta told me about it! Aerial ramming!’ And in an agony of excitement I punched a fist at the sky.

Taran.
It is the same word in Polish and Russian. There is a technique to it, which Irina showed me – her hands became planes, wings spread and rigid, above our faces in the sky.

Irina had the most beautiful hands!

(I am amazed I remembered the rhyme scheme for a triolet. Mr Wagner would be proud of me.)

These are your weapons, Irina’s hands told me – pointing with the left, demonstrating with the right. Propeller, fuselage, wing. Go for the enemy wing or rudder, clip it with your own wing or prop.

All around us people were weeping in fear, face down in the dirt, while Irina’s hands flew over our heads. She showed me how she rammed her last kill. Then I showed her how I tipped my V-1 flying bomb.

When the air raid began, anyone who was Camp Police like Karolina had been hustled off to the perimeter ditches to haul sandbags and drag the anti-aircraft guns into position; but Ró
ż
a and Lisette were both watching, and helping along the conversation which was now going on in four languages. I made my hands chase each other in slow motion. My left hand crept up on the right, passed it, slowed down again as the right caught up, four times. Finally thumb to thumb, wing tip to wing tip, a sliver of space between them, until the slight triumphant moment when the wings caress –

And I dropped my right hand like a falling bomb.

‘Again,’ Irina said. ‘There was no touch – no contact?’

I showed her how I’d made the other aircraft stall, filling in English words when I didn’t know the French. Lisette helped in Russian.

Ró
ż
a suddenly interrupted in a hiss of a whisper, ‘
51498!
You told us they arrested you because you landed in the wrong place! Now you’re saying it was because
you knocked down a Luftwaffe plane in a
taran
attack?
’

‘Well – I got caught because I was lost. And I got lost because I went chasing after a flying bomb.’

‘You knocked down a flying bomb and you landed in one piece on a runway afterwards?’

‘Well –’ I held my hands up against the sky. ‘It was the wrong runway.’

‘Think she’s a liar?’ Ró
ż
a asked of no one in particular.

‘A good one, if she is,’ Irina said mildly. ‘The hands know what they are talking about.’

‘Maybe you’re a liar too, Russian Bat Girl.’

‘Maybe I am, Polish Rabbit. What do you care? I think I have met another
taran
pilot.’

Two things happened – another wave of American bombers began to whine past overhead, and one of the watchtowers on the concrete walls exploded with machine gun fire, followed by distant screams.

The guns were aimed at
us.
Or – not at us personally – at some of the other prisoners. ‘
Karolina!
’ Lisette gasped in horror.

Instinctively I snatched my hands out of the air and held them tight against my chest. Instinctively Ró
ż
a grabbed me. Instinctively, on the other side of me, Irina gripped my other hand.

‘It’s not Karolina,’ Ró
ż
a insisted, fiercely reassuring. ‘They’re screaming on the
Appelplatz
, not in the ditches.’ The
Appelplatz
was the big open square where the camp gathered for work details. I don’t know what the prisoners there had done to deserve getting fired at with machine guns. We clung to one another, cowering beneath the invading aircraft and the guns and the sounds of agony on the
Appelplatz.

Then Irina let go of my hand and held her spread fingers a little bit over our faces, the silhouette of a plane in the dark, and rocked her hand as though she were rocking the wings of an aircraft at me. ‘
Taran
,’ she whispered.

Like Elodie whispering, ‘
La victoire!
’ A secret sign of hope, of the slow inevitable end to this NEVER-ENDING WAR.

I rocked my own hand above our faces in the dark for a silent reply.

‘
Taran
,’ I whispered back.

Irina invaded our bunk. There wasn’t even much of a fight. Some of the Russian prisoners had been put on night work and it was less crowded in the bunks than it had been – at least, in ours there were only me and Lisette and Ró
ż
a before Irina turned up.

‘What’s the ugly Russian Bat Girl doing here?’ Karolina asked, crawling back in exhausted ten minutes after the rest of us. (She asked it in Polish, but I
know
that’s more or less what she said.)

‘She’s Rose’s friend,’ said Ró
ż
a. ‘They’re both aerial combat Aces. And I am the prima ballerina of the Warsaw Ballet. Let her stay – she’ll protect you from the other Russian pigs.’

Do you know what I ended up with stuck in my head?

Six hours later the clear sky was gone, and I stood for roll call in the pouring rain, eaten up with anxiety over the thought of all those young American bomber pilots having to fly home through such spectacularly horrible weather. I wasn’t paying any attention to the SS guard screaming incomprehensible numbers in German.

‘
Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig! Die Verfügbar!
’ she yelled. She advanced on our row like a turkey buzzard, red in the face with rain streaming from her black cape. Her awful dog tried unsuccessfully to shake itself dry all over our entire row.

‘That’s you, my dear,’ Lisette whispered from the other side of Irina. ‘She wants an “Available”.
Verfügbar
.’

No one else looked up. No one else even said anything, not daring to risk the narrowest chance of punishment with the dog standing there grinning savagely at us.

‘
Verfügbar!
’ the buzzard-woman screeched again. ‘
Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!
’

Ró
ż
a gave me a little push. ‘Available 51498.’ I stepped out of line feeling like I was going to my doom. Ró
ż
a’s words from my first day in Block 32 rattled in my head: ‘
You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you. Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do
.’

The guard looked me over, then glanced at Irina standing there next to my empty place in line, her gaunt six-foot frame towering over tiny Ró
ż
a. The guard beckoned to Irina with a regal shake of her head. Irina tried to protest – she wasn’t an Available. She was supposed to work in the power plant with a bunch of other Russian girls.

The guard couldn’t have cared less what Irina was supposed to be doing. She slapped Irina in the face for protesting and herded her out of line to join me. Then she drove us both ahead of her through the gate in the chain-link fence that separated our block from the rest of the camp. Standing woefully soaked and miserable out there was a group of a dozen other Availables, waiting for me and Irina to join them in some unknown back-breaking and nasty work assignment.

The guard turned us over to our group leader, a German
Kolonka
(
Kolonka
is a Ravensbrück word, short for something I can’t remember, but basically means forewoman) – the
Kolonka
wasn’t an SS guard, but a German prisoner. She wore a green triangle and a red armband. The red armband showed she was a forewoman and let her go anywhere she wanted. The green triangle showed she was a criminal. One of the very first things Ró
ż
a had told me was how a German criminal with a red armband was exactly the worst combination of work leader, and to my utter terror this one homed in on me right away.

She was nearly as tall as Irina. She had the stub of an unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of her mouth, and she barked orders around it like a gangster. I stood quivering as she pinpointed me to question on the first day I turned up in her work crew. Right there in the pouring rain she pointed to the letters Elodie had embroidered in my sleeve patch. ‘USA?’ she asked curiously.

‘
Ich bin Amerikanerin
,’ I explained.

In perfect, almost unaccented English, she asked, ‘Why are you here?’ She had intense pale green eyes the exact colour of a Coca-Cola bottle. I didn’t answer, and she shrugged a little. ‘Just wondering. I don’t give a shit why you’re here. I went to college in America. But you’re the first American I’ve seen in Ravensbrück.’ Then she began firing these weird, casual, ordinary questions at me. ‘Have you ever been to Chicago?’

I swallowed, at sea as to where this was going. I gave her terse, suspicious answers.

‘I stayed overnight once.’

‘Who’s your favourite band leader?’

‘Um – Tommy Dorsey?’

‘Do you know a recipe for Boston Cream Pie?’

I shook my head.

‘Too bad!’ She twisted her mouth in disappointment. ‘I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie. Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you for being American. If you don’t understand anything I say in German, just ask. Now I’m going to shout at you all to straighten up and get moving, OK? French morons.’

And she did, just launched into a long tirade of orders in German.

French morons?
I wondered.

Irina, who was Russian, was in line next to me. I stole a glance at the girl walking ahead of her, whose left sleeve I could see pretty well. Her red triangle had a defiant black letter ‘F’ embroidered in it the way Elodie had embroidered hers, and I could just make out the number above her political prisoner patch – 51444. She was from my original French transport.