Rose Under Fire (23 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Wein
A couple of mornings later the camp authorities distributed coats, and that made everyone’s hopes soar too, because we were sure they wouldn’t waste winter coats on people they were about to execute. The coats got dumped in big piles outside the chain-link fence around our block, arranged by nationality, with numbers and prisoner patches already sewn on. You were out of luck if your coat didn’t fit. Lisette, who was used to dropping her status as honourary Pole whenever they made us line up in national groups, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the French pile of coats along with the spies and Resistance couriers in their beetroot rouge.
Not surprisingly, these garments had all seen better days; their linings had all been ripped out, and every coat had had one sleeve ripped off and another sleeve of a wildly contrasting colour sewn back in its place, to make them obviously prison coats. We tossed them back and forth, trying to find our own numbers, and suddenly Lisette burst out laughing. She shoved a lightweight pale green wool at me – it had a velvet collar so moth-eaten that no one had bothered to salvage it.
‘Come on!’ Lisette pulled at my arm again. ‘Back in line!’
I started to pull on the coat she’d given me and suddenly recognised the navy contrasting sleeve.
It was from my ATA tunic. My ‘USA’ flash was still in place on the shoulder. That was what had made Lisette laugh.
Wonderful
Elodie!
Later, when I had a chance to check out the coat more closely, I discovered that Elodie had tucked my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy into a pocket hidden on the inside. With the blue thread from the collar of my dress she’d embroidered another rose on the hanky in the corner opposite Aunt Rainy’s, and on either side of it she’d put our initials, with a little French flag under the ‘EF’ and a little American flag under the ‘RJ’.
And she’d also hidden cigarettes in the hem of the coat, and a couple of threaded needles, and three sugar cubes wrapped in paper (worth more than their weight in gold in terms of bribing the insatiable Anna). Hope, hope, soaring like a kite! We were clinging to anything we could. A coat without a lining, full of hidden pencil stubs! What treasure! It was already so
cold
in November.
We had a regular supply of calcium for Ró
ż
a by then too. She screamed and carried on the first time we tried to inject her, until Irina threatened to tie her down and gag her like the SS did when they operated on her in the Bunker. Who do you think Ró
ż
a finally let give her the jabs? NO ONE. She did it herself. She’d rather do it
herself
than let anyone else poke a needle into her.
Thorny little Ró
ż
yczka.
Thanksgiving(by Rose Justice)
From the steaming kitchen it’s a quarter-mile
across the crowded wasteland to the patchwork barrack,
and we two get to haul the drum of soup
heavier than we are. The challenge is
not to let go. It’s a race against time (it will be cold,
already it’s cooled down), a race against
the several thousand grasping hands and gulping mouths
we have to pass before we eat.
(Thank you for the gold November sky,
the warm steel kissing my cold hands, no mud today.)
But first we have to get it down the steps.
We stop to rest outside the kitchen door –
the barrel still is gently hot between us,
steaming like a bath. One second’s pause
to take a breath, gather the strength to lift
and then to drag ourselves and the drum of soup
the endless quarter-mile over the cinders.
One second too long on the steps.
Behind us blows and screams (we are too slow),
and in the square a hundred hungry scarecrows
race towards us ready to lighten our load.
Trapped between buzzards and gaping beaks
we fight like the mutts we are – I
won’t
let go –I’ll fight with teeth and feet, I’ll bite the girl
who tries to scoop a bowlful under my clinging fist –
but when we kick it’s our mistake.
The careful balance goes. The whole thing tips.
(Thank you for the hands that caught the heavy drum
and those who saved what spilled in bowls of soup
and cups of dirt and their cupped palms,
and those who sponged it up with bread
and those who licked the thirsty earth –
Thank you for the chagrin that let us go
with no one begging more, thank you
that now our load was lighter for the long walk back.)
Paris
Guess what – I am dressed.
I have been sitting here writing or pacing around this room stark naked for over a week, and now Fernande has taken me quietly in hand. It started with the extra quilt and now she has moved on to clothing. She brought me a pile of panties and camisoles and a couple of skirts and blouses. She’s built a lot like me, tall and bony. Not as bony as I am now, of course, but she’s built like I ought to be. I don’t think the clothes are hers though – I think they are her daughter’s. She wouldn’t say they were, but she did tell me her daughter had been put in prison and she doesn’t know what happened to her. I am probably wearing another dead woman’s clothes. But it is easier to wear these than the clothes Elodie organised for us, because these have been lovingly looked after in the hope that their owner might come back for them some day.
And maybe Fernande’s daughter will come back. But I doubt it.
This is what’s so heartbreaking: the fact that I am here, alive, has no doubt given Fernande some grain of hope for her daughter. But the fact that I was
there
makes me sure there isn’t any.
My hair is not too bad now – softer, the curl coming back. It’s very short. I have been taking ridiculous long baths and stuffing myself with French cream – I eat it in spoonfuls, like soup, separately from the coffee. It is wonderful just on its own, mixed up with a little sugar (I mix margarine and sugar and eat that too). Fat mixed with sugar is the richest thing I have eaten since forever and I just
crave
it. My hair likes it too.
And I have been able to sleep a little longer each night. I don’t jerk awake at 4 a.m. expecting the Screamer any more. But I still have the dream about the cold wind in the empty bunks. Funny how my Ravensbrück nightmare is about the bunks being empty, because by the end they were
never
empty. The whole camp was so overcrowded we had to sleep in shifts, even during the day.
I have got to keep writing. I can’t talk about it at all; not to Mother or Aunt Edie over the telephone; not to Fernande in broken French. It would break her heart, I think, if I told her about it. I keep wishing I could talk to Nick, but how could I explain any of it to him? How could I
possibly
make Nick understand?
I wrote him a poem for a Christmas present, though of course I knew I couldn’t give it to him then. I still feel the way I do in the poem. Apart from the clean clothes, I am still a walking ghost. I don’t know how I can possibly explain to him what’s happened to me.
There won’t be anything to say
.
Love Song & Self Portrait(by Rose Justice)
At first I dreamed that you
offered warm arms of comfort and strength,
pulling me close,
your soft lips brushing and kissing my bare head,
all of you loving me,
the nightmare over and the dream come true –
Now I only dream that you
offer me bread.
My dreams still produce you
out of habit, but the sweet
longing for your touch is gone.
I long for nothing from you any more
but something to eat.
And if I did come back,
what in return could I offer to you,
who used to make so free
with my softness and kisses and verse
as if it were your due?
Imagine me
on your doorstep – would you laugh in the old way
and greet me lovingly:
Hello, it’s been a long time,
how are you today?
I would offer you myself
in mismatched shoes and blood-soaked rags,
shaved scalp all scabs
and face gone grey,
no old woman but a walking ghost
on a skeleton’s frame –
And you would be forced to look away.
There won’t be anything to say.
*
If it was a clear night during a roll call, we’d get a whispered astronomy lesson from one of the imprisoned university professors. The astronomy lessons drove me crazy because they were in Polish.
‘What did she say?’ I whispered, getting frustrated, because I really loved learning the names of the stars – except for languages, astronomy was the one class we could do practically, and I couldn’t understand the Polish astronomy teacher.
Karolina whispered, ‘She said it is December, and we won’t see Arcturus in the evening until spring. When we see Arcturus again the war will be over!’
I gasped. ‘It’s
December
! My gosh – I’m nineteen! I forgot my birthday!’
‘Forgot your birthday!’ Ró
ż
a snickered with scorn. ‘You’ve missed your name day too. Yours is the same as mine, Rose, September 4th, and I
never
forget. We have a party
every year
, and my sixteenth, last year, was so special. Zosia and Genca were on firewood-gathering duty in the pine forest, and they made me a flower wreath. And Gitte brought me a cake. A cake, honestly, a centimetre thick and as big around as the palm of my hand, with jam and margarine. They stole it from the infirmary – I’d just been operated on for the fifth time and I was too sick to eat the cake, but I wore the wreath.’ Ró
ż
a knew perfectly well how utterly pathetic this sounded, and poked me slyly. ‘Tell us about your sixteenth. Did you have a cake with roses made out of pink frosting?’
‘I did!’ I exclaimed in astonishment. ‘How did you guess?’
‘Your name is Rose.’
Irina shook with silent laughter.
‘Was there champagne?’ Lisette asked.
‘No, Mother wouldn’t let us. We had Shirley Temple cocktails – ginger ale and grenadine. And Daddy hired a dance band. The party was in the hangar at Justice Field, and we spent the whole day before it moving planes out on to the field to get the hangar ready, and then we decorated it with dozens of coloured paper lanterns shaped like owls –’
Crushing, black embarrassment kicked me in the head at this point and I clammed up.
‘It’s not a crime you weren’t in prison on your sixteenth birthday, darling,’ Lisette said gently.
Ró
ż
a let out one of her insane giggles. ‘Have you
ever
committed a crime, Rosie?’
‘Shut up, 7705!’ Karolina hissed. ‘I don’t want to hear about her criminal activities. I want to hear about her pink cake and Shirley Temple cocktails.’
I know why I forgot my birthday. It was sometime while I was in the Bunker. I had entirely forgotten who I was by the end of that two weeks. I lost count long before nineteen.
The camp authorities shot our
Blockova
Gitte next. We didn’t see that coming, but we should have, shouldn’t we? Since they didn’t shoot the Rabbits? We should have known we weren’t going to get away with our desperate war of passive defiance. But we thought they’d take it out on us, not on Gitte. Although, of course, murdering Gitte and replacing her with the demon
Blockova
Nadine Lutz
was
taking it out on us.
After Nadine arrived, there was no talking while we ate, no talking while the knitters worked, no talking in the bunks – we were allowed to talk outside on Sunday afternoons only. Most of our communication happened while we were going to the toilet, because Nadine wouldn’t come near the waste ditches when everyone else was going. But she’d dole out soup herself for the sheer pleasure of smacking you on the head with the empty ladle afterwards. She brought reinforcement guards with their dogs inside the barrack, even at night. It didn’t stop us trying to whisper, but it made every word we said to each other weighted with terror. One night she set a couple of dogs loose in the bunks. Gosh, we hated those dogs. The most common injury people turned up with in the sickbay, according to Anna, was dog bites.
I can’t describe how desperate we were to fly below the Demon Nadine’s radar – to fool her, to go behind her back. We did crazy things. We’d be standing in a never-ending roll call and I’d inch one foot out of the mismatched shoe that was a little too big, so slowly you couldn’t see me moving, and then I’d nudge Ró
ż
a in the ribcage and she’d turn her head and glance down at my toes and stifle a giggle. You could still see the nail polish, disappearing into a thin ruby crescent as my toenails grew out, like the waning moon. Ró
ż
a would poke Karolina in her ribs and hiss, ‘Candy store’s open.’ And Karolina would poke Irina, and we’d all stand there poking each other and snorting with stifled mirth until Lisette exclaimed, ‘
Shhh!
’ as Nadine looked in our direction, and I’d ram my foot back into the muddy shoe and stare vacantly at the back of the woman in front of me.
Playing Statues(by Rose Justice)
If I sigh my shoulders rise and fall.
It counts as movement. I won’t sigh. I’ll blink.
I’ll count how many blinks it takes before
the shadow of the smokestack hits the wall.
But if I blink I’ll fall asleep. I’ve closed my eyes before
standing in line; it’s dangerous to blink.
I’ll watch the sky.
I’ll count how many crows
touch the long cloud behind the trees.
Oh God, but then I’ll cry.
Wings in the pine boughs always make me think
of freedom. I won’t count or blink or sigh.
I’ll think of food. I’ll think of bread and meat,
pretend that when we’re told to go
there will be pepper pot
thick with tripe chunks, spicy and faintly sweet,
like Mrs Kessler sells on Union Street.
God no, and no, and no! Of all things, not
Union Street
: Don’t think of
Union Street
!Don’t think of
home
.Anything else but that. I’ll throw
myself on the electric wire. I’ll wiggle my toes.
I’ll sprint to the end of the row
and sock that pretty dog handler in the nose.
That makes me smile and clench my fist.
I’m out. She sees me move. Now I
can blink and sigh and sob.
She’ll make me count the blows.
