Rose Under Fire (24 page)

My work team of Tall Girls got sent back to the maintenance shed we’d cleared out earlier.

Since we’d been there some prisoners from the men’s camp had boarded up the windows and the big garage doors of the shed, and replaced them with just a normal-sized set of wooden doors. Now we had to paint the interior walls black as high as we could reach. Once the guards made us understand what they wanted, they locked us in – Anna was allowed to make herself a little camp outside the new door of the building, with a crate for a chair and a coffee can or something for a stove with a fire in it like a hobo. Where she got the coal and how she got away with burning it right out there in the open, I will never know. But she was a red armband. She could get away with a lot.

And because we had Anna for a guard, we could get away with little acts of rebellion while she wasn’t looking. Inside the shed, Irina scavenged in the corners – nails, scraps of thin copper wire like they used in Siemens, wood splinters. French Political Prisoner 51444, otherwise known as Micheline, got busy painting Allied defiance all over the walls in letters three feet tall:
VIVE LA FRANCE! VIVENT LES ALLIÉS! MORT AUX NAZIS!
and a token GOD BLESS AMERICA! Her friend 51350 followed behind frantically covering everything up so they wouldn’t get caught.

‘You’ll get us into so much trouble!’

‘You should have seen what I got up to when I worked in the post office,’ Micheline said. ‘We’d put big black censor stamps all over instructions being sent to German officers, or we’d steam open envelopes and swap letters around so they went to the wrong people, or steam off stamps so there was postage due – and anything that came from Paris with a German name on it we’d return to sender. Every now and then we’d send off a mailbag with a burning cigarette butt tied up inside it. My God, I miss the thrill of being a civil servant!’

We all laughed. Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.

We sure did drag out that paint job as long as we could. It was wonderful to be able to talk to each other for a little while without having to whisper or worry that someone would hit us.

I also painted words on the walls. It was such a relief to be able to write down what I was thinking instead of having to memorise it. It is true that I had to obliterate everything I’d written, but I think it is much easier to write a poem when you can write it down. I couldn’t have written ‘The Subtle Briar’ without that paint job. I spent three days slapping black paint on the walls of a disused warehouse and refining the most complex and ambitious poem I’ve ever written.

When we’d caked the entire interior of the building in black about three quarters of the way to the ceiling, they turned out all the lights and shut us in so we could paint over the places where cracks of light came in through the boarded windows and around the newly built front wall.

Try standing on a ladder in pitch-darkness with a bucket of black paint and not get any on yourself or the girl who’s on the ladder beneath you. When they let us out as it was getting dark, in time to eat, all of us were covered head to foot in black paint. I had paint
in my ears
. We stood blinking blindly in the harsh street lights, but of course we didn’t get any time to readjust to reality – just got shoved back into our fives and marched back to camp.

‘What the hell are they making you do?’ Ró
ż
a demanded.

Our shed-clearing-and-painting job was a fierce discussion topic whenever we were allowed, or able, to talk. Lined up along the ditches in the dark at 4 a.m. usually.

‘They’re repurposing a maintenance shed.’

‘By boarding up and blacking out the windows? Why does it have to be so dark? What are they going to put inside it?’

‘Maybe it’s a new quarantine block – someplace to process new prisoners,’ Lisette said.

‘You know what it’s for,’ Karolina accused quietly. ‘You know it. You won’t say it, but you know it. They have all these prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and nothing to feed them. They are building a gas chamber.’

‘They are building two,’ said Irina. ‘A new building is going up outside the north wall. The men’s camp is building it.’

Hope is treacherous. Lisette insisted, ‘That is a laundry, my dear. Ravensbrück is a work camp, not a death camp – an ordinary camp!’

‘They don’t dare shoot us in handfuls,’ said Karolina. ‘They’re going to kill us all at once.’

It took me a long time to write ‘The Subtle Briar’, but it was translated into three languages in a day. Every time it got passed on I got another bread ration. Oh God, we needed
something
to cling to. We were scared.

They shot half a dozen Red Army women from our block, and six more from the Lublin Transport, though not Rabbits. No one knew anything about it ahead of time. It was a week before Christmas, and I’m sure of the timing, because Karolina wasn’t there with us for roll call that day. Nadine had caught Karolina showing off a little paper tree with tiny pop-out birds that she’d made for Lisette for a Christmas present, and had sent her to the Bunker for
Fünfundzwanzig
. We were standing in the early morning roll call – before breakfast, hearts aching for Karolina – when they just pulled the girls right out of line and made them take their coats off and hand them over to someone. That’s how we knew they wouldn’t be coming back.

That one girl’s face, looking back at us in defiance as they led her away, bleak and desperate, biting her lip. She went shivering to her death in the dark, in the flowered summer dress she’d been wearing when I got here. One of the other girls tried to take her hand, and the guards wouldn’t let her – they had to walk alone to their execution. We stood in silence for another half an hour while they counted us, but all I could think of was when I’d hear the shots and I’d know they were dead.

No one would ever know what happened to them
.

The distant claps of sound made me jump half out of my skin when they finally came.

Lisette gave a single, angry sob. But the executed Polish and Russian girls hadn’t cried as they’d walked away, so I bit my lip like the one in the flowered dress, bit my lip until it was bruised and bleeding, and I didn’t cry either.

They booted Karolina back into Block 32 as soon as they’d finished with her. She was at work later that day, knitting socks until she was well enough to go back to her patrol.

Being lashed in the Bunker turned her into a spluttering wreck. We had to let her lie on the edge of the bunk so she could have her back to the narrow aisle. She clung to me like a monkey, and I held her hands so she wouldn’t fall off. Her mouth was so close to my ear that she could speak to me in almost less than a whisper. ‘Do you think the scars will be as bad as yours? I don’t want scars like yours! It’s not fair, it’s not
fair
, they ruined my leg and now they’ve destroyed my back! I want to go to the Venice film festival awards wearing a Chanel evening gown, I want to wear a red bathing suit and sunbathe on the beach at the Lido –’

Ró
ż
a didn’t tease her. Actually, I don’t think Ró
ż
a could hear her. But even if she could, you didn’t make fun of someone who got
Fünfundzwanzig
.

‘You had twice five and twenty,’ Karolina whispered to me in wonder. ‘
Twice
in a week. I only had one round and I can’t stand up and I can’t sit down and I have to go back into the anti-aircraft ditches tomorrow. How did you bear it when they beat you the second time?’

‘I don’t know.’ I really don’t. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘I don’t want people to see the scars!’

‘Who cares about the scars! I’ll wear a red bathing suit anyway. I don’t care who sees my scars! Not me – I can’t see them! I’ll wear a two-piece!’

‘Your Nick will like you in a red two-piece,’ Karolina whispered. ‘Tell me a Nick Story.’

The Nick Stories were evolving from fabulous rescue fantasies into rhapsodies about food which often had nothing to do with Nick – I couldn’t stop myself. But it was dreamily distracting to make them up.

This one was just for Karolina. I didn’t dare whisper loudly enough for the others to hear, but Karolina needed distracting. My lips barely moved against her ear.

‘OK. It’s just after supper and there was meat in the soup, chunks of sausage, so you’re feeling strong. You and me are carrying the empty barrel back to the kitchens. And there’s a full moon, everything is light, all silver, and the
Appelplatz
and the
Lagerstrasse
are empty, they haven’t started the evening roll call yet. And then you hear this clattering old-fashioned airplane engine. It’s a German plane, with ugly long wheel struts like a stork – actually it
is
a Stork, Nick’s stolen a German Stork so the anti-aircraft guns won’t shoot at him because it’s a German plane. And Nick lands right in the middle of the empty
Appelplatz
. You and I drop our empty soup pot and run, and Nick opens the door, and we jam ourselves into the back seat – you can sit on my lap. And he flies us back to –’

Here I stalled, brutal reality kicking in. Where would we go?

‘The Lido,’ Karolina whispered back. ‘Let’s go to the beach on the beautiful Adriatic Sea. Red bathing suits for both of us in the back seat.’

I wonder where Nick is now, what he’s doing. If he’s still alive. Oh, I hope so – I hope so.

Paris

I had a phone call today from Aunt Edie, but the line was very bad and she was in a hurry – I didn’t ask about Nick. Edie is coming to get me this weekend. I am panicking about that now – having to see Aunt Edie and be polite. I can hardly bear to think of the shock on her face when she sees me. It’s one thing to fool Mother on a transatlantic phone call, but I won’t be able to fool Aunt Edie face to face.

I don’t understand why I don’t want to go home. How can it be possible for me to feel more desolate than I did on Christmas Day?

Christmas presents – poems and feathers and bracelets made of string or paper. Elodie sent me a minuscule tea set made out of tinfoil and I tore my rose hanky in half diagonally to make two little triangular ones, and gave Elodie the side with Aunt Rainy’s pretty embroidery. Karolina made me the most wonderful tiny flipbook that played a two-second cartoon she’d drawn, of me in my Spitfire ramming the flying bomb. The bomb exploded into stars in the last frame.

There was a Christmas tree set up in the
Lagerstrasse
– with
lights
– cross my heart. They played German carols over the loudspeakers, ‘Oh, Christmas Tree’ and ‘Silent Night’. And gave us jam and margarine with our bread. The SS guards got blotto, staggering drunk. In Block 32 we were allowed to sing carols, mostly in French and Polish and Russian so I couldn’t join in – but I told a ton of fantastic stories. Nick performed a series of daring rescues and we all ended up skating on the Conewago Grove Lake, and then there was a rambling Hotel Hershey story involving sleds and a sumptuous Pennsylvania Dutch smörgåsbord buffet.

I mostly gave everybody poems for Christmas, but I made another for Lisette, after our Christmas Day disaster. Actually, it was for thorny little Ró
ż
yczka. But neither one of us ever told her about this one.

It had been my idea to do the Christmas bread, and Karolina who did the artwork – we were so excited about surprising the others. We cut our entire ration into squares an inch wide, like Fliss did back in Hamble, and we decorated them with
stars
, a scraping of margarine and a tiny star-shaped blob of red jam on each square.