Rose Under Fire (29 page)

The only thing that makes this a fairy story is the idea that we could ever all be there together.

The Nick Stories were all these ridiculous rescue dramas, Hollywood hero antics that could never happen in a million years. But the Lake Stories – I didn’t even bother to pretend the staff at the refreshment stand would bring us our drinks in a Lake Story. We’d help ourselves and pay, just the way anyone would. Even the boys asking us for a canoe race really happened last summer – I mean the summer before last, 1943, on that wonderful weekend before Labor Day when I’d nearly finished at the boring old paper box factory and I spent the day at the lake with Polly and Fran.

And that is what makes it
so unfair
. It is such a
simple
fairy story.

Lisette dragged me and Ró
ż
a out of the pit during breakfast on the third morning and helped us change into clothes I knew had been organised by Elodie – plain, respectable stuff – navy skirt and stockings, and incredibly good coats, with wool cuffs and collars and lining still attached, though the elbows were threadbare. Numbers stolen from dead women were attached to the right sleeves, and there was no evidence of yellow star patches on the fronts. Warsaw coats, not Auschwitz coats. Lisette’s hands were cold and her face was drained and grim. I knew something terrible had happened, something that had changed her world.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Irina came back to that roll call wearing your coat,’ Lisette said. ‘And Karolina fought her for it.’

‘They fought over my
coat
 
?’ I repeated dumbly, astonished. They wouldn’t do that, either one of them.

Ró
ż
a understood instantly. ‘They didn’t fight over your coat, you turnip head,’ she said coldly. ‘They fought over your
number
.’

Lisette looked away from me, her cold hands still helping me into the warmest clothes I’d worn for months and months.

‘Did Irina win?’ I whispered.

‘Karolina won.’

I feel like it is the worst thing I have ever done – lie weeping in a hole in the ground while Karolina –

I can’t write it.

‘You have
one task only
this morning and that is to keep anyone from noticing Ró
ż
a’s legs. Hide her, hold her up – if she falls over, make it look like you have knocked her down. Irina is going to be on the same transport, so look for her and she will help you. There can be one of you on each side of Ró
ż
a when you get to the other end, but you will be on your own until you find Irina.’

‘Where’s Irina?’ we asked together.

‘She’s in the Punishment Block –’

‘Because –?’ Ró
ż
a interrupted, and then guessed, ‘For fighting with another prisoner during roll call, right? For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat?’

Lisette pressed her thin lips together, and I caught the crazed wet gleam in her eyes that had been there when I’d first met her, right after Zosia and Genca had been shot. Not for the first time, I wanted to punch Ró
ż
a in the teeth.

‘For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat,’ Lisette agreed. ‘They are shipping out the whole Punishment Block this morning; I don’t know why, but you are going with them.’

‘In
these
clothes?’

‘There will be some Warsaw evacuees as well; they’re still wearing civilian clothes. You know where the transport trucks line up? You’ll have to wait till they bring Irina’s block out and then get into line with them. Oh, darling
Ró
ż
yczka
–’

‘Rose will take care of me,’ Ró
ż
a said with composure. Because I couldn’t say it myself. I wasn’t sure.

‘What if they take you straight to –’

‘What if they take us straight to Monte Carlo? We’ll be rich!’ Ró
ż
a laughed hilariously.

Lisette kissed Ró
ż
a on both cheeks. She gave me six slices of bread, wealth beyond imagining – two slices each, two days’ worth, to last us who knew how long. And who knew where she got it. Then she kissed me too.

‘
Get her out
,’ Lisette said. She didn’t say goodbye to us. But of course she hadn’t said goodbye to any of her other children. And this time she had a slender hope we weren’t going to be killed.

And this time she was right, as it happens, though she never knew, and may be dead. I can’t believe Lisette is dead, but she probably is, and I’ll never know that either.

It was about six weeks ago – I have been in Paris for just over two weeks, writing and writing, and we left Ravensbrück late in March. It hadn’t stopped snowing when we left – at that point I thought it was
never
going to stop snowing.

Irina was easy to find because she is so tall, and because of her white hair. She looked as dazed and crazed as Lisette, standing in line waiting to climb into the transport truck. She was staring at nothing. We couldn’t get near her, but we got into the same truck.

You know, I think we could have climbed into any truck we wanted to. Who’d have ever dreamed that any prisoner would
willingly
climb into one of those stinking, overcrowded, hellbound crates? Who’d have dreamed that
I
would?

It was bomb fuses all over again – like taking the fuse away from the boy on the railway tracks, or refusing to make the relay.
I didn’t have a choice
. I really didn’t. I
had
to climb into that truck with Ró
ż
a. For Karolina – for Lisette. For Micheline and Elodie. For
Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia
–

Controlled flight into terrain.

We were expecting something like a three-day trip with maybe a bucket of water to share among us, nothing to use for a toilet, and having to sleep standing up because there wasn’t any room to sit down. We were expecting that, prepared for it. Resigned to it anyway. But the journey didn’t take much more than an hour. And we knew we’d really been driving somewhere, not going in the slow and terrible final circle around the outside of the camp.

They didn’t let us out right away. The hours crawled by. When they finally opened the trucks, for the first few minutes, while everybody was untangling themselves from one another and gulping in fresh air, there were only two things I thought about: hiding Ró
ż
a’s legs, and getting to Irina. I dragged Ró
ż
a under one arm and I shoved my way towards Irina’s white head. Irina caught Ró
ż
a under her other arm and then I’d done both my jobs.

‘Where is this place?’ Irina asked pointlessly. Who had any idea? It was a rhetorical question and I looked around rhetorically –

And I knew where we were.
I knew where we were
.

We were in the exact same parking lot I’d pulled up in on the back of the mechanic’s motorcycle when Karl Womelsdorff and I flew to Neubrandenburg last September. It could have been anywhere, the loading area for any factory complex. There wasn’t really anything distinctive about it. But it is emblazoned on my brain and I recognised it.

‘We’re in Neubrandenburg,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. They make aircraft parts here – there’s an airfield. And a town.’

Ró
ż
a acted
so fast.
‘Give me the bread,’ she demanded in a whisper, and I stupidly gave it to her.

‘BREAD!’ she screamed, just the way she’d done in front of the fence by the
Revier
. ‘
Das Brot! Chleb! Le pain!
The SS are giving out bread!’

There was another instant riot. Only this time there really was bread.

She threw it with calculated cunning and accuracy into the middle of the crowd of hundreds of starving women climbing out of the trucks. They didn’t mob us – they mobbed the bread. All the available guards piled in after them to sort out the havoc. There were big chain-link fences topped with barbed wire around the yard, but the vehicle gates were still open wide.

Ró
ż
a ran. Or didn’t run exactly, just hurled herself in her ridiculous lopsided, gimpy lurch away from the crowd and round the truck we’d just climbed out of. Irina and I sprinted after her, but she was in the open before we were, and before we could catch up she was out of the gates and into the road.

That was our escape. It took thirty seconds and six slices of bread.

We didn’t know it then though. We were just in a frenzy of panic and fury that Ró
ż
a could have done anything so utterly, desperately, monstrously
stupid
. We were out of Ravensbrück, out of the danger of being gassed, we’d got her scrawny Exhibit A legs safely into an ordinary work camp, and now she’d killed us all by trying to escape.

But they hadn’t counted us getting into the truck back in Ravensbrück. Well, maybe they’d counted Irina, but they hadn’t counted Ró
ż
a and me, and they didn’t count us getting out. So that was lucky – they didn’t know we were there, and thanks to Ró
ż
a’s staged food fight, no one noticed us leaving. We caught up with Ró
ż
a easily as soon as we broke free of the bread ruckus. The road outside the gates was also full of trucks. In a couple more seconds the dogs would come after us, we’d be dragged back into the factory yard and they’d beat us all to a pulp and shoot us. We didn’t turn back. How could we turn back? They’d have beaten us to a pulp and shot us if we’d turned ourselves in.

Irina threw Ró
ż
a under the nearest truck and dived in after her. So did I.

For another minute or two we lay there panting. Running fifty feet had just about killed us. We were still so close to the fence that we could see the riot in the parking lot.

‘Come on –’ Irina gasped, and we crawled beneath the trucks, moving slowly from one to another, until we were a little further away and we felt safe enough to rest again.

We were also lucky the ground was frozen. We didn’t get coated head to foot in mud or slush. I shrugged off my coat and gave it to Irina. She pushed it away and I threw it back at her insistently, too fearful to talk. I wasn’t being noble – I was being sneaky.

‘Put on the coat, you stupid Bat Girl,’ Ró
ż
a snarled. ‘You look like a schmootzich. We don’t have a hope in hell out here with you in stripes. Cover up! As soon as we stand up we have to look like normal people –’

I’d caught what was usually Ró
ż
a’s disease: inappropriate hysterical laughter. I lay on my face on a sheet of oily ice under a German munitions truck, smothering myself and shaking with mirth.

‘Holy Mother of God!’ Ró
ż
a swore. ‘I’m surrounded by lunatics!’ She began to giggle too. Irina did not, but she quietly put my coat on and then lay next to me with her arm over my back.

‘You threw away
all our bread
,’ I pointed out to Ró
ż
a. ‘Talk about lunatics!’

And we both broke into muffled hysterics again.

Irina took hold of my ear and twisted it hard. I shut up.

‘We have no papers,’ she said. ‘We speak no German. What is our story when someone stops us?’

Ró
ż
a improvised wildly, ‘We are French –’

‘
French!
’

‘French servants. We have to be French – it’s our only common language. You and Rose are cooks! And I am your sister. Only I speak German. We are servants for a German officer – I do all his sewing and cleaning –’

‘I bet you do,’ Irina snickered.

We lay quietly for a few minutes, feeling falsely secure. It was cold, but no colder than standing in a roll call in the dark.

‘We better move,’ said Ró
ż
a. ‘If they notice the Bat Girl’s gone, they’ll look for her.’

We crawled for half an hour. We crawled underneath the entire row of trucks. When there weren’t any more we had to stand up and walk, vulnerable and obvious, along a barren stretch of road outside the camp and factory complex. We could see the town in the distance, church spire and silhouettes of buildings, and there wasn’t the faintest question that we could go that way.

‘Maybe we should try to get into the woods,’ I said. A lot of the landscape around us was the same sandy tracts of pine and birch that surrounded Ravensbrück.

‘We’d just freeze to death. We should go into town and walk down the middle of the street,’ Ró
ż
a countered. ‘Right down the middle, like we belong there. Slowly.’ She turned and gave me a witchy grin. ‘Smiling at everyone.’

‘Gee whiz, not smiling like
that
.’

‘You look almost human in that skirt and sweater, Rosie,’ she said critically. ‘Like an SS secretary, almost human. The kerchief is the best part.’

‘Shut up, Rabbit.’ The kerchief was ridiculous. But I was more ridiculous without it. I’d had my head shorn again very recently, as punishment for annoying the Demon Nadine with nervous humming.

‘Dark in a few hours,’ Irina said to me.

‘We can’t stop here. But – I know! There were farms on the other side of the airfield – I saw them as we were landing. This is the road they brought me in on. We’ll go back past the airfield. Maybe hide in a barn – find some turnips or potatoes –’

‘A cow!’ Ró
ż
a improvised wildly.

‘Maybe a cow! Maybe send you into someone’s kitchen to organise a loaf of bread. Maybe –’ Now I was thinking about what I’d find in the summer kitchen of the Mennonite farm just on the other side of Justice Field – succotash and applesauce and smoked sausage and shoofly pie. Talking like this was just going to lead to fantasies about
Fasnachts
and bologna. ‘Anyway, we’ll be safer on the other side of the airfield. Come on, girls!’