Rose Under Fire (40 page)

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.

In the preface to his book on Ravensbrück, Jack Morrison points out that it would have been impossible for a single prisoner to have as broad a view of the camp as the researcher who tries to look at all aspects of its six-year operational history. Rose’s experience is limited from September 1944 to March 1945, which means that within the confines of
my
book it’s impossible to describe much of what went on before or after these dates. Also, Rose’s experience is limited to an extremely closed circle of prisoners and their restricted movements – she never gets inside the textile factories, or the kitchens, or is sent on coal-picking duty, or unloads barges by the lake. She doesn’t interact with children or Gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses or the men’s camp, all of which have their own moving stories of oppression and rebellion. Rose doesn’t work in the prisoner-organised maternity ward, a story of miracle and heartbreak. After June 1943, and until the Auschwitz evacuees turned up late in 1944 there were very few Jewish women at Ravensbrück, and those were confined to a single block; their stories are also different. There is a lot more out there than the limited window on Ravensbrück which Rose’s experience provides . . . just so you know.

Each of my main characters is inspired in part by real people, but they are original characters. There’s no Ró
ż
a Czajkowska or Karolina Salska on the actual list of Rabbits’ names. However, Dr Leo Alexander and the four Polish women who gave evidence at the Doctors’ Trial – Maria Broel-Plater, Jadwiga Dzido, W
ł
adys
ł
awa Karo
ł
ewska, and Maria Ku
ś
mierczuk – were all real. The doctors Fritz Fischer, Karl Gebhardt and Herta Oberheuser were real, and so was Ravensbrück’s commander in 1945, Fritz Suhren (Rose only ever refers to him as ‘the stinking commander’). Most of Ravensbrück’s copious documentation was purposefully destroyed before the Soviet Army freed the camp, so the bulk of research on Ravensbrück comes from witness and survivor accounts.

Rose’s mnemonic counting-out rhyme includes all the given names of the seventy-four Polish women experimented on in Ravensbrück (the spelling of their names has been simplified for English-speaking readers). Some of the women had similar first names or shared a name – in the poem each name is only listed once. The real names of these seventy-four women experimented on are printed on the title page of this book.

Writing out Rose’s handwriting sample made me cry. It was the first time I had ever really
thought
about the Declaration of Independence and what it means to say that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights.
Tell the world.
I have tried.

The editorial teams behind
Rose Under Fire
were much more actively involved in its creation than in any of my previous books. I am deeply and eternally grateful for their focus and enthusiasm. Thank you, Stella Paskins of Egmont UK, Catherine Onder of Disney Hyperion and Janice Weaver of Doubleday Canada – and thank you to my agent, Ginger Clark, who was involved in every single editorial discussion.

Obviously it wasn’t just Ravensbrück that I researched for this book, and if you check my website on www.elizabethwein.com you’ll be able to find discussion of a range of details from aircraft interception to women pilots. I owe thanks to Steve Venus for information on V-1 fuses and prisoner accounts of forced labour in German factories; his website and collection can be viewed at http://www.bombfuzecollectorsnet.com. Katja Kasri was my German language consultant; her training as a history teacher means that whenever I ask her a question about, say, how to address someone using her prisoner number, she spends a couple of hours trawling newsreel footage and witness testimony to confirm the accuracy of the answer. Tori Tyrrell, Miriam Roberts and Amanda Banks all read the manuscript at
least
three times and provided me with invaluable reader criticism and encouragement. Katherine Nehring also got tagged at the last minute as a ‘fresh eye’ and provided much-needed annotations on a very tight deadline.

Last, but hardly least, I am indebted to the generous sponsors and organisers of the European Summer School at Ravensbrück and to the Ravensbrück Memorial and International Youth Meeting Centre for both their tremendous welcome and for the wealth of critical thinking and resources they opened to me.

(German unless otherwise noted)

Norman Longmate,
The Doodlebugs: The Story of the Flying-Bombs.
London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1981.

Betty Lussier,
Intrepid Woman: Betty Lussier’s Secret War, 1942–1945.
Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2010.

Jack G. Morrison,
Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939–45.
Princeton, New Jersey: Markus-Wiener Publishers, 2000.

J.T. Quinlivan, ‘The Taran: Ramming in the Soviet Air Force’, Rand Paper Series No. 7192. Santa Monica, California: The Rand Corporation, 1986. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P7192.pdf

Ulf Schmidt,
Justice at Nuremberg: Leo Alexander and the Nazi Doctors’ Trial.
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 (2004).

Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova,
Red Sky, Black Death: A Soviet Woman Pilot’s Memoir of the Eastern Front.
Translated by Margarita Ponomaryova and Kim Green; edited by Kim Green. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2009.

Giles Whittell,
Spitfire Women of World War II.
London: HarperPress, 2007.

Survivor Accounts of Ravensbrück

Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz,
God Remained Outside: An Echo of Ravensbrück.
Translated by Margaret Crosland. London: Souvenir Press, 1999 (1998).

Corrie ten Boom, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill,
The Hiding Place.
Bungay, Suffolk: Hodder & Stoughton and Christian Literature Crusade, 1976 (1971).

Margarete Buber-Neumann,
Déportée à Ravensbrück (Deported to Ravensbrück).
Translated to French from German by Alain Brossat. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988 (1985).

Countess Karolina Lanckoro
ń
ska,
Michelangelo in Ravensbrück: One Woman’s War Against the Nazis.
Translated by Noel Clark. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press 2007 (2001).

Micheline Maurel,
Ravensbrück.
Translated by Margaret S. Summers. London: Anthony Blond, 1959 (1958).

Wanda Pó
ł
tawska,
And I Am Afraid of My Dreams.
Introduced and translated by Mary Craig. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987 (1964).

Germaine Tillion,
Ravensbrück.
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988 (1973).

I have also drawn on accounts from survivors interviewed by Loretta Walz in her documentary film
Die Frauen von Ravensbrück (Women of Ravensbrück)
, 2005.

Internet Sources

‘Voices from Ravensbrück’ is part of the digital archives of Lund University in Sweden, and includes transcriptions, some in English, of many of the 500 survivor interviews collected between 1945 and 1946 by the Polish Research Institute (http://www.ub.lu.se/collections/digital-collections/voices-from-ravensbr-ck).

The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, to which I was pointed by women’s studies scholar and writer Dr Andrea Petö of the Central European University in Hungary, provides over a thousand English-language testimonies of Holocaust survivors including thirty-eight who were imprisoned at Ravensbrück The site requires user registration and log in but is free. (http://vhaonline.usc.edu).

The Stephen Spielberg Film and Video Archive available on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website contains public domain footage of Maria Ku
ś
mierczuk and Jadwiga Dzido appearing as witnesses in the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg on 20 December 1946, while Dr Leo Alexander explains, in English, the damage to their legs (http://resources.ushmm.org/film/display/Brandenburg Memorials Foundation) detail.php?file_num=1961&tape_id=b272053b-eb79-440e-8780-e8b0b6c6364e&clip_id=&media_type=flv).

The Ravensbrück Memorial website (part of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation) can be visited at http://www.ravensbrueck.de/mgr/index.html.

There is an excellent ‘Teacher’s Guide’ on Ravensbrück produced by the Kennesaw State University Museum of History and Holocaust Education in Georgia, USA, available for download here: http://www.kennesaw.edu/historymuseum/pdf/tg-ravensbruck.pdf

These web links were correct at the time of this book’s publication.

‘Spring and All, Section I’ by William Carlos Williams, from
The Collected Poems: Volume I
, 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

Edna St Vincent Millay, ‘To a Young Poet’, ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’ and excerpts from ‘Scrub’ and ‘Dirge Without Music’ from
Collected Poems.
Copyright 1923, 1928, 1939, 1951, © 1955, 1967 by Edna St Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Millay Society. www.millay.org

‘Canoe Song’ (aka ‘My Paddle’s Keen and Bright’), by Margaret Embers McGee

‘Make New Friends’ (aka ‘New Friends and Old’), attributed to Joseph Parry

‘Praise for Bread’ (‘Morning is Here’), attributed to A. R. Ledoux

‘Rose, Rose’, anonymous

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