‘Yes –’
The stenographer looked up sharply. She stared at me with a face full of awe and suspicion, as though she wanted to see what kind of person would have the gall to fly a plane equipped with a ‘radio device’. I don’t know how much English she understood, but she must have understood everything the interrogator and the translator had just said to each other.
What were they after? Maybe they didn’t mean a radio. Maybe ‘radio device’ was an attempt to translate something else. I asked, ‘Do you mean radar?’ Radar would make it a surveillance aircraft – a spy plane. And suddenly I was more frightened than I’d been before.
‘I mean, no! There’s no radar on that plane –’
I stopped abruptly, shaking my head and sucking in a gasp of air. I didn’t know if there was a radar set on that plane. I didn’t think there was – I knew the real thing takes up a lot of space but I wasn’t sure. That Spitfire was new this year and was about to be modified for reconnaissance.
‘I don’t know!’
‘You were orbiting when you were intercepted – why? Taking pictures?’
‘No! There’s no radar and no cameras – I don’t think there are –’
I didn’t know that either. I didn’t know anything about what that plane might be carrying in its wings, other than fuel – cameras, cannon, spy equipment, plastic explosive – who knows? I don’t think there was anything like that on board, but who knows?
It just went downhill from there – everybody as polite as possible, and me not knowing the answer to anything they asked me. ‘But I was in France!’ I pointed out miserably. ‘I wasn’t even over your territory!’
‘It was ours last week,’ the translator said calmly.
None of this actually took very long. All the administration was done that day – the telephone calls after they finished questioning me, and the decision from some command centre in Berlin, and the paperwork – all magically completed in less than two hours. I don’t think the Luftwaffe pilots knew where I’d end up. They just did what they were told to do with me.
The translator was a transport pilot too. He was delivering a small communications aircraft to its new home base. It wasn’t far from a place where they held a lot of women who were political prisoners, and I was supposed to go along with him so he could drop me there.
The little plane looked like a flying lawnmower with awnings. ‘It is a Storch,’ the pilot told me. ‘Fieseler Fi-156. Stork, in English. Bird with long legs!’
I tried to smile at the lame joke.
‘Don’t be frightened. You will be safe where they send you. The papers we have given you state that you are a transport pilot and that you were intercepted without weapons – you will have to remain in custody here, but you will be fed and clothed and housed –’ He hesitated a little. ‘And given work to do. They will find work for you at a skilled level. Don’t lose the written statement our commander gave you – it explains how you came here, and it is important that you show the Luftwaffe stamp and signature, for you won’t always be able to find another English-speaker as fluent as I to give you assistance.’
We finished the outside aircraft checks and the pilot opened the door for me to climb into the rear seat.
‘I am Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff,’ he said.
‘I am Third Officer Rose Justice,’ I told him. ‘My little brother is named Karl too.’
‘Why this German name for an American boy?’
‘My mother’s family is from Germany,’ I said. ‘Two hundred years ago they came to America from right around here, from Pfaltz. A lot of people in Pennsylvania come from south-west Germany.’
Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff glanced at me with a tight, sad smile as he climbed into the pilot’s seat ahead of me.
‘Now you are back,’ he said.
Holy smoke, that plane. How did I ever fly that plane?
‘You will fly the Storch,’ Oberleutnant Womelsdorff told me. I don’t think he meant it to sound so much like a command. It was a present, a wonderful secret between us, one pilot to another, and a very generous present too, considering I was a prisoner of war or whatever.
Compared with the morning’s high-speed chase in the Spitfire, it was like being on a bicycle. We didn’t go very high, staying out of the way of planes that might be faster than us – or planes that might try to shoot us down. It was a mercy to be flying, to be focused on the unfamiliar aircraft and the heading and being too close for comfort to the treetops and just to be in control.
In the officers’ restroom at Köthen, where we stopped to refuel, I sat with my head against my knees and cried for five minutes. It was like digging myself deeper and deeper into a pit that I’d never be able to climb out of. I was halfway across Germany now and I still didn’t know where I was going to end up.
When we took off from Köthen, Womelsdorff let me sit in the front.
‘What if someone sees me in the pilot’s seat when we land? Won’t you be in trouble?’
He shrugged and laughed. ‘Why should I be, if we land in the right place? We’ll say you are the American cousin of Hanna Reitsch. You know of Hanna Reitsch? Germany’s most daring test pilot is a woman! As long as there are two of us in the plane, they will not accuse me of wasting fuel we do not have.’ I didn’t dare to answer. I am pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to tell me that the Luftwaffe is low on fuel.
The last stage of the trip was cloudier and bumpier, and Womelsdorff made me stay even lower, to avoid being bombed. Once we saw a flight of Allied aircraft crossing the sky ahead of us – high, dozens of them, steady black spots speckling the clouds like a swarm of gnats – heading, no doubt, for Berlin.
We puttered along far below them, slow and out of sight against the ground.
‘Daylight raid,’ commented my guard and guide. ‘Is this arrogance or desperation?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. But now I think the answer wasn’t either of those – it was really just persistence. Persistence is what kept me alive all winter. And persistence will win the war.
Half an hour south of Neubrandenburg we flew almost directly over a pretty town surrounded by serene lakes. We were so low over the biggest lake I could see the reflection of our wings below us in its glassy surface. On the far side of the lake was a gigantic complex of long sheds and wide open gritted yards, all in the middle of a complicated railway junction – everything surrounded by concrete walls and what looked like miles and miles of wire fences.
‘What’s that?’
‘Fürstenberg industrial area,’ Womelsdorff answered. ‘You’ll only ever see it from the air – the maps show only the town and the lakes. What they make there is a state secret. Impossible to miss from the air, so it makes an excellent pinpoint. That is a pilot’s secret.’
It was my first sight of Ravensbrück.
I saw it for the first time from the air. I have spent a long time – mostly during roll calls – trying to put together my first view of it from a thousand feet overhead with the view from the parade ground in front of Block 32. I just can’t justify in my head that I must have been looking at the same sky in both places. From the air it was forbidding, but not menacing. It looked sterile. It was just a place. It didn’t even look inhabited – of course, it was the middle of the afternoon and everyone must have been at work, so the grounds were relatively empty. I wish I’d known – I wish I could remember the detail of what it looked like from the air. Was there smoke coming from the crematorium chimney? Were they loading or unloading transports? Was a train arriving? It was so still, so empty, so impersonal – so distant. It was an ordinary industrial site in the middle of an ordinary day. It didn’t mean anything to me, it wasn’t significant or ominous, and the detail is gone. A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.
April 18, 1945
Paris
I shocked the chambermaid. Or whatever they are called in France! I forgot to hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door – Ne pas déranger – and she came in a while ago to make the bed and clean the bathroom. I was sitting at the little vanity table, which I pulled over so it is in front of the big window, and I was writing with not a stitch on. I did have that incredible silk bedspread thing wrapped round me, but it slipped right off when I turned around to see who had come in.
Oh God, we were both SO EMBARRASSED. I look like a corpse. The Red Cross did a good job of delousing me and getting the scabies under control, but you can still see the rash all over my breasts and arms, and if those scales and Bob Ernst’s metric conversion are right, I have lost forty-five pounds in the last seven months. (Amazing, because I am still heavier than Irina, who is taller than me. But she was there longer.) I saw myself in the mirror over the dresser when I was taking my clothes off yesterday, and I am so horrible I had to cover the stupid mirror with a sheet so I don’t scare myself by accident.
‘Come back! Come back!’ I mewed pathetically after the chambermaid as she backed out – I got the right word in French, but used the familiar form by accident because we did all winter (‘Reviens!’) – trying to pull the bedspread up and to remember how to say ‘Don’t go’ politely. She left anyway, shutting the door softly behind her, and I put my head down on the table and cried. I am so lonely. I should get dressed and go back to the Embassy and see if I can find some way to get back to the Swedish Red Cross people. But I don’t even know their unit name or number or where they were headed next. ‘Sweden’ is not very specific.
The chambermaid came back ten minutes later with coffee and rolls for me on a silver tray. Real coffee. She plunked it down on the vanity table and told me her name and rushed away to make the bed.
Her name is Fernande. She doesn’t speak English. She is busy with the bed now – she has even brought up a new spread so I can stay wrapped in this one. She hasn’t started on the bathroom and that will take her some time, because the one thing I did do last night was take a two-hour bath in that gigantic tub. The only reason I didn’t make it last longer is because they shut the hot water off at 9 p.m. I am going to write as fast as I can while she’s here. I’ve been putting off remembering what that night on the ground was like, and I don’t want to think about it when I’m by myself.
They let me use the pilots’ restroom at Neubrandenburg also, but they took away all my pilot’s gear except my flight bag. Womelsdorff turned me over to a grouchy mechanic who took me on the back of his motorbike to this so-called women’s prison. There is a women’s prison camp outside Neubrandenburg – it is one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. But you were supposed to be processed through the main camp first. I was in the wrong place, I wasn’t on their radar, and they didn’t know what to do with me when the mechanic turned me over to them.
I remember standing uncomfortably in a drab office somewhere, standing very straight and trying to look more official than I felt – I’d even slapped my uniform cap back on when I handed them my papers. They passed my papers around and argued for half an hour while I just stood there waiting. Then, as it was getting dark, they took me outside at gunpoint and locked me in the back of an empty armoured truck. I had no idea I was in the wrong place – I had no idea why they’d put me in the truck (for a few horrible minutes I thought they were just going to shoot me right there). I didn’t understand anything anyone said. I know now what was going on – I know that the truck was just an empty transport and was returning to Ravensbrück the next day for another load of prisoners, and that they were going to drop me off before loading up again.