After that, everybody settled down.
It happened every single night I was in quarantine in Block 8. Last thing every night, some unseen voice would yell into the dark, ‘Vive la France!’ and someone else would answer, ‘God bless America!’
It was never me. I was never brave enough. My accent would have given me away.
But it was brave of the others to do it for me.
April 20, 1945
Paris
The telephone rang again. I burst into tears again. But it just kept on ringing and ringing. They know I am here and finally I thought that if I didn’t answer it they’d send someone up to make sure I wasn’t drowned in the tub or something, and it would be worse having to open the door to a French bellhop – especially since I still haven’t got dressed – than it would be talking on the phone to the English-speaking switchboard operator. So I answered and said ‘Hello’ in my best imitation of Before-Ravensbrück-Rose-Justice.
It was Mother.
For a long time after we were connected she just kept calling, ‘Rosie? Rosie?’ as if she were hunting for me in the Conewago woods, and I was so dumbstruck to hear her voice that I didn’t answer at first, which didn’t help. Then, believe it or not, I did not burst into tears again. I just said, ‘Hello, Mother,’ very calmly, and lied and lied and lied.
I’ve been in a prison camp in Germany. Yes, a political prisoner, I landed in the wrong place and they wouldn’t let me go back over the front lines. Yes, I’m OK. Uncle Roger has me staying in the Paris Ritz!
I talked about the wonderful silk quilt thing and the beautiful big window and the ridiculous gigantic tub and room service.
‘Didn’t the Nazis take over the Ritz in Paris?’
‘Yes, that’s why it’s in such beautiful condition! And –’
I could talk about this safely, with real enthusiasm.
‘– The Germans didn’t bomb Paris at all – the German commander in charge of Paris was supposed to pound the city to pieces before he surrendered, and he refused to do it. Berlin told him to blow up all the monuments – the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral and the Arc de Triomphe – and he didn’t. And when I brought Uncle Roger to France last summer I flew over the whole of the city and it was just beautiful.’
Mother sighed.
‘Oh, Rosie. It is so good to hear your voice.’
She was crying – not me. I had fooled her.
She said, ‘I thought – we just thought you must have been shot down, of course. It seemed like the only thing that could have happened. Although – have you heard what they’re finding now? There are some terrible stories. Have you heard about these concentration camps they say they’re liberating? The Red Cross keeps coming up with people who say they’ve been freed from these awful places. We don’t believe any of it for a second – those Jewish women who said they’d been –’
I didn’t hear what happened or didn’t happen to the Jewish women because I held the receiver at arm’s length until the distant transatlantic twitter of Mother’s voice went anxious and I could tell she was calling my name again.
I put the phone back to my ear.
‘Hi, Mom.’
‘Oh!’ she gasped in relief. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’
Every spring, Mother makes us wash the house – actually hose down and scrub the outside of our house. She is probably doing it now, getting excited about me coming home. Our house is brick and about fifty years old. There is a wide front porch with columns, and Daddy always gets up on the porch roof to do the second floor and the bedroom windows. Mother watches critically and directs everything from the front yard. I run back and forth to the kitchen delivering buckets of warm soapy water for Daddy; Karl and Kurt play with the hose until it’s time to rinse all the soap off.
Afterwards the porch smells of pine soap and the windows are so clean they are just reflective slabs of blue sky.
How can I ever tell Mother about the filth? It wasn’t plain old dirt. Dirt’s easy to get rid of – you can rinse it away. It doesn’t hurt you. The linoleum of our kitchen floor gets scrubbed with Clorox every two weeks. Mother would pick up a ball of pie dough off the kitchen linoleum if she dropped it, and shrug and slap it down on the pastry cloth on the dough tray, and laugh. ‘We’re all going to eat a peck of dirt before we die.’
I’m not talking about dirt. I’m not talking about a crumb of dust or a dog hair in the pie crust. I’m talking about more than 50,000 women locked inside a cinder and concrete prison half a mile wide and a quarter of a mile across with no toilets. When I got there, there were three toilets that still worked in Block 8, although they were pretty horrible. There were 400 of us using them and only one was still working by the time they sent me to the Siemens factory three weeks later or whenever it was. Most of us used the ditch outside.
By the middle of January even the ditches were full. For the last couple of months we went against the wall outside the building we lived in. There wasn’t anyplace else to go, and most of us had dysentery or typhoid. You’d have to let it run down your legs if you needed to go during a roll call. How can I ever tell Mother? How can I ever tell her about the filth I have lived in all of last fall and winter and half this spring?
I can’t tell her. I’ll never tell her.
After one night in quarantine, we had so many flea bites it is a miracle we didn’t all end up with bubonic plague. During that first 4.30 a.m. roll call all I wanted to do was scratch until I’d peeled my entire skin off. Why do they go for your ankles, which are the hardest part of your body to reach when you’re pretending to stand at attention? Are fleas in league with the SS?
Quarantine was just about bearable. You knew it wouldn’t last. Three weeks of Block 8, of overflowing toilets and fleas and eye-crossing boredom during the day, sitting there waiting for the quarantine to finish and not being allowed to talk to anybody, and then we would all get to move on.
If I’d known I’d never see Elodie again when it was done, I might not have been in such a rush to get it over with. I feel like I squandered my three weeks of being friends with her by wasting the whole time eagerly looking ahead to some mythic improvement that never actually happened. But you can’t blame us for hoping, can you? Doesn’t hope keep you going? We’d stand in line swapping camp songs in French and English under our breath, and when we discovered we knew some of the same tunes, ‘Tallis Canon’ and ‘By the Light of the Moon’, our delight wasn’t desperate – it was real. We should have had a chance to be friends.
Elodie was a natural Organiser. I don’t mean that in the normal English language sense of people who can arrange things. I mean it in the camp sense of magically being able to get hold of miraculous, hard-to-find forbidden items like woollen scarves and soap and paper and cigarettes. She pulled stuff out of nowhere like a magician. She bartered with the schmootzichs. She bartered with the guards, and she had to get someone to translate for her when she did that. I watched her sometimes, trying to figure out how she did it, like it was a knack you could pick up. And it is of course, but it came naturally to Elodie.
She got us toothbrushes and soap, needle and thread, a collection of pencil stubs, a razor to sharpen them with. Underpants for me and socks to line her own mismatched shoes and a button to close the gap at the side of the dress she’d swapped with me. She organised sanitary pads for me. Most of the other people in our block didn’t need them – they’d been in prison so long that malnourishment and fatigue and, I guess, just living with such an intensity of fear and distress had temporarily shut them down. I shut down eventually too, thank God. But when I first started my period halfway through quarantine, Elodie was the one who scavenged bits of cotton blanket and jute ripped from the edge of the straw mattresses. With half a steel sewing machine needle and thread unravelled from the ragged edge where the collar was missing on my own dress, we whipped together a small collection of primitive pads, uncomfortable but effective.
Elodie wasn’t a leader. She’d been a courier in the French Resistance, delivering messages, doing as she was told. She was just really sneaky. She’s the one who figured out that prisoners from other countries had a letter in their triangular ID patch showing what country they were from – Polish prisoners had a black ‘P’ in their patch, Czechs a ‘T’ for ‘Czech’ in German. The French patches were blank – special humiliation for the French. So Elodie embroidered an ‘F’ in her own red triangle. And ‘USA’ in mine.
More dry words on a page. I wish I could capture Elodie, make her come alive again – small, scarred, sneaky, singing.
When I think of her – when I picture her – I picture her with her gold bangs sticking to her forehead in the September sun on that first afternoon, though I don’t know if her hair ever grew back before they gassed her. Of course, I didn’t see her go – Irina told me. Elodie shouting with Micheline and Karolina from the back of the crammed truck – ‘TELL THE WORLD’ – and I picture Elodie the way she looked the day I met her. They yelled in French and in Polish, English and German. ‘TELL THE WORLD! TELL THE WORLD! TELL THE WORLD!’
Micheline Karolina Elodie Zofia Veronica Rozalia Genca Maria Alfreda Apolonia Kazimiera Anna Zosia Aniela –
So many dead. There were probably over thirty thousand living women in Ravensbrück when I got there and nearly sixty thousand or more by the time I left, so who knows how many thousands died in between? And how many died before I got there and after I left? How many in other camps?
I will tell the world.
Mother said she doesn’t believe it.
I WILL TELL THE WORLD.
I say that so fiercely. I say it with such conviction, such determined anger. But I couldn’t even tell Mother, could I? A few pages ago I vowed I wouldn’t tell Mother. How can I possibly tell the world?
I have to. This is a beginning. If I write it all down, later it can turn into a plan.
April 21, 1945
Paris
When my quarantine was finished, they sent me over to the Siemens factory. They just hauled me out of my row in roll call and stuffed me into a smaller group of twenty other women, not from my French transport. They marched us out through the big gates and along the lake. I got a glimpse of the SS staff housing – there were neat long swathes of red flowers bordering their front yards, and window boxes. A woman in civilian clothes was sweeping up leaves with a couple of tiny tot kids, and the kids were throwing leaves at each other and they were all laughing. They looked so ordinary. My heart lifted a little. I was outside those terrible walls again. The last three weeks hadn’t been easy, but they were over and I was out.
It is a longish walk from the main camp to Siemens, about half a mile. You could see Fürstenberg and its church spire across the lake, like a ‘Scenes from Old Europe’ picture on a jigsaw puzzle. On our side of the lake we passed hundreds of Ravensbrück prisoners busy at something or other – cutting reeds, hauling potatoes and firewood from somewhere, unloading barges full of coal. Finally we came to another complex of long grey buildings behind chain-link and barbed-wire electrified fences which was the Siemens factory itself. Around the buildings here, other prisoners were doing hard, hard labour, unloading iron pigs from railway cars and dragging them away in wagonloads. But this is where my Luftwaffe letter of recommendation suddenly kicked in. Thank God, I thought, as I realised what was going on – thank you, Luftwaffe commander, thank you, Karl Womelsdorff.