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?’ Róża 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.’
The Subtle Briar
(by Rose Justice)
When you cut down the hybrid rose,
its blackened stump below the graft
spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.
It claws at life, weaving a raft
of suckering roots to pierce the earth.
The first thin shoot is fierce and green,
a pliant whip of furious briar
splitting the soil, gulping the light.
You hack it down. It skulks between
the flagstones of the garden path
to nurse a hungry spur in shade
against the porch. With iron spade
you dig and drag it from the gravel
and toss it living on the fire.
It claws up towards the light again
hidden from view, avoiding battle
beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,
unloved, unfed, it clings and grows
in the wild hedge. The subtle briar
armours itself with desperate thorns
and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher,
unquenchable, it now adorns
itself with blossom, till the stalk
is crowned with beauty, papery white
fine petals thin as chips of chalk
or shaven bone, drinking the light.
When you cut down the hybrid rose
to cull and plough its tender bed,
trust there is life beneath your blade:
the suckering briar below the graft,
the wildflower stock of strength and thorn
whose subtle roots are never dead.
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 –’
Róża didn’t tease her. Actually, I don’t think Róża 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.
April 30, 1945
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 Różyczka. 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.
Holiday Grace (for Lisette)
(by Rose Justice)
‘Now we’ll give thanks,’ you said, ‘and bless this food.’
Smiling, you passed around the Christmas feast –
a loaf sliced small in diamond panes and spread
with stars of glittering jam, bright tinsel treats
to put us in a festive mood.
We took the pretty stars and you, devout and pleased,
wished us ‘Joyeux Noel!’ and gratefully blessed the food.
Irony turned your frail adopted daughter
into a sneering brute.
‘Bless what ?’ she snarled, wild with angry laughter.
‘Why, are these holy wafers? Call this food ?
Tasteless stale bread, a smear of sour fruit!
Call it Christ’s body and his blood!