They saved a dozen lives when Irina and Róża and I got caught by SS guards with guns, cornered against the fence around the Revier.
It was a Sunday. On Sunday, theoretically, you were allowed to walk up and down the Lagerstrasse for a couple of hours chatting with a friend and drying your underpants, if you had any – you could wash them under a spigot, but you couldn’t hang them anywhere or someone would steal them, so you just paced up and down holding them out in front of you and flapping them around. That Sunday we weren’t drying underwear. We were shifting a bunch of Rabbits from one hiding place to another. You weren’t supposed to walk with more than one or two other people on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d followed that rule. But we were more or less together just because the street was so crowded, and the guards were on the lookout for people who limped. That day there were too many Rabbits together in the same place.
It happened fast. They rounded us up and backed us against the fence. I think it was partly our own fault, because we were so used to being herded that it took us a moment to realise the guards had spotted our Rabbits, and weren’t just trying to clear a path for some high-ranking official or a transport truck.
‘A selection!’ Irina guessed, and a couple of people heard her and started to cry, because now we all thought we were going to be gassed.
‘Shut up! Stand up straight!’ Róża barked at the other Rabbits in German, like an SS turkey buzzard herself. Selections weren’t usually random – they went for the older women, or the sick ones, or people who looked sick. Having a faceful of cold sores or impetigo put you at high risk of being gassed. So you stood up straight and tried to look healthy during selections. Or pinched each other’s cheeks to make them glow, like we used to do in the bathroom before a school dance, when we were too young to wear make-up.
In the back of our huddle, Irina struggled to hack a hole in the fence around the Revier behind us. The rest of us tried to hide what she was doing. The guards surrounding us weren’t the usual SS women – these were men, armed soldiers. For a moment we stood facing each other like opposing dodgeball teams.
I wonder what we looked like? Fifteen filthy, haggard, ragged, wild-eyed girls – half of us crippled – facing off against two dozen tall, strong, well-fed boys with rifles. What did it look like, as the troop leader slowly raised his gun? I wish I had a picture of us all. I wish there were a picture of it on the front page of the New York Times. No one will ever believe me.
Except – the picture wouldn’t tell you the whole story, would it? It wouldn’t show you how Irina was frantically trying to cut us an escape route in the fence behind us, or tell you that the front row of us was defensive – me and the three brave Red Army girls from Block 32 who liked to pretend they were heavies had all moved to stand in front of Róża and the other Rabbits. The man who’d raised his gun swept the barrel up and down our pathetic front line, looking for an easy gap.
Róża screamed in Polish at the top of her voice, ‘Bread! Bread! The SS are giving out bread!’
A mob swarmed over us, first right off the street, and then a horde of starving women came piling towards us from the tent.
‘BREAD! BREAD HERE!’ we all screamed, because nobody cared if there was any or not – just the idea of bread was enough to cause glorious chaos. Irina and I and the Russian girls pushed Róża and everybody on their stomachs through a plate-sized hole between the fence and the ground, and they hid in the Revier. The rest of us were safe in the crowd.
Safe. What a completely loony use of the word ‘safe’. Exactly the way I have been using ‘hope’.
We prised up the filthy red clay tiles in the Block 32 washroom and dug a pit under the floor of the barrack, stinking of sewage and cold as the Arctic, and lined the hole with straw and a couple of the last rotting cotton blankets, and we hid Róża and five of the worst-damaged girls there for a week.
The SS didn’t kill any Rabbits. It didn’t stop them gassing 200 other prisoners every day. You always think you’re immortal, don’t you? I mean, it hasn’t happened yet. I am still alive.
When they read off my number over the loudspeakers I didn’t even hear it. I was so busy listening out for Róża’s number, or Karolina’s, it never occurred to me to listen for mine. But of course I was still wearing it, and I was still being counted every morning and night as Available Prisoner 51498. They called out lists of doomed prisoner numbers all the time. Not everyone could hide. One of the French girls in our block had escaped a selection only because her mother had swapped numbers with her and been gassed in her place.
It was still dark and no one had had breakfast yet. Karolina grabbed me round the waist.
‘Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig,’ she hissed in my ear. 51498.
Then I heard her, but I still didn’t take it in for a moment or two. And then my heart turned into a block of ice.
‘What? Why?’
You face it with a total lack of comprehension, even though less than two weeks ago, when we got caught in front of the Revier fence, I’d thought they were going to shoot me.
‘It is your transport,’ Lisette gasped. ‘The French girls you came with. All of them.’
I stood frozen and staring, completely unable to believe it or react. A deer in headlights.
Irina peeled away Karolina’s arm and took me by the wrist. She stepped out of line with me, and led me quietly out of our row and through the gate towards the Lagerstrasse. No one else from our block had been called, so there wasn’t anyone to go with me to the trucks, and they let Irina lead me out.
I went with her meekly.
We walked hand in hand past the tent. But instead of heading towards the gates where they parked the terrible open trucks, Irina guided me to double back around the far side of the tent. When we got close to the fence around Block 32 she put a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me to the ground, and got down beside me, and we crawled back into the parade ground around our block through the hole in the fence. People saw us, but no guards did. No one said anything as Irina and I climbed in the back window of our barrack, the one we’d used as an escape route when we first hid the Rabbits.
Inside the barrack, Irina made me take off my damp coat and sit on the floor close to the cranky little stove that was supposed to heat the whole place. There wasn’t a fire in it now, but it was still warm to touch because the Demon Nadine slept next to it and sometimes managed to stoke it up with scraps of coal or wood before she went to sleep. Irina got me a drink of water. Neither of us said anything; she just stood there waiting patiently while I drank the water, and then finally she reached down to help me back to my feet.
‘Come, Rosie,’ she insisted. ‘Hide with Różyczka.’
I shook my head, because I didn’t see the point – I wasn’t a Rabbit.
But I was too numb to rebel or take control of myself. So I let Irina lead me into the washroom, to the place under the sinks where the boards and filthy matting covered up our six hidden Rabbits in the pit under the floor. Irina pulled up a board and made me crawl in with them.
Invisible hands pulled me down beside the others. Irina laid the false floor back in place above us, and the six girls already hiding there found an impossible space for me alongside them – like playing sardines. For the first ten minutes I couldn’t do anything but retch. I thought I’d suffocate.
‘Worse than being gassed,’ came Róża’s infuriatingly cheerful whisper. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
When I figured out how to breathe I started to cry.
Someone hissed angrily, ‘Shut up, you idiot!’ because I was making too much noise. And wasting air.
‘What are you doing here, 51498?’ Róża whispered in my ear.
‘They are gassing my whole transport,’ I sobbed.
‘Bad luck. There isn’t anything special about your transport!’
I wanted to kill her.
‘Micheline is special. Elodie is special,’ I hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Kiss your wool hose goodbye, you miserable Rabbit.’
We curled against each other in the dank, stinking underground in silence after that, trying to breathe and not kick anybody and waiting to be found and shot. I knew I had to stop crying and the only way to do it was to recite poetry to myself, moving my lips without speaking, clinging to words, to sense and beauty –
‘Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.’
Róża knew what I was doing, even in the silent dark. I felt her familiar thin arms wind round my waist and hold me tight.
I don’t know how she held out there for a week – I don’t know how any of them did. I think I was there for two days. You could hear the Screamer, muffled, telling us when the roll calls and meals and work details came. That was the only way to count the time passing. We ate stolen bread – no soup – and nothing hot, ever – we had to eat lying down.
‘Tell us something warm and sunny. Tell us a Lake Story,’ Róża whispered.
‘We are all wearing red bathing suits. But all different, with flowers on yours and stripes on mine. Big white polka dots on Karolina’s, like Minnie Mouse, and Irina’s is silver with red stars, like a Soviet aircraft. You are all staying in our summer cottage with me, and we are going to lie on the beach in the sun and drink Coca-Colas, in frosty green bottles right out of the ice box – one by one, boys will come and ask us to go for a canoe ride with them. And when we are each in a different canoe with a different boy, we will line up at the rental dock and have a race across the lake.’
‘Lisette too.’
‘Gosh, yes, Lisette too. There is a very handsome famous actor from the Summer Rep Theatre at the Chautauqua Playhouse who’s come to the lake for the afternoon and he spots Lisette right away. So we race the canoes and your team will win. And we’ll all be annoyed so we’ll gang up on you and tip your canoe. Then everybody will tip each other’s canoes and we’ll all fall in the water, and it’ll feel wonderful because we’ll be hot and sweaty from racing, and while we’re splashing around, there will be belted kingfishers scooting overhead and scolding each other –’
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 Róża 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.