Rose Under Fire

Also, I didn’t write that most of the SS people guarding us were women too. When I read over the part about being dragged out of the truck and into line it sounded like it was a man doing it, taking advantage of a poor dazed female. But it wasn’t – it was a girl not much older than me and a couple of inches shorter. She probably wasn’t any stronger either. She was just meaner.

I asked Fernande to ask someone to send me some more ink. I know I won’t ever catch up with that Red Cross unit. Now that I’ve glided down I haven’t got enough lift to get airborne again. I don’t have any clothes, and I still have this exhausting, rib-cracking cough. If I stand looking out the window for more than ten minutes, I get so tired I have to sit down. Out of an entire hotel menu I can’t keep down anything more exciting than unsweetened rice pudding or boiled macaroni with nothing on it. I want to go back out there. But I just can’t do anything more energetic than write or sleep, and even sleeping is exhausting. I tried to take a nap and dreamed I was sleeping alone in our barrack, with an icy wind howling through the broken windows, and everybody else had been gassed.

Which is probably a nightmare based on the fact that I am alone, and it’s my own fault. All I can do is pray Irina takes care of our stubborn little Róża. How how how did I lose them both, when we were already out ?

April 19, 1945

Paris

When the 6 p.m. siren let out its piercing howl, we nearly jumped out of our skin.

We had all fallen into a stupor of exhaustion and misery and you could see a ripple of attention race through our ranks as the noise shocked us wide awake. Not long after that they finally fed us. They did it outside, right where we were standing – like CAMP, hah. First they let us help ourselves to water from a row of spigots by the main gate, after about a year of standing in line to get there, and then they brought out two big oil drums of soup. It was absolutely chaotic – seemed chaotic anyway, the first time, 400 of us trying to get at two pots all at once. We had about one bowl between four of us to take turns with, which they took away again when we were done, since we hadn’t yet been issued official bowls of our own. You had to carry your bowl around with you all the time in a little bag or someone would steal it and then you wouldn’t get any soup. No bowl, no soup. Of all the unbelievable things about Ravensbrück, I think the Administration and Politics of Bowls must have been the battiest.

Now it just seems incredible that we got something to eat that day. We all got some soup, and we all got a piece of bread, and we ate it standing up. I ate mine, but I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t remember what the soup was – I mean, you never really knew what it was, but I don’t remember it being the worst soup I’d ever eaten. I do remember that I couldn’t eat the biggest chunks of whatever mystery root vegetable was in it, because they were completely raw. Inside a month I wouldn’t care, but what did I know at that point?

What I remember most about that first meal there is the filthy, crawling, skeletal beggars who fought over the raw chunks of potato or turnip or whatever it was in the soup that I couldn’t make myself eat. There was a camp word for those beggars, which I never did figure out how to say or spell, because it sounds so much to me like schmootzich – Mother’s nasty way of describing a girl who doesn’t take care of herself. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for filthy greasy.

They took any food you gave them. The first day, because I was still ignorant enough to be picky about what I ate, I tried to hand over my leftover chunks of raw vegetable to one of these desperate people. In seconds I was being clawed at by ten skeletal hands, grabbing at me anywhere they could to try to get in on the handout – five crawling creatures who had once been women snatching at my skirt, my arms, my hair. One of the guards had to beat them off. It left me shaking with shock. I never dared that kind of charity again.

You could drop a breadcrust on the ground and the schmootzichs would fight over it. If you dropped a breadcrust and stepped on it, or a guard spat on it, they still fought over it. They were like seagulls. Like seagulls going after garbage. They were so far from being human that at first it didn’t even occur to me then that they could be fellow prisoners – I thought they must be hoboes or something who’d crawled in off the train tracks. God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn’t want to believe something.

After we ate, the guards pointed us in the direction of a ditch we could use for a latrine. I kept telling myself, it’s like camp. It’s a camp; I’m at camp.

God knows what I thought I was telling myself.

We got herded into a harshly lit factory shed to be registered and examined and given prison clothes. Elodie and I were somehow always the last in line, and by the time our turn came for anything, we got the absolute worst of it. But on the other hand, by the time you’d stood in line for an hour or three or four, you knew what was going on. We were able to do a lot more whispering in the administration building than we’d been able to do standing under guard all afternoon, and most information was highly refined by the time it reached me and Elodie. We knew before we got to the line of desks where they processed us that, like all new prisoners, we were in ‘quarantine’ – being ‘decontaminated’ to prevent the spread of typhoid. That sounded plausible, and a good thing, but it was clearly a complete joke – the schmootzichs had had their filthy, oozing hands all over us.

My ATA pilot’s uniform was like a rallying flag. Everybody was ravenously starved for encouraging news from the Front, and only one day ago I’d been a free woman flying over a free Paris. ‘Caen is ours,’ I whispered. ‘And Brussels and Antwerp, and Le Havre just yesterday! I heard before I took off! We’re past Reims in France now. We’ve got most of France and a big part of Belgium. The push is north to Holland and west to the German border. We haven’t got all the French ports – we’re still fighting for Boulogne, but it’ll be any day. And the Luftwaffe –’

Womelsdorff had been cursing his own military for wasting resources.

‘They’ve got spectacular new jets, but no fuel.’

People relayed the news to one another in nearly silent whispers. The guards wouldn’t let us talk, but they couldn’t keep their eyes on all 400 of us at once. The news flew around the shed.

Other prisoners were already packing everybody’s things up and carting them away to be sorted by the time I had to dump out my flight bag on one of the dozens of administrators’ desks lined up across the shed. I bit my lip, my stomach churning with worry while the administrator squinted at my papers, because I knew they were going to keep my passport and Luftwaffe letter of reference and leave me without any ID except for whatever they assigned me.

Finally the administrator called someone else over – both of them SS guards, both of them women, maybe five years older than me. They talked to each other in German, studying my American passport. One of them rolled her eyes at the other and made a face. She’d noticed my middle name – Rose Moyer Justice. The other glanced at me, pointed at her friend and told me drily, ‘Das ist Effi Moyer.’

Effi Moyer wasn’t happy about it at all. She grabbed hold of the lapel of my tunic and gave it a demanding yank. I took the tunic off and handed it to her. She started to go through my pockets with brisk efficiency and found the wrappers from my chocolate bars.

I’d folded the silver foil and brown paper very carefully, wrapped it in my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy and pushed it deep into the corner of my tunic pocket. I wanted to keep it because it smelled so overwhelmingly of Pennsylvania, of home, of flying over Hershey and the fields of Jericho County.

When Effi Moyer found the brown and silver paper, she passed it to her friend – they both unfolded the scraps with deep and interested suspicion, as though they expected lumps of gold to drop out. Effi held the silver foil up to her nose exactly the way I’d done in the truck the night before and took a deep breath.

‘Schokolade,’ she said, and passed the empty candy wrapper to her colleague, who also took a deep breath.

They made a fierce, disappointing search through the rest of my pockets, and checked my bag again, and then they divided up the paper between them – each of them got one full wrapper.

I watched the whole performance biting my lip, trying to kill another terrible, terrible urge to laugh. And also feeling a new kind of fear taking hold of my stomach and tying it in knots. These were the prison guards confiscating my empty candy bar wrappers as if they were hundred-dollar bills. If that’s how hard up the guards were . . .

Effi tossed my tunic to the woman standing a couple of desks down from her, and it got lost in the pile of hundreds of other abandoned jackets and blouses and skirts. Then I had to take off the rest of my clothes. It wouldn’t have been so bad if you didn’t have to do it in front of men too – SS officers and guards who were directing and pushing people and just standing around watching. But everyone else had already had to strip. I was the last.

There was a little office room like a clinic where you had to sit on a table while a couple of people in rubber gloves put you through an unspeakable body search with tongue depressors and a flashlight. When they were done with the search, Effi barked an order at the doctors or whatever they were, and I had to sit backwards on a chair (holding on to the back of it) while they sheared my hair off. They really did shear it – with a scissors up against my scalp, not close enough to my head to count as shaving it off, but so close there was nothing left. If I was going to do that to anyone, I’d time it that way too – addle her brain with shame and discomfort and then quickly get her hair before she came to her senses. The shock of losing my hair didn’t hit me till later. The tongue depressors and flashlights seemed much more terrible at the time – even though that only lasted a couple of minutes, and I was stuck with my hair. Without it, I mean.

Finally I got smacked on my bare backside with someone’s clipboard because I hesitated going into the slimy, dark shower room.

Nothing that happened to me that day made me cry. Some of it scared me; but most of it just made me SO MAD.

I’d lost Elodie. The room with the showers was badly lit and murky with mildew – it reminded me of the abandoned bathhouse by the old pool at Conewago Park, which they haven’t used since before the Great War. Me and the other summer kids used to explore all the old park buildings, but not the bathhouse – it was just too creepy. Here in Ravensbrück I hesitated in the doorway, smarting, but unable to take another step over the slimy, red clay tiles towards those black, trickling overhead spigots and the dozens of white, skinny, bald women shivering beneath them.

‘La femme pilote américaine! Mon amie américaine!’

‘Ici!’ I yelled. ‘Here!’

Elodie and I got slapped simultaneously on opposite sides of the shower room. But I knew where she was now, and we managed to get back together.

The guards were trying hard to get everybody done with – it was dark, it was late, they were sick of us – and finally they shoved a couple of prison dresses at Elodie and me, and we had to put them on while we were still wet. Her dress came down to her ankles and mine was too tight. Someone threw shoes at us. Between us there was one each that fitted – none of them matched. No stockings, no bra, no underwear of any kind.