Of course there wasn’t.
I was in the cell block, the Bunker, for two weeks. The veterans say you aren’t a real Ravensbrück prisoner till you’ve been in the Bunker. Irina was there for four months in solitary confinement while they interrogated her about the Soviet Air Force in 1943, and it is also where they did the last batch of medical experiments on the Rabbits, when they tied the girls down and gagged them before they operated on them. I feel like two weeks isn’t really long enough to count as time in the Bunker, especially since they fed me once a day and left me alone in between my two doses of twenty-five lashes – my twice ‘Fünfundzwanzig’. There was a week in between each round because if you get fifty at once you’re likely to die. Twice twenty-five was a mild punishment for failing to make parts for flying bombs. Deliberate sabotage is punishable by death, so I was lucky I just stopped working and didn’t try to do anything more underhanded. After they finished my second beating I got put straight back into the main camp.
They make you count aloud as they thrash you. You are supposed to count, in German, the number of strokes you are given. Thanks to Grampa, of course, I could make it up to twenty, but like a jillion other pathetic creatures I didn’t know how to count beyond that, so they had to prompt me. I managed it the first time, but not the second.
I said they left me alone between the beatings and that’s true, but the week between them was pretty awful. Because this time I knew what was coming, and I was already in bad shape. There wasn’t anything to do but lie in the gloom and wait for next Friday – flat on my face on the bare planks, listening to the Screamer siren counting off the days. My mind skips lightly over that week and that second Friday – even what I can remember, I don’t want to. I don’t remember being tied to the sawhorse or if I saw the stinking commander, though I know he liked to watch and he was always there on Fridays. The counting, the second time, was the significant thing. The really significant thing.
I got to 8 and after that I thought I couldn’t speak. They kept going and I was still counting in my head, in English, because I knew that when I got to 25 it would be over, and counting was the only thing I could do to move things along. I lost count at 15. I must have been unconscious by 20. At any rate I don’t remember how it ended or what happened after.
I woke up lying on my stomach on another bare wood slab in an acre of endless, empty, stinking plank bunks – there wasn’t one above me, but the ceiling was so close I couldn’t have sat upright if I’d wanted to, and the closeness made it so dark you couldn’t see where the bunks ended. It was grey twilight and that was because somewhere in the room, below me, there were windows, and it was still light out. I didn’t know where I was or how I’d got there, though it was obviously another part of the same Godawful prison complex.
It was quiet and I couldn’t move, even though I was awake. I just lay blinking and breathing – not really thinking. Not even feeling sorry for myself.
I’d more or less forgotten who I was.
So then a voice near my head commanded in English: ‘Say your poem.’
The command made no sense and I didn’t even try to answer.
‘Say your poem,’ the voice insisted. ‘Say the counting-out rhyme.’
Counting – that made more sense. The last thing I could remember was being told to count, and the last thing I could remember doing was trying to count aloud, so I kind of assumed we were picking up where we’d left off. I felt certain that whether or not I obeyed I’d eventually wind up unconscious again, if not dead. But maybe if I cooperated we’d get it over with quickly. And so a poem called ‘Counting-Out Rhyme’ began to spill abruptly out of me.
‘Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.’
I said it very slowly.
While I was speaking, a strange thing happened. I began picturing the springtime woods of Pennsylvania, each branch and twig, as I said its name. I had to stop after the first verse – just three lines – because it was exhausting.
‘Go on,’ said the nearby voice.
After a moment of despair, I pulled myself together and went on.
‘Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.’
And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these words, to remember that these things existed – the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the leaves.
Incredible to think these same spring leaves are uncurling there now.
‘Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.’
It was MAGICAL to say their names. It was a blessing. It was holy.
‘Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.’
I was finished. That is the whole poem. There was a pause.
‘Is that your poem?’
‘No. It’s by Edna St Vincent Millay.’
‘Do you know more?’
‘Dozens,’ I croaked. ‘She’s my favourite poet.’
Oh, what a lot she’s got to answer for, Edna St Vincent Millay, whipping the youth of America into action in Europe. I’m sure she didn’t mean for me to end up in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany when she signed my copy of Make Bright the Arrows in that lecture hall at Jericho Valley College last spring, and shook my hand and wished me good luck ferrying planes in England.
‘Is that the poem you said when they were beating you?’
‘What?’
‘They told you to count and you said it was a counting-out rhyme. They stopped halfway through so they could call in Gitte, our Blockova, to watch and to translate, because you knew so much about munitions they decided they would have to put you in high security – here, Block 32. With the Soviet Red Army women soldiers and the Polish experimental Rabbits and the French Night and Fog spies. And when they brought you here, our Blockova Gitte told me to ask you to tell me your poem, because I am trying to learn poetry in English for my exams.’