Rose Under Fire

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.’

My interrogator was Polish. Her heavily accented English was just like Felicyta’s, though the voice was different – higher, soprano instead of alto. And younger. I could tell.

‘Blockova?’

‘Block leader. You might as well learn Blockova, because no one ever calls them anything else. It’s a Polish word, not German. The Blockovas are prisoners too. Most of the group leaders are prisoners. The German criminals are the worst. Look out for them; they’ve got green triangles to show they’re criminals and red armbands to show they’re forewomen. They’ll report you for smiling if they don’t like your face. Gitte’s all right; she’s a political prisoner, a German communist. Handed out one too many anti-Nazi leaflets!’

I can’t really write her accent or her idioms without making her sound stupid, and she never did sound stupid. Anyway, I can’t remember them. I always understood her. So I am just going to write it the way I understood it, not the way she said it.

‘You’re learning poetry for your exams?’ I repeated, completely bewildered.

‘Yes, they pulled a lot of us out of school when they arrested us, along with half the professional scholars in Poland – all the ones they didn’t just murder right away. So we students are trying to earn our diplomas with the professors. Oh well, it’s a good thing to pretend anyway – that the war will end before we’re all shot or starved to death, and that I will need a diploma. Like you reciting poetry while they beat you.’

‘I don’t remember –’

I began to say it, and then suddenly I did remember.

‘Oh!’

This is what I’d done: I’d continued my instinctive effort to save my sanity that began when they first took away my relays for the bomb fuses. When I stopped counting during the second beating, I started muttering aloud the poem I’d been making up for the past two weeks – the words I’d had in my head as I stood swaying with exhaustion in the Siemens factory, the words I’d whispered to myself in the dark in the cold, cramped cell in the Bunker.

So now I remembered my sanity-saving poem, but I didn’t move. I was still lying flat on my face.

‘Go on,’ the Polish student prompted me.

I remembered the whole thing.

I wrote a few words of it in England last summer – I think it is in this notebook, but I haven’t got the heart to look back at anything I wrote last summer. This will be the first time I’ve ever written down the finished poem.

Counting-out Rhyme

(by Rose Justice)

Silver tube of fuse and hollow

cylinder of detonator

cap and gyro.

Toppled gyro forcing action,

copper wire to spark ignition,

pulse jet engine.

Amatol before explosion,

Bosch and Siemens, Argus, Fieseler,

in production.

Shining fragile fuse and hollow

warhead fuselage awaiting

detonation.

‘Is that by your favourite poet as well?’ the Polish girl asked. ‘Edna Millay?’

‘No, that’s by me. I made it up.’

‘What is it about? Not trees this time.’

‘Flying bombs. It’s about making them. Or not making them – that’s why they punished me.’

‘I will give you one slice of bread for every poem you make me. I can do it. I’m one of the camp Rabbits, the Króliki, and people take care of me. Every time you make me a new poem I’ll get you an extra slice of bread.’

I didn’t know it then. But I know it now and I’m sure of it. My counting-out rhyme saved me from starving to death this winter.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘I’m Polish Political Prisoner 7705,’ she reeled off, glib and bitter. ‘I’m a Rabbit.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

I don’t know how I knew I could talk to her like that. I hadn’t even looked at her yet.

‘My name is Róża Czajkowska,’ she said.

In my ears it sounded like a meaningless babble of foreign sound. Very humbly, and worried that she would go away if I offended her, I asked her to spell it.

‘Oh, I can’t do English letters out loud,’ she answered with deep scorn. ‘Róża. How difficult is that? It means rose in English.’

I turned my head for the first time since I’d woken up. It was exhausting. But I could see her now.

She was – she is – seventeen. She was the tiniest seventeen-year-old I’d ever seen – I thought she was about eleven when I first saw her, the thinnest, most starved-looking kid alive. Being starved-looking was the only thing I noticed about her at first, her only distinguishing feature – it still hadn’t dawned on me that this wasn’t a distinguishing feature at Ravensbrück, and that Róża had other, more significant peculiarities. She had long hair – a lot of the long-term prisoners did – but it was hidden beneath a headscarf, and her dress was one of the old-style grey-and-blue striped uniforms.