Rose Under Fire

‘Rose!’ I exclaimed.

‘Róża,’ she corrected. ‘People call me Różyczka sometimes, little Rose, because I am so little.’

‘Little Rose – like Rosie? How do you say it?’

‘Say “Ro-shij-ka”. Różyczka!’

‘Różyczka!’

‘It is my pleasure to meet you, English-speaking French Political Prisoner 51498. What’s your name?’

‘Rose Justice,’ I said, remembering who I was. ‘Rose. Or Rosie. Same as yours.’

She gave a shrill, maniacal howl of laughter.

At the other end of the narrow aisle that led between the rows of bunks, there came the sound of footsteps. After a moment the footsteps stopped – another turbaned head appeared (it was Gitte, our extremely wonderful German Blockova). I couldn’t have begun to guess Gitte’s age when I first saw her face that afternoon – honestly, she could have been anywhere between twenty-five and a hundred. She said something sharply to Róża in German. Róża patted me on the head like a dog. She said to Gitte in English, ‘Look – Justice has come to Ravensbrück!’ and let out another cackling peal of laughter.

Then Róża patted a thin cotton blanket which was folded near my head.

‘Listen, English-speaking French Political Prisoner with the same name as me. I have to go back to work. There’s a blanket here if you want it now, but you have to give it back to the others later and no one will thank you if she has to wash blood out of it, so keep it off your backside. I’ll bring your supper here, but you’ll have to get up to come to the 6.30 roll call.’ She giggled again before she added, ‘I’ll help you if you can’t walk.’

Gitte gave an indulgent sigh. She assured me in English, ‘Someone else will help.’

She reached towards Róża to help her down from the bunk. At first I thought it was just because Róża was so little. She put her arms around Gitte’s neck like a monkey and let herself be lifted to the murky floor. Then I saw the back of her legs and I understood why she needed help climbing down, and why her offer of support to me was such a joke.

Both her legs had been split in half. That’s what it looked like – from knee to ankle in the back of her calves were long clefts so deep you could poke your finger in them up to the second knuckle.

I gasped aloud in horror. It shook me physically – I actually flinched backwards, away from Róża’s awful legs, and then I gasped again in pain because it hurt so much to move.

Róża’s injuries weren’t new – her legs had healed that way. They were as good as they were going to get. When Gitte put Róża down and she turned round to face me, I could see a trio of sunken, dented scars in the front of her right leg, half an inch deep, where bone should have been.

It looked like her legs had been split with a butcher’s knife and then she’d been shot at close range.

She picked up a makeshift crutch – a Y-shaped stick padded with more of the striped prison cloth – and tucked it beneath her right arm.

‘Can you knit?’ she demanded.

‘Sort of.’

She pulled a face and mimicked, ‘Sort of.’

‘You’re an “Available”,’ Gitte told me. ‘Verfügbar. That means you’re not assigned to any special work.’

‘You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you,’ Róża elaborated. ‘Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do.’

I blinked down at her, still lying flat, too much of a wreck to lift my head. A skilled job. Well, I’d had my chance.

‘Hey, don’t cry. We’ll keep you inside the block for a few days – till you can sit down anyway. Gitte’s going to say she needs another knitter to keep the quota up this week, since Zosia and Genca were shot.’

Then Róża disappeared into the twilit aisle between the bunks, escorted by the ageless block leader. I was too high up to see them go. But I could hear Róża’s progress as her wooden clogs clomped against the dank concrete floor, punctuated by the thump of her crutch.

After about thirty seconds, the clomping and thumping stopped suddenly. She yelled back at me, in English, ‘One piece of bread per poem!’

Until November we had two evening roll calls – that was the way they’d always done it, one at 6.30 and one at 9 p.m. Eventually they stopped the 6.30 one because there were so many of us it was taking up to three hours three times a day to count us all. But the week I came to Block 32 they were still doing both evening roll calls, and I went to both. I have no memory of either one, or of climbing up and down out of the top bunk. The population of Block 32 was really, really good at propping people up.

In between the roll calls I am pretty sure I did nothing but lie on my face. I was all burny with a light fever and I didn’t want to eat anything, and Róża, for whatever reason, didn’t follow through with her promise to bring me supper – to be fair, there wasn’t a notice up saying ‘Feed the New Girl in the Top Bunk’ and I was still nothing more to any of them than just the unknown person who’d be making up the murdered Zosia and Genca’s knitting quota.

Gosh, I was dazed.

What I do remember is that suddenly on this plank where I’d been sprawled flat on my face all afternoon, there were three other people trying to make themselves comfortable. We struck a kind of bargain where I got to stay sprawled and the rest of them got the blanket, only they had to sleep sitting up. Or as near upright as you can get when the ceiling is three feet above your head and you are asleep.

We slept that way for five hours, maybe, and then the 4 a.m. Screamer went, and it was a scramble to the horrible toilet ditches before the 4.30 roll call. And that was me back on my feet.

I said my counting-out rhyme saved my life and it’s true, because that’s what made Gitte notice me and give me to Lisette to take care of. You were dead if you didn’t have someone looking out for you. But I never had to worry about finding a teammate. I was so lucky. Lisette’s bunkmates in Block 32 weren’t just a team – we were a proper Camp Family, with Lisette in the role of Lagermutter, Camp Mother.

It took me some time to notice Lisette was there, because Róża acted like she ruled the roost and Lisette was so quiet. Lisette was older than Daddy, but she didn’t really look it, partly because she’d been such a beauty. I like to think she will be again. It was a game I played during roll calls, trying to picture everybody in real life. Lisette Romilly, possibly France’s most popular detective novelist, Jazz Age flapper who drank cocktails with F Scott Fitzgerald in Paris, then surprised everybody by marrying the principal cellist of the Lublin Philharmonic and uprooting herself to move to Poland. She had three boys all as handsome and talented as their parents, she became an archivist at the Catholic University in Lublin, she learned to play the bass violin at the age of thirty-two and within two years she became so good they let her join the orchestra.

Her husband was Jewish. He and her three boys – the oldest was two years younger than me – were all swept up in 1939 and marched out of the city and shot on the road. They didn’t even take them to a camp. Lisette got thrown out of their apartment and there she was, widowed, her children dead, owning nothing, in a foreign country at war. She had no work because the Germans had closed down all the Polish universities. She tried to go back to France and got arrested at the train station. When it first happened, she thought it was for carrying a cello without a licence or something like that. But actually, they arrested practically anyone who was connected with the Polish universities. I think they shot most of them.

I loved Lisette. We all loved Lisette.

Lisette Waits

(by Rose Justice)

Her suitcases are full. But after all

she leaves them standing lifeless in the hall

and takes the cello – for its golden voice

sings back to life her murdered love and boys.

She leaves behind her mother’s silver service,

linen and pearls and books. The railway office

demands she buy two tickets; so she does.

The cello’s all she has and ever was.

The piercing whistle tells the tracks are clear.

She strains to glimpse the plume of steam draw near

and sees the uniforms, a distant gun

aimed at her breast. The cello cannot run.

She pulls it to her heart, fearing the worst,

still praying for the train to reach them first.

Lisette was in prison in Lublin for a while before they sent her to Ravensbrück, and she was part of Róża’s transport. There were about a hundred and forty of them to begin with. A lot of them had already been killed one way or another by the time I got thrown in with them, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why Lisette adopted me – why she adopted Róża, why she was a natural Lagermutter. She needed people to mother. It was how she stayed sane.

Lisette didn’t care about my head full of poetry in English. She had a reasonable supply in her own head, along with an inexhaustible supply of French and Polish and Russian and German poems too. I got tucked under Lisette’s wing because Zosia and Genca, the girls who had been shot last week, had also been her adopted daughters, along with Róża and Karolina. The Blockova Gitte hadn’t just had Róża’s thirst for poetry in mind when she’d boosted me, semi-conscious, into that particular bunk under the roof. I was there for Lisette to look after, to distract her from going crazy with grief and fury all over again.

I must have been the slowest knitter of anybody in the block. I hadn’t knitted in the round before, and I’d never tried holding the yarn in my left hand like the rest of them; but fortunately all we were making was socks. I didn’t mind knitting socks for German soldiers. German soldiers need socks. If they were going to force me to do anything for the Axis war effort, keeping conscripted boys’ feet warm on the Eastern Front was OK. Making bombs was not OK.

I did my knitting standing up. I ate standing up. The back of my dress had dark brown stripes of dried blood across it that I never managed to wash out in the whole time I wore it.

The knitting went on in the block itself. There was a big main room on either side of the so-called washroom in the middle. We ate in the big rooms, and that was also where the knitters worked in the day. Older women knitted, or people who couldn’t walk. There was a guard who watched over everything as we got to work, but mostly they left things up to Gitte. As long as we got the required number of socks knitted, they didn’t waste time keeping an eye on us. And as soon as the SS guards were gone in the morning, everybody relaxed a little bit. We still had to work like fury – if we didn’t meet the quotas, everyone got punished with an extra hour or two of ‘Strafstehen’ – punishment standing – waiting outside the barrack in the dark after the last roll call of the day. But the knitters could talk to one another, a huge advantage and privilege.

Róża sat on the table facing me, resting her feet on the bench. She’d stowed her wooden clogs and her crutch underneath the table. She didn’t say anything to me for about an hour – just eyed me up and down critically, while another woman carried on a quiz session in Polish. They played school, mathematicians and geologists and historians taking turns at tutoring the younger girls. I didn’t understand any of it, and after a while I began to hate the sound of their meaningless foreign voices. It was a nightmare I could never really define, to have so many people packed around me and not be able to communicate with any of them unless they felt like it.