Rose Under Fire

And, of course, they knew we were singing to Róża.

‘MUFFINS!’ yelled the girl at the window.

Instant silence. A dozen hands dragged me off the table. In five seconds we were all bent with our heads over our knitting and a guard stomped in to yell at Gitte for reasons I never figured out.

I got my fair share of bread that night. I didn’t recognise the girl who handed it to me as we crowded round the drums of soup. ‘Thank you!’

‘You’ve got Zosia and Genca to thank, because they’re dead,’ Róża informed me brutally.

‘Shut up, Różyczka.’ The girl who’d given me the bread made a face and told me in a mixture of French and English, ‘Lisette is your Lagermutter now, your Camp Mother, and she’s mine and Róża’s also. So we’ll treat you like a sister.’

‘I’m Rose,’ I said.

‘I know you’re Rose. Rose Justice, American poet. Well, I’m Karolina Salska, Polish film maker. Not famous yet. I worked as a projectionist before the war but what I really want to do is animation, like Disney, you know? You’ll pay for the bread by telling me all about Fantasia.’ She added as a breathless afterthought, ‘You have seen Fantasia, right?’

‘Well, yes, but . . .’ What had happened in Fantasia? Mickey Mouse in a wizard’s hat and flying horses and . . . dinosaurs? ‘It was about four years ago and I don’t remember the music.’

‘Don’t worry, I haven’t seen it, but I know what they play in every sequence, and Lisette is like a walking music library. We’ll get her to hum and you can describe what happens, OK? Gitte sometimes lets us sing after lights-out.’

‘But –’

‘Look, I said don’t worry. If you can’t remember the whole thing, you can teach me some new American dance tunes as compensation.’ Karolina herded me towards one of the long tables where the knitters worked – Róża curled up under the end of the table on the concrete floor with Lisette, and squeezed over to make room for me and Karolina. It was their little family place for a quarter of an hour twice a day, a private nook under the table and out of the chaos of the hundreds of people trying to get to the soup and bread. Karolina tried to let me creep in first, but I couldn’t sit. I had to stay on my knees at the table’s edge. As Karolina shuffled in past me, I noticed that she was wearing a Camp Police armband. Then I glanced down at her bare legs and saw the scar splitting her shin.

‘You’re a Rabbit!’

She glanced up at me. She’d gone red. ‘And I like to dance to American music.’

I probably went red too. ‘Oh! I didn’t mean you couldn’t dance! I was just surprised about your armband!’

‘A few of us are Camp Police. Rabbits are privileged. I patrol the anti-aircraft ditches and don’t have to go around with SS guards breathing down my neck all the time.’

She tossed her head defiantly, smoothing her kerchief with the back of her hand as if it were her hair. ‘I don’t limp,’ she said. ‘One operation only, a bacterial infection, very neat. They didn’t peel off the muscle or cut out pieces of my shinbone like they did to Róża –’

‘You were sick for longer,’ Róża interrupted. ‘You couldn’t walk for eight months.’

‘But you wouldn’t notice now, if I was wearing stockings.’ Listening to the Rabbits talk about their operations was like watching a horror movie in a foreign language. You sort of hoped you’d misunderstood what was going on. And then when you figured out what was really going on, it was worse than you thought.

‘I can walk without limping,’ Karolina said again. ‘My legs weren’t even worth a picture, remember?’ She turned to me again. ‘Róża got two snapshots all to herself, front and back.’

‘What kind of pictures?’ I asked in an agony of confusion. I didn’t think she meant art. Did the SS make them pose?

‘We stole a camera a couple of weeks ago. There’s a soldiers’ prison camp not far from here, and sometimes the Ravensbrück work units have to deliver things there, and people get to talk to the boys. They got us a camera. We took an entire roll of film of the worst damaged legs.’

Róża said savagely, ‘They’ll kill us all eventually, but at least we’ve got evidence.’ She let out one of her bitter cackles of laugher. ‘If somebody ever gets the pictures developed. One of the French prisoners is hiding the film –’

At that point Lisette raised one finger to her lips, and both Róża and Karolina gave her their full attention, waiting expectantly.

Lisette said something in Polish. The second she’d finished, they all took a tiny bite of the stale bread, and a moment later I realised that Lisette had just said grace. They were crouching on a dirty concrete floor under a table and they said grace.

I was astonished at the time. Now I understand. It was one of the ways Lisette held herself together.

Then Lisette turned to me and said in casual English, just carrying on the conversation where she’d interrupted it, ‘Karolina helped take the snapshots, but we can’t risk letting her guard the film. That’s what you were arrested for in the first place, isn’t it, darling? Illegal filming!’

‘I didn’t film anything. I made a short cartoon showing a bunch of wolves herding rabbits into prison trucks,’ Karolina corrected with satisfaction. ‘And I still can’t believe I got the rabbits right! Anyway I was arrested for showing the film, not for making it.’ She gave her empty tin bowl a swipe with the hem of her dress and tried to tilt it so she could see her reflection, then sighed at the hopelessness of this project. She stowed the bowl in a little bag on a string tied round her waist. ‘Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of here and do an updated sequel, involving wolf bites. What were you arrested for, Rose?’

‘I landed my plane in the wrong place,’ I said.

Róża snickered and leaped into the conversation. ‘I was arrested for being a Girl Scout. They arrested my whole Girl Scout troop in the summer of 1941. I was fourteen.’

I gaped at her.

‘We were delivering plastic explosive for bombs,’ she said. ‘You know, little home-made bombs to sabotage officials’ cars and throw in office windows. Most of us got released, but they kept the oldest – and I didn’t stand a chance because I’d actually been stopped at a checkpoint and, well, it was pretty obvious I was smuggling explosives. You know how it is when you’re fourteen, you think you’re so much smarter than everybody else and nothing will ever hurt you . . .’ She trailed off, wiping her own bowl with her last crumb of bread, and then said in her offhand way, ‘They didn’t beat me, but they made me watch while they beat my mother, trying to get me to tell them who I was working for. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Someone always dropped off the stuff in our baskets with a note that said where to take it. They beat the crap out of our Girl Scout leader and then they shot her. So, 51498, what were you doing when you were fourteen?’

‘I’m older than you,’ I said faintly. ‘The war hadn’t started yet.’

It had though. It had already been going on for a year, but the USA wasn’t in it yet. MY GOD, it’s been going on SUCH A LONG TIME.

‘Well, what were you doing? Do they have Girl Scouts in America?’

‘Yes – we –’

Oh – we hung May baskets on people’s doors. Daddy got a brand-new Piper Cub for the flying school and he took me along to pick it up from Lock Haven, and I flew it all the way home and Hemlock Council gave me a special ‘Young Pilot’ badge. I went on my second Juniata River canoe trip that summer. We took the Brownies on a picnic to the Conewago Grove Lake. We were not smuggling explosives and we were not being arrested by the Nazis. Nobody executed my troop leader. I did not have to watch my mother being beaten.

That is one of the very simple horrors I can’t shake – I can strip the clothes from a pile of dead bodies without retching, but thinking about this ninth grade Girl Scout having to watch her mother being tortured still makes me feel sick. Though I am not sure Róża would have grassed on anyone even to save her mother. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Why lucky for her? Not lucky for the people she was protecting, but lucky for Róża. She didn’t have to choose.

‘Do they still – these experiments on people’s legs, do they still –?’ I couldn’t finish the question.

Karolina glanced down at my own bloodstained dress. I’d been kneeling for a quarter of an hour and my knees were aching, but I couldn’t sit. I hung on to the edge of the table to hold myself up.

‘Don’t worry, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘I mean, your legs are safe. They stopped the experiments last year.’

‘They might shoot you, of course, but they might do that to anybody,’ Róża offered.

‘Hey, hey!’ Karolina said, and Lisette suddenly crawled out next to me and grabbed me round the shoulders.

‘Don’t be scared, darling. Don’t let Róża scare you! She makes fun of everything. It’s how she is.’

‘She laughs when she’s in pain,’ Karolina assured me. ‘She doesn’t cry, just laughs like a mechanical fortuneteller in a glass box. Don’t cry!’

‘The war’s nearly over,’ Lisette said soothingly.

‘Look, I’ll let you in on a secret –’ Karolina peeled back the edge of her kerchief. She was hiding a new crop of soft brown curls. ‘I want to look nice when the American soldiers get here. I’ve got to make sure no one sees that I’m growing my hair out though. The guards really hate curly hair.’

It had been drizzling all afternoon and was pouring with rain by the 9 p.m. roll call, and it was the coldest it had been since I’d got to Germany. I was burning with fever by lights out – it nearly killed me to have to climb up to the top bunk.

‘Why do you sleep so high up?’ I gasped. ‘With your legs the way they are?’

‘When people get the shits, it rains down on the lower bunks,’ Róża explained. ‘We had to fight the Red Army bitches for the high ones. Mother in Heaven, you’ve never had to fight for anything, have you?’

I was still only capable of lying flat on my face in the crowded bunk, and they all used me for a furnace. Róża and Karolina snuggled up on either side of me, Karolina behind me with her arms right around me, and Róża in a sodden, shivering ball of misery between me and Lisette.

‘OK,’ Karolina demanded. ‘Fantasia! Start with ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ – that’s an easy one. Sing, Lisette!’

‘Shh,’ Lisette said. ‘Tomorrow.’

Lisette’s word was law, and she’d been watching me closely; she knew I couldn’t perform any more that night. But I had to give them something, payment for the bread, for being adopted into their family, even if I wasn’t going to give a movie commentary.