Rose Under Fire

Really dying of it, I think.

Hands and arms and heads stuck out anywhere there was a gap – cupped hands collecting rainwater, some holding bowls or even just a piece of cloth to collect moisture – I saw one woman lying on her back with her hair in the black cinder mud at the tent’s edge, her mouth open, letting a rivulet of water stream down the canvas and into her mouth.

You know, it set you at war with yourself.

A back-of-my-mind part of me wanted to help – the Lutheran-church-bred Girl Scout in me wanted to race back and forth with buckets of water for everybody.

But another back-of-my-mind part of me, cowed and self-centred, was going, Thank GOD I am in Block 32. Thank GOD I am not in that tent.

And the front of my mind – the biggest part of me – was just screaming over and over in denial and disbelief: WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

‘Don’t look,’ the German Kolonka advised again, and then her voice suddenly went hard and flat. ‘Oh, what the hell, go ahead and look. If they throw any bodies out of the tent, we’ll probably have to pick them up. But stay on this side just now!’

There were twelve of us, all with numbers in the 51000s except for Irina and the Kolonka, and when we got to work, I realised that what we had in common was our height – all of us were tall. That’s why the guard had pulled Irina out of line on a whim when she’d come to get me that morning.

The Kolonka wasn’t kidding about picking up bodies. We got marched down the main street of the camp, the Lagerstrasse, to a depot. There we collected half a dozen handcarts, and then our very first job was clearing the top bunks in the Revier, the sickbay, which shorter women couldn’t see or reach as easily as we could. We left the carts standing at the back door of the Revier and lined up to go in. The Kolonka pulled the neck of her dress up over her nose like a gas mask, yelled another order at us through the blue-and-grey striped cloth, and we marched inside like we were going to war. The stench was unbelievable. Within seconds we all had our dresses pulled up over our noses.

And I do not remember what we did.

I know what we did, of course, and I remember doing the same thing later – we moved hundreds of corpses this winter. We lifted them out of the bunks and undressed them. We stacked them in rows on the floor of the mortuary. We carried them out to our handcarts and hauled them to the crematorium and unloaded them again. But I don’t remember the first time I did it. It was worse doing it for the first time. And I have blocked it out.

This is what I do remember about that first day of work as an Available: just before we marched back to our blocks for the 6 o’clock roll call, our Kolonka assembled us in the washroom of the Revier and gave us each a vitamin C tablet out of a green triangular package.

‘These are from the Swiss Red Cross, and yes, they’re stolen. Take them now – nothing leaves this room. Any of you breathe a word and I’ll get you transferred to the Punishment Block. Not the Bunker – don’t expect a cosy private cell with nothing to do all day. You’ll be digging toilet pits and hauling road rollers.’

She didn’t have to threaten us again. Even I knew already what the Punishment Block was, and it wasn’t the extra hard and filthy work people dreaded about being sent there. The women in the Punishment Block were known for being the nastiest people in the camp. Probably with good reason, but you didn’t want to have to fight for sleeping space or food with someone who’d kick you under the bunks and steal your bowl and make you buy it back with your bread ration for the entire week.

The Kolonka watched us all closely while we swallowed the vitamins, her pale green eyes narrow with suspicion. Suddenly she advanced on Irina. She seized hold of Irina’s jaw and rammed her head back against the tiled wall, pinching her nostrils closed and holding a hand over her mouth.

‘Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ the Kolonka rapped out over her shoulder. Prisoner 51498! – me. I stepped forward fearfully.

‘Does this bitch understand anything but Russian?’

‘A little French,’ I gulped.

‘Swallow!’ The Kolonka ordered Irina in French, punctuating her command by bashing the back of Irina’s skull against the wall. Irina choked and spluttered and finally swallowed.

The German girl turned round and told us, ‘No hiding stolen vitamin pills under your tongue to take to your friends back in your block. I’m not being nice or doing you a favour. I’m taking care of myself. No one on my team gets scurvy. Line up!’

We lined up meekly.

‘My name’s Anna,’ she growled at us. It seemed like an odd thing to finish up with. I think it was the closest she could come to an apology.

‘So what did they make you do?’ Róża asked cheerfully as we scrambled to get our tepid soup that evening.

My hands were shaking. Karolina put her own hand under my bowl so I didn’t spill anything.

‘We were working in the Revier. Irina tried to organise vitamins for you,’ I told Róża. ‘She got bashed in the head for it.’

‘For me? Really, Russian Bat Girl?’

Irina shrugged. ‘No, not for you, Rabbit. If I got away with it I would have sold them.’

‘Can you get calcium tablets?’ Lisette asked.

Irina shot me a warning glance which said clearly, Shut up or Anna will get you transferred to the Punishment Block. But Lisette wouldn’t let it go, and after we’d all squeezed into our spot under the end of the table and she’d said her grace in Polish, she said to me again, ‘Calcium tablets.’

‘Why calcium?’ I asked.

‘For the Rabbits who have had bone operations. For Róża, so she doesn’t break her leg walking on the damaged bone. It can happen. Calcium helps make bones stronger.’

I thought about it for a minute. Anna was like a guard dog – trained to be vicious, but maybe if you handled her the right way . . . I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie, she’d said.

Irina caught my eye and raised two fingers to her lips, miming smoking.

She was right – I was ready to bet Anna could be bribed with cigarettes. Except for Irina, the other girls on my work team were all from my original transport. If they were still sharing bunks with Elodie, if they were still in the same block with her and she was still alive, maybe one of them could carry a message to her – I felt sure Elodie was capable of organising cigarettes for me to give to Anna.

‘We’ll work on it,’ I said.

The next morning Irina and I joined the tall French girls again and marched through the mud past the tent, with Anna marching next to our column where she could keep an eye on us. Irina stood between me and Anna to hide the fact that I had a whole day’s bread ration hidden in the blouse of my dress, about a quarter of a loaf. That was the standard unit of camp currency, a day’s bread ration, and we’d scraped it together in anticipation of our great calcium caper.

Hope – you think of hope as a bright thing, a strong thing, sustaining. But it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s simply this: lumps of stale bread stuck down your shirt. Stale grey bread eked out with ground fish bones, which you won’t eat because you’re going to give it away, and maybe you’ll get a message through to your friend. That’s all you need.

God, I was hungry.

I don’t mean I was more hungry that day than I’d been the day before. I mean I was constantly, hopelessly, stupefyingly hungry. I said earlier, I can’t remember when I first felt that way – though I know I wasn’t able to eat much right after I got out of the Bunker, I don’t remember ever not being hungry. The thing is, when you’re that hungry, it’s almost impossible to think about anything else. You know you ought to, and you want to, and sometimes you’re forced to. Calcium and cigarettes. Air raids. Feeling sorry for the people who are dying of thirst and the half-human schmootzich beggars licking spilled soup off the kitchen steps. But it takes an effort.

We got marched past the tent, past the Bunker and the sickbay and kitchens and out through the main gate, but without our handcarts this time. Then we went around the walls towards the crematorium, the path we’d taken with the corpses yesterday, and I had a bad moment thinking they’d make us work at the incinerator ovens today. But we passed the crematorium and ended up in the building next to it, a long shed with a sort of huge garage door entrance. It was being used as a storage area for building and maintenance equipment. Our team of Tall Strong Amazons was supposed to clear it out.

The shed was full of tools, shovels, long lengths of rail, stuff like that. I don’t think I could ever in a million years describe what it was like for me and three other underfed girls to pick up a steel rail – two of us on each end – and carry it on our shoulders to a pile by the train tracks. If any one of us had dropped her end, or stumbled, our feet would have all been crushed.

Irina and I worked together, but on our third rail we somehow got swapped around with a couple of the French girls, and I ended up next to Prisoner 51444.

‘I have some of your things,’ she muttered suddenly. ‘Your friend Elodie sent them.’

We were at the unloading point and let our end of the rail come thundering down into the muddy ground. We had to shift the rail over to line it up, and the girl hissed in my ear as we worked, ‘Wait till we’re back in the shed. I’ll hand them over.’

Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you’re being lifted you don’t worry about plummeting.

‘I have bread for you to give Elodie,’ I whispered back. ‘Can she get me some cigarettes?’

51444 gave a panicked, explosive laugh. ‘What if I eat the bread myself?’

I hissed in her ear, ‘You won’t. You just said you’re Elodie’s messenger.’ I hazarded wildly, ‘You can have half.’

‘I’m Micheline,’ she said.

Later on she stumbled against me and grabbed at my arm for support, and suddenly I was holding something soft and silky balled up in the palm of my hand.

I stuffed the silky wad into the neck of my dress, and gave her the bread.

I didn’t know what she’d pressed into my hand until I got back to Block 32 that night and had a chance to look. It turned out to be my hose. Elodie had sent me my stockings! They were actually little socks that she’d made out of my hose. She’d been put to work in one of the workshops where they re-purposed everybody’s clothes, and she’d got hold of my torn nylons and cut them into pieces and made me three little pairs of socks – they just slipped over your feet so they’d be hidden by your shoes. I hope she kept a few pairs back for herself.

And – this is so Elodie – she’d embroidered a tiny rosebud on the instep of each one. The thread was from my own dress, the one I was still wearing, from the same ball of thread we’d unravelled from the torn collar when we were together in quarantine. A little blue rose on each foot.

Oh, wonderful Elodie!

Three pairs of nylon socks. If I’d worn all three on top of each other my feet would have still been cold – but of course I gave a pair to Róża. And another to Lisette. I passed them round under the table when we’d finished eating. Lisette tried to give hers to Karolina – Karolina wouldn’t take them. They had a fight over them. Or rather, Karolina refused heatedly. Lisette just kept calmly insisting, ‘I won’t wear this newfangled nylon, my dear, so you may as well have them.’