Rose Under Fire

The Lublin Special Transport refused to do that in the past, and no one really believed they were going to do it now.

In desperation Gitte threatened, ‘The whole camp knows. The whole camp knows what happened to the Rabbits. Their names got out before and they’ll get out again. If you kill any more of them, someone is going to tell the world.’

It doesn’t sound like much of a threat, does it? Someone is going to tell the world. But when the war is over, that stinking commander and those soulless doctors will all have to get real jobs again, and who will want Drs Fischer and Gebhardt cutting up their legs after what they did to Róża’s? They knew what the reaction would be when people found out, when the Allied soldiers found the camps. When people started to ask them to explain, to account for what they’d done. They knew. And they were scared.

‘You need to learn our names,’ Róża whispered as we all struggled to get comfortable in our crowded bunk.

‘I know your names.’

‘All our names. You need to learn the list of Rabbits’ names. Then if you get out, you can tell everyone about us. You might be released back to your Air Force or the Red Cross might come for you. But that won’t happen to any of us because we’re all condemned. Special Transport. So if you survive the war, you have to tell everyone our names, our full names. All seventy-four of us, the living and dead.’

‘There were more than that, darling,’ Lisette reminded her. ‘Also the German Bible Student and the Ukrainian girl. And the others whose legs they amputated.’

‘Never mind the amputees,’ Róża said heartlessly. ‘They’re all dead and no one remembers their names anyway. There are no witnesses and there’s no evidence.’

‘God!’ I exclaimed. ‘They amputated people’s legs?’

‘Those girls were mentally ill to start with – no one will ever know who they were. Anyway, you’ve seen us. You know what happened. You know it was real.’

‘Oh, Róża, how can I remember all your names?’ I wailed. ‘I can’t even spell your name!’

‘In a poem,’ said Lisette. ‘Make a poem for a mnemonic. Make yourself another counting-out rhyme.’

I know the list by heart now too, their real names. But I started just the way Lisette suggested, by making myself a counting-out rhyme out of all their given names. Some of them had the same first name, so I only used each name once in the rhyme to keep it simple. I whispered it to myself in roll call and recited it in my head as I shivered between Róża and Irina in the bunks, my head and stomach aching with hunger, my frozen feet too numb to feel my painted toes.

Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,

Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,

Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,

Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,

Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,

Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,

Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,

Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia.

*

The seven Rabbits’ names came off the list of people they were going to execute. We were pretty sure it was just a postponement so they could catch us off guard later.

Karolina staggered back to us after nearly a week in the tent, more ravenous than we were and full of news. She’d been talking to the Jewish women in the tent who’d been transferred from Auschwitz.

‘They were killing tens of – tens of thousands of people there every day this summer,’ Karolina stuttered. ‘TENS OF THOUSANDS. Gassing them and burning the bodies, or just – just burying them in piles when the incinerators got behind – if Fischer hadn’t infected me with gangrene on purpose, for no reason at all, I wouldn’t believe the numbers either. TENS OF THOUSANDS EVERY – EVERY DAY –’

What a meaningless number. It would have wiped out Ravensbrück in a couple of days, and Ravensbrück was enormous. No wonder Karolina was stuttering.

‘Ten thousand a day in your dreams,’ Róża challenged bitterly. ‘Who was doing the counting? How big is Auschwitz?’

‘Bigger than Ravensbrück.’ Karolina took a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. ‘Listen, 7705, your number has not come up on the death list yet and you haven’t spent a week in that hellhole under the tent. Oh, I want a bath, I want to wash my hair! They pile the corpses at one end if no one comes to take them out. They dig gravel and mud out of the ground with their hands to try to cover them up. They have no toilets and they can’t go outside. They catch rainwater and snow in the tent flaps or they’d all be dead of thirst. And that is only the ones who are still capable of doing more than rocking back and forth and wailing and trying to eat their own hands –’

Lisette put a gentle arm round Karolina’s waist.

‘I saw a woman doing that,’ Karolina said, shuddering. She shook Lisette off and lowered her voice. ‘Listen, just before they started evacuating Auschwitz so the Soviets won’t be able to liberate it, there was a prisoner rebellion there. In October. The prisoners destroyed one of the crematoriums – they tried to blow up the gas chambers. They killed guards with hammers.’

‘Where did they get explosive?’ Irina asked quietly.

‘The women in the munitions factories smuggled gunpowder out to them. It took them months. Hundreds of them escaped – they escaped –’ Karolina made a funny noise, a cross between a sob and a laugh. ‘Of course everybody got caught and they were all shot, two hundred of them in a day. Except the ones who’d planned it, and the women. They were all slammed into the Auschwitz Bunker. You can imagine what’s going on there now.’ She gave that gulping laugh again. ‘They say the men gave out the women’s names. But – but the women aren’t giving them anything.’

Lisette was listening with twenty kinds of horror – horror at what had happened, at what was still happening back in Poland, at what was happening under the tent, and mainly at what had happened to Karolina and at the half-crazed way she was telling her stuttering story. But Irina and Róża were listening with ambition and admiration. I could tell. They’d stopped thinking about food for a minute and were thinking about rebellion.

A couple of mornings later the camp authorities distributed coats, and that made everyone’s hopes soar too, because we were sure they wouldn’t waste winter coats on people they were about to execute. The coats got dumped in big piles outside the chain-link fence around our block, arranged by nationality, with numbers and prisoner patches already sewn on. You were out of luck if your coat didn’t fit. Lisette, who was used to dropping her status as honourary Pole whenever they made us line up in national groups, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the French pile of coats along with the spies and Resistance couriers in their beetroot rouge.

Not surprisingly, these garments had all seen better days; their linings had all been ripped out, and every coat had had one sleeve ripped off and another sleeve of a wildly contrasting colour sewn back in its place, to make them obviously prison coats. We tossed them back and forth, trying to find our own numbers, and suddenly Lisette burst out laughing. She shoved a lightweight pale green wool at me – it had a velvet collar so moth-eaten that no one had bothered to salvage it.

‘Come on!’ Lisette pulled at my arm again. ‘Back in line!’

I started to pull on the coat she’d given me and suddenly recognised the navy contrasting sleeve.

It was from my ATA tunic. My ‘USA’ flash was still in place on the shoulder. That was what had made Lisette laugh.

Wonderful Elodie!

Later, when I had a chance to check out the coat more closely, I discovered that Elodie had tucked my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy into a pocket hidden on the inside. With the blue thread from the collar of my dress she’d embroidered another rose on the hanky in the corner opposite Aunt Rainy’s, and on either side of it she’d put our initials, with a little French flag under the ‘EF’ and a little American flag under the ‘RJ’.

And she’d also hidden cigarettes in the hem of the coat, and a couple of threaded needles, and three sugar cubes wrapped in paper (worth more than their weight in gold in terms of bribing the insatiable Anna). Hope, hope, soaring like a kite! We were clinging to anything we could. A coat without a lining, full of hidden pencil stubs! What treasure! It was already so cold in November.

We had a regular supply of calcium for Róża by then too. She screamed and carried on the first time we tried to inject her, until Irina threatened to tie her down and gag her like the SS did when they operated on her in the Bunker. Who do you think Róża finally let give her the jabs? NO ONE. She did it herself. She’d rather do it herself than let anyone else poke a needle into her.

Thorny little Różyczka.

Thanksgiving

(by Rose Justice)

From the steaming kitchen it’s a quarter-mile

across the crowded wasteland to the patchwork barrack,

and we two get to haul the drum of soup

heavier than we are. The challenge is

not to let go. It’s a race against time (it will be cold,

already it’s cooled down), a race against

the several thousand grasping hands and gulping mouths

we have to pass before we eat.

(Thank you for the gold November sky,

the warm steel kissing my cold hands, no mud today.)

But first we have to get it down the steps.

We stop to rest outside the kitchen door –

the barrel still is gently hot between us,

steaming like a bath. One second’s pause

to take a breath, gather the strength to lift

and then to drag ourselves and the drum of soup

the endless quarter-mile over the cinders.

One second too long on the steps.

Behind us blows and screams (we are too slow),

and in the square a hundred hungry scarecrows

race towards us ready to lighten our load.

Trapped between buzzards and gaping beaks

we fight like the mutts we are – I won’t let go –

I’ll fight with teeth and feet, I’ll bite the girl

who tries to scoop a bowlful under my clinging fist –

but when we kick it’s our mistake.

The careful balance goes. The whole thing tips.

(Thank you for the hands that caught the heavy drum

and those who saved what spilled in bowls of soup

and cups of dirt and their cupped palms,

and those who sponged it up with bread

and those who licked the thirsty earth –

Thank you for the chagrin that let us go

with no one begging more, thank you

that now our load was lighter for the long walk back.)

April 28, 1945

Paris

Guess what – I am dressed.

I have been sitting here writing or pacing around this room stark naked for over a week, and now Fernande has taken me quietly in hand. It started with the extra quilt and now she has moved on to clothing. She brought me a pile of panties and camisoles and a couple of skirts and blouses. She’s built a lot like me, tall and bony. Not as bony as I am now, of course, but she’s built like I ought to be. I don’t think the clothes are hers though – I think they are her daughter’s. She wouldn’t say they were, but she did tell me her daughter had been put in prison and she doesn’t know what happened to her. I am probably wearing another dead woman’s clothes. But it is easier to wear these than the clothes Elodie organised for us, because these have been lovingly looked after in the hope that their owner might come back for them some day.