Rose Under Fire

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Irina came back to that roll call wearing your coat,’ Lisette said. ‘And Karolina fought her for it.’

‘They fought over my coat ?’ I repeated dumbly, astonished. They wouldn’t do that, either one of them.

Róża understood instantly. ‘They didn’t fight over your coat, you turnip head,’ she said coldly. ‘They fought over your number.’

Lisette looked away from me, her cold hands still helping me into the warmest clothes I’d worn for months and months.

‘Did Irina win?’ I whispered.

‘Karolina won.’

I feel like it is the worst thing I have ever done – lie weeping in a hole in the ground while Karolina –

I can’t write it.

Karolina on the beach at the Lake in a red bathing suit, sunbathing under a blue sky.

‘Now pay attention, my dear,’ Lisette said, holding me fiercely by the shoulders. ‘You are going with Róża.’ I know that’s why Karolina did it – for Róża, not for me. Everyone Róża’s age was already gone, but she was so crippled she couldn’t go by herself. Karolina and Lisette were counting on me to get her out, to get her scrawny mutilated legs out where someone might see them – because Róża was a better piece of evidence than Karolina, who could walk to her death without limping.

‘You have one task only this morning and that is to keep anyone from noticing Róża’s legs. Hide her, hold her up – if she falls over, make it look like you have knocked her down. Irina is going to be on the same transport, so look for her and she will help you. There can be one of you on each side of Róża when you get to the other end, but you will be on your own until you find Irina.’

‘Where’s Irina?’ we asked together.

‘She’s in the Punishment Block –’

‘Because –?’ Róża interrupted, and then guessed, ‘For fighting with another prisoner during roll call, right? For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat?’

Lisette pressed her thin lips together, and I caught the crazed wet gleam in her eyes that had been there when I’d first met her, right after Zosia and Genca had been shot. Not for the first time, I wanted to punch Róża in the teeth.

‘For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat,’ Lisette agreed. ‘They are shipping out the whole Punishment Block this morning; I don’t know why, but you are going with them.’

‘In these clothes?’

‘There will be some Warsaw evacuees as well; they’re still wearing civilian clothes. You know where the transport trucks line up? You’ll have to wait till they bring Irina’s block out and then get into line with them. Oh, darling Różyczka –’

‘Rose will take care of me,’ Róża said with composure. Because I couldn’t say it myself. I wasn’t sure.

‘What if they take you straight to –’

‘What if they take us straight to Monte Carlo? We’ll be rich!’ Róża laughed hilariously.

Lisette kissed Róża on both cheeks. She gave me six slices of bread, wealth beyond imagining – two slices each, two days’ worth, to last us who knew how long. And who knew where she got it. Then she kissed me too.

‘Get her out,’ Lisette said. She didn’t say goodbye to us. But of course she hadn’t said goodbye to any of her other children. And this time she had a slender hope we weren’t going to be killed.

And this time she was right, as it happens, though she never knew, and may be dead. I can’t believe Lisette is dead, but she probably is, and I’ll never know that either.

It was about six weeks ago – I have been in Paris for just over two weeks, writing and writing, and we left Ravensbrück late in March. It hadn’t stopped snowing when we left – at that point I thought it was never going to stop snowing.

Irina was easy to find because she is so tall, and because of her white hair. She looked as dazed and crazed as Lisette, standing in line waiting to climb into the transport truck. She was staring at nothing. We couldn’t get near her, but we got into the same truck.

You know, I think we could have climbed into any truck we wanted to. Who’d have ever dreamed that any prisoner would willingly climb into one of those stinking, overcrowded, hellbound crates? Who’d have dreamed that I would?

It was bomb fuses all over again – like taking the fuse away from the boy on the railway tracks, or refusing to make the relay. I didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t. I had to climb into that truck with Róża. For Karolina – for Lisette. For Micheline and Elodie. For Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia –

Controlled flight into terrain.

We were expecting something like a three-day trip with maybe a bucket of water to share among us, nothing to use for a toilet, and having to sleep standing up because there wasn’t any room to sit down. We were expecting that, prepared for it. Resigned to it anyway. But the journey didn’t take much more than an hour. And we knew we’d really been driving somewhere, not going in the slow and terrible final circle around the outside of the camp.

They didn’t let us out right away. The hours crawled by. When they finally opened the trucks, for the first few minutes, while everybody was untangling themselves from one another and gulping in fresh air, there were only two things I thought about: hiding Róża’s legs, and getting to Irina. I dragged Róża under one arm and I shoved my way towards Irina’s white head. Irina caught Róża under her other arm and then I’d done both my jobs.

‘Where is this place?’ Irina asked pointlessly. Who had any idea? It was a rhetorical question and I looked around rhetorically –

And I knew where we were. I knew where we were.

We were in the exact same parking lot I’d pulled up in on the back of the mechanic’s motorcycle when Karl Womelsdorff and I flew to Neubrandenburg last September. It could have been anywhere, the loading area for any factory complex. There wasn’t really anything distinctive about it. But it is emblazoned on my brain and I recognised it.

‘We’re in Neubrandenburg,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. They make aircraft parts here – there’s an airfield. And a town.’

Róża acted so fast. ‘Give me the bread,’ she demanded in a whisper, and I stupidly gave it to her.

‘BREAD!’ she screamed, just the way she’d done in front of the fence by the Revier. ‘Das Brot! Chleb! Le pain! The SS are giving out bread!’

There was another instant riot. Only this time there really was bread.

She threw it with calculated cunning and accuracy into the middle of the crowd of hundreds of starving women climbing out of the trucks. They didn’t mob us – they mobbed the bread. All the available guards piled in after them to sort out the havoc. There were big chain-link fences topped with barbed wire around the yard, but the vehicle gates were still open wide.

Róża ran. Or didn’t run exactly, just hurled herself in her ridiculous lopsided, gimpy lurch away from the crowd and round the truck we’d just climbed out of. Irina and I sprinted after her, but she was in the open before we were, and before we could catch up she was out of the gates and into the road.

That was our escape. It took thirty seconds and six slices of bread.

We didn’t know it then though. We were just in a frenzy of panic and fury that Róża could have done anything so utterly, desperately, monstrously stupid. We were out of Ravensbrück, out of the danger of being gassed, we’d got her scrawny Exhibit A legs safely into an ordinary work camp, and now she’d killed us all by trying to escape.

But they hadn’t counted us getting into the truck back in Ravensbrück. Well, maybe they’d counted Irina, but they hadn’t counted Róża and me, and they didn’t count us getting out. So that was lucky – they didn’t know we were there, and thanks to Róża’s staged food fight, no one noticed us leaving. We caught up with Róża easily as soon as we broke free of the bread ruckus. The road outside the gates was also full of trucks. In a couple more seconds the dogs would come after us, we’d be dragged back into the factory yard and they’d beat us all to a pulp and shoot us. We didn’t turn back. How could we turn back? They’d have beaten us to a pulp and shot us if we’d turned ourselves in.

Irina threw Róża under the nearest truck and dived in after her. So did I.

For another minute or two we lay there panting. Running fifty feet had just about killed us. We were still so close to the fence that we could see the riot in the parking lot.

‘Come on –’ Irina gasped, and we crawled beneath the trucks, moving slowly from one to another, until we were a little further away and we felt safe enough to rest again.

We were also lucky the ground was frozen. We didn’t get coated head to foot in mud or slush. I shrugged off my coat and gave it to Irina. She pushed it away and I threw it back at her insistently, too fearful to talk. I wasn’t being noble – I was being sneaky.

‘Put on the coat, you stupid Bat Girl,’ Róża snarled. ‘You look like a schmootzich. We don’t have a hope in hell out here with you in stripes. Cover up! As soon as we stand up we have to look like normal people –’

I’d caught what was usually Róża’s disease: inappropriate hysterical laughter. I lay on my face on a sheet of oily ice under a German munitions truck, smothering myself and shaking with mirth.

‘Holy Mother of God!’ Róża swore. ‘I’m surrounded by lunatics!’ She began to giggle too. Irina did not, but she quietly put my coat on and then lay next to me with her arm over my back.

‘You threw away all our bread,’ I pointed out to Róża. ‘Talk about lunatics!’

And we both broke into muffled hysterics again.

Irina took hold of my ear and twisted it hard. I shut up.

‘We have no papers,’ she said. ‘We speak no German. What is our story when someone stops us?’

Róża improvised wildly, ‘We are French –’

‘French!’

‘French servants. We have to be French – it’s our only common language. You and Rose are cooks! And I am your sister. Only I speak German. We are servants for a German officer – I do all his sewing and cleaning –’

‘I bet you do,’ Irina snickered.

We lay quietly for a few minutes, feeling falsely secure. It was cold, but no colder than standing in a roll call in the dark.

‘We better move,’ said Róża. ‘If they notice the Bat Girl’s gone, they’ll look for her.’

We crawled for half an hour. We crawled underneath the entire row of trucks. When there weren’t any more we had to stand up and walk, vulnerable and obvious, along a barren stretch of road outside the camp and factory complex. We could see the town in the distance, church spire and silhouettes of buildings, and there wasn’t the faintest question that we could go that way.