Rose Under Fire

And honestly, why not?

Why not? We were free and independent. We were grown-ups. Even if she wasn’t working to begin with, little Różyczka wouldn’t be very expensive to feed. We might need more space than my bed-sitting room offered. But not much. We wouldn’t need much. We’d shared a lot less.

Now she didn’t even say anything. She just came over to share my window with me and took my hand and squeezed it hard. And I knew it wasn’t just another Nick Story, another impossible rescue fantasy. We were really going to do it. She’d come with me to Scotland on Monday.

She’d probably come with me to Hamburg in January.

We could see the coast as we landed, green flat fields arching lazily towards Yugoslavia, the docks of Monfalcone crowded with US Navy ships, the narrow strip of sand at the edge of the marsh across the bay. That was where we were going. It wasn’t a resort – it wasn’t the Lido. But it was a beach on the Adriatic. It really was.

Róża let go of my hand as we landed. She watched out the window, unflinching, the whole way down. She’d made up her mind she wasn’t scared. I could believe she’d delivered plastic explosive for the Polish Resistance on her bicycle when she was in ninth grade. I could believe she’d told the SS camp commander she’d rather be executed than be experimented on again.

She climbed out of the plane without letting anybody help her.

Ronchi dei Legionari wasn’t exactly tropical. That part of the Adriatic Sea is actually the most northern coast of anything connected to the Mediterranean. You can still see the Alps, blue in the near distance. The sun was shining, but the stiff breeze was chilly. It smelled like the ocean. It felt like spring.

I caught my breath in panic all of a sudden. If only we had something to do, I thought. I don’t want to stand on a strange beach feeling blue about Karolina. We need sand pails and shovels to distract us. Something to collect shells in. Fishing nets –

Róża turned to me and said, ‘Remember Irina’s paper planes? Remember the glider? My sister and I used to make kites out of newspaper. You think they’d let us have some paper and string?’

*

They did better than that. They gave us silk maps. The airfield had been a materiel supply depot since Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943 and, among other things, they still had a big box of unused aircrew escape maps of all of southern Europe sitting in a corner of their radio room. Everybody on the airfield got involved – actually, I think everyone fell a little in love with Róża, swamped in her enormous flight suit with its rolled-up cuffs, with her fluffy caramel hair shining in the dusty sunlight streaming through windows still crossed with peeling tape so they wouldn’t shatter in an air raid. Someone found a reel of fishing line and balsam strips to make a frame with. The gum-cracking receptionist cut us a strip of the silver tinsel Christmas garland she’d draped round the door for us to use as a tail. She made us pose with her for a snapshot.

‘You gals are nuts,’ she said approvingly. ‘Gosh, I wish I could come with you. It’s mighty boring sitting here waiting for phone calls and watching the planes come and go. I don’t speak Italian so I’m too scared to go out by myself when I’m done – gotta wait for one of the boys to come along and escort me! Have fun!’

Sitting in the back of an American military jeep next to Róża, as one of the mechanics drove us along a muddy track through a pine swamp and we struggled to keep our silk kite from taking off on its own before we got anywhere, I felt very smug and lucky.

It is nice to feel that way.

‘What does “nuts” mean?’

‘She meant we’re crazy.’

‘We are.’

We’d walked right up to the water’s edge, knee-high rippling waves that were a colour I’d never imagined – an opaque, pale green, like mint sugar wafers. You could see the big steamers and Navy ships across the bay, the way you could from the little village of Hamble, just outside Southampton, where I’d been stationed when I was an ATA pilot. The sky was a pure, piercing blue, utterly without any cloud in it anywhere.

‘Remember the sky at Ravensbrück?’ Róża said.

‘Yes, always beautiful, even when it was snowing.’

‘Remember the sunset the night you and Karolina spilled half a drum of soup on the kitchen steps?’

‘Oh, I wrote a poem about that – clouds like flaming rubies and fireworks, and all of us sobbing over the horrible soup. The irony! What about the shooting stars that night in November, in the early-morning roll call!’

‘The Leonids!’ Róża remembered. ‘And what about the rainbow? The full double rainbow? Lisette started to cry!’

‘I longed to be in the sky,’ I said. ‘When it was windy like this, I just watched the clouds or leaves or birds racing overhead and I longed to be up there with them. It hurt.’

‘Here we are,’ she answered softly. ‘Free in the wind!’

Suddenly she launched into my kite poem.

‘Hope has no feathers.

Hope takes flight

tethered with twine

like a tattered kite,

slave to the wind’s

capricious drift,

eager to soar

but needing lift.’

I stared at the brilliant sky, listening to Róża softly chanting my own words.

‘Hope waits stubbornly,

watching the sky

for turmoil, feeding on

things that fly:

crows, ashes, newspapers,

dry leaves in flight

all suggest wind

that could lift a kite.’

She paused. The first thing I’d ever said to her was a poem, so after a moment I finished this one for her, softly.

‘Hope sails and plunges,

firmly caught

at the end of her string –

fallen slack, pulling taut,

ragged and featherless.

Hope never flies

but doggedly watches

for windy skies.’

She was quiet then. The last verse isn’t really very hopeful. Poor ragged kite, always waiting for a wind that never comes.

Finally Róża took a deep breath.

‘It’s windy now,’ she said.

She put down her walking stick to take the spool of fishing line. She played out about six feet and let go. The wind was fierce and steady and the kite lifted like a bird. We both stared up at it, and it was like looking at a landscape from the air, the silk map bright with green and yellow and brown and blue. The tinsel tail snapped and flashed blindingly. After a second our beautiful improvised kite did exactly what the one does in the poem, and plunged earthward – I grabbed it by the fragile frame before it nosedived into the sand.

‘It needs thrust,’ I said. ‘You have to run with it. Can you run?’

She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over her shoulder, letting out line as I held the kite above my head.

‘Run with me, Rose,’ she cried.

by Rose Justice

Craig Castle, Castle Craig

December 31, 1946

Afterword

Declaration of Causes

Primo Levi, the author of possibly the most moving descriptions of Auschwitz in print, felt that the true witnesses to the atrocities of the concentration camps were the dead. Survivors like himself, he felt, could only give partial testimony. Memories become fixed or simplified or distorted as they are told over and over, making living testimony inaccurate. This was one of the themes we discussed at length at the 8th European Summer School at Ravensbrück in August 2012 – how memory itself is a construction, particularly as it becomes more and more distanced in time from actual events.

Rose’s testimony is even further removed because I made it up. In Rose’s story, I have constructed an imitation of a survivor’s account. It has become a false memory of my own – Rose’s dream of the icy wind in the empty bunks is my dream, the single vivid nightmare I had while sleeping in the former SS barracks at Ravensbrück during the week I spent at the Summer School. My book is fiction, but it is based on the real memories of other people. In the end, like Rose, I am doing what I can to carry out the last instruction of the true witnesses – those who went to their death crying out: Tell the world.

What I’d really like to pound into the reader’s head, if there’s any lesson to be learned here, is that I didn’t make up Ravensbrück. I didn’t make up anything about Ravensbrück. Often I have had to fill in the blanks – when the toilets stopped working, how thick the mattresses were, how you might improvise a sanitary pad. The little things. The terrible and the unbelievable, the gas chambers and the medical experiments and the twenty-five lashes, propping up the dead to make the roll call count come out right, the filth and the dog bites and the curl hunts and the administration and politics of bowls, I did not make up. It was real. It really happened to 150,000 women. And that is just one camp.

I did simplify some things in order to keep the pace going. I kept the Rabbits in Block 32 for the whole story, when technically they got moved into different blocks a couple of times during the winter of 1945. I left out the fact that between being selected and being gassed prisoners got taken to another camp, about a mile away, where they were locked in unheated barracks without food or blankets and left to starve or freeze to death to make it easier on the limited capacity of Ravensbrück’s makeshift gas chamber. I didn’t explain that the female ‘SS guards’ were technically auxiliary to the SS, which was all male. I didn’t translate every one of Rose’s conversations into three different languages before she could understand it.

In the preface to his book on Ravensbrück, Jack Morrison points out that it would have been impossible for a single prisoner to have as broad a view of the camp as the researcher who tries to look at all aspects of its six-year operational history. Rose’s experience is limited from September 1944 to March 1945, which means that within the confines of my book it’s impossible to describe much of what went on before or after these dates. Also, Rose’s experience is limited to an extremely closed circle of prisoners and their restricted movements – she never gets inside the textile factories, or the kitchens, or is sent on coal-picking duty, or unloads barges by the lake. She doesn’t interact with children or Gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses or the men’s camp, all of which have their own moving stories of oppression and rebellion. Rose doesn’t work in the prisoner-organised maternity ward, a story of miracle and heartbreak. After June 1943, and until the Auschwitz evacuees turned up late in 1944 there were very few Jewish women at Ravensbrück, and those were confined to a single block; their stories are also different. There is a lot more out there than the limited window on Ravensbrück which Rose’s experience provides . . . just so you know.

Each of my main characters is inspired in part by real people, but they are original characters. There’s no Róża Czajkowska or Karolina Salska on the actual list of Rabbits’ names. However, Dr Leo Alexander and the four Polish women who gave evidence at the Doctors’ Trial – Maria Broel-Plater, Jadwiga Dzido, Władysława Karołewska, and Maria Kuśmierczuk – were all real. The doctors Fritz Fischer, Karl Gebhardt and Herta Oberheuser were real, and so was Ravensbrück’s commander in 1945, Fritz Suhren (Rose only ever refers to him as ‘the stinking commander’). Most of Ravensbrück’s copious documentation was purposefully destroyed before the Soviet Army freed the camp, so the bulk of research on Ravensbrück comes from witness and survivor accounts.