Rose Under Fire

I look for your Rose in every face, dead and living. But there are so many, and all of them are ravaged by hunger and grief and loss, even the faces of the enemy. I swear, it’s sometimes hard to tell which faces do belong to the so-called ‘enemy’. Deserters hide as civilians to avoid capture, not only by us, but also by their own army, and civilians surprise you with hospitality and gratitude. I met a group of four displaced men travelling together – two had escaped from a German prison camp, and the other two were shot-down German airmen trying to get back to their base. All we did was trade cigarettes. Strip men of uniforms and badges and they are just men.

A year and a half ago, when we first lost track of Julie, I remember you described the way people disappear into the Nazi death machine like an unlucky lapwing hitting the propeller of a Lancaster bomber – nothing left but feathers blowing away in the aircraft’s wake, as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed. It has happened to tens of thousands of people. Maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions. They are gone. They have vanished without leaving even a vapour trail. Everywhere I go I meet people who are hunting for husbands, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, lovers, and they are all gone.

Your friend Rose has evaporated with them. I don’t know what else to tell you, Maddie.

What a miserable letter! And your last one to me was so full of encouragement and flying stories. I am afraid you will cry when you read this one. I wish I hadn’t mentioned the frozen children. But you know I would never be anything less than wholly honest with you.

Here is better news to end with – surprising, but positive at least. The Boy Nick has got married. I think it was partly a way for him to cope with losing Rose, but partly, it is true, he has found another lovely girl. His new bride is also American, a Red Cross worker who does counselling and social work for the troops. She is not made of the same strong stuff your Rose was, but to tell the truth the Boy Nick isn’t either. Maybe it’s as well they didn’t tie the knot last summer.

I am desperate for it to be over now, and to see you again and to be with you always.

Thine ain true

Jamie

This pretty book is all that’s left of Rose and her poetry. She’s written my name in the front – ‘A present from Maddie Brodatt’. The army nurses she was staying with at Camp Los Angeles found it in her camp bed. I should have sent it to her mother and father, I suppose, but I haven’t got the heart. I remember when I gave it to her, to write Celia’s accident report in.

Oh, Rose, Rose. Bloody, bloody hell.

I’ve lost you – lost another friend – ‘as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed’. This war has taken my best friend and my bridesmaid from me in the space of a year. IT ISN’T FAIR.

Oh, Rose – when the US Air Force transport pilot from Camp Los Angeles dropped your notebook off at Operations in Hamble last September, for a long time I still hoped you’d turn up and I could give it back to you. I know it’s possible to crash-land in occupied Europe and make it out alive. I know.

So I find it impossible to ‘close the book’ – to accept that you’re not coming back. And just in case I’m right, I am going to leave your notebook and my letters for you to collect at the American Embassy in Paris. I think you’re as likely to end up there as anywhere, if you’re still alive. Your Uncle Roger is in on my plot and has already filled a safe-deposit box there with a little money for you and a letter from your family. He’s told the Embassy to put you up at the Ritz Paris until other arrangements are made for you. What it’s like to have relatives in high places! Not that it makes much difference to you now.

Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before – words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

If this message ever reaches you – I know you have family in England and plenty of loving friends and family back home in America – but my mother-in-law, Esmé Beaufort-Stuart, says that you have got a home from home with her as well and please to contact her without hesitation. It is a better address to leave than mine – at the moment I am still being sent all over everywhere with work, and I don’t know where I’ll be by the time this ever catches up with you. Esmé’s address, you probably know, is Craig Castle, Castle Craig, Aberdeenshire. That is pretty much also her telephone number, which I don’t actually know – I just ask the operator for Craig Castle when I ring them.

Esmé has always been generous about giving a home to waifs and strays and other exiles. There is a band of tinkers who stop on their riverbank every year for a month – Julie and Jamie were so familiar with them as children that they picked up their strange dialect! And then there are the evacuee lads from Glasgow, whom you’ve met – Esmé has actually adopted two of them now, though the others have gone home. She has also got a dozen wounded airmen convalescing there. For Esmé, I think, the war effort will continue for a while after the war has officially ended.

And, of course, there is me. I am one of her waifs and strays too. She would do anything for me, I think, so on my behalf and by her own invitation, you must consider Craig Castle one of your homes from home. Bring your friends.

That’s given me hope – a vision of you and a lot of other Rose-like people drinking coffee and singing songs from Girl Guide camp, while Esmé plays the piano, in the morning sunlight of the Little Drawing Room at Craig Castle.

Your fellow pilot and loving friend,

Maddie

PS Fliss and I had to go through your things like we did with Celia’s, and I kept your fuse – I wanted to keep something of yours. I don’t suppose you’ll ever want it back, but it seemed a bit horrible to return it to your Aunt Edie.

Oh, Rose – What happened to you?

Part 2

Ravensbrück

Rose Moyer Justice

Handwriting Sample, April 17, 1945

Paris, France

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They told me to stop after I listed the ‘unalienable Rights’. By then I had written enough for them to tell it really was my handwriting, and I was crying so hard I could barely see the page. Life. Liberty. Happiness. Unalienable rights.

I can write again. Oh God! I can write again. All those months of not being able to write! Of not being allowed to write. More than six months of hiding pencil stubs in the hem of my dress, hiding chips of charcoal in my cheek, hiding torn shreds of newsprint in my shoes. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught with any of it. And SO MUCH that I wanted to write. It seems like I have been a prisoner for so long.

I can write!

It feels dangerous – like stealing a plane. But it is my unalienable Right. And this is my own notebook, which they gave back to me in the American Embassy this morning, along with an enormous pile of cash from Uncle Roger and a temporary passport. The passport is made out in the name of Rose Moyer Justice; date of birth, 22 October 1925; place of issue, Paris; date of issue, 17 April 1945, today. I mean yesterday. And a photograph that Aunt Edie had sent them, a wallet-sized copy of my portrait in ATA uniform from last spring.

I have changed so drastically since then that no one at the Embassy could tell this photograph was really me. That’s why they made me write out the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence – so they could compare it to my handwriting in the rest of this notebook. My handwriting has not changed. My signature matches too. Mother had sent them my Pennsylvania driver’s licence as a sample.

That has convinced even me that I am still Rose – my handwriting has not changed. It is the only physical thing about me that looks exactly the same. I can still write.

In fact it is the only thing I can do. I can’t even sleep. The Embassy people checked me in here at the Paris Ritz and left me in this gigantic room Aunt Edie has reserved for me, but I sat on the floor for three hours because I didn’t dare to touch any of the beautiful furniture. Then I got up and spent another hour pacing, checking the Place Vendôme every time a car or truck went by just in case it was Bob Ernst coming back. But now it is nearly three in the morning and nothing is going by any more. My brain won’t let me go to sleep – my internal clock is tensed for the 4 a.m. siren. I tried to get dressed again, but I can’t bear to put those dead women’s clothes back on, not if I have to go naked for the rest of my life. It’s not that cold here. Anyway, I’m used to being cold. And also used to being wide awake when all I want to do is collapse.

What I’m not used to is being by myself.

How could it have happened? I don’t know how it happened. I LOST THEM. Irina and Róża, my more-than-sisters – Russian taran pilot and Polish Rabbit – I couldn’t have escaped without them, I couldn’t have survived last winter without them, and I have lost them both.

But I’m kidding myself. I do know how it happened. If I hadn’t been so set on getting to Paris – if I hadn’t rushed off with Bob Ernst in that convoy of American soldiers – if I had double-checked what was going on. We camped overnight with the Swedish Red Cross unit, and I was talking with Bob and that Minnesotan chaplain who was interpreting for the Swedes, and I told them myself that Róża needed medical treatment. Only it never occurred to me they would leave her with the Red Cross without asking me – without even telling me! Irina was with her and I was in Bob’s jeep, and we set off the next morning near the front of the convoy. I never dreamed Róża wasn’t following in one of the trucks with Irina. So stupid of me! Of course the Swedish Red Cross unit was going back to Sweden.

I’ve lost Róża and Irina.

I feel like my world has ended.

But it hasn’t – not even the war has ended yet. It just keeps going relentlessly on and on and on, like a concentration camp roll call when they can’t get the numbers to come out right. And I guess I just go on and on too.

I wonder what has happened to Nick since last August. Oh, Nick! I have dreamed of seeing him again for so long, made up all those stories about him coming to rescue me – but what will he think when he sees what a walking corpse I’ve become? How can I tell him what happened to me, all I’ve seen and had to do?

A lot of it is a blur anyway. I don’t remember the first time I thought I was so hungry I was going to die. I don’t remember when the chilblains started, or whether they were on my hands or feet first. I don’t remember the details of being beaten. I know my sentence was ‘with force’ which means on your bare backside, but I don’t remember them pulling up my dress, not either time. I remember trying to count the blows, but not what it felt like. I have blocked it out.