Rose Under Fire (12 page)

Paris

When the 6 p.m. siren let out its piercing howl, we nearly jumped out of our skin.

We had all fallen into a stupor of exhaustion and misery and you could see a ripple of attention race through our ranks as the noise shocked us wide awake. Not long after that they finally fed us. They did it outside, right where we were standing – like CAMP, hah. First they let us help ourselves to water from a row of spigots by the main gate, after about a year of standing in line to get there, and then they brought out two big oil drums of soup. It was absolutely chaotic – seemed chaotic anyway, the first time, 400 of us trying to get at two pots all at once. We had about one bowl between four of us to take turns with, which they took away again when we were done, since we hadn’t yet been issued official bowls of our own. You had to carry your bowl around with you all the time in a little bag or someone would steal it and then you wouldn’t get any soup. No bowl, no soup. Of all the unbelievable things about Ravensbrück, I think the Administration and Politics of Bowls must have been the battiest.

Now it just seems incredible that we got something to eat that day. We all got some soup, and we all got a piece of bread, and we ate it standing up. I ate mine, but I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t remember what the soup was – I mean, you never really knew what it was, but I don’t remember it being the worst soup I’d ever eaten. I do remember that I couldn’t eat the biggest chunks of whatever mystery root vegetable was in it, because they were completely raw. Inside a month I wouldn’t care, but what did I know at that point?

What I remember most about that first meal there is the filthy, crawling, skeletal beggars who fought over the raw chunks of potato or turnip or whatever it was in the soup that I couldn’t make myself eat. There was a camp word for those beggars, which I never did figure out how to say or spell, because it sounds so much to me like
schmootzich
– Mother’s nasty way of describing a girl who doesn’t take care of herself. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for filthy greasy.

They took any food you gave them. The first day, because I was still ignorant enough to be picky about what I ate, I tried to hand over my leftover chunks of raw vegetable to one of these desperate people. In seconds I was being clawed at by ten skeletal hands, grabbing at me anywhere they could to try to get in on the handout – five crawling creatures who had once been women snatching at my skirt, my arms, my hair. One of the guards had to beat them off. It left me shaking with shock. I never dared that kind of charity again.

You could drop a breadcrust on the ground and the schmootzichs would fight over it. If you dropped a breadcrust and stepped on it, or a guard spat on it, they still fought over it. They were like seagulls. Like seagulls going after garbage. They were so far from being human that at first it didn’t even occur to me then that they could be fellow prisoners – I thought they must be hoboes or something who’d crawled in off the train tracks. God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn’t want to believe something.

After we ate, the guards pointed us in the direction of a ditch we could use for a latrine. I kept telling myself, it’s like
camp.
It’s a camp; I’m at camp.

God knows what I thought I was telling myself.

We got herded into a harshly lit factory shed to be registered and examined and given prison clothes. Elodie and I were somehow always the last in line, and by the time our turn came for
anything
, we got the absolute worst of it. But on the other hand, by the time you’d stood in line for an hour or three or four, you knew what was going on. We were able to do a lot more whispering in the administration building than we’d been able to do standing under guard all afternoon, and most information was highly refined by the time it reached me and Elodie. We knew before we got to the line of desks where they processed us that, like all new prisoners, we were in ‘quarantine’ – being ‘decontaminated’ to prevent the spread of typhoid. That sounded plausible, and a good thing, but it was clearly a complete joke – the schmootzichs had had their filthy, oozing hands all over us.

My ATA pilot’s uniform was like a rallying flag. Everybody was ravenously starved for encouraging news from the Front, and only one day ago I’d been a free woman flying over a free Paris. ‘Caen is ours,’ I whispered. ‘And Brussels and Antwerp, and Le Havre just yesterday! I heard before I took off! We’re past Reims in France now. We’ve got most of France and a big part of Belgium. The push is north to Holland and west to the German border. We haven’t got all the French ports – we’re still fighting for Boulogne, but it’ll be any day. And the Luftwaffe –’

Womelsdorff had been cursing his own military for wasting resources.

‘They’ve got spectacular new jets, but no fuel.’

People relayed the news to one another in nearly silent whispers. The guards wouldn’t let us talk, but they couldn’t keep their eyes on all 400 of us at once. The news flew around the shed.

Other prisoners were already packing everybody’s things up and carting them away to be sorted by the time I had to dump out my flight bag on one of the dozens of administrators’ desks lined up across the shed. I bit my lip, my stomach churning with worry while the administrator squinted at my papers, because I knew they were going to keep my passport and Luftwaffe letter of reference and leave me without any ID except for whatever they assigned me.

Finally the administrator called someone else over – both of them SS guards, both of them women, maybe five years older than me. They talked to each other in German, studying my American passport. One of them rolled her eyes at the other and made a face. She’d noticed my middle name – Rose Moyer Justice. The other glanced at me, pointed at her friend and told me drily, ‘
Das ist Effi Moyer
.’

Effi Moyer wasn’t happy about it at all. She grabbed hold of the lapel of my tunic and gave it a demanding yank. I took the tunic off and handed it to her. She started to go through my pockets with brisk efficiency and found the wrappers from my chocolate bars.

I’d folded the silver foil and brown paper very carefully, wrapped it in my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy and pushed it deep into the corner of my tunic pocket. I wanted to keep it because it smelled so overwhelmingly of Pennsylvania, of home, of flying over Hershey and the fields of Jericho County.

When Effi Moyer found the brown and silver paper, she passed it to her friend – they both unfolded the scraps with deep and interested suspicion, as though they expected lumps of gold to drop out. Effi held the silver foil up to her nose exactly the way I’d done in the truck the night before and took a deep breath.

‘
Schokolade
,’ she said, and passed the empty candy wrapper to her colleague, who also took a deep breath.

They made a fierce, disappointing search through the rest of my pockets, and checked my bag again, and then they divided up the paper between them – each of them got one full wrapper.

I watched the whole performance biting my lip, trying to kill another terrible,
terrible
urge to laugh. And also feeling a new kind of fear taking hold of my stomach and tying it in knots. These were the
prison guards
confiscating my empty candy bar wrappers as if they were hundred-dollar bills. If that’s how hard up the guards were . . .

Effi tossed my tunic to the woman standing a couple of desks down from her, and it got lost in the pile of hundreds of other abandoned jackets and blouses and skirts. Then I had to take off the rest of my clothes. It wouldn’t have been so bad if you didn’t have to do it in front of men too – SS officers and guards who were directing and pushing people and just standing around watching. But everyone else had already had to strip. I was the last.

There was a little office room like a clinic where you had to sit on a table while a couple of people in rubber gloves put you through an unspeakable body search with tongue depressors and a flashlight. When they were done with the search, Effi barked an order at the doctors or whatever they were, and I had to sit backwards on a chair (holding on to the back of it) while they sheared my hair off. They really did shear it – with a scissors up against my scalp, not close enough to my head to count as shaving it off, but so close there was nothing left. If I was going to do that to anyone, I’d time it that way too – addle her brain with shame and discomfort and then quickly get her hair before she came to her senses. The shock of losing my hair didn’t hit me till later. The tongue depressors and flashlights seemed much more terrible at the time – even though that only lasted a couple of minutes, and I was stuck with my hair. Without it, I mean.

Finally I got smacked on my bare backside with someone’s clipboard because I hesitated going into the slimy, dark shower room.

Nothing
that happened to me that day made me cry. Some of it scared me; but most of it just made me SO MAD.

I’d lost Elodie. The room with the showers was badly lit and murky with mildew – it reminded me of the abandoned bathhouse by the old pool at Conewago Park, which they haven’t used since before the Great War. Me and the other summer kids used to explore all the old park buildings, but not the bathhouse – it was just too creepy. Here in Ravensbrück I hesitated in the doorway, smarting, but unable to take another step over the slimy, red clay tiles towards those black, trickling overhead spigots and the dozens of white, skinny, bald women shivering beneath them.

‘
La femme pilote américaine! Mon amie américaine!
’

‘
Ici!
’ I yelled. ‘Here!’

Elodie and I got slapped simultaneously on opposite sides of the shower room. But I knew where she was now, and we managed to get back together.

The guards were trying hard to get everybody done with – it was dark, it was late, they were sick of us – and finally they shoved a couple of prison dresses at Elodie and me, and we had to put them on while we were still wet. Her dress came down to her ankles and mine was too tight. Someone threw shoes at us. Between us there was one each that fitted – none of them matched. No stockings, no bra, no underwear of any kind.

Back in the long factory room, with the prison dresses sticking to our wet backs, we had to pick up patches with our prisoner numbers on them, along with another patch that was supposed to show what kind of prisoner you were – all red triangles for us, which meant we were political prisoners. Then we had to learn to say our numbers in German. I remembered my number – that wasn’t the trouble. After all, Grampa taught me how to count to twenty in Dutch, or Low German, or whatever it really is, when I was two. The trouble was that when Effi Moyer tried to teach me how to say my number, I tried to tell her I wasn’t French.

‘
Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig
,’ she prompted me – French political prisoner 51498.

Remembering what the Luftwaffe pilots had called me when they were arguing over my papers in Mannheim, I said to Effi: ‘
Ich bin Amerikanerin.
’ I pointed to the others then to myself and shook my head. ‘I’m not French.
Amerikanerin
.’

Effi looked me in the eye with a face full of disdain and irritation and said, ‘
Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig
’ – and honestly my German has not improved very much, but I
know
that is what she said, because my name was
Französisch politischer Häftling 51498
for six months.

I repeated the numbers. But not the ‘French political prisoner’ part, because I wasn’t French. I was
trying
to behave myself. Effi just glared at me and started to put away the ledgers, ignoring me, and I turned away to find Elodie waiting for me with her mouth twisted into a sort of imitation of a grin. She tossed back the golden bangs – she’d managed to keep her hair, presumably because she was such an Aryan blonde – and gestured quickly at our badly fitting dresses with one finger.
Swap you.

We started to strip the dresses off again, right there. We didn’t think anyone would care, because everyone ahead of us was being made to strip again so we could sew the red patches and our prisoner numbers on to our sleeves. But I hadn’t counted on Effi Moyer. She’d
noticed
me. I was the embarrassing prisoner who shared her name, the one who’d failed to save her a Hershey bar, the one who’d argued with her about being American.

Effi saw me and Elodie about to swap our dresses, and she came marching over to us and grabbed them away from us. Then she grabbed Elodie by her hair, close to her scalp, and dragged her over to sit down on the floor right next to the desk. Effi jerked one arm fiercely in my direction to tell me to follow Elodie – she wanted to keep an eye on us both as we sewed on our patches.

Elodie suddenly seemed totally cowed. Stark naked, she hunched over the dress, covering her lap with it; her shoulders shook a little as if she were sobbing. She didn’t make a sound though. I sat next to her, biting my lip, helpless with feeling so humiliated and
so mad.
We had to wait for someone to pass us a needle, and when we got one, Elodie dropped it. Then she couldn’t find the patch with her number on it after she’d threaded the needle. We scrambled around hunting for it and both of us got whacked over the head with one of Effi Moyer’s clipboards. Then, when it was my turn to use the needle, I couldn’t find
my
number.

Elodie had it. She handed me the patch quietly, and her mouth twisted in a quick little grin. The scar on the side of her face made her pretty smile lopsided.

It wasn’t till I was sewing it on my sleeve that I realised she’d swapped our numbers. All the shuffling around had just been a show to distract Effi Moyer from Elodie’s sleight of hand. She’d sewn my 51498 on to the sleeve of her pale-blue shirtwaisted sailor dress with the too-long skirt that came down to her ankles, its big collar ripped off so that it wouldn’t hide the contrasting prison X across the front and back of the bodice. And now I sewed Elodie’s 51497 on to my too-tight brown gingham. Effi Moyer had been so busy making sure we put on the dumb dresses we’d been ‘issued’ with, she hadn’t paid any attention to the numbers we’d sewn on them.