Rose Under Fire (21 page)

And anyway, she was just so delighted by my fire-engine-red toenails when I put on the little nylon slipper socks for the first time that she didn’t care about her own feet.

‘
Nail varnish!
’ Karolina hissed in delight. ‘You are a
painted woman
! No wonder they slapped you with a French prisoner’s triangle!’

It is true. The nail polish for my date with Nick still hadn’t come off. My toenails had grown out a bit, so there was a bare gap between the nail bed and the enamel, but if you didn’t look too closely and you didn’t look at the skin of my blistered feet, my toenails were still pretty.

Ró
ż
a rolled her eyes. ‘Karolina is the vainest creature in the world. Last time she tried to grow her hair out they made her wear a sign that said, “I have violated camp rules by curling my hair.”’

‘
Shut up
, Ró
ż
yczka. What’s the colour called? The colour of the varnish?’

‘Cherry Soda,’ I said. ‘It was a little bottle I brought with me from America.’

Karolina and Ró
ż
a both sighed in ecstasy.

‘
Cherry Soda!
No wonder your toes look like balls of candy.’

‘My mother never let me wear make-up –
ever
,’ Ró
ż
a vowed with vivid envy.

‘You were fourteen when you were arrested!’ I protested. ‘My mother didn’t let me wear make-up either when I was fourteen!’

‘Did you paint them yourself or was it done by a beauty specialist? How long does it last? What shoes did you wear with it? Were they open-toed – could you see your toenails with your shoes on?’

‘Sandals. It was for a date with my boyfriend, Nick.’

‘Did he like them?’

I shrugged and looked away. I don’t think he’d noticed them. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of Nick, and the thought of him always made me ache. What would he think if he could see me now? There wasn’t any way I could ever be mistaken for anything but a concentration camp prisoner, hairless, in my torn dress with its missing collar and big mismatched fabric X’s and the brown striped bloodstains across my backside. Early on I used to dream about him, though I stopped dreaming about anything but food after a while – I dreamed he was touching my head and asking, ‘Where is your hair?’

Karolina stifled a giggle. ‘Let’s name your toes. That’d be a hilarious little cartoon, a row of dancing toes like the Rockettes! Each a different flavour. Cherry! Peppermint!’

‘Redcurrant!’ said Lisette.

‘Beetroot,’ said Irina.

‘Beetroot!’ Ró
ż
a sneered.

‘It is sweet. And red.’

They coaxed me into putting the rhymes together.

‘Strawberry, cranberry –’

‘– grenadine, raspberry!’

And I made a rhyme about painted toes. It is a sort of insanely starved person’s version of ‘This Little Piggy’.

Of course, it was not just the illicit beauty of my toes that everyone admired – it was also, and in a big way, the fact that they looked so edible.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been scavenging that day. Irina turned out to have an entire newspaper hidden in her shirt. She must have picked it up in the maintenance shed we’d been working in, though I hadn’t noticed a thing at the time (she was fantastic at organising paper, it turned out). As we were climbing into the bunks, just before the lights went out, she pressed most of the paper thin and hid it wedged between the bunk slats and frame. But one last piece she twitched in front of Ró
ż
a’s nose, and when she’d got Ró
ż
a’s attention, folded the scrap of paper while we watched.

It was only about as wide as her palm. Her hands moved so quickly you couldn’t follow what she was doing. Oh, Irina’s hands were pretty! And suddenly she’d transformed a yellowed corner of a stolen Nazi newspaper into a little paper airplane with short, broad wings. She held it out to Ró
ż
a.

‘Fly this,’ Irina said. She mimed the action of throwing a dart.

Ró
ż
a lifted the paper plane towards the ceiling and pitched it across the bunks. She didn’t even throw it very hard, but it glided away into the gloom, and after a moment someone threw it back with a sharp cautionary warning in Polish. It flew better than any paper airplane I had ever seen.

‘I like to fly them over the walls,’ Irina said. ‘When no one is looking.’

You know how I stood in roll calls making up poems to keep from going crazy with fear and boredom? Irina made up aircraft.

That was a good day, nylon socks and painted toes and Irina’s first paper airplane. Some of the ones she made later Karolina decorated – she’d put Nick as the pilot, though of course she didn’t know what he looked like. He was our hero – I whispered stories about Nick to Karolina and Ró
ż
a after lights-out, where he’d come to rescue us, sneaking into the power plant with wire-cutters and disabling the electric fences, carrying a knapsack full of chocolate bars. Karolina made him look like Clark Gable. Or she’d draw caricatures of us on Irina’s planes, with Irina and me in the cockpit, and Karolina and Ró
ż
a and Lisette as our passengers. They were very funny and she could do them
so fast
– sometimes, when we were standing in a roll call, she’d make doodles of the turkey buzzard guards with her toes in the cinders at our feet. Just a couple of broad swipes and you’d see it and you’d have to pretend to sneeze so you didn’t burst out laughing. And then she’d kick it into dust before she got caught.

Oh God, dry words on a page. How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about was death and imaginary strawberries?

‘Rose, let’s make a book,’ Ró
ż
a whispered to me as we lay sleepless and shivering and scratching in the restless dark. ‘I want to do something like your poems. Karolina makes moving pictures, Irina makes planes – I want to
make
something. So you could write the poems in English and I could translate them into Polish – a kind of memory book –’

‘We could get everybody to do her own memory!’

‘A page for each of us, for each of the Rabbits –’

‘Your whole transport. The whole Lublin Transport.’

‘Yes, the ones who have been murdered, too. We’ll have photos of them as civilians – you’ll have to track those down after you get out, OK?’

‘We’ll need paper.’

‘And recipes! We can get a recipe from everybody!’

‘Paper
.’

‘Irina can organise some paper for us. It will be better than just a list of names – it will be about
people
.’

Our
Blockova
Gitte came crashing through the evening soup squabble, like a speedboat ploughing up waves in the Arctic, tagging people. Karolina Salska was one of them.

‘
You’re on tomorrow’s list
.’ Half a dozen of us heard the icy whisper. There was no reason I should know what she meant, but I knew. I knew intuitively, along with everybody else who had experience of what it meant, and the hair stood up all down my spine.

‘No!’ Lisette gasped fiercely. ‘They’re not going to execute any more Rabbits.’

‘That’s why I’m telling you now,’ Gitte said. ‘There are seven from my block on the list. We’ll hide you all in the tent with the transfer prisoners.’

Block 32 was tucked away in a southern spur of the camp, in a corner, which gave us a sort of ‘back to the wall’ advantage sometimes – we always knew when anyone was coming for us because they could only approach from one direction. And it was right next to the tent. I hadn’t ever thought about that being an advantage.

When Gitte said about hiding in the tent, Lisette went white. And then her face closed down. ‘They’ll miss us at roll call. They pull you out of the morning roll call. They’ll pull someone else out instead.’

‘They’ll know we’re hiding people, but what else can we do? We’ve got to show them we’re not going to give you up without another fight. They don’t like it when we fight back. Too many people find out.’

Karolina, also white, asked, ‘How will we get in the tent?’

‘The fence gate’s still open. I’ll let you out now.’

The Block 32 numbers didn’t come out right in that night’s roll call – no surprise. They shouted and hustled the dogs around us and checked our numbers about a hundred times. We had to stand there with our arms at our sides, looking straight ahead.

They made us stand there for a solid day.

When they made you stand there for hours and hours like that as punishment, they called it
Strafstehen
, ‘punishment standing’. But this time it was different. It was the worst
Strafstehen
of the whole time I was there, the longest and the hungriest; but it didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like a battle.

All night, all the next day, and past lights-out the next night – with nothing to eat and nothing to drink. It wasn’t the coldest day we ever had to stand out there for hours and hours, but it was November now and it was darned cold. It snowed for most of the afternoon, squally, blowing flurries that didn’t stick. They let us march in place because the one thing they couldn’t stop us doing was shuffling our feet to keep warm. I held my breath and let it out slowly, watching how it made a little cloud in front of my face, amazed there was enough warmth somewhere deep inside my body that the air in me could condense into cloud on its way out.

People started to collapse. Ró
ż
a collapsed. Irina and I pulled her to her feet. Ró
ż
a tried to fall over again on purpose, throwing her full weight into it, but she weighed
nothing
. We linked our arms through hers to keep her up. Lisette gave a sob and Irina risked hissing a command in Russian at Ró
ż
a to get her to behave – none of us wanted an SS guard to notice us.

But it was different. We had a purpose – we had a mission. We were standing there because we were
fighting
. Maybe if we’d given up the seven hiding in the tent they’d have let us go earlier. But none of us gave up
anybody
.

At midday, in the snow flurries, we heard the gunshots over the walls – they always took people outside the camp to shoot them. Three. There were supposed to be ten. Our seven didn’t get shot.

They let us go, I think, because they’d grown sick of guarding us. We staggered in a wild rush for the faucets in the washroom and handed out water to each other in bowls and buckets and tin cups, all of us crazed with thirst. Lisette stripped off her messed-up pants and ran water through them and put them back on wet. We piled into the bunks, hundreds of us climbing over one another in the dark, and collapsed in gasping, clinging bundles of misery. The snow turned into rain again, pattering on the wooden roof. It sounded just like the rain on the sleeping porch.

‘Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,’ Ró
ż
a chanted in my ear, under her breath. ‘We won, we won, we won. Don’t cry.’

‘We won?’ I echoed, stupefied.

‘
We won
. Not like last time, when they shut us all in the block for three days in August with the windows closed and we nearly suffocated and then they threw us into the Bunker and operated on us there instead of in the
Revier
. Oh – Lisette – which was worse, standing in the snow till you turned into a block of ice, or being slowly roasted alive? Remember that day we had one cup of water between the five of us till it got dark and you made us share it out by dipping our fingers in it?’

‘Holy Mary, you stupid Rabbit, shut up and go to sleep,’ Irina yawned. ‘They will get us up again in three hours.’

‘
We won
,’ Ró
ż
a rasped in my ear, and it was the last thing I heard, and then I was unconscious.

‘No coffee this morning.’

Ró
ż
a collapsed in mirth. ‘
No coffee!
That’s one hell of a punishment. Wow, what did we get yesterday? I don’t remember any
coffee
. What did we get the day before, was that
coffee?
’

Our daily dose of ‘coffee’ at 6 a.m. was brown and lukewarm and tasted of nothing. It was the idea of coffee though, brown and lukewarm. We’d stood in the snow for over twenty-four hours, we’d slept for three hours, we’d stood in the drizzling, freezing dark for another two hours, and then we had no coffee. And then they sent us all back to work, even though that morning’s roll call hadn’t come out right either.

The real miracle is that we didn’t all kill one another that morning and save them the trouble of their executions.

The whole week that Karolina and the six other condemned Rabbits were hiding, Irina and I had to go back each day to our weird work crew of tall girls, doing jobs that shorter people couldn’t do as easily as we could – dismantling shelves, boarding up broken windows, carrying stacks of boxes – clearing top bunks of people who’d died in the night, especially in the
Revier
, where people were too sick to do it themselves.

Anna, the
Kolonka
with the green badge and green eyes, was contemptuously familiar with the
Revier
because she’d worked in it before. She took over the back washroom to use as a temporary morgue because the real one was always too full. She’d stand guard at the door by the sinks to make sure we had the place to ourselves, and get a conversation going with me in English so she could pretend not to see if some of us sneaked a dead woman’s wooden comb or a pair of socks down our blouses. I never took anybody’s clothes. I couldn’t bear the thought of wearing some dead girl’s socks fresh off her dead feet. I had other things to think about anyway: Elodie had managed to smuggle me five tiny cigarettes via Micheline, something that looked like tobacco rolled in thin airmail paper, and I was waiting for my moment to try to bargain with Anna for the calcium.