Rose Under Fire (25 page)

Sandwiched in between Ró
ż
a and Irina that night I thought about Christmas in Pennsylvania. Not about past Christmases – I was thinking about
this
Christmas. I thought about
my
mother, and Daddy and Karl and Kurt and Mawmaw and Grampa, and how they’d be sitting round the table for Christmas dinner – maybe they were doing it
now
, this very moment – sitting at the cherry table with Mother’s Limoges china from out of the corner cupboard, and the poinsettia tablecloth and the brass and china candelabra with the tall red candles on it, and Daddy starting to carve the turkey. Mawmaw would be trying to say funny things to make the boys laugh and Grampa would be starting on his third bourbon. Suddenly Mother would leap up from the table and run into the dark living room, lit only by the low fire and the red and blue and green lights on the Christmas tree, and she’d curl on the sofa and sob.

She’d be doing it
right now
. I could see it so clearly, as though I were looking in the living-room window from the front porch.

She’d know I was missing – she’d have known that for months. And she hoped and hoped I was still alive, but she didn’t really believe it.

And the worst thing was that even though I
was
alive, I would never be able to tell her – and even if I could tell her, if I could have come through the feathers of frost on the windowpane and whispered in her ear, ‘Your Rosie is still alive,’ what hope could I have given her when I told her where I was? That I was starving and freezing and covered with lice and scabies and would probably be dead of typhoid or shot for stealing a turnip before the war ended?

Well, anyway, I started to cry again.

After a while Ró
ż
a wiped my face with her sleeve.

‘You are thinking about Pennsylvania now, aren’t you?’

‘I am thinking about my mother.’

‘You idiot. I never think about my mother. I’d rather pinch the holes in my leg until they’re black and blue than think about my mother.’

I could understand that – it was probably less painful for
her
never to think about her mother. But it didn’t help
me
.

‘My mother will
never know
what happened to me,’ I said. ‘At least your name is out there on the BBC. Your legs are in those photographs. I’m just French Political Prisoner 51498. They don’t even have my nationality right. No one will
ever know
. And I bet they’ll incinerate all their precious prisoner records anyway, when the Allies come. They won’t want anyone to find out what’s going on here, just like they don’t want anyone to find out what happened at Auschwitz last summer.’

‘Don’t think about your mother. Think about the food she’s eating,’ Ró
ż
a advised cheerfully. ‘You have a special meal on Christmas Day, like the Germans, right? What do you have for Christmas dinner in Pennsylvania?’

How she could be cheerful about food after what she did to Lisette I do not know. But we had the Christmas dinner discussion anyway. I won’t bother to write the rest of the conversation, because it was boring.

But now I am longing again for Cope’s Dried Corn, boiled for two hours in milk and butter and sugar and salt. I am daydreaming about a tablespoon heaped with golden milky corn – just one spoonful.

On New Year’s Day they made us line up for a special roll call, and the stinking commander gave a speech over the loudspeakers.

It is one of the things I have nightmares about – that tinny voice droning on and on all around me, in words I can’t make head nor tail of, on and on and on. In my dreams I don’t understand the words, but at the same time I know exactly what the voice is saying.

That’s because while we were standing there, in real life, Lisette was translating a mile a minute on one side of me and Karolina on the other, a sort of madwoman’s stereo speaker set up. So I had to listen to it all twice, Karolina a little behind Lisette.

‘He says,
You’ll never get out alive
–’

‘
He’ll never let us out alive
.’

‘They won’t let the Allies get near us –’

‘
He’ll kill us all before the Allies get here
.’

‘They’ll dismantle the camp –’

‘He’ll
mine the camp, rig it with bombs, blow up the whole thing with us in it
–’

‘– And one of the gas chambers is working now –’

‘
And the first selections for gassing will be tomorrow.
’

This was the same stinking commander who liked to come and watch people get their backsides beaten raw every Friday. It could have been his idea of a joke: see if I can make all 50,000 of them cry on New Year’s Day. It was hard to know whether to take him seriously.

Ró
ż
a didn’t. I could see her shoulders shaking as she tried desperately not to laugh.

‘Oh God,’ she cackled, ‘he must have really hit the New Year with a bang last night!’

He might have been kidding about the mines. He wasn’t kidding about the gas chambers though.

They started with the old and the injured and the sick, and they’d just pick you out of roll call. They tricked people into volunteering for it by telling them they’d be taken to a ‘rest camp’. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on. The Lublin Special Transport reckoned they were doomed: most of them limping, all of them condemned to death more than three years ago.

When it rained, when hail rattled on the roof, when the wind howled, when a train came clattering by, when the planes roared overhead or the air raid sirens wailed, when the anti-aircraft guns thumped and the demon
Blockova
Nadine Lutz couldn’t hear us, we all burst into a frenzy of whispered plots and panic.

Irina hadn’t let Nadine stop her from scavenging. She carried the copper wire from the shed wrapped round her waist like a belt. It was thin and flexible and she’d get it out under the table or over the ditches, sometimes even working at it lying blindly in the dark bunks with her hands held up over her head. Then she’d twist what she’d built carefully round her waist again and get it out later. Eventually she had to hide it in the roof behind the ceiling panels.

‘Are you making a bomb?’ Ró
ż
a whispered in an agony of delight and curiosity, as we all balanced ourselves outside in the dark over the stinking sewer. ‘Like they did at Auschwitz?’

‘Kite!’ Karolina guessed, more sensibly.

‘It’s a plane,’ I said.

I’d been watching Irina shape the wings, the long and narrow wings of a glider. I could see where she was planning to reinforce the fuselage with her stolen strips of wood. It would be too heavy for a kite. But it might glide like a model plane, if she got a chance to cover it with her stolen paper. In the right wind it might soar for miles.

Ró
ż
a choked back one of her insane giggles. ‘That’s not going to be big enough for all the Rabbits.’

‘Big enough for all your names though. Another escape for the Rabbits’ names!’

‘You have to write in piss so it’s invisible,’ Ró
ż
a said knowingly. ‘That’s how we got the letter to the Pope.’

It was getting harder and harder for the guards to keep track of what we did – we couldn’t get out of the camp, but the whole place was so crowded and filthy that it was easier to hide sabotage and thievery, if you weren’t too sick to move.

‘It will need a hell of a wind,’ Irina said. ‘If we could be ready to launch – find a place to hide it –’

‘I can launch it!’ Karolina said. ‘I can launch it from the air raid ditches. I can hide it in the sandbags till we get the right wind. You can sneak it out to us in one of your Corpse Crew carts!’

‘Corpse Crew’ – more and more, that’s what they were using my team for. During the winter, as everyone started collapsing with cold and starvation and a million diseases, that’s
all
we did – they stopped giving us other jobs and we were just one of a dozen Corpse Crews. They gave up on us boarding up broken windows, and concentrated on clearing the bunks in the
Revier
and the other sickbay blocks (they kept adding extra ones, trying to keep the typhoid and tuberculosis cases separated from everyone else). There were always dead bodies piled outside the tent in the morning, and there were usually a few from our own block with so many new people coming in – the incinerator in the crematorium was always working, greasy black soot splattering the daylight sky and red cinders spattering the sky at night.

I carried so many dead women this winter that I am – I don’t know how to put this. I want to say it’s like typhoid – I have been inoculated. I am immune. After the first couple of weeks, it stopped being appalling and became ordinary. It was better than if I’d been put to work in the crematorium. Wasn’t it?

It was better. I didn’t do anything I’m ashamed of. Some of it was too fearsomely gruesome to write about, even to think about any more, and my mind skips lightly over it, the same way I can’t remember the week between my beatings. There was that time we had to pick up one of the schmootzichs and it turned out she wasn’t dead – this pathetic bundle of bones and rags lying in the
Lagerstrasse
, still breathing. The guard who’d found her made us load her up anyway, but we managed to sneak her into the washroom in the
Revier
on our way out to the crematorium. She was dead when we got back.

I made the place a little cleaner, a little less of a hellhole. Not much less, but what can one living girl do when there are two dozen dead women she has to move in a day? What can one starving girl on her feet do to help out a couple of hundred others who can’t get up? Especially if you don’t want to catch typhoid yourself.

I kept telling myself:
I’ve been inoculated. I’ve had the ‘jabs’
.

I was the
only
one of my work team who didn’t get sick this winter, but none of us ever got admitted to the
Revier
ourselves. We lived in horror of it, partly because of what we saw there several times a week – for me it was also because I knew in much too much detail what had happened to the Rabbits there. For a while Micheline had a fever high enough that she could have begged off work and got herself into the sickbay – you had to have a fever of 102 before they’d let you in – but instead she hid for three days in one of the blocked-up toilet cubicles in her barrack. None of the guards ever went in the broken toilets. Micheline was such a genius at pretending to follow rules that the whole time she was sick she didn’t miss a single roll call.

We never launched Irina’s glider. We did get it hidden in the sandbags, but we never got the right wind or a moment when we wouldn’t be spotted trying to hurl a model airplane an open-arm-span wide over the twenty-foot-high walls. Who knows what happened to it, whether anyone found it, whether the names scribbled all over the fuselage were still legible? But dreaming about the potential success of our air mail service, doing it all in secret, kept us
alive
. When you lost hope, you turned into a schmootzich, one of the mindless beggars who were the bottom-crawlers of that entire scummy camp, or you
died
.

Lisette had bigger plans than paper airplanes.

‘There are transports leaving every day for Ravensbrück’s satellite camps,’ she directed. ‘We need to get the Rabbits out of here. We need to be
organised
. We’ll start with the youngest – all the Rabbits under twenty-one, the schoolgirls. Smuggle one or two at a time into the evacuation transports as they leave. Now listen, my darlings, the next time they try to pull any more Rabbits out of a roll call, we’re going to have to be brave. We’re going to have to disrupt things so violently they can’t count us.
Everyone
switch numbers – something like that. And every one of the girls who gets out will take the list with her – the names from the Lublin Transport, everybody who was operated on. We are going to
tell the world
.’

Lisette got dragged out of line the next morning without warning and we thought she was dead. I marched off to my hideous work snivelling like a two-year-old. I sobbed quietly to myself all day – Micheline worked beside me and Irina without asking what was going on. It wasn’t the first time one of us had sobbed quietly to herself all day. But Anna got so fed up with me that she smacked me with someone’s empty shoe.

And it turned out Lisette wasn’t dead anyway. Because she was an archivist she’d been hand-picked to do some secretarial work in the record office. She came back unbelievably excited. She whispered her news to us in the evening roll call.

‘There’s a radio in the record office – a radio! It’s always on! We’ve pushed the German army back!’

‘Really?’ Karolina gasped. ‘
Really?
’

‘Well, back to where they were in December – everyone is fighting up to their hips in snow.’

We groaned. It was the end of January, and the best we could do was beat the Germans back to their December starting point?

‘What about France?’ Ró
ż
a and Karolina clamoured together. ‘What about Belgium? Have the Allies crossed the Rhine yet?’