Rose Under Fire (31 page)

‘No no no no no no, I
won’t
–’

Ró
ż
a fought like a little kid as we scuttled across the apron in the gloom, dragging her with us and trying to stay low. She tried to scratch and bite and we had to hold her arms behind her back.

‘I won’t I won’t I won’t –’

‘Darn it, Ró
ż
a, keep it down!’ I growled.

‘I won’t get in that thing!’

‘Then we will leave you for the dogs and the gas chambers!’ Irina said brutally. ‘I will drop you
right here
if you don’t stop fighting!’

Ró
ż
a stopped fighting, but she began to weep.

‘What the hell is wrong with her?’ Irina demanded, because Ró
ż
a
never
cried. We were both gasping with the effort of manhandling her. The ground was slippery with hidden patches of ice, and the snow flurries were beginning to stick. The longer we were there in the open, the more likely we’d be noticed. Although I don’t think it looked like we were protecting Ró
ż
a – more like we were hauling her away to be punished somewhere. Maybe I
did
look like an SS secretary – a skinny, miserable, worn-out drudge, somebody who’d had to drop everything and run out after this little creep who’d stolen a pen or something, and I’d left my office so fast I hadn’t even bothered to put on a coat.

‘I think she’s afraid of flying,’ I said.

Actually, I was
sure
she was afraid of flying, because that is exactly how Polly acted last year before I left for England, when I tried to bully her into flying with me. But Ró
ż
a wasn’t going to get a choice.

We dragged her beneath the Stork’s wings. We crouched by the fuselage, hiding between the ridiculous long front wheels, lying on the ground just the way we’d lain beneath the military trucks earlier. Irina gave Ró
ż
a a quick, harsh lecture in Russian, I think, which I know that Ró
ż
a understood. Ró
ż
a spat venom back at her in Russian the way she’d done on the night last October when Irina invaded our row for the first time.

‘Enough of this.’

Irina stood up close to the plane, under the high wing. She tried the door. Ró
ż
a and I heard the latch click.

‘Get up,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to get in first, in the front. You get in the back after me and wait for Irina. When she jumps in, get out of her way as fast as you can. You’ll have to sit on her lap.’

‘Why can’t
you
sit in the back?’ Ró
ż
a wailed. ‘I want
you
to sit with me!’

‘Irina’s stronger than me. She has to start the plane. She’s got to swing the propeller.’

‘Start the plane! Who’s going to fly it?’

‘Well, I am, Ró
ż
yczka,’ I said apologetically. And then, in self-defence, ‘I’ve flown this plane before.’

Irina climbed up to the wings to sweep off the snow and check the fuel tanks.

‘Hard to see,’ she called down. Then a second later, as she dipped her finger in, she exclaimed in astonishment, ‘Full! But why –’

‘It’s got an auxiliary fuel tank too, did you see that? That’s new.’

Irina checked. It was also full.

‘The pilot of this plane maybe knows something we do not,’ she suggested drily.

She was right, of course; the Allies crossed the Rhine
the next day.
I don’t know if the Neubrandenburg Stork was all set that night for an escape mission or a rescue mission or a spy mission, but it sure was loaded up and ready for someone to fly it. We were
so lucky.
Without the auxiliary tank, without full fuel, we’d have never made it over the front.

‘How will you go? Due west?’

‘Gosh, no, we’ll end up in Holland. It’s still under German control! South-west,’ I said firmly. The headings of that flight across Germany are imprinted on my brain forever. ‘Towards Paris.’

Irina gave a wild laugh at last. ‘
To Paris!
’ She jumped to the ground. ‘Are you tied in? If I start it, and you cannot hold the brakes, leave me.’

‘I’ll hold the brakes,’ I said. ‘There are straps on the pedals for your feet.’

It was so gloomy now, and the snow so fitful, that I couldn’t see Irina standing in front of the plane. I could hear her, though – the grunt of effort as she hung her not-very-substantial weight on the edge of the propeller, and the dull
thunk
as the engine turned over without firing.

I have always really hated swinging the prop, or waiting for someone else to do it. Daddy never let me do it myself until I was eighteen anyway – he finally showed me how just before I left for England, in case I had to do it when I got there. I don’t know how Irina did it – or how I held the brakes so she didn’t get chopped in half when the engine finally fired. It helped to have my feet strapped to the pedals so they had no chance of slipping.

Irina came bounding in and slammed the door.

‘Go,
go!
’

Where would we go? The Lido. To the beach on the beautiful Adriatic Sea.

It didn’t matter. I was going to get Ró
ż
a out of here after all, anywhere. For Karolina and Lisette. For all of them. A living witness, living evidence. I opened the throttle and cranked down the awnings. Irina and I pulled back the control columns in front and back together – neither one of us would have been strong enough to get that tail up on our own. But the Stork leaped into the sky, straight off the apron. There was a faintly lit compass in the control panel, and I made a long, steady turn towards the south.

‘How is Ró
ż
a?’ I asked. I could still hear her sobbing.

‘No help,’ Irina grunted. ‘Stay low. We will be harder to see from above.’

The dusting of snow highlighted the fields around the German airfield in the darkness.

‘Good,’ Irina yelled from the back. ‘Good visibility! The snow will help if it is not too heavy. Light clouds, high moon. Full too, or almost full!’ She was right – it was easier to see than I’d expected.

‘No chasers,’ she added briefly. Then the plane lurched as she leaned over my seat again to see out the front, and hauled the sobbing Ró
ż
a up beside her. ‘
Look – there! Look!
’

Ravensbrück at 800 feet was like a beacon, a glaring, self-contained bonfire of harsh white light in the blacked-out landscape – the lights of the
Lagerstrasse
, the column of red sparks from the crematorium chimney, the blue-white beams of the anti-aircraft searchlights.

‘That’s it?’ Ró
ż
a said. ‘That’s
us
? That’s what the American bombers see!’

She clambered forward, hanging perilously over my shoulder and staring.

‘It doesn’t look very big from up here!’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. But –’

I couldn’t let myself cry. I was
flying.
I clenched my teeth and muttered in the back of my throat.

‘Are you doing the counting out rhyme?’

‘
No
.’

‘Is it you, or Millay?’

‘Millay.’

‘Say it so we can hear.’

I choked out the last lines of ‘Dirge without Music’.

I turned. I didn’t want to fly into the searchlights. I told Irina the new heading.

It was a pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.

I knew we didn’t have enough fuel to get to France, even with an extra tank. I knew this because of having to refuel last September, halfway to Neubrandenburg, when Womelsdorff brought me there. And when we were flying back, I didn’t have any accurate way of measuring time. Irina made Ró
ż
a count, just to keep her occupied, but we were basically faking it. Ró
ż
a fell asleep eventually anyway, which was a good thing because it meant Irina was able to do some of the flying. We took turns. It wasn’t hard work, once we were in the air, but I couldn’t have done it all myself. I really couldn’t.

I tried to fly parallel, but further north, to my original course. I did a pretty good job because we ended up somewhere in Belgium before we ran out of fuel. You could see every single place they were bombing – all of Germany on fire, the sky stained red in the distance. And we knew when we came to the front, because we could see it. Fire and tracer and searchlights in one long line that just stretched on and on and on like a wall of shifting, glittering light in front of us.

It was beautiful really, fireworks and bonfires, but terrifying. And we’d been flying for what, three or four hours through the burning night before we got there? If my flight
into
Germany made me wonder if I was in purgatory, the flight out of Germany was pure hell. We’d left one of the prisons in hell, we’d flown all night through hell, and now there on the horizon ahead of us was the boundary – the gates of hell.

Irina said so, looking at it as we approached the front.

‘
L’enfer
.’

She said it in French, so she wasn’t even cursing, just stating the facts. We’re in hell.

I must have pulled back the control column instinctively, trying to go higher, to get away from the guns. Irina pushed the plane nose forward again from her controls in the rear seat, keeping us level.

‘I will fly,’ she told me. Because even if she counted my flying bomb as a
taran
, she knew I wasn’t a combat pilot. And she knew we were about to get guns fired at us.

We didn’t get hit and I’m not sure they shot at us on purpose, or even which side was doing the shooting. Irina just kept smoothly on course, steady as – well, steady as a fighter pilot, I guess; as steady as
Daddy
– straight across one of the darkest stretches of the line of fire, until the noise was behind us, though we never really lost the orange light on the horizon.

We didn’t even wake the sleeping Rabbit.

‘Now you can land in one piece!’ Irina said cheerfully.

Oh well. I did my best. I didn’t break any of
us
anyway. We landed in a field in the dark. It was not my best landing ever, for many reasons – exhaustion and inexperience being the main reasons, I guess – but the plane came down the right way up, if not entirely in one piece (I smashed the wheel struts and the prop). We all got violently bounced around – none of us were strapped in (only my feet!) – and when everything had become quiet and still in the dark, Ró
ż
a untangled herself from Irina and hurled herself at me like a rabid squirrel.

‘
I hate you
, Rose Justice,
I hate you
, and I am never getting in another airplane as long –’

Irina grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck, hauled her away from me and gave her a wallop across the face that was as brutal as anything she’d ever got from an SS guard.

‘
You Russian BITCH!
’ Ró
ż
a screeched.

Irina slapped her again, not quite as hard. Irina said in fury, ‘
You are alive. You are over the front. You and your skinny Rabbit legs are safe with the Allies
.’

She switched to Russian for the rest of the lecture, and Ró
ż
a screeched back at her in Russian, and then
I
began to cry. Irina heaved an impossible sigh, probably remembering her last crash-landing, when she’d been captured. Ró
ż
a scrambled around trying to open the door of the plane and discovered a thick woollen Luftwaffe overcoat which had been jammed behind the back seat until the heavy landing.

‘You want to get out?’ Irina said neutrally. ‘Or we could just sleep here, where it is warm –’

Ró
ż
a laughed until she broke off choking. ‘Oh, so now that I’ve got a decent coat I’m supposed to stay in the plane with the crazy
taran
pilots!’

‘Oh,
Ró
ż
yczka
.’ I sighed too. I didn’t know how to explain to her that she could
stop fighting
now. Or stop fighting
us
anyway. ‘This plane isn’t going anywhere else tonight.’

So all three of us jammed into the back in a pile, sharing the luxury of the Luftwaffe overcoat. I was asleep in about thirty seconds, and didn’t wake up until the local truants found us there after it got light the next morning. Not their fault they were truants, I guess. Their school gym was full of refugees.

Trust small boys to be the first people to turn up at a crash site!

That was near the end of March. I think it was a little more than two weeks between when we left and when I got to Paris in the middle of April, and it is early May now. I have been here for three weeks – as utterly out of touch with the world as when I was in prison – maybe
more
out of touch. I know that President Roosevelt just died, because Fernande told me so. But I knew more about the Allied advance when Lisette was tuning in to clandestine radio broadcasts.

You know how sometimes you just keep going and going and then, when you get a chance to rest, you collapse with the flu or something like that? That’s what happened to me after we landed. I woke up in the back of the Stork with the scratchy beginnings of a sore throat, and by mid-morning I had a streaming cold, after waiting absolutely forever for the kids to go away and come back with someone’s big sister who could tell us for sure that we were in Belgium.
We’d made it.
The whole place was supposedly crawling with Americans because they kept sending weapons and soldiers to the front through the town, and bringing wounded soldiers back the same way.

When did it really sink in? Not that day – not that week. On our first day of freedom we spent a couple of hours sitting on someone’s doorstep drinking fake coffee and eating minuscule slices of bread with nothing on it – the people whose house it was wouldn’t let us further inside and I don’t blame them. Later that day we had to walk a mile or so to the school which the Americans had set up as a refugee centre. But there weren’t any Americans there that day. The middle of the town was nothing but one big dusty crater. The nearest working telephone was said to be twenty miles away. Everyone looked like ghosts and already we were letting ourselves be herded again.