Rose Under Fire (32 page)

We waited in the school for not quite two weeks, and then an American convoy came through and Bob Ernst picked us up – he was with the convoy that took us to the Swedish Red Cross unit, the night before Bob brought me to Paris. I don’t remember much about the first two weeks in the school. It was like after being let out of the Bunker – a lot like that. For about five days I had a fever so high it would have got me admitted to the
Revier
, and I coughed so hard that, two weeks later, when the Red Cross nurse checked me, she bandaged up my ribs because she thought I’d given myself stress fractures. She guessed I’d had bronchitis. My ribs still hurt now when I cough, but I got rid of the bandages when I took that first long bath.

Ró
ż
a caught my cold too, but she had something else wrong with her and I still don’t know what it was.

I mean, I do, sort of – she’d picked up an infection in her leg. Her right leg, the fragile one.

I
think
I can remember her announcing cheerfully, ‘Well, it’s broken now! I’m not getting up again.’ She said this as she sat down next to me in the school gym holding two chipped, grubby mugs of cabbage soup, but I thought she was talking about the dishes. I
think
that she didn’t get up after that – not without help. Irina quietly fed us and took turns dragging each of us to the ditch in the schoolyard a couple of times a day.

When I write it – and I know this is partly due to the gaps in my memory – it doesn’t sound a lot different from what we’d escaped. It was the same kind of food, doled out sparingly, the same desperate toilet arrangements, the same incomprehensible babble of people shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. But there were two blankets between the three of us now, thick, scratchy US Army blankets – and the soup was salted sometimes – it wasn’t full of dirt because whoever made it actually cleaned the earth off the potatoes or turnips – and no one cared if we didn’t get up all day. That was the real difference.

I should never have stuck to Bob Ernst like that. It was because I knew he was a reporter, and I wanted so badly to give him our story, even though I was never brave enough to begin. We got going talking about my poems. He
sang
with me. I’m pretty sure, thinking back (and I don’t remember it as clearly as I should) that what he meant about interviewing Ró
ż
a was that it was the
Red Cross
who wanted to talk to her, not Bob himself. And of course they didn’t want to tell her story in an international newspaper; they wanted to know how they could help her.

And somehow I ended up going with him in the front of the convoy, and twelve hours later when we stopped –

I can’t believe I lost them.

Before the Red Cross camp, during that wonderful spring day when we were all together driving through the forest riding in the back of Bob’s jeep and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, I asked Irina, ‘Why are
you
going to Paris?’

She shrugged. ‘It takes me away from the Red Army. I have no place to go. Why is
Ró
ż
a
going to Paris?’

‘I’m just sticking with my family,’ Ró
ż
a said.

Because we were
all she had.

This notebook – I can’t believe I am the same person who wrote in this same notebook less than a year ago. I can hardly stand to think of my earnest last-summer-self sermonising about heroism and how much fun it is to be part of a crowd. ‘Home for the living, burial for the dead.’ Irina will never go home. Elodie and Karolina will never be buried.

I thought I’d finished writing, and Edie is coming for me tomorrow, so I finally dared to skip back to the beginning of this notebook so I could read what I wrote about my Big Date with Nick – the one when I painted my delectable toenails with Cherry Soda nail polish. And when I opened this book to the front, I found the letters from Maddie. They were tucked in a little cardboard pocket inside the cover, which is why I hadn’t found them before. I’ve been so obsessed with what I’m writing and so scared to look back that I just didn’t notice they were there.

Nick is married. He is
married.
Married to some other girl – he didn’t even wait till the war was over.

All that time I was alive, all that time I was – all I’ve seen, all I’ve had to do – cartloads of skeletal dead women, gas chamber paint in my ears, Karolina and Irina fighting over my coat, the list of mutilated girls stuck in my head, crumbs of stale bread for Christmas dinner, that day of
Strafstehen
in the snow, twice
Fünfundzwanzig
– telling fairy stories about him rescuing us! We’d never even split up – he
proposed
to me on our last date! And he went and
married someone else.

There won’t be anything to say.

I did stop dreaming he was touching my hair and all I dreamed about was bread. But he could have
waited.
He could have waited till the war was over.

My gosh, how Ró
ż
yczka would laugh.

Fernande took away my camp clothes about a week ago. This morning she returned what she found in my pockets, all the pointless things I’d stuffed there in a panic before I left Ravensbrück: a couple of poems I’d managed to write down, a paper airplane decorated with a silly drawing of Lisette nitpicking my scalp in the pilot’s seat, a pencil stub. Irina’s airplane, Karolina’s drawing of Lisette. Nothing of Ró
ż
a. And the half of Aunt Rainy’s hanky that Elodie embroidered for me with the blue rose and our flags and our initials.

I can’t believe that this is all I get – a torn handkerchief and a drawing on half a piece of folded paper. That these scraps of garbage are all I have left of
any
of them. And there isn’t a thing I can do about it – maybe not ever.

I’m not going to go home either.

December 23, 1946

I am thinking about that line from the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence – the words they made me write at the Amercian Embassy last year to prove that I am really Rose:
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

DARN IT. ‘Declare the causes.’ That is another way of saying, TELL THE WORLD.

It is a year and a half since I got back from Germany and I haven’t really told the world. I have been fooling myself about it for a while. I gave the Rabbits’ names to the US Embassy.
Olympia Review
published most of my Ravensbrück poems – but not ‘Service of the Dead’, ‘Gas Leak’ or ‘The Ditch’, which the poetry editor, Sue Parker, thought were all just too
nasty
to print. It says in her letter: ‘We feel these are so grotesque that they detract from the lyrical sensitivity of your other poems.’ And I didn’t argue.

To be fair to Parky, she called the other poems ‘magnificent’ and had the inspired idea of combining ‘The Subtle Briar’ with the counting-out rhyme of the Rabbits’ names. But it was easy going along with her editorial suggestions. I didn’t have to do anything except type them up for her. She forwarded all the nice letters that came in to the magazine afterwards, and she didn’t let me read the ones accusing me of ‘sensationalism’ and ‘false reporting’.

When the Mount Jericho Rotary Club asked me to come and talk to them, I was able to say no because I live in Scotland now and it was too far for me to travel. But when the English Department of the University of Edinburgh got hold of a copy of the
Olympia Review
and wanted me to come read the poems aloud in one of their classes, I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t do it.
I said I would, and I went, but I
couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t even stay in the classroom while someone else read them. The professor took me into his office and made me drink a glass of sherry while it was going on, and I went back in afterwards when it was over and they all applauded very soberly. I said thank you and then ran away while they were getting out of their seats, before anyone could talk to me about the poems.

So much for telling the world.

But I just couldn’t escape the ripples spread by the
Olympia Review.
The officials organising the trials against the Ravensbrück administration managed to track me down as well. They asked me to come be a witness at the first Ravensbrück tribunal in Hamburg, in Germany, which has just started. Of course, all this summer I was wolfing down the news of the international tribunal in Nuremberg, as the Allied governments tried and sentenced the high-ranking Nazi officials. If the invitation to the Ravensbrück trial had come a week earlier I’d have been nervous about it, but I’d probably still have said yes, of course I’ll come. Unfortunately I got the letter right after that Edinburgh University poetry reading fiasco. I said no. When I got Lisette’s letter a week later I’d already weaselled out of it.

I have been feeling miserable about it ever since – I
am
a witness. I am a victim and a witness. And the Ravensbrück tribunals are being run by the British; so being an English-speaking witness, of English heritage, imprisoned while working for a civilian British organisation, makes me a
valuable
witness. I
want
to be a witness. I want to be
responsible.
I want to keep my promises to the people I loved whose lives were violated and ruined. But I have never spoken aloud to
anyone
in detail about what happened to me at Ravensbrück. I made a life-and-death promise that I would, and I am scared to do it.

Also, at the Nuremberg tribunal they handed out a lot of death sentences. I want retribution for my friends, and for the millions like them that I don’t know about. But I am fearful of having a hand in anyone’s death sentence. It may be just punishment for what they did – it may be the
only
just punishment. And the sentencing won’t be my decision. But it seems like an empty victory to me, killing all the perpetrators. I want retribution, but so much more than that I just wish everything could be put
right.

I have
always
felt this way. Even before Ravensbrück. I put it in my ‘Battle Hymn of 1944’ poem:

Then I had the idea of doing a new story for
Olympia.
I wrote to Parky telling her about the poetry-reading fiasco, and my cowardice about the trial, and Lisette’s suggestion that even if I didn’t go to Hamburg, I should go along to watch the Nazi Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg – and I offered to go as a journalist for
Olympia.
I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone; I could just sit in the gallery with the other reporters and listen and take notes. It would be relevant to my studies as a medical student – I could write a report for my university tutor as well as for
Olympia.
I could help to ‘tell the world’ from behind the mostly anonymous shields of my notebook and typewriter. Parky sent me the world’s most enthusiastic yes – she wired me money for a train ticket. So I went.

Now I’m back, and everything’s changed. Everything!

I’m not much of a journalist. But I didn’t get a chance to feel like an imposter at the Doctors’ Trial last week because Dr Alexander, the American medical expert, kept me so busy. The medical report for my tutor will be straightforward and mostly a matter of typing up my notes. The sizzling human interest story is harder to write, especially since I ended up sitting in court for one day only. I’ve got an idea for how to tell it though – how going to the Doctors’ Trial changed my mind about going to the Ravensbrück trial. I still don’t
want
to go and even if I
am
going now I feel kind of ashamed and embarrassed for being such a scaredy-cat about it in the first place, but I’ll use this story for
Olympia
as a chance to defend myself.

I’m going to try writing a draft of it right here in my Ravensbrück notebook. It seems like the right place to do it. And that’s why Maddie gave it to me in the first place after all, to bribe me with nice paper. There’s enough room left because the Ravensbrück bit is all written from top to bottom and edge to edge of every page in absolutely
minuscule
writing. I don’t remember doing that on purpose – in the back of my mind I probably thought someone was going to take the paper away from me.

I like the idea that if I draft this article here then the story will be complete and in one place, even if the last part – the part I am about to write – gets typed up later and published somewhere else.

(by Rose Justice)

A pilot’s greatest challenge is not bad weather or low fuel or getting lost. It’s not even getting shot at. My greatest challenge is a friend who is afraid of flying.

I got my high school diploma six months early because I had a job in the British Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft for the Royal Air Force in the spring of 1944 just before the Allied invasion of Normandy. Before I went to Europe I decided I was going to take every one of my best friends from the girls’ varsity basketball team for a joyride in one of my dad’s Piper Cubs. It only has two seats, so this was a fun project, just me and my friends without my dad. We’d fly over their houses or over the lake where we swam in the summer, or west to see the state Capitol building, and they’d take pictures, and then we’d get my dad to take a picture of us standing together by the plane afterwards – laughing and windblown, arms around each other’s shoulders, looking very pleased with ourselves.