Rose Under Fire (35 page)

So it was Lisette who suggested me as a witness – Lisette, who knew better than anyone our duty to the living and the dead. But it was also Lisette who gave me the idea of going to Nuremberg to see Ró
ż
a instead.

I squeezed all my end-of-term exams into one week so that I could be in Nuremberg for the second week of the Doctors’ Trial, the week that the Rabbits would be there. The
Olympia Review
advanced me a small stipend for my hotel stay, the train from Edinburgh to London and the amazing boat-train from London to Paris (it is called the Golden Arrow). My Uncle Roger arranged an onward flight for me from Paris to Nuremberg with the US Air Force – not with Sabena, so I didn’t see Irina on board.

Maybe you’ve seen the US Air Force moving pictures. Europe is in ruins. It is as visible from the air as it is from the ground. The only difference is that from the air you don’t see the grubby kids playing in the rubble and the old women gathering pieces of furniture to use as firewood and the piles of broken German planes stacked along the roadside waiting to be cleared. But from the air you really get the
extent
of it. Imagine if you took the train from Philadelphia to Boston, and the whole way, all through New Jersey and through New York City and on up through coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island, all the way to Boston, just imagine if the
whole way
every city that you went through was smashed to smithereens. That’s what it looks like. The entire East Coast turned into a demolition site.

Weight, weight – a heavy conscience. We have heaped more destruction on the German cities than they have heaped on us, and that is the truth. Weight. Rubble to clear.

Nuremberg – it is correctly Nürnberg in German – is one of the cities that we hit hard. But it got chosen for the International Military Tribunal for war crimes because the Palace of Justice is still standing, with a good secure prison still attached to it. And of course it is the symbolic centre for the birth of Nazism, so it seems like a good place to restore things. The IMT earlier this year was run by the Allied powers. The Doctors’ Trial is being run by the Americans – it’s actually called ‘United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al.’. The city of Nuremberg is still a wreck, and I was pretty much forbidden to go out of the hotel alone after I got there. I didn’t see anything of the medieval city the whole time I was there, although I think it would have made me sad if I did – ninety per cent of it is destroyed.

I got driven to the train station to meet Ró
ż
a. The GI who did the driving had a gun with him, so I felt pretty safe, but the medical expert from the tribunal, Dr Leo Alexander, came along too.

‘I don’t mind going by myself,’ I said.

‘Neither do I,’ he said, smiling through his moustache. ‘We’ll be braver together.’

He’d been very kind to me ever since I arrived – warm but serious, an intense, earnest man
impassioned
with his job of interviewing and examining the Ravensbrück Rabbits and preparing their statements. That’s the right word for it –
impassioned.
He was born in Austria and emigrated to the US in 1934, I think because he was Jewish; you could still hear the German accent (or Austrian or whatever it is). He was eager to meet Ró
ż
a, the first of the Rabbits to arrive. She’d taken the train all the way from Sweden – it crosses the Baltic Sea on a ferry, like the Golden Arrow. As far as I knew, Ró
ż
a hadn’t been in another airplane since the snowy night in March 1945 when I flew her out of Germany.

It took us a moment to recognise each other – even though Ró
ż
a still had to walk with a supporting stick and she still had the crazed gleam in her eyes that Maddie and Bob had agreed on in the Ritz on VE Day. It was over a year and a half later and she still had it.

She had to switch sides with her cane so she could shake hands.

‘I am pleased to meet you, Dr Alexander,’ she said in English.

‘The pleasure is mine, Miss Czajkowska,’ he answered.

Ró
ż
a held her cane hooked over her left arm, swinging it a little. She turned to me and held out her hand. She didn’t smile or rush to swallow me in a bear hug, but I felt
everything
in our clasped hands, even through our gloves.

‘Hello, Rose Justice,’ she said coolly.

It’s no wonder I didn’t recognise her. When I’d first met her, when she was seventeen, she’d been so emaciated I’d thought she was about eleven. She wasn’t any taller now, still petite, but so
curvy
– she wasn’t carrying any extra weight, but there was nothing angular or pointy about her anywhere – all curves. She was incredibly lovely. I’d once seen a glimpse of that, but had never imagined I’d see her in her full glory. Her hair was exactly the colour of caramel, coppery gold and gleaming, not long, but stylishly permed and framing a face like a china doll’s. She had on a camel-hair coat and a grey wool suit, dull but smart – and showing off all the amazing curves.

‘Hello, Ró
ż
yczka,’ I said – little Rosie.

We were subdued in the car going back to the hotel. The bomb damage isn’t as obvious at night as it is in the daytime, but when you do notice it at night, it’s eerier. A dark row of empty windows with stars shining through them. A big pale heap you think is a snow bank until you get close enough to see it’s a pile of broken marble. A grey shadow like a naked torso crawling through the rubble in a vacant lot. By day you’d just see a scrap of newspaper fluttering aimlessly.

‘I didn’t think Germany would look like this,’ Ró
ż
a said.

‘All of Europe looks like this!’ I exclaimed. ‘Haven’t you
seen
?’

‘Sweden doesn’t.’

Sweden was neutral during the war, of course – no bombs dropped on it.

Dr Alexander leaned back from the front seat. ‘You won’t mind spending time tomorrow going over your story in my office in the Palace of Justice, will you?’ he asked Ró
ż
a. ‘I have the daunting task of interviewing all the young ladies appearing as witnesses. I must also make an examination of your injuries. But it would be appropriate to conduct the exam after the other four “Rabbits” arrive tomorrow, when you are all together. In the mean time we have only four days to prepare your statements, so I’d like to begin with yours tomorrow morning.’

‘All right,’ she answered softly.

As we climbed out of the car in front of the hotel, she whispered to me, ‘Are you going to be a witness also, Rose?’

‘No, I’m going to be a reporter. I have to write a story for the magazine that published my Ravensbrück poems.’

It was absolutely freezing – you felt like your breath was turning to ice when you talked. Ró
ż
a didn’t say anything. And suddenly I felt cold not because of the winter night, but cold inside.

The Ró
ż
a I’d known at Ravensbrück had been a live wire of defiance and daring and desperate hope, the girl who taught me to curse like a sailor in five languages, who’d wisecracked instead of sobbed when she was told she was going to be executed the next day. Something was different. She seemed like a person who has been on a tear for a week and now has sobered up again.

The Grand Hotel in Nuremberg was crawling with reporters and soldiers, but
not
with young curvy porcelain-complexioned girls, or even tall angular ones. In fact there weren’t very many women there at all, because the US military had a half-hearted rule about not letting spouses come along, though some of the judges’ wives were there helping out. It wasn’t exactly like having French strangers grabbing kisses from any pretty girl on VE Day, but Ró
ż
a and I caused heads to turn. People smiled and nodded politely and held open doors and grabbed Ró
ż
a’s bag. People ushered us into the dining room, and though my meals were included in my board, I’d have never had to pay for them even if they weren’t, because people kept offering to buy us drinks and coffee and cigarettes.

There was a buffet. I carried both our plates so Ró
ż
a could walk, one hand gripping her cane and the other pointing to what she wanted. We’d hardly said anything to each other since we got out of the car, though we’d smiled and thanked our entourage of helpful suited and uniformed men. But when we sat down across from each other at the little table over steaming plates of bratwurst sausages and potatoes, and another plate piled with a mountain of gingerbread
Lebkuchen
which Ró
ż
a had collected without my noticing, we both suddenly started to laugh.

‘I eat by myself most nights and everything is
still rationed
in Britain,’ I said. ‘I have one room and no kitchen, just the coal fire and a gas burner. Cheese on toast and bouillon cubes.’

‘I live in a boarding house. I have meals cooked for me!’ Ró
ż
a said. ‘As good as this, most of the time, but still – here we are! You and me in Germany, eating like kings!’ She paused, and challenged in a low voice, ‘Bless this food, Rose.’

This was more like the Ró
ż
a I knew – everything she said heavy with hidden meaning. Lisette had
always
said a brief grace over our thin prison soup.

I sat up straight and sang a grace from Girl Scout camp. Not loud, but I sang.

There was delighted laughter and a scattering of applause from the nearest tables around us. Ró
ż
a ducked her head demurely, one hand shielding her face beneath the short, shining caramel waves of her permed hair, as though I’d embarrassed her.

‘You never taught us that one!’ she accused.

‘I forgot about it,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t think I ever felt thankful enough to sing that one. I never really felt
thankful
to get food there – just relieved.’

‘We are both ungrateful wretches,’ Ró
ż
a said. ‘But praise God for bread anyway. Praise God for
gingerbread
!’

It felt so strange to eat with her – to eat a real meal together. We had slept pressed against each other like sardines for six months. We had stood naked in the snow side by side for two hours because one of the female guards had lost a watch or something, and they made our entire barrack line up outside and take all our clothes off so they could hunt for it. But we’d never sat at a table together and eaten a decent meal, not even after we got out. It made us both self-conscious.

‘You’re making me think I have to stuff it in before you take it away from me,’ Ró
ż
a accused.

‘
I know
.’ And of course we’d never stolen food from each other, ever, which made the sensation of covetous greed very weird. We’d both been reasonably well-fed for the past year and a half and now we were in a restaurant in a fancy hotel. It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.

We asked the hotel reception to fix it so we could share a room, which they were happy to do, because it freed up another room for the overflowing reporters and trial observers. When we got undressed for bed, Ró
ż
a proudly showed off to me her Exhibit A legs.

‘I broke my right leg in the refugee centre in Belgium. This is the leg they took the bone samples from. It held for two and a half years in their camp and then it broke, just like that, a week after I got out. I wasn’t even doing anything – just carrying your soup across the gym hall for you.’

I realised, suddenly, the notable difference about her – she’d stopped swearing.

She peeled her thick wool hose down to her ankles. ‘See? Here, in my shin. The new scar is where they operated on it in Sweden. I have a steel rod in there now, holding everything together. I couldn’t stand up for four months!’

I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know how I lost you, Ró
ż
a.’

‘Oh, well I do.’ She flung her hose on a chair. ‘You were crazy about that reporter. You forgot us the second you laid eyes on him.’

‘I wanted to tell him all your names! I wanted to tell him about the Rabbits, about the experiments! You spent six months drilling everybody’s names into my head – Karolina and Elodie got dragged off to be gassed yelling that we should tell the world about it, that’s what Irina told me, and Bob was the first reporter I ran into! It was like he’d dropped out of the sky. And then I wasn’t brave enough to tell him anything.’

Ró
ż
a laughed, not the old raucous cackle, but a soft, regretful sigh of a laugh. The ghost of a laugh. ‘That was us dropping out of the sky, not him. Remember? We’re the ones who crash-landed.’

‘I told the American Embassy your names,’ I said defensively.

We turned out the lights. It was a little room with twin beds. We lay in the dark wide awake with the weight of where we were and what lay ahead of us pressing on us.

‘Rose?’ she said softly.

‘Yeah?’ I answered.

‘It is just as strange to know you are there, and to be warm and comfortable, as it is to eat with you.’

‘It really is.’

‘Tell me “The Subtle Briar” again,’ she asked.

She knew I would still know it by heart.

I whispered to her in the dark.