Rose Under Fire (36 page)

Ró
ż
a gave a long sigh. Then she whispered, ‘Rose, I really miss you.’

Ró
ż
a spent most of Sunday telling her story to Dr Leo Alexander – we had supper with him that night afterwards, before the other Ravensbrück witnesses arrived. Everyone I met who was involved in the trial was friendly and straightforward, as though we were at a conference. This was not quite what I was expecting, but I think it is a result of everything being pulled together at the last minute. And although I wasn’t one of Dr Alexander’s witnesses he was interested in me, because I am a writer and a medical student, which is a less advanced version of what
he
is.

Ró
ż
a told him at supper, ‘Rose could be a witness here. She has scars too.’

He looked at me with sudden intense interest. ‘You
do
? An American witness?’

I shook my head violently. ‘I wasn’t operated on. I was just thrashed because I wouldn’t work. So was everybody who didn’t work, or who did anything else they didn’t like. We’re a dime a dozen and nothing to do with a trial for medical staff.’

‘I hate to say it, but you’re right,’ Alexander agreed. ‘I’ll admit I’ve already rejected several so-called witnesses exactly like you.’ He turned his mild, smart gaze back to Ró
ż
a. ‘You will likely have heard of the concept of genocide, a term coined by your countryman Raphael Lemkin, which the IMT used as a basis for their charges against the Nazi leaders? We are using a parallel concept in this trial: thanatology, the science of producing death. These men are being charged with murder. The charge is that their experimentation was designed to discover not how to heal, but ways to kill. Simply put, you’re a survivor of attempted murder. A punitive lashing, however ugly the scars may be, is, unfortunately, irrelevant.’

‘I couldn’t show off my scars anyway!’ I protested, taking refuge in being ridiculous to hide my cowardice. ‘What would I do, step on to the witness stand in a bathing suit? A two-piece!’

‘It would be
sensational
,’ Ró
ż
a exclaimed.

‘No one would notice any scars!’ Dr Alexander teased.

What a very weird dinner conversation.

The other Rabbits arrived. They were
all
as unrecognisable as Ró
ż
a – well-fed, well-dressed, wearing their hair fashionably styled beneath new hats, smiling for the flashing press cameras at the train station. We hugged and kissed as if we were all long-lost family: Vladyslava, tall Maria, Jadviga, and little Maria who’d had to stay in the
Revier
for a year and a half. I hadn’t known any of them very well at Ravensbrück, but I knew their names. I’d hidden with Vladyslava and Jadviga in a pit dug beneath our washroom for two days. They’d hidden there with Ró
ż
a for a week.

We were all on the bus to the Palace of Justice at 8.30 the next morning and stayed there till 6 p.m., and I didn’t see much of anybody that day. I got asked, ‘Can you type?’ and I said yes, and suddenly I was part of the team landed with the tortuous job of organising Dr Alexander’s notes as fast as he could hand us paper. I was set up in an office with the Chief Prosecutor’s wife, who was also working there, because I wasn’t allowed in the interview room with the Ravensbrück witnesses. Ró
ż
a ran piles of paper back and forth between me and the rest of them, since she’d already been interviewed. I spent the first three days of that week in unwaged labour, gaining a little understanding of the trial and a lot more understanding than I’d ever wanted to know about the hideous things that had actually been
done
to Ró
ż
a and the women I’d been imprisoned with.

The whole week was a race against time – the medical examinations, the interviews, translating everything from Polish to English to German, working out the order for the Rabbits’ appearances and practising what they’d say, and then we had
one day
to present everything before the whole court shut down for its Christmas break. We were in the Palace of Justice every day, but we never went into the courtroom. We knew where it was; we got our ID checked and got ushered in and out of the building with the reporters and observers every morning, and ate with them in the canteen in the basement; we gaped wide-eyed at the armfuls of headphones and the miles and miles of telephone wire that trailed everywhere as the IBM technicians struggled to keep the translations going round the clock.

Ró
ż
a and I were standing outside the entrance in the forecourt on Thursday evening with a few other people, on the side with the trees, waiting for the shuttle bus to take us back to the hotel. Suddenly Ró
ż
a grabbed my arm and hissed in my ear, ‘Look, that’s Fischer. And that’s Gebhardt.
They did it.
’

She let go for one second to point. Soldiers were leading a group of the defendants somewhere – well-dressed, sober civilians under armed guard.

‘Did what?’ I asked.

‘Tied me down in a prison cell and cut chunks out of my bones.’

I stared.

Being on the winning team gave us no strength. Ró
ż
a clutched my arm and there we were, standing in the dark in a flurry of German snow, and we might as well have been standing in the roll call square back in Ravensbrück.

‘
That’s Oberheuser
,’ Ró
ż
a choked.

‘
Shhh!
’

There wasn’t any reason to hush her. There wasn’t any reason except I felt instinctively that we’d be walloped for talking and pointing.

‘Oberheuser’s the woman?’ I whispered.

‘Yes – she helped.’ They were being led to a different entrance. I knew that Oberheuser was the only woman of the two dozen accused doctors. Right in front of us were all three of the Ravensbrück doctors, Gebhardt, Fischer and Oberheuser – maybe going to a separate interview before the Ravensbrück witnesses gave their testimony the next day.

There was another woman who had come out with the others, but was now left guarded on her own. She stood hopping from foot to foot to keep warm, a little to the side of the tall, imposing entryway, chatting with one of the helmeted American guards. She wore a halo of cigarette smoke.

Ró
ż
a and I recognised her at exactly the same time, for different reasons.

‘There’s Engel,’ Ró
ż
a said. ‘She was one of the lab technicians, the creepiest thing on legs. She was always sneaking around injecting people with morphine. We called her the “Angel of Sleep”. Hah! She wasn’t working in the
Revier
any more when they did the Bunker operations. Bet she never dreamed the Americans would catch up with her.’

Our bus pulled up. I stared back over my shoulder as I climbed on, in shock. Ró
ż
a had recognised another Nazi on her personal vendetta list – but I’d seen a ghost. Anna Engel had been the leader of my work crew at Ravensbrück, scheduled to be gassed at the same time as the Rabbits. I’d thought she was dead.

I admit to
joy
when I realised she was still alive.

People on the bus gave up seats for us. I leaned over Ró
ż
a to rub a clear patch in the fogged-up window and stared at the girl standing there in her plume of smoke and condensed breath, hugging a thin raincoat around her and listening with a cynical expression to something the GI in the helmet was saying. She handed him her cigarette and it glowed as he put it to his lips, and then they both laughed. And then the bus pulled away.

Anna had been a prisoner herself by the time I knew her – a German prisoner. We’d got along all right. She’d told me she’d been an actual employee at Ravensbrück in 1942, quit her job and got sent back as a criminal in 1944.

‘That was
Anna
!’ I exclaimed. ‘My
Kolonka
! I thought they gassed her!’

‘I wish they had,’ Ró
ż
a snarled. ‘That was the bitch who put me under for the first operation.’

We didn’t say anything to each other on the short bus ride back to the hotel, because I didn’t trust Ró
ż
a with what I knew.

I knew that Herta Oberheuser was the only woman on trial. I’d done a lot of boning up on what was going on, and I’d talked with Dr Alexander. Ró
ż
a, on the other hand, focused on vengeance, was not paying much attention to the mechanics of the trial.

If Oberheuser was the only woman on trial, any other women involved must be here as witnesses – possibly even as witnesses for the defence. So Anna must be a witness, like Ró
ż
a herself.

I didn’t dare to tell her. I’d liked Anna.

Ró
ż
a sat on the edge of her bed and slowly rolled down her hose the way she had on our first night in Nuremberg. I started to get undressed too. Ró
ż
a said suddenly, ‘Your scars are nasty, Rose. Do they hurt?’

I craned my neck. I’d never actually seen much of my scars, which start on my lower back and go halfway down my thighs.

‘They don’t hurt, but I got a stupid infection last winter that had to be operated on. I couldn’t sit down again for a week.
So
embarrassing. I’m fine now.’ I pulled my nightgown on.

‘You never make a fuss about anything. You don’t even want
revenge
.’

I turned around to look at her. She was still sitting there with her stockings around her ankles.

‘For my beating? Gosh, I don’t even know who did it!’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t want it to happen to anyone
else
, ever again. But how would I get revenge for
that
 
? They used to bribe other prisoners to do the beatings sometimes, by giving them extra bread! What if they’d held back your rations for two weeks then given you extra bread to beat me? I wouldn’t have blamed you!’

‘Holy Mary, you sound just like
Lisette
,’ she sneered, and I could tell she didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘
Faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Forget about revenge! These trials aren’t about revenge. They’re about
justice
. Don’t you want
justice
, Rose Justice?’

For a moment I thought she was going to burst out in her evil cackling laugh at her own stupid pun.

Instead she started to cry.

I’d only ever seen her cry once before, and that had been a full-fledged tantrum. She always made such a big production out of laughing like a witch that I was unprepared for the simplicity of her despair now. She hardly made a sound or moved, but big silent crystal tears like Cape May diamonds slid quietly down her cheeks.

‘
Of course I want justice
,’ I said through my teeth, aching with guilt and loss and the colossal
unfairness
of it all. I buried my face in my hands for a moment.

‘Rose, I can’t do it,’ I heard her gasp.

I looked up. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You can’t do what?’

‘I can’t do the trial. I can’t be a witness. I just
can’t
.’

‘Oh,
Ró
ż
yczka
!’

I sat down beside her and pulled her into my arms because I knew,
I knew
exactly how she felt.

She buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed. I’d never seen her cry like this – not ever.

‘I don’t want to do it,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t want to stand up in front of all those men, all those strangers, barefoot with my skirt pulled up so they can stare at me, and have that dry little man point with his stick and explain it all in words I’ll
never
make sense of. I don’t want to have to turn around and tell everyone how they did it. It made me cry in the interview, telling about how they stuffed the rags in my mouth in the Bunker so I couldn’t scream, and twisted my arms back and held me down while they injected me – how I fought and fought and just woke up to my hips in plaster again with chunks of bone missing
anyway
, only in
prison
this time, they hadn’t even washed the mud off my feet – they did the same thing to Vladyslava, but she’s so much more sensible than me. I told Dr Alexander in his office, but I just
can’t
tell that hall full of strangers. With that sickening Fischer
listening.
Men
scare
me.’

Since she’d been fourteen, all the men in her life had done nothing but hurt her.

‘But you’re Ró
ż
a! You’re so strong!’

‘Yes. That’s the other thing. I’m brave and strong and young – and little and pretty. Dr Alexander wants to show off all that. It’ll make people feel sorry for us, wring their hearts, shock them –’

‘As it should!’

‘But Rose, I’m not
smart
.’

‘
What?
’

Ró
ż
a, as far as I knew, was pretty fluent in six languages, not counting Ravensbrück camp patois. She’d memorised every song and poem I’d ever recited after hearing it three times. She knew more about Polish politics than I’d know about anybody’s politics in a lifetime.

‘Holy Virgin Mother, I felt so
stupid
watching the others get interviewed. Vladyslava is a teacher and the rest of them are all scientists. They always understand what Dr Alexander’s talking about, what was done to them. Their brains are crammed with mysterious expertise in bacteria or chemicals – or medicine, like you.’

‘Well, you’ve got a translation job!’

‘Who told you that? Oh, Lisette.’ Ró
ż
a heaved another desperate sob. ‘I lied to her about that. You have to have a degree to do that kind of work for the Polish Research Institute. I’m just the girl who makes them coffee and puts the stamps on envelopes. They pay me mostly because they feel sorry for me. It doesn’t matter now anyway because they’ve run out of funding and I won’t be able to work there when I get back. But I don’t even have a high school diploma –’

‘So get one!’

‘I can’t, Rose, I
can’t
.’ She burst into fresh tears. ‘I
tried.
I tried to take an exam and I
can’t do it
, and that’s how I
know
I can’t do the trial tomorrow. I
dread
it all happening again. I was going to start with mathematics, because I’m good at it and it’s neutral and I could do it in Swedish, and all I did was sit there for an hour
cringing
while the proctor walked up and down between the candidates making sure they weren’t cheating. Every time she passed me I ducked. I kept expecting her to hit me. And finally, just to prove to myself that I could do anything I wanted and she
wouldn’t
hit me, I scrunched up the test paper and threw my pencils on the floor and walked out. Then I sat in the toilets and cried until the exam was over.’