No Safe Place

by Deborah Ellis

  The other two girls were whimpering, arms wrapped around each other, trying to look small on the bed. Rosalia did not cry. She got to her feet and got back in bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.

  She closed her eyes, but she could feel the men glaring at her. She heard the bolt lock again, and she heard the chair being pulled into a position right against the door.

  “You two — if she gets away, you will both pay,” one man said to the girls. “Now, go back to sleep!”

  “Take her shoes,” the other man said.

  She didn’t move a muscle as the covers were pulled from under the mattress and her sneakers were untied and yanked off.

  “Now try to get away.”

  Rosalia kept her face still, but inside, she was smiling.

  As if a lack of shoes could keep her from running.

  / / / / / / / /

  They were up and in the car again before the sun came up. No one was sleeping anyway, so the men decided they might as well be burning up miles. They sent all three girls into the bathroom together to get ready.

  “I’m watching you,” the Czech girl cautioned Rosalia. “I’m going to Berlin. I’m not blowing this chance and I’m not going to let you ruin my life.”

  “Your life is already ruined,” Rosalia was tempted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. If the girls couldn’t see the signs for themselves, they wouldn’t be convinced by anything she had to say.

  They made brief stops, no more picnic lunches. A few toilet breaks, sandwiches eaten in the car, the men trading off between driving and sleeping. It was raining. They hadn’t returned Rosalia’s shoes, and the socks on her feet were wet and cold.

  Rosalia read the highway signs and saw they were heading to the northern part of Berlin. The car finally turned into a housing complex beside a big shopping mall. It stopped in the parking lot of a row of short apartment houses.

  The men got out quickly and one took a firm hold of Rosalia’s arm. She was allowed to carry her own suitcase. The other man kept up cheery patter about how the girls would enjoy shopping at the mall on their days off.

  Rosalia kept her eyes open. She saw the name of the street — Zühlsdorfer — and took note of the giant number one painted on the front door.

  On the third floor, they stood before apartment 3A. One of the men knocked, and the door was opened.

  More men were inside. Rosalia counted four of them.

  Six men in total, and three girls.

  In spite of herself, she started to tremble.

  “This is what you’ve brought us?” one of them asked. “You travel all that way, and come back with this?”

  “Clean them up, they’ll be good enough,” one of the drivers said. “Keep the lights low.”

  They saw she had no shoes. “Problems?”

  “Too much spirit. We calmed her down.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Rosalia was taken away into a small room with a narrow bed and a little bureau with four slender drawers. Three of the men entered the room with her and shut the door behind them.

  She tried hard to control her shaking, but it had taken over her whole body. She put her suitcase on the floor by the bureau, then stood upright with her shoulders back and her head high.

  I am brave, she told herself.

  “You’re shaking,” one of the men said.

  “My feet are cold,” she replied, in careful but correct German. She was far from fluent, but could manage simple sentences.

  She immediately realized she’d made a mistake. It would have been better not to let the men know she could understand them.

  “We’d better get you out of those wet socks then,” a man said. He bent down to take them off.

  “I will do it,” she said. She stripped her feet bare of the filthy, wet socks.

  Then she coughed a deep chest cough. It was a cough that sounded like a cross between whooping cough and bronchitis, wet and contagious.

  The three men backed away.

  “You have your own toilet,” one said, “through there.” And they left her alone.

  In case they were watching her through the keyhole, Rosalia kept her face passive as she went into the little room that had just a toilet and a sink. There was a rack with a towel on it. The towel was threadbare, but it was clean, like the rest of her space.

  Rosalia washed her socks in the sink, rubbing most of the dirt out with the bar of hand soap, and hung them to dry beside the towel.

  She washed herself in the sink and put on track pants for sleeping. Before turning out the light and crawling into bed, she moved the little bureau across the door. The horrible-sounding cough covered up the noise of moving furniture.

  She got into bed, for the moment feeling fine.

  The cough was fake. Her brothers had taught her. They’d used it to get their mother to bring them hot tea in bed on cold mornings.

  Back when their mother was alive. Back when they had beds.

  They’d taught her a lot of things. She was a good student.

  / / / / / / / /

  Early the next morning, Rosalia took a closer look at her surroundings. The window in the small room would not open and was mostly painted over, except for a foot or so at the top that let in a bit of light. By standing on her bed, she could see outside.

  The apartment building looked over a large park, still green in the fall, with trees that were starting to change color. Train tracks ran along one side of it, and apartment blocks rose up all around it.

  She coughed again while she moved the bureau and got washed and dressed quickly. The apartment was quiet, but she was hungry. Maybe she could get some food and get back into her room before anyone else woke up.

  She tried the door but it wouldn’t open. She was locked in her room.

  She was about to examine the window again — maybe there was a way to unlock it, a way to shimmy down a drainpipe three stories to freedom below — but she heard movement in the outer apartment.

  Someone had opened the apartment door. Rosalia heard the jangle of keys, then heard water running, cupboard doors opening and closing, and soon smelled coffee brewing.

  Her bedroom door was suddenly unlocked.

  “Oh. You girls have arrived, have you? I suppose I’ll have to open another jar of jam. How many are you?”

  The woman at the door was short, perhaps in her mid-sixties, and she peered at Rosalia with an air of accusation.

  “Good morning,” Rosalia said in German. She held out her hand. “My name is Rosalia.”

  “Are you the only one?” The woman ignored the outstretched hand.

  “There are two others.”

  “More work for the same wages,” the woman muttered as she turned away, but she left the door open, and Rosalia stepped out.

  The apartment was a mess of liquor bottles, plates of old food and cigarette butts. There was no sign of the men, but Rosalia assumed they were asleep somewhere.

  The woman kept working in the kitchen, and Rosalia got busy tidying the other room. It could only help her to have this woman on her side.

  The woman showed surprise at the tidy living room, but just said, “I guess you’d better come and eat.”

  Rosalia sat at the kitchen table. She didn’t try to make conversation again. She just ate as much as she could hold. There were hard-boiled eggs, dark rye bread, slices of cheese, and jam. She kept eating as the other two girls joined her. Rosalia drank lots of coffee and watched the other girls pick at their food.

  Too foolish to know they’ll need their strength, she thought.

  After breakfast the girls were put back in their rooms. Rosalia asked no questions, but the other girls did, and they got no answers from the housekeeper other than, “I’ve got my orders.” Rosalia used the time to go through the exercises her brothers had taught her, keeping h
er legs strong with squats and lifts, her arms strong with push-ups and isometrics, and her stomach muscles hard with crunches and twists.

  Then she stood back on her bed and looked out the bit of window. She watched cars and trams going by, and she saw people pushing strollers and walking dogs.

  She was still standing there when the door was unlocked again, and the housekeeper came in with her broom and cleaning supplies.

  “You’ve made your bed,” the woman said. “You’re a tidy one. I like that.”

  Rosalia took that remark as an invitation to chat.

  “What is that park?” she asked. She wasn’t really interested, but one bit of unimportant information might lead to others, maybe more vital.

  “That park? That’s Marzahn. This whole area is Marzahn. Metro station’s called Marzahn, too, although I don’t expect you’ll be going on many trips. Are you going to be this tidy every day?”

  Rosalia didn’t understand all the words — the woman spoke too quickly — but she got the question and replied, “I like to be tidy.”

  “Well, I can use the help around here,” the woman said before she shut the door and locked it. Rosalia did another round of exercises.

  The men got up an hour or so later. Rosalia thought she heard one man walking around, mumbling complaints at the housekeeper. Then other men entered the apartment and talked with him. They left the girls locked in their rooms.

  A meal was brought in on a tray and left on the bureau. There was stew, bread and more coffee. Rosalia ate everything quickly, while it was hot.

  She had just swiped the stew bowl clean with the last bit of bread when she realized where she was.

  She had heard the stories, and the tales must have included the name, but it hadn’t stuck in her head, not like the other names and the other places.

  Marzahn was the first concentration camp for Gypsies.

  Rosalia pushed aside the tray and stood back up on the bed.

  The park, now green and golden, had been the place where the Nazis had gathered together all the Roma and Sinti of Berlin in 1936, and forced them to live in squalor, guarded by dogs and men with guns.

  It was the Olympics, the government said. We want Berlin to look good for the world. We want the garbage off our streets.

  So they rounded up the Roma people — people like Rosalia’s great-grandparents, whose ancestors had lived in Germany since the 1400s — and they kept them prisoners for the crime of being Roma.

  Rosalia tried to picture it. She tried to picture the barracks, cold and crowded, and the barbed wire, and the barking dogs, and the shooting guards. Down below, where people now jogged and walked their poodles, her people had suffered.

  “So many died of illness,” she remembered her grandmother saying. “They died of hunger and the cold. And some died fighting.”

  The stories came flooding back.

  That park out there belonged to her as much as it belonged to anyone in Germany. Her family’s blood and tears had fallen on the soil where flowers now grew.

  In 1944, the order came to clear the Roma out of Marzahn. The soldiers came to herd the people into trucks and trains. Her great-grandmother had stood with the others in her barracks, clutching bars of iron and boards of wood, and beating the heads of any Nazi soldiers who came near.

  The Germans backed down.

  “Some of the soldiers were just boys,” Rosalia remembered being told. “They didn’t know what to do with women who fought back.”

  The victory hadn’t lasted. All the Roma and Sinti of Marzahn were sent to Auschwitz. Only a handful were still alive at the end of the war. Rosalia’s great-grandmother was one of them.

  My family are fighters, Rosalia thought, as she heard a knocking on the apartment door and more men came in.

  She kept up her fake cough, coughing as close to the door as possible so the men would be sure to hear her.

  They left her alone again that night.

  She coughed all through the pleading, screaming and crying of the other two girls. She coughed while the parade of men laughed and slapped and grunted and drank. She coughed and thought about her great-grandmother fighting off the Nazis.

  She knew she would not be left alone another night.

  / / / / / / / /

  “Put this on,” the housekeeper said, handing her a skimpy dress, spiky high-heels and a plastic container with bits of make-up in it. “I’m to take your other clothes.”

  She waited while Rosalia put on the dress and shoes, then took her other clothes and her little suitcase. She closed but did not lock the door behind her. Music started to play in the living room. Men entered the apartment.

  Rosalia took off the shoes. She stuffed one of them under the bed, then curled her hand around the toe end of the other. She put both hands behind her back. Then she stood and stared at the door, thinking about what had happened at Marzahn before she was born.

  The door opened.

  “Time to start earning your keep,” a man said, and another man came into the room. “Thirty minutes, or you pay more,” he was told. Then the door was shut.

  “Don’t just stand there. You heard him. Tick tock.” He was at her in two steps.

  “I do not want this,” Rosalia said, clearly and in German. She was sure she had the words right. “I am fourteen years old, and I do not want this.”

  “I was told you were a fighter,” the man said, grabbing her shoulders and drawing her toward him. He forced his fat, slimy tongue into her mouth.

  Rosalia bit down, hard, and brought her knee up into his groin at the same time. The man folded in pain. She swung the shoe at him, aiming the stiletto at the soft point in his skull. He dropped to the floor.

  She waited a moment, catching her breath, to be sure he was unconscious, and to be sure the men outside had not heard him fall over the sound of the music playing. Then she took off his shoes, his pants, his jacket and his shirt. She gathered them all into a bundle, tying them together with his belt, and used the stiletto heel to break through the window. She dropped the clothes outside, slicing her arm open.

  She grabbed a chunk of broken glass just as the men came bursting into her room.

  Rosalia had cut an artery, and the blood spurted out in a gush. She flung it at the men, hitting some of them in the eyes.

  Waving the broken glass, she leapt through the men, slashing out at anything in her way, and made it to the apartment door.

  She had trouble with the locks. There were too many.

  “Let me out!” she screamed at the housekeeper, who was standing with a tray of drinks. The men were coming after her.

  The housekeeper didn’t move. A man was almost at her, almost grabbing her.

  Rosalia turned quickly, jagged bloody glass pointing out. She stabbed the man hard in the belly, leaving the glass shank inside him.

  She got the last lock undone and flung the door open. She bolted down the stairs, leaping two and three steps at a time.

  Down she ran, around and around, leaving a trail of blood, willing herself not to get dizzy, willing herself to stay upright. There was the front door, and then she was out on the street.

  Bloody, barefoot, and in a dress too skimpy for the chilly fall night, Rosalia took a big breath of free air. She found the bundle of clothes in some shrubs, then dashed across the parking lot.

  Through families of shoppers coming out from the mall, around moving cars, narrowly missing trashcans, Rosalia ran. With the bundle tucked under her armpit, she kept one hand clamped firmly over her wound. She heard one shoe then the other drop out of her bundle as she ran.

  She was at the point of collapse, but she could not stop now. The park was dark. If she could just get there, she could find a place to hide. Probably, they were following her. She didn’t take the time to turn around and check.

  Steps up took her over
the train tracks, and steps down took her to the laneway that led to the park. As she got closer, she could see that the park was really a cemetery, and that it was closed for the night.

  The low fence at the entrance was not going to stop her. The bundle went over first. She had to unclasp her wound before pulling herself over. It was almost impossible, but the shadows in the park were waiting for her. She had to get there.

  Then she was over, and after a few steps more she reached the deep shadows and bushes. She collapsed in a thicket of trees.

  Rosalia undid the bundle and wrapped the shirt around the wound in her arm, using her teeth to help her tie it tight. She put the trousers on over the foolish excuse for a dress and pulled the jacket over her shoulders. There wasn’t much she could do about her bare feet, but cold feet were a small price to pay for freedom.

  She sat hidden in the trees and the shadows, peering out at the cemetery entrance and the laneway leading to it. No one was coming after her, or at least no one had chased her into the park.

  Rosalia put her hands in the trouser pockets to keep them warm. In one pocket was a wallet, and she could feel the edge of bills folded inside it. She found some keys, which she tossed into the trees, and some coins. Just inside the cemetery entrance was a pay phone. She knew what she had to do.

  She left the comfort of the shadows and made her way to the telephone. She dropped several coins through the slot and pressed some numbers.

  “Fire!” she yelled, using the German word, and she gave the address of the apartment. “Children! Hurry!” She didn’t think anyone would come if she just said girls were in trouble. Then she hung up and went back to the shadows.

  She found a spot by the fence where she could look across the train tracks and see the apartment building where she’d been held. It wasn’t long before she heard the sirens and saw the flashing lights of the police and fire trucks.

  Maybe now the other two girls would be rescued. Deportation or even prison would be better than what they were going through in that apartment.

  And now the fatigue really set in. She knew it would be better to keep running, to put as much distance as she could between herself and those men, but she was too weary. She moved deeper into the cemetery, with its quiet paths and comforting darkness.