Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  Lisette was in prison in Lublin for a while before they sent her to Ravensbrück, and she was part of Róża’s transport. There were about a hundred and forty of them to begin with. A lot of them had already been killed one way or another by the time I got thrown in with them, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why Lisette adopted me – why she adopted Róża, why she was a natural Lagermutter. She needed people to mother. It was how she stayed sane.

  Lisette didn’t care about my head full of poetry in English. She had a reasonable supply in her own head, along with an inexhaustible supply of French and Polish and Russian and German poems too. I got tucked under Lisette’s wing because Zosia and Genca, the girls who had been shot last week, had also been her adopted daughters, along with Róża and Karolina. The Blockova Gitte hadn’t just had Róża’s thirst for poetry in mind when she’d boosted me, semi-conscious, into that particular bunk under the roof. I was there for Lisette to look after, to distract her from going crazy with grief and fury all over again.

  I must have been the slowest knitter of anybody in the block. I hadn’t knitted in the round before, and I’d never tried holding the yarn in my left hand like the rest of them; but fortunately all we were making was socks. I didn’t mind knitting socks for German soldiers. German soldiers need socks. If they were going to force me to do anything for the Axis war effort, keeping conscripted boys’ feet warm on the Eastern Front was OK. Making bombs was not OK.

  I did my knitting standing up. I ate standing up. The back of my dress had dark brown stripes of dried blood across it that I never managed to wash out in the whole time I wore it.

  The knitting went on in the block itself. There was a big main room on either side of the so-called washroom in the middle. We ate in the big rooms, and that was also where the knitters worked in the day. Older women knitted, or people who couldn’t walk. There was a guard who watched over everything as we got to work, but mostly they left things up to Gitte. As long as we got the required number of socks knitted, they didn’t waste time keeping an eye on us. And as soon as the SS guards were gone in the morning, everybody relaxed a little bit. We still had to work like fury – if we didn’t meet the quotas, everyone got punished with an extra hour or two of ‘Strafstehen’ – punishment standing – waiting outside the barrack in the dark after the last roll call of the day. But the knitters could talk to one another, a huge advantage and privilege.

  Róża sat on the table facing me, resting her feet on the bench. She’d stowed her wooden clogs and her crutch underneath the table. She didn’t say anything to me for about an hour – just eyed me up and down critically, while another woman carried on a quiz session in Polish. They played school, mathematicians and geologists and historians taking turns at tutoring the younger girls. I didn’t understand any of it, and after a while I began to hate the sound of their meaningless foreign voices. It was a nightmare I could never really define, to have so many people packed around me and not be able to communicate with any of them unless they felt like it.

  They took a break in the lecture after a while, though we all kept on furiously producing limitless amounts of grey wool tubing (which of course we were never allowed to use ourselves, even when it was snowing). By the time they got to their recess, I was swaying on my feet. I couldn’t sit, but I couldn’t really stand yet either – not for the whole day. It was about 10 o’clock in the morning and I’d been up since 4.00.

  ‘So how come you’re French, if you don’t speak anything but English?’ Róża asked. ‘Are you another parachutist?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘There are a few English ladies here who were dropped into France by parachute, as spies. Are you a spy?’

  ‘Gosh – would I tell you if I was?’

  She laughed. It was a real laugh this time, a bubbly giggle of a laugh, not the other bitter, ironic cackle. ‘You look French – bald. When Paris was liberated, they shaved all the French prisoners’ heads again as punishment. What are you then? And how did you end up here?’

  ‘Are your English ladies here now?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they’re not in this block. And even if they were, they’re not cripples. They have to do real work,’ Róża said offhandedly.

  ‘Are you all crippled?’ I asked, looking around the room. I wondered, Am I here because I’ve been crippled? No, I’d been given six hours to recover and now I was already on my feet. Apart from the Polish girls who’d come back inside to knit after the morning roll call, all the rest of the Block 32 prisoners were fine – none of the French or Russian women had anything wrong with them apart from being filthy dirty and covered with scabies and starving, and they’d all marched off on work details that morning. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened to you, since I asked first,’ Róża said seriously. ‘Because if we start talking about me, you won’t believe me, and we’ll argue. Tell me about 51498, the French Political Prisoner with no French.’

  ‘Pardonez-moi, mais je parle un peu de français,’ I said. Excuse me, I do speak a little French. More now than I did then, of course.

  ‘Moi aussi, plus bien que toi,’ she answered. ‘Me too, better than you. And I learned most of it here, in Lisette’s French class. You should never use vous, the formal “you”, to another prisoner – we’re comrades. Not even to Lisette, who’s older than my mother was. Are you sure you’re not a spy? How did you get to Ravensbrück speaking only English?’

  ‘I’m American. I’m a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary in England – we ferry aircraft for the Royal Air Force. I landed in the wrong place and they sent me here. I got registered with a transport of French prisoners and they counted me as French too.’

  ‘Hah! Too bad you can’t speak German or you could report the stupid bitch who signed you up as French. She’d get in trouble for sloppy record-keeping.’

  ‘Boy, I wish she would,’ I said with feeling.

  Róża gleefully repeated my story in Polish so that it could be passed around the rest of the room, and once again everyone shot questions at me about the invasion and the Allied advance and how soon the war was likely to end. (The Polish prisoners were pretty good at English, it turned out; later I realised they carried out some of their lessons totally in English.) I told them about D-Day and how we handed out the strawberries to the soldiers, and my gosh, that was a hit.

  ‘How many did each soldier get?’

  ‘Did you eat any yourself?’

  ‘How big were they?’

  ‘What variety?’

  We switched topics from politics to food and I described the way Felicyta had made the little squares of toast with jam on them after Celia’s funeral.

  Someone burst out with an exclamation in an excited voice and everybody laughed.

  ‘They think we could do that too,’ Róża explained drily. ‘The next time somebody gets jam. Sometimes a food package makes it through without the goddamned SS stealing everything in it except the paper it was wrapped in.’

  ‘They took my paper,’ I said. ‘I had chocolate.’

  ‘Chocolate!’

  They were off again.

  ‘Hey, why don’t you lie across the table here?’ Róża said suddenly. ‘Here by me. You can lean on your arms with your wrists over the edge so you can go on working. Pile the wool on the bench. Yeah, like that. Better?’

  It was better. The women on the other side of the table had to squeeze up a little to make room for my legs, but they compromised by using them as a backrest.

  ‘Just be ready to get down in a hurry if one of the guards comes in. Code word this week is muffins.’ (I don’t really remember what the code word was that week. It was always food-based: ‘Oh, how I wish I had ten muffins for lunch!’ I know a lot of Polish words for food now.) ‘Listen to Maria – she can see the window.’

  Lying flat on my stomach across the table with my not-very-advanced sock dangling over the edge next to Róża’s kne
e, I had a close-up view of her thin right leg with the row of holes gouged in her shin. I couldn’t see anybody else’s legs, because they were all sitting the right way around with their feet under the table, and everybody was packed very close together. The absolutely awful thing about the damage to Róża’s leg was that it was so obviously permanent – it had healed that way.

  ‘Have you made me a poem yet?’ she demanded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No extra bread for you today.’

  I said to Róża, ‘I’m not giving you a poem till you tell me what happened to everybody’s legs.’

  She tapped her shin with one of her knitting needles. I didn’t dare to look, but I couldn’t help seeing out of my peripheral vision. She was poking the tip of the steel needle into one of the holes – just awful. Macabre and awful. Then she made a loud announcement in Polish. People turned interested heads in our direction. Nobody stopped working.

  ‘Everyone in my transport is condemned to death,’ she explained in English. ‘Special Transport. Condemned, all of us. They’ve executed dozens of us already. But some of us they didn’t kill right away, and since they plan for us all to end up dead anyway, they used us – tested us –’

  She hesitated, not with emotion, but just because she couldn’t find the right words. I don’t think she could find the right words in English or Polish. She used words like ‘experiment’ and ‘trial’ and ‘medical’ and they came out of her mouth so laden with sarcasm and hatred that it sounded like she was telling a really bad joke.

  ‘They “operated” on seventy-four of us, all Polish, mostly students from my transport. My Special Transport. Like experimental rabbits. That’s why we still get called rabbits, króliki – Kaninchen in German. Actually, what we said was that we’re not rabbits – one of the first girls operated on yelled it at one of the doctors and he thought it was funny. And it stuck. So that’s what they did, they cut us up like rabbits. They’d slice your calf open and fill the wound with gangrene and then seal it up in plaster for two weeks. Or they’d cut pieces out of your muscles or your nerves. Or they’d cut a chunk of bone out of your leg and try to stick it in someone else’s leg. I am special – I got operated on five times! Because I am so young and healthy, get it? They said they wanted to learn how to treat “wounds in the field” – “the field” means the Eastern Front, which is where most of Germany’s wounded soldiers are – so they’d “simulate” war wounds on us. Make a hole like a gunshot wound and then see what happens to it if you put a dirty bandage on it in a trench and never change the dressing. Guess what happens?’

  I swallowed but couldn’t answer. The iron needles seemed to waver in front of my face, as if I were looking at them through a sheet of old glass.

  ‘Look, I’ll show you what happens –’ She barked orders in Polish at the girls sitting on her left and on my right.

  They never stopped knitting. They turned round on the bench – they had room to do it because Róża and I were on the table. They stuck their own legs out in front of me, turning and showing off their scars as if they were models at a fashion show.

  I burst out, ‘I heard about you on the radio.’

  Róża dropped a needle.

  It clattered on the concrete floor and the girl next to her dived to pick it up. They chattered together in rapid excitement and then suddenly the whole room was buzzing again – really buzzing – and they were all focused on me.

  ‘You heard ? On the radio? On the BBC? What did they say? Does everyone know?’

  Róża explained very quickly, ‘Some of us died of it, some of us have been executed, but most of us are still alive, and we have been fighting to get the story to spread outside the camp. We smuggled out letters addressed to the BBC and the Vatican and the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. Now we are such an embarrassment to the camp administration that they don’t know what to do with us – we’re all still condemned to be killed, but they’re scared to do it. They know we’ve been telling people, they know it’s leaking out – we got a blessing sent to us by the Pope! A civilian worker in Siemens will hear, or someone from the men’s camp, or a prisoner who knows about us will get released or transferred to another camp. It’s getting out. Some day, the bastards will have to account for what they did to us. What did you hear?’

  ‘I don’t know who it was. The report was about an American woman who’d been in a prison camp in Germany – she had a list of names.’

  ‘It was Aka! She does have American citizenship! It was us! See, it’s working! What did you do when you heard? What did you think? What did people say?’

  I hesitated. They were so excited, and my answer was going to be so disappointing.

  ‘We didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘We just thought it was anti-German propaganda. No one believed it.’

  ‘No goddamn extra bread for you ever,’ Róża snarled with venomous resentment.

  Instead of snapping back at her I sang softly,

  ‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

  Will I ever see thee wed?’

  ‘You bitch,’ she murmured, just as soft.

  ‘It’s a round. It’s easy. I’ll teach you.’

  ‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

  Will I ever see thee wed –’

  Suddenly the girl on my right sang the first line back to me – Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose. She even picked up the unfamiliar English words of the second line, Will I ever see thee wed –

  ‘I will marry at thy will, sir,

  At thy will.’

  When I started to sing it a third time, a voice across the table joined in too.

  It didn’t take them long. It is an easy round. They were practised and fast at learning things by heart, and starved of beauty.

  And, of course, they knew we were singing to Róża.

  ‘MUFFINS!’ yelled the girl at the window.

  Instant silence. A dozen hands dragged me off the table. In five seconds we were all bent with our heads over our knitting and a guard stomped in to yell at Gitte for reasons I never figured out.

  I got my fair share of bread that night. I didn’t recognise the girl who handed it to me as we crowded round the drums of soup. ‘Thank you!’

  ‘You’ve got Zosia and Genca to thank, because they’re dead,’ Róża informed me brutally.

  ‘Shut up, Różyczka.’ The girl who’d given me the bread made a face and told me in a mixture of French and English, ‘Lisette is your Lagermutter now, your Camp Mother, and she’s mine and Róża’s also. So we’ll treat you like a sister.’

  ‘I’m Rose,’ I said.

  ‘I know you’re Rose. Rose Justice, American poet. Well, I’m Karolina Salska, Polish film maker. Not famous yet. I worked as a projectionist before the war but what I really want to do is animation, like Disney, you know? You’ll pay for the bread by telling me all about Fantasia.’ She added as a breathless afterthought, ‘You have seen Fantasia, right?’

  ‘Well, yes, but . . .’ What had happened in Fantasia? Mickey Mouse in a wizard’s hat and flying horses and . . . dinosaurs? ‘It was about four years ago and I don’t remember the music.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t seen it, but I know what they play in every sequence, and Lisette is like a walking music library. We’ll get her to hum and you can describe what happens, OK? Gitte sometimes lets us sing after lights-out.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Look, I said don’t worry. If you can’t remember the whole thing, you can teach me some new American dance tunes as compensation.’ Karolina herded me towards one of the long tables where the knitters worked – Róża curled up under the end of the table on the concrete floor with Lisette, and squeezed over to make room for me and Karolina. It was their little family place for a quarter of an hour twice a day, a private nook under the table and out of the chaos of the hundreds of people trying to get to the soup and bread. Karolina tried to let me creep in first, but I couldn’t sit. I had to stay on my knees at the table’s edge. As Karolina shuffled in past me, I n
oticed that she was wearing a Camp Police armband. Then I glanced down at her bare legs and saw the scar splitting her shin.

  ‘You’re a Rabbit!’

  She glanced up at me. She’d gone red. ‘And I like to dance to American music.’

  I probably went red too. ‘Oh! I didn’t mean you couldn’t dance! I was just surprised about your armband!’

  ‘A few of us are Camp Police. Rabbits are privileged. I patrol the anti-aircraft ditches and don’t have to go around with SS guards breathing down my neck all the time.’

  She tossed her head defiantly, smoothing her kerchief with the back of her hand as if it were her hair. ‘I don’t limp,’ she said. ‘One operation only, a bacterial infection, very neat. They didn’t peel off the muscle or cut out pieces of my shinbone like they did to Róża –’

  ‘You were sick for longer,’ Róża interrupted. ‘You couldn’t walk for eight months.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t notice now, if I was wearing stockings.’ Listening to the Rabbits talk about their operations was like watching a horror movie in a foreign language. You sort of hoped you’d misunderstood what was going on. And then when you figured out what was really going on, it was worse than you thought.

  ‘I can walk without limping,’ Karolina said again. ‘My legs weren’t even worth a picture, remember?’ She turned to me again. ‘Róża got two snapshots all to herself, front and back.’

  ‘What kind of pictures?’ I asked in an agony of confusion. I didn’t think she meant art. Did the SS make them pose?

  ‘We stole a camera a couple of weeks ago. There’s a soldiers’ prison camp not far from here, and sometimes the Ravensbrück work units have to deliver things there, and people get to talk to the boys. They got us a camera. We took an entire roll of film of the worst damaged legs.’

  Róża said savagely, ‘They’ll kill us all eventually, but at least we’ve got evidence.’ She let out one of her bitter cackles of laugher. ‘If somebody ever gets the pictures developed. One of the French prisoners is hiding the film –’