Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

  At that point Lisette raised one finger to her lips, and both Róża and Karolina gave her their full attention, waiting expectantly.

  Lisette said something in Polish. The second she’d finished, they all took a tiny bite of the stale bread, and a moment later I realised that Lisette had just said grace. They were crouching on a dirty concrete floor under a table and they said grace.

  I was astonished at the time. Now I understand. It was one of the ways Lisette held herself together.

  Then Lisette turned to me and said in casual English, just carrying on the conversation where she’d interrupted it, ‘Karolina helped take the snapshots, but we can’t risk letting her guard the film. That’s what you were arrested for in the first place, isn’t it, darling? Illegal filming!’

  ‘I didn’t film anything. I made a short cartoon showing a bunch of wolves herding rabbits into prison trucks,’ Karolina corrected with satisfaction. ‘And I still can’t believe I got the rabbits right! Anyway I was arrested for showing the film, not for making it.’ She gave her empty tin bowl a swipe with the hem of her dress and tried to tilt it so she could see her reflection, then sighed at the hopelessness of this project. She stowed the bowl in a little bag on a string tied round her waist. ‘Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of here and do an updated sequel, involving wolf bites. What were you arrested for, Rose?’

  ‘I landed my plane in the wrong place,’ I said.

  Róża snickered and leaped into the conversation. ‘I was arrested for being a Girl Scout. They arrested my whole Girl Scout troop in the summer of 1941. I was fourteen.’

  I gaped at her.

  ‘We were delivering plastic explosive for bombs,’ she said. ‘You know, little home-made bombs to sabotage officials’ cars and throw in office windows. Most of us got released, but they kept the oldest – and I didn’t stand a chance because I’d actually been stopped at a checkpoint and, well, it was pretty obvious I was smuggling explosives. You know how it is when you’re fourteen, you think you’re so much smarter than everybody else and nothing will ever hurt you . . .’ She trailed off, wiping her own bowl with her last crumb of bread, and then said in her offhand way, ‘They didn’t beat me, but they made me watch while they beat my mother, trying to get me to tell them who I was working for. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Someone always dropped off the stuff in our baskets with a note that said where to take it. They beat the crap out of our Girl Scout leader and then they shot her. So, 51498, what were you doing when you were fourteen?’

  ‘I’m older than you,’ I said faintly. ‘The war hadn’t started yet.’

  It had though. It had already been going on for a year, but the USA wasn’t in it yet. MY GOD, it’s been going on SUCH A LONG TIME.

  ‘Well, what were you doing? Do they have Girl Scouts in America?’

  ‘Yes – we –’

  Oh – we hung May baskets on people’s doors. Daddy got a brand-new Piper Cub for the flying school and he took me along to pick it up from Lock Haven, and I flew it all the way home and Hemlock Council gave me a special ‘Young Pilot’ badge. I went on my second Juniata River canoe trip that summer. We took the Brownies on a picnic to the Conewago Grove Lake. We were not smuggling explosives and we were not being arrested by the Nazis. Nobody executed my troop leader. I did not have to watch my mother being beaten.

  That is one of the very simple horrors I can’t shake – I can strip the clothes from a pile of dead bodies without retching, but thinking about this ninth grade Girl Scout having to watch her mother being tortured still makes me feel sick. Though I am not sure Róża would have grassed on anyone even to save her mother. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Why lucky for her? Not lucky for the people she was protecting, but lucky for Róża. She didn’t have to choose.

  ‘Do they still – these experiments on people’s legs, do they still –?’ I couldn’t finish the question.

  Karolina glanced down at my own bloodstained dress. I’d been kneeling for a quarter of an hour and my knees were aching, but I couldn’t sit. I hung on to the edge of the table to hold myself up.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘I mean, your legs are safe. They stopped the experiments last year.’

  ‘They might shoot you, of course, but they might do that to anybody,’ Róża offered.

  ‘Hey, hey!’ Karolina said, and Lisette suddenly crawled out next to me and grabbed me round the shoulders.

  ‘Don’t be scared, darling. Don’t let Róża scare you! She makes fun of everything. It’s how she is.’

  ‘She laughs when she’s in pain,’ Karolina assured me. ‘She doesn’t cry, just laughs like a mechanical fortuneteller in a glass box. Don’t cry!’

  ‘The war’s nearly over,’ Lisette said soothingly.

  ‘Look, I’ll let you in on a secret –’ Karolina peeled back the edge of her kerchief. She was hiding a new crop of soft brown curls. ‘I want to look nice when the American soldiers get here. I’ve got to make sure no one sees that I’m growing my hair out though. The guards really hate curly hair.’

  It had been drizzling all afternoon and was pouring with rain by the 9 p.m. roll call, and it was the coldest it had been since I’d got to Germany. I was burning with fever by lights out – it nearly killed me to have to climb up to the top bunk.

  ‘Why do you sleep so high up?’ I gasped. ‘With your legs the way they are?’

  ‘When people get the shits, it rains down on the lower bunks,’ Róża explained. ‘We had to fight the Red Army bitches for the high ones. Mother in Heaven, you’ve never had to fight for anything, have you?’

  I was still only capable of lying flat on my face in the crowded bunk, and they all used me for a furnace. Róża and Karolina snuggled up on either side of me, Karolina behind me with her arms right around me, and Róża in a sodden, shivering ball of misery between me and Lisette.

  ‘OK,’ Karolina demanded. ‘Fantasia! Start with ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ – that’s an easy one. Sing, Lisette!’

  ‘Shh,’ Lisette said. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Lisette’s word was law, and she’d been watching me closely; she knew I couldn’t perform any more that night. But I had to give them something, payment for the bread, for being adopted into their family, even if I wasn’t going to give a movie commentary.

  ‘If I grow bitterly,’ I whispered, and managed shreds of Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Scrub’.

  ‘If I grow bitterly,

  Like a gnarled and stunted tree,

  Bearing harshly of my youth

  Puckered fruit that sears the mouth . . .

  . . . It is that a wind too strong

  Bent my back when I was young,

  It is that I fear the rain

  Lest it blister me again.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Róża whispered in astonishment. ‘Beautiful and twisted and exactly like us! Did you think it up today? When did you ever get a chance? You are better than I thought you would be.’

  ‘It’s just more Millay,’ I confessed. ‘My poems aren’t that good.’

  The rain on the thin barrack roof sounded exactly like the rain on the roof of the sleeping porch. I ached with such desperate longing for Pennsylvania that I couldn’t tell where the homesickness ended and the dull throb of the bloody slashes on my back began.

  I will never be as good a writer as Edna St Vincent Millay, I thought miserably. My poems will never be that good, because I will die here before I get the chance to write anything worth reading.

  April 24, 1945

  Paris

  Air Raid at Ravensbrück

  (by Rose Justice)

  ‘Runter!’ they screamed. ‘Get down!’ As if we’d all

  leap up like mongrel dogs with our teeth bared.

  But being obedient curs, down we all went,

  not knowing why yet, flat on our faces, prone,

  wet cinders in our mouths. The lights in the street

  went out. The guards took cover, their well-bred

 
Alsatians with them. Open siren throats

  shrilled an empty threat to swallow us whole.

  We lay like forty thousand corpses in rows ten deep

  by ourselves, and one thought hit us all hard in the head:

  Run NOW. In the dark – get up and run now. Dare

  the charged barbed wire NOW. No one sees or cares.

  But when our brothers-in-arms in the bombers swarmed

  over the blackened street, the howling night

  leaped up in fury wielding searchlight whips

  to flay the planes and skin the moon; the beams

  broke harsh across our backs and froze us where

  we lay revealed – wild does, not fanged or clawed

  but weaponless rabbits and deer, blinking and blind.

  No one ran or tried to run, lashed down

  by the bright perimeter straps of light, bonds lighter

  than moonlit air, heavier than iron chains.

  My first air raid was during a roll call. It was about a week after I got to Block 32, the day before I was deemed well enough to be booted out of the knitting brigade. As the sirens went off, they made us lie on our faces. We were like a great big living, breathing target with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. They turned out the spotlights, but they had searchlights in the anti-aircraft ditches, sweeping the sky for the planes.

  When I heard the planes, I rolled over on my back – no one cared. I lay with my dress bunched up under my backside and my hands beneath my thighs, cushioning my legs a little because they were still sore, with the back of my bare skull and most of my legs cradled by the cold, damp grit of the ground. I counted thirty-one US Air Force Flying Fortresses in the first echelon blacking out the silver moonlit sky, with an escort of fighter planes too far away and tiny to identify in the dark. Barely a mile away from me, 6,000 feet above my head, were American boys not much older than me, carrying Pennsylvania Hershey bars in their emergency rations, one hand on the control column and one hand on the throttle. They were looking down at the same scene I’d looked down at a month ago. Beneath the searchlights they’d see the dim outlines of a factory complex and the black rows of barrack roofs, the long black threads of the railway junctions, and the cool lakes shining silver in the light of the glorious full moon.

  They’d be too high and it was too dark for them to see any of the 40,000 women lying face down on the damp gravel, trapped in our wire and concrete cage.

  A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.

  Five rows away from me, someone stood up suddenly. From where I lay she was silhouetted against the sky in the moonlight, six feet tall and skeletal, with a shock of spiky, short white hair like an old man with a crew cut. She didn’t say anything, just stood with her head thrown back, staring up at the passing planes. The moon lit her bristling hair like frost.

  The woman next to her pulled at her skirt, trying to get her to lie down. She completely ignored this, and after a minute she raised one arm to the sky with her fist clenched – not raging, but saluting the airmen above her. Then suddenly she started to shake with sobs. I couldn’t hear her – the noise of the next wave of planes overhead and the sirens on the ground drowned out everything else – but I could see her shoulders heaving, and after a moment she stuffed her clenched fist against her mouth to shut herself up.

  The other woman was still pulling at her skirt fearfully, and the tall one snapped at her angrily and reached towards the sky again. This time her hand was open, grasping – as if she were trying to snatch the planes out of the sky like King Kong, or trying to catch hold of them to pull her away with them.

  I burst out unthinkingly, ‘Don’t cry!’

  She turned to look for me. She didn’t lower her arm.

  ‘Ne pleure pas!’ I repeated in French, because it was the only other language I had a chance in.

  She answered me in French that was worse than mine, heavily accented and without any real grammatical connections.

  ‘It hurts me that I do not know the planes. These are new since I became a prisoner. The big ones are maybe American? I do not know. They could be my own, I would not know. It always makes me cry.’

  ‘They’re American,’ I agreed.

  She lowered her arm.

  ‘You know this?’

  ‘I’m a pilot.’

  She burst out in joyful laughter and swore incomprehensibly in her own language. Then she took five long strides over the huddled bodies between us and came to lie down next to me – on her back beside me, squeezed in between me and Lisette, so that the two of us were lying side by side looking up at the sky like stargazers on a beach.

  ‘American planes,’ she said. ‘What kind of planes?’

  ‘The big ones –’ I didn’t know the French for ‘bomber’ either, so I just said it in English. ‘The big ones, the bombers, are B-17s, Flying Fortresses.’

  ‘Four engines,’ she added. You could see them.

  ‘Wright Cyclone engines,’ I told her. ‘Crew of ten. The little planes, what-do-you-call-them, I don’t know the French for fighters, I think Mustangs.’

  She hugged me passionately and I gave a surprised yell of agony as my hands got knocked out from beneath my thighs and my backside hit the rough ground.

  ‘Oh! What?’

  ‘Fünfundzwanzig,’ I gasped. ‘Last week.’

  ‘Sorry!’

  She inched away respectfully. She knew it was pointless to try to help (she did know how it felt). She said, ‘I am Irina Korsakova.’

  Róża, flat on her face beside me, hissed, ‘Don’t talk to her – Russian scum!’

  The timing was bad for Róża and Irina. Usually the Poles and the Russians in Block 32 got along pretty well – they were united in their disdain of the French, who were shy about undressing and rouged their faces with carefully saved slivers of beetroot. Block 32 was split down the middle with the French all on one side and the Russians and Poles on the other. But when Irina first threw herself into our row, the Warsaw Uprising had just come to a disastrous conclusion and all summer the Soviets had done a lousy job of giving the Poles any useful support. When the Germans finally beat the rebellion down, they practically destroyed the city – Block 32 knew perfectly well what was happening because imprisoned Polish women and children from Warsaw had been pouring into Ravensbrück for the past two weeks. So when I met Róża, she was holding a grudge against the whole of the USSR. Also, she was just by nature a jealous little thing.

  On the other side of me Irina asked in a bored voice, ‘What did the fucking Rabbit say about me?’

  ‘She told me not to talk to you.’

  They had a brief argument in Russian (I think), spitting and hissing like a pair of cats.

  ‘Fucking Poles,’ Irina said to me in French.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say? What did she say?’

  ‘Fucking Russians,’ Róża half-translated. (Róża taught me to swear like a sailor in about half a dozen European languages. The Polish students from Lublin spoke everything. It made me feel so stupid sometimes, this uneducated American who could only speak English and barely scrape by in French.)

  ‘Go ahead and talk to her,’ Róża sneered permission. ‘Witch. That’s what the Germans call those Soviet girl pilots – Nacht Hexen. Night witches. Go ahead and listen to her propaganda.’

  I couldn’t imagine what kind of propaganda I was going to get from a girl who’d been in prison so long it had turned her hair white. In all the time I knew Irina, I never heard her say the words ‘communist’ or ‘party’ without turning away from me and spitting. But most of the Russian women at Ravensbrück were Red Army soldiers. Irina was a little different.

  Her lanky height and hollowed face and white crew cut gave her the look of a grim, battle-worn king – Macbeth, maybe – someone competent and ruthless and experienced.

  ‘I’m not a Night Witch,’ Irina murmured low in my ear. ‘I never flew those tired old sewing machines except when I was training students. I am in Sovie
t Air Force 296 Regiment, based at Stalingrad. Men and a few women, flying Yaks, chasing together.’

  ‘Chasing together?’ I pictured a school dance, everyone running around after other people’s partners. ‘Chasing what?’

  ‘Chasing the Fascists.’ She always said ‘the Fascists’ when she was talking about the Germans. ‘Chasing Fascist aircraft.’

  The French word doesn’t mean chasing – it means hunting. Irina was a hunter pilot. In English we say fighter, not hunter.

  She was a combat pilot.

  I was so thrilled it took my breath away. It was like meeting Amelia Earhart. Irina was a woman, and a fighter pilot.

  ‘What’s your score?’ I asked breathlessly.

  She hesitated, trying to think of the right word. ‘Eleven?’

  ‘Eleven?’

  That couldn’t be right. Shooting down five enemy aircraft makes you an official Ace. She’d said eleven – a double Ace.

  She held her hands up so they were silhouetted black against the bright moonlit sky – ten fingers. Then one more, shaken for emphasis. ‘Eleven kills. Decorated Hero of the Soviet Union. Have you many kills?’ she added casually, as if we were comparing notes. She called them kills – a hunter bringing down prey.

  ‘No, I’m a transport pilot.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I was –’ I didn’t know the French for intercepted. ‘I was caught – caught in the air by Luftwaffe jets. Jets? Fast planes. I had no guns.’

  ‘When my guns were empty, I made a taran. Straight into a Fascist bomber, a fast dive from above. They did not know what hit them. Lost my –’ She didn’t know the French for propeller – she sketched a tight, fast spinning circle in the air above our faces. ‘Forced to land in Poland, and Fascist soldiers picked me up with a face full of glass and half my ribs broken.’

  ‘You made a taran!’

  She must have thought I didn’t know what she meant. She smacked the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. ‘In the air. Like this –’