Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth E. Wein

‘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 Róża – 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 Róża 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. Róża 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 Róża 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.

  Róża 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 Róża 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. Róża 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,’ Róża 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.

  Róża and I recognised her at exactly the same time, for different reasons.

  ‘There’s Engel,’ Róża 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. Róża 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 Róża 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,’ Róża 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 Róża 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. Róża, 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 Róża herself.

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

  Róża 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. Róża 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 l
oss 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, Różyczka!’

  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 Róża! 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?’

  Róża, 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.’ Róża 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.’

  It was almost exactly what had happened to me, when I’d tried to read my poems aloud to an audience. I knew exactly how she felt.

  Róża sniffed, wiping her eyes on her sleeves.

  ‘I know I’ll do the same thing tomorrow. It’ll be worse tomorrow. Vladyslava and Maria were operated on in the Bunker just like I was, but they can talk about it and I can’t. They’ll answer the questions so calmly and precisely and I’ll just burst into tears or start screaming at Fischer again –’

  ‘Well, that could be impressive, too, you know.’

  ‘I’m not going to do it, Rose. They’ve got four smart, educated grown-ups to show off and they don’t need my testimony and I’m not going to do it.’

  I held on to her tightly while she calmed down a little.

  ‘Will you tell Dr Alexander for me?’ she begged.

  I could see why she didn’t want to do that herself.

  The wily Ravensbrück prisoner in me rose to the surface.

  ‘I’ll tell him for you,’ I agreed. ‘But only if you sit with me and watch the trial.’

  ‘You bitch,’ she snapped automatically, and I was so relieved to hear her being nasty. But she didn’t act like she was mad at me. She hugged me tightly round the waist, snuggling all her weight against me.

  She was so much heavier than I expected. No lift balancing her life at all.

  3. Drag

  Dr Alexander took it very well, considering how early it was and that I had to interrupt him in his office right before the session started so I could catch him privately, and this was the last day before the Christmas recess. He is such a kind man.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he admitted. ‘I thought someone might back out, and I’m glad it’s Róża. She’s a volatile witness. She’s different from the others.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘She isn’t finished. She has no sense of who she is. The others knew that before the war started – but how old was Róża when she went to prison, fourteen? Sixteen when she underwent the first experiment? She grew up in Ravensbrück. In a way, she’s still there.’

  I knew exactly what he meant. There wasn’t any part of Róża that wasn’t connected to Ravensbrück, even her work, even the parts of her body that had escaped experimentation – she hadn’t started her period until she was eighteen, after the war was over.

  It is true that Ravensbrück shaped me – whatever I would have been without it interfering, I am someone else now. On the simplest level, I don’t think I would be in Scotland or in medicine. But Ravensbrück doesn’t define me. I had a lot of ‘being Rose’ to cling to when I landed there – I was a pilot, I was a poet, I was a Girl Scout, I was part of a family, I was the captain of the Mount Jericho High School County Champion Girls’ Varsity basketball team, and I still bore traces of all these things even in the concentration camp. I wore my Air Transport Auxiliary USA flash on my shoulder and identified the aircraft that flew overhead, so we could guess at how the Americans or the Soviets were advancing. I was given jobs only a tall girl could do; I taught my companions Scout songs and learned theirs; I produced more poetry in six months than I’d ever produced in my life, most of it in my head. And I was part of a family – Lisette, Irina, Karolina, Róża.

  Róża was part of my family. But her own real family had all been killed before she’d even arrived at Ravensbrück. I knew mine were safe. That made a difference, too. Róża’s Camp Family was her only family.

  When I told anyone at the camp who I was, I’d say, ‘I’m Rose Justice. I’m a pilot.’

  When Róża first told me who she was, she’d said, ‘I’m Polish Political Prisoner 7705. I’m a Rabbit.’

  When you’re flying, the changing balance of lift and weight pulls you up or down. But another pair of forces pulls you forwards or backwards through the air: thrust and drag. Thrust is the power that pulls the kite forward – you run with it to get it up in the air. You have to have thrust to create lift. Drag is there because your kite’s surfaces push against the air and slow the kite down. Drag doesn’t pull you out of the sky; it makes you fly more slowly.

  For the most part, Room 600 in the Palace of Justice, the Doctors’ Trial courtroom, looked just like you imagine any courtroom – actually, it looked spanking new, with its wood panels gleaming with varnish, and m
odern lighting installed in the ceiling. That was all done last year just before the IMT, the International Military Tribunal. The four American judges were all wearing new robes flown there specially from Washington DC. But the outstanding feature of the courtroom was that it was entirely snarled in telephone and electronic cables for the simultaneous translations, everybody caught in a huge black spider’s web. Everyone was connected by this web – defendants, witnesses, lawyers, judges, observers, reporters and, of course, the panel of translators themselves – everybody had his or her head plugged into this amazing machine. You could tell right away who’d been here before and who was here for the first time by their nonchalant or inept use of the headphones.

  Talk about drag! You were so dependent. Also, it was easy to see why people just stopped listening when Madame Vaillant-Couturier was telling them about the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It was like turning off the radio. You can’t bear to listen? Just pull the headphones off.

  Róża, who understands English and Polish and German, didn’t need headphones.

  We sat in the gallery to watch, just in front of one of the film crews. We were surrounded by an intense crowd of German medical students my age who were frantically taking notes. Róża perched ramrod straight on the edge of her seat. She gripped the sides of her chair. I don’t know what she was thinking, but she looked like a fury. Her face was set in a sneer and her eyes were burning. She didn’t watch her friends giving evidence; her gaze was locked on the defendants, the twenty-two Nazi men and one woman.

  Dr Alexander’s evidence and the questioning of the Rabbits took the entire day, and no one else dared question them. The presiding judge, Walter B Beals, would ask if the defence wanted to cross-examine a witness and there would be flat silence. One of Jadviga’s scars had been inflamed that whole week and she stood there anyway, still in pain, telling about how they tied her down in the Bunker.

  How you knew they were going to operate on you because the first thing they did was shave your legs.

  Telling how Fischer had smoked cigarettes between operations without bothering to change his gloves.