Rose Under Fire

At midday, in the snow flurries, we heard the gunshots over the walls – they always took people outside the camp to shoot them. Three. There were supposed to be ten. Our seven didn’t get shot.



They let us go, I think, because they’d grown sick of guarding us. We staggered in a wild rush for the faucets in the washroom and handed out water to each other in bowls and buckets and tin cups, all of us crazed with thirst. Lisette stripped off her messed-up pants and ran water through them and put them back on wet. We piled into the bunks, hundreds of us climbing over one another in the dark, and collapsed in gasping, clinging bundles of misery. The snow turned into rain again, pattering on the wooden roof. It sounded just like the rain on the sleeping porch.



‘Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,’ Róża chanted in my ear, under her breath. ‘We won, we won, we won. Don’t cry.’



‘We won?’ I echoed, stupefied.



‘We won. Not like last time, when they shut us all in the block for three days in August with the windows closed and we nearly suffocated and then they threw us into the Bunker and operated on us there instead of in the Revier. Oh – Lisette – which was worse, standing in the snow till you turned into a block of ice, or being slowly roasted alive? Remember that day we had one cup of water between the five of us till it got dark and you made us share it out by dipping our fingers in it?’



‘Holy Mary, you stupid Rabbit, shut up and go to sleep,’ Irina yawned. ‘They will get us up again in three hours.’



‘We won,’ Róża rasped in my ear, and it was the last thing I heard, and then I was unconscious.



‘No coffee this morning.’



Róża collapsed in mirth. ‘No coffee! That’s one hell of a punishment. Wow, what did we get yesterday? I don’t remember any coffee. What did we get the day before, was that coffee?’



Our daily dose of ‘coffee’ at 6 a.m. was brown and lukewarm and tasted of nothing. It was the idea of coffee though, brown and lukewarm. We’d stood in the snow for over twenty-four hours, we’d slept for three hours, we’d stood in the drizzling, freezing dark for another two hours, and then we had no coffee. And then they sent us all back to work, even though that morning’s roll call hadn’t come out right either.



The real miracle is that we didn’t all kill one another that morning and save them the trouble of their executions.



The whole week that Karolina and the six other condemned Rabbits were hiding, Irina and I had to go back each day to our weird work crew of tall girls, doing jobs that shorter people couldn’t do as easily as we could – dismantling shelves, boarding up broken windows, carrying stacks of boxes – clearing top bunks of people who’d died in the night, especially in the Revier, where people were too sick to do it themselves.



Anna, the Kolonka with the green badge and green eyes, was contemptuously familiar with the Revier because she’d worked in it before. She took over the back washroom to use as a temporary morgue because the real one was always too full. She’d stand guard at the door by the sinks to make sure we had the place to ourselves, and get a conversation going with me in English so she could pretend not to see if some of us sneaked a dead woman’s wooden comb or a pair of socks down our blouses. I never took anybody’s clothes. I couldn’t bear the thought of wearing some dead girl’s socks fresh off her dead feet. I had other things to think about anyway: Elodie had managed to smuggle me five tiny cigarettes via Micheline, something that looked like tobacco rolled in thin airmail paper, and I was waiting for my moment to try to bargain with Anna for the calcium.



The only thing Anna ever wanted to talk about with me was American food. Popcorn and root beer and hot dogs with mustard and relish and sauerkraut (she’d been to a ball game once). Gosh knows what I will eat when I get home – anything I talked about in the shower room with Anna will taste like sawdust and fill me with nausea.



‘Do you have pork barbecue in Pennsylvania?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘When I was in Chicago there was a diner we used to go to after the lab shut, and they had these fluffy white bread rolls that they baked themselves, and they’d pile the meat in with an ice-cream scoop –’



She broke off with a sob and suddenly we were both crying over pork barbecue. Abruptly we turned our backs on each other at exactly the same moment. I stopped crying first. I spun around and said, ‘Calcium. I’ll write you out a pork barbecue recipe if you can get me calcium tablets.’



‘Calcium!’



‘Isn’t that good for bones? My friend had her bones broken here.’



‘Oh.’



The German Kolonka went tight-lipped. She thought about it for a moment.



‘Not tablets. She’ll need injections – calcium gluconate. You’re friends with the Rabbits, huh?’



Anna had a guilty secret – before she’d been sent to Ravensbrück as a prisoner, she’d worked at Ravensbrück as an employee.



After a lot of wheeling and dealing, I got the dirty story and the calcium out of her in exchange for the cigarettes, the promise of two more bread rations and Mother’s Fasnacht recipe. I tempted her into that one by mentioning how Mother and I had spent two days making deep-fried doughnuts for the church sale for Fasnacht Day, the last day before Lent. Anna let me sit on one of the filthy sinks in the converted washroom-turned-mortuary for a couple of minutes before I started to take the clothes off that day’s corpses so the rest of my crew could cart them off to the incinerator. For a few seconds she watched me writing my recipe against the tiled wall with a stolen pencil stub, and then she just suddenly began talking.



‘You might as well know because if your Rabbits ever find out who I am, they’ll never trust you again,’ she said, leaning against the other sink and smoking furiously. ‘I’m a pharmacist. I got a job here in 1941, requisitioning drugs and bandages – antiseptic, aspirin, glucose, things for the sickbay. Just stocktaking really, because I’m not a nurse. I was here in 1942 when they did the first operations on the Polish girls. I saw what they did. I wasn’t involved at first, I just tiptoed around behind the scenes making sure there was fresh plaster for the casts, and that the knives were sharp. It was my job.’



My hand faltered in the middle of a sentence that began, ‘The day before you’re going to cook, wash and peel a bushel of potatoes, then –’



I couldn’t write the word ‘cut’. I think I left it out. Actually, the writing had now become an excuse so I didn’t have to look at her.



‘So I did my job,’ she went on. ‘At first I didn’t have to go near the – um, the patients – I got my backside pinched by the doctors now and then, because I was a pretty German patriot and not a Polish Special Transport Ravensbrück scarecrow condemned to death and good for nothing but scientific experimentation, but I didn’t enjoy knowing what was going on, you know? I didn’t feel proud to be advancing medical research and I didn’t believe we were anyway. They were sloppy about monitoring the experiments and sometimes they never followed up on them. And I didn’t like my work enough to want to do it well myself.’ She let out a gasp of smoke. ‘You wouldn’t believe the shitty jobs I’ve had to do in the last three years. This –’ She waved her cigarette at the bony corpses stacked against the wall in the unused shower stalls. ‘This is harmless. Stripping dead bodies – not much fun, but harmless. Sharpening knives that you know are going to be used to carve up some kid’s tibia and fibula so they can swap pieces of them around – that’s hard to justify.’



She asked suddenly, ‘Are you listening?’



The scrap of paper slid out from beneath my pencil stub and fluttered into the sink. ‘Of course I’m listening.’



‘They’d give the girls ether before they operated on them, and inject them with Evipan to knock them out. One day the usual nurse assistant wasn’t there for some reason and they got me to step in for her. Those poor kids knew by then what was going to happen to them, but they really were like rabbits – just so glad to get a bath and clean sheets to sleep in, so it must be OK, right? Afterwards, after they woke up and the anaesthetic wore off and the fever and infection set in and they couldn’t even see what had happened because they were up to their hips in plaster, they’d lie there screaming or sobbing or begging for lemonade – lemonade!’ She gave a hoarse bark of laughter. ‘I stole morphine for them. I’d go around injecting them when no one was looking. They called me the Angel of Sleep. I didn’t try to talk to them – they all hated me like poison because they knew I’d helped put some of them under for the operations. But they took the morphine when I could get it.’



Anna took another drag on her cigarette. It was nearly done. We could only risk another minute or two – maybe less, if someone brought another body in.



‘So, well, then I got transferred to an office job for the Occupation army in France for a while, because they needed a pharmacist and a driver and a translator and they got all three for the price of one by hiring me. I thought that job would be better, but it turned out worse, so then I got transferred back to Berlin, and my new boss got mad at me because I wouldn’t fuck him. So he gave me a choice – take my pants off for him or go back to Ravensbrück, as a prisoner this time. He thought he had a sure winner with that one, seeing as I’d been to Ravensbrück and knew what I was getting into, but actually I was fed up with playing their game by then. I’d seen a lot of . . . things I didn’t like. And I didn’t want to spread my legs for him at all, ever, and I knew that I’d be a Kolonka or a Blockova here – and also, when I’d been here before, it was run like a soldiers’ camp, much cleaner and more orderly – we used to show it off to the Red Cross, none of these schmootzichs grabbing at your bread, no shithole tent full of evacuees from other camps, only two to a bunk and enough blankets and toilets that worked. So, yeah, that was my choice.’



There wasn’t a thing left of her cigarette but a damp shred of stolen onion-skin typing paper, which she spat into the sink.



‘The bastard raped me anyway before he arrested me. The fucking bastard. He had to get help from a bunch of his pals, because I fought back. I got convicted of assaulting my boss.’ She pointed to her green triangle. ‘German criminal, right? So I’m back in the Revier at Ravensbrück, where I started. OK, I’ll get you some calcium injections. But don’t you ever tell anybody who you get them from. Much better they don’t know I’m a fellow prisoner now.’



I nodded. I held up the crumpled scrap of paper with the half-finished Fasnacht recipe.



‘I’m not done.’



‘Do it next time.’



We hid the recipe in the quarter-inch gap between the wall and the sink.



Karolina and the other condemned Rabbits were still hiding, and Gitte bargained for them with the camp authorities. ‘Take these seven off the list and the whole Lublin Special Transport will cooperate with you – they’ll line up for you in perfect order – they’ll testify that they’ve been treated well – they’ll sign their names as testimony.’