Rose Under Fire

‘Little Różyczka will fit,’ Irina said.



‘And then?’



Irina shrugged. ‘She can take the hinges off the door.’



‘Break it down,’ I improved.



It was just as likely. Róża’s starved hands would never be strong enough to unscrew the steel door that shut us in, even if she had the right tools.



‘Give her a hammer and she will break the lock –’



‘– She’ll find a blowtorch!’



We laughed together mirthlessly and turned away from the window to look at our pet Rabbit.



This is what Róża was doing: she’d found an open bucket of black paint, and she was covering the walls with graffiti, just like me and my doomed French work team had done last November. Róża hadn’t wasted any time. In letters six inches high she was writing out the list of Rabbits’ names, as far up as she could reach, all seventy-four of them, dead and alive. She was covering the walls with names in black paint beneath a thick black heading in German which said something complicated and accusing like, ‘Polish women used illegally as medical specimens in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp at Fürstenberg’ – a great big shout of defiant witness which they’d have to scrape off the walls with a razor blade if they wanted to hide it – or paint over it, of course.



We wasted a few minutes helping her complete the list.



‘Różyczka, we want you to climb out the transom window.’



‘Oh yes, I’ll run to Berlin and get a job as a showgirl,’ she said. We’d finished the list, but she’d started again, slapping paint on the shelves and counters, which would be a darn sight harder for anyone to scrape clean than the walls.



‘Be sensible. We want you to find a way to get us out. Find some wire-cutters, a screwdriver, a crowbar – hand us in some tools and maybe we can break out of here.’



‘I’ll get eaten by dogs!’



‘If we see them coming, we’ll throw paint pots at them. Come on, Rabbit, earn your keep! Get up there and get out of here.’



We hoisted her up to the transom. She stood on Irina’s shoulders and clung to the window frame, and then somehow the three of us managed to push her feet first through the narrow opening. She giggled maniacally, leaning over the transom back into the room, looking down at us from above.



‘Oh hell, it’s cold out here, this is SO UNFAIR –’ Róża wriggled her way out and lowered herself down. We watched her collapse in a heap of bones and threadbare wool on the concrete wasteland just outside the window. At least the snow wasn’t sticking, except on the plane.



Róża pulled herself to her feet and banged on the glass.



‘Keep painting!’



Then she scuttled off in her lopsided, lurching bunny-hop, supporting herself against the side of the building.



There wasn’t anything else useful for us to do while we waited, so we obeyed Róża’s last order. We covered the windows with names. And the steel door. And the floor. We’d begun on the ceiling when the bolts in the lock on the door started to click.



I froze. Irina leaped down from the counter and positioned herself beside the door, armed with a paintbrush.



But it was only Róża coming back. Irina let out a soft whistle.



‘They left the key in the door!’ Róża said. ‘To make it easy for whoever they send for us. We’re dead anyway. We’ll never get through the fence – it’s all patrolled and they’ve shut the gate. The only thing we can do is hide, and that’ll just make them madder when they find us. Actually, it’ll make them use the dogs to find us.’ Suddenly she sounded defeated. ‘I’m not going to hide.’



‘Neither are we,’ I said. ‘Come on.’



‘Dogs!’ Róża protested.



‘Just come on.’



We locked the door behind us, to confuse things and maybe buy us a minute or two of extra time. The Stork wasn’t guarded. There wasn’t any reason for it to be guarded. It never occurred to anyone we might try to steal a plane. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone on that airfield, in a million years, that two of us were pilots. Probably, when I got out of that Stork six months ago, it didn’t occur to anyone on that airfield that I was a pilot.



In the back of my mind I began thinking about Karl Womelsdorff – I wondered if he were still alive, or shot down by enemy aircraft – our aircraft. Or if, like me, he’d been taken prisoner.



‘No no no no no no, I won’t –’



Róża fought like a little kid as we scuttled across the apron in the gloom, dragging her with us and trying to stay low. She tried to scratch and bite and we had to hold her arms behind her back.



‘I won’t I won’t I won’t –’



‘Darn it, Róża, keep it down!’ I growled.



‘I won’t get in that thing!’



‘Then we will leave you for the dogs and the gas chambers!’ Irina said brutally. ‘I will drop you right here if you don’t stop fighting!’



Róża stopped fighting, but she began to weep.



‘What the hell is wrong with her?’ Irina demanded, because Róża never cried. We were both gasping with the effort of manhandling her. The ground was slippery with hidden patches of ice, and the snow flurries were beginning to stick. The longer we were there in the open, the more likely we’d be noticed. Although I don’t think it looked like we were protecting Róża – more like we were hauling her away to be punished somewhere. Maybe I did look like an SS secretary – a skinny, miserable, worn-out drudge, somebody who’d had to drop everything and run out after this little creep who’d stolen a pen or something, and I’d left my office so fast I hadn’t even bothered to put on a coat.



‘I think she’s afraid of flying,’ I said.



Actually, I was sure she was afraid of flying, because that is exactly how Polly acted last year before I left for England, when I tried to bully her into flying with me. But Róża wasn’t going to get a choice.



We dragged her beneath the Stork’s wings. We crouched by the fuselage, hiding between the ridiculous long front wheels, lying on the ground just the way we’d lain beneath the military trucks earlier. Irina gave Róża a quick, harsh lecture in Russian, I think, which I know that Róża understood. Róża spat venom back at her in Russian the way she’d done on the night last October when Irina invaded our row for the first time.



‘Enough of this.’



Irina stood up close to the plane, under the high wing. She tried the door. Róża and I heard the latch click.



‘Get up,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to get in first, in the front. You get in the back after me and wait for Irina. When she jumps in, get out of her way as fast as you can. You’ll have to sit on her lap.’



‘Why can’t you sit in the back?’ Róża wailed. ‘I want you to sit with me!’



‘Irina’s stronger than me. She has to start the plane. She’s got to swing the propeller.’



‘Start the plane! Who’s going to fly it?’



‘Well, I am, Różyczka,’ I said apologetically. And then, in self-defence, ‘I’ve flown this plane before.’



Irina climbed up to the wings to sweep off the snow and check the fuel tanks.



‘Hard to see,’ she called down. Then a second later, as she dipped her finger in, she exclaimed in astonishment, ‘Full! But why –’



‘It’s got an auxiliary fuel tank too, did you see that? That’s new.’



Irina checked. It was also full.



‘The pilot of this plane maybe knows something we do not,’ she suggested drily.



She was right, of course; the Allies crossed the Rhine the next day. I don’t know if the Neubrandenburg Stork was all set that night for an escape mission or a rescue mission or a spy mission, but it sure was loaded up and ready for someone to fly it. We were so lucky. Without the auxiliary tank, without full fuel, we’d have never made it over the front.



‘How will you go? Due west?’



‘Gosh, no, we’ll end up in Holland. It’s still under German control! South-west,’ I said firmly. The headings of that flight across Germany are imprinted on my brain forever. ‘Towards Paris.’



Irina gave a wild laugh at last. ‘To Paris!’ She jumped to the ground. ‘Are you tied in? If I start it, and you cannot hold the brakes, leave me.’



‘I’ll hold the brakes,’ I said. ‘There are straps on the pedals for your feet.’



It was so gloomy now, and the snow so fitful, that I couldn’t see Irina standing in front of the plane. I could hear her, though – the grunt of effort as she hung her not-very-substantial weight on the edge of the propeller, and the dull thunk as the engine turned over without firing.



I have always really hated swinging the prop, or waiting for someone else to do it. Daddy never let me do it myself until I was eighteen anyway – he finally showed me how just before I left for England, in case I had to do it when I got there. I don’t know how Irina did it – or how I held the brakes so she didn’t get chopped in half when the engine finally fired. It helped to have my feet strapped to the pedals so they had no chance of slipping.



Irina came bounding in and slammed the door.



‘Go, go!’



Where would we go? The Lido. To the beach on the beautiful Adriatic Sea.



It didn’t matter. I was going to get Róża out of here after all, anywhere. For Karolina and Lisette. For all of them. A living witness, living evidence. I opened the throttle and cranked down the awnings. Irina and I pulled back the control columns in front and back together – neither one of us would have been strong enough to get that tail up on our own. But the Stork leaped into the sky, straight off the apron. There was a faintly lit compass in the control panel, and I made a long, steady turn towards the south.



‘How is Róża?’ I asked. I could still hear her sobbing.



‘No help,’ Irina grunted. ‘Stay low. We will be harder to see from above.’



The dusting of snow highlighted the fields around the German airfield in the darkness.



‘Good,’ Irina yelled from the back. ‘Good visibility! The snow will help if it is not too heavy. Light clouds, high moon. Full too, or almost full!’ She was right – it was easier to see than I’d expected.



‘No chasers,’ she added briefly. Then the plane lurched as she leaned over my seat again to see out the front, and hauled the sobbing Róża up beside her. ‘Look – there! Look!’



Ravensbrück at 800 feet was like a beacon, a glaring, self-contained bonfire of harsh white light in the blacked-out landscape – the lights of the Lagerstrasse, the column of red sparks from the crematorium chimney, the blue-white beams of the anti-aircraft searchlights.



‘That’s it?’ Róża said. ‘That’s us? That’s what the American bombers see!’



She clambered forward, hanging perilously over my shoulder and staring.