‘A selection!’ Irina guessed, and a couple of people heard her and started to cry, because now we all thought we were going to be gassed.
‘Shut up! Stand up straight!’ Róża barked at the other Rabbits in German, like an SS turkey buzzard herself. Selections weren’t usually random – they went for the older women, or the sick ones, or people who looked sick. Having a faceful of cold sores or impetigo put you at high risk of being gassed. So you stood up straight and tried to look healthy during selections. Or pinched each other’s cheeks to make them glow, like we used to do in the bathroom before a school dance, when we were too young to wear make-up.
In the back of our huddle, Irina struggled to hack a hole in the fence around the Revier behind us. The rest of us tried to hide what she was doing. The guards surrounding us weren’t the usual SS women – these were men, armed soldiers. For a moment we stood facing each other like opposing dodgeball teams.
I wonder what we looked like? Fifteen filthy, haggard, ragged, wild-eyed girls – half of us crippled – facing off against two dozen tall, strong, well-fed boys with rifles. What did it look like, as the troop leader slowly raised his gun? I wish I had a picture of us all. I wish there were a picture of it on the front page of the New York Times. No one will ever believe me.
Except – the picture wouldn’t tell you the whole story, would it? It wouldn’t show you how Irina was frantically trying to cut us an escape route in the fence behind us, or tell you that the front row of us was defensive – me and the three brave Red Army girls from Block 32 who liked to pretend they were heavies had all moved to stand in front of Róża and the other Rabbits. The man who’d raised his gun swept the barrel up and down our pathetic front line, looking for an easy gap.
Róża screamed in Polish at the top of her voice, ‘Bread! Bread! The SS are giving out bread!’
A mob swarmed over us, first right off the street, and then a horde of starving women came piling towards us from the tent.
‘BREAD! BREAD HERE!’ we all screamed, because nobody cared if there was any or not – just the idea of bread was enough to cause glorious chaos. Irina and I and the Russian girls pushed Róża and everybody on their stomachs through a plate-sized hole between the fence and the ground, and they hid in the Revier. The rest of us were safe in the crowd.
Safe. What a completely loony use of the word ‘safe’. Exactly the way I have been using ‘hope’.
We prised up the filthy red clay tiles in the Block 32 washroom and dug a pit under the floor of the barrack, stinking of sewage and cold as the Arctic, and lined the hole with straw and a couple of the last rotting cotton blankets, and we hid Róża and five of the worst-damaged girls there for a week.
The SS didn’t kill any Rabbits. It didn’t stop them gassing 200 other prisoners every day. You always think you’re immortal, don’t you? I mean, it hasn’t happened yet. I am still alive.
When they read off my number over the loudspeakers I didn’t even hear it. I was so busy listening out for Róża’s number, or Karolina’s, it never occurred to me to listen for mine. But of course I was still wearing it, and I was still being counted every morning and night as Available Prisoner 51498. They called out lists of doomed prisoner numbers all the time. Not everyone could hide. One of the French girls in our block had escaped a selection only because her mother had swapped numbers with her and been gassed in her place.
It was still dark and no one had had breakfast yet. Karolina grabbed me round the waist.
‘Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig,’ she hissed in my ear. 51498.
Then I heard her, but I still didn’t take it in for a moment or two. And then my heart turned into a block of ice.
‘What? Why?’
You face it with a total lack of comprehension, even though less than two weeks ago, when we got caught in front of the Revier fence, I’d thought they were going to shoot me.
‘It is your transport,’ Lisette gasped. ‘The French girls you came with. All of them.’
I stood frozen and staring, completely unable to believe it or react. A deer in headlights.
Irina peeled away Karolina’s arm and took me by the wrist. She stepped out of line with me, and led me quietly out of our row and through the gate towards the Lagerstrasse. No one else from our block had been called, so there wasn’t anyone to go with me to the trucks, and they let Irina lead me out.
I went with her meekly.
We walked hand in hand past the tent. But instead of heading towards the gates where they parked the terrible open trucks, Irina guided me to double back around the far side of the tent. When we got close to the fence around Block 32 she put a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me to the ground, and got down beside me, and we crawled back into the parade ground around our block through the hole in the fence. People saw us, but no guards did. No one said anything as Irina and I climbed in the back window of our barrack, the one we’d used as an escape route when we first hid the Rabbits.
Inside the barrack, Irina made me take off my damp coat and sit on the floor close to the cranky little stove that was supposed to heat the whole place. There wasn’t a fire in it now, but it was still warm to touch because the Demon Nadine slept next to it and sometimes managed to stoke it up with scraps of coal or wood before she went to sleep. Irina got me a drink of water. Neither of us said anything; she just stood there waiting patiently while I drank the water, and then finally she reached down to help me back to my feet.
‘Come, Rosie,’ she insisted. ‘Hide with Różyczka.’
I shook my head, because I didn’t see the point – I wasn’t a Rabbit.
But I was too numb to rebel or take control of myself. So I let Irina lead me into the washroom, to the place under the sinks where the boards and filthy matting covered up our six hidden Rabbits in the pit under the floor. Irina pulled up a board and made me crawl in with them.
Invisible hands pulled me down beside the others. Irina laid the false floor back in place above us, and the six girls already hiding there found an impossible space for me alongside them – like playing sardines. For the first ten minutes I couldn’t do anything but retch. I thought I’d suffocate.
‘Worse than being gassed,’ came Róża’s infuriatingly cheerful whisper. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
When I figured out how to breathe I started to cry.
Someone hissed angrily, ‘Shut up, you idiot!’ because I was making too much noise. And wasting air.
‘What are you doing here, 51498?’ Róża whispered in my ear.
‘They are gassing my whole transport,’ I sobbed.
‘Bad luck. There isn’t anything special about your transport!’
I wanted to kill her.
‘Micheline is special. Elodie is special,’ I hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Kiss your wool hose goodbye, you miserable Rabbit.’
We curled against each other in the dank, stinking underground in silence after that, trying to breathe and not kick anybody and waiting to be found and shot. I knew I had to stop crying and the only way to do it was to recite poetry to myself, moving my lips without speaking, clinging to words, to sense and beauty –
‘Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.’
Róża knew what I was doing, even in the silent dark. I felt her familiar thin arms wind round my waist and hold me tight.
I don’t know how she held out there for a week – I don’t know how any of them did. I think I was there for two days. You could hear the Screamer, muffled, telling us when the roll calls and meals and work details came. That was the only way to count the time passing. We ate stolen bread – no soup – and nothing hot, ever – we had to eat lying down.
‘Tell us something warm and sunny. Tell us a Lake Story,’ Róża whispered.
‘We are all wearing red bathing suits. But all different, with flowers on yours and stripes on mine. Big white polka dots on Karolina’s, like Min
nie Mouse, and Irina’s is silver with red stars, like a Soviet aircraft. You are all staying in our summer cottage with me, and we are going to lie on the beach in the sun and drink Coca-Colas, in frosty green bottles right out of the ice box – one by one, boys will come and ask us to go for a canoe ride with them. And when we are each in a different canoe with a different boy, we will line up at the rental dock and have a race across the lake.’
‘Lisette too.’
‘Gosh, yes, Lisette too. There is a very handsome famous actor from the Summer Rep Theatre at the Chautauqua Playhouse who’s come to the lake for the afternoon and he spots Lisette right away. So we race the canoes and your team will win. And we’ll all be annoyed so we’ll gang up on you and tip your canoe. Then everybody will tip each other’s canoes and we’ll all fall in the water, and it’ll feel wonderful because we’ll be hot and sweaty from racing, and while we’re splashing around, there will be belted kingfishers scooting overhead and scolding each other –’
The only thing that makes this a fairy story is the idea that we could ever all be there together.
The Nick Stories were all these ridiculous rescue dramas, Hollywood hero antics that could never happen in a million years. But the Lake Stories – I didn’t even bother to pretend the staff at the refreshment stand would bring us our drinks in a Lake Story. We’d help ourselves and pay, just the way anyone would. Even the boys asking us for a canoe race really happened last summer – I mean the summer before last, 1943, on that wonderful weekend before Labor Day when I’d nearly finished at the boring old paper box factory and I spent the day at the lake with Polly and Fran.
And that is what makes it so unfair. It is such a simple fairy story.
Lisette dragged me and Róża out of the pit during breakfast on the third morning and helped us change into clothes I knew had been organised by Elodie – plain, respectable stuff – navy skirt and stockings, and incredibly good coats, with wool cuffs and collars and lining still attached, though the elbows were threadbare. Numbers stolen from dead women were attached to the right sleeves, and there was no evidence of yellow star patches on the fronts. Warsaw coats, not Auschwitz coats. Lisette’s hands were cold and her face was drained and grim. I knew something terrible had happened, something that had changed her world.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Irina came back to that roll call wearing your coat,’ Lisette said. ‘And Karolina fought her for it.’
‘They fought over my coat ?’ I repeated dumbly, astonished. They wouldn’t do that, either one of them.
Róża understood instantly. ‘They didn’t fight over your coat, you turnip head,’ she said coldly. ‘They fought over your number.’
Lisette looked away from me, her cold hands still helping me into the warmest clothes I’d worn for months and months.
‘Did Irina win?’ I whispered.
‘Karolina won.’
I feel like it is the worst thing I have ever done – lie weeping in a hole in the ground while Karolina –
I can’t write it.
Karolina on the beach at the Lake in a red bathing suit, sunbathing under a blue sky.
‘Now pay attention, my dear,’ Lisette said, holding me fiercely by the shoulders. ‘You are going with Róża.’ I know that’s why Karolina did it – for Róża, not for me. Everyone Róża’s age was already gone, but she was so crippled she couldn’t go by herself. Karolina and Lisette were counting on me to get her out, to get her scrawny mutilated legs out where someone might see them – because Róża was a better piece of evidence than Karolina, who could walk to her death without limping.
‘You have one task only this morning and that is to keep anyone from noticing Róża’s legs. Hide her, hold her up – if she falls over, make it look like you have knocked her down. Irina is going to be on the same transport, so look for her and she will help you. There can be one of you on each side of Róża when you get to the other end, but you will be on your own until you find Irina.’
‘Where’s Irina?’ we asked together.
‘She’s in the Punishment Block –’
‘Because –?’ Róża interrupted, and then guessed, ‘For fighting with another prisoner during roll call, right? For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat?’
Lisette pressed her thin lips together, and I caught the crazed wet gleam in her eyes that had been there when I’d first met her, right after Zosia and Genca had been shot. Not for the first time, I wanted to punch Róża in the teeth.
‘For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat,’ Lisette agreed. ‘They are shipping out the whole Punishment Block this morning; I don’t know why, but you are going with them.’
‘In these clothes?’
‘There will be some Warsaw evacuees as well; they’re still wearing civilian clothes. You know where the transport trucks line up? You’ll have to wait till they bring Irina’s block out and then get into line with them. Oh, darling Różyczka –’
‘Rose will take care of me,’ Róża said with composure. Because I couldn’t say it myself. I wasn’t sure.
‘What if they take you straight to –’
‘What if they take us straight to Monte Carlo? We’ll be rich!’ Róża laughed hilariously.
Lisette kissed Róża on both cheeks. She gave me six slices of bread, wealth beyond imagining – two slices each, two days’ worth, to last us who knew how long. And who knew where she got it. Then she kissed me too.
‘Get her out,’ Lisette said. She didn’t say goodbye to us. But of course she hadn’t said goodbye to any of her other children. And this time she had a slender hope we weren’t going to be killed.
And this time she was right, as it happens, though she never knew, and may be dead. I can’t believe Lisette is dead, but she probably is, and I’ll never know that either.
It was about six weeks ago – I have been in Paris for just over two weeks, writing and writing, and we left Ravensbrück late in March. It hadn’t stopped snowing when we left – at that point I thought it was never going to stop snowing.
Irina was easy to find because she is so tall, and because of her white hair. She looked as dazed and crazed as Lisette, standing in line waiting to climb into the transport truck. She was staring at nothing. We couldn’t get near her, but we got into the same truck.
You know, I think we could have climbed into any truck we wanted to. Who’d have ever dreamed that any prisoner would willingly climb into one of those stinking, overcrowded, hellbound crates? Who’d have dreamed that I would?
It was bomb fuses all over again – like taking the fuse away from the boy on the railway tracks, or refusing to make the relay. I didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t. I had to climb into that truck with Róża. For Karolina – for Lisette. For Micheline and Elodie. For Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia –
Controlled flight into terrain.
We were expecting something like a three-day trip with maybe a bucket of water to share among us, nothing to use for a toilet, and having to sleep standing up because there wasn’t any room to sit down. We were expecting that, prepared for it. Resigned to it anyway. But the journey didn’t take much more than an hour. And we knew we’d really been driving somewhere, not going in the slow and terrible final circle around the outside of the camp.
They didn’t let us out right away. The hours crawled by. When they finally opened the trucks, for the first few minutes, while everybody was untangling themselves from one another and gulping in fresh air, there were only two things I thought about: hiding Róża’s legs, and getting to Irina. I dragged Róża under one arm and I shoved my way towards Irina’s white head. Irina caught Róża under her other arm and then I’d done both my jobs.
‘Where is this place?’ Irina asked pointlessly. Who had any idea? It was a rhetorical question and I looked around rhetorically –
And I knew where we were. I knew where we were.
We were in the exact same parking lot I’d pulled up in on the back of the mechanic?
??s motorcycle when Karl Womelsdorff and I flew to Neubrandenburg last September. It could have been anywhere, the loading area for any factory complex. There wasn’t really anything distinctive about it. But it is emblazoned on my brain and I recognised it.
‘We’re in Neubrandenburg,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. They make aircraft parts here – there’s an airfield. And a town.’
Róża acted so fast. ‘Give me the bread,’ she demanded in a whisper, and I stupidly gave it to her.
‘BREAD!’ she screamed, just the way she’d done in front of the fence by the Revier. ‘Das Brot! Chleb! Le pain! The SS are giving out bread!’
There was another instant riot. Only this time there really was bread.
She threw it with calculated cunning and accuracy into the middle of the crowd of hundreds of starving women climbing out of the trucks. They didn’t mob us – they mobbed the bread. All the available guards piled in after them to sort out the havoc. There were big chain-link fences topped with barbed wire around the yard, but the vehicle gates were still open wide.
Róża ran. Or didn’t run exactly, just hurled herself in her ridiculous lopsided, gimpy lurch away from the crowd and round the truck we’d just climbed out of. Irina and I sprinted after her, but she was in the open before we were, and before we could catch up she was out of the gates and into the road.
That was our escape. It took thirty seconds and six slices of bread.
We didn’t know it then though. We were just in a frenzy of panic and fury that Róża could have done anything so utterly, desperately, monstrously stupid. We were out of Ravensbrück, out of the danger of being gassed, we’d got her scrawny Exhibit A legs safely into an ordinary work camp, and now she’d killed us all by trying to escape.
But they hadn’t counted us getting into the truck back in Ravensbrück. Well, maybe they’d counted Irina, but they hadn’t counted Róża and me, and they didn’t count us getting out. So that was lucky – they didn’t know we were there, and thanks to Róża’s staged food fight, no one noticed us leaving. We caught up with Róża easily as soon as we broke free of the bread ruckus. The road outside the gates was also full of trucks. In a couple more seconds the dogs would come after us, we’d be dragged back into the factory yard and they’d beat us all to a pulp and shoot us. We didn’t turn back. How could we turn back? They’d have beaten us to a pulp and shot us if we’d turned ourselves in.