Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(12)

It was such a weird thing to have delivered to me at the airfield, and I had to show it off. Everyone was interested. Of course nobody had ever seen one, and I very much doubt if it is legal for me to have it. Felicyta naturally wanted to know where Roger had got it, which I couldn’t answer. Maddie had to take it apart and put it back together about ten times. She is a mechanical nut. Felicyta didn’t say anything for a long time, just sat watching Maddie poking at electrical relays. (I was watching her too, watching her small, quick fingers with the French gold and wine-red ruby glittering there, and I thought grimly: now I’m going to dream it’s Maddie’s hands exploding.)

Suddenly Felicyta’s face shrivelled in a look of hatred and she said viciously, ‘I wonder if we could reload it.’ Her heart is in Warsaw, battling for her country with the Polish Resistance.

‘And drop it back on the factory where it came from,’ I went one better.

Felicyta and Maddie gave me awkward, pitying looks. Ignorant American schoolgirl is what those looks said.

‘My sister is at work in a German munitions factory,’ Felicyta said coolly. ‘And my mother. “Political prisoners.” That is German for “slave labour”. They are in a concentration camp.’

The embarrassing thing is, I already knew this, or sort of. But of course I hadn’t really put it together. Anyway, being an Ignorant American Schoolgirl gives me an open ticket to ask brazen, awkward questions, and I’d already put my foot in my mouth, so I just went on.

‘What is a concentration camp, Fliss?’

She shrugged. ‘A prison for civilians – for anyone the Germans don’t like. Poles because they are Poles, Jews because they are Jews. My mother because she gave a blanket to a Jew. My sister because she told the German police my mother was right to do it. People disappear all the time, and you never hear from them again.’

‘But how do you know where your family is?’

Felicyta kept her voice steady, her face still wearing an expression of patient tolerance for ignorant foreigners. ‘Two years ago my father got a postcard from a cousin in the same camp, who was allowed to ask him to send her a food package, and she told him she had seen my mother and sister alive.’

How utterly impossible it is for me to imagine – Felicyta’s mother and sister have been missing for two years. That was what Maddie was talking about on the train. She thought it was worse than being told someone was dead – not ever knowing what happened to them.

You can see why Felicyta is so angry at everything.

‘Fliss, how did you escape?’

She smiled a close-lipped, evil smile, only the corners of her mouth turning up, and said, ‘I stole a plane. OK, it was my own plane, but I did have to steal it! I was doing courier work for the Polish Air Force when the Germans invaded. I knew they would take over all communications aircraft, or destroy them, so I took this one myself. I flew to France. It took me three days, mostly flying in twilight, hiding the plane in woodland by day. France was still free then . . .’

It must have been in 1939. I was thirteen. I was in junior high school. I was oblivious to what was going on in Europe. Or anywhere except right where I was – Justice Field, Mount Jericho, Pennsylvania, the centre of the known universe.

Here is what I already knew about Felicyta’s sister – what I’d forgotten about hearing before. It happened just after I came to Hamble. I was sitting in the Operations room with a few other girls, waiting for the day’s ferry chits to be handed out. I was new enough to be shy and a little bit nervous about sitting down next to people I didn’t know, so I was sitting by myself – it was even before Celia had turned up.

The wireless was on, and because I wasn’t talking to anybody, I was listening to the radio. And it was this ugly story about a prison camp in Germany where they’d been running medical experiments on Polish prisoners, all women, mostly students – cutting open their legs and infecting them with gangrene, simulating bullet wounds, in the name of ‘medical science’ – to find treatments for German soldiers wounded on the Eastern Front. The BBC announcer read through an endless list of names that a former prisoner had secretly memorised when she knew she was going to be released. I was interested because the woman who’d memorised the names was an American citizen. It was compelling stuff – you couldn’t stop listening – but it was so absolutely awful that I couldn’t believe it, and I said so.

‘That’s got to be propaganda!’ I burst out. ‘You English are as bad as the Germans!’

‘You should read the Guardian,’ Maddie said. ‘It’s not all propaganda. The reports from the concentration camps are pure evil.’

‘Poisoning girls with gangrene?’ I objected. ‘It’s like trying to get us to believe the Germans eat babies!’

At that point Felicyta slammed her teacup down so hard she broke her saucer right in half, and stormed out of the room. The floor shuddered as the door thundered shut behind her.

Maddie thrashed her newspaper into submission and nodded towards Felicyta’s slammed door.

‘Her sister’s in a German concentration camp,’ Maddie explained in a level voice. She looked back down at the paper without meeting my eyes. ‘Felicyta thinks the Germans do eat babies.’

That was three months ago.

I am starting to understand why the Polish pilots are so fanatical about their hatred of the Germans. Thank goodness I haven’t got a ‘good old Pennsylvania Dutch’ name like Stolzfuss or Hitz or Zimmerman. Felicyta doesn’t know my middle name is Moyer, Mother’s maiden name, or that my grandfather still speaks old-fashioned Pennsylvania German sometimes. I will never tell her.