Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(24)

‘I am Third Officer Rose Justice,’ I told him. ‘My little brother is named Karl too.’

‘Why this German name for an American boy?’

‘My mother’s family is from Germany,’ I said. ‘Two hundred years ago they came to America from right around here, from Pfaltz. A lot of people in Pennsylvania come from south-west Germany.’

Oberleutnant Karl Womelsdorff glanced at me with a tight, sad smile as he climbed into the pilot’s seat ahead of me.

‘Now you are back,’ he said.

Holy smoke, that plane. How did I ever fly that plane?

‘You will fly the Storch,’ Oberleutnant Womelsdorff told me. I don’t think he meant it to sound so much like a command. It was a present, a wonderful secret between us, one pilot to another, and a very generous present too, considering I was a prisoner of war or whatever.

Compared with the morning’s high-speed chase in the Spitfire, it was like being on a bicycle. We didn’t go very high, staying out of the way of planes that might be faster than us – or planes that might try to shoot us down. It was a mercy to be flying, to be focused on the unfamiliar aircraft and the heading and being too close for comfort to the treetops and just to be in control.

In the officers’ restroom at K?then, where we stopped to refuel, I sat with my head against my knees and cried for five minutes. It was like digging myself deeper and deeper into a pit that I’d never be able to climb out of. I was halfway across Germany now and I still didn’t know where I was going to end up.

When we took off from K?then, Womelsdorff let me sit in the front.

‘What if someone sees me in the pilot’s seat when we land? Won’t you be in trouble?’

He shrugged and laughed. ‘Why should I be, if we land in the right place? We’ll say you are the American cousin of Hanna Reitsch. You know of Hanna Reitsch? Germany’s most daring test pilot is a woman! As long as there are two of us in the plane, they will not accuse me of wasting fuel we do not have.’ I didn’t dare to answer. I am pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to tell me that the Luftwaffe is low on fuel.

The last stage of the trip was cloudier and bumpier, and Womelsdorff made me stay even lower, to avoid being bombed. Once we saw a flight of Allied aircraft crossing the sky ahead of us – high, dozens of them, steady black spots speckling the clouds like a swarm of gnats – heading, no doubt, for Berlin.

We puttered along far below them, slow and out of sight against the ground.

‘Daylight raid,’ commented my guard and guide. ‘Is this arrogance or desperation?’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. But now I think the answer wasn’t either of those – it was really just persistence. Persistence is what kept me alive all winter. And persistence will win the war.

Half an hour south of Neubrandenburg we flew almost directly over a pretty town surrounded by serene lakes. We were so low over the biggest lake I could see the reflection of our wings below us in its glassy surface. On the far side of the lake was a gigantic complex of long sheds and wide open gritted yards, all in the middle of a complicated railway junction – everything surrounded by concrete walls and what looked like miles and miles of wire fences.

‘What’s that?’

‘Fürstenberg industrial area,’ Womelsdorff answered. ‘You’ll only ever see it from the air – the maps show only the town and the lakes. What they make there is a state secret. Impossible to miss from the air, so it makes an excellent pinpoint. That is a pilot’s secret.’

It was my first sight of Ravensbrück.

I saw it for the first time from the air. I have spent a long time – mostly during roll calls – trying to put together my first view of it from a thousand feet overhead with the view from the parade ground in front of Block 32. I just can’t justify in my head that I must have been looking at the same sky in both places. From the air it was forbidding, but not menacing. It looked sterile. It was just a place. It didn’t even look inhabited – of course, it was the middle of the afternoon and everyone must have been at work, so the grounds were relatively empty. I wish I’d known – I wish I could remember the detail of what it looked like from the air. Was there smoke coming from the crematorium chimney? Were they loading or unloading transports? Was a train arriving? It was so still, so empty, so impersonal – so distant. It was an ordinary industrial site in the middle of an ordinary day. It didn’t mean anything to me, it wasn’t significant or ominous, and the detail is gone. A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.





April 18, 1945



Paris



I shocked the chambermaid. Or whatever they are called in France! I forgot to hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door – Ne pas déranger – and she came in a while ago to make the bed and clean the bathroom. I was sitting at the little vanity table, which I pulled over so it is in front of the big window, and I was writing with not a stitch on. I did have that incredible silk bedspread thing wrapped round me, but it slipped right off when I turned around to see who had come in.

Oh God, we were both SO EMBARRASSED. I look like a corpse. The Red Cross did a good job of delousing me and getting the scabies under control, but you can still see the rash all over my breasts and arms, and if those scales and Bob Ernst’s metric conversion are right, I have lost forty-five pounds in the last seven months. (Amazing, because I am still heavier than Irina, who is taller than me. But she was there longer.) I saw myself in the mirror over the dresser when I was taking my clothes off yesterday, and I am so horrible I had to cover the stupid mirror with a sheet so I don’t scare myself by accident.