Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(25)

‘Come back! Come back!’ I mewed pathetically after the chambermaid as she backed out – I got the right word in French, but used the familiar form by accident because we did all winter (‘Reviens!’) – trying to pull the bedspread up and to remember how to say ‘Don’t go’ politely. She left anyway, shutting the door softly behind her, and I put my head down on the table and cried. I am so lonely. I should get dressed and go back to the Embassy and see if I can find some way to get back to the Swedish Red Cross people. But I don’t even know their unit name or number or where they were headed next. ‘Sweden’ is not very specific.

The chambermaid came back ten minutes later with coffee and rolls for me on a silver tray. Real coffee. She plunked it down on the vanity table and told me her name and rushed away to make the bed.

Her name is Fernande. She doesn’t speak English. She is busy with the bed now – she has even brought up a new spread so I can stay wrapped in this one. She hasn’t started on the bathroom and that will take her some time, because the one thing I did do last night was take a two-hour bath in that gigantic tub. The only reason I didn’t make it last longer is because they shut the hot water off at 9 p.m. I am going to write as fast as I can while she’s here. I’ve been putting off remembering what that night on the ground was like, and I don’t want to think about it when I’m by myself.

They let me use the pilots’ restroom at Neubrandenburg also, but they took away all my pilot’s gear except my flight bag. Womelsdorff turned me over to a grouchy mechanic who took me on the back of his motorbike to this so-called women’s prison. There is a women’s prison camp outside Neubrandenburg – it is one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. But you were supposed to be processed through the main camp first. I was in the wrong place, I wasn’t on their radar, and they didn’t know what to do with me when the mechanic turned me over to them.

I remember standing uncomfortably in a drab office somewhere, standing very straight and trying to look more official than I felt – I’d even slapped my uniform cap back on when I handed them my papers. They passed my papers around and argued for half an hour while I just stood there waiting. Then, as it was getting dark, they took me outside at gunpoint and locked me in the back of an empty armoured truck. I had no idea I was in the wrong place – I had no idea why they’d put me in the truck (for a few horrible minutes I thought they were just going to shoot me right there). I didn’t understand anything anyone said. I know now what was going on – I know that the truck was just an empty transport and was returning to Ravensbrück the next day for another load of prisoners, and that they were going to drop me off before loading up again.

But that night –

Oh God, that truck smelled so horrible. If there is a smell that goes with fear and despair, it is like that – sweat and dirty underpants and pee. I was already retching as they slammed the doors shut on me, and for a long time I just stood in the middle of the truck hugging myself and gagging.

There was no light. I braced myself in the dark because I thought they were going to take me somewhere any minute, and the truck would lurch into action and I’d fall over and have to touch whatever was on the evil floor. But nothing happened. Then I tried to get out, struggling with the doors until all my nails were broken – the sheets of metal interlocked and there wasn’t even a crack to feel air through. Near the front of the truck there were slatted air vents high up in the walls, but even if I’d been able to get the slats out, the opening was smaller than my head. Eventually I was so tired that I gritted my teeth and leaned in the corner below one of the air vents, where two walls propped me so I could still stand up. Then later I had to sit down.

Fernande is still here. She’s in the bathroom now. I couldn’t write about this if I were alone.

I took off my flying jacket and tucked up the edges carefully, so that only the leather of the back was touching the floor, and sat on that. It wasn’t very cold yet – still early September.

After a while I opened up my flight bag to count the papers that I’d handed over earlier and then shoved back in without looking – checking to feel that I still had my precious official letter of recommendation from the Luftwaffe, with its stamps and signatures – and beneath the pile of paper I found, mysteriously, two of my confiscated Hershey bars.

I am sure that Womelsdorff put them there.

I was starved enough to eat one, even in the grim stench of the transport truck – I didn’t dare eat both, because I didn’t know how long I’d be there. Finally I put my tunic back on and curled in my supportive corner as tightly as I could on the protective island of my flying jacket. I buried my nose in the silver paper that the chocolate had been wrapped in, sucking in the distant smell of Hershey and home to mask the stink, and managed to go to sleep.

I got woken up by the engine starting. Through the air vents high in the walls I could see that it was light. No one looked inside to see if I was even alive – I have always thought the truck driver didn’t actually know I was there.

We drove for about an hour and I couldn’t even tell what direction we were heading or how fast we were going. After the truck parked and the engine stopped, I sat in the dark for another hour. I didn’t know it, but the truck had gone through the gate, I was already inside.

I ate the last chocolate bar. We’d both travelled from the same place, me and that Hershey bar – I thought how incredible it was that we both ended up here together. I heard long, slow trains steaming and clunking past a short distance away, a comforting sound, like the freight line that goes past the lake at Conewago Grove. I heard other trucks coming and going, and orders shouted in German. I heard the siren and nearly jumped out of my skin.