Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(28)

What I remember most about that first meal there is the filthy, crawling, skeletal beggars who fought over the raw chunks of potato or turnip or whatever it was in the soup that I couldn’t make myself eat. There was a camp word for those beggars, which I never did figure out how to say or spell, because it sounds so much to me like schmootzich – Mother’s nasty way of describing a girl who doesn’t take care of herself. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for filthy greasy.

They took any food you gave them. The first day, because I was still ignorant enough to be picky about what I ate, I tried to hand over my leftover chunks of raw vegetable to one of these desperate people. In seconds I was being clawed at by ten skeletal hands, grabbing at me anywhere they could to try to get in on the handout – five crawling creatures who had once been women snatching at my skirt, my arms, my hair. One of the guards had to beat them off. It left me shaking with shock. I never dared that kind of charity again.

You could drop a breadcrust on the ground and the schmootzichs would fight over it. If you dropped a breadcrust and stepped on it, or a guard spat on it, they still fought over it. They were like seagulls. Like seagulls going after garbage. They were so far from being human that at first it didn’t even occur to me then that they could be fellow prisoners – I thought they must be hoboes or something who’d crawled in off the train tracks. God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn’t want to believe something.

After we ate, the guards pointed us in the direction of a ditch we could use for a latrine. I kept telling myself, it’s like camp. It’s a camp; I’m at camp.

God knows what I thought I was telling myself.

We got herded into a harshly lit factory shed to be registered and examined and given prison clothes. Elodie and I were somehow always the last in line, and by the time our turn came for anything, we got the absolute worst of it. But on the other hand, by the time you’d stood in line for an hour or three or four, you knew what was going on. We were able to do a lot more whispering in the administration building than we’d been able to do standing under guard all afternoon, and most information was highly refined by the time it reached me and Elodie. We knew before we got to the line of desks where they processed us that, like all new prisoners, we were in ‘quarantine’ – being ‘decontaminated’ to prevent the spread of typhoid. That sounded plausible, and a good thing, but it was clearly a complete joke – the schmootzichs had had their filthy, oozing hands all over us.

My ATA pilot’s uniform was like a rallying flag. Everybody was ravenously starved for encouraging news from the Front, and only one day ago I’d been a free woman flying over a free Paris. ‘Caen is ours,’ I whispered. ‘And Brussels and Antwerp, and Le Havre just yesterday! I heard before I took off! We’re past Reims in France now. We’ve got most of France and a big part of Belgium. The push is north to Holland and west to the German border. We haven’t got all the French ports – we’re still fighting for Boulogne, but it’ll be any day. And the Luftwaffe –’

Womelsdorff had been cursing his own military for wasting resources.

‘They’ve got spectacular new jets, but no fuel.’

People relayed the news to one another in nearly silent whispers. The guards wouldn’t let us talk, but they couldn’t keep their eyes on all 400 of us at once. The news flew around the shed.

Other prisoners were already packing everybody’s things up and carting them away to be sorted by the time I had to dump out my flight bag on one of the dozens of administrators’ desks lined up across the shed. I bit my lip, my stomach churning with worry while the administrator squinted at my papers, because I knew they were going to keep my passport and Luftwaffe letter of reference and leave me without any ID except for whatever they assigned me.

Finally the administrator called someone else over – both of them SS guards, both of them women, maybe five years older than me. They talked to each other in German, studying my American passport. One of them rolled her eyes at the other and made a face. She’d noticed my middle name – Rose Moyer Justice. The other glanced at me, pointed at her friend and told me drily, ‘Das ist Effi Moyer.’

Effi Moyer wasn’t happy about it at all. She grabbed hold of the lapel of my tunic and gave it a demanding yank. I took the tunic off and handed it to her. She started to go through my pockets with brisk efficiency and found the wrappers from my chocolate bars.

I’d folded the silver foil and brown paper very carefully, wrapped it in my rose hanky from Aunt Rainy and pushed it deep into the corner of my tunic pocket. I wanted to keep it because it smelled so overwhelmingly of Pennsylvania, of home, of flying over Hershey and the fields of Jericho County.

When Effi Moyer found the brown and silver paper, she passed it to her friend – they both unfolded the scraps with deep and interested suspicion, as though they expected lumps of gold to drop out. Effi held the silver foil up to her nose exactly the way I’d done in the truck the night before and took a deep breath.

‘Schokolade,’ she said, and passed the empty candy wrapper to her colleague, who also took a deep breath.

They made a fierce, disappointing search through the rest of my pockets, and checked my bag again, and then they divided up the paper between them – each of them got one full wrapper.

I watched the whole performance biting my lip, trying to kill another terrible, terrible urge to laugh. And also feeling a new kind of fear taking hold of my stomach and tying it in knots. These were the prison guards confiscating my empty candy bar wrappers as if they were hundred-dollar bills. If that’s how hard up the guards were . . .