Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(29)

Effi tossed my tunic to the woman standing a couple of desks down from her, and it got lost in the pile of hundreds of other abandoned jackets and blouses and skirts. Then I had to take off the rest of my clothes. It wouldn’t have been so bad if you didn’t have to do it in front of men too – SS officers and guards who were directing and pushing people and just standing around watching. But everyone else had already had to strip. I was the last.

There was a little office room like a clinic where you had to sit on a table while a couple of people in rubber gloves put you through an unspeakable body search with tongue depressors and a flashlight. When they were done with the search, Effi barked an order at the doctors or whatever they were, and I had to sit backwards on a chair (holding on to the back of it) while they sheared my hair off. They really did shear it – with a scissors up against my scalp, not close enough to my head to count as shaving it off, but so close there was nothing left. If I was going to do that to anyone, I’d time it that way too – addle her brain with shame and discomfort and then quickly get her hair before she came to her senses. The shock of losing my hair didn’t hit me till later. The tongue depressors and flashlights seemed much more terrible at the time – even though that only lasted a couple of minutes, and I was stuck with my hair. Without it, I mean.

Finally I got smacked on my bare backside with someone’s clipboard because I hesitated going into the slimy, dark shower room.

Nothing that happened to me that day made me cry. Some of it scared me; but most of it just made me SO MAD.

I’d lost Elodie. The room with the showers was badly lit and murky with mildew – it reminded me of the abandoned bathhouse by the old pool at Conewago Park, which they haven’t used since before the Great War. Me and the other summer kids used to explore all the old park buildings, but not the bathhouse – it was just too creepy. Here in Ravensbrück I hesitated in the doorway, smarting, but unable to take another step over the slimy, red clay tiles towards those black, trickling overhead spigots and the dozens of white, skinny, bald women shivering beneath them.

‘La femme pilote américaine! Mon amie américaine!’

‘Ici!’ I yelled. ‘Here!’

Elodie and I got slapped simultaneously on opposite sides of the shower room. But I knew where she was now, and we managed to get back together.

The guards were trying hard to get everybody done with – it was dark, it was late, they were sick of us – and finally they shoved a couple of prison dresses at Elodie and me, and we had to put them on while we were still wet. Her dress came down to her ankles and mine was too tight. Someone threw shoes at us. Between us there was one each that fitted – none of them matched. No stockings, no bra, no underwear of any kind.

Back in the long factory room, with the prison dresses sticking to our wet backs, we had to pick up patches with our prisoner numbers on them, along with another patch that was supposed to show what kind of prisoner you were – all red triangles for us, which meant we were political prisoners. Then we had to learn to say our numbers in German. I remembered my number – that wasn’t the trouble. After all, Grampa taught me how to count to twenty in Dutch, or Low German, or whatever it really is, when I was two. The trouble was that when Effi Moyer tried to teach me how to say my number, I tried to tell her I wasn’t French.

‘Franz?sisch politischer H?ftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig,’ she prompted me – French political prisoner 51498.

Remembering what the Luftwaffe pilots had called me when they were arguing over my papers in Mannheim, I said to Effi: ‘Ich bin Amerikanerin.’ I pointed to the others then to myself and shook my head. ‘I’m not French. Amerikanerin.’

Effi looked me in the eye with a face full of disdain and irritation and said, ‘Franz?sisch politischer H?ftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig’ – and honestly my German has not improved very much, but I know that is what she said, because my name was Franz?sisch politischer H?ftling 51498 for six months.

I repeated the numbers. But not the ‘French political prisoner’ part, because I wasn’t French. I was trying to behave myself. Effi just glared at me and started to put away the ledgers, ignoring me, and I turned away to find Elodie waiting for me with her mouth twisted into a sort of imitation of a grin. She tossed back the golden bangs – she’d managed to keep her hair, presumably because she was such an Aryan blonde – and gestured quickly at our badly fitting dresses with one finger. Swap you.

We started to strip the dresses off again, right there. We didn’t think anyone would care, because everyone ahead of us was being made to strip again so we could sew the red patches and our prisoner numbers on to our sleeves. But I hadn’t counted on Effi Moyer. She’d noticed me. I was the embarrassing prisoner who shared her name, the one who’d failed to save her a Hershey bar, the one who’d argued with her about being American.

Effi saw me and Elodie about to swap our dresses, and she came marching over to us and grabbed them away from us. Then she grabbed Elodie by her hair, close to her scalp, and dragged her over to sit down on the floor right next to the desk. Effi jerked one arm fiercely in my direction to tell me to follow Elodie – she wanted to keep an eye on us both as we sewed on our patches.

Elodie suddenly seemed totally cowed. Stark naked, she hunched over the dress, covering her lap with it; her shoulders shook a little as if she were sobbing. She didn’t make a sound though. I sat next to her, biting my lip, helpless with feeling so humiliated and so mad. We had to wait for someone to pass us a needle, and when we got one, Elodie dropped it. Then she couldn’t find the patch with her number on it after she’d threaded the needle. We scrambled around hunting for it and both of us got whacked over the head with one of Effi Moyer’s clipboards. Then, when it was my turn to use the needle, I couldn’t find my number.