Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(33)

Micheline Karolina Elodie Zofia Veronica Rozalia Genca Maria Alfreda Apolonia Kazimiera Anna Zosia Aniela –

So many dead. There were probably over thirty thousand living women in Ravensbrück when I got there and nearly sixty thousand or more by the time I left, so who knows how many thousands died in between? And how many died before I got there and after I left? How many in other camps?

I will tell the world.

Mother said she doesn’t believe it.

I WILL TELL THE WORLD.

I say that so fiercely. I say it with such conviction, such determined anger. But I couldn’t even tell Mother, could I? A few pages ago I vowed I wouldn’t tell Mother. How can I possibly tell the world?

I have to. This is a beginning. If I write it all down, later it can turn into a plan.





April 21, 1945



Paris



When my quarantine was finished, they sent me over to the Siemens factory. They just hauled me out of my row in roll call and stuffed me into a smaller group of twenty other women, not from my French transport. They marched us out through the big gates and along the lake. I got a glimpse of the SS staff housing – there were neat long swathes of red flowers bordering their front yards, and window boxes. A woman in civilian clothes was sweeping up leaves with a couple of tiny tot kids, and the kids were throwing leaves at each other and they were all laughing. They looked so ordinary. My heart lifted a little. I was outside those terrible walls again. The last three weeks hadn’t been easy, but they were over and I was out.

It is a longish walk from the main camp to Siemens, about half a mile. You could see Fürstenberg and its church spire across the lake, like a ‘Scenes from Old Europe’ picture on a jigsaw puzzle. On our side of the lake we passed hundreds of Ravensbrück prisoners busy at something or other – cutting reeds, hauling potatoes and firewood from somewhere, unloading barges full of coal. Finally we came to another complex of long grey buildings behind chain-link and barbed-wire electrified fences which was the Siemens factory itself. Around the buildings here, other prisoners were doing hard, hard labour, unloading iron pigs from railway cars and dragging them away in wagonloads. But this is where my Luftwaffe letter of recommendation suddenly kicked in. Thank God, I thought, as I realised what was going on – thank you, Luftwaffe commander, thank you, Karl Womelsdorff.

I sat in an office and had to do a couple of aptitude tests (no language aptitude required) – guide a thread round a series of tacks on a board and fold a piece of paper in a particular way, following visual instructions. Finally I had to learn to wind thin copper wire round an iron bobbin. And then I had a ‘skilled’ job, just like they’d told me I would – technically it was even a paid job, though nobody ever gave you any money, just jotted down your wages against your number. I sat at a bench under bright electric lights in a relatively clean and airy factory barrack, wrapping strands of copper wire around iron bobbins. The factory was decent because German civilians from Fürstenberg worked there too. I was a prisoner, but I was healthy and clean enough that I could work in the same room with normal people, though we weren’t allowed to speak to each other (not that I could). The dorms at Siemens were cleaner too, and less crowded. We were still three to a bed, but the mattresses were better and we had two blankets between the three of us and the toilet worked. We were all issued with kerchiefs to cover up how savagely some of us had been scalped.

I missed Elodie like crazy, and most of my ill-gotten belongings (toothbrush, soap, etc.) were still hidden in a crack between the boards of my never-to-be-revisited bunk in Block 8. I didn’t meet anyone in my new barrack who spoke either French or English. But see, I’d waited out the dreadful quarantine believing my life would improve, and it did.

I lasted three days.

That’s counting the time I stood at my bench doing nothing for eighteen hours, waiting for someone to shoot me.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work. The summer before my senior year in high school I worked at the paper box factory in Mount Jericho. It was the same kind of work – just folding and sticking on an assembly line. Actually, it was worse at the paper box factory because the air was so dusty and it was so hot that summer. And it was so boring – the only interesting thing that happened the whole summer was when Polly put that cigarette butt in her pocket and set her apron on fire. The work was worth it – I needed the money for coming to England. But it wasn’t a fun job, and I stuck with it and was pleased with myself afterwards.

OK, here I was on another assembly line, doing work that I knew I could handle, and hoping for the war to end at any minute – so why did I go and ruin it all?

I blame it on a couple of civilian workers, although that’s not really fair. I’d have figured it out on my own eventually. I heard them talking when we were coming in after the dinner break, and I heard a word I recognised:

Vergeltungswaffe – vengeance weapon.

I filed meekly back to my place at the long table full of copper wire and iron spools. And in the back of my head the word was echoing over and over with the clattering rhythm of an approaching doodlebug:

Vergeltungswaffe, Vergeltungswaffe

I sat down. I picked up a piece of copper wire.

I was making electrical relays for flying bomb fuses.

I put down the piece of wire. Then I just sat there staring at it for twenty minutes. I was so quiet, so utterly unfussy, that it took twenty minutes for anyone to notice I had stopped working. At least, it took the foreman twenty minutes to notice I had stopped working. The prisoners on either side of me didn’t say anything – they just quietly beavered away at their own electrical relays.