Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(41)

I swallowed but couldn’t answer. The iron needles seemed to waver in front of my face, as if I were looking at them through a sheet of old glass.

‘Look, I’ll show you what happens –’ She barked orders in Polish at the girls sitting on her left and on my right.

They never stopped knitting. They turned round on the bench – they had room to do it because Ró?a and I were on the table. They stuck their own legs out in front of me, turning and showing off their scars as if they were models at a fashion show.

I burst out, ‘I heard about you on the radio.’

Ró?a dropped a needle.

It clattered on the concrete floor and the girl next to her dived to pick it up. They chattered together in rapid excitement and then suddenly the whole room was buzzing again – really buzzing – and they were all focused on me.

‘You heard ? On the radio? On the BBC? What did they say? Does everyone know?’

Ró?a explained very quickly, ‘Some of us died of it, some of us have been executed, but most of us are still alive, and we have been fighting to get the story to spread outside the camp. We smuggled out letters addressed to the BBC and the Vatican and the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. Now we are such an embarrassment to the camp administration that they don’t know what to do with us – we’re all still condemned to be killed, but they’re scared to do it. They know we’ve been telling people, they know it’s leaking out – we got a blessing sent to us by the Pope! A civilian worker in Siemens will hear, or someone from the men’s camp, or a prisoner who knows about us will get released or transferred to another camp. It’s getting out. Some day, the bastards will have to account for what they did to us. What did you hear?’

‘I don’t know who it was. The report was about an American woman who’d been in a prison camp in Germany – she had a list of names.’

‘It was Aka! She does have American citizenship! It was us! See, it’s working! What did you do when you heard? What did you think? What did people say?’

I hesitated. They were so excited, and my answer was going to be so disappointing.

‘We didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘We just thought it was anti-German propaganda. No one believed it.’

‘No goddamn extra bread for you ever,’ Ró?a snarled with venomous resentment.

Instead of snapping back at her I sang softly,

‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

Will I ever see thee wed?’





‘You bitch,’ she murmured, just as soft.

‘It’s a round. It’s easy. I’ll teach you.’

‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

Will I ever see thee wed –’





Suddenly the girl on my right sang the first line back to me – Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose. She even picked up the unfamiliar English words of the second line, Will I ever see thee wed –

‘I will marry at thy will, sir,

At thy will.’





When I started to sing it a third time, a voice across the table joined in too.

It didn’t take them long. It is an easy round. They were practised and fast at learning things by heart, and starved of beauty.

And, of course, they knew we were singing to Ró?a.

‘MUFFINS!’ yelled the girl at the window.

Instant silence. A dozen hands dragged me off the table. In five seconds we were all bent with our heads over our knitting and a guard stomped in to yell at Gitte for reasons I never figured out.

I got my fair share of bread that night. I didn’t recognise the girl who handed it to me as we crowded round the drums of soup. ‘Thank you!’

‘You’ve got Zosia and Genca to thank, because they’re dead,’ Ró?a informed me brutally.

‘Shut up, Ró?yczka.’ The girl who’d given me the bread made a face and told me in a mixture of French and English, ‘Lisette is your Lagermutter now, your Camp Mother, and she’s mine and Ró?a’s also. So we’ll treat you like a sister.’

‘I’m Rose,’ I said.

‘I know you’re Rose. Rose Justice, American poet. Well, I’m Karolina Salska, Polish film maker. Not famous yet. I worked as a projectionist before the war but what I really want to do is animation, like Disney, you know? You’ll pay for the bread by telling me all about Fantasia.’ She added as a breathless afterthought, ‘You have seen Fantasia, right?’

‘Well, yes, but . . .’ What had happened in Fantasia? Mickey Mouse in a wizard’s hat and flying horses and . . . dinosaurs? ‘It was about four years ago and I don’t remember the music.’

‘Don’t worry, I haven’t seen it, but I know what they play in every sequence, and Lisette is like a walking music library. We’ll get her to hum and you can describe what happens, OK? Gitte sometimes lets us sing after lights-out.’

‘But –’

‘Look, I said don’t worry. If you can’t remember the whole thing, you can teach me some new American dance tunes as compensation.’ Karolina herded me towards one of the long tables where the knitters worked – Ró?a curled up under the end of the table on the concrete floor with Lisette, and squeezed over to make room for me and Karolina. It was their little family place for a quarter of an hour twice a day, a private nook under the table and out of the chaos of the hundreds of people trying to get to the soup and bread. Karolina tried to let me creep in first, but I couldn’t sit. I had to stay on my knees at the table’s edge. As Karolina shuffled in past me, I noticed that she was wearing a Camp Police armband. Then I glanced down at her bare legs and saw the scar splitting her shin.