Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(42)

‘You’re a Rabbit!’

She glanced up at me. She’d gone red. ‘And I like to dance to American music.’

I probably went red too. ‘Oh! I didn’t mean you couldn’t dance! I was just surprised about your armband!’

‘A few of us are Camp Police. Rabbits are privileged. I patrol the anti-aircraft ditches and don’t have to go around with SS guards breathing down my neck all the time.’

She tossed her head defiantly, smoothing her kerchief with the back of her hand as if it were her hair. ‘I don’t limp,’ she said. ‘One operation only, a bacterial infection, very neat. They didn’t peel off the muscle or cut out pieces of my shinbone like they did to Ró?a –’

‘You were sick for longer,’ Ró?a interrupted. ‘You couldn’t walk for eight months.’

‘But you wouldn’t notice now, if I was wearing stockings.’ Listening to the Rabbits talk about their operations was like watching a horror movie in a foreign language. You sort of hoped you’d misunderstood what was going on. And then when you figured out what was really going on, it was worse than you thought.

‘I can walk without limping,’ Karolina said again. ‘My legs weren’t even worth a picture, remember?’ She turned to me again. ‘Ró?a got two snapshots all to herself, front and back.’

‘What kind of pictures?’ I asked in an agony of confusion. I didn’t think she meant art. Did the SS make them pose?

‘We stole a camera a couple of weeks ago. There’s a soldiers’ prison camp not far from here, and sometimes the Ravensbrück work units have to deliver things there, and people get to talk to the boys. They got us a camera. We took an entire roll of film of the worst damaged legs.’

Ró?a said savagely, ‘They’ll kill us all eventually, but at least we’ve got evidence.’ She let out one of her bitter cackles of laugher. ‘If somebody ever gets the pictures developed. One of the French prisoners is hiding the film –’

At that point Lisette raised one finger to her lips, and both Ró?a and Karolina gave her their full attention, waiting expectantly.

Lisette said something in Polish. The second she’d finished, they all took a tiny bite of the stale bread, and a moment later I realised that Lisette had just said grace. They were crouching on a dirty concrete floor under a table and they said grace.

I was astonished at the time. Now I understand. It was one of the ways Lisette held herself together.

Then Lisette turned to me and said in casual English, just carrying on the conversation where she’d interrupted it, ‘Karolina helped take the snapshots, but we can’t risk letting her guard the film. That’s what you were arrested for in the first place, isn’t it, darling? Illegal filming!’

‘I didn’t film anything. I made a short cartoon showing a bunch of wolves herding rabbits into prison trucks,’ Karolina corrected with satisfaction. ‘And I still can’t believe I got the rabbits right! Anyway I was arrested for showing the film, not for making it.’ She gave her empty tin bowl a swipe with the hem of her dress and tried to tilt it so she could see her reflection, then sighed at the hopelessness of this project. She stowed the bowl in a little bag on a string tied round her waist. ‘Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of here and do an updated sequel, involving wolf bites. What were you arrested for, Rose?’

‘I landed my plane in the wrong place,’ I said.

Ró?a snickered and leaped into the conversation. ‘I was arrested for being a Girl Scout. They arrested my whole Girl Scout troop in the summer of 1941. I was fourteen.’

I gaped at her.

‘We were delivering plastic explosive for bombs,’ she said. ‘You know, little home-made bombs to sabotage officials’ cars and throw in office windows. Most of us got released, but they kept the oldest – and I didn’t stand a chance because I’d actually been stopped at a checkpoint and, well, it was pretty obvious I was smuggling explosives. You know how it is when you’re fourteen, you think you’re so much smarter than everybody else and nothing will ever hurt you . . .’ She trailed off, wiping her own bowl with her last crumb of bread, and then said in her offhand way, ‘They didn’t beat me, but they made me watch while they beat my mother, trying to get me to tell them who I was working for. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Someone always dropped off the stuff in our baskets with a note that said where to take it. They beat the crap out of our Girl Scout leader and then they shot her. So, 51498, what were you doing when you were fourteen?’

‘I’m older than you,’ I said faintly. ‘The war hadn’t started yet.’

It had though. It had already been going on for a year, but the USA wasn’t in it yet. MY GOD, it’s been going on SUCH A LONG TIME.

‘Well, what were you doing? Do they have Girl Scouts in America?’

‘Yes – we –’

Oh – we hung May baskets on people’s doors. Daddy got a brand-new Piper Cub for the flying school and he took me along to pick it up from Lock Haven, and I flew it all the way home and Hemlock Council gave me a special ‘Young Pilot’ badge. I went on my second Juniata River canoe trip that summer. We took the Brownies on a picnic to the Conewago Grove Lake. We were not smuggling explosives and we were not being arrested by the Nazis. Nobody executed my troop leader. I did not have to watch my mother being beaten.