Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(47)

The guard turned us over to our group leader, a German Kolonka (Kolonka is a Ravensbrück word, short for something I can’t remember, but basically means forewoman) – the Kolonka wasn’t an SS guard, but a German prisoner. She wore a green triangle and a red armband. The red armband showed she was a forewoman and let her go anywhere she wanted. The green triangle showed she was a criminal. One of the very first things Ró?a had told me was how a German criminal with a red armband was exactly the worst combination of work leader, and to my utter terror this one homed in on me right away.

She was nearly as tall as Irina. She had the stub of an unlit cigarette clamped in the corner of her mouth, and she barked orders around it like a gangster. I stood quivering as she pinpointed me to question on the first day I turned up in her work crew. Right there in the pouring rain she pointed to the letters Elodie had embroidered in my sleeve patch. ‘USA?’ she asked curiously.

‘Ich bin Amerikanerin,’ I explained.

In perfect, almost unaccented English, she asked, ‘Why are you here?’ She had intense pale green eyes the exact colour of a Coca-Cola bottle. I didn’t answer, and she shrugged a little. ‘Just wondering. I don’t give a shit why you’re here. I went to college in America. But you’re the first American I’ve seen in Ravensbrück.’ Then she began firing these weird, casual, ordinary questions at me. ‘Have you ever been to Chicago?’

I swallowed, at sea as to where this was going. I gave her terse, suspicious answers.

‘I stayed overnight once.’

‘Who’s your favourite band leader?’

‘Um – Tommy Dorsey?’

‘Do you know a recipe for Boston Cream Pie?’

I shook my head.

‘Too bad!’ She twisted her mouth in disappointment. ‘I’d give a lot to get a recipe for Boston Cream Pie. Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you for being American. If you don’t understand anything I say in German, just ask. Now I’m going to shout at you all to straighten up and get moving, OK? French morons.’

And she did, just launched into a long tirade of orders in German.

French morons? I wondered.

Irina, who was Russian, was in line next to me. I stole a glance at the girl walking ahead of her, whose left sleeve I could see pretty well. Her red triangle had a defiant black letter ‘F’ embroidered in it the way Elodie had embroidered hers, and I could just make out the number above her political prisoner patch – 51444. She was from my original French transport.

Then I tried to check the other women around me. I could see the numbers of the two ahead of me – we were all from the same transport. None of them was Elodie, but they were from Elodie’s transport.

Elodie! I thought, my heart lifting in the ridiculous way it did at any faint promise of hope – a tattered kite soaring and going nowhere. Elodie, my comrade-in-arms from the first three weeks in quarantine! Maybe I could get a message to Elodie!

Our German Kolonka barked another incomprehensible order at us, then unexpectedly followed up with a quiet translation first in French and then in English. ‘Stay over this side. Don’t go near the tent. Don’t look.’

We tried not to look. But the tent was between us and wherever we were going, and we couldn’t help seeing.

It was as big as a circus tent and had been put up while I was still in quarantine, in an open place too marshy to build on, as a temporary shelter for the new prisoners who were pouring into Ravensbrück every day – thousands of civilians from beaten Warsaw, from Auschwitz as they started to evacuate it before the Red Army got there, and from a ton of other camps and prisons closer to the front as they moved people around. You could see the tent from inside the fence around Block 32, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it while I’d been working with the knitters. Today there were more guards and dogs than usual all around the tent perimeter, keeping people inside, and the reason everyone in there was trying to get out in the rain was because they were dying of thirst.

Really dying of it, I think.

Hands and arms and heads stuck out anywhere there was a gap – cupped hands collecting rainwater, some holding bowls or even just a piece of cloth to collect moisture – I saw one woman lying on her back with her hair in the black cinder mud at the tent’s edge, her mouth open, letting a rivulet of water stream down the canvas and into her mouth.

You know, it set you at war with yourself.

A back-of-my-mind part of me wanted to help – the Lutheran-church-bred Girl Scout in me wanted to race back and forth with buckets of water for everybody.

But another back-of-my-mind part of me, cowed and self-centred, was going, Thank GOD I am in Block 32. Thank GOD I am not in that tent.

And the front of my mind – the biggest part of me – was just screaming over and over in denial and disbelief: WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

‘Don’t look,’ the German Kolonka advised again, and then her voice suddenly went hard and flat. ‘Oh, what the hell, go ahead and look. If they throw any bodies out of the tent, we’ll probably have to pick them up. But stay on this side just now!’

There were twelve of us, all with numbers in the 51000s except for Irina and the Kolonka, and when we got to work, I realised that what we had in common was our height – all of us were tall. That’s why the guard had pulled Irina out of line on a whim when she’d come to get me that morning.