Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(51)

Oh God, dry words on a page. How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about was death and imaginary strawberries?

‘Rose, let’s make a book,’ Ró?a whispered to me as we lay sleepless and shivering and scratching in the restless dark. ‘I want to do something like your poems. Karolina makes moving pictures, Irina makes planes – I want to make something. So you could write the poems in English and I could translate them into Polish – a kind of memory book –’

‘We could get everybody to do her own memory!’

‘A page for each of us, for each of the Rabbits –’

‘Your whole transport. The whole Lublin Transport.’

‘Yes, the ones who have been murdered, too. We’ll have photos of them as civilians – you’ll have to track those down after you get out, OK?’

‘We’ll need paper.’

‘And recipes! We can get a recipe from everybody!’

‘Paper.’

‘Irina can organise some paper for us. It will be better than just a list of names – it will be about people.’

Our Blockova Gitte came crashing through the evening soup squabble, like a speedboat ploughing up waves in the Arctic, tagging people. Karolina Salska was one of them.

‘You’re on tomorrow’s list.’ Half a dozen of us heard the icy whisper. There was no reason I should know what she meant, but I knew. I knew intuitively, along with everybody else who had experience of what it meant, and the hair stood up all down my spine.

‘No!’ Lisette gasped fiercely. ‘They’re not going to execute any more Rabbits.’

‘That’s why I’m telling you now,’ Gitte said. ‘There are seven from my block on the list. We’ll hide you all in the tent with the transfer prisoners.’

Block 32 was tucked away in a southern spur of the camp, in a corner, which gave us a sort of ‘back to the wall’ advantage sometimes – we always knew when anyone was coming for us because they could only approach from one direction. And it was right next to the tent. I hadn’t ever thought about that being an advantage.

When Gitte said about hiding in the tent, Lisette went white. And then her face closed down. ‘They’ll miss us at roll call. They pull you out of the morning roll call. They’ll pull someone else out instead.’

‘They’ll know we’re hiding people, but what else can we do? We’ve got to show them we’re not going to give you up without another fight. They don’t like it when we fight back. Too many people find out.’

Karolina, also white, asked, ‘How will we get in the tent?’

‘The fence gate’s still open. I’ll let you out now.’

The Block 32 numbers didn’t come out right in that night’s roll call – no surprise. They shouted and hustled the dogs around us and checked our numbers about a hundred times. We had to stand there with our arms at our sides, looking straight ahead.

They made us stand there for a solid day.

When they made you stand there for hours and hours like that as punishment, they called it Strafstehen, ‘punishment standing’. But this time it was different. It was the worst Strafstehen of the whole time I was there, the longest and the hungriest; but it didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like a battle.

All night, all the next day, and past lights-out the next night – with nothing to eat and nothing to drink. It wasn’t the coldest day we ever had to stand out there for hours and hours, but it was November now and it was darned cold. It snowed for most of the afternoon, squally, blowing flurries that didn’t stick. They let us march in place because the one thing they couldn’t stop us doing was shuffling our feet to keep warm. I held my breath and let it out slowly, watching how it made a little cloud in front of my face, amazed there was enough warmth somewhere deep inside my body that the air in me could condense into cloud on its way out.

People started to collapse. Ró?a collapsed. Irina and I pulled her to her feet. Ró?a tried to fall over again on purpose, throwing her full weight into it, but she weighed nothing. We linked our arms through hers to keep her up. Lisette gave a sob and Irina risked hissing a command in Russian at Ró?a to get her to behave – none of us wanted an SS guard to notice us.

But it was different. We had a purpose – we had a mission. We were standing there because we were fighting. Maybe if we’d given up the seven hiding in the tent they’d have let us go earlier. But none of us gave up anybody.

At midday, in the snow flurries, we heard the gunshots over the walls – they always took people outside the camp to shoot them. Three. There were supposed to be ten. Our seven didn’t get shot.

They let us go, I think, because they’d grown sick of guarding us. We staggered in a wild rush for the faucets in the washroom and handed out water to each other in bowls and buckets and tin cups, all of us crazed with thirst. Lisette stripped off her messed-up pants and ran water through them and put them back on wet. We piled into the bunks, hundreds of us climbing over one another in the dark, and collapsed in gasping, clinging bundles of misery. The snow turned into rain again, pattering on the wooden roof. It sounded just like the rain on the sleeping porch.