Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(53)
My hand faltered in the middle of a sentence that began, ‘The day before you’re going to cook, wash and peel a bushel of potatoes, then –’
I couldn’t write the word ‘cut’. I think I left it out. Actually, the writing had now become an excuse so I didn’t have to look at her.
‘So I did my job,’ she went on. ‘At first I didn’t have to go near the – um, the patients – I got my backside pinched by the doctors now and then, because I was a pretty German patriot and not a Polish Special Transport Ravensbrück scarecrow condemned to death and good for nothing but scientific experimentation, but I didn’t enjoy knowing what was going on, you know? I didn’t feel proud to be advancing medical research and I didn’t believe we were anyway. They were sloppy about monitoring the experiments and sometimes they never followed up on them. And I didn’t like my work enough to want to do it well myself.’ She let out a gasp of smoke. ‘You wouldn’t believe the shitty jobs I’ve had to do in the last three years. This –’ She waved her cigarette at the bony corpses stacked against the wall in the unused shower stalls. ‘This is harmless. Stripping dead bodies – not much fun, but harmless. Sharpening knives that you know are going to be used to carve up some kid’s tibia and fibula so they can swap pieces of them around – that’s hard to justify.’
She asked suddenly, ‘Are you listening?’
The scrap of paper slid out from beneath my pencil stub and fluttered into the sink. ‘Of course I’m listening.’
‘They’d give the girls ether before they operated on them, and inject them with Evipan to knock them out. One day the usual nurse assistant wasn’t there for some reason and they got me to step in for her. Those poor kids knew by then what was going to happen to them, but they really were like rabbits – just so glad to get a bath and clean sheets to sleep in, so it must be OK, right? Afterwards, after they woke up and the anaesthetic wore off and the fever and infection set in and they couldn’t even see what had happened because they were up to their hips in plaster, they’d lie there screaming or sobbing or begging for lemonade – lemonade!’ She gave a hoarse bark of laughter. ‘I stole morphine for them. I’d go around injecting them when no one was looking. They called me the Angel of Sleep. I didn’t try to talk to them – they all hated me like poison because they knew I’d helped put some of them under for the operations. But they took the morphine when I could get it.’
Anna took another drag on her cigarette. It was nearly done. We could only risk another minute or two – maybe less, if someone brought another body in.
‘So, well, then I got transferred to an office job for the Occupation army in France for a while, because they needed a pharmacist and a driver and a translator and they got all three for the price of one by hiring me. I thought that job would be better, but it turned out worse, so then I got transferred back to Berlin, and my new boss got mad at me because I wouldn’t f*ck him. So he gave me a choice – take my pants off for him or go back to Ravensbrück, as a prisoner this time. He thought he had a sure winner with that one, seeing as I’d been to Ravensbrück and knew what I was getting into, but actually I was fed up with playing their game by then. I’d seen a lot of . . . things I didn’t like. And I didn’t want to spread my legs for him at all, ever, and I knew that I’d be a Kolonka or a Blockova here – and also, when I’d been here before, it was run like a soldiers’ camp, much cleaner and more orderly – we used to show it off to the Red Cross, none of these schmootzichs grabbing at your bread, no shithole tent full of evacuees from other camps, only two to a bunk and enough blankets and toilets that worked. So, yeah, that was my choice.’
There wasn’t a thing left of her cigarette but a damp shred of stolen onion-skin typing paper, which she spat into the sink.
‘The bastard raped me anyway before he arrested me. The f*cking bastard. He had to get help from a bunch of his pals, because I fought back. I got convicted of assaulting my boss.’ She pointed to her green triangle. ‘German criminal, right? So I’m back in the Revier at Ravensbrück, where I started. OK, I’ll get you some calcium injections. But don’t you ever tell anybody who you get them from. Much better they don’t know I’m a fellow prisoner now.’
I nodded. I held up the crumpled scrap of paper with the half-finished Fasnacht recipe.
‘I’m not done.’
‘Do it next time.’
We hid the recipe in the quarter-inch gap between the wall and the sink.
Karolina and the other condemned Rabbits were still hiding, and Gitte bargained for them with the camp authorities. ‘Take these seven off the list and the whole Lublin Special Transport will cooperate with you – they’ll line up for you in perfect order – they’ll testify that they’ve been treated well – they’ll sign their names as testimony.’
The Lublin Special Transport refused to do that in the past, and no one really believed they were going to do it now.
In desperation Gitte threatened, ‘The whole camp knows. The whole camp knows what happened to the Rabbits. Their names got out before and they’ll get out again. If you kill any more of them, someone is going to tell the world.’
It doesn’t sound like much of a threat, does it? Someone is going to tell the world. But when the war is over, that stinking commander and those soulless doctors will all have to get real jobs again, and who will want Drs Fischer and Gebhardt cutting up their legs after what they did to Ró?a’s? They knew what the reaction would be when people found out, when the Allied soldiers found the camps. When people started to ask them to explain, to account for what they’d done. They knew. And they were scared.