Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(54)

‘You need to learn our names,’ Ró?a whispered as we all struggled to get comfortable in our crowded bunk.

‘I know your names.’

‘All our names. You need to learn the list of Rabbits’ names. Then if you get out, you can tell everyone about us. You might be released back to your Air Force or the Red Cross might come for you. But that won’t happen to any of us because we’re all condemned. Special Transport. So if you survive the war, you have to tell everyone our names, our full names. All seventy-four of us, the living and dead.’

‘There were more than that, darling,’ Lisette reminded her. ‘Also the German Bible Student and the Ukrainian girl. And the others whose legs they amputated.’

‘Never mind the amputees,’ Ró?a said heartlessly. ‘They’re all dead and no one remembers their names anyway. There are no witnesses and there’s no evidence.’

‘God!’ I exclaimed. ‘They amputated people’s legs?’

‘Those girls were mentally ill to start with – no one will ever know who they were. Anyway, you’ve seen us. You know what happened. You know it was real.’

‘Oh, Ró?a, how can I remember all your names?’ I wailed. ‘I can’t even spell your name!’

‘In a poem,’ said Lisette. ‘Make a poem for a mnemonic. Make yourself another counting-out rhyme.’

I know the list by heart now too, their real names. But I started just the way Lisette suggested, by making myself a counting-out rhyme out of all their given names. Some of them had the same first name, so I only used each name once in the rhyme to keep it simple. I whispered it to myself in roll call and recited it in my head as I shivered between Ró?a and Irina in the bunks, my head and stomach aching with hunger, my frozen feet too numb to feel my painted toes.

Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,

Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,

Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,

Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,

Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,

Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,

Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,

Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia.





*



The seven Rabbits’ names came off the list of people they were going to execute. We were pretty sure it was just a postponement so they could catch us off guard later.

Karolina staggered back to us after nearly a week in the tent, more ravenous than we were and full of news. She’d been talking to the Jewish women in the tent who’d been transferred from Auschwitz.

‘They were killing tens of – tens of thousands of people there every day this summer,’ Karolina stuttered. ‘TENS OF THOUSANDS. Gassing them and burning the bodies, or just – just burying them in piles when the incinerators got behind – if Fischer hadn’t infected me with gangrene on purpose, for no reason at all, I wouldn’t believe the numbers either. TENS OF THOUSANDS EVERY – EVERY DAY –’

What a meaningless number. It would have wiped out Ravensbrück in a couple of days, and Ravensbrück was enormous. No wonder Karolina was stuttering.

‘Ten thousand a day in your dreams,’ Ró?a challenged bitterly. ‘Who was doing the counting? How big is Auschwitz?’

‘Bigger than Ravensbrück.’ Karolina took a deep breath and crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. ‘Listen, 7705, your number has not come up on the death list yet and you haven’t spent a week in that hellhole under the tent. Oh, I want a bath, I want to wash my hair! They pile the corpses at one end if no one comes to take them out. They dig gravel and mud out of the ground with their hands to try to cover them up. They have no toilets and they can’t go outside. They catch rainwater and snow in the tent flaps or they’d all be dead of thirst. And that is only the ones who are still capable of doing more than rocking back and forth and wailing and trying to eat their own hands –’

Lisette put a gentle arm round Karolina’s waist.

‘I saw a woman doing that,’ Karolina said, shuddering. She shook Lisette off and lowered her voice. ‘Listen, just before they started evacuating Auschwitz so the Soviets won’t be able to liberate it, there was a prisoner rebellion there. In October. The prisoners destroyed one of the crematoriums – they tried to blow up the gas chambers. They killed guards with hammers.’

‘Where did they get explosive?’ Irina asked quietly.

‘The women in the munitions factories smuggled gunpowder out to them. It took them months. Hundreds of them escaped – they escaped –’ Karolina made a funny noise, a cross between a sob and a laugh. ‘Of course everybody got caught and they were all shot, two hundred of them in a day. Except the ones who’d planned it, and the women. They were all slammed into the Auschwitz Bunker. You can imagine what’s going on there now.’ She gave that gulping laugh again. ‘They say the men gave out the women’s names. But – but the women aren’t giving them anything.’

Lisette was listening with twenty kinds of horror – horror at what had happened, at what was still happening back in Poland, at what was happening under the tent, and mainly at what had happened to Karolina and at the half-crazed way she was telling her stuttering story. But Irina and Ró?a were listening with ambition and admiration. I could tell. They’d stopped thinking about food for a minute and were thinking about rebellion.