Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(58)

We all laughed. Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.

We sure did drag out that paint job as long as we could. It was wonderful to be able to talk to each other for a little while without having to whisper or worry that someone would hit us.

I also painted words on the walls. It was such a relief to be able to write down what I was thinking instead of having to memorise it. It is true that I had to obliterate everything I’d written, but I think it is much easier to write a poem when you can write it down. I couldn’t have written ‘The Subtle Briar’ without that paint job. I spent three days slapping black paint on the walls of a disused warehouse and refining the most complex and ambitious poem I’ve ever written.

When we’d caked the entire interior of the building in black about three quarters of the way to the ceiling, they turned out all the lights and shut us in so we could paint over the places where cracks of light came in through the boarded windows and around the newly built front wall.

Try standing on a ladder in pitch-darkness with a bucket of black paint and not get any on yourself or the girl who’s on the ladder beneath you. When they let us out as it was getting dark, in time to eat, all of us were covered head to foot in black paint. I had paint in my ears. We stood blinking blindly in the harsh street lights, but of course we didn’t get any time to readjust to reality – just got shoved back into our fives and marched back to camp.

‘What the hell are they making you do?’ Ró?a demanded.

Our shed-clearing-and-painting job was a fierce discussion topic whenever we were allowed, or able, to talk. Lined up along the ditches in the dark at 4 a.m. usually.

‘They’re repurposing a maintenance shed.’

‘By boarding up and blacking out the windows? Why does it have to be so dark? What are they going to put inside it?’

‘Maybe it’s a new quarantine block – someplace to process new prisoners,’ Lisette said.

‘You know what it’s for,’ Karolina accused quietly. ‘You know it. You won’t say it, but you know it. They have all these prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and nothing to feed them. They are building a gas chamber.’

‘They are building two,’ said Irina. ‘A new building is going up outside the north wall. The men’s camp is building it.’

Hope is treacherous. Lisette insisted, ‘That is a laundry, my dear. Ravensbrück is a work camp, not a death camp – an ordinary camp!’

‘They don’t dare shoot us in handfuls,’ said Karolina. ‘They’re going to kill us all at once.’





The Subtle Briar


(by Rose Justice)

When you cut down the hybrid rose,



its blackened stump below the graft

spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.

It claws at life, weaving a raft

of suckering roots to pierce the earth.

The first thin shoot is fierce and green,

a pliant whip of furious briar

splitting the soil, gulping the light.

You hack it down. It skulks between

the flagstones of the garden path

to nurse a hungry spur in shade

against the porch. With iron spade

you dig and drag it from the gravel

and toss it living on the fire.

It claws up towards the light again



hidden from view, avoiding battle

beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,

unloved, unfed, it clings and grows

in the wild hedge. The subtle briar

armours itself with desperate thorns

and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher,

unquenchable, it now adorns

itself with blossom, till the stalk

is crowned with beauty, papery white

fine petals thin as chips of chalk

or shaven bone, drinking the light.

When you cut down the hybrid rose



to cull and plough its tender bed,

trust there is life beneath your blade:

the suckering briar below the graft,

the wildflower stock of strength and thorn

whose subtle roots are never dead.





*



It took me a long time to write ‘The Subtle Briar’, but it was translated into three languages in a day. Every time it got passed on I got another bread ration. Oh God, we needed something to cling to. We were scared.

They shot half a dozen Red Army women from our block, and six more from the Lublin Transport, though not Rabbits. No one knew anything about it ahead of time. It was a week before Christmas, and I’m sure of the timing, because Karolina wasn’t there with us for roll call that day. Nadine had caught Karolina showing off a little paper tree with tiny pop-out birds that she’d made for Lisette for a Christmas present, and had sent her to the Bunker for Fünfundzwanzig. We were standing in the early morning roll call – before breakfast, hearts aching for Karolina – when they just pulled the girls right out of line and made them take their coats off and hand them over to someone. That’s how we knew they wouldn’t be coming back.

That one girl’s face, looking back at us in defiance as they led her away, bleak and desperate, biting her lip. She went shivering to her death in the dark, in the flowered summer dress she’d been wearing when I got here. One of the other girls tried to take her hand, and the guards wouldn’t let her – they had to walk alone to their execution. We stood in silence for another half an hour while they counted us, but all I could think of was when I’d hear the shots and I’d know they were dead.