Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(61)

But now I am longing again for Cope’s Dried Corn, boiled for two hours in milk and butter and sugar and salt. I am daydreaming about a tablespoon heaped with golden milky corn – just one spoonful.

On New Year’s Day they made us line up for a special roll call, and the stinking commander gave a speech over the loudspeakers.

It is one of the things I have nightmares about – that tinny voice droning on and on all around me, in words I can’t make head nor tail of, on and on and on. In my dreams I don’t understand the words, but at the same time I know exactly what the voice is saying.

That’s because while we were standing there, in real life, Lisette was translating a mile a minute on one side of me and Karolina on the other, a sort of madwoman’s stereo speaker set up. So I had to listen to it all twice, Karolina a little behind Lisette.

‘He says, You’ll never get out alive –’

‘He’ll never let us out alive.’

‘They won’t let the Allies get near us –’

‘He’ll kill us all before the Allies get here.’

‘They’ll dismantle the camp –’

‘He’ll mine the camp, rig it with bombs, blow up the whole thing with us in it –’

‘– And one of the gas chambers is working now –’

‘And the first selections for gassing will be tomorrow.’

This was the same stinking commander who liked to come and watch people get their backsides beaten raw every Friday. It could have been his idea of a joke: see if I can make all 50,000 of them cry on New Year’s Day. It was hard to know whether to take him seriously.

Ró?a didn’t. I could see her shoulders shaking as she tried desperately not to laugh.

‘Oh God,’ she cackled, ‘he must have really hit the New Year with a bang last night!’

He might have been kidding about the mines. He wasn’t kidding about the gas chambers though.

They started with the old and the injured and the sick, and they’d just pick you out of roll call. They tricked people into volunteering for it by telling them they’d be taken to a ‘rest camp’. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on. The Lublin Special Transport reckoned they were doomed: most of them limping, all of them condemned to death more than three years ago.

When it rained, when hail rattled on the roof, when the wind howled, when a train came clattering by, when the planes roared overhead or the air raid sirens wailed, when the anti-aircraft guns thumped and the demon Blockova Nadine Lutz couldn’t hear us, we all burst into a frenzy of whispered plots and panic.

Irina hadn’t let Nadine stop her from scavenging. She carried the copper wire from the shed wrapped round her waist like a belt. It was thin and flexible and she’d get it out under the table or over the ditches, sometimes even working at it lying blindly in the dark bunks with her hands held up over her head. Then she’d twist what she’d built carefully round her waist again and get it out later. Eventually she had to hide it in the roof behind the ceiling panels.

‘Are you making a bomb?’ Ró?a whispered in an agony of delight and curiosity, as we all balanced ourselves outside in the dark over the stinking sewer. ‘Like they did at Auschwitz?’

‘Kite!’ Karolina guessed, more sensibly.

‘It’s a plane,’ I said.

I’d been watching Irina shape the wings, the long and narrow wings of a glider. I could see where she was planning to reinforce the fuselage with her stolen strips of wood. It would be too heavy for a kite. But it might glide like a model plane, if she got a chance to cover it with her stolen paper. In the right wind it might soar for miles.

Ró?a choked back one of her insane giggles. ‘That’s not going to be big enough for all the Rabbits.’

‘Big enough for all your names though. Another escape for the Rabbits’ names!’

‘You have to write in piss so it’s invisible,’ Ró?a said knowingly. ‘That’s how we got the letter to the Pope.’

It was getting harder and harder for the guards to keep track of what we did – we couldn’t get out of the camp, but the whole place was so crowded and filthy that it was easier to hide sabotage and thievery, if you weren’t too sick to move.

‘It will need a hell of a wind,’ Irina said. ‘If we could be ready to launch – find a place to hide it –’

‘I can launch it!’ Karolina said. ‘I can launch it from the air raid ditches. I can hide it in the sandbags till we get the right wind. You can sneak it out to us in one of your Corpse Crew carts!’

‘Corpse Crew’ – more and more, that’s what they were using my team for. During the winter, as everyone started collapsing with cold and starvation and a million diseases, that’s all we did – they stopped giving us other jobs and we were just one of a dozen Corpse Crews. They gave up on us boarding up broken windows, and concentrated on clearing the bunks in the Revier and the other sickbay blocks (they kept adding extra ones, trying to keep the typhoid and tuberculosis cases separated from everyone else). There were always dead bodies piled outside the tent in the morning, and there were usually a few from our own block with so many new people coming in – the incinerator in the crematorium was always working, greasy black soot splattering the daylight sky and red cinders spattering the sky at night.