Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(64)

Micheline saw me thinking about it. She shook her head at me to stop me opening my mouth.

‘No one will notice another body here tomorrow morning,’ Micheline suggested to Anna brutally. ‘No one counts the corpses more than once. If we get the chaos the Soviet electricians promise, hide in here.’





For Anna


(by Rose Justice)

Your sullen sneer,



thin lips and

unlit cigarette

have disappeared

without a trace

and no one cares

and we’ll forget.

I don’t care either



but I saw

desperate and raw

fear in your face –

you said you’d hide.

I wonder now

how hard you tried –

and if you lived

or if you died,

I wonder how.





*



Block 32 that night was a prison all on its own, swarming with guards and dogs, the wire gate locked, the door to the barrack barred. It was almost surprising they let the rest of us back in, but they did, and we got our soup ration as usual. We even fought over it sort of as usual:

‘Here, take mine, you need all the energy you can get tonight.’

Or more realistically, ‘Look, just give me yours, ’cause you won’t need it if they kill you tomorrow morning anyway.’

Karolina had the same fierce, dazed gleam of insanity in her eyes as our German Kolonka Anna – the look of crazed disbelief at the UNFAIRNESS of it.

Lisette just looked like Lisette. Ró?a was a pain in the neck.

‘What do you think I’ll look like when I go up in smoke from the crematorium chimney, Rosie? As sexy as Karolina, slinking across the sky?’

‘Will you shut up!’

She wasn’t trying to be funny. She was trying to be brave, Ró?yczka-style. But it was making Karolina cry.

Irina took hold of my hand and pressed it against her waist. Tied inside her dress was a pair of wire-cutters. The hard line of her mouth was set in the ghost of a grin. She spread her palm and rocked her hand at me. Still a combat pilot.

The thing was, so many people were sobbing and crying and praying that night, that neither the guards nor Nadine could hear us as the Rabbits made their escape. I crawled with Ró?a and Karolina over the infested bare boards that counted as our bunks – people moved out of our way. Everybody helped. When one of the guards shouted or the dogs started growling, we lay flat and sobbed loud and genuine sobs of fear and frustration. It was easy.

Irina and a couple of the other Russians got out first, and they did the dirty and dangerous work of cutting a hole in the wire that fenced off Block 32 from the rest of the camp. Then we spent most of the night hoisting all the Lublin Special Transport girls out a couple of the broken windows. I had an easy job – I had to keep stuffing wads of newspaper over the jagged glass around the edges of the window frame.

The tricky part was crossing the yard between the barrack and the fence without being seen, and getting through the fence. I didn’t have to do it myself, but it still makes me shiver to think about it. Nobody got caught, but my gosh we worked slowly – though after the first dozen Rabbits had made it through the fence we got good at it.

It took two of us on one side of the window and two on the other to lift one person out efficiently. Then, one by one in the dark, Irina and her Red Army friends escorted all the Lublin Transport Rabbits through the fence into the main camp. After that they were on their own – on crutches or limping or clinging to each other.

Irina caught Ró?a herself when it was her turn.

‘The tent is the nearest place to hide,’ Irina whispered.

‘I’m not going back there,’ Karolina fired down at her, next in line to sneak out.

But Ró?a couldn’t walk – not really, not in the dark – and Karolina was stuck with her.

‘If we don’t come back, Rose knows all our names,’ Ró?a said in ringing tones of menace, a little too loud.

‘Shut up, you stupid little girl!’ Karolina gasped hysterically. ‘Or they’ll kill Rose too, and there will be NO ONE who gets out of here alive to tell anyone!’

‘The whole camp knows. Everybody knows. Rose will tell the world.’ Ró?a growled orders at me. ‘You are to tell the world, Rose, you hear me?’

‘I will! I promise!’

Irina took her under her arm to help her scuttle limping towards the hole in the fence.

Sometime before the 4 a.m. Screamer, Irina and I crept back to our own bunk in the pitch-black, and that hellhole was so darn overcrowded that when we got to our spots, there were new prisoners sleeping soundly in place of Lisette and Karolina and Ró?a – I don’t know who they were.

We lined up for roll call at 4.30 a.m. in what felt like a crowd of strangers, Irina and I at sea without our Camp Family. It felt like the whole Lublin Transport was missing.

‘Think they’ll kill us instead?’ Irina whispered.

‘Maybe,’ I gulped, thinking of Anna’s relentless description of poison gas, and my impossible promise to make sure that everybody knew everything when it was all over.

Irina tilted her hand at me. ‘Taran. We go down fighting.’

They read the list of numbers in German. It was like listening to a swarm of droning hornets.