Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(67)

And really, sometimes you didn’t feel like talking. That day the guards didn’t even bother to tell us we could get dressed again – they just walked off to pester someone else and left us standing there at attention in our stunningly unattractive birthday suits until, after a quarter of an hour, Irina got mad and risked dragging her clothes back on without getting anyone’s permission.

‘Clothes,’ Micheline muttered as we pulled our ragged dresses over our heads.

I sighed. ‘Clothes,’ I agreed.

Later, as we carried a body together through a narrow aisle between befouled bunks, she grunted, ‘For the Rabbits.’ She gave me a look as we lowered the poor thing on to the pile, like she wanted me to answer her somehow.

I frowned at her, not daring to say anything. Micheline held my eyes with hers – she had gorgeous eyes, a clear, yellow-brown hazel with dark brown flecks.

I thought back over the handful of words she’d sprinkled me with that day, like a puzzle or a radio serial, and came up with:

‘Elodie gives clothes for the Rabbits.’



‘Yes,’ I hissed. ‘Oui.’ Just to let her know I understood.



This is what she meant: the women who sorted the clothes taken from the new prisoners were organising civilian outfits for all the remaining Rabbits. Civilian clothes were the first thing you needed if you were going to escape. Not that anyone really escaped – there was that Gypsy girl they caught in the woods and her own block beat her to death because they’d had three days’ Strafstehen while the guards hunted for her. Everyone knew about her. But it didn’t stop you thinking about escaping.

Just getting people out of Ravensbrück, even on a truck bound for another camp, counted. Hundreds of the newest prisoners were transferred in or out without being put in quarantine or even getting issued with prison clothes, and civilian clothes would help the Rabbits blend in with them. We had the clothes now, and my team was good at organising false numbers from the bodies we picked up. Even if the Rabbits couldn’t get out, they could hide in the other blocks, replacing the dead.

Lisette and Karolina had diplomatic immunity – that’s the right term. They were the only contact the camp officials had with the Rabbits. That incredibly slippery character the camp commander wanted to negotiate with them. This is the same stinker who on New Year’s Day told us over the loudspeakers that he was going to blow us all up. Here’s what he tried to get the Rabbits to do for him now:

‘Please sign a form saying you hurt your leg in an industrial accident.’

‘Please, when the Soviets get here and turn this place inside out, could you tell them how well you’ve all been treated, since it was the previous camp administration who authorised the first operations and the current administration who kept you alive.’

‘Please, all of you come forward and we will send you together to another, more comfortable, camp.’

That was the best one. We knew the camp they named had already been shut down, so . . . Did he really think people were all going to climb meekly into a lot of empty trucks specially designated for the doomed Lublin Transport and let them drive everybody out the gates towards – where? Around and around the outside walls of Ravensbrück till they got back to the gas chamber? As if we had no idea what happened to the people they loaded into trucks and drove around the walls every day? You could hear them going around. You could hear them stopping at the warehouse we had to paint black on the inside. You could hear the sobbing and yelling when they made people get out of the trucks on the other side of the wall. And then their worn and lice-ridden clothes would come back inside and Elodie had to sort them.

We knew what would happen when they loaded 200 of us into open trucks before breakfast.

‘The commander’s a stinking weasel,’ Karolina said. ‘He’s scared and he’s desperate. The Nazis are beaten and they know it, but they just won’t stop. It’s like – it’s like Ró?a when she’s angry at something – she just gets nastier and nastier even though she knows everyone will end up crying. The commander wants signed statements from us all, so he can prove to General Eisenhower how generous and humanitarian he is when the Americans get here, but when he’s got his signed statements, then he can safely kill us and pretend it was an administrative error.’

‘The Rabbits are safe, my dear,’ Lisette vowed, ‘because no one will sign anything. We will agree to nothing.’

‘No one is safe. You and I could be sentenced to execution any time – they’re only letting us come and go because we’re still wearing our numbers and can be counted. The others are only safe till someone finds them,’ Karolina retorted grimly.

Kaninchen Króliki Lapins Králíci

Králíci is Czech. I don’t know how to write ‘rabbits’ in Russian, but it sounds the same as in Polish. By the end of February everybody in the camp knew all the words for rabbit in every language of every nationality at Ravensbrück, because the Rabbit Hunt was the one thing that united us.

The Rabbits sometimes called themselves something else. They used the word król. I would not have figured this out except that Karolina made a lot of caricature portraits for people showing them as rabbits wearing little crowns, and Lisette explained it to me, because she knew I love the subtleties of words as much as she does. Król is a rare Polish word for rabbit. But it also means king.