Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(68)

There is a rare English word for rabbit, coney, which also sounds a little like the German word for king – K?nig. It’s also like the Dutch word for rabbit, konijn. I’d turn all this into a poem if only I could find a connection that wasn’t a coincidence, or if it worked better in English. The Kings of Ravensbrück.

Because, in a crazy way, they ruled the place.

I want so desperately to remember it. Hiding the Rabbits gave us back our lives. But so many of the things we did to save them were unspeakable and I don’t think I can write about it. Ró?a hitching rides with me and Irina as we worked – as though we were hauling turnips? Filling in the missing people at roll call with bodies stolen from the Revier, so that our numbers always came out right when they counted us, no matter who wasn’t there? Only in Block 32. I said before that we were really good at propping people up.

It’s not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible – the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else.

But it’s not civilised. There is something indecent about it – really foully indecent. The civilised Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. And I can’t write about it.

I did make up a poem about it, ‘Service of the Dead’, but I just can’t write it down.

I think it is the most terrible thing that was done to me – that I have become so indifferent about the dead. I would be able to do a human anatomy course without ever feeling faint, do surgery with steady hands, clean up anything and not be sick and never mind the blood.

Maybe I could be a doctor.

A real one – go to medical school –

Maybe I could! I could be a poet and a doctor – like William Carlos Williams! A new direction – a new world – I could help fix things now. How does his poem go, ‘Spring and All’ –

THEY ENTER THE NEW WORLD NAKED,

COLD, UNCERTAIN OF ALL

SAVE THAT THEY ENTER. ALL ABOUT THEM

THE COLD, FAMILIAR WIND –





A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could.



This is the first I have thought of it. Maybe I could.





May 3, 1945



Paris



There were five dozen people from the Lublin Special Transport in hiding. That’s a lot of people to hide. Worse than that, it’s a lot of people to feed when there isn’t any food.

We had to keep moving people around, and sometimes they spotted us doing it. They’d corner people and we were just so desperate we’d do anything to get away – a couple of girls picked up another prisoner and threw her at the guards who were after them. Stand-offs with dogs. Climbing in and out of broken windows, hiding in the bunks in the tuberculosis block with dying women so horribly contagious that the guards wouldn’t come in. Irina’s wire-cutters got passed around, because you never knew who’d need a weapon. Most of the girls weren’t strong enough to do anything with them anyway, but it made you feel brave just to carry a pair of stolen wire-cutters. They always came back.

They saved a dozen lives when Irina and Ró?a and I got caught by SS guards with guns, cornered against the fence around the Revier.

It was a Sunday. On Sunday, theoretically, you were allowed to walk up and down the Lagerstrasse for a couple of hours chatting with a friend and drying your underpants, if you had any – you could wash them under a spigot, but you couldn’t hang them anywhere or someone would steal them, so you just paced up and down holding them out in front of you and flapping them around. That Sunday we weren’t drying underwear. We were shifting a bunch of Rabbits from one hiding place to another. You weren’t supposed to walk with more than one or two other people on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d followed that rule. But we were more or less together just because the street was so crowded, and the guards were on the lookout for people who limped. That day there were too many Rabbits together in the same place.

It happened fast. They rounded us up and backed us against the fence. I think it was partly our own fault, because we were so used to being herded that it took us a moment to realise the guards had spotted our Rabbits, and weren’t just trying to clear a path for some high-ranking official or a transport truck.

‘A selection!’ Irina guessed, and a couple of people heard her and started to cry, because now we all thought we were going to be gassed.

‘Shut up! Stand up straight!’ Ró?a barked at the other Rabbits in German, like an SS turkey buzzard herself. Selections weren’t usually random – they went for the older women, or the sick ones, or people who looked sick. Having a faceful of cold sores or impetigo put you at high risk of being gassed. So you stood up straight and tried to look healthy during selections. Or pinched each other’s cheeks to make them glow, like we used to do in the bathroom before a school dance, when we were too young to wear make-up.

In the back of our huddle, Irina struggled to hack a hole in the fence around the Revier behind us. The rest of us tried to hide what she was doing. The guards surrounding us weren’t the usual SS women – these were men, armed soldiers. For a moment we stood facing each other like opposing dodgeball teams.

I wonder what we looked like? Fifteen filthy, haggard, ragged, wild-eyed girls – half of us crippled – facing off against two dozen tall, strong, well-fed boys with rifles. What did it look like, as the troop leader slowly raised his gun? I wish I had a picture of us all. I wish there were a picture of it on the front page of the New York Times. No one will ever believe me.