Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(69)
Except – the picture wouldn’t tell you the whole story, would it? It wouldn’t show you how Irina was frantically trying to cut us an escape route in the fence behind us, or tell you that the front row of us was defensive – me and the three brave Red Army girls from Block 32 who liked to pretend they were heavies had all moved to stand in front of Ró?a and the other Rabbits. The man who’d raised his gun swept the barrel up and down our pathetic front line, looking for an easy gap.
Ró?a screamed in Polish at the top of her voice, ‘Bread! Bread! The SS are giving out bread!’
A mob swarmed over us, first right off the street, and then a horde of starving women came piling towards us from the tent.
‘BREAD! BREAD HERE!’ we all screamed, because nobody cared if there was any or not – just the idea of bread was enough to cause glorious chaos. Irina and I and the Russian girls pushed Ró?a and everybody on their stomachs through a plate-sized hole between the fence and the ground, and they hid in the Revier. The rest of us were safe in the crowd.
Safe. What a completely loony use of the word ‘safe’. Exactly the way I have been using ‘hope’.
We prised up the filthy red clay tiles in the Block 32 washroom and dug a pit under the floor of the barrack, stinking of sewage and cold as the Arctic, and lined the hole with straw and a couple of the last rotting cotton blankets, and we hid Ró?a and five of the worst-damaged girls there for a week.
The SS didn’t kill any Rabbits. It didn’t stop them gassing 200 other prisoners every day. You always think you’re immortal, don’t you? I mean, it hasn’t happened yet. I am still alive.
When they read off my number over the loudspeakers I didn’t even hear it. I was so busy listening out for Ró?a’s number, or Karolina’s, it never occurred to me to listen for mine. But of course I was still wearing it, and I was still being counted every morning and night as Available Prisoner 51498. They called out lists of doomed prisoner numbers all the time. Not everyone could hide. One of the French girls in our block had escaped a selection only because her mother had swapped numbers with her and been gassed in her place.
It was still dark and no one had had breakfast yet. Karolina grabbed me round the waist.
‘Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig,’ she hissed in my ear. 51498.
Then I heard her, but I still didn’t take it in for a moment or two. And then my heart turned into a block of ice.
‘What? Why?’
You face it with a total lack of comprehension, even though less than two weeks ago, when we got caught in front of the Revier fence, I’d thought they were going to shoot me.
‘It is your transport,’ Lisette gasped. ‘The French girls you came with. All of them.’
I stood frozen and staring, completely unable to believe it or react. A deer in headlights.
Irina peeled away Karolina’s arm and took me by the wrist. She stepped out of line with me, and led me quietly out of our row and through the gate towards the Lagerstrasse. No one else from our block had been called, so there wasn’t anyone to go with me to the trucks, and they let Irina lead me out.
I went with her meekly.
We walked hand in hand past the tent. But instead of heading towards the gates where they parked the terrible open trucks, Irina guided me to double back around the far side of the tent. When we got close to the fence around Block 32 she put a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me to the ground, and got down beside me, and we crawled back into the parade ground around our block through the hole in the fence. People saw us, but no guards did. No one said anything as Irina and I climbed in the back window of our barrack, the one we’d used as an escape route when we first hid the Rabbits.
Inside the barrack, Irina made me take off my damp coat and sit on the floor close to the cranky little stove that was supposed to heat the whole place. There wasn’t a fire in it now, but it was still warm to touch because the Demon Nadine slept next to it and sometimes managed to stoke it up with scraps of coal or wood before she went to sleep. Irina got me a drink of water. Neither of us said anything; she just stood there waiting patiently while I drank the water, and then finally she reached down to help me back to my feet.
‘Come, Rosie,’ she insisted. ‘Hide with Ró?yczka.’
I shook my head, because I didn’t see the point – I wasn’t a Rabbit.
But I was too numb to rebel or take control of myself. So I let Irina lead me into the washroom, to the place under the sinks where the boards and filthy matting covered up our six hidden Rabbits in the pit under the floor. Irina pulled up a board and made me crawl in with them.
Invisible hands pulled me down beside the others. Irina laid the false floor back in place above us, and the six girls already hiding there found an impossible space for me alongside them – like playing sardines. For the first ten minutes I couldn’t do anything but retch. I thought I’d suffocate.
‘Worse than being gassed,’ came Ró?a’s infuriatingly cheerful whisper. ‘Is that who I think it is?’
When I figured out how to breathe I started to cry.
Someone hissed angrily, ‘Shut up, you idiot!’ because I was making too much noise. And wasting air.
‘What are you doing here, 51498?’ Ró?a whispered in my ear.
‘They are gassing my whole transport,’ I sobbed.