Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(71)

‘Where’s Irina?’ we asked together.

‘She’s in the Punishment Block –’

‘Because –?’ Ró?a interrupted, and then guessed, ‘For fighting with another prisoner during roll call, right? For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat?’

Lisette pressed her thin lips together, and I caught the crazed wet gleam in her eyes that had been there when I’d first met her, right after Zosia and Genca had been shot. Not for the first time, I wanted to punch Ró?a in the teeth.
‘For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat,’ Lisette agreed. ‘They are shipping out the whole Punishment Block this morning; I don’t know why, but you are going with them.’

‘In these clothes?’

‘There will be some Warsaw evacuees as well; they’re still wearing civilian clothes. You know where the transport trucks line up? You’ll have to wait till they bring Irina’s block out and then get into line with them. Oh, darling Ró?yczka –’

‘Rose will take care of me,’ Ró?a said with composure. Because I couldn’t say it myself. I wasn’t sure.

‘What if they take you straight to –’

‘What if they take us straight to Monte Carlo? We’ll be rich!’ Ró?a laughed hilariously.

Lisette kissed Ró?a on both cheeks. She gave me six slices of bread, wealth beyond imagining – two slices each, two days’ worth, to last us who knew how long. And who knew where she got it. Then she kissed me too.

‘Get her out,’ Lisette said. She didn’t say goodbye to us. But of course she hadn’t said goodbye to any of her other children. And this time she had a slender hope we weren’t going to be killed.

And this time she was right, as it happens, though she never knew, and may be dead. I can’t believe Lisette is dead, but she probably is, and I’ll never know that either.

It was about six weeks ago – I have been in Paris for just over two weeks, writing and writing, and we left Ravensbrück late in March. It hadn’t stopped snowing when we left – at that point I thought it was never going to stop snowing.

Irina was easy to find because she is so tall, and because of her white hair. She looked as dazed and crazed as Lisette, standing in line waiting to climb into the transport truck. She was staring at nothing. We couldn’t get near her, but we got into the same truck.

You know, I think we could have climbed into any truck we wanted to. Who’d have ever dreamed that any prisoner would willingly climb into one of those stinking, overcrowded, hellbound crates? Who’d have dreamed that I would?

It was bomb fuses all over again – like taking the fuse away from the boy on the railway tracks, or refusing to make the relay. I didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t. I had to climb into that truck with Ró?a. For Karolina – for Lisette. For Micheline and Elodie. For Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia –

Controlled flight into terrain.

We were expecting something like a three-day trip with maybe a bucket of water to share among us, nothing to use for a toilet, and having to sleep standing up because there wasn’t any room to sit down. We were expecting that, prepared for it. Resigned to it anyway. But the journey didn’t take much more than an hour. And we knew we’d really been driving somewhere, not going in the slow and terrible final circle around the outside of the camp.

They didn’t let us out right away. The hours crawled by. When they finally opened the trucks, for the first few minutes, while everybody was untangling themselves from one another and gulping in fresh air, there were only two things I thought about: hiding Ró?a’s legs, and getting to Irina. I dragged Ró?a under one arm and I shoved my way towards Irina’s white head. Irina caught Ró?a under her other arm and then I’d done both my jobs.

‘Where is this place?’ Irina asked pointlessly. Who had any idea? It was a rhetorical question and I looked around rhetorically –

And I knew where we were. I knew where we were.

We were in the exact same parking lot I’d pulled up in on the back of the mechanic’s motorcycle when Karl Womelsdorff and I flew to Neubrandenburg last September. It could have been anywhere, the loading area for any factory complex. There wasn’t really anything distinctive about it. But it is emblazoned on my brain and I recognised it.

‘We’re in Neubrandenburg,’ I said. ‘It’s one of the Ravensbrück satellite camps. They make aircraft parts here – there’s an airfield. And a town.’

Ró?a acted so fast. ‘Give me the bread,’ she demanded in a whisper, and I stupidly gave it to her.

‘BREAD!’ she screamed, just the way she’d done in front of the fence by the Revier. ‘Das Brot! Chleb! Le pain! The SS are giving out bread!’

There was another instant riot. Only this time there really was bread.

She threw it with calculated cunning and accuracy into the middle of the crowd of hundreds of starving women climbing out of the trucks. They didn’t mob us – they mobbed the bread. All the available guards piled in after them to sort out the havoc. There were big chain-link fences topped with barbed wire around the yard, but the vehicle gates were still open wide.

Ró?a ran. Or didn’t run exactly, just hurled herself in her ridiculous lopsided, gimpy lurch away from the crowd and round the truck we’d just climbed out of. Irina and I sprinted after her, but she was in the open before we were, and before we could catch up she was out of the gates and into the road.