Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(79)

I can’t believe that this is all I get – a torn handkerchief and a drawing on half a piece of folded paper. That these scraps of garbage are all I have left of any of them. And there isn’t a thing I can do about it – maybe not ever.

I’m not going to go home either.





Part 3





Nuremberg





Craig Castle, Castle Craig, Scotland



December 23, 1946



I am thinking about that line from the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence – the words they made me write at the Amercian Embassy last year to prove that I am really Rose: A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

DARN IT. ‘Declare the causes.’ That is another way of saying, TELL THE WORLD.

It is a year and a half since I got back from Germany and I haven’t really told the world. I have been fooling myself about it for a while. I gave the Rabbits’ names to the US Embassy. Olympia Review published most of my Ravensbrück poems – but not ‘Service of the Dead’, ‘Gas Leak’ or ‘The Ditch’, which the poetry editor, Sue Parker, thought were all just too nasty to print. It says in her letter: ‘We feel these are so grotesque that they detract from the lyrical sensitivity of your other poems.’ And I didn’t argue.

To be fair to Parky, she called the other poems ‘magnificent’ and had the inspired idea of combining ‘The Subtle Briar’ with the counting-out rhyme of the Rabbits’ names. But it was easy going along with her editorial suggestions. I didn’t have to do anything except type them up for her. She forwarded all the nice letters that came in to the magazine afterwards, and she didn’t let me read the ones accusing me of ‘sensationalism’ and ‘false reporting’.

When the Mount Jericho Rotary Club asked me to come and talk to them, I was able to say no because I live in Scotland now and it was too far for me to travel. But when the English Department of the University of Edinburgh got hold of a copy of the Olympia Review and wanted me to come read the poems aloud in one of their classes, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I said I would, and I went, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even stay in the classroom while someone else read them. The professor took me into his office and made me drink a glass of sherry while it was going on, and I went back in afterwards when it was over and they all applauded very soberly. I said thank you and then ran away while they were getting out of their seats, before anyone could talk to me about the poems.

So much for telling the world.

But I just couldn’t escape the ripples spread by the Olympia Review. The officials organising the trials against the Ravensbrück administration managed to track me down as well. They asked me to come be a witness at the first Ravensbrück tribunal in Hamburg, in Germany, which has just started. Of course, all this summer I was wolfing down the news of the international tribunal in Nuremberg, as the Allied governments tried and sentenced the high-ranking Nazi officials. If the invitation to the Ravensbrück trial had come a week earlier I’d have been nervous about it, but I’d probably still have said yes, of course I’ll come. Unfortunately I got the letter right after that Edinburgh University poetry reading fiasco. I said no. When I got Lisette’s letter a week later I’d already weaselled out of it.

I have been feeling miserable about it ever since – I am a witness. I am a victim and a witness. And the Ravensbrück tribunals are being run by the British; so being an English-speaking witness, of English heritage, imprisoned while working for a civilian British organisation, makes me a valuable witness. I want to be a witness. I want to be responsible. I want to keep my promises to the people I loved whose lives were violated and ruined. But I have never spoken aloud to anyone in detail about what happened to me at Ravensbrück. I made a life-and-death promise that I would, and I am scared to do it.

Also, at the Nuremberg tribunal they handed out a lot of death sentences. I want retribution for my friends, and for the millions like them that I don’t know about. But I am fearful of having a hand in anyone’s death sentence. It may be just punishment for what they did – it may be the only just punishment. And the sentencing won’t be my decision. But it seems like an empty victory to me, killing all the perpetrators. I want retribution, but so much more than that I just wish everything could be put right.

I have always felt this way. Even before Ravensbrück. I put it in my ‘Battle Hymn of 1944’ poem:

‘Fight with realistic hope, not to destroy

all the world’s wrong, but to renew its good.’





Then I had the idea of doing a new story for Olympia. I wrote to Parky telling her about the poetry-reading fiasco, and my cowardice about the trial, and Lisette’s suggestion that even if I didn’t go to Hamburg, I should go along to watch the Nazi Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg – and I offered to go as a journalist for Olympia. I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone; I could just sit in the gallery with the other reporters and listen and take notes. It would be relevant to my studies as a medical student – I could write a report for my university tutor as well as for Olympia. I could help to ‘tell the world’ from behind the mostly anonymous shields of my notebook and typewriter. Parky sent me the world’s most enthusiastic yes – she wired me money for a train ticket. So I went.