Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(81)

Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, whose testimony about the gassings at Auschwitz was so shocking that people listening in the courtroom took their headphones off so they couldn’t hear the translation any more, was my fellow prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. I was also there in the Ravensbrück infirmary, the Revier, counting bodies. I am a witness too. But I am not as brave as she is. I start to sweat when I think about standing up in front of a room full of newspaper reporters and helmeted soldiers and robed judges from four different countries, not to mention the twenty or so high-ranking Nazi leaders on trial there. When I was asked to appear as a witness at the Ravensbrück trial currently going on in Hamburg, I said no. And the shame of it is that I didn’t see or suffer anywhere near as much as Mme Vaillant-Couturier, because she was imprisoned at Auschwitz for over a year before being transported to Ravensbrück, and I was only imprisoned at Ravensbrück for six months. And Ravensbrück was an ordinary camp. Mostly.

After I got out of Ravensbrück I locked myself in a hotel room for three weeks and wouldn’t come out. I was scared of freedom. I was scared of space – of being in the open and of having to decide for myself where to go – and of having to talk to people, and of being stared at. I was also afraid to face my aunt, my elegant, gracious English aunt, who was supposed to come collect me and fatten me up and put me on an ocean liner back to Pennsylvania where I would, presumably, resume normal life.

My English Aunt Edie is elegant and gracious, but she is also very, very smart. When she discovered that a friend of mine, fellow transport pilot Maddie Brodatt, was making a delivery flight to Paris only a couple of days after Edie had been planning to come get me, she asked my friend to meet me in her place. It was the second week of May in 1945.

Aunt Edie had taken the hotel room next to mine, so she gave it to Maddie instead. The rooms were connected by a pair of private communicating doors, so we could lock each other out if we wanted to. Maddie called from reception to let me know she’d arrived. I knew I didn’t have a choice, and I was clean and respectably dressed by then, so I let her come up.

I’d been her bridesmaid the year before.

When I opened the door, she stood for a moment staring at me as if she didn’t recognise me – or as if she thought I’d disappear in a puff of smoke.

I stepped aside to let her in. We didn’t hug each other. She said, ‘Oh, Rose!’ in a pained voice, and I tried to smile at her.

‘I’m OK. They didn’t feed us very well.’ (I was still less than two-thirds my normal weight.) ‘And I just had bronchitis, and – well – my hair’s growing back.’

I touched my own head with both hands. ‘They shave your hair off –’ I stopped. I couldn’t explain.

‘Because of nits?’

‘No, just to make you miserable. The last time they did it to me was because I was humming during roll call. It’s OK – really it’s –’

‘Stow it, Rosie,’ she said very gently and persuasively, and took me by the elbow and made me sit down at the vanity table by the open window where I’d been pouring out the story of my imprisonment in pen and ink for the past three weeks.

‘What’s the view like?’ Maddie asked. The drapes and shutters were closed because everything was still under blackout restrictions; we were still at war.

‘Fantastic. Turn out the lights and we can open the curtains. Not much to see in the dark though.’ Maddie followed my orders, and then stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders. There was no light in the Place Vend?me, but it was so open and so dark that it seemed like the whole sky was on fire with starlight.

‘You know we are staying in the former Luftwaffe headquarters!’ Maddie exclaimed suddenly.

‘Oh!’ It hadn’t occurred to me. ‘I never thought about that.’

‘How could you not!’

We both laughed a little. ‘I haven’t been out since I got here,’ I confessed.

‘What, not even in that smashing bar in the courtyard? This place is swarming with Americans! Journalists and war correspondents, lots of writers! You should be talking to people, sharing your poems!’

I shook my head. ‘All those strangers staring. I couldn’t.’

‘Golly, Rose, I’ll go with you tonight. We need to celebrate. Germany surrendered this morning. Everyone at the airfield was over the moon! General De Gaulle is going to make an official announcement here in Paris tomorrow afternoon – it’ll be a holiday everywhere.’

And there was Arcturus, rising over the other side of the square, just like Karolina had told me we would see it in the spring when the war was over.

Karolina was dead. I started to cry.

We didn’t go to the bar. Maddie stayed with me in my room and I let her read what I’d written over the past three weeks.

It was so easy just to hand over the notebook. I didn’t have to talk about what had happened to me, I didn’t have to burst into tears or go red or stammer or choke up and not be able to get any further. I just gave her my notebook and she read it and she knew.

I went to sleep before she finished and when I woke up in the middle of the night she was sitting next to me on the bed, with the bedside light on and my notebook propped against her knees, still reading. She didn’t know I was awake – I was curled up because I always sleep curled up now, a habit of trying to keep warm when there’s no mattress and no blanket, no glass in the window below you and no fuel in the coal stove on the other side of the barrack. I was turned away from Maddie, but I could feel her there next to me, warm against my back, and hear the flutter of paper every now and then; she turned pages with one hand, because her left hand was on my shoulder, just resting there firmly, and I could see the light in the ruby on her old French wedding ring.