Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(86)

Weight, weight – a heavy conscience. We have heaped more destruction on the German cities than they have heaped on us, and that is the truth. Weight. Rubble to clear.

Nuremberg – it is correctly Nürnberg in German – is one of the cities that we hit hard. But it got chosen for the International Military Tribunal for war crimes because the Palace of Justice is still standing, with a good secure prison still attached to it. And of course it is the symbolic centre for the birth of Nazism, so it seems like a good place to restore things. The IMT earlier this year was run by the Allied powers. The Doctors’ Trial is being run by the Americans – it’s actually called ‘United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al.’. The city of Nuremberg is still a wreck, and I was pretty much forbidden to go out of the hotel alone after I got there. I didn’t see anything of the medieval city the whole time I was there, although I think it would have made me sad if I did – ninety per cent of it is destroyed.

I got driven to the train station to meet Ró?a. The GI who did the driving had a gun with him, so I felt pretty safe, but the medical expert from the tribunal, Dr Leo Alexander, came along too.

‘I don’t mind going by myself,’ I said.

‘Neither do I,’ he said, smiling through his moustache. ‘We’ll be braver together.’

He’d been very kind to me ever since I arrived – warm but serious, an intense, earnest man impassioned with his job of interviewing and examining the Ravensbrück Rabbits and preparing their statements. That’s the right word for it – impassioned. He was born in Austria and emigrated to the US in 1934, I think because he was Jewish; you could still hear the German accent (or Austrian or whatever it is). He was eager to meet Ró?a, the first of the Rabbits to arrive. She’d taken the train all the way from Sweden – it crosses the Baltic Sea on a ferry, like the Golden Arrow. As far as I knew, Ró?a hadn’t been in another airplane since the snowy night in March 1945 when I flew her out of Germany.

It took us a moment to recognise each other – even though Ró?a still had to walk with a supporting stick and she still had the crazed gleam in her eyes that Maddie and Bob had agreed on in the Ritz on VE Day. It was over a year and a half later and she still had it.

She had to switch sides with her cane so she could shake hands.

‘I am pleased to meet you, Dr Alexander,’ she said in English.

‘The pleasure is mine, Miss Czajkowska,’ he answered.

Ró?a held her cane hooked over her left arm, swinging it a little. She turned to me and held out her hand. She didn’t smile or rush to swallow me in a bear hug, but I felt everything in our clasped hands, even through our gloves.

‘Hello, Rose Justice,’ she said coolly.

It’s no wonder I didn’t recognise her. When I’d first met her, when she was seventeen, she’d been so emaciated I’d thought she was about eleven. She wasn’t any taller now, still petite, but so curvy – she wasn’t carrying any extra weight, but there was nothing angular or pointy about her anywhere – all curves. She was incredibly lovely. I’d once seen a glimpse of that, but had never imagined I’d see her in her full glory. Her hair was exactly the colour of caramel, coppery gold and gleaming, not long, but stylishly permed and framing a face like a china doll’s. She had on a camel-hair coat and a grey wool suit, dull but smart – and showing off all the amazing curves.

‘Hello, Ró?yczka,’ I said – little Rosie.

We were subdued in the car going back to the hotel. The bomb damage isn’t as obvious at night as it is in the daytime, but when you do notice it at night, it’s eerier. A dark row of empty windows with stars shining through them. A big pale heap you think is a snow bank until you get close enough to see it’s a pile of broken marble. A grey shadow like a naked torso crawling through the rubble in a vacant lot. By day you’d just see a scrap of newspaper fluttering aimlessly.

‘I didn’t think Germany would look like this,’ Ró?a said.

‘All of Europe looks like this!’ I exclaimed. ‘Haven’t you seen?’

‘Sweden doesn’t.’

Sweden was neutral during the war, of course – no bombs dropped on it.

Dr Alexander leaned back from the front seat. ‘You won’t mind spending time tomorrow going over your story in my office in the Palace of Justice, will you?’ he asked Ró?a. ‘I have the daunting task of interviewing all the young ladies appearing as witnesses. I must also make an examination of your injuries. But it would be appropriate to conduct the exam after the other four “Rabbits” arrive tomorrow, when you are all together. In the mean time we have only four days to prepare your statements, so I’d like to begin with yours tomorrow morning.’

‘All right,’ she answered softly.

As we climbed out of the car in front of the hotel, she whispered to me, ‘Are you going to be a witness also, Rose?’

‘No, I’m going to be a reporter. I have to write a story for the magazine that published my Ravensbrück poems.’

It was absolutely freezing – you felt like your breath was turning to ice when you talked. Ró?a didn’t say anything. And suddenly I felt cold not because of the winter night, but cold inside.

The Ró?a I’d known at Ravensbrück had been a live wire of defiance and daring and desperate hope, the girl who taught me to curse like a sailor in five languages, who’d wisecracked instead of sobbed when she was told she was going to be executed the next day. Something was different. She seemed like a person who has been on a tear for a week and now has sobered up again.