Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(88)

‘I told the American Embassy your names,’ I said defensively.

We turned out the lights. It was a little room with twin beds. We lay in the dark wide awake with the weight of where we were and what lay ahead of us pressing on us.

‘Rose?’ she said softly.

‘Yeah?’ I answered.

‘It is just as strange to know you are there, and to be warm and comfortable, as it is to eat with you.’

‘It really is.’

‘Tell me “The Subtle Briar” again,’ she asked.

She knew I would still know it by heart.

I whispered to her in the dark.

‘When you cut down the hybrid rose,

its blackened stump below the graft

spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.

It claws at life, weaving a raft

of suckering roots to pierce the earth.

The first thin shoot is fierce and green,

a pliant whip of furious briar

splitting the soil, gulping the light.

You hack it down. It skulks between

the flagstones of the garden path

to nurse a hungry spur in shade

against the porch. With iron spade

you dig and drag it from the gravel

and toss it living on the fire.

‘It claws up towards the light again



hidden from view, avoiding battle

beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,

unloved, unfed, it clings and grows

in the wild hedge. The subtle briar

armours itself with desperate thorns

and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher,

unquenchable, it now adorns

itself with blossom, till the stalk

is crowned with beauty, papery white

fine petals thin as chips of chalk

or shaven bone, drinking the light.

‘Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,



Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,

Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,

Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,

Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,

Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,

Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,

Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia.

‘When you cut down the hybrid rose



to cull and plough its tender bed,

trust there is life beneath your blade:

the suckering briar below the graft,

the wildflower stock of strength and thorn

whose subtle roots are never dead.’





Ró?a gave a long sigh. Then she whispered, ‘Rose, I really miss you.’

Ró?a spent most of Sunday telling her story to Dr Leo Alexander – we had supper with him that night afterwards, before the other Ravensbrück witnesses arrived. Everyone I met who was involved in the trial was friendly and straightforward, as though we were at a conference. This was not quite what I was expecting, but I think it is a result of everything being pulled together at the last minute. And although I wasn’t one of Dr Alexander’s witnesses he was interested in me, because I am a writer and a medical student, which is a less advanced version of what he is.

Ró?a told him at supper, ‘Rose could be a witness here. She has scars too.’

He looked at me with sudden intense interest. ‘You do? An American witness?’

I shook my head violently. ‘I wasn’t operated on. I was just thrashed because I wouldn’t work. So was everybody who didn’t work, or who did anything else they didn’t like. We’re a dime a dozen and nothing to do with a trial for medical staff.’

‘I hate to say it, but you’re right,’ Alexander agreed. ‘I’ll admit I’ve already rejected several so-called witnesses exactly like you.’ He turned his mild, smart gaze back to Ró?a. ‘You will likely have heard of the concept of genocide, a term coined by your countryman Raphael Lemkin, which the IMT used as a basis for their charges against the Nazi leaders? We are using a parallel concept in this trial: thanatology, the science of producing death. These men are being charged with murder. The charge is that their experimentation was designed to discover not how to heal, but ways to kill. Simply put, you’re a survivor of attempted murder. A punitive lashing, however ugly the scars may be, is, unfortunately, irrelevant.’

‘I couldn’t show off my scars anyway!’ I protested, taking refuge in being ridiculous to hide my cowardice. ‘What would I do, step on to the witness stand in a bathing suit? A two-piece!’

‘It would be sensational,’ Ró?a exclaimed.

‘No one would notice any scars!’ Dr Alexander teased.

What a very weird dinner conversation.

The other Rabbits arrived. They were all as unrecognisable as Ró?a – well-fed, well-dressed, wearing their hair fashionably styled beneath new hats, smiling for the flashing press cameras at the train station. We hugged and kissed as if we were all long-lost family: Vladyslava, tall Maria, Jadviga, and little Maria who’d had to stay in the Revier for a year and a half. I hadn’t known any of them very well at Ravensbrück, but I knew their names. I’d hidden with Vladyslava and Jadviga in a pit dug beneath our washroom for two days. They’d hidden there with Ró?a for a week.

We were all on the bus to the Palace of Justice at 8.30 the next morning and stayed there till 6 p.m., and I didn’t see much of anybody that day. I got asked, ‘Can you type?’ and I said yes, and suddenly I was part of the team landed with the tortuous job of organising Dr Alexander’s notes as fast as he could hand us paper. I was set up in an office with the Chief Prosecutor’s wife, who was also working there, because I wasn’t allowed in the interview room with the Ravensbrück witnesses. Ró?a ran piles of paper back and forth between me and the rest of them, since she’d already been interviewed. I spent the first three days of that week in unwaged labour, gaining a little understanding of the trial and a lot more understanding than I’d ever wanted to know about the hideous things that had actually been done to Ró?a and the women I’d been imprisoned with.