Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(92)

We sat in the gallery to watch, just in front of one of the film crews. We were surrounded by an intense crowd of German medical students my age who were frantically taking notes. Ró?a perched ramrod straight on the edge of her seat. She gripped the sides of her chair. I don’t know what she was thinking, but she looked like a fury. Her face was set in a sneer and her eyes were burning. She didn’t watch her friends giving evidence; her gaze was locked on the defendants, the twenty-two Nazi men and one woman.

Dr Alexander’s evidence and the questioning of the Rabbits took the entire day, and no one else dared question them. The presiding judge, Walter B Beals, would ask if the defence wanted to cross-examine a witness and there would be flat silence. One of Jadviga’s scars had been inflamed that whole week and she stood there anyway, still in pain, telling about how they tied her down in the Bunker.

How you knew they were going to operate on you because the first thing they did was shave your legs.

Telling how Fischer had smoked cigarettes between operations without bothering to change his gloves.

How Oberheuser would make the girls stand in line, hopping on one uninjured leg to get the filthy bandages changed on the other leg, and then instead of changing them she’d tell them to come back the next day.

How sometimes, if you fought, they’d blindfold you for the operation, or wrap your head in a blanket.

About the woman guard who’d said, ‘They must be made to suffer before they’re executed.’

Fischer wouldn’t look at Jadviga. He couldn’t look at any of them. He’d done most of the operations himself, under Gebhardt’s instruction.

By the time little Maria finished her testimony at the end of the day, it sounded like there wasn’t anyone breathing anywhere in the crowded, wire-webbed room. Maria is only a couple of years older than me. She’d had muscle peeled away from her leg right down to the bone – half her leg was gone. She looked very vulnerable up on the raised platform with her back to the court, in a stylish new dress but holding her skirt bunched up around her thighs, barefoot, barelegged. Dr Alexander did a juggling act with his notes and his microphone while he pointed out how they’d torn apart her leg, but all I could do was stare at the tendrils of hair curling at the nape of Maria’s bare neck, escaping from where her hair was elegantly pinned up.

No wonder Ró?a’s backed out of this, was all I could think. Next to me, Ró?a didn’t stop gripping the sides of her chair.

I followed her gaze to the defendants, tied up in their telephone wires. Only Fischer looked remotely unhappy, his forehead resting against his fist. The others just sat staring straight ahead as though they were made of stone.

Then I looked around the room below us. There really weren’t very many women at all, and when I found one in the crowd, I’d stare at her for a moment, wondering who she was – someone’s secretary? A German doctor’s wife? A reporter or photographer?

In front of us, a girl with straight dark hair clipped back in a flat pony tail with a metal barrette was looking back at me – waiting for me to meet her cool green gaze. Hers was the only face turned upwards towards the gallery and not towards the witness stand. It was Anna.

She’d seen me and remembered me. She didn’t smile – it would have been weird for anyone to be smiling at that point, even in greeting. She gave me a brief, curt nod.

I nodded back.

She hesitated a moment. Then she rubbed her hands together deliberately, turning her palms over each other and rubbing the backs of her knuckles, briefly miming washing her hands. Just for a second. I knew exactly what she meant.

Meet me in the washroom.

When the day’s session was over, the last session before the Christmas recess, we gathered in one of the vast ornate lobbies, shaking hands with people and congratulating Dr Alexander on his moving presentation. Vladyslava and Jadviga and Maria and the other Maria got their photographs taken. Some of the photographers wanted to include me and Ró?a too, but I refused because I wasn’t a Rabbit. When Vladyslava insisted Ró?a join them, it was the perfect time for me to disappear for a few minutes.

‘Powder room,’ I told Ró?a. ‘Back in a minute! You all look beautiful – I hope they slap you on the front page of the New York Times!’

Anna was waiting for me, leaning against the sink and smoking – exactly the way I’d left her in the Revier in Ravensbrück not quite two years ago.

‘H?ftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ she rapped out. Prisoner 51498!

I don’t think I’ve ever been hit so hard by a handful of words.

It was probably the first thing that came into her head when she saw me – an exclamation of surprise, not a command. She usually did call me by my number because she was supposed to. But to hear my number barked at me in German like that was more than my brain could react to sensibly. I snapped to attention, head up and staring straight ahead, arms straight at my sides.

There was another woman in the room, an old woman sitting in the corner with a bundle of knitting, who stood up in alarm when I made my dramatic entrance. I realised she was the attendant for the ladies’ restroom, and I relaxed and kind of melted against the door frame, hanging on to it with one shaking hand as though I had missed my footing. The way a cat washes itself when you catch it doing something clumsy, pretending you never saw that.