Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(98)

‘Here we are,’ she answered softly. ‘Free in the wind!’

Suddenly she launched into my kite poem.

‘Hope has no feathers.

Hope takes flight

tethered with twine

like a tattered kite,

slave to the wind’s

capricious drift,

eager to soar

but needing lift.’





I stared at the brilliant sky, listening to Ró?a softly chanting my own words.

‘Hope waits stubbornly,

watching the sky

for turmoil, feeding on

things that fly:

crows, ashes, newspapers,

dry leaves in flight

all suggest wind

that could lift a kite.’





She paused. The first thing I’d ever said to her was a poem, so after a moment I finished this one for her, softly.

‘Hope sails and plunges,

firmly caught

at the end of her string –

fallen slack, pulling taut,

ragged and featherless.

Hope never flies

but doggedly watches

for windy skies.’





She was quiet then. The last verse isn’t really very hopeful. Poor ragged kite, always waiting for a wind that never comes.

Finally Ró?a took a deep breath.

‘It’s windy now,’ she said.

She put down her walking stick to take the spool of fishing line. She played out about six feet and let go. The wind was fierce and steady and the kite lifted like a bird. We both stared up at it, and it was like looking at a landscape from the air, the silk map bright with green and yellow and brown and blue. The tinsel tail snapped and flashed blindingly. After a second our beautiful improvised kite did exactly what the one does in the poem, and plunged earthward – I grabbed it by the fragile frame before it nosedived into the sand.

‘It needs thrust,’ I said. ‘You have to run with it. Can you run?’

She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over her shoulder, letting out line as I held the kite above my head.

‘Run with me, Rose,’ she cried.




by Rose Justice

Craig Castle, Castle Craig

December 31, 1946





Afterword




Declaration of Causes

Primo Levi, the author of possibly the most moving descriptions of Auschwitz in print, felt that the true witnesses to the atrocities of the concentration camps were the dead. Survivors like himself, he felt, could only give partial testimony. Memories become fixed or simplified or distorted as they are told over and over, making living testimony inaccurate. This was one of the themes we discussed at length at the 8th European Summer School at Ravensbrück in August 2012 – how memory itself is a construction, particularly as it becomes more and more distanced in time from actual events.

Rose’s testimony is even further removed because I made it up. In Rose’s story, I have constructed an imitation of a survivor’s account. It has become a false memory of my own – Rose’s dream of the icy wind in the empty bunks is my dream, the single vivid nightmare I had while sleeping in the former SS barracks at Ravensbrück during the week I spent at the Summer School. My book is fiction, but it is based on the real memories of other people. In the end, like Rose, I am doing what I can to carry out the last instruction of the true witnesses – those who went to their death crying out: Tell the world.

What I’d really like to pound into the reader’s head, if there’s any lesson to be learned here, is that I didn’t make up Ravensbrück. I didn’t make up anything about Ravensbrück. Often I have had to fill in the blanks – when the toilets stopped working, how thick the mattresses were, how you might improvise a sanitary pad. The little things. The terrible and the unbelievable, the gas chambers and the medical experiments and the twenty-five lashes, propping up the dead to make the roll call count come out right, the filth and the dog bites and the curl hunts and the administration and politics of bowls, I did not make up. It was real. It really happened to 150,000 women. And that is just one camp.

I did simplify some things in order to keep the pace going. I kept the Rabbits in Block 32 for the whole story, when technically they got moved into different blocks a couple of times during the winter of 1945. I left out the fact that between being selected and being gassed prisoners got taken to another camp, about a mile away, where they were locked in unheated barracks without food or blankets and left to starve or freeze to death to make it easier on the limited capacity of Ravensbrück’s makeshift gas chamber. I didn’t explain that the female ‘SS guards’ were technically auxiliary to the SS, which was all male. I didn’t translate every one of Rose’s conversations into three different languages before she could understand it.

In the preface to his book on Ravensbrück, Jack Morrison points out that it would have been impossible for a single prisoner to have as broad a view of the camp as the researcher who tries to look at all aspects of its six-year operational history. Rose’s experience is limited from September 1944 to March 1945, which means that within the confines of my book it’s impossible to describe much of what went on before or after these dates. Also, Rose’s experience is limited to an extremely closed circle of prisoners and their restricted movements – she never gets inside the textile factories, or the kitchens, or is sent on coal-picking duty, or unloads barges by the lake. She doesn’t interact with children or Gypsies or Jehovah’s Witnesses or the men’s camp, all of which have their own moving stories of oppression and rebellion. Rose doesn’t work in the prisoner-organised maternity ward, a story of miracle and heartbreak. After June 1943, and until the Auschwitz evacuees turned up late in 1944 there were very few Jewish women at Ravensbrück, and those were confined to a single block; their stories are also different. There is a lot more out there than the limited window on Ravensbrück which Rose’s experience provides . . . just so you know.