‘Is that by your favourite poet as well?’ the Polish girl asked. ‘Edna Millay?’
‘No, that’s by me. I made it up.’
‘What is it about? Not trees this time.’
‘Flying bombs. It’s about making them. Or not making them – that’s why they punished me.’
‘I will give you one slice of bread for every poem you make me. I can do it. I’m one of the camp Rabbits, the Króliki, and people take care of me. Every time you make me a new poem I’ll get you an extra slice of bread.’
I didn’t know it then. But I know it now and I’m sure of it. My counting-out rhyme saved me from starving to death this winter.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘I’m Polish Political Prisoner 7705,’ she reeled off, glib and bitter. ‘I’m a Rabbit.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
I don’t know how I knew I could talk to her like that. I hadn’t even looked at her yet.
‘My name is Ró?a Czajkowska,’ she said.
In my ears it sounded like a meaningless babble of foreign sound. Very humbly, and worried that she would go away if I offended her, I asked her to spell it.
‘Oh, I can’t do English letters out loud,’ she answered with deep scorn. ‘Ró?a. How difficult is that? It means rose in English.’
I turned my head for the first time since I’d woken up. It was exhausting. But I could see her now.
She was – she is – seventeen. She was the tiniest seventeen-year-old I’d ever seen – I thought she was about eleven when I first saw her, the thinnest, most starved-looking kid alive. Being starved-looking was the only thing I noticed about her at first, her only distinguishing feature – it still hadn’t dawned on me that this wasn’t a distinguishing feature at Ravensbrück, and that Ró?a had other, more significant peculiarities. She had long hair – a lot of the long-term prisoners did – but it was hidden beneath a headscarf, and her dress was one of the old-style grey-and-blue striped uniforms.
‘Rose!’ I exclaimed.
‘Ró?a,’ she corrected. ‘People call me Ró?yczka sometimes, little Rose, because I am so little.’
‘Little Rose – like Rosie? How do you say it?’
‘Say “Ro-shij-ka”. Ró?yczka!’
‘Ró?yczka!’
‘It is my pleasure to meet you, English-speaking French Political Prisoner 51498. What’s your name?’
‘Rose Justice,’ I said, remembering who I was. ‘Rose. Or Rosie. Same as yours.’
She gave a shrill, maniacal howl of laughter.
At the other end of the narrow aisle that led between the rows of bunks, there came the sound of footsteps. After a moment the footsteps stopped – another turbaned head appeared (it was Gitte, our extremely wonderful German Blockova). I couldn’t have begun to guess Gitte’s age when I first saw her face that afternoon – honestly, she could have been anywhere between twenty-five and a hundred. She said something sharply to Ró?a in German. Ró?a patted me on the head like a dog. She said to Gitte in English, ‘Look – Justice has come to Ravensbrück!’ and let out another cackling peal of laughter.
Then Ró?a patted a thin cotton blanket which was folded near my head.
‘Listen, English-speaking French Political Prisoner with the same name as me. I have to go back to work. There’s a blanket here if you want it now, but you have to give it back to the others later and no one will thank you if she has to wash blood out of it, so keep it off your backside. I’ll bring your supper here, but you’ll have to get up to come to the 6.30 roll call.’ She giggled again before she added, ‘I’ll help you if you can’t walk.’
Gitte gave an indulgent sigh. She assured me in English, ‘Someone else will help.’
She reached towards Ró?a to help her down from the bunk. At first I thought it was just because Ró?a was so little. She put her arms around Gitte’s neck like a monkey and let herself be lifted to the murky floor. Then I saw the back of her legs and I understood why she needed help climbing down, and why her offer of support to me was such a joke.
Both her legs had been split in half. That’s what it looked like – from knee to ankle in the back of her calves were long clefts so deep you could poke your finger in them up to the second knuckle.
I gasped aloud in horror. It shook me physically – I actually flinched backwards, away from Ró?a’s awful legs, and then I gasped again in pain because it hurt so much to move.
Ró?a’s injuries weren’t new – her legs had healed that way. They were as good as they were going to get. When Gitte put Ró?a down and she turned round to face me, I could see a trio of sunken, dented scars in the front of her right leg, half an inch deep, where bone should have been.
It looked like her legs had been split with a butcher’s knife and then she’d been shot at close range.
She picked up a makeshift crutch – a Y-shaped stick padded with more of the striped prison cloth – and tucked it beneath her right arm.
‘Can you knit?’ she demanded.
‘Sort of.’
She pulled a face and mimicked, ‘Sort of.’
‘You’re an “Available”,’ Gitte told me. ‘Verfügbar. That means you’re not assigned to any special work.’
‘You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you,’ Ró?a elaborated. ‘Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do.’
I blinked down at her, still lying flat, too much of a wreck to lift my head. A skilled job. Well, I’d had my chance.
‘Hey, don’t cry. We’ll keep you inside the block for a few days – till you can sit down anyway. Gitte’s going to say she needs another knitter to keep the quota up this week, since Zosia and Genca were shot.’
Then Ró?a disappeared into the twilit aisle between the bunks, escorted by the ageless block leader. I was too high up to see them go. But I could hear Ró?a’s progress as her wooden clogs clomped against the dank concrete floor, punctuated by the thump of her crutch.
After about thirty seconds, the clomping and thumping stopped suddenly. She yelled back at me, in English, ‘One piece of bread per poem!’
Until November we had two evening roll calls – that was the way they’d always done it, one at 6.30 and one at 9 p.m. Eventually they stopped the 6.30 one because there were so many of us it was taking up to three hours three times a day to count us all. But the week I came to Block 32 they were still doing both evening roll calls, and I went to both. I have no memory of either one, or of climbing up and down out of the top bunk. The population of Block 32 was really, really good at propping people up.
In between the roll calls I am pretty sure I did nothing but lie on my face. I was all burny with a light fever and I didn’t want to eat anything, and Ró?a, for whatever reason, didn’t follow through with her promise to bring me supper – to be fair, there wasn’t a notice up saying ‘Feed the New Girl in the Top Bunk’ and I was still nothing more to any of them than just the unknown person who’d be making up the murdered Zosia and Genca’s knitting quota.
Gosh, I was dazed.
What I do remember is that suddenly on this plank where I’d been sprawled flat on my face all afternoon, there were three other people trying to make themselves comfortable. We struck a kind of bargain where I got to stay sprawled and the rest of them got the blanket, only they had to sleep sitting up. Or as near upright as you can get when the ceiling is three feet above your head and you are asleep.
We slept that way for five hours, maybe, and then the 4 a.m. Screamer went, and it was a scramble to the horrible toilet ditches before the 4.30 roll call. And that was me back on my feet.