I said my counting-out rhyme saved my life and it’s true, because that’s what made Gitte notice me and give me to Lisette to take care of. You were dead if you didn’t have someone looking out for you. But I never had to worry about finding a teammate. I was so lucky. Lisette’s bunkmates in Block 32 weren’t just a team – we were a proper Camp Family, with Lisette in the role of Lagermutter, Camp Mother.
It took me some time to notice Lisette was there, because Ró?a acted like she ruled the roost and Lisette was so quiet. Lisette was older than Daddy, but she didn’t really look it, partly because she’d been such a beauty. I like to think she will be again. It was a game I played during roll calls, trying to picture everybody in real life. Lisette Romilly, possibly France’s most popular detective novelist, Jazz Age flapper who drank cocktails with F Scott Fitzgerald in Paris, then surprised everybody by marrying the principal cellist of the Lublin Philharmonic and uprooting herself to move to Poland. She had three boys all as handsome and talented as their parents, she became an archivist at the Catholic University in Lublin, she learned to play the bass violin at the age of thirty-two and within two years she became so good they let her join the orchestra.
Her husband was Jewish. He and her three boys – the oldest was two years younger than me – were all swept up in 1939 and marched out of the city and shot on the road. They didn’t even take them to a camp. Lisette got thrown out of their apartment and there she was, widowed, her children dead, owning nothing, in a foreign country at war. She had no work because the Germans had closed down all the Polish universities. She tried to go back to France and got arrested at the train station. When it first happened, she thought it was for carrying a cello without a licence or something like that. But actually, they arrested practically anyone who was connected with the Polish universities. I think they shot most of them.
I loved Lisette. We all loved Lisette.
Lisette Waits
(by Rose Justice)
Her suitcases are full. But after all
she leaves them standing lifeless in the hall
and takes the cello – for its golden voice
sings back to life her murdered love and boys.
She leaves behind her mother’s silver service,
linen and pearls and books. The railway office
demands she buy two tickets; so she does.
The cello’s all she has and ever was.
The piercing whistle tells the tracks are clear.
She strains to glimpse the plume of steam draw near
and sees the uniforms, a distant gun
aimed at her breast. The cello cannot run.
She pulls it to her heart, fearing the worst,
still praying for the train to reach them first.
Lisette was in prison in Lublin for a while before they sent her to Ravensbrück, and she was part of Ró?a’s transport. There were about a hundred and forty of them to begin with. A lot of them had already been killed one way or another by the time I got thrown in with them, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why Lisette adopted me – why she adopted Ró?a, why she was a natural Lagermutter. She needed people to mother. It was how she stayed sane.
Lisette didn’t care about my head full of poetry in English. She had a reasonable supply in her own head, along with an inexhaustible supply of French and Polish and Russian and German poems too. I got tucked under Lisette’s wing because Zosia and Genca, the girls who had been shot last week, had also been her adopted daughters, along with Ró?a and Karolina. The Blockova Gitte hadn’t just had Ró?a’s thirst for poetry in mind when she’d boosted me, semi-conscious, into that particular bunk under the roof. I was there for Lisette to look after, to distract her from going crazy with grief and fury all over again.
I must have been the slowest knitter of anybody in the block. I hadn’t knitted in the round before, and I’d never tried holding the yarn in my left hand like the rest of them; but fortunately all we were making was socks. I didn’t mind knitting socks for German soldiers. German soldiers need socks. If they were going to force me to do anything for the Axis war effort, keeping conscripted boys’ feet warm on the Eastern Front was OK. Making bombs was not OK.
I did my knitting standing up. I ate standing up. The back of my dress had dark brown stripes of dried blood across it that I never managed to wash out in the whole time I wore it.
The knitting went on in the block itself. There was a big main room on either side of the so-called washroom in the middle. We ate in the big rooms, and that was also where the knitters worked in the day. Older women knitted, or people who couldn’t walk. There was a guard who watched over everything as we got to work, but mostly they left things up to Gitte. As long as we got the required number of socks knitted, they didn’t waste time keeping an eye on us. And as soon as the SS guards were gone in the morning, everybody relaxed a little bit. We still had to work like fury – if we didn’t meet the quotas, everyone got punished with an extra hour or two of ‘Strafstehen’ – punishment standing – waiting outside the barrack in the dark after the last roll call of the day. But the knitters could talk to one another, a huge advantage and privilege.
Ró?a sat on the table facing me, resting her feet on the bench. She’d stowed her wooden clogs and her crutch underneath the table. She didn’t say anything to me for about an hour – just eyed me up and down critically, while another woman carried on a quiz session in Polish. They played school, mathematicians and geologists and historians taking turns at tutoring the younger girls. I didn’t understand any of it, and after a while I began to hate the sound of their meaningless foreign voices. It was a nightmare I could never really define, to have so many people packed around me and not be able to communicate with any of them unless they felt like it.
They took a break in the lecture after a while, though we all kept on furiously producing limitless amounts of grey wool tubing (which of course we were never allowed to use ourselves, even when it was snowing). By the time they got to their recess, I was swaying on my feet. I couldn’t sit, but I couldn’t really stand yet either – not for the whole day. It was about 10 o’clock in the morning and I’d been up since 4.00.
‘So how come you’re French, if you don’t speak anything but English?’ Ró?a asked. ‘Are you another parachutist?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘There are a few English ladies here who were dropped into France by parachute, as spies. Are you a spy?’
‘Gosh – would I tell you if I was?’
She laughed. It was a real laugh this time, a bubbly giggle of a laugh, not the other bitter, ironic cackle. ‘You look French – bald. When Paris was liberated, they shaved all the French prisoners’ heads again as punishment. What are you then? And how did you end up here?’
‘Are your English ladies here now?’ I asked.
‘No, they’re not in this block. And even if they were, they’re not cripples. They have to do real work,’ Ró?a said offhandedly.
‘Are you all crippled?’ I asked, looking around the room. I wondered, Am I here because I’ve been crippled? No, I’d been given six hours to recover and now I was already on my feet. Apart from the Polish girls who’d come back inside to knit after the morning roll call, all the rest of the Block 32 prisoners were fine – none of the French or Russian women had anything wrong with them apart from being filthy dirty and covered with scabies and starving, and they’d all marched off on work details that morning. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened to you, since I asked first,’ Ró?a said seriously. ‘Because if we start talking about me, you won’t believe me, and we’ll argue. Tell me about 51498, the French Political Prisoner with no French.’