‘Yes – we –’
Oh – we hung May baskets on people’s doors. Daddy got a brand-new Piper Cub for the flying school and he took me along to pick it up from Lock Haven, and I flew it all the way home and Hemlock Council gave me a special ‘Young Pilot’ badge. I went on my second Juniata River canoe trip that summer. We took the Brownies on a picnic to the Conewago Grove Lake. We were not smuggling explosives and we were not being arrested by the Nazis. Nobody executed my troop leader. I did not have to watch my mother being beaten.
That is one of the very simple horrors I can’t shake – I can strip the clothes from a pile of dead bodies without retching, but thinking about this ninth grade Girl Scout having to watch her mother being tortured still makes me feel sick. Though I am not sure Ró?a would have grassed on anyone even to save her mother. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Why lucky for her? Not lucky for the people she was protecting, but lucky for Ró?a. She didn’t have to choose.
‘Do they still – these experiments on people’s legs, do they still –?’ I couldn’t finish the question.
Karolina glanced down at my own bloodstained dress. I’d been kneeling for a quarter of an hour and my knees were aching, but I couldn’t sit. I hung on to the edge of the table to hold myself up.
‘Don’t worry, you’re safe,’ she said. ‘I mean, your legs are safe. They stopped the experiments last year.’
‘They might shoot you, of course, but they might do that to anybody,’ Ró?a offered.
‘Hey, hey!’ Karolina said, and Lisette suddenly crawled out next to me and grabbed me round the shoulders.
‘Don’t be scared, darling. Don’t let Ró?a scare you! She makes fun of everything. It’s how she is.’
‘She laughs when she’s in pain,’ Karolina assured me. ‘She doesn’t cry, just laughs like a mechanical fortuneteller in a glass box. Don’t cry!’
‘The war’s nearly over,’ Lisette said soothingly.
‘Look, I’ll let you in on a secret –’ Karolina peeled back the edge of her kerchief. She was hiding a new crop of soft brown curls. ‘I want to look nice when the American soldiers get here. I’ve got to make sure no one sees that I’m growing my hair out though. The guards really hate curly hair.’
It had been drizzling all afternoon and was pouring with rain by the 9 p.m. roll call, and it was the coldest it had been since I’d got to Germany. I was burning with fever by lights out – it nearly killed me to have to climb up to the top bunk.
‘Why do you sleep so high up?’ I gasped. ‘With your legs the way they are?’
‘When people get the shits, it rains down on the lower bunks,’ Ró?a explained. ‘We had to fight the Red Army bitches for the high ones. Mother in Heaven, you’ve never had to fight for anything, have you?’
I was still only capable of lying flat on my face in the crowded bunk, and they all used me for a furnace. Ró?a and Karolina snuggled up on either side of me, Karolina behind me with her arms right around me, and Ró?a in a sodden, shivering ball of misery between me and Lisette.
‘OK,’ Karolina demanded. ‘Fantasia! Start with ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ – that’s an easy one. Sing, Lisette!’
‘Shh,’ Lisette said. ‘Tomorrow.’
Lisette’s word was law, and she’d been watching me closely; she knew I couldn’t perform any more that night. But I had to give them something, payment for the bread, for being adopted into their family, even if I wasn’t going to give a movie commentary.
‘If I grow bitterly,’ I whispered, and managed shreds of Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Scrub’.
‘If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth . . .
. . . It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.’
‘Perfect,’ Ró?a whispered in astonishment. ‘Beautiful and twisted and exactly like us! Did you think it up today? When did you ever get a chance? You are better than I thought you would be.’
‘It’s just more Millay,’ I confessed. ‘My poems aren’t that good.’
The rain on the thin barrack roof sounded exactly like the rain on the roof of the sleeping porch. I ached with such desperate longing for Pennsylvania that I couldn’t tell where the homesickness ended and the dull throb of the bloody slashes on my back began.
I will never be as good a writer as Edna St Vincent Millay, I thought miserably. My poems will never be that good, because I will die here before I get the chance to write anything worth reading.
April 24, 1945
Paris
Air Raid at Ravensbrück
(by Rose Justice)
‘Runter!’ they screamed. ‘Get down!’ As if we’d all
leap up like mongrel dogs with our teeth bared.
But being obedient curs, down we all went,
not knowing why yet, flat on our faces, prone,
wet cinders in our mouths. The lights in the street
went out. The guards took cover, their well-bred
Alsatians with them. Open siren throats
shrilled an empty threat to swallow us whole.
We lay like forty thousand corpses in rows ten deep
by ourselves, and one thought hit us all hard in the head:
Run NOW. In the dark – get up and run now. Dare
the charged barbed wire NOW. No one sees or cares.
But when our brothers-in-arms in the bombers swarmed
over the blackened street, the howling night
leaped up in fury wielding searchlight whips
to flay the planes and skin the moon; the beams
broke harsh across our backs and froze us where
we lay revealed – wild does, not fanged or clawed
but weaponless rabbits and deer, blinking and blind.
No one ran or tried to run, lashed down
by the bright perimeter straps of light, bonds lighter
than moonlit air, heavier than iron chains.
My first air raid was during a roll call. It was about a week after I got to Block 32, the day before I was deemed well enough to be booted out of the knitting brigade. As the sirens went off, they made us lie on our faces. We were like a great big living, breathing target with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. They turned out the spotlights, but they had searchlights in the anti-aircraft ditches, sweeping the sky for the planes.
When I heard the planes, I rolled over on my back – no one cared. I lay with my dress bunched up under my backside and my hands beneath my thighs, cushioning my legs a little because they were still sore, with the back of my bare skull and most of my legs cradled by the cold, damp grit of the ground. I counted thirty-one US Air Force Flying Fortresses in the first echelon blacking out the silver moonlit sky, with an escort of fighter planes too far away and tiny to identify in the dark. Barely a mile away from me, 6,000 feet above my head, were American boys not much older than me, carrying Pennsylvania Hershey bars in their emergency rations, one hand on the control column and one hand on the throttle. They were looking down at the same scene I’d looked down at a month ago. Beneath the searchlights they’d see the dim outlines of a factory complex and the black rows of barrack roofs, the long black threads of the railway junctions, and the cool lakes shining silver in the light of the glorious full moon.
They’d be too high and it was too dark for them to see any of the 40,000 women lying face down on the damp gravel, trapped in our wire and concrete cage.
A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.