‘You were fourteen when you were arrested!’ I protested. ‘My mother didn’t let me wear make-up either when I was fourteen!’
‘Did you paint them yourself or was it done by a beauty specialist? How long does it last? What shoes did you wear with it? Were they open-toed – could you see your toenails with your shoes on?’
‘Sandals. It was for a date with my boyfriend, Nick.’
‘Did he like them?’
I shrugged and looked away. I don’t think he’d noticed them. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of Nick, and the thought of him always made me ache. What would he think if he could see me now? There wasn’t any way I could ever be mistaken for anything but a concentration camp prisoner, hairless, in my torn dress with its missing collar and big mismatched fabric X’s and the brown striped bloodstains across my backside. Early on I used to dream about him, though I stopped dreaming about anything but food after a while – I dreamed he was touching my head and asking, ‘Where is your hair?’
Karolina stifled a giggle. ‘Let’s name your toes. That’d be a hilarious little cartoon, a row of dancing toes like the Rockettes! Each a different flavour. Cherry! Peppermint!’
‘Redcurrant!’ said Lisette.
‘Beetroot,’ said Irina.
‘Beetroot!’ Ró?a sneered.
‘It is sweet. And red.’
They coaxed me into putting the rhymes together.
‘Strawberry, cranberry –’
‘– grenadine, raspberry!’
And I made a rhyme about painted toes. It is a sort of insanely starved person’s version of ‘This Little Piggy’.
No penny candy
so stubbornly sweet
as plops of red sugar
adorning my feet –
strawberry, cinnamon,
redcurrant, cranberry,
peppermint, sugarbeet,
grenadine, raspberry,
cherry and mulberry –
come look at Rose
and join in the feast
of my lollipop toes!
Of course, it was not just the illicit beauty of my toes that everyone admired – it was also, and in a big way, the fact that they looked so edible.
I wasn’t the only one who’d been scavenging that day. Irina turned out to have an entire newspaper hidden in her shirt. She must have picked it up in the maintenance shed we’d been working in, though I hadn’t noticed a thing at the time (she was fantastic at organising paper, it turned out). As we were climbing into the bunks, just before the lights went out, she pressed most of the paper thin and hid it wedged between the bunk slats and frame. But one last piece she twitched in front of Ró?a’s nose, and when she’d got Ró?a’s attention, folded the scrap of paper while we watched.
It was only about as wide as her palm. Her hands moved so quickly you couldn’t follow what she was doing. Oh, Irina’s hands were pretty! And suddenly she’d transformed a yellowed corner of a stolen Nazi newspaper into a little paper airplane with short, broad wings. She held it out to Ró?a.
‘Fly this,’ Irina said. She mimed the action of throwing a dart.
Ró?a lifted the paper plane towards the ceiling and pitched it across the bunks. She didn’t even throw it very hard, but it glided away into the gloom, and after a moment someone threw it back with a sharp cautionary warning in Polish. It flew better than any paper airplane I had ever seen.
‘I like to fly them over the walls,’ Irina said. ‘When no one is looking.’
You know how I stood in roll calls making up poems to keep from going crazy with fear and boredom? Irina made up aircraft.
That was a good day, nylon socks and painted toes and Irina’s first paper airplane. Some of the ones she made later Karolina decorated – she’d put Nick as the pilot, though of course she didn’t know what he looked like. He was our hero – I whispered stories about Nick to Karolina and Ró?a after lights-out, where he’d come to rescue us, sneaking into the power plant with wire-cutters and disabling the electric fences, carrying a knapsack full of chocolate bars. Karolina made him look like Clark Gable. Or she’d draw caricatures of us on Irina’s planes, with Irina and me in the cockpit, and Karolina and Ró?a and Lisette as our passengers. They were very funny and she could do them so fast – sometimes, when we were standing in a roll call, she’d make doodles of the turkey buzzard guards with her toes in the cinders at our feet. Just a couple of broad swipes and you’d see it and you’d have to pretend to sneeze so you didn’t burst out laughing. And then she’d kick it into dust before she got caught.
Oh God, dry words on a page. How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about was death and imaginary strawberries?
‘Rose, let’s make a book,’ Ró?a whispered to me as we lay sleepless and shivering and scratching in the restless dark. ‘I want to do something like your poems. Karolina makes moving pictures, Irina makes planes – I want to make something. So you could write the poems in English and I could translate them into Polish – a kind of memory book –’
‘We could get everybody to do her own memory!’
‘A page for each of us, for each of the Rabbits –’
‘Your whole transport. The whole Lublin Transport.’
‘Yes, the ones who have been murdered, too. We’ll have photos of them as civilians – you’ll have to track those down after you get out, OK?’
‘We’ll need paper.’
‘And recipes! We can get a recipe from everybody!’
‘Paper.’
‘Irina can organise some paper for us. It will be better than just a list of names – it will be about people.’
Our Blockova Gitte came crashing through the evening soup squabble, like a speedboat ploughing up waves in the Arctic, tagging people. Karolina Salska was one of them.
‘You’re on tomorrow’s list.’ Half a dozen of us heard the icy whisper. There was no reason I should know what she meant, but I knew. I knew intuitively, along with everybody else who had experience of what it meant, and the hair stood up all down my spine.
‘No!’ Lisette gasped fiercely. ‘They’re not going to execute any more Rabbits.’
‘That’s why I’m telling you now,’ Gitte said. ‘There are seven from my block on the list. We’ll hide you all in the tent with the transfer prisoners.’
Block 32 was tucked away in a southern spur of the camp, in a corner, which gave us a sort of ‘back to the wall’ advantage sometimes – we always knew when anyone was coming for us because they could only approach from one direction. And it was right next to the tent. I hadn’t ever thought about that being an advantage.
When Gitte said about hiding in the tent, Lisette went white. And then her face closed down. ‘They’ll miss us at roll call. They pull you out of the morning roll call. They’ll pull someone else out instead.’
‘They’ll know we’re hiding people, but what else can we do? We’ve got to show them we’re not going to give you up without another fight. They don’t like it when we fight back. Too many people find out.’
Karolina, also white, asked, ‘How will we get in the tent?’
‘The fence gate’s still open. I’ll let you out now.’
The Block 32 numbers didn’t come out right in that night’s roll call – no surprise. They shouted and hustled the dogs around us and checked our numbers about a hundred times. We had to stand there with our arms at our sides, looking straight ahead.
They made us stand there for a solid day.