After Nadine arrived, there was no talking while we ate, no talking while the knitters worked, no talking in the bunks – we were allowed to talk outside on Sunday afternoons only. Most of our communication happened while we were going to the toilet, because Nadine wouldn’t come near the waste ditches when everyone else was going. But she’d dole out soup herself for the sheer pleasure of smacking you on the head with the empty ladle afterwards. She brought reinforcement guards with their dogs inside the barrack, even at night. It didn’t stop us trying to whisper, but it made every word we said to each other weighted with terror. One night she set a couple of dogs loose in the bunks. Gosh, we hated those dogs. The most common injury people turned up with in the sickbay, according to Anna, was dog bites.
I can’t describe how desperate we were to fly below the Demon Nadine’s radar – to fool her, to go behind her back. We did crazy things. We’d be standing in a never-ending roll call and I’d inch one foot out of the mismatched shoe that was a little too big, so slowly you couldn’t see me moving, and then I’d nudge Ró?a in the ribcage and she’d turn her head and glance down at my toes and stifle a giggle. You could still see the nail polish, disappearing into a thin ruby crescent as my toenails grew out, like the waning moon. Ró?a would poke Karolina in her ribs and hiss, ‘Candy store’s open.’ And Karolina would poke Irina, and we’d all stand there poking each other and snorting with stifled mirth until Lisette exclaimed, ‘Shhh!’ as Nadine looked in our direction, and I’d ram my foot back into the muddy shoe and stare vacantly at the back of the woman in front of me.
Playing Statues
(by Rose Justice)
If I sigh my shoulders rise and fall.
It counts as movement. I won’t sigh. I’ll blink.
I’ll count how many blinks it takes before
the shadow of the smokestack hits the wall.
But if I blink I’ll fall asleep. I’ve closed my eyes before standing in line; it’s dangerous to blink.
I’ll watch the sky.
I’ll count how many crows
touch the long cloud behind the trees.
Oh God, but then I’ll cry.
Wings in the pine boughs always make me think of freedom. I won’t count or blink or sigh.
I’ll think of food. I’ll think of bread and meat,
pretend that when we’re told to go
there will be pepper pot
thick with tripe chunks, spicy and faintly sweet, like Mrs Kessler sells on Union Street.
God no, and no, and no! Of all things, not
Union Street: Don’t think of Union Street!
Don’t think of home.
Anything else but that. I’ll throw
myself on the electric wire. I’ll wiggle my toes.
I’ll sprint to the end of the row
and sock that pretty dog handler in the nose.
That makes me smile and clench my fist.
I’m out. She sees me move. Now I
can blink and sigh and sob.
She’ll make me count the blows.
*
My work team of Tall Girls got sent back to the maintenance shed we’d cleared out earlier.
Since we’d been there some prisoners from the men’s camp had boarded up the windows and the big garage doors of the shed, and replaced them with just a normal-sized set of wooden doors. Now we had to paint the interior walls black as high as we could reach. Once the guards made us understand what they wanted, they locked us in – Anna was allowed to make herself a little camp outside the new door of the building, with a crate for a chair and a coffee can or something for a stove with a fire in it like a hobo. Where she got the coal and how she got away with burning it right out there in the open, I will never know. But she was a red armband. She could get away with a lot.
And because we had Anna for a guard, we could get away with little acts of rebellion while she wasn’t looking. Inside the shed, Irina scavenged in the corners – nails, scraps of thin copper wire like they used in Siemens, wood splinters. French Political Prisoner 51444, otherwise known as Micheline, got busy painting Allied defiance all over the walls in letters three feet tall: VIVE LA FRANCE! VIVENT LES ALLIéS! MORT AUX NAZIS! and a token GOD BLESS AMERICA! Her friend 51350 followed behind frantically covering everything up so they wouldn’t get caught.
‘You’ll get us into so much trouble!’
‘You should have seen what I got up to when I worked in the post office,’ Micheline said. ‘We’d put big black censor stamps all over instructions being sent to German officers, or we’d steam open envelopes and swap letters around so they went to the wrong people, or steam off stamps so there was postage due – and anything that came from Paris with a German name on it we’d return to sender. Every now and then we’d send off a mailbag with a burning cigarette butt tied up inside it. My God, I miss the thrill of being a civil servant!’
We all laughed. Everything I know about passive resistance I learned from Micheline. She always appeared to be doing exactly as she was told, but everything she did took twice as long as it should have.
We sure did drag out that paint job as long as we could. It was wonderful to be able to talk to each other for a little while without having to whisper or worry that someone would hit us.
I also painted words on the walls. It was such a relief to be able to write down what I was thinking instead of having to memorise it. It is true that I had to obliterate everything I’d written, but I think it is much easier to write a poem when you can write it down. I couldn’t have written ‘The Subtle Briar’ without that paint job. I spent three days slapping black paint on the walls of a disused warehouse and refining the most complex and ambitious poem I’ve ever written.
When we’d caked the entire interior of the building in black about three quarters of the way to the ceiling, they turned out all the lights and shut us in so we could paint over the places where cracks of light came in through the boarded windows and around the newly built front wall.
Try standing on a ladder in pitch-darkness with a bucket of black paint and not get any on yourself or the girl who’s on the ladder beneath you. When they let us out as it was getting dark, in time to eat, all of us were covered head to foot in black paint. I had paint in my ears. We stood blinking blindly in the harsh street lights, but of course we didn’t get any time to readjust to reality – just got shoved back into our fives and marched back to camp.
‘What the hell are they making you do?’ Ró?a demanded.
Our shed-clearing-and-painting job was a fierce discussion topic whenever we were allowed, or able, to talk. Lined up along the ditches in the dark at 4 a.m. usually.
‘They’re repurposing a maintenance shed.’
‘By boarding up and blacking out the windows? Why does it have to be so dark? What are they going to put inside it?’
‘Maybe it’s a new quarantine block – someplace to process new prisoners,’ Lisette said.
‘You know what it’s for,’ Karolina accused quietly. ‘You know it. You won’t say it, but you know it. They have all these prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and nothing to feed them. They are building a gas chamber.’
‘They are building two,’ said Irina. ‘A new building is going up outside the north wall. The men’s camp is building it.’
Hope is treacherous. Lisette insisted, ‘That is a laundry, my dear. Ravensbrück is a work camp, not a death camp – an ordinary camp!’
‘They don’t dare shoot us in handfuls,’ said Karolina. ‘They’re going to kill us all at once.’
The Subtle Briar
(by Rose Justice)
When you cut down the hybrid rose,
its blackened stump below the graft
spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.
It claws at life, weaving a raft
of suckering roots to pierce the earth.
The first thin shoot is fierce and green,
a pliant whip of furious briar
splitting the soil, gulping the light.
You hack it down. It skulks between
the flagstones of the garden path
to nurse a hungry spur in shade
against the porch. With iron spade
you dig and drag it from the gravel
and toss it living on the fire.
It claws up towards the light again
hidden from view, avoiding battle
beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,
unloved, unfed, it clings and grows
in the wild hedge. The subtle briar
armours itself with desperate thorns
and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher, unquenchable, it now adorns
itself with blossom, till the stalk
is crowned with beauty, papery white
fine petals thin as chips of chalk
or shaven bone, drinking the light.
When you cut down the hybrid rose
to cull and plough its tender bed,
trust there is life beneath your blade:
the suckering briar below the graft,
the wildflower stock of strength and thorn
whose subtle roots are never dead.
*