‘Lisette too.’
‘Gosh, yes, Lisette too. There is a very handsome famous actor from the Summer Rep Theatre at the Chautauqua Playhouse who’s come to the lake for the afternoon and he spots Lisette right away. So we race the canoes and your team will win. And we’ll all be annoyed so we’ll gang up on you and tip your canoe. Then everybody will tip each other’s canoes and we’ll all fall in the water, and it’ll feel wonderful because we’ll be hot and sweaty from racing, and while we’re splashing around, there will be belted kingfishers scooting overhead and scolding each other –’
The only thing that makes this a fairy story is the idea that we could ever all be there together.
The Nick Stories were all these ridiculous rescue dramas, Hollywood hero antics that could never happen in a million years. But the Lake Stories – I didn’t even bother to pretend the staff at the refreshment stand would bring us our drinks in a Lake Story. We’d help ourselves and pay, just the way anyone would. Even the boys asking us for a canoe race really happened last summer – I mean the summer before last, 1943, on that wonderful weekend before Labor Day when I’d nearly finished at the boring old paper box factory and I spent the day at the lake with Polly and Fran.
And that is what makes it so unfair. It is such a simple fairy story.
Lisette dragged me and Ró?a out of the pit during breakfast on the third morning and helped us change into clothes I knew had been organised by Elodie – plain, respectable stuff – navy skirt and stockings, and incredibly good coats, with wool cuffs and collars and lining still attached, though the elbows were threadbare. Numbers stolen from dead women were attached to the right sleeves, and there was no evidence of yellow star patches on the fronts. Warsaw coats, not Auschwitz coats. Lisette’s hands were cold and her face was drained and grim. I knew something terrible had happened, something that had changed her world.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Irina came back to that roll call wearing your coat,’ Lisette said. ‘And Karolina fought her for it.’
‘They fought over my coat ?’ I repeated dumbly, astonished. They wouldn’t do that, either one of them.
Ró?a understood instantly. ‘They didn’t fight over your coat, you turnip head,’ she said coldly. ‘They fought over your number.’
Lisette looked away from me, her cold hands still helping me into the warmest clothes I’d worn for months and months.
‘Did Irina win?’ I whispered.
‘Karolina won.’
I feel like it is the worst thing I have ever done – lie weeping in a hole in the ground while Karolina –
I can’t write it.
Karolina on the beach at the Lake in a red bathing suit, sunbathing under a blue sky.
‘Now pay attention, my dear,’ Lisette said, holding me fiercely by the shoulders. ‘You are going with Ró?a.’ I know that’s why Karolina did it – for Ró?a, not for me. Everyone Ró?a’s age was already gone, but she was so crippled she couldn’t go by herself. Karolina and Lisette were counting on me to get her out, to get her scrawny mutilated legs out where someone might see them – because Ró?a was a better piece of evidence than Karolina, who could walk to her death without limping.
‘You have one task only this morning and that is to keep anyone from noticing Ró?a’s legs. Hide her, hold her up – if she falls over, make it look like you have knocked her down. Irina is going to be on the same transport, so look for her and she will help you. There can be one of you on each side of Ró?a when you get to the other end, but you will be on your own until you find Irina.’
‘Where’s Irina?’ we asked together.
‘She’s in the Punishment Block –’
‘Because –?’ Ró?a interrupted, and then guessed, ‘For fighting with another prisoner during roll call, right? For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat?’
Lisette pressed her thin lips together, and I caught the crazed wet gleam in her eyes that had been there when I’d first met her, right after Zosia and Genca had been shot. Not for the first time, I wanted to punch Ró?a in the teeth.
‘For trying to steal another prisoner’s coat,’ Lisette agreed. ‘They are shipping out the whole Punishment Block this morning; I don’t know why, but you are going with them.’
‘In these clothes?’
‘There will be some Warsaw evacuees as well; they’re still wearing civilian clothes. You know where the transport trucks line up? You’ll have to wait till they bring Irina’s block out and then get into line with them. Oh, darling Ró?yczka –’
‘Rose will take care of me,’ Ró?a said with composure. Because I couldn’t say it myself. I wasn’t sure.
‘What if they take you straight to –’
‘What if they take us straight to Monte Carlo? We’ll be rich!’ Ró?a laughed hilariously.
Lisette kissed Ró?a on both cheeks. She gave me six slices of bread, wealth beyond imagining – two slices each, two days’ worth, to last us who knew how long. And who knew where she got it. Then she kissed me too.
‘Get her out,’ Lisette said. She didn’t say goodbye to us. But of course she hadn’t said goodbye to any of her other children. And this time she had a slender hope we weren’t going to be killed.
And this time she was right, as it happens, though she never knew, and may be dead. I can’t believe Lisette is dead, but she probably is, and I’ll never know that either.
It was about six weeks ago – I have been in Paris for just over two weeks, writing and writing, and we left Ravensbrück late in March. It hadn’t stopped snowing when we left – at that point I thought it was never going to stop snowing.
Irina was easy to find because she is so tall, and because of her white hair. She looked as dazed and crazed as Lisette, standing in line waiting to climb into the transport truck. She was staring at nothing. We couldn’t get near her, but we got into the same truck.
You know, I think we could have climbed into any truck we wanted to. Who’d have ever dreamed that any prisoner would willingly climb into one of those stinking, overcrowded, hellbound crates? Who’d have dreamed that I would?
It was bomb fuses all over again – like taking the fuse away from the boy on the railway tracks, or refusing to make the relay. I didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t. I had to climb into that truck with Ró?a. For Karolina – for Lisette. For Micheline and Elodie. For Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia –
Controlled flight into terrain.
We were expecting something like a three-day trip with maybe a bucket of water to share among us, nothing to use for a toilet, and having to sleep standing up because there wasn’t any room to sit down. We were expecting that, prepared for it. Resigned to it anyway. But the journey didn’t take much more than an hour. And we knew we’d really been driving somewhere, not going in the slow and terrible final circle around the outside of the camp.
They didn’t let us out right away. The hours crawled by. When they finally opened the trucks, for the first few minutes, while everybody was untangling themselves from one another and gulping in fresh air, there were only two things I thought about: hiding Ró?a’s legs, and getting to Irina. I dragged Ró?a under one arm and I shoved my way towards Irina’s white head. Irina caught Ró?a under her other arm and then I’d done both my jobs.
‘Where is this place?’ Irina asked pointlessly. Who had any idea? It was a rhetorical question and I looked around rhetorically –
And I knew where we were. I knew where we were.
We were in the exact same parking lot I’d pulled up in on the back of the mechanic’s motorcycle when Karl Womelsdorff and I flew to Neubrandenburg last September. It could have been anywhere, the loading area for any factory complex. There wasn’t really anything distinctive about it. But it is emblazoned on my brain and I recognised it.