It never occurred to me Polly would be any different from anybody else on the team. She didn’t say anything. She was probably trying hard to be brave. After all, everybody else had gone flying with me, and they’d all come back safely, bubbling over with enthusiasm and snapshots.
So when Polly walked out to the plane with me, I didn’t even know anything was wrong until she sat down on the brown winter grass of the airfield and burst into tears.
I thought she’d twisted her ankle!
‘Hey, what’s wrong?’
‘I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t –’
‘Won’t what?’
‘I won’t get in that kite! I don’t want to go anywhere near it! I told you I didn’t want to come –’
She had, sort of, but she’d made it sound like her mother didn’t want her to come.
I knelt down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry! It’s not scary getting in, and there are shoulder straps. The cockpit shuts up tight just like a little car. It’s so beautiful in the air! If you close your eyes while we’re taking off –’
My best friend Polly socked me in the eye.
That might have been the biggest shock of my entire life up to that point. In a million years I wouldn’t have guessed that my best friend could possibly be so scared of something that she’d punch me in the face for trying to talk her into doing it.
I burst into tears. Polly was already crying. After a moment she clapped her hands over her mouth and gasped, ‘Rosie – I’m so sorry! Gosh, we’re like second graders pulling each other’s hair! I just –’
She didn’t actually pack much of a punch. It had just been such a surprise. I laughed shakily and said, ‘No, I’m sorry, and you should have told me you were scared! I wouldn’t bully you into doing something you’re that scared to do – it’s supposed to be a treat! It’s not important enough to make you do it!’
I really believed that when I said it to Polly. It was true for Polly. I guess it’s still true for Polly, but under other circumstances – sometimes it is important enough.
1. Lift
My sense of who I am is partly based on the fact that I learned to fly when I was twelve. But there are a lot of other things that define me. I am a Pennsylvania Dutch Lutheran. I am a student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, halfway through my second year of a Bachelor of Medicine degree. I am a published poet, in this magazine and one other, with two poems soon to be printed in The New Yorker. And, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal completed in Nuremberg three months ago, I am one of the millions of victims of Counts 3 and 4, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, brought against the Nazi leaders convicted there. I am one of the lucky ones, because I am still alive.
Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, whose testimony about the gassings at Auschwitz was so shocking that people listening in the courtroom took their headphones off so they couldn’t hear the translation any more, was my fellow prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. I was also there in the Ravensbrück infirmary, the Revier, counting bodies. I am a witness too. But I am not as brave as she is. I start to sweat when I think about standing up in front of a room full of newspaper reporters and helmeted soldiers and robed judges from four different countries, not to mention the twenty or so high-ranking Nazi leaders on trial there. When I was asked to appear as a witness at the Ravensbrück trial currently going on in Hamburg, I said no. And the shame of it is that I didn’t see or suffer anywhere near as much as Mme Vaillant-Couturier, because she was imprisoned at Auschwitz for over a year before being transported to Ravensbrück, and I was only imprisoned at Ravensbrück for six months. And Ravensbrück was an ordinary camp. Mostly.
After I got out of Ravensbrück I locked myself in a hotel room for three weeks and wouldn’t come out. I was scared of freedom. I was scared of space – of being in the open and of having to decide for myself where to go – and of having to talk to people, and of being stared at. I was also afraid to face my aunt, my elegant, gracious English aunt, who was supposed to come collect me and fatten me up and put me on an ocean liner back to Pennsylvania where I would, presumably, resume normal life.
My English Aunt Edie is elegant and gracious, but she is also very, very smart. When she discovered that a friend of mine, fellow transport pilot Maddie Brodatt, was making a delivery flight to Paris only a couple of days after Edie had been planning to come get me, she asked my friend to meet me in her place. It was the second week of May in 1945.
Aunt Edie had taken the hotel room next to mine, so she gave it to Maddie instead. The rooms were connected by a pair of private communicating doors, so we could lock each other out if we wanted to. Maddie called from reception to let me know she’d arrived. I knew I didn’t have a choice, and I was clean and respectably dressed by then, so I let her come up.
I’d been her bridesmaid the year before.
When I opened the door, she stood for a moment staring at me as if she didn’t recognise me – or as if she thought I’d disappear in a puff of smoke.
I stepped aside to let her in. We didn’t hug each other. She said, ‘Oh, Rose!’ in a pained voice, and I tried to smile at her.
‘I’m OK. They didn’t feed us very well.’ (I was still less than two-thirds my normal weight.) ‘And I just had bronchitis, and – well – my hair’s growing back.’
I touched my own head with both hands. ‘They shave your hair off –’ I stopped. I couldn’t explain.
‘Because of nits?’
‘No, just to make you miserable. The last time they did it to me was because I was humming during roll call. It’s OK – really it’s –’
‘Stow it, Rosie,’ she said very gently and persuasively, and took me by the elbow and made me sit down at the vanity table by the open window where I’d been pouring out the story of my imprisonment in pen and ink for the past three weeks.
‘What’s the view like?’ Maddie asked. The drapes and shutters were closed because everything was still under blackout restrictions; we were still at war.
‘Fantastic. Turn out the lights and we can open the curtains. Not much to see in the dark though.’ Maddie followed my orders, and then stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders. There was no light in the Place Vend?me, but it was so open and so dark that it seemed like the whole sky was on fire with starlight.
‘You know we are staying in the former Luftwaffe headquarters!’ Maddie exclaimed suddenly.
‘Oh!’ It hadn’t occurred to me. ‘I never thought about that.’
‘How could you not!’
We both laughed a little. ‘I haven’t been out since I got here,’ I confessed.
‘What, not even in that smashing bar in the courtyard? This place is swarming with Americans! Journalists and war correspondents, lots of writers! You should be talking to people, sharing your poems!’
I shook my head. ‘All those strangers staring. I couldn’t.’
‘Golly, Rose, I’ll go with you tonight. We need to celebrate. Germany surrendered this morning. Everyone at the airfield was over the moon! General De Gaulle is going to make an official announcement here in Paris tomorrow afternoon – it’ll be a holiday everywhere.’
And there was Arcturus, rising over the other side of the square, just like Karolina had told me we would see it in the spring when the war was over.
Karolina was dead. I started to cry.
We didn’t go to the bar. Maddie stayed with me in my room and I let her read what I’d written over the past three weeks.