You’d think your weight would always be the same, but it isn’t. When you do aerobatics or go into a dive – like a kite that’s plunging into the sand at the beach – there’s an increase in gravity, and that makes you weigh more. If you want your heavy kite to stay in the air, you have to increase the lift as well. Maybe by waiting for a stronger wind. Maybe by finding a windier place to fly your kite.
Maddie brought lift back into my life by forcing me outside. So did Bob, who introduced me to the editors of this magazine. So did Fernande, the chambermaid at the Paris Ritz, who gave me her daughter’s clothes and made me get dressed and brought me coffee every morning for three weeks. So did the US Air Force pilot who let me take over the controls of his C-47 so I could fly it in long, lazy circles around the Eiffel Tower over the cheering crowds on VE Day.
My dad sends me an allowance and pays for me to rent a plane from time to time at a civilian flying club outside Edinburgh. I can’t find work as a pilot – there are so many of us cooling our heels with nothing to do now that the war is over. Plenty of women with more experience than me get turned down for the few instructor and air taxi jobs available. The new commercial airlines aren’t interested in women except as hostesses. But my dad, who taught me to fly, wants to make sure I don’t get rusty.
I can’t work as a pilot anyway, because the university is taking most of my time and a huge amount of effort too. And I like Edinburgh, except for the weather. I already had friends in Scotland when I moved here, and now I have more. I am healing. I have scars that show and scars that don’t. Even when you’re flying high and steady, the weight doesn’t go away – it’s just balanced by lift. I have worked pretty hard over the past year and a half to keep my life in balance. But the weight’s still there, waiting for an increase in gravity to pull me earthwards again.
There was one factor of weight last year that was sometimes so heavy it made me curl on the floor in front of the tiny coal fire in my tiny student bed-sitting room and sob. A year after escaping from Ravensbrück I still hadn’t found my friend Ró?a. Or anybody I’d known at Ravensbrück. Half of the people I’d loved and fought beside in the concentration camp were dead, and I knew that, but I hadn’t managed to find any of those I’d last seen alive either.
In the end, they found me. I was, after all, the one who broadcast the distress signal – the one who fired the flares.
Lisette Romilly tracked me down. Lisette is also a writer, a much more successful and talented writer than me. About two months ago Lisette’s editor at Les éditions de Minuit in Paris handed her the Spring 1946 edition of the Olympia Review. He thought Bob’s concentration camp survivor story, ‘Half-Remembered Faces’, would interest her – and also the young American poet Rose Justice’s ‘Ravensbrück Poems’.
Here is her letter to me:
22 October 1946
Happy birthday, my dear Rose!
How astonished I was to see on the printed page your poems which I only know by heart! The biographical note at the end suggests you are well. You will understand both my delight and my anguish at finding you.
You may know that Ró?a is now working at the Polish Research Institute in Lund, Sweden, helping to translate and catalogue witness testimony as evidence in trials like the International Military Tribunal recently held at Nuremberg, where the high-ranking Nazi leaders were indicted, and the trials held elsewhere to convict those responsible for individual concentration camps. Trials for Ravensbrück staff are currently being organised by the British in Hamburg, and you may also be aware that three of the Ravensbrück doctors responsible for the medical experiments forced on the Lublin Special Transport will be tried with other Nazi doctors by an American court in Nuremberg in December.
I have suggested Ró?a go as a witness to Nuremberg with a number of other girls who were experimental ‘Rabbits’ and who will be appearing at this American tribunal indicting the Nazi doctors. I myself am going to appear as a witness at the first of the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, so will miss the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg. Perhaps you will be able to go to Nuremberg yourself and see Ró?a there. I have also suggested that the organisers of the Hamburg trials contact you as a potential reliable and articulate witness to the atrocities committed at Ravensbrück.
I visited Ró?a in Sweden at the beginning of the summer. She is in good health and so appears much changed from the desperately crippled Rabbit we knew at Ravensbrück. She does not seem to enjoy her work, but she is wholly obsessed with it. She still has not taken her high school diploma, which makes me a little sad as a teacher and her ‘camp mother’ – however, Ró?a is Ró?a.
She says that Irina is an air hostess with Sabena! She married a Danish pilot just after the war ended. I think it was a marriage of convenience – it conveniently prevented her from being sent back to the Soviet Union. I cannot imagine Irina content for long to run up and down the aisle of an aircraft fetching pillows and mineral water for bankers and screen stars when she really ought to be designing aircraft, but at least she is travelling the world and is back in the air.
I hope you are back in the air too, my dear Rose.
Your loving friend,
Lisette
So it was Lisette who suggested me as a witness – Lisette, who knew better than anyone our duty to the living and the dead. But it was also Lisette who gave me the idea of going to Nuremberg to see Ró?a instead.
I squeezed all my end-of-term exams into one week so that I could be in Nuremberg for the second week of the Doctors’ Trial, the week that the Rabbits would be there. The Olympia Review advanced me a small stipend for my hotel stay, the train from Edinburgh to London and the amazing boat-train from London to Paris (it is called the Golden Arrow). My Uncle Roger arranged an onward flight for me from Paris to Nuremberg with the US Air Force – not with Sabena, so I didn’t see Irina on board.
Maybe you’ve seen the US Air Force moving pictures. Europe is in ruins. It is as visible from the air as it is from the ground. The only difference is that from the air you don’t see the grubby kids playing in the rubble and the old women gathering pieces of furniture to use as firewood and the piles of broken German planes stacked along the roadside waiting to be cleared. But from the air you really get the extent of it. Imagine if you took the train from Philadelphia to Boston, and the whole way, all through New Jersey and through New York City and on up through coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island, all the way to Boston, just imagine if the whole way every city that you went through was smashed to smithereens. That’s what it looks like. The entire East Coast turned into a demolition site.
Weight, weight – a heavy conscience. We have heaped more destruction on the German cities than they have heaped on us, and that is the truth. Weight. Rubble to clear.
Nuremberg – it is correctly Nürnberg in German – is one of the cities that we hit hard. But it got chosen for the International Military Tribunal for war crimes because the Palace of Justice is still standing, with a good secure prison still attached to it. And of course it is the symbolic centre for the birth of Nazism, so it seems like a good place to restore things. The IMT earlier this year was run by the Allied powers. The Doctors’ Trial is being run by the Americans – it’s actually called ‘United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al.’. The city of Nuremberg is still a wreck, and I was pretty much forbidden to go out of the hotel alone after I got there. I didn’t see anything of the medieval city the whole time I was there, although I think it would have made me sad if I did – ninety per cent of it is destroyed.
I got driven to the train station to meet Ró?a. The GI who did the driving had a gun with him, so I felt pretty safe, but the medical expert from the tribunal, Dr Leo Alexander, came along too.
‘I don’t mind going by myself,’ I said.