‘I know.’ And of course we’d never stolen food from each other, ever, which made the sensation of covetous greed very weird. We’d both been reasonably well-fed for the past year and a half and now we were in a restaurant in a fancy hotel. It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.
We asked the hotel reception to fix it so we could share a room, which they were happy to do, because it freed up another room for the overflowing reporters and trial observers. When we got undressed for bed, Ró?a proudly showed off to me her Exhibit A legs.
‘I broke my right leg in the refugee centre in Belgium. This is the leg they took the bone samples from. It held for two and a half years in their camp and then it broke, just like that, a week after I got out. I wasn’t even doing anything – just carrying your soup across the gym hall for you.’
I realised, suddenly, the notable difference about her – she’d stopped swearing.
She peeled her thick wool hose down to her ankles. ‘See? Here, in my shin. The new scar is where they operated on it in Sweden. I have a steel rod in there now, holding everything together. I couldn’t stand up for four months!’
I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know how I lost you, Ró?a.’
‘Oh, well I do.’ She flung her hose on a chair. ‘You were crazy about that reporter. You forgot us the second you laid eyes on him.’
‘I wanted to tell him all your names! I wanted to tell him about the Rabbits, about the experiments! You spent six months drilling everybody’s names into my head – Karolina and Elodie got dragged off to be gassed yelling that we should tell the world about it, that’s what Irina told me, and Bob was the first reporter I ran into! It was like he’d dropped out of the sky. And then I wasn’t brave enough to tell him anything.’
Ró?a laughed, not the old raucous cackle, but a soft, regretful sigh of a laugh. The ghost of a laugh. ‘That was us dropping out of the sky, not him. Remember? We’re the ones who crash-landed.’
‘I told the American Embassy your names,’ I said defensively.
We turned out the lights. It was a little room with twin beds. We lay in the dark wide awake with the weight of where we were and what lay ahead of us pressing on us.
‘Rose?’ she said softly.
‘Yeah?’ I answered.
‘It is just as strange to know you are there, and to be warm and comfortable, as it is to eat with you.’
‘It really is.’
‘Tell me “The Subtle Briar” again,’ she asked.
She knew I would still know it by heart.
I whispered to her in the dark.
‘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.
‘Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,
Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,
Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,
Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,
Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,
Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,
Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,
Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia.
‘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.’
Ró?a gave a long sigh. Then she whispered, ‘Rose, I really miss you.’
Ró?a spent most of Sunday telling her story to Dr Leo Alexander – we had supper with him that night afterwards, before the other Ravensbrück witnesses arrived. Everyone I met who was involved in the trial was friendly and straightforward, as though we were at a conference. This was not quite what I was expecting, but I think it is a result of everything being pulled together at the last minute. And although I wasn’t one of Dr Alexander’s witnesses he was interested in me, because I am a writer and a medical student, which is a less advanced version of what he is.
Ró?a told him at supper, ‘Rose could be a witness here. She has scars too.’
He looked at me with sudden intense interest. ‘You do? An American witness?’
I shook my head violently. ‘I wasn’t operated on. I was just thrashed because I wouldn’t work. So was everybody who didn’t work, or who did anything else they didn’t like. We’re a dime a dozen and nothing to do with a trial for medical staff.’
‘I hate to say it, but you’re right,’ Alexander agreed. ‘I’ll admit I’ve already rejected several so-called witnesses exactly like you.’ He turned his mild, smart gaze back to Ró?a. ‘You will likely have heard of the concept of genocide, a term coined by your countryman Raphael Lemkin, which the IMT used as a basis for their charges against the Nazi leaders? We are using a parallel concept in this trial: thanatology, the science of producing death. These men are being charged with murder. The charge is that their experimentation was designed to discover not how to heal, but ways to kill. Simply put, you’re a survivor of attempted murder. A punitive lashing, however ugly the scars may be, is, unfortunately, irrelevant.’
‘I couldn’t show off my scars anyway!’ I protested, taking refuge in being ridiculous to hide my cowardice. ‘What would I do, step on to the witness stand in a bathing suit? A two-piece!’
‘It would be sensational,’ Ró?a exclaimed.
‘No one would notice any scars!’ Dr Alexander teased.
What a very weird dinner conversation.
The other Rabbits arrived. They were all as unrecognisable as Ró?a – well-fed, well-dressed, wearing their hair fashionably styled beneath new hats, smiling for the flashing press cameras at the train station. We hugged and kissed as if we were all long-lost family: Vladyslava, tall Maria, Jadviga, and little Maria who’d had to stay in the Revier for a year and a half. I hadn’t known any of them very well at Ravensbrück, but I knew their names. I’d hidden with Vladyslava and Jadviga in a pit dug beneath our washroom for two days. They’d hidden there with Ró?a for a week.