Rose Under Fire

Page 15

Back in the long factory room, with the prison dresses sticking to our wet backs, we had to pick up patches with our prisoner numbers on them, along with another patch that was supposed to show what kind of prisoner you were – all red triangles for us, which meant we were political prisoners. Then we had to learn to say our numbers in German. I remembered my number – that wasn’t the trouble. After all, Grampa taught me how to count to twenty in Dutch, or Low German, or whatever it really is, when I was two. The trouble was that when Effi Moyer tried to teach me how to say my number, I tried to tell her I wasn’t French.
‘Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig,’ she prompted me – French political prisoner 51498.
Remembering what the Luftwaffe pilots had called me when they were arguing over my papers in Mannheim, I said to Effi: ‘Ich bin Amerikanerin.’ I pointed to the others then to myself and shook my head. ‘I’m not French. Amerikanerin.’
Effi looked me in the eye with a face full of disdain and irritation and said, ‘Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig’ – and honestly my German has not improved very much, but I know that is what she said, because my name was Französisch politischer Häftling 51498 for six months.
I repeated the numbers. But not the ‘French political prisoner’ part, because I wasn’t French. I was trying to behave myself. Effi just glared at me and started to put away the ledgers, ignoring me, and I turned away to find Elodie waiting for me with her mouth twisted into a sort of imitation of a grin. She tossed back the golden bangs – she’d managed to keep her hair, presumably because she was such an Aryan blonde – and gestured quickly at our badly fitting dresses with one finger. Swap you.
We started to strip the dresses off again, right there. We didn’t think anyone would care, because everyone ahead of us was being made to strip again so we could sew the red patches and our prisoner numbers on to our sleeves. But I hadn’t counted on Effi Moyer. She’d noticed me. I was the embarrassing prisoner who shared her name, the one who’d failed to save her a Hershey bar, the one who’d argued with her about being American.
Effi saw me and Elodie about to swap our dresses, and she came marching over to us and grabbed them away from us. Then she grabbed Elodie by her hair, close to her scalp, and dragged her over to sit down on the floor right next to the desk. Effi jerked one arm fiercely in my direction to tell me to follow Elodie – she wanted to keep an eye on us both as we sewed on our patches.
Elodie suddenly seemed totally cowed. Stark naked, she hunched over the dress, covering her lap with it; her shoulders shook a little as if she were sobbing. She didn’t make a sound though. I sat next to her, biting my lip, helpless with feeling so humiliated and so mad. We had to wait for someone to pass us a needle, and when we got one, Elodie dropped it. Then she couldn’t find the patch with her number on it after she’d threaded the needle. We scrambled around hunting for it and both of us got whacked over the head with one of Effi Moyer’s clipboards. Then, when it was my turn to use the needle, I couldn’t find my number.
Elodie had it. She handed me the patch quietly, and her mouth twisted in a quick little grin. The scar on the side of her face made her pretty smile lopsided.
It wasn’t till I was sewing it on my sleeve that I realised she’d swapped our numbers. All the shuffling around had just been a show to distract Effi Moyer from Elodie’s sleight of hand. She’d sewn my 51498 on to the sleeve of her pale-blue shirtwaisted sailor dress with the too-long skirt that came down to her ankles, its big collar ripped off so that it wouldn’t hide the contrasting prison X across the front and back of the bodice. And now I sewed Elodie’s 51497 on to my too-tight brown gingham. Effi Moyer had been so busy making sure we put on the dumb dresses we’d been ‘issued’ with, she hadn’t paid any attention to the numbers we’d sewn on them.
We put our badly fitting clothes back on, wearing each other’s numbers, and lined up in front of the quarantine block to be counted.
The siren for the 9 o’clock roll call had come and gone and thousands of other prisoners had already gone to bed, but for us it was our first real roll call – Zählappell – outside, beneath the glaring electric lights, the long shadows of the dogs and the infinite rows of barbed wire making eerie pictures on the high concrete walls. It seemed to take forever. We stood there until after they turned the street lights out, the SS guards shining flashlights in our faces and making sure we didn’t try to sit down.
Elodie and I were still the last two in our group, so by the time they got to us the guards were utterly fed up with everybody and ready to go to bed too, and here we were, the last two ‘French’ women with our numbers the wrong way round.
‘Fabert, Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertsiebenundneunzig! Justice, Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ – Fabert 51497, Justice 51498. Somebody prodded Elodie’s sleeve with a club.
‘No, I’m Rose Justice!’
Two guards used their clubs to guide us out of line while a third stood hanging on for dear life to one of the awful German shepherds, and a fourth stood glaring down at her clipboard with its endless list of names, flashlight tucked under her arm and pencil in the other hand. Her hair was hanging in her eyes and she looked incredibly grouchy. She didn’t watch us at all. She couldn’t have cared less what was going on. She was just waiting to get the stupid numbers to come out right.
They made us strip naked again.
They gave me three cracking truncheon wallops – in the stomach and the small of my back and over my shoulders – the first blow made me bend over and the second knocked me to my knees, leaving my back wide open for the third. While I crouched there gasping and reeling, they got out those dreaded shears and cut all Elodie’s golden hair off. I didn’t have any hair to cut off, so I got beaten up instead.
When they’d finished battering and disfiguring us, one of them took Elodie’s dress with my number on it and threw it at me, and then took my dress with Elodie’s number on it and threw it at her. They made us get dressed again. And then they shoved us back in line and checked our numbers off the list – Fabert 51497, Justice 51498.
Elodie whispered, ‘La victoire!’ – victory.
I was black and blue for a week and Elodie had had to stand stark naked in the Lagerstrasse, the main camp street, in the middle of the night and get her hair sheared off. But she was right – we’d beaten Effi Moyer. We were wearing the dresses that fit us, and our own numbers.
You know, if it had just gone on like that for six months, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.
I hadn’t seen evil. Or if I had, I didn’t recognise it yet. I didn’t realise they’d made the schmootzichs. All I’d seen in the guards were bad tempers and meanness. But not evil. Not horror. Not really. Only . . . You know, they were always so random about dealing out their meanness. I think the randomness should have tipped me off. It was dark when they beat me up and cut off Elodie’s hair that night. They didn’t even have the benefit of much of an audience. It wasn’t humiliating; it was just vicious.
The randomness has left its mark. I am scared of anything arbitrary now – of anything that happens suddenly. I am scared of the telephone ringing. It rang this morning, when the Embassy called to see if I was OK. I am scared of loud noises in the street. I am scared of dogs, and of talking to people for the first time. It is not a normal kind of being scared – the telephone made me burst into tears. A horse-drawn cart clattering by made me crouch behind the vanity table. It took me about an hour to get the courage to go into the Embassy the other day – I just stood there against the wall outside the gate watching everybody else go in and out. I was scared of Fernande the first time she showed up.
I am not scared of this room, but I feel like a flea in a jewellery box. And I am utterly lost in the beautiful double bed, that’s for sure.
The bunks in quarantine Block 8 were triple-deckers, bare boards two planks wide, one bug-infested straw mat about half an inch thick with a couple of grubby cotton blankets between four of us. It was a one hundred per cent improvement over where I’d slept the night before. Elodie and I clung to each other because it was the only way to avoid falling out. We were on a top tier, under the wooden roof and above the windows. I was hungry, but not yet starving; my knees, shoulders, ribs and back were incredibly sore; and I was exhausted but wide awake. I still wasn’t really scared. I was just seething. So angry! This stupid fight over the dresses. I could have understood if they had a prison uniform they wanted us all to wear. They used to have one, ugly grey sacks with blue stripes – a lot of the women who’d been there a while still wore them. If we’d all been wearing the same ugly uniform I’d have understood. But why should we have to swap our own perfectly decent clothes for someone else’s that didn’t fit? What was the SS going to do with a hand-me-down Air Transport Auxiliary uniform? I’d have been perfectly happy to let them sew a big X across my uniform if only they’d let me wear it. Or – not exactly happy. But willing.
And our hair. Some of the girls were really upset about it. A couple of them, just after, didn’t even try to cover up their privates when the guards grinned at them – they covered up their bald heads, as if this were the most shameful and embarrassing thing that had ever been done to them. I wasn’t upset. I was angry, as mad as I was about everything else. There was one spiky patch on the side of my head where they didn’t really cut it close enough. They cut it too close to Elodie’s scalp, in the dark, and she had another nice long, oozy red scrape to match the scar along her jaw.
What will Nick think when he sees me? I suddenly wondered. Nick loves my hair. Maybe it will grow out by the time I see him again. Oh, please let it grow out a little bit.
Down at the bottom of the bunk my toes were still shiny with cherry-red nail varnish which I’d put on for my last date with Nick. I noticed them in the shower.
Nobody said anything in the dark, but it wasn’t silent. People rutched around trying to get comfortable, growling at each other, sighing, coughing, sobbing. I could hear the distant hum of generators or something – of course some of the workshops kept going all night, though I didn’t know that then.
Suddenly, on the other side of the thin wooden barracks, an anonymous voice yelled out, ‘Vive la France!’
Instantly there was dead silence.
We were all frozen, holding our breath, waiting for the lights to snap back on and the dogs to come back.
But nothing happened, and after another tense moment half a dozen other anonymous voices answered in defiance: ‘Vive la France! VIVE LA FRANCE!’
Then another voice called out fiercely, in English, ‘God bless America!’
It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Elodie. I don’t know who it was. But it was a battle cry. We were still at war and we were soldiers and we were Allies.