Rose Under Fire

Page 42

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 Róa. 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 Róa 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 Róa 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 Róa 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 Róa 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, Róa is Róa.
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 Róa 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 Róa. 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.
‘Neither do I,’ he said, smiling through his moustache. ‘We’ll be braver together.’
He’d been very kind to me ever since I arrived – warm but serious, an intense, earnest man impassioned with his job of interviewing and examining the Ravensbrück Rabbits and preparing their statements. That’s the right word for it – impassioned. He was born in Austria and emigrated to the US in 1934, I think because he was Jewish; you could still hear the German accent (or Austrian or whatever it is). He was eager to meet Róa, the first of the Rabbits to arrive. She’d taken the train all the way from Sweden – it crosses the Baltic Sea on a ferry, like the Golden Arrow. As far as I knew, Róa hadn’t been in another airplane since the snowy night in March 1945 when I flew her out of Germany.
It took us a moment to recognise each other – even though Róa still had to walk with a supporting stick and she still had the crazed gleam in her eyes that Maddie and Bob had agreed on in the Ritz on VE Day. It was over a year and a half later and she still had it.
She had to switch sides with her cane so she could shake hands.
‘I am pleased to meet you, Dr Alexander,’ she said in English.
‘The pleasure is mine, Miss Czajkowska,’ he answered.
Róa held her cane hooked over her left arm, swinging it a little. She turned to me and held out her hand. She didn’t smile or rush to swallow me in a bear hug, but I felt everything in our clasped hands, even through our gloves.
‘Hello, Rose Justice,’ she said coolly.
It’s no wonder I didn’t recognise her. When I’d first met her, when she was seventeen, she’d been so emaciated I’d thought she was about eleven. She wasn’t any taller now, still petite, but so curvy – she wasn’t carrying any extra weight, but there was nothing angular or pointy about her anywhere – all curves. She was incredibly lovely. I’d once seen a glimpse of that, but had never imagined I’d see her in her full glory. Her hair was exactly the colour of caramel, coppery gold and gleaming, not long, but stylishly permed and framing a face like a china doll’s. She had on a camel-hair coat and a grey wool suit, dull but smart – and showing off all the amazing curves.
‘Hello, Róyczka,’ I said – little Rosie.
We were subdued in the car going back to the hotel. The bomb damage isn’t as obvious at night as it is in the daytime, but when you do notice it at night, it’s eerier. A dark row of empty windows with stars shining through them. A big pale heap you think is a snow bank until you get close enough to see it’s a pile of broken marble. A grey shadow like a naked torso crawling through the rubble in a vacant lot. By day you’d just see a scrap of newspaper fluttering aimlessly.
‘I didn’t think Germany would look like this,’ Róa said.
‘All of Europe looks like this!’ I exclaimed. ‘Haven’t you seen?’
‘Sweden doesn’t.’
Sweden was neutral during the war, of course – no bombs dropped on it.
Dr Alexander leaned back from the front seat. ‘You won’t mind spending time tomorrow going over your story in my office in the Palace of Justice, will you?’ he asked Róa. ‘I have the daunting task of interviewing all the young ladies appearing as witnesses. I must also make an examination of your injuries. But it would be appropriate to conduct the exam after the other four “Rabbits” arrive tomorrow, when you are all together. In the mean time we have only four days to prepare your statements, so I’d like to begin with yours tomorrow morning.’
‘All right,’ she answered softly.
As we climbed out of the car in front of the hotel, she whispered to me, ‘Are you going to be a witness also, Rose?’
‘No, I’m going to be a reporter. I have to write a story for the magazine that published my Ravensbrück poems.’
It was absolutely freezing – you felt like your breath was turning to ice when you talked. Róa didn’t say anything. And suddenly I felt cold not because of the winter night, but cold inside.