‘If I grow bitterly,’ I whispered, and managed shreds of Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘Scrub’.
‘If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth . . .
. . . It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.’
‘Perfect,’ Róża whispered in astonishment. ‘Beautiful and twisted and exactly like us! Did you think it up today? When did you ever get a chance? You are better than I thought you would be.’
‘It’s just more Millay,’ I confessed. ‘My poems aren’t that good.’
The rain on the thin barrack roof sounded exactly like the rain on the roof of the sleeping porch. I ached with such desperate longing for Pennsylvania that I couldn’t tell where the homesickness ended and the dull throb of the bloody slashes on my back began.
I will never be as good a writer as Edna St Vincent Millay, I thought miserably. My poems will never be that good, because I will die here before I get the chance to write anything worth reading.
April 24, 1945
Paris
Air Raid at Ravensbrück
(by Rose Justice)
‘Runter!’ they screamed. ‘Get down!’ As if we’d all
leap up like mongrel dogs with our teeth bared.
But being obedient curs, down we all went,
not knowing why yet, flat on our faces, prone,
wet cinders in our mouths. The lights in the street
went out. The guards took cover, their well-bred
Alsatians with them. Open siren throats
shrilled an empty threat to swallow us whole.
We lay like forty thousand corpses in rows ten deep
by ourselves, and one thought hit us all hard in the head:
Run NOW. In the dark – get up and run now. Dare
the charged barbed wire NOW. No one sees or cares.
But when our brothers-in-arms in the bombers swarmed
over the blackened street, the howling night
leaped up in fury wielding searchlight whips
to flay the planes and skin the moon; the beams
broke harsh across our backs and froze us where
we lay revealed – wild does, not fanged or clawed
but weaponless rabbits and deer, blinking and blind.
No one ran or tried to run, lashed down
by the bright perimeter straps of light, bonds lighter
than moonlit air, heavier than iron chains.
My first air raid was during a roll call. It was about a week after I got to Block 32, the day before I was deemed well enough to be booted out of the knitting brigade. As the sirens went off, they made us lie on our faces. We were like a great big living, breathing target with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. They turned out the spotlights, but they had searchlights in the anti-aircraft ditches, sweeping the sky for the planes.
When I heard the planes, I rolled over on my back – no one cared. I lay with my dress bunched up under my backside and my hands beneath my thighs, cushioning my legs a little because they were still sore, with the back of my bare skull and most of my legs cradled by the cold, damp grit of the ground. I counted thirty-one US Air Force Flying Fortresses in the first echelon blacking out the silver moonlit sky, with an escort of fighter planes too far away and tiny to identify in the dark. Barely a mile away from me, 6,000 feet above my head, were American boys not much older than me, carrying Pennsylvania Hershey bars in their emergency rations, one hand on the control column and one hand on the throttle. They were looking down at the same scene I’d looked down at a month ago. Beneath the searchlights they’d see the dim outlines of a factory complex and the black rows of barrack roofs, the long black threads of the railway junctions, and the cool lakes shining silver in the light of the glorious full moon.
They’d be too high and it was too dark for them to see any of the 40,000 women lying face down on the damp gravel, trapped in our wire and concrete cage.
A pilot’s pinpoint. That’s all.
Five rows away from me, someone stood up suddenly. From where I lay she was silhouetted against the sky in the moonlight, six feet tall and skeletal, with a shock of spiky, short white hair like an old man with a crew cut. She didn’t say anything, just stood with her head thrown back, staring up at the passing planes. The moon lit her bristling hair like frost.
The woman next to her pulled at her skirt, trying to get her to lie down. She completely ignored this, and after a minute she raised one arm to the sky with her fist clenched – not raging, but saluting the airmen above her. Then suddenly she started to shake with sobs. I couldn’t hear her – the noise of the next wave of planes overhead and the sirens on the ground drowned out everything else – but I could see her shoulders heaving, and after a moment she stuffed her clenched fist against her mouth to shut herself up.
The other woman was still pulling at her skirt fearfully, and the tall one snapped at her angrily and reached towards the sky again. This time her hand was open, grasping – as if she were trying to snatch the planes out of the sky like King Kong, or trying to catch hold of them to pull her away with them.
I burst out unthinkingly, ‘Don’t cry!’
She turned to look for me. She didn’t lower her arm.
‘Ne pleure pas!’ I repeated in French, because it was the only other language I had a chance in.
She answered me in French that was worse than mine, heavily accented and without any real grammatical connections.
‘It hurts me that I do not know the planes. These are new since I became a prisoner. The big ones are maybe American? I do not know. They could be my own, I would not know. It always makes me cry.’
‘They’re American,’ I agreed.
She lowered her arm.
‘You know this?’
‘I’m a pilot.’
She burst out in joyful laughter and swore incomprehensibly in her own language. Then she took five long strides over the huddled bodies between us and came to lie down next to me – on her back beside me, squeezed in between me and Lisette, so that the two of us were lying side by side looking up at the sky like stargazers on a beach.
‘American planes,’ she said. ‘What kind of planes?’
‘The big ones –’ I didn’t know the French for ‘bomber’ either, so I just said it in English. ‘The big ones, the bombers, are B-17s, Flying Fortresses.’
‘Four engines,’ she added. You could see them.
‘Wright Cyclone engines,’ I told her. ‘Crew of ten. The little planes, what-do-you-call-them, I don’t know the French for fighters, I think Mustangs.’
She hugged me passionately and I gave a surprised yell of agony as my hands got knocked out from beneath my thighs and my backside hit the rough ground.
‘Oh! What?’
‘Fünfundzwanzig,’ I gasped. ‘Last week.’
‘Sorry!’
She inched away respectfully. She knew it was pointless to try to help (she did know how it felt). She said, ‘I am Irina Korsakova.’
Róża, flat on her face beside me, hissed, ‘Don’t talk to her – Russian scum!’
The timing was bad for Róża and Irina. Usually the Poles and the Russians in Block 32 got along pretty well – they were united in their disdain of the French, who were shy about undressing and rouged their faces with carefully saved slivers of beetroot. Block 32 was split down the middle with the French all on one side and the Russians and Poles on the other. But when Irina first threw herself into our row, the Warsaw Uprising had just come to a disastrous conclusion and all summer the Soviets had done a lousy job of giving the Poles any useful support. When the Germans finally beat the rebellion down, they practically destroyed the city – Block 32 knew perfectly well what was happening because imprisoned Polish women and children from Warsaw had been pouring into Ravensbrück for the past two weeks. So when I met Róża, she was holding a grudge against the whole of the USSR. Also, she was just by nature a jealous little thing.
On the other side of me Irina asked in a bored voice, ‘What did the fucking Rabbit say about me?’
‘She told me not to talk to you.’
They had a brief argument in Russian (I think), spitting and hissing like a pair of cats.
‘Fucking Poles,’ Irina said to me in French.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say? What did she say?’
‘Fucking Russians,’ Róża half-translated. (Róża taught me to swear like a sailor in about half a dozen European languages. The Polish students from Lublin spoke everything. It made me feel so stupid sometimes, this uneducated American who could only speak English and barely scrape by in French.)
‘Go ahead and talk to her,’ Róża sneered permission. ‘Witch. That’s what the Germans call those Soviet girl pilots – Nacht Hexen. Night witches. Go ahead and listen to her propaganda.’
I couldn’t imagine what kind of propaganda I was going to get from a girl who’d been in prison so long it had turned her hair white. In all the time I knew Irina, I never heard her say the words ‘communist’ or ‘party’ without turning away from me and spitting. But most of the Russian women at Ravensbrück were Red Army soldiers. Irina was a little different.
Her lanky height and hollowed face and white crew cut gave her the look of a grim, battle-worn king – Macbeth, maybe – someone competent and ruthless and experienced.
‘I’m not a Night Witch,’ Irina murmured low in my ear. ‘I never flew those tired old sewing machines except when I was training students. I am in Soviet Air Force 296 Regiment, based at Stalingrad. Men and a few women, flying Yaks, chasing together.’
‘Chasing together?’ I pictured a school dance, everyone running around after other people’s partners. ‘Chasing what?’
‘Chasing the Fascists.’ She always said ‘the Fascists’ when she was talking about the Germans. ‘Chasing Fascist aircraft.’
The French word doesn’t mean chasing – it means hunting. Irina was a hunter pilot. In English we say fighter, not hunter.
She was a combat pilot.
I was so thrilled it took my breath away. It was like meeting Amelia Earhart. Irina was a woman, and a fighter pilot.
‘What’s your score?’ I asked breathlessly.
She hesitated, trying to think of the right word. ‘Eleven?’
‘Eleven?’
That couldn’t be right. Shooting down five enemy aircraft makes you an official Ace. She’d said eleven – a double Ace.
She held her hands up so they were silhouetted black against the bright moonlit sky – ten fingers. Then one more, shaken for emphasis. ‘Eleven kills. Decorated Hero of the Soviet Union. Have you many kills?’ she added casually, as if we were comparing notes. She called them kills – a hunter bringing down prey.
‘No, I’m a transport pilot.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I was –’ I didn’t know the French for intercepted. ‘I was caught – caught in the air by Luftwaffe jets. Jets? Fast planes. I had no guns.’
‘When my guns were empty, I made a taran. Straight into a Fascist bomber, a fast dive from above. They did not know what hit them. Lost my –’ She didn’t know the French for propeller – she sketched a tight, fast spinning circle in the air above our faces. ‘Forced to land in Poland, and Fascist soldiers picked me up with a face full of glass and half my ribs broken.’
