‘Like fun!’
But of course, little Różyczka did need taking care of. She couldn’t go without help. I lay awake with my emotions whirling like the beaters on an electric mixer, feeling stupidly envious of Karolina’s bravery, elated that we’d got people out, fearful that they might have climbed into the wrong truck – the transfer trucks were usually closed in and the gas chamber trucks were usually open-topped, but you never, never really knew.
‘Elodie,’ Micheline uttered under her breath to me as we got dragged off to work as usual.
‘Elodie?’
She clamped her lips together, because a caped turkey buzzard with a dog was keeping an eye on us.
They’d closed the camp streets and put guards and roadblocks at all the intersections as they tried to catch the women who were hiding. By now, the second week of February, there were nearly twice as many women in the camp as when I got there. Hundreds of people came in and hundreds of others got taken away again every day. We had extra roll calls so they could try to count us – daylight roll calls, six in a day once – in my head every single one of them takes place in a snowstorm, but that wasn’t true, because I can also remember watching planes going over against a sky as blue as a summer day at the lake, and I remember just longing to be up there with my hand lightly on the control column, just longing to be back in my other half-remembered existence.
Every day me and Irina and our Corpse Crew of a dozen tall French girls still had to go around making our collection with carts and wheelbarrows up and down the Lagerstrasse. It still had to be done – it couldn’t go more than a couple of days without being done. We had a new Kolonka who didn’t speak English and didn’t like to come too close to us – she did a lot of screaming at us, but as long as we did our job she didn’t smack us. We never saw Anna again. I don’t have any idea if she managed to save her own skin. I still don’t know.
And now Micheline was mumbling Elodie’s name without telling me anything else and I was frantic with worry.
‘Elodie gives,’ Micheline muttered as we loaded the dead into the incinerator-bound trucks waiting by the main gate. We weren’t allowed outside the gate any more – prisoners from the men’s camp had to do the unloading on the other side.
That’s all she said. Elodie gives. Then Micheline went white-faced and tight-lipped again as we got herded aside and slapped and kicked until we took our clothes off. The guards weren’t supposed to let us through the various blockades unless they searched the carts first. But that was such a repugnant job that a lot of the time they’d just search us instead – make us strip and stand quivering with cold and embarrassment, stark naked with our arms at our sides, while they paced around us looking suspicious. The less cooperative we were, the longer they made us stand there. So we got in the habit of being almost unbelievably meek and mild when we were working, and this included hardly daring to breathe a word to each other.
And really, sometimes you didn’t feel like talking. That day the guards didn’t even bother to tell us we could get dressed again – they just walked off to pester someone else and left us standing there at attention in our stunningly unattractive birthday suits until, after a quarter of an hour, Irina got mad and risked dragging her clothes back on without getting anyone’s permission.
‘Clothes,’ Micheline muttered as we pulled our ragged dresses over our heads.
I sighed. ‘Clothes,’ I agreed.
Later, as we carried a body together through a narrow aisle between befouled bunks, she grunted, ‘For the Rabbits.’ She gave me a look as we lowered the poor thing on to the pile, like she wanted me to answer her somehow.
I frowned at her, not daring to say anything. Micheline held my eyes with hers – she had gorgeous eyes, a clear, yellow-brown hazel with dark brown flecks.
I thought back over the handful of words she’d sprinkled me with that day, like a puzzle or a radio serial, and came up with:
‘Elodie gives clothes for the Rabbits.’
‘Yes,’ I hissed. ‘Oui.’ Just to let her know I understood.
This is what she meant: the women who sorted the clothes taken from the new prisoners were organising civilian outfits for all the remaining Rabbits. Civilian clothes were the first thing you needed if you were going to escape. Not that anyone really escaped – there was that Gypsy girl they caught in the woods and her own block beat her to death because they’d had three days’ Strafstehen while the guards hunted for her. Everyone knew about her. But it didn’t stop you thinking about escaping.
Just getting people out of Ravensbrück, even on a truck bound for another camp, counted. Hundreds of the newest prisoners were transferred in or out without being put in quarantine or even getting issued with prison clothes, and civilian clothes would help the Rabbits blend in with them. We had the clothes now, and my team was good at organising false numbers from the bodies we picked up. Even if the Rabbits couldn’t get out, they could hide in the other blocks, replacing the dead.
Lisette and Karolina had diplomatic immunity – that’s the right term. They were the only contact the camp officials had with the Rabbits. That incredibly slippery character the camp commander wanted to negotiate with them. This is the same stinker who on New Year’s Day told us over the loudspeakers that he was going to blow us all up. Here’s what he tried to get the Rabbits to do for him now:
‘Please sign a form saying you hurt your leg in an industrial accident.’
‘Please, when the Soviets get here and turn this place inside out, could you tell them how well you’ve all been treated, since it was the previous camp administration who authorised the first operations and the current administration who kept you alive.’
‘Please, all of you come forward and we will send you together to another, more comfortable, camp.’
That was the best one. We knew the camp they named had already been shut down, so . . . Did he really think people were all going to climb meekly into a lot of empty trucks specially designated for the doomed Lublin Transport and let them drive everybody out the gates towards – where? Around and around the outside walls of Ravensbrück till they got back to the gas chamber? As if we had no idea what happened to the people they loaded into trucks and drove around the walls every day? You could hear them going around. You could hear them stopping at the warehouse we had to paint black on the inside. You could hear the sobbing and yelling when they made people get out of the trucks on the other side of the wall. And then their worn and lice-ridden clothes would come back inside and Elodie had to sort them.
We knew what would happen when they loaded 200 of us into open trucks before breakfast.
‘The commander’s a stinking weasel,’ Karolina said. ‘He’s scared and he’s desperate. The Nazis are beaten and they know it, but they just won’t stop. It’s like – it’s like Róża when she’s angry at something – she just gets nastier and nastier even though she knows everyone will end up crying. The commander wants signed statements from us all, so he can prove to General Eisenhower how generous and humanitarian he is when the Americans get here, but when he’s got his signed statements, then he can safely kill us and pretend it was an administrative error.’
‘The Rabbits are safe, my dear,’ Lisette vowed, ‘because no one will sign anything. We will agree to nothing.’
‘No one is safe. You and I could be sentenced to execution any time – they’re only letting us come and go because we’re still wearing our numbers and can be counted. The others are only safe till someone finds them,’ Karolina retorted grimly.
Kaninchen Króliki Lapins Králíci
Králíci is Czech. I don’t know how to write ‘rabbits’ in Russian, but it sounds the same as in Polish. By the end of February everybody in the camp knew all the words for rabbit in every language of every nationality at Ravensbrück, because the Rabbit Hunt was the one thing that united us.
The Rabbits sometimes called themselves something else. They used the word król. I would not have figured this out except that Karolina made a lot of caricature portraits for people showing them as rabbits wearing little crowns, and Lisette explained it to me, because she knew I love the subtleties of words as much as she does. Król is a rare Polish word for rabbit. But it also means king.
There is a rare English word for rabbit, coney, which also sounds a little like the German word for king – König. It’s also like the Dutch word for rabbit, konijn. I’d turn all this into a poem if only I could find a connection that wasn’t a coincidence, or if it worked better in English. The Kings of Ravensbrück.
Because, in a crazy way, they ruled the place.
I want so desperately to remember it. Hiding the Rabbits gave us back our lives. But so many of the things we did to save them were unspeakable and I don’t think I can write about it. Róża hitching rides with me and Irina as we worked – as though we were hauling turnips? Filling in the missing people at roll call with bodies stolen from the Revier, so that our numbers always came out right when they counted us, no matter who wasn’t there? Only in Block 32. I said before that we were really good at propping people up.
It’s not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible – the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else.
But it’s not civilised. There is something indecent about it – really foully indecent. The civilised Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. And I can’t write about it.
I did make up a poem about it, ‘Service of the Dead’, but I just can’t write it down.
I think it is the most terrible thing that was done to me – that I have become so indifferent about the dead. I would be able to do a human anatomy course without ever feeling faint, do surgery with steady hands, clean up anything and not be sick and never mind the blood.
Maybe I could be a doctor.
A real one – go to medical school –
Maybe I could! I could be a poet and a doctor – like William Carlos Williams! A new direction – a new world – I could help fix things now. How does his poem go, ‘Spring and All’ –
THEY ENTER THE NEW WORLD NAKED,
COLD, UNCERTAIN OF ALL
SAVE THAT THEY ENTER. ALL ABOUT THEM
THE COLD, FAMILIAR WIND –
A poet and a doctor. Maybe I could.
This is the first I have thought of it. Maybe I could.
May 3, 1945
Paris
There were five dozen people from the Lublin Special Transport in hiding. That’s a lot of people to hide. Worse than that, it’s a lot of people to feed when there isn’t any food.
We had to keep moving people around, and sometimes they spotted us doing it. They’d corner people and we were just so desperate we’d do anything to get away – a couple of girls picked up another prisoner and threw her at the guards who were after them. Stand-offs with dogs. Climbing in and out of broken windows, hiding in the bunks in the tuberculosis block with dying women so horribly contagious that the guards wouldn’t come in. Irina’s wire-cutters got passed around, because you never knew who’d need a weapon. Most of the girls weren’t strong enough to do anything with them anyway, but it made you feel brave just to carry a pair of stolen wire-cutters. They always came back.