She didn’t actually pack much of a punch. It had just been such a surprise. I laughed shakily and said, ‘No, I’m sorry, and you should have told me you were scared! I wouldn’t bully you into doing something you’re that scared to do – it’s supposed to be a treat! It’s not important enough to make you do it!’
I really believed that when I said it to Polly. It was true for Polly. I guess it’s still true for Polly, but under other circumstances – sometimes it is important enough.
1. Lift
My sense of who I am is partly based on the fact that I learned to fly when I was twelve. But there are a lot of other things that define me. I am a Pennsylvania Dutch Lutheran. I am a student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, halfway through my second year of a Bachelor of Medicine degree. I am a published poet, in this magazine and one other, with two poems soon to be printed in The New Yorker. And, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal completed in Nuremberg three months ago, I am one of the millions of victims of Counts 3 and 4, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, brought against the Nazi leaders convicted there. I am one of the lucky ones, because I am still alive.
Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, whose testimony about the gassings at Auschwitz was so shocking that people listening in the courtroom took their headphones off so they couldn’t hear the translation any more, was my fellow prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. I was also there in the Ravensbrück infirmary, the Revier, counting bodies. I am a witness too. But I am not as brave as she is. I start to sweat when I think about standing up in front of a room full of newspaper reporters and helmeted soldiers and robed judges from four different countries, not to mention the twenty or so high-ranking Nazi leaders on trial there. When I was asked to appear as a witness at the Ravensbrück trial currently going on in Hamburg, I said no. And the shame of it is that I didn’t see or suffer anywhere near as much as Mme Vaillant-Couturier, because she was imprisoned at Auschwitz for over a year before being transported to Ravensbrück, and I was only imprisoned at Ravensbrück for six months. And Ravensbrück was an ordinary camp. Mostly.
After I got out of Ravensbrück I locked myself in a hotel room for three weeks and wouldn’t come out. I was scared of freedom. I was scared of space – of being in the open and of having to decide for myself where to go – and of having to talk to people, and of being stared at. I was also afraid to face my aunt, my elegant, gracious English aunt, who was supposed to come collect me and fatten me up and put me on an ocean liner back to Pennsylvania where I would, presumably, resume normal life.
My English Aunt Edie is elegant and gracious, but she is also very, very smart. When she discovered that a friend of mine, fellow transport pilot Maddie Brodatt, was making a delivery flight to Paris only a couple of days after Edie had been planning to come get me, she asked my friend to meet me in her place. It was the second week of May in 1945.
Aunt Edie had taken the hotel room next to mine, so she gave it to Maddie instead. The rooms were connected by a pair of private communicating doors, so we could lock each other out if we wanted to. Maddie called from reception to let me know she’d arrived. I knew I didn’t have a choice, and I was clean and respectably dressed by then, so I let her come up.
I’d been her bridesmaid the year before.
When I opened the door, she stood for a moment staring at me as if she didn’t recognise me – or as if she thought I’d disappear in a puff of smoke.
I stepped aside to let her in. We didn’t hug each other. She said, ‘Oh, Rose!’ in a pained voice, and I tried to smile at her.
‘I’m OK. They didn’t feed us very well.’ (I was still less than two-thirds my normal weight.) ‘And I just had bronchitis, and – well – my hair’s growing back.’
I touched my own head with both hands. ‘They shave your hair off –’ I stopped. I couldn’t explain.
‘Because of nits?’
‘No, just to make you miserable. The last time they did it to me was because I was humming during roll call. It’s OK – really it’s –’
‘Stow it, Rosie,’ she said very gently and persuasively, and took me by the elbow and made me sit down at the vanity table by the open window where I’d been pouring out the story of my imprisonment in pen and ink for the past three weeks.
‘What’s the view like?’ Maddie asked. The drapes and shutters were closed because everything was still under blackout restrictions; we were still at war.
‘Fantastic. Turn out the lights and we can open the curtains. Not much to see in the dark though.’ Maddie followed my orders, and then stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders. There was no light in the Place Vendôme, but it was so open and so dark that it seemed like the whole sky was on fire with starlight.
‘You know we are staying in the former Luftwaffe headquarters!’ Maddie exclaimed suddenly.
‘Oh!’ It hadn’t occurred to me. ‘I never thought about that.’
‘How could you not!’
We both laughed a little. ‘I haven’t been out since I got here,’ I confessed.
‘What, not even in that smashing bar in the courtyard? This place is swarming with Americans! Journalists and war correspondents, lots of writers! You should be talking to people, sharing your poems!’
I shook my head. ‘All those strangers staring. I couldn’t.’
‘Golly, Rose, I’ll go with you tonight. We need to celebrate. Germany surrendered this morning. Everyone at the airfield was over the moon! General De Gaulle is going to make an official announcement here in Paris tomorrow afternoon – it’ll be a holiday everywhere.’
And there was Arcturus, rising over the other side of the square, just like Karolina had told me we would see it in the spring when the war was over.
Karolina was dead. I started to cry.
We didn’t go to the bar. Maddie stayed with me in my room and I let her read what I’d written over the past three weeks.
It was so easy just to hand over the notebook. I didn’t have to talk about what had happened to me, I didn’t have to burst into tears or go red or stammer or choke up and not be able to get any further. I just gave her my notebook and she read it and she knew.
I went to sleep before she finished and when I woke up in the middle of the night she was sitting next to me on the bed, with the bedside light on and my notebook propped against her knees, still reading. She didn’t know I was awake – I was curled up because I always sleep curled up now, a habit of trying to keep warm when there’s no mattress and no blanket, no glass in the window below you and no fuel in the coal stove on the other side of the barrack. I was turned away from Maddie, but I could feel her there next to me, warm against my back, and hear the flutter of paper every now and then; she turned pages with one hand, because her left hand was on my shoulder, just resting there firmly, and I could see the light in the ruby on her old French wedding ring.
I thought, Thank goodness I won’t have to explain anything. She’ll understand. And I went back to sleep, so glad to have someone next to me. Because even though the six months at Ravensbrück had been nothing but a battle for sleeping space on the bare bunk slats, those people crowded next to you were the only warmth and the only comfort you could get. And I missed them like crazy.
I wish it could always be that easy. I wish I never had to tell anyone and they would just know. I wish I could always have someone next to me.
The church bells didn’t wake me, but the sound was in my ears and head when I woke up again – all the bells in Paris. The official announcement wasn’t supposed to come till 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Nobody cared. The war was over and all the bells were already ringing.
Maddie had gone back to her own room and shut the communicating door behind her, so I got dressed in the worn, neat skirt and blouse the pitying chambermaid had given me – her missing daughter’s clothes – and knocked on Maddie’s door. She opened it almost immediately and this time we threw our arms around each other. And this time both of us began to cry.
‘Come on!’ Maddie said. ‘Come on, we’re going out.’
I shook my head, but she had me by the arm, and took advantage of me being easy to bully. It was stupidly easy to bully me then – I would follow directions meekly, without tears, cowering. That is how the chambermaid finally forced me to get dressed after my first two weeks of hermit-like so-called ‘freedom’.
Hanging on to my arm, Maddie stuffed her flight bag with chunks of French bread off the breakfast tray they’d grown used to sending me (she’d taken it in earlier), then grabbed her Air Transport Auxiliary uniform tunic and forced me into it.
‘No no no, I’m not a First Officer –’
‘No one will know or care. You are an ATA pilot and you are going to look like one.’
She gave me her side cap.
‘Wizard. You look perfect.’
Then she pulled on her leather flight jacket over her blouse and straightened her tie. ‘One uniform between the pair of us – that’ll do! We both look the part, right?’
I nodded, trying to smile. Her tunic was a little too short and a little too broad for me, but she belted it tight round my middle and it probably looked OK. Actually, it probably disguised how thin I was. We both wiped our eyes at the same time.
‘Let’s go. I’m taking you flying.’
Maddie tucked her arm in mine. I didn’t need propping up, but I needed someone hanging on to me, as though I were blind and couldn’t see where I was going and had to be led. Out through the sumptuous lobby, which I took in as though I were seeing it for the first time, and into the May sunlight in the Place Vendôme. It was already full of people – kids sitting on shoulders, waving paper flags and wearing paper hats that people were selling out of buckets and boxes like they’d been saving them up for weeks, everybody so dressed up.
Maddie was shameless. I think she started out heading for the Metro, but we didn’t make it across the square before she’d hitched a ride on a truck crowded with American pilots all waving and holding up two fingers in a ‘V’ for ‘Victory’.
‘Le Bourget!’ Maddie cried. ‘We want to get to Le Bourget!’
The ATA uniform worked its magic – even though we were sharing it.
‘Come on up, sister!’ They pulled us in with them.
For one long moment the world seemed hideous. The smell of engine exhaust and sweat, the bodies so close together –
Maddie, who’d been up most of the night reading about the prison where I’d spent the winter, held tight to my arm and cried out, ‘Let’s ride on the roof!’ And they boosted us up on top of the cab like a couple of figureheads. It was precarious, but it was nothing like being in a prison transport truck, and I could breathe again.
It took us hours to get through the crowded main thoroughfares. But it was fun and like nothing I’d ever done before, sitting on the roof of a slow-moving military truck, clinging to my borrowed ATA cap – with my friend’s arm secure around my shoulders and an enormous bundle of lilacs in my lap (where did those come from?), and our brave boys blowing kisses at everyone and trying to learn the words to the French national anthem.