‘You gals are nuts,’ she said approvingly. ‘Gosh, I wish I could come with you. It’s mighty boring sitting here waiting for phone calls and watching the planes come and go. I don’t speak Italian so I’m too scared to go out by myself when I’m done – gotta wait for one of the boys to come along and escort me! Have fun!’
Sitting in the back of an American military jeep next to Ró?a, as one of the mechanics drove us along a muddy track through a pine swamp and we struggled to keep our silk kite from taking off on its own before we got anywhere, I felt very smug and lucky.
It is nice to feel that way.
‘What does “nuts” mean?’
‘She meant we’re crazy.’
‘We are.’
We’d walked right up to the water’s edge, knee-high rippling waves that were a colour I’d never imagined – an opaque, pale green, like mint sugar wafers. You could see the big steamers and Navy ships across the bay, the way you could from the little village of Hamble, just outside Southampton, where I’d been stationed when I was an ATA pilot. The sky was a pure, piercing blue, utterly without any cloud in it anywhere.
‘Remember the sky at Ravensbrück?’ Ró?a said.
‘Yes, always beautiful, even when it was snowing.’
‘Remember the sunset the night you and Karolina spilled half a drum of soup on the kitchen steps?’
‘Oh, I wrote a poem about that – clouds like flaming rubies and fireworks, and all of us sobbing over the horrible soup. The irony! What about the shooting stars that night in November, in the early-morning roll call!’
‘The Leonids!’ Ró?a remembered. ‘And what about the rainbow? The full double rainbow? Lisette started to cry!’
‘I longed to be in the sky,’ I said. ‘When it was windy like this, I just watched the clouds or leaves or birds racing overhead and I longed to be up there with them. It hurt.’
‘Here we are,’ she answered softly. ‘Free in the wind!’
Suddenly she launched into my kite poem.
‘Hope has no feathers.
Hope takes flight
tethered with twine
like a tattered kite,
slave to the wind’s
capricious drift,
eager to soar
but needing lift.’
I stared at the brilliant sky, listening to Ró?a softly chanting my own words.
‘Hope waits stubbornly,
watching the sky
for turmoil, feeding on
things that fly:
crows, ashes, newspapers,
dry leaves in flight
all suggest wind
that could lift a kite.’
She paused. The first thing I’d ever said to her was a poem, so after a moment I finished this one for her, softly.
‘Hope sails and plunges,
firmly caught
at the end of her string –
fallen slack, pulling taut,
ragged and featherless.
Hope never flies
but doggedly watches
for windy skies.’
She was quiet then. The last verse isn’t really very hopeful. Poor ragged kite, always waiting for a wind that never comes.
Finally Ró?a took a deep breath.
‘It’s windy now,’ she said.
She put down her walking stick to take the spool of fishing line. She played out about six feet and let go. The wind was fierce and steady and the kite lifted like a bird. We both stared up at it, and it was like looking at a landscape from the air, the silk map bright with green and yellow and brown and blue. The tinsel tail snapped and flashed blindingly. After a second our beautiful improvised kite did exactly what the one does in the poem, and plunged earthward – I grabbed it by the fragile frame before it nosedived into the sand.
‘It needs thrust,’ I said. ‘You have to run with it. Can you run?’
She gave me a dirty look. Then she broke into the bubbly champagne laugh. She turned and ran, limping but steady. She laughed over her shoulder, letting out line as I held the kite above my head.
‘Run with me, Rose,’ she cried.
by Rose Justice
Craig Castle, Castle Craig
December 31, 1946
Afterword
Declaration of Causes
Primo Levi, the author of possibly the most moving descriptions of Auschwitz in print, felt that the true witnesses to the atrocities of the concentration camps were the dead. Survivors like himself, he felt, could only give partial testimony. Memories become fixed or simplified or distorted as they are told over and over, making living testimony inaccurate. This was one of the themes we discussed at length at the 8th European Summer School at Ravensbrück in August 2012 – how memory itself is a construction, particularly as it becomes more and more distanced in time from actual events.
Rose’s testimony is even further removed because I made it up. In Rose’s story, I have constructed an imitation of a survivor’s account. It has become a false memory of my own – Rose’s dream of the icy wind in the empty bunks is my dream, the single vivid nightmare I had while sleeping in the former SS barracks at Ravensbrück during the week I spent at the Summer School. My book is fiction, but it is based on the real memories of other people. In the end, like Rose, I am doing what I can to carry out the last instruction of the true witnesses – those who went to their death crying out: Tell the world.
What I’d really like to pound into the reader’s head, if there’s any lesson to be learned here, is that I didn’t make up Ravensbrück. I didn’t make up anything about Ravensbrück. Often I have had to fill in the blanks – when the toilets stopped working, how thick the mattresses were, how you might improvise a sanitary pad. The little things. The terrible and the unbelievable, the gas chambers and the medical experiments and the twenty-five lashes, propping up the dead to make the roll call count come out right, the filth and the dog bites and the curl hunts and the administration and politics of bowls, I did not make up. It was real. It really happened to 150,000 women. And that is just one camp.
I did simplify some things in order to keep the pace going. I kept the Rabbits in Block 32 for the whole story, when technically they got moved into different blocks a couple of times during the winter of 1945. I left out the fact that between being selected and being gassed prisoners got taken to another camp, about a mile away, where they were locked in unheated barracks without food or blankets and left to starve or freeze to death to make it easier on the limited capacity of Ravensbrück’s makeshift gas chamber. I didn’t explain that the female ‘SS guards’ were technically auxiliary to the SS, which was all male. I didn’t translate every one of Rose’s conversations into three different languages before she could understand it.