They took a break in the lecture after a while, though we all kept on furiously producing limitless amounts of grey wool tubing (which of course we were never allowed to use ourselves, even when it was snowing). By the time they got to their recess, I was swaying on my feet. I couldn’t sit, but I couldn’t really stand yet either – not for the whole day. It was about 10 o’clock in the morning and I’d been up since 4.00.
‘So how come you’re French, if you don’t speak anything but English?’ Róża asked. ‘Are you another parachutist?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘There are a few English ladies here who were dropped into France by parachute, as spies. Are you a spy?’
‘Gosh – would I tell you if I was?’
She laughed. It was a real laugh this time, a bubbly giggle of a laugh, not the other bitter, ironic cackle. ‘You look French – bald. When Paris was liberated, they shaved all the French prisoners’ heads again as punishment. What are you then? And how did you end up here?’
‘Are your English ladies here now?’ I asked.
‘No, they’re not in this block. And even if they were, they’re not cripples. They have to do real work,’ Róża said offhandedly.
‘Are you all crippled?’ I asked, looking around the room. I wondered, Am I here because I’ve been crippled? No, I’d been given six hours to recover and now I was already on my feet. Apart from the Polish girls who’d come back inside to knit after the morning roll call, all the rest of the Block 32 prisoners were fine – none of the French or Russian women had anything wrong with them apart from being filthy dirty and covered with scabies and starving, and they’d all marched off on work details that morning. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened to you, since I asked first,’ Róża said seriously. ‘Because if we start talking about me, you won’t believe me, and we’ll argue. Tell me about 51498, the French Political Prisoner with no French.’
‘Pardonez-moi, mais je parle un peu de français,’ I said. Excuse me, I do speak a little French. More now than I did then, of course.
‘Moi aussi, plus bien que toi,’ she answered. ‘Me too, better than you. And I learned most of it here, in Lisette’s French class. You should never use vous, the formal “you”, to another prisoner – we’re comrades. Not even to Lisette, who’s older than my mother was. Are you sure you’re not a spy? How did you get to Ravensbrück speaking only English?’
‘I’m American. I’m a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary in England – we ferry aircraft for the Royal Air Force. I landed in the wrong place and they sent me here. I got registered with a transport of French prisoners and they counted me as French too.’
‘Hah! Too bad you can’t speak German or you could report the stupid bitch who signed you up as French. She’d get in trouble for sloppy record-keeping.’
‘Boy, I wish she would,’ I said with feeling.
Róża gleefully repeated my story in Polish so that it could be passed around the rest of the room, and once again everyone shot questions at me about the invasion and the Allied advance and how soon the war was likely to end. (The Polish prisoners were pretty good at English, it turned out; later I realised they carried out some of their lessons totally in English.) I told them about D-Day and how we handed out the strawberries to the soldiers, and my gosh, that was a hit.
‘How many did each soldier get?’
‘Did you eat any yourself?’
‘How big were they?’
‘What variety?’
We switched topics from politics to food and I described the way Felicyta had made the little squares of toast with jam on them after Celia’s funeral.
Someone burst out with an exclamation in an excited voice and everybody laughed.
‘They think we could do that too,’ Róża explained drily. ‘The next time somebody gets jam. Sometimes a food package makes it through without the goddamned SS stealing everything in it except the paper it was wrapped in.’
‘They took my paper,’ I said. ‘I had chocolate.’
‘Chocolate!’
They were off again.
‘Hey, why don’t you lie across the table here?’ Róża said suddenly. ‘Here by me. You can lean on your arms with your wrists over the edge so you can go on working. Pile the wool on the bench. Yeah, like that. Better?’
It was better. The women on the other side of the table had to squeeze up a little to make room for my legs, but they compromised by using them as a backrest.
‘Just be ready to get down in a hurry if one of the guards comes in. Code word this week is muffins.’ (I don’t really remember what the code word was that week. It was always food-based: ‘Oh, how I wish I had ten muffins for lunch!’ I know a lot of Polish words for food now.) ‘Listen to Maria – she can see the window.’
Lying flat on my stomach across the table with my not-very-advanced sock dangling over the edge next to Róża’s knee, I had a close-up view of her thin right leg with the row of holes gouged in her shin. I couldn’t see anybody else’s legs, because they were all sitting the right way around with their feet under the table, and everybody was packed very close together. The absolutely awful thing about the damage to Róża’s leg was that it was so obviously permanent – it had healed that way.