The Girl with a Secret by Kate Hewitt

Author:Kate Hewitt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2024-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

JUNE 1940—ISLE OF MAN

The little island perched on the surface of the flat, gray water like the last outpost of humanity, the Irish Sea stretching all the way to a blank horizon. As Rosa disembarked the ferry that had transported several hundred female internees across the sea, her stomach still churning from the voyage, she had no idea what to expect.

The last month in Holloway Prison had been, in turns, stultifyingly boring and unbearably hellish. At the start, she’d shared a cell with a Jew, at least; some Jews had to share the small, barren cells with hostile Nazis sympathizers, which had seemed awful in the extreme, and they had come to both insults and blows, until the wardens had had the sense to separate them. She’d also been able to wear her own clothes, rather than the shapeless prison garments the other inmates wore, and so she was able to keep her sliver of emerald, which she had slipped into her brassiere, close to her skin.

It seemed the status of the German internees was somewhat in question; they were not quite prisoners, like the regular inmates, a rather rough group of women who eyed this new crop with surly suspicion, but they were certainly not free. They were able to move as they chose from their cells to the other areas of the prison, such as they were—a scrubby courtyard, a social hall—but they could not leave the prison and they were given nothing to do. They had no access to newspapers or a wireless, no ability to telephone or post letters, no visitors or contact with the outside world at all. Sometimes Rosa had felt as if she’d been enclosed in a tomb—a tomb with a thousand other women in it.

Rumors had flown, just as they had on that other, unlikely prison, the St Louis. The women would be interned at Holloway for the entire war; they would be moved on as soon as possible. They would be let go, as no one saw the point of interning thousands of innocent people, some of them British citizens; they would disappear, forgotten by the country that had taken them in, just as they might have been back in Germany.

Rosa had forced herself to stop paying attention to the pointless hysteria, keeping to herself as much as she could. She had been acutely conscious that she fell uncomfortably between the innocent Jews, which most of the internees were, and the few dastardly Nazi sympathizers, who incurred enmity among just about everyone. She’d had no desire to explain what had got her reclassed as Category B, that she’d entertained Adolf Eichmann, of all people, in her own home. She feared what might happen to her if she did.

Three days after she’d arrived at Holloway, she had been shocked to see her mother in a corner of the crowded social hall, standing by herself, looking pale, forlorn and frightened.

“Mutti.” The name had fallen naturally from Rosa’s lips. She’d crossed the room to take her mother by both shoulders.

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