Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Author:Elizabeth Wein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Electric Monkey
Published: 2013-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

so stubbornly sweet

as plops of red sugar

adorning my feet –

strawberry, cinnamon,

redcurrant, cranberry,

peppermint, sugarbeet,

grenadine, raspberry,

cherry and mulberry –

come look at Rose

and join in the feast

of my lollipop toes!

Of course, it was not just the illicit beauty of my toes that everyone admired – it was also, and in a big way, the fact that they looked so edible.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been scavenging that day. Irina turned out to have an entire newspaper hidden in her shirt. She must have picked it up in the maintenance shed we’d been working in, though I hadn’t noticed a thing at the time (she was fantastic at organising paper, it turned out). As we were climbing into the bunks, just before the lights went out, she pressed most of the paper thin and hid it wedged between the bunk slats and frame. But one last piece she twitched in front of Róża’s nose, and when she’d got Róża’s attention, folded the scrap of paper while we watched.

It was only about as wide as her palm. Her hands moved so quickly you couldn’t follow what she was doing. Oh, Irina’s hands were pretty! And suddenly she’d transformed a yellowed corner of a stolen Nazi newspaper into a little paper airplane with short, broad wings. She held it out to Róża.

‘Fly this,’ Irina said. She mimed the action of throwing a dart.

Róża lifted the paper plane towards the ceiling and pitched it across the bunks. She didn’t even throw it very hard, but it glided away into the gloom, and after a moment someone threw it back with a sharp cautionary warning in Polish. It flew better than any paper airplane I had ever seen.

‘I like to fly them over the walls,’ Irina said. ‘When no one is looking.’

You know how I stood in roll calls making up poems to keep from going crazy with fear and boredom? Irina made up aircraft.

That was a good day, nylon socks and painted toes and Irina’s first paper airplane. Some of the ones she made later Karolina decorated – she’d put Nick as the pilot, though of course she didn’t know what he looked like. He was our hero – I whispered stories about Nick to Karolina and Róża after lights-out, where he’d come to rescue us, sneaking into the power plant with wire-cutters and disabling the electric fences, carrying a knapsack full of chocolate bars. Karolina made him look like Clark Gable. Or she’d draw caricatures of us on Irina’s planes, with Irina and me in the cockpit, and Karolina and Róża and Lisette as our passengers. They were very funny and she could do them so fast – sometimes, when we were standing in a roll call, she’d make doodles of the turkey buzzard guards with her toes in the cinders at our feet. Just a couple of broad swipes and you’d see it and you’d have to pretend to sneeze so you didn’t burst out laughing. And then she’d kick it into dust before she got caught.

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