‘La femme pilote américaine! Mon amie américaine!’
‘Ici!’ I yelled. ‘Here!’
Elodie and I got slapped simultaneously on opposite sides of the shower room. But I knew where she was now, and we managed to get back together.
The guards were trying hard to get everybody done with – it was dark, it was late, they were sick of us – and finally they shoved a couple of prison dresses at Elodie and me, and we had to put them on while we were still wet. Her dress came down to her ankles and mine was too tight. Someone threw shoes at us. Between us there was one each that fitted – none of them matched. No stockings, no bra, no underwear of any kind.
Back in the long factory room, with the prison dresses sticking to our wet backs, we had to pick up patches with our prisoner numbers on them, along with another patch that was supposed to show what kind of prisoner you were – all red triangles for us, which meant we were political prisoners. Then we had to learn to say our numbers in German. I remembered my number – that wasn’t the trouble. After all, Grampa taught me how to count to twenty in Dutch, or Low German, or whatever it really is, when I was two. The trouble was that when Effi Moyer tried to teach me how to say my number, I tried to tell her I wasn’t French.
‘Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig,’ she prompted me – French political prisoner 51498.
Remembering what the Luftwaffe pilots had called me when they were arguing over my papers in Mannheim, I said to Effi: ‘Ich bin Amerikanerin.’ I pointed to the others then to myself and shook my head. ‘I’m not French. Amerikanerin.’
Effi looked me in the eye with a face full of disdain and irritation and said, ‘Französisch politischer Häftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig’ – and honestly my German has not improved very much, but I know that is what she said, because my name was Französisch politischer Häftling 51498 for six months.
I repeated the numbers. But not the ‘French political prisoner’ part, because I wasn’t French. I was trying to behave myself. Effi just glared at me and started to put away the ledgers, ignoring me, and I turned away to find Elodie waiting for me with her mouth twisted into a sort of imitation of a grin. She tossed back the golden bangs – she’d managed to keep her hair, presumably because she was such an Aryan blonde – and gestured quickly at our badly fitting dresses with one finger. Swap you.
We started to strip the dresses off again, right there. We didn’t think anyone would care, because everyone ahead of us was being made to strip again so we could sew the red patches and our prisoner numbers on to our sleeves. But I hadn’t counted on Effi Moyer. She’d noticed me. I was the embarrassing prisoner who shared her name, the one who’d failed to save her a Hershey bar, the one who’d argued with her about being American.
Effi saw me and Elodie about to swap our dresses, and she came marching over to us and grabbed them away from us. Then she grabbed Elodie by her hair, close to her scalp, and dragged her over to sit down on the floor right next to the desk. Effi jerked one arm fiercely in my direction to tell me to follow Elodie – she wanted to keep an eye on us both as we sewed on our patches.
Elodie suddenly seemed totally cowed. Stark naked, she hunched over the dress, covering her lap with it; her shoulders shook a little as if she were sobbing. She didn’t make a sound though. I sat next to her, biting my lip, helpless with feeling so humiliated and so mad. We had to wait for someone to pass us a needle, and when we got one, Elodie dropped it. Then she couldn’t find the patch with her number on it after she’d threaded the needle. We scrambled around hunting for it and both of us got whacked over the head with one of Effi Moyer’s clipboards. Then, when it was my turn to use the needle, I couldn’t find my number.
Elodie had it. She handed me the patch quietly, and her mouth twisted in a quick little grin. The scar on the side of her face made her pretty smile lopsided.
It wasn’t till I was sewing it on my sleeve that I realised she’d swapped our numbers. All the shuffling around had just been a show to distract Effi Moyer from Elodie’s sleight of hand. She’d sewn my 51498 on to the sleeve of her pale-blue shirtwaisted sailor dress with the too-long skirt that came down to her ankles, its big collar ripped off so that it wouldn’t hide the contrasting prison X across the front and back of the bodice. And now I sewed Elodie’s 51497 on to my too-tight brown gingham. Effi Moyer had been so busy making sure we put on the dumb dresses we’d been ‘issued’ with, she hadn’t paid any attention to the numbers we’d sewn on them.
We put our badly fitting clothes back on, wearing each other’s numbers, and lined up in front of the quarantine block to be counted.
The siren for the 9 o’clock roll call had come and gone and thousands of other prisoners had already gone to bed, but for us it was our first real roll call – Zählappell – outside, beneath the glaring electric lights, the long shadows of the dogs and the infinite rows of barbed wire making eerie pictures on the high concrete walls. It seemed to take forever. We stood there until after they turned the street lights out, the SS guards shining flashlights in our faces and making sure we didn’t try to sit down.
Elodie and I were still the last two in our group, so by the time they got to us the guards were utterly fed up with everybody and ready to go to bed too, and here we were, the last two ‘French’ women with our numbers the wrong way round.
‘Fabert, Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertsiebenundneunzig! Justice, Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ – Fabert 51497, Justice 51498. Somebody prodded Elodie’s sleeve with a club.
‘No, I’m Rose Justice!’
Two guards used their clubs to guide us out of line while a third stood hanging on for dear life to one of the awful German shepherds, and a fourth stood glaring down at her clipboard with its endless list of names, flashlight tucked under her arm and pencil in the other hand. Her hair was hanging in her eyes and she looked incredibly grouchy. She didn’t watch us at all. She couldn’t have cared less what was going on. She was just waiting to get the stupid numbers to come out right.
They made us strip naked again.
They gave me three cracking truncheon wallops – in the stomach and the small of my back and over my shoulders – the first blow made me bend over and the second knocked me to my knees, leaving my back wide open for the third. While I crouched there gasping and reeling, they got out those dreaded shears and cut all Elodie’s golden hair off. I didn’t have any hair to cut off, so I got beaten up instead.