Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein Read Free Book Online

know where your family is?’
    Felicyta kept her voice steady, her face still wearing an expression of patient tolerance for ignorant foreigners. ‘Two years ago my father got a postcard from a cousin in the same camp, who was allowed to ask him to send her a food package, and she told him she had seen my mother and sister alive.’
    How utterly impossible it is for me to imagine – Felicyta’s mother and sister have been missing for
two years
. That was what Maddie was talking about on the train. She thought it was worse than being told someone was dead – not ever knowing what happened to them.
    You can see why Felicyta is so angry at everything.
    ‘Fliss, how did
you
escape?’
    She smiled a close-lipped, evil smile, only the corners of her mouth turning up, and said, ‘I stole a plane. OK, it was my own plane, but I did have to steal it! I was doing courier work for the Polish Air Force when the Germans invaded. I knew they would take over all communications aircraft, or destroy them, so I took this one myself. I flew to France. It took me three days, mostly flying in twilight, hiding the plane in woodland by day. France was still free then . . .’
    It must have been in 1939. I was thirteen. I was in junior high school. I was
oblivious
to what was going on in Europe. Or anywhere except right where I was – Justice Field, Mount Jericho, Pennsylvania, the centre of the known universe.
    Here is what I already knew about Felicyta’s sister – what I’d forgotten about hearing before. It happened just after I came to Hamble. I was sitting in the Operations room with a few other girls, waiting for the day’s ferry chits to be handed out. I was new enough to be shy and a little bit nervous about sitting down next to people I didn’t know, so I was sitting by myself – it was even before Celia had turned up.
    The wireless was on, and because I wasn’t talking to anybody, I was listening to the radio. And it was this ugly story about a prison camp in Germany where they’d been running medical experiments on Polish prisoners, all women, mostly students – cutting open their legs and infecting them with gangrene, simulating bullet wounds, in the name of ‘medical science’ – to find treatments for German soldiers wounded on the Eastern Front. The BBC announcer read through an endless list of names that a former prisoner had secretly memorised when she knew she was going to be released. I was interested because the woman who’d memorised the names was an American citizen. It was compelling stuff – you couldn’t stop listening – but it was so absolutely awful that I couldn’t believe it, and I said so.
    ‘That’s got to be propaganda!’ I burst out. ‘You English are as bad as the Germans!’
    ‘You should read the
Guardian
,’ Maddie said. ‘It’s not all propaganda. The reports from the concentration camps are pure evil.’
    ‘Poisoning girls with gangrene?’ I objected. ‘It’s like trying to get us to believe the Germans eat babies!’
    At that point Felicyta slammed her teacup down so hard she broke her saucer right in half, and stormed out of the room. The floor shuddered as the door thundered shut behind her.
    Maddie thrashed her newspaper into submission and nodded towards Felicyta’s slammed door.
    ‘Her sister’s in a German concentration camp,’ Maddie explained in a level voice. She looked back down at the paper without meeting my eyes. ‘Felicyta thinks the Germans
do
eat babies.’
    That was three months ago.
    I am starting to understand why the Polish pilots are so fanatical about their hatred of the Germans. Thank goodness I haven’t got a ‘good old Pennsylvania Dutch’ name like Stolzfuss or Hitz or Zimmerman. Felicyta doesn’t know my middle name is Moyer, Mother’s maiden name, or that my grandfather still speaks old-fashioned Pennsylvania German sometimes. I will never tell her.
    I can’t believe I have only been in England for three months – it seems like