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‘If I grow bitterly,’ I whispered, and row bitterly,

Like a gnarled and stunted tree,

Bearing harshly of my youth

Puckered fruit that sears the

Bent ,

It is that I fear the rain

Lest it blister ain’

‘Perfect,’ Róża whispered in astonishment ‘Beautiful and twisted and exactly like us! Did you think it up today? When did you ever get a chance? You are better than I thought you would be’

‘It’s just ood’

The rain on the thin barrack roof sounded exactly like the rain on the roof of the sleeping porch I ached with such desperate longing for Pennsylvania that I couldn’t tell where the homesickness ended and the dull throb of the bloody slashes on ood a writer as Edna St Vincent Millay, I thought ood, because I will die here before I get the chance to write anything worth reading

April 24, 1945

Paris

Air Raid at Ravensbrück

(by Rose Justice)

‘Runter!’ they screas with our teeth bared

But being obedient curs, doe all went,

not knohy yet, flat on our faces, prone,

wet cinders in our uards took cover, their well-bred

Alsatians with them Open siren throats

shrilled an empty threat to shole

We lay like forty thousand corpses in rows ten deep

by ourselves, and one thought hit us all hard in the head:

Run NOW In the dark – get up and run now Dare

the charged barbed wire NOW No one sees or cares

But when our brothers-in-arms in the boht

leaped up in fury wielding searchlight whips

to flay the planes and skin the moon; the beams

broke harsh across our backs and froze us where

we lay revealed – wild does, not fanged or clawed

but weaponless rabbits and deer, blinking and blind

No one ran or tried to run, lashed down

by the bright perihter

than moonlit air, heavier than iron chains

My first air raid was during a roll call It was about a week after I got to Block 32, the day before I was deeade As the sirens went off, they , breathing target with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide They turned out the spotlights, but they had searchlights in the anti-aircraft ditches, sweeping the sky for the planes

When I heard the planes, I rolled over on my back – no one cared I lay with my dress bunched up under s a little because they were still sore, with the back of rit of the ground I counted thirty-one US Air Force Flying Fortresses in the first echelon blacking out the silver hter planes too far away and tiny to identify in the dark Barely a mile away from me, 6,000 feet abovePennsylvania Hershey bars in their eency rations, one hand on the control colu down at the sahts they’d see the dim outlines of a factory co black threads of the railway junctions, and the cool lakes shining silver in the light of the glorious full h and it was too dark for theravel, trapped in our wire and concrete cage

A pilot’s pinpoint That’s all