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We never launched Irina’s glider We did get it hidden in the sandbags, but we never got the right wind or ato hurl a h walls Who knohat happened to it, whether anyone found it, whether the naible? But drea about the potential success of our airit all in secret, kept us alive When you lost hope, you turned into a schars ere the bottom-crawlers of that entire scu

(by Rose Justice)

Hope has no feathers

Hope takes flight

tethered with twine

like a tattered kite,

slave to the wind’s

capricious drift,

eager to soar

but needing lift

Hope waits stubbornly,

watching the sky

for turs that fly:

crows, ashes, newspapers,

dry leaves in flight

all suggest wind

that could lift a kite

Hope sails and plunges,

fir –

fallen slack, pulling taut,

ragged and featherless

Hope never flies

but doggedly watches

for windy skies

Lisette had bigger plans than paper airplanes

‘There are transports leaving every day for Ravensbr&uuet the Rabbits out of here We need to be organised We’ll start with the youngest – all the Rabbits under twenty-one, the schoolgirls Sle one or two at a time into the evacuation transports as they leave Now listen, s, the next time they try to pull anyto have to be brave We’re going to have to disrupt things so violently they can’t count us Everyone switch nuirls who gets out will take the list with her – the names from the Lublin Transport, everybody as operated on We are going to tell the world’

Lisette got dragged out of line the next ht she was dead Ilike a two-year-old I sobbed quietly to myself all day – Micheline worked besideon It wasn’t the first tiot so fed up with me that she smacked me with someone’s empty shoe

And it turned out Lisette wasn’t dead anyway Because she was an archivist she’d been hand-picked to do some secretarial work in the record office She came back unbelievably excited She whispered her news to us in the evening roll call

‘There’s a radio in the record office – a radio! It’s always on! We’ve pushed the Gerasped ‘Really?’

‘Well, back to where they were in Dece up to their hips in snow’

We groaned It was the end of January, and the best we could do was beat the Ger point?

‘What about France?’ Róża and Karolina claium? Have the Allies crossed the Rhine yet?’

‘No, no Look, darlings, forget about the Western Allies! The Soviets are going to get here first Yesterday they liberated Auschwitz!’

It was all I could do not to yell We stamped our feet wildly in the black slush, a little defiant dance of triuht from a Fascist prison camp to a Soviet one’

‘Why? You’re a double Ace! A decorated Hero of the Soviet Union! You spent four ated by the ene!’

‘When a person spends four ated by the enemy and is still alive at the end, the Soviet Union calls her a traitor, not a hero No, thank you I would rather hang o home’

She sounded like she meant it, too, which kind of put a da rescued by the Soviets

Anna caught me in the horrible converted washroorey paper a quarter of an inch wide

‘What is this?’

‘Tomorrow’s list’

‘Tomorrow’s death list? But –’

There were dozens and dozens of numbers there I started to read them, and realised that I knew almost every one of them I associated faces with most of them 7705 especially – Róża Karolina too Every single one of the Rabbits was on that list, and a few others, including Lisette

‘They’re going to shoot eighty people in a day?’ I gasped

‘Just tell everyone you see That’s what I’ Except Irina, my whole family was on that list

‘They can’t execute all of thehed atwant And what they’re doing now is burning the evidence’

She pointed to the last nuher in sequence than the others Also a familiar number

‘You too!’

‘I’m a witness,’ she said, with bitter irony ‘My God I never thought I’d end up shovelled into the Ravensbrück incinerator with that pathetic bunch of Poles’ She suddenly took the unlit cigarette butt out of her mouth and tucked it down the front of her dress She looked away ‘I’asped ‘Tellthe Rabbits" If I tell people in Ger