Free Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

dress, hiding chips of charcoal in my cheek, hiding torn shreds of newsprint in my shoes. Knowing I’d be shot if I were caught with any of it. And SO MUCH that I wanted to write. It seems like I have been a prisoner for
so long.
    I can write!
    It feels dangerous – like stealing a plane. But it is my unalienable Right. And this is my own notebook, which they gave back to me in the American Embassy this morning, along with an enormous pile of cash from Uncle Roger and a temporary passport. The passport is made out in the name of Rose Moyer Justice; date of birth, 22 October 1925; place of issue, Paris; date of issue, 17 April 1945, today. I mean yesterday. And a photograph that Aunt Edie had sent them, a wallet-sized copy of my portrait in ATA uniform from last spring.
    I have changed so drastically since then that no one at the Embassy could tell this photograph was really me. That’s why they made me write out the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence – so they could compare it to my handwriting in the rest of this notebook. My handwriting has not changed. My signature matches too. Mother had sent them my Pennsylvania driver’s licence as a sample.
    That has convinced even me that I am still Rose – my handwriting has not changed. It is the only physical thing about me that looks exactly the same. I can still write.
    In fact it is the only thing I
can
do. I can’t even sleep. The Embassy people checked me in here at the Paris Ritz and left me in this gigantic room Aunt Edie has reserved for me, but I sat on the floor for three hours because I didn’t dare to touch any of the beautiful furniture. Then I got up and spent another hour pacing, checking the Place Vendôme every time a car or truck went by just in case it was Bob Ernst coming back. But now it is nearly three in the morning and nothing is going by any more. My brain won’t let me go to sleep – my internal clock is tensed for the 4 a.m. siren. I tried to get dressed again, but I can’t bear to put those dead women’s clothes back on, not if I have to go naked for the rest of my life. It’s not that cold here. Anyway, I’m used to being cold. And also used to being wide awake when all I want to do is collapse.
    What I’m not used to is being by myself.
    How could it have happened? I don’t know how it happened. I LOST THEM. Irina and Ró ż a, my more-than-sisters – Russian
taran
pilot and Polish Rabbit – I couldn’t have escaped without them, I couldn’t have survived last winter without them, and I have lost them
both.
    But I’m kidding myself. I do know how it happened. If I hadn’t been so set on getting to Paris – if I hadn’t rushed off with Bob Ernst in that convoy of American soldiers – if I had double-checked what was going on. We camped overnight with the Swedish Red Cross unit, and I was talking with Bob and that Minnesotan chaplain who was interpreting for the Swedes, and I told them
myself
that Ró ż a needed medical treatment. Only it never occurred to me they would leave her with the Red Cross without asking me – without even telling me! Irina was with her and I was in Bob’s jeep, and we set off the next morning near the front of the convoy. I never dreamed Ró ż a wasn’t following in one of the trucks with Irina. So stupid of me! Of course the Swedish Red Cross unit was going back to
Sweden.
    I’ve lost Ró ż a and Irina.
    I feel like my world has ended.
    But it hasn’t – not even the war has ended yet. It just keeps going relentlessly on and on and on, like a concentration camp roll call when they can’t get the numbers to come out right. And I guess I just go on and on too.
    I wonder what has happened to Nick since last August. Oh, Nick! I have dreamed of seeing him again for so long, made up all those stories about him coming to rescue me – but what will he think when he sees what a walking corpse I’ve become? How can I tell him what happened to me, all I’ve seen and had to do?
    A lot of