No Safe Place (7 page)

“Good morning,” Rosalia said in German. She held out her hand. “My name is Rosalia.”

“Are you the only one?” The woman ignored the outstretched hand.

“There are two others.”

“More work for the same wages,” the woman muttered as she turned away, but she left the door open, and Rosalia stepped out.

The apartment was a mess of liquor bottles, plates of old food and cigarette butts. There was no sign of the men, but Rosalia assumed they were asleep somewhere.

The woman kept working in the kitchen, and Rosalia got busy tidying the other room. It could only help her to have this woman on her side.

The woman showed surprise at the tidy living room, but just said, “I guess you'd better come and eat.”

Rosalia sat at the kitchen table. She didn't try to make conversation again. She just ate as much as she could hold. There were hard-boiled eggs, dark rye bread, slices of cheese, and jam. She kept eating as the other two girls joined her. Rosalia drank lots of coffee and watched the other girls pick at their food.

Too foolish to know they'll need their strength, she thought.

After breakfast the girls were put back in their rooms. Rosalia asked no questions, but the other girls did, and they got no answers from the housekeeper other than, “I've got my orders.” Rosalia used the time to go through the exercises her brothers had taught her, keeping her legs strong with squats and lifts, her arms strong with push-ups and isometrics, and her stomach muscles hard with crunches and twists.

Then she stood back on her bed and looked out the bit of window. She watched cars and trams going by, and she saw people pushing strollers and walking dogs.

She was still standing there when the door was unlocked again, and the housekeeper came in with her broom and cleaning supplies.

“You've made your bed,” the woman said. “You're a tidy one. I like that.”

Rosalia took that remark as an invitation to chat.

“What is that park?” she asked. She wasn't really interested, but one bit of unimportant information might lead to others, maybe more vital.

“That park? That's Marzahn. This whole area is Marzahn. Metro station's called Marzahn, too, although I don't expect you'll be going on many trips. Are you going to be this tidy every day?”

Rosalia didn't understand all the words — the woman spoke too quickly — but she got the question and replied, “I like to be tidy.”

“Well, I can use the help around here,” the woman said before she shut the door and locked it. Rosalia did another round of exercises.

The men got up an hour or so later. Rosalia thought she heard one man walking around, mumbling complaints at the housekeeper. Then other men entered the apartment and talked with him. They left the girls locked in their rooms.

A meal was brought in on a tray and left on the bureau. There was stew, bread and more coffee. Rosalia ate everything quickly, while it was hot.

She had just swiped the stew bowl clean with the last bit of bread when she realized where she was.

She had heard the stories, and the tales must have included the name, but it hadn't stuck in her head, not like the other names and the other places.

Marzahn was the first concentration camp for Gypsies.

Rosalia pushed aside the tray and stood back up on the bed.

The park, now green and golden, had been the place where the Nazis had gathered together all the Roma and Sinti of Berlin in 1936, and forced them to live in squalor, guarded by dogs and men with guns.

It was the Olympics, the government said. We want Berlin to look good for the world. We want the garbage off our streets.

So they rounded up the Roma people — people like Rosalia's great-grandparents, whose ancestors had lived in Germany since the 1400s — and they kept them prisoners for the crime of being Roma.

Rosalia tried to picture it. She tried to picture the barracks, cold and crowded, and the barbed wire, and the barking dogs, and the shooting guards. Down below, where people now jogged and walked their poodles, her people had suffered.

“So many died of illness,” she remembered her grandmother saying. “They died of hunger and the cold. And some died fighting.”

The stories came flooding back.

That park out there belonged to her as much as it belonged to anyone in Germany. Her family's blood and tears had fallen on the soil where flowers now grew.

In 1944, the order came to clear the Roma out of Marzahn. The soldiers came to herd the people into trucks and trains. Her great-grandmother had stood with the others in her barracks, clutching bars of iron and boards of wood, and beating the heads of any Nazi soldiers who came near.

The Germans backed down.

“Some of the soldiers were just boys,” Rosalia remembered being told. “They didn't know what to do with women who fought back.”

The victory hadn't lasted. All the Roma and Sinti of Marzahn were sent to Auschwitz. Only a handful were still alive at the end of the war. Rosalia's great-grandmother was one of them.

My family are fighters, Rosalia thought, as she heard a knocking on the apartment door and more men came in.

She kept up her fake cough, coughing as close to the door as possible so the men would be sure to hear her.

They left her alone again that night.

She coughed all through the pleading, screaming and crying of the other two girls. She coughed while the parade of men laughed and slapped and grunted and drank. She coughed and thought about her great-grandmother fighting off the Nazis.

She knew she would not be left alone another night.

/ / / / / / / /

“Put this on,” the housekeeper said, handing her a skimpy dress, spiky high-heels and a plastic container with bits of make-up in it. “I'm to take your other clothes.”

She waited while Rosalia put on the dress and shoes, then took her other clothes and her little suitcase. She closed but did not lock the door behind her. Music started to play in the living room. Men entered the apartment.

Rosalia took off the shoes. She stuffed one of them under the bed, then curled her hand around the toe end of the other. She put both hands behind her back. Then she stood and stared at the door, thinking about what had happened at Marzahn before she was born.

The door opened.

“Time to start earning your keep,” a man said, and another man came into the room. “Thirty minutes, or you pay more,” he was told. Then the door was shut.

“Don't just stand there. You heard him. Tick tock.” He was at her in two steps.

“I do not want this,” Rosalia said, clearly and in German. She was sure she had the words right. “I am fourteen years old, and I do not want this.”

“I was told you were a fighter,” the man said, grabbing her shoulders and drawing her toward him. He forced his fat, slimy tongue into her mouth.

Rosalia bit down, hard, and brought her knee up into his groin at the same time. The man folded in pain. She swung the shoe at him, aiming the stiletto at the soft point in his skull. He dropped to the floor.

She waited a moment, catching her breath, to be sure he was unconscious, and to be sure the men outside had not heard him fall over the sound of the music playing. Then she took off his shoes, his pants, his jacket and his shirt. She gathered them all into a bundle, tying them together with his belt, and used the stiletto heel to break through the window. She dropped the clothes outside, slicing her arm open.

She grabbed a chunk of broken glass just as the men came bursting into her room.

Rosalia had cut an artery, and the blood spurted out in a gush. She flung it at the men, hitting some of them in the eyes.

Waving the broken glass, she leapt through the men, slashing out at anything in her way, and made it to the apartment door.

She had trouble with the locks. There were too many.

“Let me out!” she screamed at the housekeeper, who was standing with a tray of drinks. The men were coming after her.

The housekeeper didn't move. A man was almost at her, almost grabbing her.

Rosalia turned quickly, jagged bloody glass pointing out. She stabbed the man hard in the belly, leaving the glass shank inside him.

She got the last lock undone and flung the door open. She bolted down the stairs, leaping two and three steps at a time.

Down she ran, around and around, leaving a trail of blood, willing herself not to get dizzy, willing herself to stay upright. There was the front door, and then she was out on the street.

Bloody, barefoot, and in a dress too skimpy for the chilly fall night, Rosalia took a big breath of free air. She found the bundle of clothes in some shrubs, then dashed across the parking lot.

Through families of shoppers coming out from the mall, around moving cars, narrowly missing trashcans, Rosalia ran. With the bundle tucked under her armpit, she kept one hand clamped firmly over her wound. She heard one shoe then the other drop out of her bundle as she ran.

She was at the point of collapse, but she could not stop now. The park was dark. If she could just get there, she could find a place to hide. Probably, they were following her. She didn't take the time to turn around and check.

Steps up took her over the train tracks, and steps down took her to the laneway that led to the park. As she got closer, she could see that the park was really a cemetery, and that it was closed for the night.

The low fence at the entrance was not going to stop her. The bundle went over first. She had to unclasp her wound before pulling herself over. It was almost impossible, but the shadows in the park were waiting for her. She had to get there.

Then she was over, and after a few steps more she reached the deep shadows and bushes. She collapsed in a thicket of trees.

Rosalia undid the bundle and wrapped the shirt around the wound in her arm, using her teeth to help her tie it tight. She put the trousers on over the foolish excuse for a dress and pulled the jacket over her shoulders. There wasn't much she could do about her bare feet, but cold feet were a small price to pay for freedom.

She sat hidden in the trees and the shadows, peering out at the cemetery entrance and the laneway leading to it. No one was coming after her, or at least no one had chased her into the park.

Rosalia put her hands in the trouser pockets to keep them warm. In one pocket was a wallet, and she could feel the edge of bills folded inside it. She found some keys, which she tossed into the trees, and some coins. Just inside the cemetery entrance was a pay phone. She knew what she had to do.

She left the comfort of the shadows and made her way to the telephone. She dropped several coins through the slot and pressed some numbers.

“Fire!” she yelled, using the German word, and she gave the address of the apartment. “Children! Hurry!” She didn't think anyone would come if she just said girls were in trouble. Then she hung up and went back to the shadows.

She found a spot by the fence where she could look across the train tracks and see the apartment building where she'd been held. It wasn't long before she heard the sirens and saw the flashing lights of the police and fire trucks.

Maybe now the other two girls would be rescued. Deportation or even prison would be better than what they were going through in that apartment.

And now the fatigue really set in. She knew it would be better to keep running, to put as much distance as she could between herself and those men, but she was too weary. She moved deeper into the cemetery, with its quiet paths and comforting darkness.

Just beyond the area of German headstones she came upon a sign.
Sinti und Roma
. An arrow pointed the way. She walked in that direction.

Light filtered in from the pole lights above the train tracks. Rosalia stepped into a large square of grass full of low stone nameplates.

She bent down to touch a stone and could just make out the name:

Irina Sajetz, born 19-2-1920, died 31-12-1943

She moved to another one.

Hanna Srasko, born 10-5-1878, died 30-1-1944

There were more, many more — the Roma and Sinti who had died in Marzahn concentration camp and the German citizens who had stood up to the Nazis, also sent here to eventually die.

She sat among the markers. This may have been the very spot where her great-grandmother had beaten back the Nazi soldiers.

Rosalia raked her fingers along the grass and thought about that fight.

How scared her grandmother must have been! And how brave!

A bit of sparkle caught her eye. Tiny black stones surrounded the base of a memorial statue. Rosalia picked up a handful of the shiny marble pieces and held them in her hand. She folded her fingers and held the jagged stones tightly, so that the edges pressed into her palm.

All the people who had been brought to this camp had wanted to live. They wanted to laugh and love and be with their families. They didn't want to be treated like garbage. They didn't want to go up in smoke.

And they didn't want to give up.

She wouldn't give up, either.

The man's wallet in her pocket had money in it. She was healthy, brave and strong. She had a better chance than most, and she was not going to throw it away.

Rosalia opened her hand, looked at the bits of marble, then looked back at the grave markers of her people. She put the marble pieces into her pocket. She'd keep them always, then pass them on to her own child, if she ever had one. It was almost like having a piece of land.

She left the graveyard, climbing back over the fence, and found the entrance to the metro station. A couple of Euros fed into a machine got her a ticket. There was a map of Berlin nailed to a wall.

She'd go to the station that was the farthest west.

Germany was not a place for her to stay. France was next, then England. She'd find somewhere. The world was a big place. She'd find a home.

The train came into the platform and she got on. The train car was heated and its floor was kind to her bare feet. She'd find shoes somewhere, but first she wanted to get away.