I put myself back in the narrative

Oh, you guys. Did you read Code Name Verity? You should. I mean, it’ll break your heart wide open but you should read it. If only so you can then pick up Rose Under Fire, the companion book to Code Name Verity, and break your heart all over again.

Rose Justice, apart from having a great, superhero-esque name, is a young American pilot who goes to fight in WWII. She works for the ATA and becomes friends with Maddie, who you’ll recognize if you read Code Name Verity. Rose has a pilot boyfriend named Nick who she enjoys but is not wildly in love with, and she loves poetry as much as she loves flying. She’s young and naive and doesn’t know this war is about to wring all of the hope and innocence out of her.

While transporting goods in France, Rose is brought down by two German planes. She’s taken prisoner and soon transferred to a concentration camp, Ravensbrück. She’s labeled a French prisoner, as she doesn’t speak German and cannot communicate with her captors. She is, of course, treated like any other prisoner of a concentration camp. Her clothing is taken away. Her head is shaved. She’s mistreated at every turn. She’s broken down, confused, and lost. No one knows where she is and, in fact, all assume she died. Even her boyfriend, who had proposed to her right before she was captured, quickly marries someone else.

Rose soon meets a group of women she’ll eventually call family. This group of Polish women is known as the Rabbits, prisoners who were horribly experimented upon by Nazi doctors, and who are still suffering from these procedures. Rose falls in with them because, though she was first assigned the cushiest job (if a job at a concentration camp could be called cushy) at the weapons factory, she found herself unable to build weapons for the opposing side. For this, she was savagely whipped and beaten, and is put with the Rabbits to recover. They take her in with no question and she soon begins to repay their kindness with poetry.

Rose’s prison family consists of the most incredible women. Their prison mother, Lisette, who tries to teach the younger girls as if they are just in school. Sweet Karolina, who I can’t bear to think about because it still makes me too sad. Stoic Irina, who is a fighter pilot and level-headed when it’s most needed. And Róża, difficult, broken, Róża, who lived so many of her formative years at Ravensbrück, and who has to put herself back together, because there’s no one else to do it for her.

What was most amazing to me were the ways these women found to protect one another. They’d hide each other WITHIN the camp, to escape terrible fates. They’d start mini-riots if it meant it would protect just a handful of prisoners. And they did this after living in the most deplorable conditions imaginable, when no one would have looked down on them for just doing the bare minimum needed to survive. But that’s the point. They didn’t want to do the bare minimum. They wanted to be left at least somewhat whole, if not physically, then at least inside, when the war ended and they were finally rescued. And, no matter who came for them, who set them free, they had to look after themselves so there would still be someone to save when the time came.

I expected this book to be difficult to read, given the subject matter, and I was right, but I’d absolutely recommend reading it. Sometimes you need to break your own heart to remind yourself that it can be broken and still function.