Rose Under Fire

Rose Under Fire (2013), a historical novel written by Elizabeth Wein, follows the protagonist Rose Justice, a young pilot working for the Air Transport Auxiliary throughout World War II. Captured by the Nazi Regime during a secret flight near the end of the war, Justice is taken to Ravensbrück, the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps for women. There, Justice meets countless characters with riveting stories, including a French novelist whose Jewish husband and three sons had been killed, a young girl who was the guinea pig-like subject of Nazi medical experiments, and a Nachthexen, or “Night Witch” — a prodigious female Soviet fighter pilot for the air force. The highly resilient women she meets form a strong community, sharing stories and working together to survive the harsh conditions of the camp.

The novel begins as Justice, a naive but well-meaning young girl, attempts to join the Allied forces stationed in England to fly bomber planes in the war effort. She decides to keep a journal documenting her experiences in the war. She recalls “flying bombs,” also known as doodlebugs and buzz bombs, utilized by the Germans. She also learns an aerial tactic called “taran,” in which a pilot knocks a bomb away from its target. Her first assignment is a short secret mission to Paris, where she earns the fast admiration of her fellow male pilots. They free the city; elated and feeling invincible, they depart for their base in England.

However, during the party’s return from Paris, she is ambushed by Nazi planes. She implements taran successfully, but the Nazis capture her and her plane; the fate of her cohorts is unknown. The Nazis send Justice to Ravensbrück concentration camp, a women’s facility in the part of Germany fully occupied by their regime. Her journal is left behind, and the remainder of the novel is written in her journal in retrospect six months later, after escaping the concentration camp.



At the camp, Justice meets a group of women called the Rabbits. The Rabbits are victims of cruel medical experimentation, often torturous, by the Nazis to advance medical science using the plentitude of human subjects they had imprisoned. The Rabbits are kept at the camp with no chance of escape because the Nazi regime fears that they will reveal Nazi atrocities to the relatively ignorant international community. Justice integrates into the camp with the Rabbits and the other Polish and French women, believing naively that everyone will escape, but foreshadowing the inevitable loss of life.

Within the group at Ravensbrück, there exists a plurality of experiences and perceptions of the war. These ultimately translate into different coping strategies, not all of them forged by optimistic belief systems. Some of the inmates fall into total despair, failing to form social connections, withdrawing into their cells, often refusing to eat or drink for days. Others betray their fellow inmates, hoping in vain that giving information about rebellions and loyalties forming within Ravensbrück will ultimately save them. Justice observes that the most powerful forms of resistance are the small defiances, almost imperceptible, that remind them of their shared humanity. She points to whispered stories, shared food, and the patient subversion of orders to make life marginally better.

Justice says that she doesn’t judge or blame those inmates who can’t cope or fight. She argues that there is no right or wrong way to understand atrocity, vindicating her peers’ complex individual narratives. This revelation about humanity culminates in the final part of the novel when Justice attends various trials to bear witness to the Nazi regime’s atrocities. She realizes that given the chance to explain their stories, many of the former prisoners cannot. Nameless, voiceless, and alienated from their families and the other elements that make up one’s identity, the prisoners are muted by their internal demons. Rose finds her own coping strategy, writing and sharing her poetry, and inspiring others to write, to create their own solace.



Though Rose Under Fire ostensibly has a protagonist, she primarily observes. Through Justice, Wein shines a floodlight over the plurality of female voices and silences that constitute a terrorized population often forgotten in lieu of male-dominated narratives. Indeed, the novel stretches the limits of what it means to be a witness. As she enters the war, Justice’s conception of fighting atrocity is being a pilot in a plane with a birds’ eye view of the land to be saved. With the irony characteristic of the confused existentialism of the Holocaust period, she is brought into a site of atrocities, learning what it means to experience and observe the reality of human suffering.