These ultimately translate into different coping strategies, not all of them forged by optimistic belief systems. Within the group at Ravensbrück, there exists a plurality of experiences and perceptions of the war. 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. 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. 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. 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.Īt the camp, Justice meets a group of women called the Rabbits.

The Nazis send Justice to Ravensbrück concentration camp, a women’s facility in the part of Germany fully occupied by their regime. She implements taran successfully, but the Nazis capture her and her plane the fate of her cohorts is unknown. However, during the party’s return from Paris, she is ambushed by Nazi planes. They free the city elated and feeling invincible, they depart for their base in England. Her first assignment is a short secret mission to Paris, where she earns the fast admiration of her fellow male pilots.

She also learns an aerial tactic called “taran,” in which a pilot knocks a bomb away from its target. She recalls “flying bombs,” also known as doodlebugs and buzz bombs, utilized by the Germans. She decides to keep a journal documenting her experiences in the war. 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. The highly resilient women she meets form a strong community, sharing stories and working together to survive the harsh conditions of the camp. 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. 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. 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.

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein