Making Bombs For Hitler (11 page)

“Lida! Here!” Zenia’s voice. I scanned the car. There she was, sitting near the back by herself. Across the aisle from her sat Kataryna and Natalia from our barracks. Mary, the school girl I had thought was a teacher, sat in
front of her with an older labourer whose name I didn’t know.

I made my way down the aisle and sat beside Zenia, setting my bowl, cup and spoon on my lap.

After having an assignment away from the others for so long, it was a nice change to be with some people I knew, and of all the girls in my barracks, I liked Zenia the best.

“We’ll be together,” I said. “Won’t that be wonderful?”

Zenia regarded me, one brow arched. “There is no such thing as wonderful here.”

“You’re right, Zenia. But I am still looking forward to working with you.”

“Yes, that is a good thing. Let’s just hope our new jobs aren’t too difficult.”

The last to get into the compartment were two policemen. One of them slid the door shut and a policeman outside bolted it. The train shuddered and screeched and soon we were speeding away. I watched out the window, hungry for a view of something that wasn’t surrounded by barbed wire.

The train stopped at stations along the way and I watched through the window as policemen with clipboards would approach the train. The labourers would be herded out, and a policeman from the train would give a sheet of paper to the new policeman, who clipped it to his board and checked off the workers one by one. Some of them were loaded into the backs of trucks and others walked in single file, led by a German in civilian clothing.

Zenia had been travelling this route for some time. “Who are those people taking the labourers away?” I asked her.

“Factory owners, quarry managers, business owners,” she replied.

“I thought we were forced workers for the Nazis.”

“These businessmen pay the government for the privilege of using us,” replied Zenia bitterly. “I am sure they find it quite a convenience to have slaves.”

Her comment made me wonder what these regular Germans thought about us. Did they think we had done something wrong and were being punished? Or did they even know that their government captured people from other countries and made them work for Germany?

As our train idled at a later stop, we watched as a cluster of near-dead men who wore yellow stars on their striped rags were forced into the back of a truck by a soldier with a billy club. We were treated terribly, but one glance told us these Jewish people had it even worse. Were they fed at all? A shiver ran down my back, as if someone had stepped on my grave.

Our stop was the last. The whole time I had been on the train I hadn’t heard the sound of bomber planes overhead. It wasn’t because they had stopped, but because the train’s chugging was so loud. As soon as I stepped outside, the familiar high-pitched whine of American bombs was all I could hear. The ground trembled when one hit and I would see a puff of smoke in the near distance. It didn’t matter how often I heard bombs, I could never get used to them.

I stepped in line behind Mary and waited to be processed. The sun was shining over the top of a mountain range in the distance. These sharp grey rocks were nothing like our mountains back home. Ours had gentle
rolling slopes covered with trees and grass. These jutted up into the heavens like weapons.

As I waited in line, I felt the folded ridges of my identification paper in my pocket. I could not lose this. I pulled it out and for the first time took a good look at the photograph. Was that really me? It was less than a year ago, but I looked so young and innocent. Aside from the whip slash on my face, the shaved head and the bug bites, I had looked almost healthy. I put my hand up to my cheekbone where the cut had been. The wound had closed over, but the skin was so thin that I could feel each of my teeth. I put my hand up to my hair. It was longer now, but standing up in tufts. Washing it with the harsh bleaching powder and cold water was essential to keep the lice away, but it burned my scalp and matted my hair.

The paper was snatched out of my hand. I looked up. The policeman.

“You are Lida Ferezuk?”

I nodded.

He found my name on his list and put a check mark beside it. “You go over there to Frau Zanger,” he said, pointing with his pencil to a woman in a tailored blue suit.

I tried not to stare at her, but it was hard not to. First of all, the only other women at the train station were either frumpy looking mothers with children, or they were slave labourers. I could tell by the cut of this woman’s suit that it was custom-made to show off her narrow waist. The material was expensive — I suspected it was a fine woven wool from England. Mama once had a customer who got her clothing from England, and she would bring it in to
us for alterations. Frau Zanger’s outfit reminded me of that woman’s.

The policeman showed her his clipboard and together she ran through our names: me, Kataryna, Zenia, Mary, Natalia and a woman I didn’t recognize, named Bibi. “Very good,” she said in German, but with an unfamiliar accent. “And you’re sure these all have steady hands?”

The policeman flipped through the pages in his clipboard. He pointed to one name. They both looked up at Zenia, who had removed the bandages on her arm, but the scratches were still vivid. “I don’t know why they gave you one who is injured.”

“If she’s not any good, I’ll just get rid of her.”

“Yes, ma’am. I do know that these six were all hand-selected for you. Should I load them up?”

“Yes, Hans. I’ll meet you at the factory.”

She walked up to a long black car that was idling beside the station building. A uniformed man jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back door on the opposite side, opening it wide just as she got to it. He closed her door once she stepped in, then he got back in and sped away.

The workman loaded the six of us onto the open back of a pickup truck. The truck bed was wet with rain and there were no benches, so we had no choice but to sit down in the puddles. We huddled together with Zenia in the middle to keep her from falling on her scratches as we were driven away from the station. What had we been hand-selected for?

As we were driven through the busy city streets, I could not see a single building that had been untouched by bombs. I watched in awe as we passed a husband and wife
sipping tea at a kitchen table in a second-floor flat — only the flat had no walls and no ceiling. Below them the building was in rubble as well. I guess they were thankful they at least had a kitchen.

From the camp, I had listened to the American and British bombs going off non-stop since I had arrived there. But listening to bombs in the distance was quite different from witnessing the damage close up. I knew we were in more danger here in the city, but I was exhilarated to see that the Nazis weren’t doing so well. How I longed for the war to be over. Then I could find my sister and we could both go home.

The driver manoeuvred around fallen stonework from a bombed church, which sent us careening to one side in the back of the truck. I tried to keep Zenia upright, but when I lost my balance, she landed painfully on her injured arm. I watched clean, well-fed men and women wearing decent clothing walking along on the sidewalks, stepping through bombed fragments of lumber, stone and brick. Looking at them made me feel dirty and insignificant. None of them seemed to notice us at all. I guess they had got used to seeing truckloads of scrawny labourers passing by.

The truck pulled up to the entrance of a large U-shaped building made of yellow brick. It seemed to have miraculously escaped most of the air raids, although an outbuilding was nothing more than fresh rubble of twisted metal and brick. The large arched windows of the main building had all shattered and were boarded up with wood. Shards of glass still hung from parts of the framework like jagged teeth. I suspected that damage was just from
the ground shaking rather than a direct bomb hit.

“Oh no,” said Zenia. “I was hoping to be assigned somewhere else.”

“This is the metalworks factory that was just bombed?” I asked.

“I was working in there.” She pointed to the flattened outbuilding.

What part of this factory would we be working in? How long would it stay standing? I had heard that factory buildings were a magnet for bombs.

“It’s safer than you think,” Zenia said, reading the look of fear in my eyes. “The main building has been marked on the roof with the symbol for Hospital and it has largely escaped the bombing. I bet my building got hit by mistake.”

The workman opened up the back of the truck. We got out and he ushered the six of us through the front entrance. I was grateful to be in a dry place, but I wished I was back at the laundry. We stood in a reception area. To one side was a glassed-in office, with a large double-sided desk. Two healthy looking blond women faced one another, one pecking at a typewriter with two fingers, while the other tackled forms, one by one, filling them out with a pen.

Frau Zanger had one hand clasped around the knob of a battered wooden door that stood beside a larger door. She was having a heated conversation with a woman in a wraparound white smock. The woman’s head was bowed respectfully, but her hands were clenched at her side. Frau Zanger stabbed one finger in our direction and said to her, “I don’t care how much other work you need to do. You will train these workers now.”

Then she turned to us. “In there, all of you,” she snapped.

She opened the door and ushered the supervisor and us up the stairs and into a wire-mesh second-floor catwalk. She didn’t follow us. Down below we could see the metalworks factory as the day shift came in and the night shift shuffled out. Although we were a storey above the machines, we were still enveloped in the mechanical thrumming, banging, clanging and grinding. Even the wooden floor of the walkway vibrated. I looked down at one contraption that had a huge sledgehammer device on a swinging arm. I watched the labourer at that station place a piece of metal down on a flat tray. The mechanized sledgehammer slammed down, turning the metal piece into the shape of a small bowl. As the sledgehammer rose again, the worker swept the stamped bowl onto a conveyor belt and placed the next piece of metal in the same spot on the tray.

It seemed to me that it would be easy to have a finger or a hand on the tray at the wrong time, yet the worker was using her bare hands. The force of that sledgehammer could send bits of metal into her face, even her eyes. I guess it didn’t matter to the owners.

The metal bowls travelled down the conveyor belt and were picked up by women operating machines with spinning stone wheels. As they smoothed and ground the sides of the metal bowls, they were enveloped in a cloud of dust.

Zenia was in front of me as we walked single file behind the supervisor. “Was that your job before?” I asked, pointing at the grinding machines.

“That’s what I was doing, but in the outbuilding we were working with different-shaped metal,” she said.

Other machines produced cylindrical pieces of metal, some as long as my arm. The labourers looked almost like machines themselves, except for their gaunt appearance and their exhaustion.

When we had walked the length of the factory, we followed the German supervisor through another door and into a low-ceilinged white room. It had a wooden table and attached benches at one end and an open tiled area with a long metal trough for washing at the other. A small pail of bleaching powder was hooked onto one of the taps. There was a single flush toilet off to one side.

“Put your eating utensils on the table,” she said. “You will wash your arms and hands carefully and then I will inspect you.”

We did as we were told. I used the dreaded bleaching powder sparingly, but the water was gloriously hot. Zenia washed her scrapes gingerly with the stinging powder. Her left hand was slightly swollen, but she seemed to have good control over her fingers. I hoped that the supervisor would deem her useful.

When we were finished, we lined up in a row, our hands dripping water as we stood at the edge of the tiled area.

“Hold them out,” she ordered. She inspected the palms of our hands first, then turned each one, examining our fingernails closely. “You pass … you pass … you pass …”

My hands were clean enough, so I stood to one side. Bibi was wearing a wedding ring. “This must come off,” said the woman.

The ring was loose on Bibi’s finger and I was surprised that she had managed to keep it for so long. “Madame Manager,” she said, blinking back tears, “I have never removed this ring. It is all that I have left of my husband.”

“I don’t want your ring,” said the woman. “For your own protection, there can be no metal in the room you’ll be working in. Leave the ring on the table with your eating utensils.”

“Might someone steal it, just sitting there?” asked Bibi.

“The other workers do not come into this area,” said the woman.

When she got to Zenia, she made a clicking noise with her tongue. “How do you expect to work with swollen fingers?”

Zenia opened and closed the fingers on her left hand. “My hand works just fine,” she said.

The woman shook her head in disgust. “Why did they even send you to me? Couldn’t they find anyone better than a half cripple?”

“I am one of the bomb survivors,” said Zenia. “If you ask Foreman Lichstaedler, he will tell you what a good worker I am.”

“Lichstaedler did not survive the attack,” said the supervisor. “I’ll give you a try.” Her eyes landed on Zenia’s neck. “That cross — it’s metal. Take it off.”

Zenia drew the leather strap over her neck and placed my precious cross on the table.

The woman led us through the next door into yet another white room, this one empty, save for a table stacked with clean grey smocks.

“You will notice that these smocks have no metal snaps
or clips and no dangling belts. They’re washed daily and they wrap around you and tie at the back. It is important that they are worn snugly, but your labourer badges must still be visible. Do any of you have metal on your clothing?” She examined each girl’s dress, looking for snaps, zippers or metal clips, but none of us had any.