Making Bombs For Hitler (13 page)

On the last Sunday in October, Natalia looked especially pleased with herself as she stepped into the wash house. She sat down on the edge of the trough and we gathered around her in anticipation.

“You will never believe what I managed to get this time,” she said, her eyes shining. She reached into an inconspicuous pocket in the depths of her threadbare dress, pulled out a small flat package and folded back the paper. Brown sugar!

Curling the paper into a cone, she said, “Hold out your hand.”

She shook out a small pyramid of brown sugar on my palm. I licked it up, revelling in the burst of sweetness. When was the last time I had eaten anything so good? Not
in the years of Soviet rule, and certainly not since the Nazis had come.

All at once I remembered my last bit of sweetness. That Nazi woman dressed in brown who gave Larissa and me candies in exchange for information …

I swallowed down the sugar that coated my tongue, but the memory hung there. Had I not taken those candies, maybe Larissa and I would still be safe. And my own grandmother — was she dead because of me? My eyes filled with tears. I blinked hard, trying to erase the disturbing images. I looked over to Zenia. She held her hand in front of her face, palm up.

“This reminds me of the gunpowder we use in the bombs,” she said.

Kataryna had licked every last speck of sugar from her own palm. She stared at Zenia’s grains.

“This … this brown sugar is the wrong texture … and it’s not dark enough,” she said. “I think the dirt outside this wash house looks more like the gunpowder …”

Gunpowder. Grains that looked like the explosive but weren’t …

“What would —” Natalia began, then stopped.

We all looked at her.

“What would happen if we put some dirt into the bombs?” said Natalia.

My heart nearly stopped beating. What a bold thought. “They wouldn’t work so well, is my guess,” said Zenia. She still hadn’t eaten the sugar on her palm.

“How would we sneak it in?” asked Kataryna.

“The same way I brought in the sugar,” said Natalia. “In our pockets.”

We looked at each other solemnly. Could it work? Would we be caught? It was hard to know.

Was it worth the chance? Definitely.

Kataryna looked at Natalia, her eyes alight with a new idea. “If I ease up on the hammer machine early,” she said, “I think the bombs would fail to snap together all the way. They might fall apart instead of exploding.”

“We have many ways of ruining the bombs,” I said. “But we are watched. Always watched.”

As fall turned towards winter, we noticed subtle changes all around. Bombs had been falling all day and night for months, but now the sky was black with Allied bomber planes. We heard that entire German cities had been destroyed. At the work camp, some of the policemen hung up their uniforms and left. The ones who stayed became even more cruel than they had been. It was like their war losses were our fault. Once, when Officer Schmidt was annoyed by a prisoner’s answer at roll call, he cocked his gun and shot the man on the spot. We were all afraid to breathe.

On our way to and from the city, I would look out the window and try to make sense of what I saw. Waves of ragged refugees walked through city streets. Some were starving like us, but others looked like they had recently been well fed. The few Germans who still rode on the train with us would whisper among themselves and I would try to listen, to find out what was going on. From what I could hear, the Soviets were pushing the Nazis back. As the battleground moved closer to us, whole villages and towns were being destroyed. People who
survived fled west — away from the fighting — but farther into Nazi territory.

One icy evening in November when I stepped off the train after work, Juli met me, her eyes rimmed with red.

“I have something for you,” she said. “Come quickly.”

She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me along to her barracks. We stepped inside. It was empty save for us. She knelt in front of her bed, which was a bottom bunk close to the heater at the back, reached in and drew out a pair of worn leather shoes that were made for a woman.

“Put these on and let’s get out of here before anyone else comes in.”

Shoes were like gold in the camp. Where had Juli got these? I didn’t stop to think about it, but slipped my feet inside. They were roomy, but I didn’t mind. My feet were swollen and the shoes felt warm and solid. I followed Juli out the door, stepping gingerly, trying to re-teach myself how to walk in shoes.

I noticed a truck idling by the entrance to the hospital.

“What is that truck for?”

Juli’s eyes filled with tears. “Don’t go there.”

But of course I did.

The back of the truck was stacked with the gaunt bodies of dead slaves, many with faces frozen in painful contortions. I recognized one as the woman who had replaced me helping Inge in the laundry. She was barefoot. I looked down at my feet and knew where my shoes had come from. My heart felt like it could burst with guilt. Here I was, benefiting from someone else’s death.

“Better you have the shoes than they get buried,” Juli murmured.

I said a silent prayer for the woman whose shoes I wore, then looked at the others in the truck. They were mostly strangers. Where had these people come from and why were they now all dead?

“What happened?” I asked Juli.

“The Nazis are retreating in the east, and camps there are being overrun by the Soviets.” She nodded back towards the truck. “The Nazis shipped those prisoners away from a work camp just before it was liberated by the Soviets. The prisoners arrived on a train this morning, starving and nearly frozen. Officer Schmidt decided that they wouldn’t be useful workers and he didn’t want to waste food on them. He ordered the cook to put poison into today’s Russian soup.” She blinked back tears. “All of the eastern workers who were in the camp today have died.”

Even though my stomach was empty, bile rose in my throat. Should I be thankful that my friends and I had our soup at the factory instead of at the camp? Should I be thankful for my shoes? It was mere chance that I wasn’t one of those corpses on the back of the truck.

“I had heard about these mass poisonings before, but it seemed so impossible, even for the Nazis, I thought it was a rumour,” said Juli, brushing away a tear with the back of her hand. “I’ve been told that is why the Russian soup always has a separate ladle.”

I looked down at my new shoes and then back towards the truck. “The Nazis will pay for this,” I vowed to Juli. “They should think twice before asking slaves to make bombs.”

Chapter Fourteen
Scrap of Light

When 1944 arrived we did nothing in the camp to mark the new year. Maybe the camp guards and the police had extra food. Maybe they toasted each others’ good health. For us it was a usual Friday night. I went to bed and tried to sleep. I tried not to think of the possibility of spending another year making bombs for Hitler.

Ukrainian Christmas Eve was the following Thursday, and those of us in Barracks 7 sang hymns together as we lay in our bunks, shivering under our covers. Just a year ago I had been with Larissa and my grandmother. Back then I thought things couldn’t get worse. I was an orphan, after all. Looking back now, I realized how I should have been thankful for all that we had — not much food, no parents, but a roof over our heads and the love of our grandmother.

As January blizzards blew outside, I was grateful for my shoes. The man behind the glass stopped paying so much attention to us. He would bring in the daily newspaper and read every page. I would glance over and see him
engrossed in the latest news from the Front, not looking our way for fifteen minutes at a time. Every once in a while he would leave. Sometimes he would be gone for only a minute or so, but there were times when he was gone for half a day.

We sensed the war was turning very bad for the Nazis. Some of the changes were subtle: German supervisors in the factory simply stopped showing up. In their place would be German housewives who seemed wholly unprepared for the job they were supposed to do, or boys in Hitler Youth uniforms, who were eager but untrained. I lived in hope that the man behind the glass would abandon his post as well, but although his absences became longer, and he paid scant attention to us while he was there, he always seemed to eventually come back.

But we had the opportunity for sabotage in those times that he was gone. Each morning now we filled our pockets with dirt from the camp. Even with the supervisor reading the paper, it was possible to slip my hand into my pocket and fill the metal bowl with dirt instead of gunpowder.

Natalia’s trick could only be done when the supervisor was gone. She would dampen the inside cavities of the bombs with the icy fluid. The gunpowder that was inserted after that was spoiled — we hoped.

One morning we came in and the supervisor was gone. On his desk was a day-old newspaper and a dirty coffee cup. Perhaps he would finally not come in at all. We used his early absence to sabotage bombshell after bombshell. Natalia gave the barrel of gunpowder a good soaking with her cooling fluid. She sprayed fluid all over the straw-like
Kordit
as well. We made the bombs out of this destroyed material, and included scraps of paper upon which Bibi wrote in several languages,
Dear Allies, this is all that we can do for you now.

Shortly before lunch the supervisor came back. We had just closed up one of the tampered bombs. I had a hard time keeping my face serious, I felt so exultant. I was positively giddy with the fact that we had succeeded in destroying so many bombs. Had he bothered to glance into our room, he might have noticed the
Kordit
glistening, but he didn’t look. Instead he opened up his briefcase with trembling fingers and began frantically stuffing papers into it from his desk. Without glancing at us even once, he left, stray papers fluttering behind him.

With him gone, we continued to make fake bombs. At midday we joked together as we hung up our smocks, then washed up as usual. I was grateful when the kitchen worker came in with our soup. So many Germans seemed to be fleeing. Our turnip soup was not filling, but it was the only thing keeping us alive.

Just as I held a spoonful of watery turnip to my lips, the room was enveloped in a loud boom. A gust of air whooshed in from above with such force that it blew me off my chair. My spoon flew out of my hand and smacked against the wall. I scrambled to my feet, trying to make sense of what had just happened. When I looked up at the ceiling, my heart stood still. Where grey ceiling tiles should have been, there was a huge star-shaped hole. And that’s when I looked immediately below the hole — our table. Sticking up in the middle of it was the narrow end of a small bomb, fins pointing upward.

Time stood still. For one long moment I stared at that bomb, comparing it to the ones we were making. This was similar in size and colour, but teardrop-shaped instead of oblong. All at once I came to my senses. This was a bomb that had been dropped on us. It hadn’t exploded … yet.

“Out!” I screamed. “Now!”

The other girls seemed as stunned and confused as I was.

I scrambled to my feet and ran to the door that connected our room to the catwalk above the factory. I pulled on the handle. Mercifully, it was unlocked. Zenia, Mary, Bibi, Natalia, Kataryna and I all flew out, yanking the door closed behind us. We stumbled down the catwalk as quickly as our feet would take us. When we were nearly at the other end of the factory, the ground shook so violently that I was knocked off my feet, my friends tumbling around me.

I turned to look. The force of the explosion had blasted our lunchroom door off its hinges. Hot air and flames licked down the catwalk towards us.

“Get up! Up up!” screamed Kataryna, pulling on my arms. I stumbled to my feet, as did Zenia behind me. Mary was the farthest down the catwalk and she got to the exit door first. She pulled it open and we all tumbled out into the main entryway of the factory and collapsed in a heap, smoke billowing out behind us.

Hands pulled at us. Air-raid sirens blared, but I could hear the rumble of bricks and mortar falling around us. All at once I gulped in cold fresh air. I looked up and counted. All six of us were there. We had miraculously survived the bombing.

Young boys with Hitler Youth arm bands herded us away from the building and told us to stand with factory workers from the main wing. We milled about, shocked and frightened, blood trickling from our wounds.

I took huge gulping breaths to calm myself and willed myself not to cry. Zenia and Bibi were standing a few feet apart from the other workers, pointing to part of the factory. I turned to look, and gasped. One third of it had been bombed flat. And where our bomb room had been was now a hollowed-out shell. My first thought was one of frustration — all those sabotaged bombs had been destroyed. All that trickery for nothing. My second thought was exultation. Maybe the bombs didn’t get used, but I was sure we had saved many labourers’ lives here today because of watering the gunpowder. But then I wondered: how long would it take the officers in charge to realize that had those bombs been real, they’d have exploded when the Allies’ bomb hit, and the damage would have been far worse than this? What would they do to us when they realized what we had done to the German bombs?