Making Bombs For Hitler (17 page)

Astrid took my hand and together we walked over to those fluttering bits of prayer. I reached up and held one flat so I could read it.
Anya Zuk, from Drohobych, looking for Ivan. Left for Flensburg June 2, 1945.
I looked at another, and another. All were details of refugees, searching for their loved ones.

“Will they get into trouble for making these notes?” I asked.

Astrid shook her head. “Who is it you’re looking for, Lida? I’ll help you go through these.”

I told her about Larissa, but also about Luka and Zenia, Kataryna and Natalia. My heart ached as I read the details of so many lost loved ones, but I kept my hope until the very last paper. When we were finally done and I found no one I loved, I wanted to curl up and weep, but Astrid told me she would send my name and the names of my dear ones to the Red Cross.

“It may take time,” she said. “But maybe we will find someone you know.”

With her hand draped lightly across my shoulder, she led me inside the refugee camp.

Chapter Nineteen
Praying for Larissa

The smell of bleaching powder but not misery. No barbed wire. No Nazi soldiers with guns. This refugee camp had taken on a personality while I was being treated at the hospital. Fragments of families had claimed corners of rooms in the various blasted-out convent buildings. Others had built makeshift homes amidst the rubble from what they could find — twisted metal, broken-down doors, half-bricks.

The first thing I looked for was the church. People grinned when I asked about it and pointed me to an area at the back of the camp. Set off to one side was what looked like a long-abandoned barn on the outside, but there was a well-trod path leading up to it. I walked to the door and it creaked loudly as I opened it.

Sunlight poured in from the shattered rafters.

I gasped in amazement at what I saw. An altar neatly made of stacked tin cans with a wooden door laid across as a tabletop. The stolen icon from that German house
was propped up in the centre of the altar, a golden candelabra on one side and dirt-filled tin cans holding hand-dipped candles on the other side. On the back wall of the barn hung a handmade wooden cross.

I knelt down before the altar and sobbed a prayer for the souls of my mother, father, grandmother. I hoped that soon they could rest in peace.

I was safe.

I would find Larissa.

I said a prayer of thanks that I still lived, and then another of hope, for Luka … Zenia … Kataryna … Mary … Natalia …

Larissa.

I don’t know how long I stayed in contemplation, but it must have been quite a while. When I tried to stand up, I couldn’t. My legs and feet were stiff and numb.

“Let me help you.”

A voice from a distant dream. I looked up.

The way the light shone through the broken slats in the barn roof made it difficult to see who was standing there, but the silhouette was beloved. The voice was dear. Could it possibly be?

“Luka?”

He stepped forward. His shock of wild hair had grown back but his eyes were circled with shadows of grief. “They told me I might find you here.” He knelt and placed my arms around his neck.

Together we stood. “Dear Lida,” he said. “I promised I would find you.”

“I dreamt of you the night you escaped.”

He smiled. “I was thinking of you as well, praying that
you would be safe. I felt guilty leaving you behind.”

“How did you manage to get away?”

We walked out of the makeshift church together — Luka still helping me, although my feet and legs were feeling less numb — and he told me about that night.

“I couldn’t just walk out,” he said. “During the day there were too many people around, and at night the gates were locked and guards with guns were on patrol.”

“So how did you escape?”

“Did you ever see what they did with the dead bodies?” he asked.

I shuddered at the memory. “They piled them into trucks.”

Luka nodded. “There were many trucks. Many deaths at the hospital. I got out on one of those trucks.”

I looked at Luka, not sure that I had heard correctly. “You hid among the corpses?”

“Yes.”

We walked in silence past children playing with makeshift toys, and mothers scrubbing rags in soapy basins of water. What a contrast to be with people smiling and relaxed when in my mind was the image of Luka in a truck of the dead.

“It must have been awful,” I said.

He squeezed my hand and sighed. “I managed to loosen the tarp from the back of the truck and jump out onto the road when we were a good distance from the camp. Thank goodness it was dark out. I hid in the woods and met up with others who had escaped from camps as well.”

“You stayed in the woods all that time?”

He looked at me but his eyes seemed distant. “We
moved around a lot. The Nazis hunted us down. Not all our group survived.”

We were each lost in our own thoughts and without realizing it, we reached the end of the refugee camp. I sat down on the tire of an abandoned Jeep and patted the spot beside me. Luka sat as well.

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“A day or so ago,” he said. “I found out that a group of survivors from our work camp had been taken to the American army hospital down the road. I thought that if you were among that group, you would end up here.”

“Have you found any others?”

Luka shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone else I knew from there.”

Luka and I spent as much time as we could together over the next days and weeks. There was much work to do — helping families patch together makeshift homes, assisting with food distribution, playing with the younger children. He was much healthier than most of the refugees, and now that my feet were healing and I was eating more than turnip soup, I had become stronger as well. Luka found a place to sleep with a group of boys his age. I found a cozy spot on my own in the corner of what used to be an office in one of the convent buildings.

Every morning I would check with the people from the Red Cross to see if there was any word about Larissa, but each day the answer was the same.

“I am sorry, dear,” said the kind-hearted Canadian woman whose hair was a mass of red curls. “I hope we’ll have better news for you soon.”

“Is there any way of checking German records?”

“What do you mean?” asked the woman.

“I may have seen her with some Germans,” I said evasively. I didn’t want to admit that I thought I had seen her with a Nazi officer’s family.

“The Germans destroyed records as they abandoned offices,” said the woman, “but we’re doing the best that we can.”

Her words cut me to the heart. What chance did I really have of ever finding my sister? I didn’t even know if she would be using her real name, if she’d been living with that Nazi family I saw in the car.

Later, when I sat beside Luka and we ate tasty buns made with white flour and a faint taste of sugar, he said, “Don’t ever give up hope. All you can do is keep on looking. She’s probably looking for you as well.”

He was right, and I knew it. Every day I checked the fluttering messages, hoping that one day I would see a message from my sister.

Luka checked as well. He had no way of finding his father, who was either still in Siberia or dead by now. But his mother had been a slave labourer. Perhaps one day a fluttering message from her would appear.

Chapter Twenty
The Lucky Ones

Life in the displaced persons’ camp settled into a routine. Each morning we children would be gathered together in a makeshift classroom to be taught Ukrainian and English spelling and grammar, arithmetic, history, geography. For so long I had pretended to be older than I was, and it was difficult for me to be clustered together with the other eleven-year-olds. Many of these children had lived through conditions as difficult as my own, but a few had managed to stay with a parent or grandparent throughout the war. These few lucky ones seemed so separate and special. Did I dare admit how jealous I was of them?

I knew it wasn’t fair of me to feel that way, but every time I looked at the lucky ones, I felt unbearably lonely. I was grateful to be with Luka, but I had to find Larissa, and it wasn’t just to ensure that she was safe. I needed to find her for my own sake. We were sisters, after all. We shared the same family, childhood — even thoughts. With her gone, half of me was gone as well.

My teacher was a former high school instructor from Lviv named Pani Zemluk and she was demanding and precise in her expectations. Often after all the other children had gone off to play, I would stay at my spot on the bench made from a plank of wood and two empty paint tins, my workbook open on my knees. I was determined to master my school work, especially the English language. It was such a gift to finally be given the opportunity to learn. Pani Zemluk would come and sit beside me, correcting my errors and giving me extra exercises when I wanted them. And we would talk.

I confided to her my hopes and dreams of finding Larissa. I confessed to her what I did in the war. I wept on her shoulder as I admitted to accepting the candy from that Nazi woman, and how my selfishness had destroyed my family.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “What starving child would say no to a sweet? It was meant to be.”

Pani Zemluk advised me to change my identity. “You cannot let people know that you’re from Chernivets’ka. That’s in the Soviet part of Ukraine, and everyone from there is being sent back to the Soviet Union.”

“But I want to go home.”

“Your home no longer exists. Besides, you were a labourer for the Nazis. If you go back to the Soviet Union, you will be punished for that.”

I rubbed the tears away with the back of my hand and stared at her. “That makes no sense,” I said. “I was a
prisoner
of the Nazis.”

“No matter. You will be punished as a Nazi.”

“They already know my true identity at the hospital,” I
told her. “Besides, if I change who I am, how can I ever find my sister?”

Pani Zemluk brushed away a stray hair from my brow and looked me in the eye. “Your first job is to save yourself, Lida. You have been very lucky so far, but if you don’t stay free, you and your sister can never hope to be reunited.”

Her words shattered me.

Luka was in the spiralling lineup of refugees at lunchtime. Once we each got a brimming bowl of hot pea soup and a handful of crackers, we walked down the pathway to the makeshift church. It was cool there, and quiet at midday. We sat side by side on the ground, leaning against the wall.

I filled my spoon with thick soup and blew on it, waiting for it to cool down just a bit. I didn’t actually like the taste of pea soup — we’d been served it more than any other food — but it filled my stomach and staved off the gnawing hunger that seemed always to be present. I swallowed down the first spoonful, then as I waited for the next to cool, I watched Luka. He shovelled down the soup, piping hot. The look on his face was one of urgency, as if he was afraid that someone would take the food away from him if he didn’t consume every last speck instantly.

“Have you heard anything about your mother?” I asked him.

He shook his head and continued eating. I swallowed down another spoonful of soup, then as I stared at my bowl, I told Luka about what Pani Zemluk had said.

Luka didn’t answer right away. He was too involved with licking every last bit of soup from the bottom of his bowl. When he was finished, he methodically ate his
crackers, chewing each one with gusto. Once he swallowed down the last cracker he turned to me and said, “I think she is wrong.”

His words confused me. “So you think we should go back to the Soviet Union?”

“I haven’t heard anything about my mother,” said Luka. “But this morning some Red Army soldiers came into my classroom and asked to speak to me.”

His words made my heart pound. “What did they want?”

“They told me that my father is alive and that he is living in Kyiv. He’s got his own pharmacy.”

“That is wonderful, Luka!”

“They are coming back tomorrow morning. They will take me home.”

His words were like a stone in my heart. I had no idea if I would ever find Larissa, but Luka was right here, with me. He was the brother of my heart. How could I bear to lose him yet again? Was I destined to be all alone? I didn’t say anything. I stared at the soup in my bowl, but suddenly I had no appetite.

Luka’s finger gently brushed a tear away from my cheek. “You could come with me,” he said.

Should I? Could I? But if I went back to the Soviet Union and Larissa was living somewhere here in Germany, how would I ever find her? It was all too overwhelming. There was too much to think about.

“I am leaving tomorrow morning, no matter what,” said Luka. “Come and say goodbye to me, or come and join me. Your choice.”

Chapter Twenty-One
Luka Leaving

All night I tossed and turned. How wonderful it would be to go home again and help rebuild all that had been lost. Maybe I could go to Kyiv with Luka. Maybe his father would adopt me and then I would truly be Luka’s sister.