Making Bombs For Hitler Read online

  Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

  For Anelia V.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Losing Larissa — 1943

  Chapter Two: Cross-stitch

  Chapter Three: Russian Soup

  Chapter Four: Zenia

  Chapter Five: Work

  Chapter Six: Seams

  Chapter Seven: Bloodstains

  Chapter Eight: Grey Ghosts

  Chapter Nine: The Hospital

  Chapter Ten: A New Dress

  Chapter Eleven: Roll Call

  Chapter Twelve: Making Bombs

  Chapter Thirteen: Like Rats

  Chapter Fourteen: Scrap of Light

  Chapter Fifteen: Alone

  Chapter Sixteen: Lace Curtain

  Chapter Seventeen: Shokolad

  Chapter Eighteen: Looking for Larissa

  Chapter Nineteen: Praying for Larissa

  Chapter Twenty: The Lucky Ones

  Chapter Twenty-One: Luka Leaving

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Lost

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Fleeing

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Fischbeck Camp, British Zone, Germany

  Epilogue: 1951

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Losing Larissa — 1943

  The room smelled of soap and the light was so white that it made my eyes ache. I held Larissa’s hand in a tight grip. I was her older sister after all, and she was my responsibility. It would be easy to lose her in this sea of children, and we had both lost far too much already. Larissa looked up at me and I saw her lips move but I couldn’t hear her words above the wails and screams. I bent down so that my ear was level with her lips.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said.

  I wrapped my arms around her and gently rocked her back and forth. I whispered our favourite lullaby into her ear.

  A loud crack startled us both. The room was suddenly silent. A woman in white stepped in among us. She clapped her hands sharply once more.

  “Children,” she said in brisk German. “You will each have a medical examination.”

  Weeping children were shoved into a long snaking line that took up most of the room. I watched as one by one other children were taken behind a broad white curtain.

  When it was Larissa’s turn, her eyes went round with fright. I did not want to let go of her, but the nurse pulled our hands apart.

  “Lida, stay with me.”

  I stood at the edge of the curtain and watched as the woman made Larissa take off her nightgown. My sister’s face was red with shame. When the woman held a metal instrument to her face, Larissa screamed. I rushed up and tried to knock that thing out of the nurse’s hand, but she called for help and someone held me back. When they finished with Larissa, they told her to stand at the other end of the room.

  When it was my turn, I barely noticed what they were doing. I kept my eyes fixed on Larissa. She was standing with three other children. Dozens more had been ordered to stand in a different spot.

  When the nurse was finished with me, I slipped my nightgown back on. I was ordered to stand with the larger group — not with Larissa’s.

  “I need to be in that group,” I told the nurse, pointing to where Larissa stood, her arms outstretched, a look of panic on her face.

  The nurse’s lips formed a thin flat line. “No talking.”

  She put one hand on each of my shoulders and shoved me towards the larger group. A door opened wide. We were herded out into the blackness of night.

  Larissa screamed, “Lida! Don’t leave me!”

  I looked back into the room, but could not see her. “I will find you, Larissa!” I shouted. “I promise. Stay strong.”

  A sharp slap across my face sent me sprawling onto the cold wet grass. I scrambled up and tried to break through the sea of children. I had to get back to Larissa.

  Strong arms wrapped around my torso and lifted me up. I was thrown into blackness. With a screech of metal the door slammed shut.

  Blackness.

  I dreamed that I was lying in a sea of humming bees. We were swaying back and forth and I sang the lullaby under my breath, imagining that I was being rocked in Mama’s arms. I opened my eyes. It was so dark they took a few minutes to adjust.

  I was crammed inside a hot metal room that smelled like a dirty barn. It was so stuffy and stinky and crowded that I could barely breathe. I realized with a shock that we were moving. This was not a room after all, but a train car — the kind for cattle. It swayed back and forth. The sound was not the humming of bees, but the whispers of frightened children and the thrumming of the train on its tracks. At least the sound of war was muffled out.

  “Does anyone know where we’re going?”

  The whispers stopped. A lone thin voice answered. “To Germany, I think.”

  My heart sank. If they took me to Germany, how would I ever find Larissa? Wherever she was, she must be feeling so frightened, so alone.

  I tried to stand, but with the movement of the car and the hazy light, I fell backwards, one of my bare feet landing on another child’s chest.

  “Ow!” she cried.

  “I am sorry.”

  It was pointless to try standing, so I sat up and tried to get my bearings. In the dim light I could see a tangle of limbs and tufts of hair. Children were packed in so tightly that each overlapped the other. Something smelled bad and a sloshing sound came from one corner.

  “What is that over there?” I asked no one in particular.

  “That’s our bathroom,” said the girl I had stepped on. “A pail.”

  I wrinkled my nose. All these children and one pail for a bathroom? No wonder it smelled so bad.

  I crawled as far away as I could get from the stinky pail, moving slowly and being careful not to hurt any of the children who were crammed in my way. When I got to the other side of the car, there was a thin seam of light framing a panel in the siding. It was a door. I pounded and screamed with all my might. The children who were propped up against it scooted to the side.

  “It won’t do you any good,” said a boy’s voice. “We’ve already tried to open it.”

  I looked over to him in the dim light and saw a silhouette of wild hair. There was a trickle of dark on his cheek. Was he bleeding?

  Using the ridges in the siding to help me balance in a standing position, I felt a long lever across the door. I pushed it down hard. It moved and sprang back up but the door didn’t open.

  “It’s locked from the outside,” a girl’s voice said.

  I pounded on it again with my fists. Nothing happened.

  The wild-haired boy looked up at me and said, “Even if it did open, what would you do then? Fall out onto the train tracks in the middle of nowhere?”

  I slid back down and sat beside him, wrapping my arms around my knees and staring at my feet. Was Larissa in a cattle car like this, going somewhere else? How would I find her? What was happening to me?

  In the dark monotony, we children exchanged names with those who sat closest to us. The wild-haired boy was Luka Barukovich from Kyiv. Sitting beside him was Zenia Chornij, also from Kyiv. The girl I had stepped on was Marika Steshyn, from Babin, not far from my village of Verenchanka. The thin seam of light around the door frame was my only marker of time. It dimmed, then darkened. I slept.

  In that space between day and nightmare my body swayed with the chug-chug-chug of the boxcar. One child chanted prayers in a voice hoarse from crying. Gradually, the seam around the door got light again.

  Daytime stretched out in endless minutes. I was hungry, thirsty, hot. Weren’t we all?

  A second night pa
ssed. Would we all die in this cattle car?

  A loud screech and we came to a halt. The door slid open. I would have fallen out had I not grabbed onto Marika, who was curled in fitful sleep on my lap. The sudden daylight hurt my eyes and the whoosh of cold filled my lungs with what felt like a thousand tiny pins.

  I propped myself up and squinted, trying to make sense of what I saw outside the cattle car. A young Nazi soldier, his face a rash of pimples, pointed a rifle at Luka. I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out. My mouth and throat were like sawdust.

  Behind the soldier stood some sort of train depot or maybe a town. I couldn’t tell for sure. There were wooden buildings that were mostly still standing, and sad looking people milling about. The only signs I could see were written in German.

  A high-pitched whizzing sound was followed by a boom. In the distance, a puff of smoke. Bombs.

  “Stay in there, Russian swine,” screamed the boy soldier in German, jabbing his rifle menacingly.

  Why was he calling us Russian, and why were we now pigs? I didn’t dare ask.

  He turned and motioned to someone we could not see. A door opened on one of the buildings and a hollow-cheeked woman in rags appeared behind him. Balanced on her shoulders was a long stick with a sloshing pail attached to either end. She paused beside him, awaiting further instructions.

  He flicked his hand impatiently at her, indicating that she should set the pails inside our car.

  “Be useful or they will kill you,” she whispered to us urgently in Ukrainian, lifting one pail into our car and pushing it in against our legs. It was filled with water.

  “No talking,” shouted the soldier. Why did he have to shout?

  He aimed his rifle at the woman.

  Her fearful eyes darted to him. She lifted up the second bucket and Luka grabbed the handle. We all pushed back so there was room to set it on the floor. This one was filled with a grey watery sludge.

  The door clanged shut and we were engulfed in darkness once again. The train jolted, then picked up speed.

  I moved on my hands and knees over to the sludgy pail and sniffed — a dank smell that reminded me of the rotting vegetable scraps Mama would use to fertilize our garden when we still had a home. In other circumstances, the smell might have turned my stomach, but it had been so long since any food had passed my lips that my stomach rumbled in anticipation. I dipped one finger in. Lukewarm. I tasted it. “This is some sort of soup.”

  There were no spoons or bowls so we took turns crawling over to the pail and carefully scooping out a bit of the muck with cupped hands. In the handful that was mine, I could feel a chunk of turnip with my tongue, but otherwise it was mostly water. I chewed the turnip slowly and swallowed it down, the wet mush feeling like a balm on my dry throat.

  My eyes were getting used to the dimness of our car, so I watched as the others lined up and swallowed down their meagre share of soup. Marika didn’t get in line. She didn’t even sit up. I crawled over to her and placed my hand on her forehead. It was cool — too cool — to the touch.

  “Food, Marika. You’ve got to eat.” I gently shook her shoulder. Her eyes opened slightly, and I thought for a minute that she looked at me, but they quickly fluttered shut.

  I got back to the pail of watery turnip soup, nudging my way to the front of the line. “Marika needs something to eat.”

  The children closest to the pail made room for me and I scooped up as much of the solid bits as I could with my hands. It wasn’t easy getting back, with the rail car swaying, the darkness and the other children. But each time I nearly fell, one of the others would steady me.

  Luka and Zenia propped Marika up between them. I knelt in front of her and held my cupped hands to her face. Her nose wrinkled. Perhaps her dreams were more pleasant than the smell of these vile bits of turnip. Her eyes opened and she looked down.

  “Eat.”

  She cupped her fingers over mine and drew my hands to her mouth. She swallowed a piece of soggy turnip and choked.

  “Slowly.”

  She held my hands close to her mouth as if she were afraid I wouldn’t give her any more, but she carefully chewed every bit of turnip and swallowed it down. She licked my fingers, then pushed my hands away and slumped back into Zenia, exhausted.

  There was barely any soup left for Luka, the last in line. We reversed the order for the water, so at least Luka got a few good swallows.

  With the little bit of food in my stomach and water to wet my lips, I felt stronger. “I wonder what that woman meant, ‘Be useful or they’ll kill you’?”

  “We’re too young to be of much use to the Nazis,” said Luka. “And useless people are killed.”

  The words were like a stone on my heart. If I was too young to be useful, what about Larissa? What could she do to prove herself useful? How could I save her? First I would have to figure out a way to save myself.

  “What work could I possibly do?” I asked.

  “Figure out a skill,” said Luka. “And say you’re older.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  Luka sighed. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been caught by the Nazis.”

  Chapter Two

  Cross-stitch

  A skill.

  All Mama had to do was look at a dress and she could make the pattern for it. Tato was like that too, but with leather-work. They could make anything with a needle, awl and thread.

  Once the Soviets invaded, Mama hummed lullabies under her breath and taught me cross-stitch on potato sacks. “Remember, Lida,” she would say. “You can make beauty anywhere.”

  I looked around the cattle car. Was there any beauty here?

  I began to sing Mama’s favourite lullaby:

  Kolyson’ko, kolyson’ko

  Kolyshy nam dytynonku

  Luka’s voice answered:

  A shchob spalo, ne plakalo

  A shchob roslo, ne bolilo

  Luka knew my lullaby? I would sing it with Larissa, but never before had I sung it with another child. I had always thought it was our family’s personal song. I joined in, my face wet with tears:

  Ni holowka, ni vse tilo.

  Luka ran his work-hardened fingers gently through Marika’s hair. He looked up at me and we sang the lullaby again. Others joined in, and by the third time we sang it, almost all of the children in the car were singing. I may have temporarily lost Larissa, but in Luka and the others here, I had found sisters and brothers of the heart.

  My eyes were still wet with tears, but somehow singing together made the pain more bearable. We sang the lullaby over and over. Mama was right. Beauty could be made anywhere. We sang for hours until, one by one, each of us fell hoarse.

  Marika’s head rested on Luka’s shoulder, her eyes closed in sleep. I was tired, but awake. Luka’s eyes were fixed on something in the distance.

  “What are you thinking about?” I whispered.

  “Being locked in here reminds me of when I was taken to the first work camp.”

  “You escaped?”

  He looked at me with eyes that seemed far older than he was. Slowly, he nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “I was sent with a work unit to dig ditches close to the Front, but we were hit with Soviet fire. The officer in charge was injured and so were some of the prisoners. We all scattered. I got to a village and a widow hid me. Said I reminded her of her grandson. But the Front kept moving closer. I had only been there a few days when I woke up at dawn to the ground shaking. Through the cottage window, we could see Soviet tanks lined up on one side of the street and Nazi tanks along the other. The village was in the middle of the battlefield. The widow’s house was blasted to rubble with us inside. We tried to make a run for it but it was impossible.”

  “You were caught by the Nazis again?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened to the widow?”

  “Dead. They thought I would be useful, but not her.”

  I felt tears well up in my eyes
at the thought of the woman who had tried to protect Luka. My own grandmother would have done the same thing. I grabbed one of Luka’s work-worn hands and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I am so sorry.”

  His grip tightened over my hand in response.

  I felt awful about the things that Luka had had to go through, and his story left me with more questions than answers. I knew how bad it felt to be caught once, but twice? And where was his family? Maybe in time he would share that with me as well.

  We sat together in silence, each wrapped in our own sadness but thankful to not be alone.

  I drifted to sleep with the rhythm of a lullaby rocking me. I dreamed that Larissa was curled asleep on my lap, my arms wrapped around her. I dreamed that Mama and Tato were still alive. I held my hand up to my neck and felt the thin leather necklace that held my metal cross. It was the only thing I still had from my family.

  The days and nights blended from one to another until I lost count of them. One time the train shuddered to a stop, but the doors stayed closed. Would they leave us here, in this locked stinking car, until we died? Another time it stopped and the door screeched open. I gulped in the fresh sweet air for that brief moment that it took for them to shove in another batch of soup and a pail of water. How long had it been since they’d fed us last? I couldn’t be sure but it felt like many days. We were all so weak that we fell into a sort of stupor.

  I dreamed of the times after Mama and Tato were taken. Larissa and I going to live with our grandmother. The three of us stitching out bits of happiness however we could. I knew in my heart that Baba would not have survived that night the soldiers came and snatched me and my sister from her bed. Larissa was all I had left. But where was she now? How could I find her and make sure she was safe?

  I sat up with a sudden jolt.

  Had I slept for hours, or days? Time mixed together in the grey stink of the cattle car.

  My scalp felt alive with a squirming itch. I ran my fingers through my hair and could feel tiny twisty things writhing on my scalp. I snatched one with my fingertips and pulled it out, nearly losing a bit of hair in the process. A bug. I crushed it with my fingernails, then snatched another and another, but the squirming continued.