Making Bombs For Hitler Read online

  The steam press had heated enough for Inge to use, so she left me to my mending and began to tackle the folded mound of damp sheets. As she worked, she hummed a melody that must have been German. I didn’t recognize it. I stayed silent. I needed to concentrate on making faultless chevron seams.

  When I was finished my first entire sheet, I stood up and stretched the kinks out of my back. Inge took the sheet from me and examined each stitch.

  “This is fine work,” she said. “It will look like new once this sheet has been ironed.”

  She put it through the giant press and I was pleased with the results. My stitches were just as I had wanted them — tidy and even like a machine had made them, but with a pattern that no machine could do.

  “I guess I can trust you with this, then.” She brought me the roll-call officer’s uniform jacket and shirt and set it on the table in front of me.

  The uniform smelled faintly of tobacco and sweat. I threaded a thicker needle with sturdy grey thread and fixed the loose brass button on the uniform. That part was easy. Fixing the frayed collar without having the mend show was trickier, but I managed.

  Inge snatched it from me when I had finished, held it up to the light and carefully inspected it. “This will do,” she said. And she almost smiled.

  “You can mend one of the ironed sheets,” she went on. “I’ll run the edges through the press a second time to tidy them once you’re finished.”

  The ironed sheets were smooth and warm and easier to work with. By the time the 6 p.m. whistle blew, I had managed to hem two entire sheets and a good portion of a third. I had pricked myself a few times, but hadn’t got a single drop of blood on any of the cotton. My hands and back ached from the concentration, but I was pleased with myself. There were worse places than this warm clean laundry.

  I had wanted to stay longer to finish the third sheet. I was so fearful that the officer would think I had worked too slowly.

  “I will tell him you’re a good worker when I take back his uniform.” Inge tapped her foot, waiting for me to finish. “Now go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Chapter Seven

  Bloodstains

  The cold air caught at my throat as I stepped out of the steamy warmth of the laundry building. My feet hit a patch of ice on the gravel surface of the walkway and I nearly lost my balance. I hurried into the girls’ bathroom and was surprised to see that it was empty.

  When I stepped into the wash house to clean my hands, I startled Juli, who was alone there, frantically scrubbing. She had sprinkled some of the bleaching powder onto the bloodstains on her cuff and now all that was left was a wet pink patch. I noticed for the first time how swollen and chapped her hands were. How many times since she got here had she needed to wash away blood?

  She saw me staring at her hands, and I guess she must have realized that I saw the pink stain too. She rinsed off the bleaching powder and held her hands behind her back.

  I wanted to ask her about the blood on her cuff, but sensed that this wasn’t the time.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked instead.

  “The train is not back yet,” she said. “By the time everyone gets picked up and dropped off, it will be another half hour or so.”

  What a long day it was for those people who were working away from the camp. It was gruelling for me and I had one of the best places to work.

  I washed my hands in the cold water, using just a tiny bit of the bleaching powder. I needed to stay clean because I didn’t want to get those bugs back again. The powder stung the tips of my fingers, especially where I’d poked myself with the needle.

  Juli stood there expectantly, as if she were waiting for something or someone. “How did you make out with the sewing?” she asked.

  “I think I did fine,” I told her. “Inge seemed pleased.”

  Juli’s shoulders relaxed. “I am relieved to hear that.”

  I stepped to the door of the wash house and stuck my head out. No one else was waiting to get in. We were alone. I came back in and regarded Juli.

  “Please,” I said. “Have you seen the children they took to the hospital this morning?”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she sat down on the edge of the giant metal wash trough. “I did see them,” she said. “But you must put them out of your mind.”

  I could feel the frustration building inside me. Why wouldn’t she tell me what they were up to? Surely she realized that not knowing was worse than the most horrible reality. “Please, Juli,” I said. “I must know.”

  She breathed in a deep shuddering breath and stared at the cement floor. “Not all of the children suffer the same fate,” she said. “So I’m not sure what happens to them all.”

  “But what have you seen?”

  She touched the pink stain on her cuff. “Blood,” she said. “They remove it.”

  My mind went blank. Then I managed, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “They put a needle in the child’s arm and drain out blood into bottles. A lot of blood.”

  I tried to imagine a needle going into Olesia’s arm. She would be so frightened. And what about Larissa? Had the nurses at that other place taken her blood as well? The thought of it made me ill.

  “What would they do that for?”

  “They send it to the Nazi soldiers who are fighting on the Front. If the soldiers are injured, they lose blood. They get an infusion of children’s blood to make up what they’ve lost.”

  The room swirled. Did the Nazis see us as nothing more than spare parts for their war machine? My knees buckled and I crashed to the floor.

  In an instant Juli was down on the floor beside me. She cradled my head on her lap. I could feel a hot tear splash onto my forehead.

  “It’s terrible,” she said. “I know it is. But I do everything I can to make them comfortable. Mostly they die in their sleep, and in war, that is not such a bad death.”

  The thought of little Olesia being bled to death was horrifying. She had been so hopeful that her choice had been right. I thought of the other young girls — Daria and Katya. And of Tatiana, who had chosen to pretend she was younger. I thought of our introductions in Barracks 7. I was just getting to know them and now they were gone.

  I also felt guilt. If I had stepped forward and been truthful about my age, maybe the officer would have told Tatiana to step back. Did I have blood on my hands too? I held my fingertips close to my face and looked at the red pinpricks. I deserved these hurts. I was a horrible person.

  I curled into a ball on the hard cold floor and wept. I wept for the children who had died, and I wept for all of us still living. I thought about my dear Larissa and prayed that this was not her fate. I wept for my parents and all of the other parents who had been killed by the Soviets or the Nazis. The despair enveloped me and I choked through my tears.

  Juli’s hand felt warm on my back. “I’m glad that you lied about your age,” she whispered. “Otherwise it could have been your blood on my clothes.”

  The words were like a slap in the face. I stopped crying. Juli helped me sit up.

  “What do you do with the children?”

  She shuddered, but managed to look me in the eye. “I clean up after the doctor has taken the blood.” She let out a huge gasping sob and collapsed into my arms. “When the doctor and nurses go on their break, I try my best to comfort the children. I sing to them and give them water. I wish I could do more.”

  The two of us clung to each other and wept.

  Chapter Eight

  Grey Ghosts

  Suddenly the door to the wash house burst open. Zenia, Kataryna and Anya stepped in. They nearly tripped over me and Juli.

  “That’s not a very good place to take a nap.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but when I turned towards Zenia, I got the shock of my life. The person standing in front of me looked like a ghost. Zenia was covered in a powdery soot from head to toe, her eerily familiar smile seemed suspended in air.

  Juli helped
me to my feet. My head still swirled with a combination of hunger, fear and horror, and Zenia’s appearance did nothing to make me feel better.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “This is metal dust,” she said, trying to brush a bit of it off her forearm. “I’m working on small machinery, using a power sander to smooth out the seams on newly welded pipes.” She walked over to the wash trough and turned on a tap, then splashed water and bleaching powder on her face and arms. Rivulets of the dust whirled down the drain. “There’s no window or fan in the room and this dust fills the air like fog, it’s so thick.” Slowly the Zenia I knew emerged from behind the ghost-like apparition.

  I helped her wash the dust from the back of her neck and the top of her scalp. It was encrusted all over the cross I had given her too. “It can’t be good to breathe in all that metal dust,” I said.

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” said Zenia. “It’s probably why there are no Germans in that room —” She started coughing and ended up spitting phlegm into her hand. I could see that it was laced with streaks of grey.

  We were barely finished when the wash house was overrun by more workers coming back from their assignments. The smell of bleaching soap, metal powder and sweat was bringing back my dizziness, so I got out of the building as quickly as I could, gulping in the cooler air, hoping my knees wouldn’t buckle again.

  A long snaking lineup had formed in front of the outhouses and washing rooms. Not all of the people were children. I recognized some from the morning’s assembly. About half looked like Zenia — exhausted ghosts — covered head to toe with a fine grey powder. Some had soot-blackened hands and feet. Others just looked bone-tired.

  It took me a while to spot Luka. He was one of the grey ghosts. I caught up with him as he stood in the lineup for the men’s wash house. “You’re doing metal work?”

  He nodded. “It’s not the worst job.”

  Making her way through the crowd of slave labourers was our warden, a sour expression on her face. She clapped her hands sharply to get our attention. “No dawdling,” she shouted. “If you’ve finished cleaning yourselves, get back to your barracks.”

  “Go,” said Luka. “You don’t want to get into trouble.”

  I was the first to step back into Barracks 7, exhausted and hungry and sad. I sat at the edge of my bunk and looked at the room with its straw-stuffed mattresses and scratchy blankets. Such a small and mean place for thirty-six young girls.

  My eyes rested on the bunk that had so briefly been Olesia’s. It seemed hard to believe that I would never see her again. I looked at the neatly made beds of Daria, Katya and Tatiana. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer for their souls.

  I stretched out onto my bed and stared at the wooden bunk above me. I barely had to reach to touch it. Did they put the adults in bunks this small? Even the workers who built these bunks must have known that no one could be comfortable in them. I bundled up my blanket and pretended it was a stuffed toy, hugging it to my chest. Where was Larissa now? If I thought hard enough about her, would she be able to read my thoughts? Larissa, Larissa, dear sister … I love you … I’ll find you … Stay safe … I must have fallen asleep, chanting my wish for Larissa, because the next thing I knew, the barracks door creaked open. I sat up with a jolt.

  The warden’s silhouette was framed in the entry. “You there, on the bed,” she said to me. “Show these new girls where they should sleep.”

  She ushered in three girls, then left. Their heads were freshly shaved and their clothing stunk of the lice chemical. Each girl’s outfit had a purple P stitched on a yellow diamond-shaped patch of cloth.

  Just last night, Olesia, Daria, Katya and Tatiana had slept in this room with me. We had gotten up together and eaten breakfast. It was bad enough that they were now gone. But for them to be replaced already? Were we really nothing more than pieces of machinery? I looked at these three and at first I was angry. They wore P for Polish, which meant that they’d get better food than the rest of us. That was bad enough, but to take the place of our dead friends was dreadful. I wanted Olesia and the other girls back.

  But I looked at the three new girls and saw the fear in their eyes. It wasn’t their fault. I wasn’t the first one to sleep on my bed either. We were prisoners, after all. I swallowed back my anger and held out my hand. “My name is Lida.”

  A gangly girl with knobby wrists reached out and grasped it. “I’m Oksana,” she said in Polish, shaking my hand vigorously. “This is my little sister, Marta.” The girl beside her stepped forward and shook my hand. Although she was Oksana’s younger sister, she was an inch taller. Her eyes were a startling green, made more so from their tear-reddened rims.

  “I am Natalia.” The other girl thrust her hand out. She was the shortest of the three, but she was sturdily built.

  “Are any of you under twelve?” I asked.

  “I’m fifteen,” said Oksana. “Marta’s fourteen.”

  “And I am fourteen as well,” said Natalia.

  “That’s good,” I said, leading them over to the beds that were now empty. “Don’t say you’re younger. You’ll be safer if you’re over twelve.”

  “We know that,” said Oksana. “This isn’t our first camp.”

  I told her to have Daria’s bed and gave Marta the bed that had been Katya’s. Tatiana’s bed would do for Natalia. I kept Olesia’s bed empty. Would it stay empty? Not likely. But I couldn’t bear to see a replacement girl sleep in it quite yet.

  The new girls were almost settled in when Zenia walked through the door. Soon after, a stream of girls who had worked outside the camp came in as well.

  Zenia got undressed, dropping her filthy blouse and skirt onto the floor. She pulled her bed apart and wrapped herself in her scratchy blanket. “We’re taking turns washing our clothing, Lida,” she said. “If you wash mine now, I’ll wash yours tomorrow.”

  She bundled up her clothing from the floor and handed it to me.

  I took the bundle from her. Natalia offered to wash some clothing too, so she and Ivanka, one of the older girls from the Kyiv area, stepped out the door with me. I was surprised to see that it was dark.

  “We have to hurry,” said Ivanka. “Lights out at seven and it’s six-thirty already.”

  When we got to the wash house it was empty except for one stick-thin woman who looked to be older than my mother. She had the same idea as us and was busily scrubbing a bundle of colourless rags with a rock. She looked up when she heard us come in. “You must be new here,” she said. “I’m Mary.”

  We introduced ourselves to her and got down on our knees in front of the trough.

  Mary had plugged the drain with a bit of wood and had filled the trough with water, but there were carcasses of dead lice mixed in a bleachy scum of sweat and dirt on the surface of the water.

  “Do you mind if I freshen the water?” I asked her.

  “I was just about to. Go ahead.”

  We watched as the scum swirled down the drain and then sprinkled our own laundry with a liberal dose of bleaching powder. Mary handed me her rock. “Better to scrub with this than your fingers,” she said.

  I thanked her and took the rock from her hands. It was amazing all the stuff that came out of Zenia’s clothing, yet when I was finished, it looked almost as dirty as when I started. It was the best I could do.

  “How long have you been here, Mary?” I asked.

  “I think it’s been eight months,” she replied. “You lose track in here after a while.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Irpin, outside of Kyiv.”

  “How were you taken?”

  “Soldiers raided our secret school,” she said. “They took all of us.”

  I knew that schools had been disbanded when the Nazis invaded, so secret schools had popped up everywhere. A dangerous act of resistance. “Were you the teacher?” I asked.

  A wave of surprise, then understanding, passed over Mary’s face. “I guess I’ve aged,” she said
. “I was seventeen when they captured me. I’m —”

  A whistle blew and Mary stood up.

  “Lights out in ten minutes,” she said. “You’d better hurry.” She wrung out the excess water from her laundry and walked out the door.

  Natalia, Ivanka and I walked quickly in the darkness back to Barracks 7, holding our dripping bundles of clothing in front of us so we didn’t get wet, but I shivered anyway in the March night air with just a thin dress on and bare feet. All around us, other prisoners were rushing about, trying to get things done before lights out.

  “How did you end up here?” I asked Natalia.

  “The three of us were at a different camp. Some of the prisoners revolted, demanding better food. Some were shot. Others were sent to different places. The three of us worked in the kitchens and we were not part of the revolt, so we got off easy compared to others.”

  “Where are you from originally?” asked Ivanka.

  “I am from Lviv,” said Natalia. “The two girls with me, Marta and Oksana, they’re from Drohobych.”

  “Are you Polish or Ukrainian?” I asked.

  “I’m Polish. Marta and Oksana are Ukrainian.”

  “At least you Poles will all get better food than we do,” said Ivanka.

  When we got back to Barracks 7, I helped Zenia drape her blouse and skirt at the end of her row of bunks. Would they dry by morning? Hard to know. All we had to warm the room with was the body heat of thirty-five frightened girls and one small stove, whose warmth seemed to stretch no farther than six inches.

  I lay back down on my own bunk, pulled the covers over me and tried to stop shivering. Would I ever get used to walking on the wintry ground barefoot? But I was grateful that at least I was working inside in a warm place every day. Yes, every muscle in my body ached, and yes I was tired, but I was alive.

  I thought of Olesia, Daria, Katya and Tatiana. I was grateful that I had been spared, but it made me feel guilty too. They were so young, yet no one had helped them stay alive. Would someone help Larissa? I prayed that she had met up with people who could look out for her, who would treat her well until I could find her. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but hunger gnawed at my belly and thoughts of Larissa haunted my dreams.