Making Bombs For Hitler
Read Making Bombs For Hitler Online
Authors: Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
For Anelia V.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Losing Larissa — 1943
Chapter Fourteen: Scrap of Light
Chapter Eighteen: Looking for Larissa
Chapter Nineteen: Praying for Larissa
Chapter Twenty: The Lucky Ones
Chapter Twenty-One: Luka Leaving
Chapter Twenty-Four: Fischbeck Camp, British Zone, Germany
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 passed. 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.”