Making Bombs For Hitler (2 page)

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.

Around me, children roused, and as they did, they whimpered. Like me, they grabbed at their hair and clothing and tried to shake out the bugs.

“It won’t do any good.” Luka was in his usual spot, propped up against the panel door, Marika asleep beside him. “With all of us crammed in here for so many days and no place to wash, we’re a breeding ground for body lice.”

I shuddered. For each bug I squished, a hundred would escape. Could I find beauty in this situation? I crawled over to sit beside Marika.

Her eyes fluttered open. “I don’t feel well,” she said. She tried to sit up but was engulfed in a fit of coughing.

I tried to help her up but she flopped back down. I gently placed my hand on her forehead. The last time I had felt her, she’d been too cool, but now she was burning. Her pale face had an angry red splotch on each cheek. I looked at Luka and was about to say something, but he shook his head. I think he realized how sick she was but didn’t want to say it out loud. I took her hands in mine and stroked them gently, singing our lullaby in a low voice. Other children joined in. Untold hours passed.

The train shuddered to a stop. Luka grabbed Marika by her armpits and dragged her away from the door just as it yawned open. A gust of icy air whooshed in and the sunlight was so white that it hurt my eyes.

“You dirty swine, get out now!” a voice shouted from somewhere beyond the brightness of the day.

Why did Nazis always shout?

We cringed away from him, but I was afraid of what he might do to us if we didn’t get out, so I edged to the door. I tried to shimmy down, but my legs were rubbery from sitting so long. All at once I felt a blow to my head. I fell out of the car and smacked into sharp gravel on my hands
and knees. My palms and kneecaps screamed with pain but I had no time to think about that. Children tumbled out above me. I rolled away and missed being trampled by a second.

Luka grabbed me by the hand. “Get up now.” I looked up and squinted. Marika was in his arms.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m hurt.”

“You can’t afford to be hurt.”

Luka practically wrenched my arm out of its socket, he pulled so hard. I swallowed back the pain and stumbled to my feet, scraping them on the gravel. My eyes were getting used to the bright light. Several men brandishing short rubber clubs lined the children up at the opening of what looked like a modern fortress made of bricks and wood. The entrance was in the middle of a two-storey wooden building. It looked like an upside down U, protected with a fancy metal-and-wire gate. Above the entrance was a small house with windows. Maybe a lookout?

The Germans with billy clubs wore plain clothing but they each had a bandage on one arm with the word
Wachmann
printed on it. I knew that word. Police.

What a sorry lot we were: covered in rags, dirty, hungry, stinky and squirming with lice. We straggled inside and the gate clanged shut behind us. We stood in a cluster, fearful of what would happen next. I could hear the distant sound of sirens and the
whizz-boom
of bombs.

“Clothes off here,” said a policeman.

He was making the girls undress in front of the boys? My face burned with shame.

“Take Marika,” whispered Luka. He draped one of her arms around my neck and I wrapped my arm about her
waist. I could feel her try to stand, but she was very weak.

We girls moved in a cluster to the back of the line. Luka turned to me one more time. His mouth opened but I couldn’t hear what he said above the sound of the weeping and groaning.

A policeman struck him on the ear with his club. “Didn’t you hear me?” he screamed. “Undress now.”

Luka said something to the boys. They all turned their backs to us and began to undress.

“Look away from the boys,” I told the other girls. “These police may make us undress in public, but we don’t have to be shamed.”

All at once a club crashed down on my head. “No talking.”

Zenia was beside me. She quickly took off her rags and threw them into the pile, then held Marika for me as I took off my nightgown and tried not to think of my humiliation. I slipped the leather necklace with the cross off my neck but I couldn’t bear to leave it with the piles of clothing. I clasped it in my fist and hoped that no one would notice. Zenia helped me undress Marika and between the two of us we kept her moving along the line.

“Go to the barber over there,” shouted one of the policemen.

The barber was a bored looking man with a pot belly and the stub of a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Marika barely opened her eyes as her hair was shaved off. When it was my turn, he scraped a straight razor over my head in a series of deft strokes. I watched as clumps of my hair fell on top of the pyramid of bug-infested locks that had already collected. “Next,” he said,
dismissing me. I shivered as the cold air hit my scalp.

After the haircuts, we were herded into a large concrete building. The door whooshed shut behind us.