Making Bombs For Hitler (7 page)

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.

With a sinking feeling, I realized I must have slept through supper. “Can someone do me a favour tomorrow?” I said to no one in particular. “Please wake me up so I don’t miss supper.”

Stiff blankets rustled and there were a few suppressed chuckles.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “I’m starving.”

“Silly girl,” said Zenia. “None of us got supper.”

Her words slapped me in the face. A triangle of sawdust bread and a bowl of watery turnip soup and that was all for the entire day? No wonder Mary had aged so quickly in a matter of months.

“When I get out of here, the first thing I’m going to do is eat a piece of fresh homemade bread slathered with butter and dripping with honey.” It was Natalia who said that.

“Don’t talk about food,” said Zenia.

“I won’t,” said Ivanka. “How can we talk about fresh bread, or butter and honey when we’re all so hungry? I wouldn’t want to talk about the beautiful tortes my mother would make, or soup made with wild mushrooms my brother picked in his secret spot in the woods …”

My stomach grumbled with hunger. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

But try as we might, the conversation kept on coming back to food.

I fell into sleep, dreaming of my grandmother’s poppy seed cookies.

The blast of the early morning whistle and the next day began. Then the next, the next and the next. They all knitted together with sadness, hunger and cold. We laboured through March and April and into May.

Each day was much like that first Monday. We would get up in the dark and work until it was practically dark again. Twelve hours was usual, although there were a few who toiled longer. Every few days, more labourers would arrive by train, yet it seemed that the camp always had room for more. On Saturdays we finished at noon, and Sunday, glorious Sunday, we usually had off.

The higher-class prisoners who didn’t wear the OST badge were allowed to use the train and go into town on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. A few did housekeeping for German civilians and would be fed as payment. Oksana and Marta used the privilege of their P badge to go into town and sell items that we girls in Barracks 7 made in our off-hours — sculptures made of discarded wood with a sharpened spoon as a carving tool, or small bits of embroidery made with thread and fabric I stole from the laundry. The two girls would stand in the streets, hawking our items. It was a dangerous thing to do and money was worthless in the camp, but they could barter for a piece of lard or a chunk of horsemeat,
and these little bits kept the rest of us in Barracks 7 alive.