Chapter Thirteen
Like Rats

All night I listened to Allied bombers blast the countryside. As sirens shrilled, I prayed that Luka would be safe. When I finally got to sleep I dreamed that bombs were everywhere. They lined up for soup in the Kantine with me and they lay down in the bunk beside me. There were so many bombs in the air that the sky looked grey. I dreamed of Larissa, her arms holding a bomb like it was a baby. I woke up weeping.

When we got to our work area the next day, our wooden rack of bombs had been emptied. I figured that removing them must be a job for someone on the night shift. I watched my own hands measure out explosives and carefully fill the nose of each bomb, making sure there wasn’t a grain too much gunpowder or too little, acutely aware of that man behind the glass. It was almost as if those hands didn’t belong to me.

The third day was the same as the first and the second, but the monotony of building bombs did not relieve the terror. Each night I tossed and turned, wondering about who would be dead because of me.

I didn’t think it would ever happen, but after a few weeks we all somehow did get used to making bombs. And we breathed easier as time passed and our building was not hit. The aerial camouflage seemed to be working.

We six did not talk about our work at lunchtime or on the train ride back. We looked forward to our moments of privacy, like those few minutes in our barracks while the others were washing up. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon or on Sunday we were able to gather together as well, but during those times Natalia was gone, working for hire. But since she would come back with tidbits of information as well as food for us, it became a Sunday night ritual for the six of us to gather together inside the wash house just before curfew.

On the last Sunday in October, Natalia looked especially pleased with herself as she stepped into the wash house. She sat down on the edge of the trough and we gathered around her in anticipation.

“You will never believe what I managed to get this time,” she said, her eyes shining. She reached into an inconspicuous pocket in the depths of her threadbare dress, pulled out a small flat package and folded back the paper. Brown sugar!

Curling the paper into a cone, she said, “Hold out your hand.”

She shook out a small pyramid of brown sugar on my palm. I licked it up, revelling in the burst of sweetness. When was the last time I had eaten anything so good? Not in the years of Soviet rule, and certainly not since the Nazis had come.

All at once I remembered my last bit of sweetness. That Nazi woman dressed in brown who gave Larissa and me candies in exchange for information …

I swallowed down the sugar that coated my tongue, but the memory hung there. Had I not taken those candies, maybe Larissa and I would still be safe. And my own grandmother — was she dead because of me? My eyes filled with tears. I blinked hard, trying to erase the disturbing images. I looked over to Zenia. She held her hand in front of her face, palm up.

“This reminds me of the gunpowder we use in the bombs,” she said.

Kataryna had licked every last speck of sugar from her own palm. She stared at Zenia’s grains.

“This … this brown sugar is the wrong texture … and it’s not dark enough,” she said. “I think the dirt outside this wash house looks more like the gunpowder …”

Gunpowder. Grains that looked like the explosive but weren’t …

“What would —” Natalia began, then stopped.

We all looked at her.

“What would happen if we put some dirt into the bombs?” said Natalia.

My heart nearly stopped beating. What a bold thought. “They wouldn’t work so well, is my guess,” said Zenia. She still hadn’t eaten the sugar on her palm.

“How would we sneak it in?” asked Kataryna.

“The same way I brought in the sugar,” said Natalia. “In our pockets.”

We looked at each other solemnly. Could it work? Would we be caught? It was hard to know.

Was it worth the chance? Definitely.

Kataryna looked at Natalia, her eyes alight with a new idea. “If I ease up on the hammer machine early,” she said, “I think the bombs would fail to snap together all the way. They might fall apart instead of exploding.”

“We have many ways of ruining the bombs,” I said. “But we are watched. Always watched.”

As fall turned towards winter, we noticed subtle changes all around. Bombs had been falling all day and night for months, but now the sky was black with Allied bomber planes. We heard that entire German cities had been destroyed. At the work camp, some of the policemen hung up their uniforms and left. The ones who stayed became even more cruel than they had been. It was like their war losses were our fault. Once, when Officer Schmidt was annoyed by a prisoner’s answer at roll call, he cocked his gun and shot the man on the spot. We were all afraid to breathe.

On our way to and from the city, I would look out the window and try to make sense of what I saw. Waves of ragged refugees walked through city streets. Some were starving like us, but others looked like they had recently been well fed. The few Germans who still rode on the train with us would whisper among themselves and I would try to listen, to find out what was going on. From what I could hear, the Soviets were pushing the Nazis back. As the battleground moved closer to us, whole villages and towns were being destroyed. People who survived fled west — away from the fighting — but farther into Nazi territory.

One icy evening in November when I stepped off the train after work, Juli met me, her eyes rimmed with red.

“I have something for you,” she said. “Come quickly.”

She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me along to her barracks. We stepped inside. It was empty save for us. She knelt in front of her bed, which was a bottom bunk close to the heater at the back, reached in and drew out a pair of worn leather shoes that were made for a woman.

“Put these on and let’s get out of here before anyone else comes in.”

Shoes were like gold in the camp. Where had Juli got these? I didn’t stop to think about it, but slipped my feet inside. They were roomy, but I didn’t mind. My feet were swollen and the shoes felt warm and solid. I followed Juli out the door, stepping gingerly, trying to re-teach myself how to walk in shoes.

I noticed a truck idling by the entrance to the hospital.

“What is that truck for?”

Juli’s eyes filled with tears. “Don’t go there.”

But of course I did.

The back of the truck was stacked with the gaunt bodies of dead slaves, many with faces frozen in painful contortions. I recognized one as the woman who had replaced me helping Inge in the laundry. She was barefoot. I looked down at my feet and knew where my shoes had come from. My heart felt like it could burst with guilt. Here I was, benefiting from someone else’s death.

“Better you have the shoes than they get buried,” Juli murmured.

I said a silent prayer for the woman whose shoes I wore, then looked at the others in the truck. They were mostly strangers. Where had these people come from and why were they now all dead?

“What happened?” I asked Juli.

“The Nazis are retreating in the east, and camps there are being overrun by the Soviets.” She nodded back towards the truck. “The Nazis shipped those prisoners away from a work camp just before it was liberated by the Soviets. The prisoners arrived on a train this morning, starving and nearly frozen. Officer Schmidt decided that they wouldn’t be useful workers and he didn’t want to waste food on them. He ordered the cook to put poison into today’s Russian soup.” She blinked back tears. “All of the eastern workers who were in the camp today have died.”

Even though my stomach was empty, bile rose in my throat. Should I be thankful that my friends and I had our soup at the factory instead of at the camp? Should I be thankful for my shoes? It was mere chance that I wasn’t one of those corpses on the back of the truck.

“I had heard about these mass poisonings before, but it seemed so impossible, even for the Nazis, I thought it was a rumour,” said Juli, brushing away a tear with the back of her hand. “I’ve been told that is why the Russian soup always has a separate ladle.”

I looked down at my new shoes and then back towards the truck. “The Nazis will pay for this,” I vowed to Juli. “They should think twice before asking slaves to make bombs.”