The German Wife(105)

“They...the prisoners live in here?”

I looked out the window again, and now noticed the slumped shoulders of the men as they worked.

“Some live at the Dora camp now, not far from here. But other men still live in the cross tunnels. It’s about efficiency, you see. If they are here, we don’t waste time transporting them back and forth.”

I heard what he was really saying: the rocket program had been deemed more important than anything else—a higher priority than hygiene or dignity or comfort or even the sanctity of human life.

I turned back to face the tunnel in front of the car, but my eyes had finally adjusted to the light and now I saw striped uniforms hanging on skeletal frames everywhere. There were hundreds of men in this section, maybe even more. They were bent over tables, fixing fine parts to small components. They were on scaffolds, working on the lights that illuminated the passage. They were collapsed on the floor, as if they’d died standing and simply folded over themselves. They were pushing train carriages by hand, dozens of men grunting and grimacing as they tried to push components along.

Not one of them looked at the car as we passed, and I wanted nothing more than to look away from them too. Each seemed more drawn than the last, their hair matted, their bodies often showing signs of trauma—a bloodied hand, a severe limp, a bruised face. Every single man was emaciated. I had no idea how they were sustaining the intense manual labor—sometimes I saw four or five men working together to lift one small piece of metal, or two men struggling to push a tiny component into place.

“How do you bear this every day?” I whispered to Aldo.

“I tried to warn you,” he said weakly. “This is no place for a lady.”

“Is it always like this?”

“It was much worse in the beginning,” he said. “This is more orderly...less distressing than it used to be.”

My stomach lurched at the thought. I pressed my fist into my mouth. I wanted to pray for strength, but I had the sense that what was happening in those tunnels was beyond the reach even of God.

The tunnel kept rolling on and on. It felt like we’d been driving for hours, although a glance at my watch confirmed it had only been minutes. I was desperate to see Jürgen. I was desperate to get out of there. How did these prisoners endure it?

“How much farther?”

“A few hundred feet more.”

“How long is this facility?”

“The entire loop through both is about two miles long.”

“Is it all like this?” I asked, my voice small.

“Yes.”

We drove on in silence. But for the evolution of the rockets on the line, I might have been caught in an endless loop of the same fifty feet of tunnel, a repeated, sickening montage of the absolute depths of human misery.

But then I finally saw Jürgen, his suit protected by a lab coat, clipboard in hand as he stood next to a rocket that seemed to be fully assembled. Aldo parked the car, as he gnawed at his lip.

Just then, Jürgen noticed me. He passed the clipboard to a man beside him, slapping it against his chest in a move that was close to aggression, and, without a word, strode toward me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he hissed.

“I—I came to bring you these,” I stammered, extending the blueprints toward him. Jürgen’s nostrils flared. He grabbed me firmly by the elbow and dragged me to the cross tunnel nearby. Several workers in striped uniforms scurried from the space as we approached, dismissed without a word. When we were alone, Jürgen dropped the blueprints to the ground and he cupped my face in his shaking hands.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he choked out, staring desperately into my eyes. “Sofie, I never wanted you to see this.”

“I didn’t mean to come inside, I promise. But when I got here with the blueprints, I realized this was my chance to understand...” His throat was working as if he wanted to speak, but he didn’t say a word—he just stared into my eyes. “Remember? You said I didn’t understand. You said I didn’t know what it had cost for me and the children to live our lives in Berlin. I wanted to—”

“This isn’t a game,” he snapped, stepping away from me, pinching the bridge of his nose. He drew in a series of sharp breaths, then dropped his voice as he hissed, “Get out of here, Sofie. Please.”

I held myself together until I made it back to my car, out the gates, back onto the main road—but then I swerved to a shoulder and opened the car door just in time to be violently ill.

I spent the afternoon in a daze, trying to process what I’d seen at Mittelwerk—but the scale of the suffering was too great to “make sense of.”

I wanted to make amends.

There was no way to make amends.

Even if I could have personally freed every man in that tunnel, it still wouldn’t be enough. They’d endured conditions and pain and torture that were beyond anything that could be forgiven. Even if they were liberated right that minute, they’d be scarred for the rest of their lives.

Jürgen and I had an odd kind of argument that night—scribbling furiously on paper as we tried to negotiate a safe way to discuss what I’d seen. I wanted to go to another hotel so we could speak freely. He refused—saying it would arouse suspicion. He wanted to “talk about it another time,” which I suspected meant he didn’t want to talk about it at all. Eventually, I all but dragged him to the bathroom and slammed the door behind us, then turned the faucet on.