The Room on Rue Amélie(88)
Ruby shuffled with the rest of the prisoners through several stations, where they were ordered to hand over their clothes, their jewelry, and all their belongings to the guards. In another room, she was forcibly separated from the kind woman and told to climb onto a table. She wanted to scream as a hawk-faced female guard probed between her legs. But the exam was a cursory one, and as Ruby was ushered on, quaking with relief, she realized that every woman who came into the room was being subjected to the same indignity. The guards were checking to make sure they hadn’t hidden any valuables inside their bodies.
Next, Ruby fell into a line to have her head shaved, and she sobbed as her auburn hair fell in glossy ringlets to the floor. The tears earned her a slap across the face, and then, nearly bald and shivering, she was sent into another room, where she was shoved under a shower, handed a tiny towel, and given a pair of dirty underpants and a thin cotton dress with an X sewn onto both the back and the front.
She saw the kind woman again as the prisoners were herded into the huge barrack that would become their home. There were dirty straw mattresses, roughly five feet wide, arranged in bunk formations three high, and the women were told they would be sleeping three to a bed. The older woman sidled over to a dazed Ruby and took her hand. “You are all right?” she asked.
Ruby could only nod; she still couldn’t understand how the physical examination had failed to reveal her condition.
“Thank God for that,” the woman said. “He must have heard our prayers.”
But as the days turned into weeks, Ruby began to wonder whether God could hear them at all here or whether all of Germany was somehow a void from which no prayers could escape. She was sent to work at first on a crew that leveled sand dunes. It was hard, grueling labor under the watchful gaze of a female guard with a face like a bulldog’s. They worked for nearly twelve hours each day, with very few breaks, and Ruby worried constantly that the food she was given wouldn’t be enough to keep the baby alive. Every day, she inhaled a small amount of rutabaga or beet soup, a tiny portion of bread, and some watery grain coffee. Once a week, the meager rations were supplemented with a slice of sausage or an ounce of cheese. Ruby knew she was losing weight quickly. Her belly was still growing, and she was relieved to know that the baby, at least, was receiving some nourishment. But it came at Ruby’s expense. The only saving grace was that with the near starvation, Ruby’s pregnancy wasn’t readily apparent, although it should have been by now.
On her second week at Ravensbrück, Ruby’s dorm was flooded with two dozen new arrivals, women from Russia who came in with their freshly shorn heads held high. At first, the French women Ruby had arrived with bristled at the intrusion, and Ruby was afraid that there would be an argument. But one of the Russians—a young woman named Nadia, whose high cheekbones and clear green eyes distinguished her as beautiful even in this hellhole—spoke French and managed to defuse any misunderstanding. “We are all in the same situation,” she said in a tone that was impossibly soothing. “We are friends, all of us, united against a common enemy. Let us work together.”
On the third day after the Russians arrived, Nadia approached Ruby. “You are not French. Yet you are with the French prisoners. Why?”
“I’m American,” Ruby said. “But I’ve lived in France for several years now.”
“Why?” Nadia asked again, her gaze sharp and penetrating.
“I married a Frenchman. And when the war started, I couldn’t bear to leave. I—I didn’t realize that things would get so bad.”
“If you were to do it over again, would you go home? Before the war began?”
“No. I think perhaps I did some good before I was arrested.” Ruby also knew that if she’d gone home, she would never have helped save Charlotte. Or met Lucien or Thomas. And she wouldn’t be carrying Thomas’s baby right now. The way things had unfolded felt predestined somehow, even if she couldn’t imagine the reason.
“And you are here why?” Nadia’s questions were unrelenting, but her eyes had turned kinder.
“I was arrested on suspicion of being part of an underground escape line for Allied pilots.”
“And are the accusations true?”
Ruby smiled slightly. “Of course not.”
But the look they exchanged told a different story, and Ruby knew that Nadia understood. Ruby had put her neck out and had been caught, something she could never admit aloud.
“I see,” Nadia said.
“And you? Why are you here?”
The woman smiled. “I, too, was accused of helping people to escape. Of course I confess nothing, but there are perhaps five hundred men who might tell a different story.”
Ruby stared at her. Was she saying she had helped five hundred men escape the Nazis? “Well,” Ruby said at last, “it is good we are both so honest and obedient. Just think what would have happened if we’d actually been involved in undermining the enemy.”
Nadia grinned. “Yes, just think.”
The next morning, when they were given their rations for the day, Nadia sidled up beside Ruby and pressed half of her bread into Ruby’s hand.
“Why?” Ruby asked, trying to hand the bread back. “You need your strength too.”
But Nadia turned away, smiling at Ruby over her shoulder. “There are two of you,” she said, glancing at Ruby’s belly, “and only one of me.”