The Room on Rue Amélie(89)

She had disappeared into a swarm of other prisoners by the time Ruby recovered enough to respond. Was her pregnancy really that obvious by now? And if so, why hadn’t the guards noticed? She wasn’t sure if she could, in good conscience, accept another woman’s bread. But she was hungry, so hungry. Nadia was already gone. And surely, just this once, it would be okay.

Ruby stuffed the bread into her mouth before she could change her mind, and as she set off for the dunes with the rest of her work crew, she touched her belly and hoped her baby was getting the nourishment she needed to survive.



IN LATE JULY, RUBY, NADIA, and sixteen other women were taken out of the camp to the nearby Siemens factory, beyond the south wall, to interview for temporary jobs. “They are taking women who are clever,” Nadia whispered to Ruby on the way. “The rumor is that these are skilled labor positions. Pay attention, Ruby, for this will be much better than the work we’ve been doing.”

Ruby knew that Nadia’s concern came from the fact that Ruby’s belly was swelling more obviously beneath the loose cotton of her dress now, though she still managed to conceal her condition from the guards by rounding her shoulders and leaning forward slightly during roll call. She was nearly seven months along, and there would come a time soon when her body could no longer rise to the demands of the daily physical labor. Factory work would be much less taxing. It was, she realized with a surge of panic, the only chance she had of saving herself and her baby.

“Do you know what we’ll be making?” Ruby ventured.

“Does it matter?” Nadia asked.

“But what if they have us making weapons that will be used against the Allies?”

Nadia was silent for a moment. “There are a thousand women waiting behind us. If we don’t take the jobs, someone else will. At least you and I will have a chance of sabotaging the work.”

Ruby looked up sharply. “Sabotage? I thought you were talking about saving my baby.”

“I am,” Nadia said, her eyes sparkling. “But we do what we can to fight the war.”

Their interviews were with a man called Herr Hartmann, a German civilian who oversaw part of the assembly line. He was about the age of Ruby’s father, and Ruby thought it strange that her first reaction to him was that he had kind eyes. She had come to despise the Germans, but there was something different about Herr Hartmann.

“Why do you want to work here?” he asked stiffly in French as Ruby sat down with an SS guard lurking in the corner.

“I—I think I have the ability to do a more skilled job than I’ve been doing at Ravensbrück so far,” she said. “I have a university degree and a bit of technical experience.” The last part was a lie, but she knew he wouldn’t be able to check the veracity of her words.

“A university degree? From where?”

“Barnard College in New York.”

“Are you American?”

She nodded. “I married a Frenchman before the war and moved to Paris. But yes. I was born in California.”

He leaned forward, switching to English. “I would very much like to go to America someday.” They exchanged a look before Herr Hartmann blinked and glanced at the guard. “In any case, the job here is on an assembly line. Do you think you can handle taking orders and working with machinery?”

“Yes, sir.” She paused. “Your English is quite good.”

“Thank you,” he said. He gave her a sad smile. “I took courses in English literature long ago. I was a university professor, once upon a time.”

“The war has changed us all,” Ruby said softly.

Herr Hartmann nodded. “Yes, I look in the mirror and feel I hardly know myself anymore.”

She knew as she left the interview that she would get the job.





CHAPTER FORTY


July 1944

Nadia and Ruby began work at the Siemens factory the following Monday. Though the job was somewhat easier than the physical labor of the dunes had been, it was still grueling. The women sat at their stations for twelve hours a day, hands numb and bleeding, eyes bloodshot and raw.

Ruby realized quickly that they didn’t need the specialized technical skills Herr Hartmann had claimed. They were assembling electrical parts to be used in rockets, and they needed only to be able to follow basic instructions. Ruby imagined, as she worked, that she might be building an electrical component for a weapon that would be fired at Thomas’s base in England, that somehow, she would be responsible for both saving him and destroying him in the same lifetime. So when Nadia showed her how to solder the parts loosely, so that there was a chance the circuits would short out, she was an eager pupil. “You must insert everything properly so that the Germans don’t notice,” Nadia explained patiently, “but there’s still room to tinker.”

Ruby could have sworn that Herr Hartmann knew what they were doing, but the man never said anything. On the contrary, in front of the guards, he treated the prisoners like the slaves they had become, ignoring them almost entirely except to coldly correct the construction of a part here and there. But there were corners in the factory where the guards rarely ventured, and Ruby soon learned that if she carried her electrical components there as if on an errand, Herr Hartmann would often be waiting, eager to have a chat. It turned out that he was horrified at the lack of humanity being shown to Ruby and the others. He would whisper questions—Why did they shave your heads? What happens to the women who are too frail to work? How much do they feed you?—and his face would grow paler with each answer.