by Luce d'Eramo
Grùscenka was slim and, though tattered and filthy, had an elegant bearing. Lucia had noticed that even the Germans were charmed by her oval face with its high, slightly curving forehead, arched eyebrows, aloof blue eyes and slender nose; a face so perfect as to appear cold, almost abstract.
Twenty-four years old, she had studied at the Naval Academy in Moscow to become a captain in the merchant marine. They had arrested her near the front. She was fortunate that they had only deported her, she said unemotionally.
The two girls whispered intensely in German, a language that the Russian knew better than Italian.
They got into the habit of lying side by side, amid the whiff of decay that rose from the canal and mingled with the animal reek of their coveralls. Beneath the fog, in a language foreign to them both, they dreamed of stealing shoes and clothing. It was a quiet, slow dream that soothingly shaped their words, in which the only problem was not getting caught. Grùscenka, in a crystalline voice, suggested they get hired as maids in private homes, so they would have all the time they needed to choose the stuff to carry off at the right time. Lucia, constantly gripped by hunger, proposed they set their sights on money, provisions, and food stamps instead.
Huddled together beside the two girls, taking it easy, were two Polish civilian deportees, Johann and Stanislaw. Every so often they yawned a few words, especially when Johann, pricking up his ears at the women’s whisperings, mumbled a rejection or encouragement to a proposal by the Russian or Italian girl. Stanislaw, who didn’t understand German, added his own mutterings just the same, as soon as Johann told him what stage the girls’ planning had reached regarding the possibility of getting work in the private home of a German family.
IV
Throughout the shift, Grùscenka and Lucia plotted together happily. Lucia went down to the toilets of the Ch 89 whenever she could escape the foreman’s eye, and listened intently to her friend’s proposals. The wife of one of the camp’s wardens, through her husband, had sent for someone to wash clothes at her home. Both the Lagerführer and the wardens lived with their families in a cluster of stone houses at the edge of the camp, by the road. One of those buildings also housed the administrative offices, and a small platoon of camp guards was stationed in another.
In the evening, returning from the factory, the warden accompanied Lucia to his home. To make a good impression on the warden’s wife, as agreed with Grùscenka, Lucia had cleaned up thoroughly, taking a shower in the locker room after work. Though she had then showed up looking quite presentable, she was led directly into the laundry room, where she scrubbed clothes from 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. The German woman, standing with her, occasionally recounted the linens, constantly fearing that some item might have disappeared. A woman with a meek, frightened expression, not only did she marshal her eldest son by her side, but, rather than leave the foreigner alone for a moment, she repeatedly called her younger daughters to bring her more bleach, another bit of soap, or a forgotten pillowcase, then waved her hands to send them away immediately. The two little girls pointed at the foreigner, their eyes taking in the patches, the frayed hem.
Lucia had wanted to wear the last personal clothes she had left, a dark green woolen dress and a gray coat with Persian lamb trim that she kept in her locker. But when the time came to put on the dress, she realized that it didn’t fit: she had gained so much weight in just over two months that the seams in the armpits and on one side had ripped. She’d had to show up in the thick twilled jacket and pants the camp supplied to the internees, which for that matter went better with the wooden-soled boots (she had removed the OSTEN from her lapel).
The girl had a mental image of herself that she had carried with her from Italy and did not see how she had become: bloated in her coveralls, her face heavy, her eyes wary behind her courteous manner. She offered herself as a laundress to all the camp wardens but no other private home accepted her services. Instead, she sold them her gold Omega wristwatch for eight two-kilo loaves of bread, the coat for five loaves, and the dress for two.
After she sold her watch and ate two loaves in a row one night, wrapped up in her blanket or hiding in the toilet to avoid being seen, it occurred to her that she was behaving exactly like her roommates, whose ability to eat on the sly, ignoring the famished eyes of their companions, she continued to despise. In the few days in which she went through the supplies, she spent her time feverishly calculating how many grams per person it would take if she shared her loaves with the ten Russian prisoners and the four Warsaw partisans she worked with at the Ch 89, not counting Grùscenka, Johann, and Stanislaw, in addition to the twenty-one occupants of the barrack, not to mention the Italian prisoners of the Ph 32 opposite her shop, twenty or so dejected men, called “badogliani” by the Germans and “Fascist sheep” by the French prisoners, to whom she could not deny at least a loaf. The Italian prisoners of September 8, 1943, were the only ones, together with Soviet prisoners of war, who did not enjoy the assistance of the International Red Cross, from which the French and the Anglo-Americans received food parcels. She certainly could not deny them a piece of bread.
In the evening, lying on her side on her bunk, which fortunately was the last of those against the wall opposite the door, she turned her back to the woman in the next bed and, still under the blanket, meticulously cut the slices to be distributed, splitting them ad infinitum so as not to exclude anyone, until the overhead light was turned off. Upon awakening, she stuffed the slices under her jacket and took them to the factory. Once there, suddenly ashamed of her frugality, she doubled the rations, promising those who were left without that she would give them their portion of bread the next day. She was so absorbed by the effort of dividing, multiplying, and distributing grams, every so often remembering someone whom she had neglected, that she furtively gobbled up pieces stolen from her mental calculations and, after ingesting half a loaf, would be devastated at having to start the computations all over again to equitably reduce the others’ rations. Fearful of gorging too much by herself if she made her cache of bread last too long, she sped up the distribution, and it was a relief to her when, after six days, the eight loaves were finally consumed. It was Hitler’s birthday, April 20, 1944, and the loudspeakers at the factory and at the camp transmitted martial anthems and festive chorales alternating with brief messages exalting the Führer.
As they lay on the canal bank during the midday break, Grùscenka observed that the Nazis seemed like a metaphysical entity, omnipresent and invisible. She’d gotten a glimpse of them when they arrested and deported her, but afterward she’d no longer been able to spot one, except for the Lagerführer, who for that matter acted through the guards and wardens, rarely appearing in the flesh. In the factory, moreover, the foreman didn’t look like a Nazi and the few German technicians seemed mainly concerned with holding off the foreigners’ repressed violence: “Put yourself in their place. We are at least eighty percent of the workforce, from ten to fifteen thousand.”
Johann whispered that the German guard at a warehouse of pure alcohol had taken him aside that morning, telling him, “I want to celebrate the Führer’s birthday with you: I’ll let you take a few bottles of alcohol and I’ll look the other way. But I warn you, if you get caught, I’ll come down on you even harder than the others.”
The last quarter hour of the break was spent planning the thefts. By now they were on their feet and, stepping over the nearby bodies, went off behind a shed.
Grùscenka suggested that the French prisoners also be involved in the caper, since they could sell off the alcohol as a product of the parcels they received from the Red Cross: “They can keep the price up. But if we Osten and P resell the alcohol,” she said as if it were the name of a company, “people are going to think we stole it!” The last words were spoken with mock consternation. Then her expression hardened: “Anyone is apt to report or blackmail us. So see to it that the French have a joint interest in this, Lùszia, otherwise all we can do with this alcohol is get drunk.”
“Hey!” Johann laughed, winking. “Is it so awful to have ninety-proof fire buzzing in your veins?”
Stanislaw, tall and lanky, went on talking in Polish, his eyes lively in a fuzzy face; he kept slipping his closed fist here and there under his jacket and in his pants, as if he had bottles hidden in there. Johann translated: “Anyone leaving at night with a bulge somewhere ends up getting noticed”; he added that Stanislaw insisted they organize a chain so it wouldn’t always be the same internees who carried the stolen goods out of the factory.
The young men hastened to make arrangements for the following day. Like the Westerners, civilian internees from the East were lined up in columns on the road, outside the factory; workers from the various shops were able to walk to the gates in scattered groups, and could therefore mingle with the French prisoners without attracting attention. (The Russian and Polish war prisoners were the only ones made to form a column as soon as they left their shops.)
“Tell the French to agree to meet us a couple of times between one factory and another, where the streets we walk every day come together inside the IG,” Grùscenka said, “so we can negotiate the percentage they demand for reselling the alcohol for us and, if we agree, pass them the loot.”
“Much safer under cover,” Johann said. “It’s easy to switch locker rooms, no one notices. Tell them this: each of us will let the other know which locker room he goes to in the evening to wash off, then instead of going to his own, he mistakenly goes to the one used by the comrade who has to carry out the stuff and delivers it to him.”
That night in the barrack, Lucia called Martine aside. They had not spoken for eight weeks, since the argument following the prank with the tramp’s spoon. The French girl invited Lucia up to her pallet; close to the door, hers was the only bunk that wasn’t paired with another. Squeezing in to make room for her guest, Martine quietly confided that for some time now, in partnership with Etienne and Alain, she’d been stealing sugar and soap in the factory: “Once,” she recalled proudly, “I carried off half a kilo of sugar in one fell swoop.”
Lucia explained the locker rooms plan: “It’s a chance to become friendly with all nationalities, we can even eradicate the gap between East and West. I could be useful to you, you know?” And counting on her fingers: “I sleep in the Westerners’ barrack, I work with the Osten and I know the languages.”
Martine unexpectedly stiffened. Eyes bright, her thin lips redder than usual, she assured her in a dismissive tone that she would speak to the French internees the next day about taking in Grùscenka and Lucia, Johann and Stanislaw as a group.
On leaving the factory, Grùscenka showed a bag full of harmless rags and bundles, which she let the guards inspect thoroughly. Alain appeared up ahead speaking falteringly with the warden. Martine slipped the stolen goods into Grùscenka’s bag and began yelling at her accomplice, who was detaining the warden while others froze to death waiting. She pushed him aside, offering her body for inspection, arms outstretched. Grùscenka sighed with the resigned expression expected of an Osten and humbly went out.
Or else Lucia would sneak a bottle of alcohol under the jacket of her coveralls, holding it in place with her arms crossed over her chest and hands under her armpits, as if she were cold; head held high, she passed through the booths where the guards patted down the workers as they went out, pleading, “Quick, my column is leaving.” A warden quickly felt the pockets of her jacket and trousers, and the girl walked off.
But they had to come up with new methods all the time. One warden, in fact, demanded that Lucia spread her arms. The girl slipped one hand only out from under her armpit and with an accusing look held it out to him, livid and bruised. “Go on, go on!” the warden barked, annoyed, and Lucia slipped quickly through the gate.
“Heaven protects us,” she whispered to Martine as they walked together in the column to the Lager. “Just today a hammer shot out of someone’s hand and bruised my fingers. Otherwise, what would I have shown the warden? Look here, the wounds I had for weeks have disappeared. Hands and feet, the hide of an elephant, not even the smallest crack.”
The two girls were now getting along well and often talked together in the evening, in the barrack.
The night of the Führer’s birthday, careful not to let anyone see her, Lucia had torn up the photographs of Hitler and Mussolini that she’d kept in her duffel bag and thrown the pieces into the stove. Afterward she continued to check that the padlock of her locker was secure, so as not to let her roommates win.
“You still don’t condemn Fascism,” Martine said point-blank as she undressed on top of her pallet. “You find extenuating circumstances for it as opposed to Nazism.”
“I’ll have to think about that,” Lucia said, taken by surprise. “I need to come up with a criterion by which to judge it that doesn’t fall short the first time it’s tested. Here I’ve been able to see things from the other side, but there? I know nothing about it.”
“Never mind her,” the girl who scraped by through prostitution cut in. “Don’t you understand that she grew up in polite society?”
But Martine wanted to know what the Italian girl had ever found good about Fascism.
As she listed the merits of her country, its dedication to the cause, its fortitude and courage in difficult times, Lucia felt a sense of vagueness that humiliated her and for which she held Martine responsible.
“Why do you call her the Italian?” Jacqueline asked. “You can see she’s still here with us, she’s more French than you and me put together.”
“No,” Martine retorted, “it’s one of two things: either she’s more aware of the class difference when she’s with her fellow countrymen and feels she’s above them, or she’s ashamed of being a Fascist.”
“But I lived in France, where I was born, for fourteen years, and later spent only four years in Italy, so what are you talking about? I don’t feel I’m above them. I’m less familiar with the Italian mentality, that’s all.”
One night when it was drizzling, Lucia had seen Martine confront her boyfriend on the way out of the factory: “It’s a mistake to want to pull the rug out from under her all at once.”
Putting his arm around her shoulders, Etienne had walked along slowly with Martine in the rain. And by his gestures, it was clear he was explaining his reasons.
Martine’s behavior was erratic. At times she would tell Lucia, “Don’t let them intimidate you,” and at other times she would mutter, “Go ahead and keep your Fascism. The worse for you when you’re ready to spit it out and no one will want to hear it.”
“Up till now I’ve spat out judgments on things I didn’t know anything about,” Lucia retorted. “So I will only judge what I know, doing my best with the values I have—that is, the ones I’m discovering.”
“And what are those values?”
“Solidarity, for example, which is different from Fascist unanimity.”
“We’ll see.”
*
The French prisoners working on the lathe adjacent to the Ch 89 had become friendly toward Lucia, who again would stop and talk with them after a sulfuric ice delivery.
“Take that OSTEN out of your lapel,” Alain, the elderly prisoner, told her.
“It’s what the Nazis ordered.”
The man curled up his lips: “You draw too much attention to yourself, you don’t fit in with us.”
“So who ever wanted to?” Lucia leaped up, stung.
“Exactly. Someone who wants to stand out doesn’t interest us,” Alain repeated offhandedly.
Chauvinists, Lucia thought—they don’t hang around with Russians. They deign to talk to me only because French is my mother tongue.
But just the same she had a feeling they were studying her as if they wanted something from her.
And toward the end of April she began to connect certain details. With exactly the same casual tone Grùscenka used, Martine pointed out that the Germans at IG Farben were a negligible minority compared t
o the foreigners.
Moreover, Martine often asked about her childhood and adolescence spent in France: What had she observed in people’s behavior, strangers to her, that was lacking in Italy? In turn she told her that she had worked at Renault, on the assembly line, since she was sixteen, but had not had time to experience the strikes and sit-ins in the factories because war had broken out with the immediate occupation of the invaders.
Lucia then recalled the processions of Parisian protesters who paraded through Rue Monge, where she lived. She remembered the echo of the rallies that followed her on the way to school—emphatic, incomprehensible words reaching her ears.
*
So, unexpectedly, as they walked in a column to the factory one morning, Lucia had an extraordinary idea: “Martine,” she whispered in her ear, “why don’t we organize a strike?”
“Have you lost your mind?” her friend laughed at her. “And while we’re on the subject, what’s come over you recently that’s made you go around saying you were deported to Germany? I’ve already heard it from three people. A volunteer is what you are, stay that way.”
Lucia had never intended this white lie of hers to reach Martine’s ear and, caught in the act, replied in a choked voice, “I should have expected it: you’re all afraid. You bark constantly but you never bite.”
V
For more than a year (Lucia would never have imagined this), a number of French internees had been planning a strike at IG Farben.
Alain was a French partisan who had gotten himself deported to Germany along with other maquisards like him, to organize an uprising of foreign workers; there were said to be about fifteen million men and women transported to the Third Reich, including six or seven million employed in industry.
Fifty-two guerrilla fighters, who together made up an entire command, had let themselves be rounded up by the occupying forces as military prisoners or ordinary civilians, making sure they were arrested at various times and places so as to be put on board trains headed to different cities. They were all highly skilled workers, certain of being hired at major industrial complexes. For reasons of control and logistical organization, foreign labor was concentrated in large factories that turned out parts, but absent in plants which produced finished military products. The task of the French militants was to ensure that an uprising of foreigners employed in the factories coincided with the Allied landing in Normandy, in order to weaken the Nazis on the home front and accelerate their surrender.