Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  The Frenchmen communicated with one another in code, persuading some compassionate, innocent German to transcribe the messages in his own hand and mail the letters in his name.

  The most sensitive information from their base of operations was reported to them verbally by people like Martine, whose volunteer status allowed her to choose her destination venue. Assisted by Etienne, Alain had informed and involved about a dozen French workers. Martine maintained contact with the others, since she had more freedom of movement as a volunteer.

  The French militants had drawn a topographic map of the Lagers that spread over the plain on the west side of Frankfurt-Höchst, the side overlooking the Rhine.

  There were four camps for prisoners of war, one beside the other, each with its own kitchen and its own Lagerführer, though jointly sharing some services such as disinfestation and access to the air-raid shelter, laid out in the usual arrangement of East and West: the two camps for the “Bolsheviks” and Polish inmates farther away from IG Farben, those of the French and Italian internees closer. And at the end of the row, isolated from everyone, the small camp of the Warsaw insurgents.

  Across the road lay the barracks of volunteers and civilian workers who’d been rounded up, divided into two clusters of unequal density, with seven to eight thousand people in the camp of the “Slavs” and about half that number in that of the “Westerners.”

  Drawing the human map of IG Farben had been more complex, not so much due to the irregular distribution of the buildings as to the mixture of peoples. The factories did not adhere to the sharp distinction between groups from the East and those from the West, on which the separation of the Lagers and the factory canteens was based. Workers with or without the triangle, military prisoners or civilian workers, were employed in the same factory though distinguished by levels. The upper floor was given over to machinery, alongside the workshops, for distilling or monitoring: skilled, light jobs assigned to the Germans, of course. Moving down, the levels expanded, going from the French and Belgians to the Italians, Greeks, and Croatians (situated at the same level), down to the base of Slovenians, Poles, and especially Russians, who were given the toughest tasks.

  This pyramid arrangement in the factories, however, only seemingly facilitated the planning. No foreigner could go up to the gallery or to the workshops of the Germans except briefly, to transport material, with the exception of “one of them,” namely Lucia; not so much because the girl was a Fascist—the few French Pétainists and pro-Nazi Romanians of the Iron Cross remained on the lower floors—as because of her higher social status, which she never missed an opportunity to make known.

  As a result, being able to count the Germans had required time and complex calculations on the part of the organizers. Those assigned to count the Germans’ faces when passing hurriedly in or out of work were always likely to describe them in such a way that others wouldn’t recognize someone who’d already been counted: “The one I mean is a different one,” the next counter would answer. He was taller, or shorter. They lost time sketching a picture, okay, it was someone else. But the resulting number would mean too many Germans and they had to start over. Then they all turned out to be the same man and the number became too few.

  Besides counting the Germans, for the purpose of effectively planning the strike, establishing the distribution and number of the various nationalities of the foreigners in the individual workshops had also required patient, painstaking work.

  It should be noted that there were no concentration camps (reserved for Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, and common criminals) connected to IG Farben, only labor and detention camps. So there were no exterminations that could upset the calculation of the masses in the fenced-in camps. After taking into account fluctuations due to the arrival of new convoys, exchanges with other factories, sudden relocations of entire communities due to demands for reinforcements elsewhere, a satisfactory estimate could be deduced, namely, that the foreign labor force accounted for between fourteen and sixteen thousand workers, a good quarter of which were women.

  If the distinction between military prisoners and civilians was evident at first glance, in part because the former wore the military uniform with a big KG printed on the back, among the civilians, on the other hand, it was hard to distinguish the volunteers from those rounded up and deported en masse. The former, in fact, as soon as they looked around, tended to deny their volunteer status in order to blend in with the other internees.

  At first the French militants had considered it essential to distinguish the two categories, regarding the volunteers as less trustworthy. But after wasting several months on that virtually useless exercise, they had gradually come to realize that, with the exception of some lumpenproletarians who had lived in the most abject poverty in their countries of origin, most of the volunteers harbored an even greater hatred toward the masters than the deportees. And when they heard someone laughing his head off about the alluring promises Nazi propaganda made to entice suckers, they realized that one of the suckers was the person speaking and that he wouldn’t back down when the moment came to strike.

  Time available to the organizers was getting tight since, in November ’43, Martine had brought word that preparations for the foreigners’ rebellion in Germany had to be in place by May ’44, ready for it to begin at the first signal.

  The planners were still gauging the actual makeup of Germans in the factory. Though they had managed to estimate their number, they now also had to distinguish between German citizens of the first degree and German citizens of the second degree, a difference that a foreigner could not read on their faces.

  German second-degree citizens, that is, Volksdeutschen, were less numerous. They came from countries variously appropriated in the Third Reich, such as the areas surrounding Gdansk, Alsace and Lorraine, several Czechoslovakian territories, and Dutch and Flemish regions. Enlisted in the Arbeitsdienst (the Labor Service), they were transported to Germany. They constituted a large part of the skilled workers, truck drivers, and transport workers in general, served as accountants in the offices and in the camps, and were the head cooks in the factory canteens.

  The pure Germans, on the other hand, namely, the Reichsdeutschen, were more numerous. These citizens of the first degree constituted the entire management staff down to the lowest chemistry professor; the clerical staff, comprised almost exclusively of women; the platoon of soldiers who escorted the detainees and foreign deportees; the nucleus of soldiers from FLAK (antiaircraft forces) assigned to IG Farben, as well as custodial personnel.

  The strike’s organizers paid particular attention to the Reichsdeutschen working in the factories, the foremen, the Vorarbeitern and technicians who with few exceptions were men unfit to fight, elderly, or exempt from national service. All those able to fight were at the front. In addition there were the chemical assistants (Laborantinnen) trained to prevent foreigners from gaining access to the laboratories, to avoid acts of sabotage that would have caused incalculable damage, given that the products were flammable.

  On the other hand, the foreign workers feared a fire as much as the Germans did. That was the reason why everyone was especially fearful of the factory being bombed: what with chemical powders, acids, huge tanks of fuel, the plants would go up in a chain explosion that would spread into a single conflagration. Everyone was relieved to have escaped such a danger till then. All the same, the growing anxiety of the lab staff could be seen in the white skull and crossbones that appeared more and more frequently on the doors.

  Ultimately, adding up the Reichs-and the Volksdeutschen, it turned out that about eighty-one to eighty-three percent of the workforce was made up of foreigners.

  *

  Once these preliminary studies were complete, the French militants made contact with elements of other nationalities. At times the difficulties seemed insurmountable. There were patently delicate situations: most Poles did not forgive the Russians for having sided with the Nazis at the beginning of the
conflict, for having invaded them and for continuing to occupy them even after they had become allies again. Only the one hundred thirty-eight men of the Warsaw Uprising supported the strike as a bloc, even before the organizer finished revealing the plan. They were all emaciated, their eyes reticent. They were forbidden to exchange a word with anyone, and everyone, both their countrymen and other foreigners, fell silent as they passed, torn between respect and apprehension.

  The Nazis had fostered the irredentism of the Ukrainians, promising them independence from the USSR; they had fueled the separatism of several Lithuanian villages in northern Poland, and backed the preeminence of the Croatians in Yugoslavia at the expense of Serbs and Slovenians. And it wasn’t easy to convince such heterogeneous communities, divided by conflicting passions, to set aside their internal hatreds and give precedence to the fight against those who had in some way unified them by deporting them from their fatherland.

  Finally, there was the French’s contempt for the Italians, whom they accused of stabbing them in the back on the eve of the occupation, to steal Nice and Savoy from France.

  Nevertheless, given the greater concerns, a number of prisoners and deportees of every nationality joined the French militants, with whom they gradually spun a web of provocations and clandestine connections. Since the base of local operations was in the lathe workshop attached to the Ch 89, the decision was made to proceed with the plan of persuading the workers in a spiral fashion, starting with the more distant plants and circling round and round to the closest buildings. The organizers wanted to avoid having too great a proximity prompt the workers informed of the plan to constantly ask for news and information, displaying an excitement that would eventually arouse suspicion. As a result, the job of persuading the Ch 89 was saved for last. Not for a moment did the strike organizers forget that the most insignificant whisper could derail an undertaking of such scale.

  Things had seemed to be going well when, at the beginning of February ’44, in the Western civilians’ camp, that girl who proclaimed herself Italian had appeared, seemingly reckless, too rash to be credible. Martine’s line of reasoning, namely, that if Lucia were a spy she would have pretended to be an anti-Fascist partisan, only partially convinced the French militants. It could in fact be an astute tactic of reverse psychology on the part of the masterminds whose instrument the student was, to make her seem like a naive innocent who goes over to the opposite side when shown the facts. After all, Martine herself had fallen for it. And if Lucia wasn’t a spy, that didn’t make her any less dangerous, given the unpredictability of her behavior.

  So they considered various tactics. At first they tried to repulse the girl so that her reactions might in any case provide some clue. But every act on her part lent itself to a double interpretation: it could be a pretense to win over the detainees and be asked to forge links with the Russians, for instance, to then reveal the ploy at the right time; or it could be a sincere display. In fact, since the girl had been born and raised in France, Lucia’s Fascism might well be more superstructural than she herself suspected. It was therefore possible that the clash with reality might strip her of an adolescent infatuation for the regime’s mythology. Martine, who leaned toward this hypothesis, namely, that Lucia was acting in good faith, sounded her out to that effect. Etienne, on the other hand, judging her to be an insidious, bourgeois schemer, held to his opinion. Alain vacillated, leaning slightly toward Martine’s theory. The other militants felt that no opportunity should be dismissed out of hand. If their wariness was excessive, they would effectively lose a valuable mediator: given her knowledge of languages, once the girl was persuaded to take advantage of her earlier reputation as a Fascist and make the most of the indulgence the Nazis still accorded her, she could step up the final contacts and contribute to the success of the endeavor.

  To that end, it was essential that she not alienate herself from the Nazis completely but give them at least a sign of having second thoughts. Hence Alain’s instruction that she remove the triangle from her jacket.

  When Lucia ultimately had the idea about a strike, the French decided to continue trusting her to a degree. They agreed to make her responsible for the entire initiative. That way she would be so involved with the internees that she would no longer be able to betray anyone.

  “If one of us had acted as erratically as you have,” Alain said, coming up alongside Lucia as they left the factory, “they would have thrown him into Dachau without thinking twice. They certainly wouldn’t have been satisfied with transferring him to another work area. You could afford to have those fits of anger, my so-called heroine. And whom did they benefit? Neither you nor anyone else.”

  “I don’t take instruction from those who don’t bite.”

  “Now you’re even speaking in metaphors?”

  “How cultured you are!” Lucia scoffed.

  “Does it surprise you that a worker is educated and knows the word metaphor? What an embodiment of class consciousness you are! You feel a distance between us and you!”

  “I feel it because it’s there,” Lucia replied distractedly. She wanted to savor the prisoner’s humiliation: she too was learning to offend him pleasantly, wearing the same preoccupied expression he wore.

  “You’re wrong, my poor girl,” Alain sympathized. “Open your eyes, finally: here there is no distance between you and us. We have exactly the same social status, all barrack dwellers. Before there was a class difference and maybe there will be one afterward as well—imagine someone like you not going back and retreating to her social rank. But here, in Frankfurt-Höchst, in the IG Farben camps, whether you like it or not, we’re equals. In fact, you’re lower down because you’re uneasy and we’re not. The reasons why you came don’t mean a thing given the fact that, in this situation, you’re in up to your neck.”

  Once again she resented that man: “And you, why do you always insult me? What do you know about how much it cost me to do what I did, even if to you my actions seem like impulsive fits?”

  “Because in your place I would have acted very differently!” Alain exclaimed, suddenly cheerful. He slowed down, since by now they were nearing the gate. “If I could pass myself off as a Pétainist, as a collabò, I’d be in the saddle by this time. I would kick up such a racket, my dear, that I’d make their hair stand on end.”

  “But when I suggest organizing a strike, you’re not in favor.”

  “You, a strike? With that OSTEN in your buttonhole? Go on! Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  “Didn’t I steal with you in the factory, with the OSTEN in plain sight on my jacket?”

  “Then you don’t know what you’re talking about! You mean to compare a little theft to an uprising? Well then…” And the man walked away.

  VI

  Lucia decided to fight alone. She would take advantage of her comings and goings from one workshop to another at the factory to air the idea of a strike.

  She now volunteered to carry bags of coal on her back, rolls of plastic on her shoulders; once she’d had them load and tie on her back a machine weighing nearly a hundred kilos, which she had carried up a flight of stairs. She had become incredibly strong. In one of the Sicherheitsdienst* examinations to check her personal characteristics, she read on the scale’s indicator that in three months she had gained more than twelve kilos over her normal weight: she weighed sixty-four kilos and was one meter sixty-five centimeters tall.

  She couldn’t, however, let them discover her. The French were right, it was unwise to draw attention to herself. And how to go about approaching a stranger to suggest he go on strike? Internees were always proposing some act of bravado.

  She decided to use the technique of grousing. And with every foreigner she ran into, she griped: “What do they think we are, slaves? Why don’t we go on strike?” She’d learned to say words like that not only in Russian and Polish, but also in Greek and Slovenian. She met few workers, however, because most of them performed their jobs inside the machine shops. And whe
n she incited them by urging “What do you say, huh?” those few simply returned her greeting. At most they responded with a hand gesture, as if to say: “It’s just talk!” Or else they winked and snickered, “Sure, why not?” It seemed like a prank with no consequences.

  Even the Russians, with whom she slogged away in the Ch 89, merely smiled broadly at her. One merrily clapped her vigorously on the back, making her stagger.

  At the camp, Lucia considered it pointless to divulge her suggestion. In the evening, at the canteens, the internees only wanted to gulp down their soup and they reacted by swearing if anyone disturbed their apathy. In the lavatories at dawn it was even worse: they washed up in a daze, like automatons. As they walked in a column, back and forth from work, parading through the barracks, men in front and women behind, she could only speak with her dorm mates. But the people you live with, she thought, are always the last ones you should inform.

  At the factory, however, they were all alert and ready to revolt. There was more drive, the nationalities were mixed. The ideal thing would be to get to the military prisoners. Hadn’t Grùscenka said one day that she envied the KGs? “By convention, even in the eyes of the Germans, they have a right to passive resistance. They can take more chances than civilian deportees, even the Soviets, see, because of the respect the Nazis have for military virtues. Only the Warsaw insurgents are at serious risk.” Grùscenka was right: the KGs were more united than the civilians, they could be influenced.