by Luce d'Eramo
At a moment when the supervisor was distracted, Lucia snuck into the shop opposite hers. She had decided to change her tactic, that is, to assume a different tone depending on the circumstances. She thought it best to adopt a firm, thoughtful manner with her compatriots: “We can’t go on like this, we must rise up,” she began, but she had to raise her voice to be heard above the clamor in the shop. “We have an exceptional weapon: we can strike.”
The five Italian prisoners in the Ph 32, whose curiosity had been piqued when they saw her come in, exchanged weary glances. “We don’t have enough trouble, all we need is to satisfy an urge just for the hell of it!” someone shouted at her in the din and asked: “Can you imagine what they’d do to us?”
Lucia had another go at it the following morning, again eluding the foreman’s attention. But the Italian prisoners continued working around the furnace, amid the sparks of red-hot metal plates that they slowly fed into the presses, surrounded by the sizzle of tiny filings shooting out from all sides.
“We are no longer puppets,” Lucia shouted, hands cupped around her mouth. “From now on we will act on our own.”
“You think you’re on the balcony of Piazza Venezia?”
The girl would quickly crouch behind a press, going round and round the machinery depending on the movements of the Vorarbeiter, who, perhaps drawn by the voices, strode in to inspect the Italians.
She met them again later, on the way back from the canteen after the lunch break: “Hey, Osten from Rome,” a badogliano called to her, “what do the others say?”
“What do you expect them to say?” his neighbor interjected. “Everybody knows already: it will come to nothing.”
“Sure!” a third man said, smiling to himself. “Just let them try it and within fifteen minutes we’ll see: if they don’t slaughter us all in a single burst of machine-gun fire, we might at least get some small satisfaction!”
Within a few days Lucia had gotten used to standing up to the wary ones. At a glance she would decide whether to bring up the subject with a confidential or challenging tone, though an assured, even somewhat casual pitch almost always caught on better.
The Slovenians, who’d fought in Yugoslavia against the pro-German Croatians and were persecuted by the Nazis, started giving her imperceptible smiles of consent with complicit looks. They worked near the small station of the internal railway.
Using gestures, a Greek made her understand that, if everyone refused to work, he was in. But if only a few of them striked and the majority continued to work, then no, count him out.
An Italian civilian internee, who worked on the first level of the Ch 89, took an interest in the issue. To Lucia it was almost as if the man, an immigrant from Puglia, all nerves and facial expressions, were lying in wait for her so he could express his point of view: he objected, he suggested strategies, he predicted counter-moves by the Nazis, he would seem to support the idea of a strike, then suddenly shrug, “Impossible, it can’t be done.”
The more sensible the girl found the Apulian’s observations to be, the more torn she was between the need to get his promise of support and the desire to slip away whenever she saw him silently approaching out of the corner of her eye. A whistle from the overseer usually resolved her dilemma.
One afternoon when Lucia was pulling a cart and passed in front of Alain and Etienne’s doorway, they motioned for her to stop. Three or four Frenchmen busied themselves around a machine that they had carried outside; unscrewing a cogwheel and hammering bolts, they asked how things were going.
“In spite of the lily-livered cowards, beautifully,” the girl said.
“Did any sucker take the bait?” Etienne said with a faint smile.
Lucia exaggerated the show of consent from the Russians, Slovenians, and Greeks, not mentioning the skepticism of the Italians.
“Interesting!” one of the Frenchmen muttered occasionally, pretending to concentrate on his work.
“Don’t you want to participate?” the girl asked.
“Us?” they said, laughing their heads off.
The following day Lucia again saw them in the open area near their doorway, still crouching, busy fumbling around a piece of machinery. As if to catch her breath, the girl let the sack she was carrying on her back slide to the ground and stopped. She explained that there was a good chance of success. The French, looking distracted, let her talk, occasionally tossing out a question, a little “technical detail” (they said) about her plans:
“And where are you going to stop working? In front of the machinery?” “All of you jammed in the toilets?” “Who’s going to give the signal?” “Are you going to use a flute or a trumpet?”
Lucia noticed that they kept exchanging glances behind her back and winking at each other; then their faces would suddenly harden and they replied in monosyllables.
“You know what I say?” she snapped angrily. “I’d like to wipe my ass with you.” She tried to reload the sack on her back, and Alain and Etienne hastened to help her. “How vulgar the little schoolgirl has become!” Alain sighed as he adjusted the load, pushing it higher up her back. “What do you think, pal? You can’t bring her to the debutante’s ball!”
Lucia couldn’t forgive the tone in which they had asked those questions. She couldn’t find the right words to crush them. She rejected worms, animals: too weak. Finally: “Pack of riffraff,” she said indifferently.
Her relations with Martine had also worsened, since the French girl teased her about the Italians, suggesting that with them it would be a fiasco, especially the war prisoners, too defeated, too distrustful. “Don’t you see how they are? They walk with their heads bowed, and if you talk to them, they look at you as if you were trying to make fools of them.”
“Well, aren’t they right? Given the insults that you and the Nazis reward them with, do you expect them to start dancing?”
“You pass yourself off as French by birth and then, if someone touches your Italians, you’d think he’d stepped on your tail.”
“It’s a legacy handed down from you people, my dear girl. At school, in France, the words macaroni and mandolinist were repeated to me so often during recess that I became proud of them.”
When Alain came up to her as she left the shop, she put him off, saying sweetly: “I don’t have time for those born to be slaves.” It was a phrase she had prepared at night.
Luckily there were Grùscenka, Johann, and Stanislaw, who mobilized their friends in organizing the strike. From the depths of the foreigners’ toilets, Grùscenka circulated suggestions of individuals in the Ch 89 who were most prone to being tapped for the initiative. With her lazy manner, she roused more people than Lucia with her head-on approach (it was Grùscenka who finally obtained the Apulian immigrant’s support).
Stanislaw spread the word to the most trusted Poles in his Lager while Johann, who knew Russian well, plotted with the Ukrainians; they welcomed him affably enough, offering him a cucumber, but then demurred. Ukrainians were the most skillful at rooting out cabbage and cucumbers from the fields, on the way to and from the factory. Feigning urgent bodily needs, they were permitted to hurry off from the column to relieve themselves behind a bush. Nonetheless, they were reluctant to strike.
*
For three weeks now Lucia had been living solely for the strike (it was nearly the end of May). She felt like she was moving in a vacuum, with nothing to show for it. She had pleaded her cause with two, maybe three hundred internees, but there were several thousand foreigners. At this rate it would take an infinite period of time to approach them all, and by the time the last one agreed, the first one would already have forgotten about it. Furthermore, after the first few days of euphoria, she was beginning to feel scared. The overseers in the various workshops had given her a good talking-to and chased her away when they spotted her around. As soon as she got within earshot, they demanded to know where she was wheeling that bin or pushing that cart and, irritated, pointed out that she was going in the wron
g direction.
The girl had hoped that her willing readiness would persuade the French to take part in planning the endeavor. She had never really doubted their fighting skills, and it seemed to her that without their contribution, the results were much more uncertain, despite her reliance on the Osten and Poles.
Grùscenka had focused her attention on putting together the general aspects of the plan and was mainly occupied with organizing and administering its implementation. She repeatedly conferred with the military prisoners, both the Russians and those from the Warsaw Uprising, who worked in the Ch 89. The latter, in turn, arranged things with their fellow militants in the Lager, some of whom maintained contacts with the French activists.
The support of the Russian civilian deportees was not a concern. For the Osten the call to stop work was merely a continuation of the course of action already adopted at home: though few had taken part in guerrilla actions, all of them had engaged in passive resistance against the invading armies.
On the other hand, it wasn’t easy to unite workers from East and West, to vary the arguments and convince workers of such different backgrounds to strike together, without setting their sights on such ambitious aims as a general insurrection. It was obvious that, in the state of permanent abasement in which the internees lived, the idea of plunging back into an active war, weapons in hand, could only terrify them.
The Soviet prisoners, who were ordinary soldiers, respected Grùscenka, recognizing in her the qualities of an officer. Nevertheless, since at IG Farben the girl was only a civilian deportee, the soldiers, trained in military intelligence, didn’t let her in on the plot with the French prisoners. They did, however, pose the most intricate practical problems to her and saw to it that her orders were carried out.
“The situation is clear,” Grùscenka explained to Lucia. “We can only establish one thing: how to stop work. Other than that, we have to act based on the way the Germans react. But we have the first move, that’s something.”
Occasionally Grùscenka relied on Lucia to approach a “hard-ass” pointed out by her companions: “You have a way with words—let’s see what happens.”
Other times she cautioned her: “Careful, Lùszia, the determination to stop work must reach a fever pitch at just the right time, which must be synchronized throughout the shops. So cool down your incitement in this area.” She gave the same warnings to Johann and Stanislaw, both nineteen and, like Lucia, unprepared to consider the organic unity of the overall plan to be primary. “Measure out the propaganda,” warned Grùscenka, who seemed to be back at the Moscow Naval Academy, calm and authoritative, her manner laid-back. “We don’t give a good goddamn about those dimwits fed by the Red Cross,” she added, referring to the French military prisoners with a callous smile on her composed, pretty face.
But Lucia had taken in the objections raised by the “hard-asses.” She agonized over the Germans’ resources, their methods of repression. She spent her time in bed lying awake, brooding over the complications. And if she dozed off, she experienced scenes of terror like those the Warsaw insurrectionists had described to Johann. One night she dreamed not only about the French abstaining, but also about the mass defection of the Osten. Only Grùscenka, on the main deck of a ship, was left standing, a slender figure in the rags that clothed her. When a towering breaker was about to crash over her, Lucia woke up screaming.
She was afraid to fall asleep again, and, feeling her limbs grow heavy, she shook herself, pulled on her coveralls, slipped into the wooden-soled boots, and left the barrack. The air outside was so dry that the Lager’s two German shepherds heard her footsteps from far off. Lucia heard them come trotting over on the gravel. They must have recognized her scent from a distance, because they slowed up. One jogged off while the other waited. As she approached, Lucia heard him panting, his breathing agitated. He looked like the one she’d confronted on one of her first evenings there. She thought she saw him foaming at the mouth, his big tongue lolling out, his breathing harsh and shallow; the animal seemed to be reading the fear in her mind.
Now the dog was sniffing her. The girl was about to hide her hand in her pants pocket but thought: Oh God no, he’ll think it’s a threat. She kept her fingers still, pressed against the outside of her pocket, where she remembered she’d stashed half a sausage: He can smell it, he thinks I stole it, which means I can’t be one of his masters. But I’ll show him I’m not loaded with sausages!
And impulsively she tossed him the precious piece bought with the proceeds of a theft, watching the animal sink his teeth into it on the fly with a snap of his jaws.
That was the dog under whose nose a guard had placed a stolen garment. And after feverishly poking at the cloth with his snout, the shepherd had started leisurely wandering around the Lager, sniffing the ground or breathing the air until he’d set off at breakneck speed. A man, herded into the yard with a group of internees, had started whimpering, turning himself in before being knocked to the ground.
Half a sausage is still better than a plate of lentils, Lucia thought, disheartened by her schoolgirl humor as she cast wary glances at the animal, who’d started wagging his tail beside her.
In the morning she fell asleep standing up, like a horse, at the factory’s little station where four of them were waiting for a freight car of methane to unload.
At the end of the shift Alain stopped her. “Excuse me”—Lucia tried to dodge him—“but I don’t have time to argue.”
“We’re willing to go along,” Alain said.
Lucia shrugged and headed toward the gate; the man walked beside her and kept talking to her, though she didn’t answer him and wasn’t really paying attention to what he said.
“Are you listening to me?” he said, taking her hand.
“Excuse me?” She felt bewildered.
“I said you did a good job, both you and Grùscenka in the Ch 89 and Johann and Stanislaw in the Na 14.”
“We weren’t alone.”
“I know.”
On the way back, Lucia joined the column of Italian girls from her barrack, who made room for her without all the fuss of the past.
She mentioned the strike.
“You can count on us,” the pregnant Bergamo woman replied. “They’ll have to drag me on the ground to force me to work.”
“Me,” the other girl from Bergamo chimed in, “not even if they pull me by the hair. I’m not moving.”
Carla, the tall, strapping, sixteen-year-old worker, a brunette with rosy cheeks and big teeth, who had formed an attachment with a badogliano war prisoner, stepped between Lucia and one of the Bergamo women: “My boyfriend and I also did our part,” she said with a gentle voice, turning her velvety eyes on Lucia, “and without all the ballyhoo.”
“What fun!” Pina, the apprentice hairdresser from Rome laughed. “Much better than playing hooky!” Often alone since her inseparable friend had found a “fiancé,” she’d started acting even more infantile.
“I can’t stand that simpering girl,” the gaunt, taciturn woman from the orphanage grumbled, irritably moving to the outer end of the row.
“Did you hear that?” whined Pina, the petite Roman. “She’s the la-di-da one, you’ll see if she strikes! Bloodsucking bastard is all you are.”
“In fact,” the woman in question replied with dignity, “I’m not joining in. But I’m not a traitor, nor a scab. When the time comes. I’ll say I’m sick.”
That same evening Martine called Lucia up to her pallet: the strike was scheduled for the following day. All the foreign workers would be informed during the trek from the various camps to IG Farben. At the same time they would learn the details of the operation, which Martine meticulously disclosed to Lucia in advance, revealing behind-the-scenes activity that the Italian girl was not aware of.
Their heads side by side under the blanket, Martine whispered in Lucia’s ear for an hour. As she murmured, “With the advance of the Anglo-Americans tomorrow, all the foreign workers in Germany…” she
fell asleep without finishing the sentence.
VII
The internees left the Lagers at dawn, in column formation as usual, walking briskly. The announcement of the strike circulated from row to row: as soon as they reached the factory, the workers were to start heading toward their workshops, those who had a short way to go walking very slowly, the others a little less slowly; but nobody was to hurry because everyone had to be at their locker rooms the moment the six o’clock siren wailed. When it sounded, all the foreigners in each of the factory’s plants were to simultaneously proceed to the lavatory, where they usually went only in the evening to wash off the machine oil. Once inside, they initially had to pretend to wash their hands or pee in the urinals, so as to keep the Germans confused for a few seconds more. They were then to remain in the lavatories, not moving from there, until further notice. They should keep in mind that as long as they were scattered throughout IG Farben, the foreigners could control the situation; but if they let the Germans round them up, they were done for. The workers would be informed of the progress of the strike as it went along. But they should beware: the Germans would certainly spread false rumors. No one should pay any attention to hearsay. The watchword was: wait for instructions.
Punching their cards one by one at the various entrances to IG Farben, the foreigners peeled off single file toward the workshops, slipping out to the lavatories when the work siren sounded.
Carla, who in her excitement had stumbled, falling facedown to the ground, had not had time to reach the factory where she worked and had crept into one of the lavatories of the Ch 89 with Lucia.
After they’d spent a few minutes crowded into the same room, with a row of sinks on one side and urinals on the other, the guards appeared: “Back to work, let’s go!” they ordered.
The foreigners, about thirty of them, looked at them placidly and went on scrubbing their hands under the faucets or pretending to pee against the wall tiles in front of them. The two guards advanced toward the internees to force them to move from there, first pushing them and then also kicking them. But in a sepulchral silence the detainees thronged so closely around them that the two guards, immobilized by the pressure of bodies whose every muscle they could feel tensed, feared for their lives. The Apulian worker, nose to nose with the German soldiers, gauged them with his eyes and said through half-closed lips, “We could gag and disarm these two, if we were sure that all the lavatories were holding their hostages.” Lucia translated quickly into French. “But if we’re the only ones,” the Apulian continued, “they can blackmail us: either release the two soldiers or we’ll toss ten hand grenades into ten lavatories. Some choice!” He concluded: “We have to let them go.” And with his shoulder he shoved a way through. Outside, the shrill sound of brass whistles mounted, strident and imperious. Reluctantly, the foreigners made way, the press of their bodies driving back the guards, who, disregarding decorum, slunk out once they reached the door. “Aah!” Everyone breathed a sigh of satisfaction. “We may not have acted too diplomatically,” said a Frenchman who had worked at Höchst for four years, “but they had it coming.”