by Luce d'Eramo
“What a kick, guys!” exclaimed an Italian, stretching with pleasure.
Little by little, however, their courage shrank. Everyone shushed his neighbor then, listening silently; some nodded approval: not a sound of machinery could be heard. For seconds the stillness was broken by the sudden roar of an engine speeding beyond the walls that men and women, white-faced, huddled against.
“My stomach hurts,” someone said.
Perhaps a quarter of an hour passed and still nothing happened.
“They’ll force us out with gas,” a man’s voice rose to say, “and once we’re out, they’ll exterminate us,” he whimpered.
“Shut up, you goddamned jinx!” a woman silenced him.
But, overcome by terror, the man who had spoken broke away from the wall and went to the door, where he was swallowed up in the dawn. Across the deserted street, the leaden buildings emerged lifeless, or so it seemed. Maybe a minute later, the worker reappeared, dazed: “It’s working!” he told them. After turning the corner, he had run into the foreman and the small group of Vorarbeitern from his iron metallurgy shop. Standing idly at the door, they’d looked at him as though seeing a ghost. And he’d made an about-face and run back to the lavatory. “The strike is working…” he repeated incredulously, his voice faint.
“They disarmed us psychologically, hammering into our brains a fearsome image of their cruelty,” the French veteran of IG Farben, who had also been a fighter in the Resistance, began. “This image we have of the Nazis, you have to get it through your heads that they were the ones who fixed it in our brains. That way, fearing their reactions, we’d never dare make a move. Just remember that they’re men just like us, with weaknesses and fears, and so—”
“You sure love to preach all the time!” said a woman who had grown impatient.
“It’s true, he’s right,” said the man who had left and then taken heart after seeing the “paralysis” of the workshops around them. “The fact is that the strike is working.”
As they argued, the warning siren sounded.
They looked at one another: “At this hour?” It was about 6:40 a.m.
“What’s going on?” the Frenchman interned at Höchst since ’40 worried. “There’s never been an alarm at this time, not once in four years.”
Pairs of footsteps on the pavement were approaching.
“To the air-raid shelter!” ordered the same two guards from before, rifles in hand, but in a normal tone of command. “All of you to the bunker, quick! An unprecedented formation of Flying Fortresses has been reported!”
With meaningful glances, the foreigners remained motionless, as if bolted to the ground between the sinks and the footrests of the urinals.
They struggled to hold on to a feeling of strength as the guards remained in the doorway. Despite the Germans’ outraged expressions, they hadn’t beaten the workers with their rifle butts; finally they went away.
The French militant used his sleeve to wipe the sweat running down his face. He grabbed his neighbor by the back of the neck:
“It’s clear,” he breathed, “we’re not alone. All the factories, get it?” Then the Vollallarm* slashed the air with its piercing undulating sirens that gave you shivers just hearing them.
Shouting could be heard outside, human voices moaning and sobbing, a running clatter. The alarm’s wailing never ceased.
The seasoned Frenchman looked out: “Bastards!” he shouted to be heard over the shriek of the sirens. “Go back to the lavatories!”
“We’ll all be roasted alive here!” a voice shrieked.
“Come back!” the Frenchman shouted at the top of his lungs. “Victory is in hand!”
Someone in the lavatory moved swiftly to the door. The Frenchman blocked his way. “I have to shit, I can’t help it,” the man said, shaking, as he jerked free and went out.
The two guards reappeared together with a German civilian. It was the foreman of the Ch 89 himself. The thought that he had not rushed to the armored shelter “nur für Deutschen,” only for Germans, calmed the strikers down for a few moments. They also noticed that, incredibly, behind the guards’ backs, the foreman was giving them signs of complicity: his eyes indicating the sinks and the walls, he signaled by winking. The foreigners looked at one another uncertainly. Then the foreman stepped in front of the two guards and spoke harshly to the strikers crammed into the lavatory: “To the bunker, you good-for-nothing trash, Dreckleuten,” he ordered. Meanwhile, he slipped his thumb in his vest pocket and pointed to his chest with his index finger, then, making fists, crossed his wrists over his belly, in a gesture indicating handcuffs.
Everyone immediately averted their eyes, assuming glowering expressions toward the foreman to spare him the guards’ suspicions. “Thank you for your kindness,” Carla whispered in Italian, her eyes sparkling.
“Get it?” They nudged one another when they were alone again. “They wanted to trap us in the shelter!”
“Very clever, the foreman! Who would have thought?”
Some had sat down on the floor, others on the sinks, calculating aloud how many hours they would need to hold out. They did not intend to return to the Lagers that night, planning to stay put and simply occupy the factories and the canteens with all the food supplies. They had almost forgotten the bombing danger when the Vorentwahnung* rang out.
“I’m going to my boyfriend,” Carla announced. “I’ll continue the strike with him.” And she ran out. The others heard her scream and for a moment saw her pass in front of the open door, kicking and writhing, two guards dragging her by the arms. The shrieks of women and a scuffling of bodies amid the barking of male voices could also be heard in the distance. And again the Vollallarm rose with its urgent undulations, its wailing twisting everyone’s bowels.
“Planes!” a woman screamed.
Petrified, the foreigners in the lavatory listened to the drone of the powerful engines, which seemed to rise from every corner of the earth, the pregnant, muffled buzz they knew all too well, which came just before the sighting of bombers in the sky.
“I’m going to the shelter,” a man decided firmly, when it seemed that the aircraft’s roars were increasing. “God help anyone who stops me,” he said, turning a murderous look on the others. Four people followed him.
Everyone expected the bombs to crash down on the factories at any moment. Each of them estimated the flammable substances being processed in his own workshop, determined to disobey orders at the first explosion, in his mind already running toward the gates, amid collapsing walls and flames, stoked by acids, leaping up to lick at the fuel tanks.
Lucia buried her head in her arms as the rumble of the planes grew in intensity.
“Someday they’re going to destroy the IG for sure,” the Apulian muttered bitterly, sitting cross-legged on the floor and rocking.
“But did it have to be today when we’re striking?” the seasoned Frenchman shot back, having understood the Italian words. “Just today?”
“We would have been better off taking hostages,” the Apulian whined over and over.
A breathless worker appeared in the doorway, clinging to the doorposts: “It’s a trick,” he said in Italian. Short of breath, he could barely get the words out. “Those aren’t bombers.” With an effort he straightened up: “Spread the word,” and he disappeared.
Meanwhile, the roar of the planes came closer, making everyone’s hair stand on end. The vibration was stronger than before.
“Bastards,” muttered the French militant. “We thought of everything, prison, the firing squad, being gassed en masse in Buchenwald, but not this elementary trick of letting the strike collapse with a false alarm, with a fake air raid.” He sat slumped on the floor. “Could they have simultaneously exterminated the foreign workers in all the German factories who revolted on the same day? And what about military production? What would have happened to military production? Who would have manufactured their weapons for them? Their only option was to cause the strike to fail
. As simple as that! How did we not think of it, I mean…” He stared ahead, dazed. “It was the first move we should have expected…”
“We underestimated them,” a young Belgian woman admitted, she too stunned.
“They’re not bombers,” the other French and Italians crouched against the walls kept saying, terrified by the uncertainty that they might be, when the blasts rang out.
A woman rushed out the door, hands in her tangled hair, with a bestial wail that was chilling.
Lucia had hunkered under a sink, fear giving her gooseflesh.
“They’re not bombers, right?” a man croaked, leaping furiously to his feet. “The strike isn’t a suicide mission,” he spat at his companions, and with a sweeping gesture of his hand said: “Everybody to the Na 14’s armored shelter, let’s go!” He ducked out the door, doubled over to protect himself from shrapnel.
“Don’t fall for it!” implored the French soldier and the Belgian girl, forming a wall against those who wanted to leave. “Let’s think calmly,” Lucia spoke out, joining them. “It’s the tension of the strike that’s playing nasty tricks on us.” The Apulian who’d remained seated on the floor stretched out his legs, tripping a man and a woman, who tumbled to the ground.
In the uproar that followed, someone from outside thumped the backs of those barring the door, who quickly turned around. Everyone suddenly fell silent as the man, wearing an Arbeitsdienst (Labor Service) armband, stepped into the lavatory. “Don’t be afraid!” he fired out in German. “It’s the FLAK.” He smiled, pressing a hand to his chest, his face flushed, and with a brief wave of benediction, vanished.
“It’s not bombers, just antiaircraft guns shooting into the air,” Lucia translated.
“It’s a trap to make us burn alive.”
“No,” the veteran Frenchman thundered. “That man was telling the truth. He’s a Protestant pastor who sympathizes with us, I know him.”
They kept silent, worn out. In fact, the blasts were followed by a mixture of rat-tat-tats and unusual thuds, intense rounds from machine-gun belts; not the piercing hiss of bombs falling but a more muted pressure of air, typical of gunfire. They listened intently, but even the repeated reverberations were too closely spaced. But outside, the hustle and bustle and scurrying footsteps continued. The young Belgian woman left the lavatory to try to detain the foreigners who were running to the shelters. The Apulian, the French Resistance militant, Lucia, and a few others followed her.
“They’re firing into the air,” one of them shouted.
“A fake bombing,” another yelled loudly. People stopped, peered around, squinted up at the sky.
“Don’t let them trap you—it’s psychological warfare.”
Then the blasts of real bombs were heard, with the relentless hiss, the booms, the hollow thuds.
The confusion in people’s minds was immeasurable. (Only later did they find out that the bombs had been dropped intentionally in the open countryside, on a restricted area pitted with craters from repeated carpet-bombing.)
A few hundred foreigners remained in scanty groups in the lavatories. Lucia ran into Martine and Etienne, who took her with them.
Alain was leaning against the wall, eyes closed.
“Here’s your enemy,” Martine joked.
Alain made an effort to smile at her: “We’re fucked,” he said, but he couldn’t keep his tone light. “At forty years old, it’s tougher.”
By now convinced that hundreds, thousands of tons of explosives would be dropped by the American flying fortresses hurtling through the sky, they shuddered as a matter of course, apathetically.
But little by little the explosions diminished, the blasts lost their momentum until at 11:00 a.m. the all-clear signal (the Vorentwahnung) rang out again. Immediately a crackling sound, inexplicable at first, spread through the air. Then an amplified voice swept through the loudspeakers in all the workshops. Though clouded by the radio transmission, Lucia recognized the voice as belonging to Director Lopp.
He spoke gently but firmly. He said the war was intensifying and all the workers in the German factories were increasingly subjected to the threat of air strikes, regardless of nationalities and ranks, united in the same risk of death.
Sober, persuasive voices repeated the director’s words in different languages, in Dutch, French, Italian, Croatian, Russian, Polish, Greek, and Slovenian.
Lucia noted that the Russian translation had not been relegated to last, probably because of the numerical strength of the Osten.
It was essential that they remain united, Director Lopp went on, in order not to give in to the enemy forces, namely, to rich nations that hurled their weapons of death on women and children, on German citizens and foreign workers alike, on enemies and allies, in their attempt to wipe out civilization.
After the round of translations, Director Lopp, revealing a chink of conscious generosity, announced that despite the extreme rationing of the German people, an extraordinary measure had been taken.
The versions that followed without pause heightened the expectation.
“Today,” the director’s voice rose, “in all the canteens, for all foreign workers employed at IG Farben, there will be pea soup and a boiled egg apiece. I repeat, in all canteens at the midday meal, making no discrimination between nationalities and ranks, everyone—volunteers, deportees, prisoners of war from every country—will be entitled to pea soup and a boiled egg.”
As the loudspeakers continued to broadcast the communication in the internees’ languages, the streets of IG Farben filled with workers as swarms of people streamed toward the canteens.
A hundred fanatics tried in vain to oppose the tide: “This is when we must not give in.” But the famished workers were pleased with themselves, crying, “We won! They were afraid of us and they’re giving us an egg.”
“No!” the activists barked. “Only if we refuse their alms will they really be scared.” They had joined solidly together, arm in arm in several rows, at the junction where the streets for the East and West canteens branched off: Stanislaw, Grùscenka, the Apulian, Lucia, Johann, Martine, Etienne, Jacqueline, a Russian prisoner, Carla, her badogliano boyfriend, a Greek man, Alain, and many others. “Now the strike will really begin,” they chanted.
The German guards watched without intervening. Sure enough, the tide that pressed toward the canteens prevailed. The hordes streamed toward the smell of food, mouths watering.
Lucia, disconsolate, savored the pea soup in small spoonfuls, while Martine meticulously peeled her egg with silent tears on her haggard cheeks. Over the canteen’s loudspeaker, a male voice quietly repeated in French and Italian:
“The air attack was repelled. The danger has ceased. You can safely go back to work. And if the flying fortresses that could hamper supplies don’t return, tomorrow there will be a new distribution. Tomorrow, a herring apiece.”
Rome, 1975
PART 4
THE DEVIATION
I
There is a fact that I evaded. By so often saying that I had been deported to Dachau, I ended up believing it. But it’s not true. My companions were transferred to that Lager. Not me. I was repatriated.
Four days after the strike, on June 6, 1944, a Tuesday, I was stopped as I punched my card at the entrance to IG Farben and loaded into a police van, where I found Martine and Grùscenka. We just had time to exchange looks that said no, deny everything and that’s it. At the jail, the officer who transcribed our details patted us down and emptied our pockets—Martine had a penknife and Grùscenka a piece of string—informing us that we’d been accused of theft at the factory. At that, we looked at one another, reassured, since we hadn’t stolen anything for some weeks. But climbing the stairs, Martine muttered:
“We’re fucked.”
I was in front of her, and when I turned around quickly, she pushed me to keep going. Only at the fourth landing did she explain what she meant.
“When do they ever tell you why they arrested you? And ju
st now, a simple theft? We won’t get out alive.”
On the sixth floor, one of the two jailers who were escorting us led us down a windowless corridor, with bolted iron doors on either side.
He began turning one key after another in the three locks of the first door—the turns of the key were endless, screeching by fits and starts as the gears caught.
Martine came alongside me, touching my arm, and, looking at that iron door, her lips barely moving, said:
“Save yourself at least. Play your Fascist cards.”
I stared at her so deeply hurt that she shook her head almost imperceptibly: “You’ll never understand a thing,” she whispered.
The iron door opened, grinding on its hinges. A muted whiff of metal and urine spilled out; I gripped Martine’s fingers. Grùscenka, her arm grabbed by a jailer, was dragged past us, white-faced, a faint smile of goodbye in her eyes. She didn’t turn. More clanking from inside, out of sight.