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.
In her third week at the factory, Herr Hartmann pulled Ruby aside and asked if she’d like him to send a letter for her. “Your family must be very worried about you,” he said. She wondered, for a split second, if it was a trap, a false invitation designed to bait her into breaking the rules. But his eyes were as kind as ever, and after a moment, she whispered, “Yes,” her heart soaring. To know that there was at least a chance she’d be able to get word to her parents would be worth the risk. “But I don’t have any paper or a pen.”
He assured her he would provide both the following day. True to his word, he slipped her two sheets of paper and a pen on her visit to the corner the next morning, and that night, while her two bunkmates slept, she wrote by the light of the moon. She kept the letter light and devoid of most personal information and negative commentary, because there was always the chance that it would be confiscated.
Dearest Mother and Father,
Words cannot express how much I miss the both of you. I think of you all the time, and I dream of the day I’ll be able to see you again. In the interim, please know I’m all right. I am in a prison camp in Germany at the moment, but you mustn’t worry. Marcel died in 1941, but my cousin is in good health. She’s fifteen years old now, in fact. She can explain everything to you. Please do all you can to bring her to the States and to look after her if something should happen to me. Until we meet again, please know that it is my thoughts of you and of home that sustain me.
My deepest love always,
Ruby
She knew she couldn’t mention the baby, and she debated for at least an hour before deciding to include the verbiage about a cousin. She knew it would baffle her parents, but she hoped that if she were to perish in Germany, Charlotte would somehow find her way to them, and that they would understand who the girl was and how much Ruby had loved her. To mention any more, though, would be to put Charlotte in danger.
Thinking of Charlotte was painful. At least Ruby could fight to the death to protect the baby in her womb. Charlotte, by contrast, was hundreds of miles away. For all Ruby knew, Charlotte could have been picked up already, shot to death. Ruby gagged and heaved at the thought and tried to push it away, but she couldn’t sleep that night without seeing Charlotte being tortured.
“Are you all right?” Nadia asked her the next day after their contingent of prisoners had been marched from Ravensbrück to the factory in the hazy light of early morning. They settled next to each other on the assembly line and whispered, as they often did, when the guards’ backs were turned.
“I’m just thinking of someone I left behind,” Ruby replied. The letter to her parents was folded and pressed into her underclothes, just in case she was searched on the way in, but the guards seemed distracted this morning.