The Room on Rue Amélie

by Kristin Harmel

  On her second week at Ravensbrück, Ruby’s dorm was flooded with two dozen new arrivals, women from Russia who came in with their freshly shorn heads held high. At first, the French women Ruby had arrived with bristled at the intrusion, and Ruby was afraid that there would be an argument. But one of the Russians—a young woman named Nadia, whose high cheekbones and clear green eyes distinguished her as beautiful even in this hellhole—spoke French and managed to defuse any misunderstanding. “We are all in the same situation,” she said in a tone that was impossibly soothing. “We are friends, all of us, united against a common enemy. Let us work together.”

  On the third day after the Russians arrived, Nadia approached Ruby. “You are not French. Yet you are with the French prisoners. Why?”

  “I’m American,” Ruby said. “But I’ve lived in France for several years now.”

  “Why?” Nadia asked again, her gaze sharp and penetrating.

  “I married a Frenchman. And when the war started, I couldn’t bear to leave. I—I didn’t realize that things would get so bad.”

  “If you were to do it over again, would you go home? Before the war began?”

  “No. I think perhaps I did some good before I was arrested.” Ruby also knew that if she’d gone home, she would never have helped save Charlotte. Or met Lucien or Thomas. And she wouldn’t be carrying Thomas’s baby right now. The way things had unfolded felt predestined somehow, even if she couldn’t imagine the reason.

  “And you are here why?” Nadia’s questions were unrelenting, but her eyes had turned kinder.

  “I was arrested on suspicion of being part of an underground escape line for Allied pilots.”

  “And are the accusations true?”

  Ruby smiled slightly. “Of course not.”

  But the look they exchanged told a different story, and Ruby knew that Nadia understood. Ruby had put her neck out and had been caught, something she could never admit aloud.

  “I see,” Nadia said.

  “And you? Why are you here?”

  The woman smiled. “I, too, was accused of helping people to escape. Of course I confess nothing, but there are perhaps five hundred men who might tell a different story.”

  Ruby stared at her. Was she saying she had helped five hundred men escape the Nazis? “Well,” Ruby said at last, “it is good we are both so honest and obedient. Just think what would have happened if we’d actually been involved in undermining the enemy.”

  Nadia grinned. “Yes, just think.”

  The next morning, when they were given their rations for the day, Nadia sidled up beside Ruby and pressed half of her bread into Ruby’s hand.

  “Why?” Ruby asked, trying to hand the bread back. “You need your strength too.”

  But Nadia turned away, smiling at Ruby over her shoulder. “There are two of you,” she said, glancing at Ruby’s belly, “and only one of me.”

  She had disappeared into a swarm of other prisoners by the time Ruby recovered enough to respond. Was her pregnancy really that obvious by now? And if so, why hadn’t the guards noticed? She wasn’t sure if she could, in good conscience, accept another woman’s bread. But she was hungry, so hungry. Nadia was already gone. And surely, just this once, it would be okay.

  Ruby stuffed the bread into her mouth before she could change her mind, and as she set off for the dunes with the rest of her work crew, she touched her belly and hoped her baby was getting the nourishment she needed to survive.

  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 R
uby 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.

  “Your beau?”

  Ruby smiled. “No. There is a man, but . . .” She trailed off and shook her head. How could she explain Thomas to anyone? It all still felt like a dream to her, like he’d never been real at all. “No, Nadia, I was thinking of a girl who’s very important to me. Her parents left her with me two years ago, when they were taken, and she’s become like a sister to me. Maybe a daughter, even. I worry about her every day.”

  “And there is someone hiding her?”

  “There is a boy looking out for her. He’s only sixteen, but he loves her.”

  Nadia’s expression softened. “How extraordinary to find love in the midst of war.”

  Ruby nodded, again thinking of Thomas. “Extraordinary indeed.”

  “She will be all right, then.”

  Ruby had to laugh at the certainty in her friend’s voice. “I wish I had your optimism. You seem so sure about the future.”

  A guard passed by then, glaring at them, and Ruby pretended to be deeply absorbed in her work. When he was gone, Nadia nudged her. “I am not sure of anything. But if we don’t have hope, we don’t have anything.”

  “I wish I had your hope, then.”

  “You do,” Nadia said. At Ruby’s confused expression, she smiled. “That is what my name means. Hope. So as long as you have Nadia, you have hope.”

  Ruby smiled. It was a nice thought, the idea that hope itself could be embodied in a person. She was silent for a moment as another guard passed by. “Herr Hartmann has offered to send a letter home to my parents for me. You don’t think it’s a trap, do you?”

  Nadia bit her lip. “No, I do not. I think he is a good man who feels terrible about the things that are happening to us.”

  “Then why doesn’t he do something to stop it?”

  “You don’t think he wants to? You don’t think there are many Germans who want to? I think that in a place like this, the system itself has grown so huge that it’s impossible to stop. Like a snowball that starts at the top of a mountain and has turned into a boulder by the time it reaches the bottom. I think, though, that there are people like Herr Hartmann trying to make a difference on a smaller level, with people like us. I think you can trust him.”

  “So do I.”

  Later that afternoon, Ruby passed by Herr Hartmann in the corner of the factory and slipped him the letter. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “It is the least I can do, Ruby,” he said gravely. “None of you should have to endure this.”

  “But how can you stand to work for the Gestapo? To run an assembly line that produces weapons for the Nazis?”

  He frowned, and for a moment, she was sure she had overstepped her bounds. But after a pause, he shook his head. “I manage just enough breakdowns in the assembly line that I slow the production of weapons. It’s not much, Ruby, but it’s something. We all must do what we can, don’t you think? It is the only way good has a chance of winning in the end.”

  BY MID-AUGUST, RUBY HAD HEARD that prisoners who could no longer pull their weight were being killed immediately, their bodies cremated in enormous furnaces that sent cruel clouds of black smoke belching into the sky. The smell of burning flesh lingered in the air.

  Ruby was nearly eight months pregnant, but she didn’t look that way. Her belly was half the size it had been during her first pregnancy. She was only five or six weeks away from being full-term, and yet if she stood just the right way, the cotton of her loose dress skimmed the air, keeping her secret safe. The guards at the factory were distracted much of the time anyhow, and they didn’t seem to be as focused on abusing the prisoners as the guards inside the camp had been.

  Death no longer lurked around the corner quite as hungrily as it had when Ruby had worked inside the main camp. But at the same time, falling ill would land a prisoner back inside the gates, and if you remained in the hospital block for too long, the rumor was that you were sent directly to your death. That’s what had happened to Denise, a young, quiet French girl who worked several stations down from Ruby on the assembly line. One day, she’d been coughing; the next, she was gone. It had taken a week before word came back that she’d been diagnosed with rheumatic fever and condemned to die. The factory workers had held a secret moment of silence for her on Tuesday, and by the end of that day, Ruby was horrified to realize that she, too, had a nagging tickle in her throat.

  “I think I might be getting ill,” she said to Nadia that night as they settled down to sleep. Her throat was raw and scratchy, and she could feel herself beginning to perspire.

  Nadia put a cool hand on her forehead. “Ruby, you’re burning up.”

  “Fever?”

  Nadia nodded, her expression grave.

  Ruby struggled upright. “But I can’t be sick. My illness could hurt the baby.”

  Nadia frowned. “I am more conce
rned about what will happen if they bring you to the hospital block. They certainly won’t miss your pregnancy this time.” She was silent for a moment. “You must tell Herr Hartmann.”

  “What?”

  “You must tell him,” Nadia said more insistently. “He has helped you before, Ruby. He will not let you die.”

  “But what can he do?” Ruby was crying now. She’d been strong for such a long time, but she was suddenly so tired. She felt the heat of her fever surge within her.

  “I don’t know. But I think it is your only chance.”

  The next morning, Ruby felt even worse. Her face was hot, and the world seemed to be spinning. Before she left the barracks, she put her hands on her belly and whispered a prayer. “I don’t know if you can hear me, God, but please, save my baby.” She bit back tears, splashed water on her face, and headed out to roll call, praying that the guards wouldn’t notice her illness.

  Fortunately, they didn’t, but that meant only a brief reprieve. Ruby could tell, as the morning wore on, that she was getting worse. Her hands shook as she tried to piece together electrical parts, and she could feel sweat dripping from her brow. Her mouth was dry, so dry, and she thought that if she dared close her eyes, she might never open them again.

  “You must go to Herr Hartmann now,” Nadia whispered as midday approached. “You have no choice, Ruby. The guards will notice your condition very soon if you do not.”

  “It is my only option?” Ruby asked.

  Nadia nodded. “I think so, yes.”

  And so Ruby rose shakily after the next time the guard walked by, and she made her way toward the back corner of the building, where she’d seen Herr Hartmann heading a few minutes earlier. It was a struggle to walk straight without leaning into the wall. She had to concentrate hard so that the floor in front of her didn’t reach up to drag her down. By some miracle, she found Herr Hartmann alone, going over several pages of notes with a furrowed brow. He looked up when she approached. “Ruby!” he said, smiling. But his expression quickly turned as she stumbled forward. “My God,” he said, reaching out a hand to steady her. “What’s wrong?”