CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
June 1944
Ruby was still imprisoned at Fresnes when she heard the news of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The end of the war, it seemed, was at hand. But how long would it take for the Allies to reach Paris? Would she survive that long?
Five and a half months into her pregnancy, her belly was growing, but the guards hadn’t noticed yet. In fact, they hardly seemed to notice her at all anymore. They’d tried to force the names of her associates out of her when they first captured her, but she’d maintained a steadfast denial, repeating that they were wrong, that she’d never worked for the Resistance, that she had no idea what they were talking about. She suspected the only reason she hadn’t been tortured or executed was that she was American.
Home was now a whitewashed cell ten feet long and six feet across with an iron cot attached to the wall and an open toilet in the corner. Every day, weak coffee was handed out in the morning, and just before noon, the soup cart came by. The same bland potage was served at dinner along with a small piece of bread. The prisoners were given minuscule amounts of cheese or meat twice a week, and sometimes, there were Red Cross food parcels filled with treats like chocolate, jam, and crackers. Some prisoners received clothing or food from relatives, but of course Charlotte couldn’t come forward with a delivery without revealing herself. Ruby received packages just twice, from her “cousin” Lucien, who wrote that his wife was fine and in good spirits. She knew it was his way of telling her that Charlotte was alive and well, and that knowledge brought her far more comfort and warmth than the wool socks and bread he sent.
Twice a week, the prisoners were taken into the courtyard for twenty minutes of exercise. Communication with prisoners from other cellblocks was forbidden, but Ruby was heartened to catch glimpses of Laure twice during the first few weeks. After that, the raven-haired courier was gone, and Ruby had no way of knowing whether she’d been released, sent east, or executed. She prayed for the first but knew the last was far more likely.
Ruby found she could communicate with the prisoners in the adjoining cells by speaking close to the faucets; somehow, the pipes went through the walls and carried sound next door. She learned that the woman to her right was a twenty-three-year-old named Angelique, accused of helping to distribute a Resistance newsletter. To her left was Jacqueline, who was forty-two and suspected only of being the girlfriend of a man who worked on one of the escape lines. Both women refused to admit any wrongdoing, and they were beaten regularly for it. Ruby found strength in their steadfast resistance, and she tried to draw upon that inspiration in her darkest hours.
And there were many dark hours. She was by herself for most of the day, but she wasn’t really alone, for she had the baby in her belly. Thomas’s baby, her source of strength. And if she was grateful to the Germans for anything, it was that they never tried to starve her as a tactic to make her talk. They took away every other freedom they could, but the fact that she was still able to feed herself meant that her baby was able to grow. At night, when she couldn’t sleep, she sang softly to her belly and hoped that the baby wasn’t somehow absorbing her fears. She prayed for a better life for her child, and she begged God each night to continue to conceal the pregnancy.
There were four women who had babies with them and had been allowed to remain at Fresnes, but still, Ruby hesitated to give up her secret. She didn’t know what the other women had been accused of, but she suspected their alleged transgressions were more minor than hers, for the guards left them alone.
In mid-June, she was moved to the prison at Romainville, on the edge of Paris, which sent chills down her spine. She knew that this was the place where prisoners were taken before being deported to Germany. On the way into the prison, she had to sit down with one of the commanders, a hulking Nazi soldier who looked blank and unsympathetic as he quickly skimmed her file.
“I’m American,” she said, trying to sound confident. “You can’t send me east. I have rights.”
He merely laughed and said, “None of you have rights. Haven’t you worked that out by now?”
For a week and a half, she languished in a cell with nine other women, all of whom were just as worried as she was about what was coming next. Romainville should have seemed a pleasure after Fresnes—after all, they were allowed to socialize with each other, and their cells even had windows, which looked out on the prison yard—but the 4:00 A.M. roll call each day ruined any chance Ruby had at happiness. Every morning, the prisoners were marched into the prison yard, and thirty or forty names were read out. These women were on the list to be deported east, and most of them stepped forward with heads held high. Some shouted “Vive la France!” and others simply smiled bravely and waved good-bye. All of them seemed to be facing the future with courage. Ruby didn’t know how they did it.
And then, on June 25, her name was called. She didn’t dare look back at the others, for fear of crying. She felt so much weaker than they were; she wanted to scream and rage and cry out that this wasn’t fair, that this was France, that the Germans had no right to take her away. But there would be no point in any of that, and she knew it. She was on her own.
Ruby was loaded onto a bus full of other women, all of whom were silent as they made their way through the familiar streets of Paris. Ruby stared out the window and searched the faces of passersby, hoping against hope to see Charlotte or Lucien or even Monsieur Savatier, but of course it was only a sea of strangers, many of them staring with detachment as if the same couldn’t possibly happen to them.
At the Gare de Pantin, on the northeast edge of the city, the SS shoved the women into trains, sixty to a car. There was straw on the floors and very little ventilation from the tiny slit windows above. There was an air of fear as they pulled out of the station, and soon that fear was tinged with the pungent scent of urine from the overflowing tin toilet in the corner.
For the next few days, the train stopped frequently, sometimes for hours at a time, as it chugged slowly east. Twice a day, the prisoners were let out briefly, with armed guards standing by, to relieve themselves in fields. A few tried to flee, but they were shot dead on the spot. Ruby simply tried to blend in with the others, hiding her belly as the transport drew closer to the German border. There were rumors that children and pregnant women were being shot upon arrival at the concentration camps. She didn’t know if this was true, but she couldn’t risk anyone noticing her condition. As long as she was still in France, as long as she could hear bombs dropping in the distance, Ruby held on to the hope that they could be rescued.
Then, on June 30, her mother’s birthday, the train passed through the eastern French city of Nancy and finally, inevitably, into Germany. Once the French border had disappeared behind them, Ruby’s heart sank. They were in Hitler’s land now. And as they rolled farther into Nazi territory, Ruby felt a heavy sense of certainty. There would be no reprieve. She had to do all she could to protect herself and her child until the Allies came.
RAVENSBRüCK—THE CAMP WHERE RUBY AND the other prisoners were taken—was hot. Blisteringly hot. On the day of their arrival, Ruby and the other women were marched through a town called Fürstenberg, some fifty miles north of Berlin, up and down dusty hills and winding roads until they finally reached the enormous green gates of an expansive prison camp. Barracks seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, and the women who were already imprisoned there walked back and forth, pushing carts and pulling wagons with hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, and emaciated limbs. It was like something out of a Bela Lugosi horror movie, and Ruby had to pinch herself as a reminder that in fact this was real life. Her life. Her stomach lurched, and she had to bite her tongue to avoid vomiting in the dirt.
Ruby was horrified when the arriving prisoners were ordered into a huge building and told to undress. What if someone noticed her belly? But a heavy woman who had been near her on the train moved toward her as they entered the building and took her arm. “You are pregnant?” the woman whispered in French.
Ruby hesitated. “Is it obvious?” Tears clouded her vision. Had she been fooling herself to think she could get away with concealing it?
“Stand behind me,” the woman said firmly. “We will not let them see. We cannot let them see.”
“Thank you,” Ruby whispered. She held her breath as she cowered, naked and terrified, behind the woman.
“I have two daughters of my own,” the woman said softly as they inched forward. “They are around your age. I pray every day for their survival; as a mother, it is the most important thing in the world, is it not?”
“Yes,” Ruby managed. “Yes, it is.”
Ruby shuffled with the rest of the prisoners through several stations, where they were ordered to hand over their clothes, their jewelry, and all their belongings to the guards. In another room, she was forcibly separated from the kind woman and told to climb onto a table. She wanted to scream as a hawk-faced female guard probed between her legs. But the exam was a cursory one, and as Ruby was ushered on, quaking with relief, she realized that every woman who came into the room was being subjected to the same indignity. The guards were checking to make sure they hadn’t hidden any valuables inside their bodies.
Next, Ruby fell into a line to have her head shaved, and she sobbed as her auburn hair fell in glossy ringlets to the floor. The tears earned her a slap across the face, and then, nearly bald and shivering, she was sent into another room, where she was shoved under a shower, handed a tiny towel, and given a pair of dirty underpants and a thin cotton dress with an X sewn onto both the back and the front.
She saw the kind woman again as the prisoners were herded into the huge barrack that would become their home. There were dirty straw mattresses, roughly five feet wide, arranged in bunk formations three high, and the women were told they would be sleeping three to a bed. The older woman sidled over to a dazed Ruby and took her hand. “You are all right?” she asked.
Ruby could only nod; she still couldn’t understand how the physical examination had failed to reveal her condition.
“Thank God for that,” the woman said. “He must have heard our prayers.”
But as the days turned into weeks, Ruby began to wonder whether God could hear them at all here or whether all of Germany was somehow a void from which no prayers could escape. She was sent to work at first on a crew that leveled sand dunes. It was hard, grueling labor under the watchful gaze of a female guard with a face like a bulldog’s. They worked for nearly twelve hours each day, with very few breaks, and Ruby worried constantly that the food she was given wouldn’t be enough to keep the baby alive. Every day, she inhaled a small amount of rutabaga or beet soup, a tiny portion of bread, and some watery grain coffee. Once a week, the meager rations were supplemented with a slice of sausage or an ounce of cheese. Ruby knew she was losing weight quickly. Her belly was still growing, and she was relieved to know that the baby, at least, was receiving some nourishment. But it came at Ruby’s expense. The only saving grace was that with the near starvation, Ruby’s pregnancy wasn’t readily apparent, although it should have been by now.
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.