“And who the fuck did you know to get in here?” Little Bear asked in her gravelly tone.
Wayne was taken aback by the question. Did she suspect something amiss? “Know? What do you mean?” he said.
Wayne owed no explanations to this woman who looked like she could take on any man in a fistfight and hold her own. He also wondered where she got the name Little Bear. Was she an American Indian? Wayne could not detect any features on her that might have been Indian and he was not about to ask her about it.
“What do you think I mean?” Little Bear snapped at Wayne. “I know you have a connection in order to work in here. Never mind. Let me show you what you got to do before I get sick of your ugly face. Sit your ass down.”
Wayne sat down on an empty chair next to the familiar woman whose face he was still trying to place. He didn’t know what that Little Bear’s problem was, but he didn’t want to piss her off anymore.
Little Bear grabbed one of the electronic components out of the large box of likewise components that was resting on the enormous table in front of the workers. “Your job is to take one of these,” she said and then picked up a different component out of another box, “and one of these and screw them together.” With a screwdriver, Little Bear screwed the two small electronic devices together. “Is that too hard for you?” she said slowly as if speaking to a child.
“No.”
“All of these parts are coded,” Little Bear continued in her harsh way, “so if something’s not done right, I’ll know where it came from and you’ll be back to the shithole that you came from.” She swaggered off.
Wayne began to perform his assigned task. The other workers at his table were silently doing similar jobs to what he was performing, which consisted of attaching various electronic elements to one another. Some of the workers were busy using soldering irons to join wires from the electronic devices together.
A number of times Wayne noticed as he worked on his menial task, out of the corner of his eye, that the woman who he was certain he knew from somewhere would be staring at him, but when he looked directly at her, she would turn away.
Wayne was elated to have a job where he was allowed to sit down, out of the cold. He thought about how the painful blisters that had populated his feet and hands would finally go away. The work he was performing required no brainpower at all, so his thoughts easily drifted to other, better, times and places. He remembered hanging out with his friends back in New York when he was growing up, of visiting his late grandparents in Miami Beach, and, of course, there were so many special memories of Lauren. And, after an hour of fastening electronic gizmos together of which he had no idea of what their purpose was for, it hit him like a bolt of lightning during a spring thunderstorm that came crashing down out of the sky. The last time Wayne had seen her she possessed a beautiful head of long dark hair that ran down past her shoulders and not the standard-issue buzzcut that she was currently wearing. She had slept in his arms on that crowded train during that awful journey to Hollenburg. He had not thought of her since that wretched day which seemed to him so long ago.
Wayne turned to her and said, “Linda, forgive me, my memory isn’t…”
“Be quiet. Don’t talk now,” she interrupted.
Wayne bit his tongue and looked around. No one was talking. That rule hadn’t changed from the quarry.
The morning slowly dragged on and Wayne began counting the seconds off till lunch. He looked around for a clock. There was none. His stomach growling told him that lunchtime had to be creeping up. Wayne estimated that he had been working for between four and five hours when a loud whistle came beaming through a loudspeaker. With it, the laborers, including Little Bear and Linda, stood up and began to quietly walk, single file, to a destination Wayne did not know, but he prayed that it was a meal.
Wayne followed the members of his work detail to a small fenced in outdoor area that was located adjacent to the rear of the factory. It was a crush of people in too small an area, as the prisoner workers from all of the work details in the plant lined up for the common lunch of a soup and bread ration. Wayne was close to the end of the food line. He feared that the lunch rations would be depleted before the turn to receive his came up. Unlike the quarry, Wayne pleasantly found out, there would be enough meal rations available for every prisoner at the munitions plant. Maybe, the slave laborers at his new place of work were considered by the SS to be more indispensable than the lowly men whom worked with their primitive tools in the quarry.
“Wayne,” Linda called out from where she sat on the concrete ground once she saw Wayne had his meal ration.
Wayne walked through the mass of men and women quietly sitting on the ground eating their treasured daily lunches. Wayne sat down beside Linda. Linda hugged Wayne tightly and kept her arms wrapped around his upper body for a full two minutes. “It’s good to see you,” he told her, not really sure of what to say.
“Wayne, I have thought about you so much,” Linda said as she released him from her arms. “I am so glad to see you.”
“I’m sorry about this morning, Wayne,” Linda said. “If Ari or Little Bear found out we already knew each other, then you’d be put on a separate work detail from me. You have to be careful about talking at the work stations — they’re bugged.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Wayne said and started to ingest his inadequate amount of rations called a meal. “Where are you interred?”
Linda answered, “Ravensbruck, a women’s camp not far from here. I asked some of the men here if they knew you, but they didn’t. I was curious as to what happened to you.”
“I have been holed up at the lovely resort town known as Hollenburg,” Wayne said in a sarcastic tone. “No heat, no phones, no cable television, hell, no television at all. But, there’s no extra charge for the torture handed out and the supreme privilege to bust your butt slaving in a quarry from dawn to dusk every damn day. But, then again, what should I be moping about? I mean,” he chuckled, “after all, I did need to take off a couple of pounds.”
“I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Linda said.
“Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me from losing my mind.” Wayne swallowed his lukewarm soup in one big gulp. “How’s life in the women’s camp? Is it any more civilized than Hollenburg?” he asked.
“From what I hear, the same shit goes on in the camps, no matter if it’s a men’s camp or a women’s camp. How’d you end up here?”
“It’s a long story,” Wayne replied.
An identical loud whistle signaled the end of lunchtime for the prisoners. Wayne looked at the loudspeaker fastened high up on the side of the dreary brick building and thought about what a satisfying feeling it would be if he could snip the wire that attached it to the rest of the public address system at the plant. If he could snip the wires to the loudspeakers in Hollenburg too. The snakelike black wires that brought sound to the speakers that woke him so early from his much needed sleep each morning with the sun rising over the horizon. The same lurking wires that sometimes woke him and the other prisoners in camp in the middle of the night for senseless fatigue drills, which included carrying heavy sacks of sand, stone, manure, or soil around camp, doing endless pushups, and scrubbing down the outsides of the barracks in the bitter cold of a winter night.
The workers marched single file, under the always-watchful eyes of the guards, back into the tremendous munitions factory. “By the way, do you know what those things are that I’ve been putting together all morning?” Wayne asked Linda, curious to know exactly what it was that he had been assembling.