By afternoon, they had reached the work camp, its boundaries marked out with double rows of barbed wire enclosing some newly built barracks and several previously existing structures. Processing was rapid, methodical.
“We have letters, from your Lieutenant Berg, in Yalta,” Ksenia held the documents out to the officer at the table. “For farm work. We volunteered.”
“Ja, klar.” He glanced at the pages, dropped them onto a stack at his elbow. “Of course.”
They were permitted to stay together, assigned, along with nine other families, to a low building that had once been a beer hall. The darkly paneled walls and wood floor still held a smoky, yeasty, not unpleasant aroma, though all counters and furnishings had been stripped out.
“Each family will stay in its own space,” the escorting corporal decreed, pointing to a grid of white lines painted on the floor. Clotheslines above the lines crisscrossed the room from wall to wall. “No cooking. Lights out at ten. Up at six. Sharp.”
“Are we to sleep on these?” Galina toed a stack of burlap-covered straw mattresses in the family’s allotted space, some stained blankets folded on top.
“As you see,” Ksenia said. “Help me with these blankets. It’s good we have a corner space.”
They draped the blankets on the clothesline, giving their “room” a semblance of privacy. Others were doing the same, talking in low voices among themselves. Children ran around the hall, weaving in and out of every grouping as if laying out the rules of a new game.
Supper, dispensed outside the kitchen door, was thin cabbage soup and a slice of grainy bread. For breakfast, the same bread, harder now, only made edible by soaking in bitter acorn “coffee” muddied with a bit of milk.
An open-bed truck took them and another thirty or so people, then, to an industrial area several kilometers away. The sun hung dully in a leaden sky that promised more snow.
“Heraus, alle,” the guard commanded when the truck stopped in front of a large factory. “Schnell. Everybody out.” It was a four-story rectangular building, not unlike a latter-day castle, with what looked like rounded grain silos at each corner for turrets and many tall, narrow windows cut into thick stone walls.
“What do they make here?” Filip asked the truck driver, who looked barely old enough to drive.
“Zement,” the boy replied. He jumped into the cab and slammed the door. “Cement.”
4
“SLOW DOWN.” THE MAN at Filip’s side plunged his shovel into the bin but came up with only half as much coal as it could hold.
“What?” Filip paused to wipe his face with his sleeve, then started in again, his shovel fully loaded, moving twice as fast as his wiry neighbor.
“Slow down. Po malu,” the other said again after the overseer went by. “Unless you’re eager to help the Fascists build more bunkers.”
It didn’t take Filip long to cultivate the illusion of working hard while producing little in the way of results; he quickly learned how to put his back into each shovel thrust but pitch fewer and fewer coals into the blazing furnace. Hadn’t his father often chided him for laziness? Now, this natural inclination served him well.
It was a dangerous game. If the factory fell short of production quotas, if it failed to deliver the required amount of cement on time, everyone suffered the consequences. Shorter rations, longer hours, tighter, more vigilant supervision, and, of course, no end of verbal abuse seasoned with the occasional beating.
The violence was almost entirely arbitrary. Anyone, at any time, could feel the crack of a baton against his head or back; shoving and kicking were so commonplace as to be barely noticed, by workers and guards alike. Whether the misdeeds were real or imagined made no difference.
Some misdeeds, like the bucketful of steel shavings and rusted nails that found its way, bucket and all, into the stone crusher, were real enough. The sabotage went unnoticed until the metal, melted by the kiln’s intense heat, fouled the morning’s batch, requiring cooling down and thorough scrubbing of the machinery before work could resume. The entire workforce endured two days without food, then half rations for another week, while working sixteen-hour shifts with no days off for a month.
“We can survive this,” the men said with grim satisfaction to one another. “But, damn, it feels good to slow them down, even a little.”
Filip had gone to the infirmary with a high fever the day the guards took their revenge. He returned to work an hour later, dosed with aspirin, to find Savko, a young Macedonian, dead on the floor.
He started to ask, but read the warning in the other men’s eyes, each going about his task with unaccustomed efficiency, stepping around the body with care. The guard shoved Filip’s shoulder with the flat of his hand. “Take his boots off. Then get back to work. Your sick day is over.”
Filip bent over the dead man, trying to ignore the blood pounding in his ears, willing his fingers to stop trembling. The boots were poorly made, the cheap leather scuffed and cracked; spots of mildew blossomed on them like buds on a vine. Jammed onto Savko’s bare feet, they were a tight fit. The left came off without too much effort, but Filip struggled to work the right one free, rocking it from side to side, kneeling on the grimy floor to get a better grip. When it gave way, the edge caught and broke a blister on Savko’s heel, oozing a snail’s trail of pus onto Filip’s hand.
The foot was still warm; the skin showed smooth and tawny between crusted patches of embedded dirt. Filip recoiled. He wiped his hand on the man’s pant leg, suppressing the bile rising in his throat. He felt faint with fever. To steady himself, he glanced sideways at Savko’s face. He’s only a boy, Filip realized, shocked to see the first tendrils of an adolescent beard curled against a dimpled chin.
In the truck heading back to camp, the men started talking. “He was crazy, that Savko. They’re all crazy, the Makedon. Wild,” said one, referring to the mountain people from Macedonia
“Why crazy?” another man asked. “Aren’t they all Yugoslav now?”
“Bah. Yugoslavia is not a country. Just a patched up mess of people the French and British couldn’t tell apart, so they lumped them all together and washed their hands of the southern Slav problem. And mark my words: you’ll see how the whole stew will disintegrate once their man Tito dies.”
“Dictators have big heads but small shoes,” the first man declared cryptically. “There’s always another one ready to step in.”
“But—” Filip tried to cut in, but the older men ignored him, caught up in their discussion, each eager to outdo the others in explaining his version of the world.
“Now the Serbians—” the first man started, shaking a calloused finger at the assembled circle, ready to make his point.
“Wait.” Filip, his patience at an end, raised his voice. “What happened? Will someone tell me?”
“You don’t know? Savko was up on the scaffolding, monitoring the paddles that stir the slurry. The guard was on the other side, his back turned, watching us worker ants below.”
“They like to do that,” someone observed.
“Yes. Well, he turned around just in time to see Savko pissing into the vat. Shot him in the head, on the spot.”