“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 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,