Deviation by Luce d'Eramo

Author:Luce d'Eramo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

V

For more than a year (Lucia would never have imagined this), a number of French internees had been planning a strike at IG Farben.

Alain was a French partisan who had gotten himself deported to Germany along with other maquisards like him, to organize an uprising of foreign workers; there were said to be about fifteen million men and women transported to the Third Reich, including six or seven million employed in industry.

Fifty-two guerrilla fighters, who together made up an entire command, had let themselves be rounded up by the occupying forces as military prisoners or ordinary civilians, making sure they were arrested at various times and places so as to be put on board trains headed to different cities. They were all highly skilled workers, certain of being hired at major industrial complexes. For reasons of control and logistical organization, foreign labor was concentrated in large factories that turned out parts, but absent in plants which produced finished military products. The task of the French militants was to ensure that an uprising of foreigners employed in the factories coincided with the Allied landing in Normandy, in order to weaken the Nazis on the home front and accelerate their surrender.

The Frenchmen communicated with one another in code, persuading some compassionate, innocent German to transcribe the messages in his own hand and mail the letters in his name.

The most sensitive information from their base of operations was reported to them verbally by people like Martine, whose volunteer status allowed her to choose her destination venue. Assisted by Etienne, Alain had informed and involved about a dozen French workers. Martine maintained contact with the others, since she had more freedom of movement as a volunteer.

The French militants had drawn a topographic map of the Lagers that spread over the plain on the west side of Frankfurt-Höchst, the side overlooking the Rhine.

There were four camps for prisoners of war, one beside the other, each with its own kitchen and its own Lagerführer, though jointly sharing some services such as disinfestation and access to the air-raid shelter, laid out in the usual arrangement of East and West: the two camps for the “Bolsheviks” and Polish inmates farther away from IG Farben, those of the French and Italian internees closer. And at the end of the row, isolated from everyone, the small camp of the Warsaw insurgents.

Across the road lay the barracks of volunteers and civilian workers who’d been rounded up, divided into two clusters of unequal density, with seven to eight thousand people in the camp of the “Slavs” and about half that number in that of the “Westerners.”

Drawing the human map of IG Farben had been more complex, not so much due to the irregular distribution of the buildings as to the mixture of peoples. The factories did not adhere to the sharp distinction between groups from the East and those from the West, on which the separation of the Lagers and the factory canteens was based. Workers with or without the triangle, military prisoners or civilian workers, were employed in the same factory though distinguished by levels.

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