Samuel had kept his promise. Wayne, without any explanation given by the prisoner detail leader, was transferred to the new munitions plant. Wayne and the other prisoners were bussed to the plant under heavy guard. He recognized four of the two-dozen silent men on the rickety bus from his barracks. He didn’t know their names, or ever really socialized with them, but they were familiar. There was an air of excitement throughout the bus. It felt great to Wayne to leave the camp for the first time since he had been interned there, even if it was just to travel to work.
As the bus pulled up in front of the munitions factory, Wayne observed how dreary and depressing the new plant looked. The size of the windowless factory was enormous, measuring over twenty-seven thousand square meters. The munitions plant was one of seven new ones that the Reich had built because of escalating Japanese threats. Armaments were built in the munitions plants and stored in regional sites nearby military bases. The Germans carried out their weapons production and distribution with efficiency of a well-oiled machine.
The laborers were led off the bus, through a metal detector, and into the vast building. Ari, the detail leader for the factory, was in charge of all work allocation for the prisoners. Inmates were shipped in six days a week from the large pool of men’s and women’s labor camps that were located within a hundred kilometer radius of the plant. Ari had lived most of his life as a concentration camp prisoner. He was a very hard worker, as well as honest, and had impressed his superiors enough so that he was steadily promoted into important positions of responsibility, despite being a prisoner himself.
Ari the new workers into the plant. As Wayne approached, he noticed something familiant about him.
Ari put his hand out, “I’m Ari.”
Wayne shook his hand and said, “Wayne. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Ari said, “Samuel tells me that you’re a good, hard-working guy. Just be productive and nobody will bother you here. Come on, let me show you to your workstation.”
As Ari led Wayne through the munitions factory, Wayne looked around the big building in awe. It seemed to go on forever. Everybody that Wayne passed by kept their eyes firmly on their work. The guards posted throughout the plant seemed watchful, but they didn’t seem to have the twisted, sadistic look on their faces like the guards back in Hollenburg. This was a new, better place Wayne would be spending his long days.
Ari halted Wayne at a workstation, where half a dozen prisoners, male and female, were busy working on electronic gadgets. Wayne thought one of the women looked familiar to him. Where had he seen her before? Her short dark hair tugged at his memory. Wayne ran through a quick mental checklist. NYU? No. High school? No. Hometown? No. Summer job? No. Nothing registered. The woman was staring back at Wayne, too.
“Do you two know each other?” Ari asked.
The young, attractive woman answered, “I have never seen this guy before.”
“Little Bear,” Ari called out.
A tall, tough looking woman, dressed the same as the other prisoners in her blue worn out slacks, blue denim shirt, and dull black shoes walked over.
“Little Bear,” Ari said, “this is Wayne.” He turned to Wayne and informed him, “Little Bear’s in charge of this work station. She’ll show you what to do. Take care.”
As Ari strolled off to attend to his numerous daily tasks, Wayne called out to him, “Thank you, Ari.”
Wayne felt extremely grateful to Ari for acting as his savior and rescuing him from the quarry. He was sure that if he had continued at the quarry, he would have quickly died one way or another.
“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
