Russia at war 1941-1945

rabbit skins. We were given no gloves and our shoes also were falling to pieces. Our hands got into a terrible condition with handling those rabbit skins and treating them in some kind of acid." Galina Ivanovna showed her hands; they were small and well-shaped, but they looked scarred and the flesh round the nails seemed to have been eaten away.

"Yes," she went on, "I lived in that factory barracks for eight months and twenty days; and to give you an idea of the condition in which we girls were, I'll say something which may seem indelicate—but I hope you'll understand. 180 girls were working there, and

most of them didn't have what girls have every month; the barracks were thirty yards away from the factory, and we never got outside the factory grounds, except on our 'day off'. We were under constant guard.

"We worked ten or twelve hours a day, and on our 'day off' we were always taken to the goods station to unload railway trucks. We were made to wear an 'Ost' badge—a blue

badge with white lettering—but were never allowed to go into town. They actually

charged us fifty pfennigs for the badge. For seven days' work we received one mark

twenty pfennigs, and for fifty pfennigs we bought Sprudel—soda water—there was

nothing else we could buy. I remembered now how Graf Spretti had told us that we'd

wear silk stockings, and have 100 marks a week. At first when we arrived, we were

promised new clothes and blankets; all we got was one blanket each, and once a fortnight they'd give us a tiny bit of soap with which to wash ourselves and wash our clothes. In our part of the barracks there were 180 girls, but in the other parts of the building there were 200 more women, all Ukrainians, or from Kursk, and 200 lads, from fifteen to

twenty-three. What they gave us to eat was blue cabbage, turnips and sometimes some

spinach, and 100 grammes per day of margarine to cook the stuff in—100 grammes for

100 people, that is, one gramme per day. Really nourishing, what! In other buildings there were Czechs and Poles and Greeks, and Belgians, and Frenchmen. We weren't

allowed to speak to them— but we did all the same.

"The Poles and the French were better off than we were. They received twenty-five to thirty-five marks a week. The Poles had to wear a badge with a yellow 'P', the Belgians and the French were not expected to wear any badge. No difference was made between

Ukrainians and Russians—both were treated the same. The Belgians and the Czechs, the Frenchmen and the Italians were all very decent to us, and gave us things. The Poles were more aloof. The Italians spoke longingly of macaroni.

"We used to meet the other girls in the lavatory, and there we'd talk—talk in bad German.

One day one of the Italian girls said to me: 'You are even unluckier than we are. They say you are being treated like this because you are Communists. But, believe me, we are far more Communist than you are. Come on, let's sing the International. And there, in the ladies' lavatory, the two of us softly sang the International, each to her own words.

"We once even threatened a hunger strike when the food had become altogether

impossible, and we were developing scurvy so that our hands and arms swelled and our eyebrows started falling out, and the hair on our heads got all brittle...

"During air raids we were all driven into a big basement covered over with cement, and the door was locked from outside. The Germans went to their own shelter. When the airraid warning started, the chefs, as they were called, came rushing in, brandishing whips, and drove us into the cellar. I lived through seven or eight big raids. One big bomb fell near the cathedral of Ulm, and wrecked the Rathaus, and demolished a small factory

where they made some kind of metal tubing; 120 of our Ukrainians who were working

there, were killed..."

"But what were the Germans like with whom you had to work?" I asked.

Galina Ivanovna merely screwed up her face. "There was one fat German in our factory.

He once came into our barracks, and said: 'Ah, Ukrainian girls,' and said he liked

Ukrainian songs, and would we sing to him. So we said: 'Alright, only we don't get much to eat, and will you give us something if we sing.' So he said yes. So we sang, in the dark miserable barracks, and as we sang the tears trickled down our faces. When we had

finished, he said: 'That was very nice.' And he pulled out a five mark note and asked for three marks change." Galina laughed angrily. "As if he didn't know we had nothing. Still, he insisted, so we scraped together what pfennigs we had, and it came to two marks

thirty. He seemed annoyed it wasn't more, but took the change and went away. "And then," she went on, "there was a foreman who worked in our workshop. He had a tiny bit of ground near our barracks, where he grew vegetables. He was a fat man with a shaved head and a concertina neck. What a fuss he made of his plot! He managed to grow a