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Gerlitz, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are transported from Essen to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory. For ten hours a day, six days a week, they disassemble massive forging presses and stack the usable metal in crates to be loaded onto train cars. Unscrewing, sawing, hauling. Most days Frau Elena works close by, wearing a torn ski jacket she has found, mumbling to herself in French or singing songs from childhood. They live above a printing company abandoned a month before. Hundreds of crates of misprinted dictionaries are stacked in the halls, and the girls burn them page by page in the potbelly stove. Yesterday Dankeswort, Dankesworte, Dankgebet, Dankopfer. Today Frauenverband, Frauenverein, Frauenvorsteher, Frauenwahlrecht. For meals they have cabbage and barley in the factory canteen at noon, endless ration lines
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