A Feather on the Water(15)

Some of the people who had lined up outside the office had simply come to beg for help to locate missing relatives. Kitty had once again surprised Martha with a maturity beyond her years when she explained that there were lists published each week by the Red Cross and that she would get them sent to the camp and display them for everyone to see.

“How did you know about those lists?” Martha asked when the last person in line had left the office.

“I heard about them in England.” Kitty turned away, opening a drawer in one of the filing cabinets to replace the remaining forms. “Someone I worked with in Manchester was trying to trace family in Germany.”

Martha nodded, staring at the rubber stamp on the desk in front of her. She knew that she was going to have to put everything she had seen and heard out of her mind if she was going to get through what needed to be done: there were the blockhouses to inspect, the supplies in the warehouse to check out—and she wanted to talk to the people who worked in the kitchens to find out how the food was distributed to the DPs.

Talk. The word mocked her. How was she going to run this place if she couldn’t even communicate with the inhabitants of the camp? She could hardly expect Kitty to follow her around like a dog on a leash, always on hand to translate.

“I want you to have the time to help people find their relatives,” Martha said. “Apart from food and shelter, it’s the single most important thing we can do for them. But this morning has shown me how little I can do without a translator.” She gave Kitty a wry look. “How long would it take for you to teach me Polish? Just the basics . . .”

“That depends,” Kitty replied.

“On what?”

“On how many hours a day you put in. And if you have an ear for languages. But there must be people here who speak some English.”

Martha nodded. “We just have to find them.” She picked up the receiver of the field telephone—a strange-looking contraption like a large battery with bells on top. She turned one switch, then another, before she heard a crackly voice say: “Command post.”

“Hello . . . it’s Assistant Director Radford here. Can you put me through to Major McMahon?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am; he’s on his way to Munich.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “Who am I speaking to?”

“It’s Sergeant Lewis, ma’am.”

“I wonder if you can help me, Sergeant? Do any of the DPs in the camp speak English?”

There was a moment of silence at the other end of the phone.

“No one?”

The line crackled. Then she heard the sergeant clear his throat. “Sorry, ma’am, got a supply truck wanting to come through the gate. You could try the DP they call Chance; he speaks English.”

The line went dead.

“Chance?” Martha turned to Kitty. “Is that a Polish name?”

“Not one I’ve ever heard,” Kitty said.

“He said, ‘Try the DP they call Chance’—would it be a nickname?”

Kitty frowned. “Hmm. I wonder if . . .”

“What?”

“Ksi?dz. Sounds like chance. It means ‘priest’ in Polish.”

“Really?” Martha frowned. “A priest who speaks English? How would someone like that wind up in a place like this?”

Kitty shrugged. “Want me to find him?” She grabbed her bag and headed for the door.



A woman in the camp kitchen, who was tossing shredded cabbage leaves into an enormous pan of soup, told Kitty that there was a little chapel in the woods, built by the DPs themselves, where she might find the priest.

Kitty nodded. The smell of the soup was making her salivate. She wondered how many of these gigantic pans it took to provide enough for almost three thousand hungry people. She listened as the woman told her the way to the chapel—the description punctuated by slurps and the shaking of salt into the bubbling liquid.

The route took Kitty along the river, past the huge weaving shed where the Nazis’ slave laborers had worked day and night, producing artificial silk. Some of the windows had been smashed in. She peered through a gap in the glass. The shadowy shapes of the looms were like rows of giants standing guard over the place. The thought of someone losing fingers in one of the machines was horrific. To make silk.

For Kitty, that word carried bittersweet memories. Silk had been her parents’ livelihood, the business that had sustained them until the fateful night in November 1938 when—like the broken panes she was looking through now—the windows of Blumenthal’s had been shattered by flying bricks.

Her parents hadn’t been there because it had happened after dark. If her father had been in the shop, he would surely have been dragged out and beaten, as so many of Vienna’s businessmen had been that night. Clara, who lived in the upstairs apartment and helped with the tailoring, had described it to them the next day. Kitty remembered her mother asking Clara if she had been afraid. And she could still recall Clara’s mumbled, hesitant reply: “Not really, Mrs. Blumenthal . . . because I’m not . . .”

Not a Jew. Kitty’s father had finished Clara’s sentence. And just five weeks later, Kitty had boarded the train that would take her away from everything and everyone she’d ever known.

The memory of her father’s words brought something else to mind—something that had been troubling her ever since she and the others had left Munich. The UNRRA officer had said that the people working as slave laborers at the artificial silk mill had not been Jews. But surely there would be Jewish refugees among those who had been brought to the camp since the war ended. Kitty had assumed that every DP camp in Germany would house Jews, that there would be people she could talk to from Vienna or who might have met her parents during the war. But what if she’d been wrong about that? What if there was no one here to help her in her search?