A Feather on the Water(18)

“Miss Radford?” His eyes were very blue, very alert.

“It’s Mrs. Radford.” She held out her hand, wondering if his English was good enough to know the difference.

“Sorry.” He looked uncomfortable. She wondered if the priest had had to work hard to persuade him to come.

“That’s okay. Please sit down.” She gestured to the chair she’d placed on the opposite side of the desk.

“Now, Mr. Dombrowski . . .” She hesitated. If they were going to work together, she needed to know a little about him. But she was wary of appearing nosy about his past. “Father Josef tells me you speak English and German.”

He nodded. “I learnt English for my business in Poland. I traded with Britain before the war.” He looked at his hands, the fingers interlaced, resting on the desk. They were tanned from summer days spent outdoors, the knuckles rough and the cuticles ingrained with dirt. “The German, I picked up in Rathenow—near Berlin. I worked in a factory, making Heinkel bomber planes.”

“How long were you there?”

“Three years.”

It was hard to respond without sounding trite. “That must have been tough,” she said.

He looked up, his eyes meeting hers momentarily before he bent his head again. “I survived. Many did not. I learnt German—it helped me to live.”

“Will you help me?” she asked. “If I’m going to run this place, I have to understand the people who are living here, and I have to deal with the Germans, to organize supplies for the camp.” She waited for him to respond. When he remained silent, she said: “It’s a position of some responsibility, and that would be recognized. You would receive an extra allowance of cigarettes.” She had no idea if he smoked, but she knew that cigarettes were like currency in the camp. He could trade them for whatever else he needed or wanted.

“Yes, I can translate for you,” he said without looking up. “But cigarettes I do not want. To chop trees is harder, no? You give me more, I cannot look those guys in the face.”

“I understand,” she said. “But when we get started, you might change your mind. If so, you must tell me.” Martha stood up. “First of all, I’d like to see where everyone lives. Will you show me around the blockhouses?”



Kitty had taken over the job of giving out passes while Martha went to inspect the camp. She was glad she’d been able to watch Martha handling the people who’d come the previous morning: it would have been terrifying to be thrown into that kind of work without some knowledge of what to expect.

There was one person she suspected of trying to deceive her: a man who said he wanted to go to the nearby village to buy strawberries for his child, who was recovering from pneumonia. He held up a small cup made of silver, the kind of thing a baby might receive as a gift. He said he was going to trade it for the fruit.

It was a request that would melt any heart. But some indefinable aspect of his body language made Kitty wary of saying yes. But how could she tell if he was lying?

In a flash of inspiration, she asked him the name and age of his child. The momentary hesitation confirmed her suspicions. There was no child.

The man had slunk out of the office, muttering words she didn’t understand—obscene Polish curses, she guessed. He’d been the last in line for passes, and she’d grabbed a coffee when the door closed, thankful for a few minutes’ peace. But as soon as she’d drunk it, she was riffling through the filing cabinets. There was something she’d been wanting to do since she’d first set foot in the office. The files contained the details of every person in the camp. Somewhere in those drawers there must be a list of names—a document that would reveal in a matter of minutes whether there were any Jewish DPs in Seidenmühle.

It didn’t take Kitty long to find what she was looking for. The names were not in alphabetical order; the list had a randomness that suggested people had been added as they’d arrived. The columns were dominated by common Polish surnames: there were dozens of Kowalskis, Nowaks, and Wozniaks. She searched for the familiar names of her childhood. For a Klein, a Bergmann, or an Adler. But no such names jumped out of the rows of black type. She read through the list a second time, just to be certain, then sat down heavily in the chair. It seemed impossible. Poland was a place that many Jewish people called home—her mother had been born there—so why were there none in this camp?

Kitty picked up the phone. Sergeant Lewis—the officer Martha had spoken to the day before—answered in the guardhouse that doubled as the camp switchboard.

“I need to put through a call to the Red Cross office in Munich,” she said.

“I can look up the number and get back to you when I have them on the line,” he said. “By the way, did you manage to track down that guy yesterday?”

“Yes, thank you,” Kitty replied. “It took us a while to work out that he was a priest.”

“Sorry—I should have explained. Things were going a bit crazy down here when your boss called.”

“I found him in the chapel.” Kitty hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she should reveal that they were concealing Bo?ena and her child in their billet house, and were about to convert the other two cabins into a mother-and-baby home.

“Did he tell you he was in Dachau?”

“No.” The flesh on the back of Kitty’s neck prickled. “He didn’t say anything about his past. We did wonder, though, how he came to be here.”