A Feather on the Water(19)

“He didn’t like what the Nazis were doing and wasn’t afraid to speak out in public,” the sergeant replied. “He was lucky: they sent hundreds of guys like him to Dachau—only a handful survived.”

“H . . . have you been there?” Kitty felt the tremble at the back of her throat. “Is that how you know?”

“We liberated the place.” His voice betrayed no emotion. “Around a quarter of the men in this camp were prisoners there. The rest were slave laborers—either here or in factories across Germany.”

A host of questions filled Kitty’s head. All she knew about Dachau was what she’d read in British newspapers. The reports had contained horrific images but precious little detail about the prisoners. Had there been women survivors? How many of those liberated were Jewish? Were any of them from Austria? And—most important of all—where were they now?

“Hello? Are you still there?” Sergeant Lewis broke the silence.

“I . . . I’m sorry. Someone’s just arrived. Have to go.” She replaced the receiver, her hand shaking, cursing herself for not having the nerve to come out with what she wanted so desperately to know.



A light drizzle was falling as Martha followed Stefan Dombrowski along the cobbled main street to the blockhouses. The first thing she noticed as he opened the door was the smell. It was a mixture of damp wool and woodsmoke, with a hint of something unsavory—the sort of sour odor that wafted out of the entrance to the Marcy Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.

There was a list inside the door of everyone who lived there—145 names. At first sight, the interior of the blockhouse resembled a fabric warehouse. Dombrowski explained that the DPs had divided what was basically a large barn into minuscule apartments, using nothing but suitcases, piled on top of one another, and blankets suspended by ropes from the wooden rafters.

It reminded her of something she’d seen in New Orleans as a teenager. The Mississippi River had flooded, and hundreds of homeless families had been brought to warehouses near the docks. She and her grandmother had gone to take food donated by the neighbors. Climbing up to where the grain and cotton were stored, she’d been mesmerized by the faces peering over walls made from piles of sacks.

“This place is for families and married people.” Dombrowski paused in front of a blanket that had been tied back with what looked like a dressing gown cord. A wizened old woman in black clothes and a white headscarf sat on a three-legged stool, guarding her little domain with a look as ferocious as a mountain lion. From inside the dark interior space, Martha could hear children’s voices.

Dombrowski had a brief conversation with the woman. Although Martha understood none of it, she saw a look of alarm cross the woman’s face before her expression softened a little.

“She thought we came to bring more people to live here,” he said. “She said: ‘No room!’ I told her we are just looking around—we haven’t come for that.”

“How many in her family?” Martha asked.

“Six people in here,” he replied. “She is the grandmother. There is also her daughter, her daughter’s husband, and three children. The daughter works in the laundry. The husband is in the kitchen. He bakes bread.” He cocked his head toward the old woman. “She looks after the children.”

Martha frowned. “Is there no school in the camp?”

“Some days they have school. Not today. The teacher is sick.”

“Just one teacher? For . . . how many children?”

“Maybe two hundred,” he replied. “It grows each week—we get more families. Trains come to Fürstenfeldbruck, full of DPs. The army brings them here.” He swept his hand over the rows of makeshift cubicles. “They are happy to see new people because maybe some might be from their village in Poland, have news of family they have not seen for years. But they are afraid, too, because there is not enough room for more people.”

Martha nodded. “I understand.” As she followed him along the central passageway toward the back of the blockhouse, the hot, fusty air made her feel faint. The idea of cramming still more people into this place was out of the question. What on earth was she going to do if the army brought another trainload?

At the far end of the building, a single potbellied stove sat in a space festooned with washing that hung on lines strung from one wall to another. On the stove was a steaming pot, which smelled revolting. It was being stirred by a woman who could have been the twin of the one they’d just seen. Her clothes were identical and her expression grew equally fierce when she saw them coming.

After another exchange in Polish, Martha’s guide explained that the pot contained not food but soiled diapers. “She’s boiling them to make them clean. She says she doesn’t have enough to send to the laundry: it’s too long to wait to get them back.”

Martha shot a sympathetic glance at the woman. She’d witnessed similar scenes in the tenements on the Lower East Side: families so poor they had nothing but rags to bind around their babies—rags that were boiled on a stove every day until they fell apart.

“Where do the people go to wash themselves?” she asked.

“Out there.” He pointed to a door to the left of the stove. “They get water from a pump. And there are lavatories.”

“Can I see?”