A Feather on the Water(25)

“What did you say?” Martha asked, as he climbed back into the car.

“I told them to go fishing in a different place.”

“And the German—what did you say to him?”

“I told him they won’t take his fish anymore.”

“His fish? Does he own this land?”

“No. He comes from Fürstenfeldbruck.” He shrugged. “Germany is his country. So, his fish, that’s what he says.”

Martha drew in a breath as she put the car in gear again. She wondered how he’d managed to remain so calm, so controlled. He must hate the Germans for what he’d suffered during the war, and for reducing him to the status of a penniless refugee in a foreign land. It was incredible that he hadn’t lashed out at the man.

As if reading her thoughts, he said: “He hates us because Germany lost the war. If he sees people from the camp, it reminds him. But, for now, we must live here. So, it’s not worth making trouble.”

She jabbed the horn as they overtook the cabbage wagon. In the rearview mirror she saw the German raise his arm in an obscene salute.

Martha wondered how she was going to find a way to work with people like him. If the local farmers resented the DPs so much, it was going to be a nightmare of a task to get them to provide enough food to lay in for the winter.

“Not all Germans are bad like him. Some hate what the Nazis did.”

Martha kept her eyes on the road ahead, wondering if he’d say more. In the silence that followed, her mind turned to the girl, Bo?ena, who had been on the verge of selling her baby to a German couple. It was hard to square the resentment she had just witnessed with the idea of local people paying to adopt a DP’s child.

It occurred to her that in a small community like Seidenmühle, news like that would travel fast. Dombrowski might even know the identity of the DP who had arranged the shady transaction.

“I heard that some Germans offered to buy a Polish woman’s baby,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied. “The father was a Nazi.”

“I know there’s a black market in the camp—that things are traded—but to sell a baby . . .”

“Yes, it is very bad.”

“If I knew who had set up a deal like that, I’d have him locked up.”

There was a moment of silence. She heard him take a long breath.

“I am happy to do translation,” he said. “I want to help you. But, please, do not ask me to be your spy.”





CHAPTER 6


Kitty was working through the list of tasks that Martha had left for her. The Polish mothers who had moved in next door had taken up most of her morning. She was only supposed to be making a note of what they needed from the warehouse—but she quickly realized that what they really wanted was to find out what the future held for them. Were they going to be sent to another camp? Where would it be? Would they stay together? And what about their friends, still in the hospital waiting to give birth? Would they be going to the same place? And how long would it be before they went back to Poland?

Kitty couldn’t answer any of these questions. All she could do was reassure them that Martha had their best interests at heart and that arrangements would be made with the army as soon as possible.

“Gdzie si? nauczy?a? polskiego?” Where did you learn Polish? It was Bo?ena who asked, smiling shyly as she looked up from feeding her little girl.

“My mother’s Polish,” Kitty replied. “She was born in ?ód?.”

One of the other women said she had an aunt who came from ?ód?. Then Bo?ena wanted to know where Kitty had grown up.

“W Anglii.” In England. It wasn’t really a lie: she had been a child when she’d arrived there. She hoped this short answer would satisfy them, but it didn’t. They wanted to know how her mother had come to be living in England, whether her father was English, what the food was like there—and why she had chosen to come to a terrible place like Germany.

To Kitty’s relief, Father Josef appeared as this volley of questions was being fired. He’d brought another of the new mothers, who had given birth to a baby boy the previous night. The attention of the other women immediately shifted to this new arrival. Kitty and the priest were able to leave them to help her settle in.

“Would you like coffee?” Kitty asked, as they stepped outside.

“That would be very welcome.”

As she followed him along the path to her cabin, Kitty noticed that his limp was more pronounced than it had been that first day, in the chapel. She wondered whether he’d been injured while he was a prisoner in Dachau. Would it be okay to let on that she knew he’d been held there? There was so much she wanted to know. Would it be unfeeling to ask him about it?

“Your English is very good,” she said, as she put the kettle on the stove. “Where did you learn it?” That was a good way to start, she thought.

“In Warsaw,” he replied. “I taught English at the university before I went into the Church.”

“Is that where you were living when the war started?”

“Yes. I was at the cathedral there—Saint Anny. We gave our little chapel the same name.”

She spooned coffee into two tin mugs. Without looking at him, she said: “I hope you won’t be offended, but one of the GIs told me that the Nazis arrested you for speaking out against them.”