A Feather on the Water(42)

“Do you have their photographs?” The priest’s eyes had a wistful, faraway look. “May I see them?”

“Of course.” Delphine bent to retrieve a leather wallet from her nurse’s bag. “I take them everywhere.” She tried to smile, but the edges of her mouth felt numb, as if the muscles had been anesthetized. She passed him a picture of Claude with his arm around Philippe’s shoulders. It was a snap that had been taken on vacation in Brittany before the war. She tried not to look as she took it out of the wallet—it was impossible to catch sight of their faces without welling up.

Father Josef angled the image to the light. “I wish I could say I knew them. I would have been there when they arrived. But there were so many of us. Thousands from Poland alone. There was a whole section of Dachau reserved for French political prisoners. We were on the other side of the camp. We rarely saw them.”

“I was afraid of telling anyone,” Delphine whispered, as she took back the photograph and slipped it into the wallet. “The other day, at the hospital, there was a young man who so reminded me of Philippe. I had to go outside. I wandered about, crying, talking to myself, telling myself that if I couldn’t keep these feelings hidden, I was in danger of falling over the edge . . .”

He nodded. “I feel like that sometimes. It would be easier to shut away the memories. But there are other men in this camp who were at Dachau. They say it helps them to talk to someone who lived through it, as they did.”

“I wonder if any of them would remember Claude or Philippe?”

“It’s possible, of course—although, like me, they are all Polish. The Nazis seemed to have an especial hatred of our country. They liked to keep us separate from all the other prisoners.” He raised his hand to his chin, rubbing the knuckles against his beard. “Tell me, did you come to Seidenmühle to be close to the place where your husband and son died?”

“Partly,” Delphine replied. “I’d already decided that I had to leave Paris. For me it was a place full of ghosts. Not just Claude and Philippe. So many others were gone—and there was so much destruction. When I applied to work for the refugee organization, they asked me if I had any preference as to where I would be sent. I knew that Dachau was in Bavaria . . .” She trailed off, taken aback by the matter-of-fact tone of her own voice. She sounded as if she were talking about picking a vacation destination.

“Have you been there?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know where it is, only that it’s somewhere near Munich.”

“It’s not far from here, just a few miles to the north. It’s been taken over by the Allies as a prison camp for SS officers.”

Delphine closed her eyes. It took a moment to process this. All she could think was that if only the Allies had come sooner—if they had reached Dachau a few months earlier—Claude and Philippe would have been saved. They would still be alive.

“Would it help you if you went there?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” She’d thought of it many times. Part of her longed to see the place where they had died. There would never be graves to visit. If she could lay flowers at the place where they had spent their last days, that would be something, wouldn’t it? But another part of her recoiled at the idea. Wouldn’t it be better to remember them as they were, to not have their memory defiled by allowing the death camp to burn its image into her brain?

“Is it even possible?” She was staring at her hand, still gripping the bench, at the blue veins showing through the thin, translucent skin.

“You can drive up to the gates,” he replied. “You can’t go in, of course. But you can stand by the fence and look through the barbed wire.”

“You’ve been back there?” She glanced up at him. “Why?” She couldn’t conceal the astonishment in her voice.

“I didn’t want to.” He let out a long, slow breath. “After I’d been here for a while, I realized that I needed to. I had many friends there—men who didn’t survive. I never got the chance to say goodbye to them.”

She nodded. “That’s how I feel. But I don’t know if I could face it. The thought of seeing a place like that, of actually knowing it was real . . .”

“Think about it,” he said. “If you decide you want to go, I’ll take you there.”

“Thank you.” She could hear people outside. Any minute they would be coming through the door. “I must be getting back.” She stood up. Her legs still felt shaky. As she made her way out, she thought about what it would be like to make that journey. She’d been there many times in her nightmares. Always she had gone there alone. Would it be less traumatic with someone by her side?

She nodded and smiled at the people going past as she walked back toward the hospital. The mask was firmly back in place. But she felt as if a little of the weight had shifted off her heart.



Kitty stared at the pile of paper on the desk in front of her. She was making files for all the new arrivals, translating details from dog-eared documents that had barely survived the long train journey from Czechoslovakia. Some had been lost, which meant visiting each blockhouse to search for the people on the transport list for whom no identity papers existed.

She pushed back the chair and went to pour herself some coffee. It was lukewarm, but the caffeine gave her the boost she needed. She stood by the window while she drank it, watching people going past outside. Most were heading for the path that led to the chapel. She glanced at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. They must be on their way to Mass.