Long Way Home(83)

“Yes, of course. I would be glad to help.” He and the other medics and doctors would tell me what they wanted to say, and I would try to translate it into German or Flemish. The fact that I had nurse’s training helped.

When I was able to move around on my own fairly well, I glimpsed my reflection in a window one day and was appalled by what I saw. My hair had grown back in ragged patches after being shaved off. Festering sores covered my pale, colorless skin from lice and flea bites and malnutrition. I could have counted all my bones, like the diagrams of skeletons we’d studied in anatomy class. Would Sam still love me if he saw me? Even if I had been strong enough to search for him, I didn’t want him to see me this way.

Little by little, my strength returned and I was released from the camp hospital. But there were still so many thousands of people to care for. I had told Jim and the others that I was a licensed nurse, and now I asked if I could stay and help take care of the other patients and translate for them.

“You would be willing to stay in this terrible place when you have a chance to leave?” Jim asked in amazement.

“It’s the least I can do. Besides, I have no home to return to and no money to get there even if I did have the strength to travel.”

Major Cleveland, who was in charge of all the hospital facilities, agreed.

“But please take it slow and easy,” Jim said. “You can start by helping just a little bit every day.” I took patients’ vital signs, adjusted IV tubes, gave sponge baths, and hand-fed people too weak to feed themselves. I talked with them and listened to their stories. The SS barracks was filled with the most desperate cases, but many thousands in the camp outside still had urgent needs for nursing care, too. Jim moved a cot into what had been the barracks’ pantry and I slept there when I wasn’t working. The work I did in the following weeks helped restore me to wholeness. At last, I had found the reason for my becoming a nurse.

The stronger I grew, the more restless I became to find Sam and Ruthie. I had already begun searching while I was still a patient, helped by various Jewish relief agencies and the Red Cross. They had set up tracing services in the camp to help former prisoners find their loved ones. I had added my name to the lists of the living, and whenever a new list was printed, I searched it for Sam’s and Ruthie’s names. There were also endless lists of the dead. Hope and fear wrestled in my heart every time I read through those names. I was reading the list of the dead from Auschwitz one day when I saw Sam’s name. My heart stopped. But this Sam Shapiro had been from Austria and was sixty-seven years old when he died. I must have looked pale when I finished reading because Jim hurried over to me and asked, “Are you all right, Gisela?”

“I had a bad scare. I found my fiancé’s name on a list from Auschwitz, but it wasn’t him after all.”

“Let’s step outside for some air and you can tell me about him.” We walked out of the barracks and all the way to the open gate so I wouldn’t feel so trapped behind the walls and barbed wire. Jim and I had become friends by then, and I knew I could tell him anything. He had a gift for being still and listening to people, and sometimes it seemed as though he could see into our very souls. An Army vehicle was parked outside the wall and we sat down on the bumper together. “What’s your fiancé’s name?” Jim asked.

“Sam Shapiro.”

“I think you called out his name a few times when you were delirious. Is he also from Berlin?”

“We met on board a luxury steamship, the St. Louis, that was supposed to take us to safety in Cuba. But something went wrong and the Cuban government refused to accept our landing permits. We sailed around the Atlantic Ocean for a month, searching for someplace to land, trying to find a friendly nation that would offer us refuge.”

“I remember when that happened,” Jim said. “I followed the story in the newspaper for days. I even wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, begging him to let the passengers land in the United States. When the ship had to return to Europe, the newspapers led us to believe there’d been a happy ending to the story. Everyone had found refuge outside of Germany.”

“That’s true; we were given refuge, but it wasn’t a happy ending. Most of us ended up in either France, the Netherlands, or Belgium, countries that eventually fell to the Nazis. Only the passengers who’d gone to Great Britain were able to stay out of their hands.”

“That’s what makes me so furious about all the death and destruction I’ve witnessed over here. And now in this terrible place—which I’m told is just one of many camps. None of this had to happen! It was our own indifference and prejudice that caused this. Stories circulated, telling about what was happening over here, how the Jews were being persecuted. There were even people who’d escaped and who tried to tell the world the truth about the so-called labor camps. But people in America didn’t want to hear it. They thought the war was none of our business. Yes, the Nazis are responsible for this. But so are ordinary people like me who decided to look the other way.”

Jim had balled his hands into fists, and I took one of them between my own, unfolding his fingers and rubbing them to soothe away his tension. My hands looked frail and skeletal compared to his brawny ones.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh. “I didn’t mean to go off that way. You were telling me about Sam.”