“Good afternoon.”
The man looked up, startled by her greeting. In that brief unguarded moment, he looked confused, overwhelmed. He was a similar age to the male recruits Martha had traveled over from the States with. He scrambled to his feet.
“Good afternoon, ladies.” The accent was English. He came around the desk to shake hands. Martha noticed that his left arm ended at the elbow, the sleeve of his jacket pinned up under the armpit.
The introductions over, he checked their names against a list, then told them that the camp they were assigned to was called Seidenmühle. “It’s southwest of here, on the Amper River.” He went over to a map on the wall, which was peppered with colored thumbtacks. “There won’t be any signs, but you’ll see a big mill wheel from the road.” He stabbed a patch of blue beneath a yellow thumbtack. “Tell the driver that if he hits this lake, he’s gone too far.”
“I’m not sure we have a driver.” Martha exchanged glances with the other women. “He went off when we arrived, and he hasn’t come back.”
The man nodded, as if unsurprised by this news. “Don’t worry. We’ll find another.”
“When will we meet the rest of the team?” Kitty asked.
This was met with a look of incomprehension.
“We were told in Cherbourg that we’d join up with the others here in Munich,” Delphine added.
“There’s been a spearhead team out at Seidenmühle for the past few weeks,” he said. “You’ll meet them when you get there. And the US Army will be providing backup. There’s a tank battalion stationed nearby.”
“How many people are there in the camp?” Martha asked.
“A couple of thousand at the last count.” He shrugged. “Poles, mostly, I think. Not certain about that, though: could be a few Balts there, too.”
“Balts?” This was an unfamiliar word to Martha.
“Refugees from the Baltic countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.”
Martha nodded. One of the families she’d delivered food to on the Lower East Side was from Lithuania. Only the father had spoken English—limited to a dozen or so words. They’d arrived in New York with just the clothes on their backs.
“Some of the inmates were brought in as forced labor by the Nazis from occupied countries,” the man went on. “The name of the place means ‘silk mill’ in English. They made artificial silk from wood fiber, chopping down trees to turn into linings for uniforms. When the place was liberated, there were plenty of empty bunkhouses, so we took it over as a DP camp.”
“Empty?” Kitty echoed. “Because people had escaped?”
He shook his head. “Because they’d been worked to death. It wasn’t only Jews that the Nazis exterminated—the people at Seidenmühle weren’t Jewish, but their chances of survival were not much greater. The Nazis fed them starvation rations. They didn’t care who they sent out into the forest: anyone, old or young, male or female, was made to chop wood. And in winter, it’s freezing cold. They didn’t last long.”
From the corner of her eye, Martha saw Kitty’s head drop. Could someone so young have had any idea what sort of place she was going to when she signed up? Martha wondered if she’d be able to pull her weight on the team—or whether she’d be a liability, as much in need of looking after as the DPs themselves.
The replacement driver—another Frenchman—seemed to have little idea of where they were going. Eventually he found the river whose course they were supposed to follow upstream to get to the camp. They were making good progress until the road veered away from the river and they found themselves traveling through a pine forest. After half an hour he admitted to Delphine that he was totally lost.
They gathered around as he spread the map out on a tree stump. The sun had gone down and the light was beginning to fade. It was difficult to make out the names of places.
“There are so many rivers,” Martha said. “And all these patches of woodland. How on earth do we know which one we’re in?”
“I saw a house back there,” Kitty said. “Shall I go and ask where we are?”
Martha turned to her. “How would you do that? Take the map and get them to point?”
“No.” Kitty smiled. “I’ll ask for directions. And if it’s really complicated, I’ll write them down.”
Martha’s eyes widened. “You speak German?”
Kitty nodded, gathering up the map. “I learnt it at school.”