“Why not?” Martha looked at her, perplexed. “This is your future, Kitty. You mustn’t jeopardize it by worrying about us.”
“But I do worry. Every time people leave, more DPs arrive. It’s never-ending. You and Delphine can’t carry on like this. It’s been well over a year since we got here, and neither of you has had a proper break. It just doesn’t seem fair for me to go swanning off to America.”
“We’ll manage.” Martha tried to smile. “You deserve this chance to be happy. This place certainly won’t be the same without you, but that’s no reason to hang around when you could be on a boat to the States.”
“What will you do? Will UNRRA send someone to replace me?”
“Probably.” Martha avoided her eyes. She didn’t want to lie to Kitty; she hadn’t told the others that the latest communication from Munich had relayed that the organization would cease to exist in a few months’ time. The UNRRA was to become the International Refugee Organization. Their work was winding down; the camps would soon be empty. But as Kitty had rightly pointed out, that was not the case at Seidenmühle.
“You think they’ll deploy someone from a camp that’s closing down?” Kitty wasn’t going to let her get away with such an evasive answer.
“I expect so.” Martha knew that this was unlikely. It was what she’d thought would happen, but so far there had been no hint of it. It seemed that when a camp closed, the people who had been running it simply melted away to wherever they had come from. She suspected it came down to money. The cost of running the camps was a burden the Allies were obviously keen to shake off as soon as possible.
“I don’t know how they can keep on closing camps, though,” Kitty said. “No one wants to go back to Poland now. Not even the food bribe is working anymore.”
Martha nodded. Stalin’s grip on Poland was tightening by the day. Soon there would be no place for the DPs to go.
“I’ll write to Charlie,” Kitty said. “He’s just moved to New York to start his college course. I need to check that it’ll be okay for me to be on campus with him.”
“What about your parents?” Martha said. “Will they be able to join you there?”
“In theory, yes. Once I’m living in America, I can sponsor them to immigrate.” Kitty was looking out the window at the DPs filing past on their way to the mess hall. “I wish I’d heard from them. I haven’t had a letter in weeks. Charlie’s mother gets a newspaper called the Chinese Pacific Weekly. She told him there’s civil war there now: the Communists fighting the Nationalists. I just don’t know how they’re going to get out of Shanghai.”
Martha wished there were something she could say to ease Kitty’s mind. She had so much to contend with. The troubled, lonely girl Martha had first encountered on the ship from England had transformed into a confident woman forging a future not just for herself and her husband but for her parents, too. If only the people she loved were not on opposite sides of the world, separated by oceans from one another; if only the end of the war had brought peace to China as well as to Europe. If only . . . They had to be two of the saddest words in the English language.
A few days later, Delphine got the news that her application for adoption had been approved. It had required months of letter writing and phone calls to get hold of all the documents she needed—copies of her birth and marriage certificates, financial details from her bank, references from the hospital where she’d worked—but finally it had all come through. In the cabin that evening, she passed the letter around for the others to see.
“Oh, this is wonderful news!” Martha angled the paper to the light. “Wait a minute . . .” She broke off, staring at Delphine in astonishment. “There are three names here.”
“That’s right.” Delphine beamed at her across the table. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure it would all go through.”
Kitty grabbed the letter from Martha’s hand. “Wolf Adamicz, Pawel Bednarz, and Agata Krawiec,” she read aloud. “You’re adopting all of them?”
“How could I not?” Delphine spread her hands, palms up, on the table. “I would have taken on the others, too, if they hadn’t been so set on going to work in Warsaw.”
“Have you told them yet?” Martha said.
“I thought I’d wait till the weekend. Maybe take them for a picnic in the forest and tell them then.”