At dawn on the day of departure, a service was held outdoors. Father Josef stood in front of the trucks that had arrived to take the men to the train. The silver thread in his embroidered stole caught the pink glow in the sky as he raised a tall wooden cross.
“W imi? Ojca i Syna, i Ducha ?wi?tego . . .” In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . . This was the last blessing the men would receive in their native tongue for a long time. The priest moved along the line of trucks, sprinkling holy water on each one. The men on board bowed their heads and crossed themselves as he passed by. Many had bunches of flowers in their hands, given to them by their wives and girlfriends. As the service ended, Aleksandra passed little Rodek into Marek’s outstretched arms. She ran off to wait for him at the camp gates as the engines of the trucks grumbled to life. She wanted her husband to be able to hold his son until the last possible moment.
Martha followed her. Together they watched the procession head onto the road. The tires had left tracks in the dusty ground outside the guardhouse. To Martha, they were more than marks in the earth: they were hieroglyphs spelling out the beginning of the end of what she had come to Germany to do.
CHAPTER 32
Within weeks, offers started coming in from other countries. Canada wanted hard-rock miners and lumbermen. Australia required common laborers. Textile workers were being recruited for Britain and Holland, while domestic workers were needed in France. The tears Dr. Jankaukas had shed at being rejected by the Belgian recruiters were replaced by unbridled joy when he discovered that doctors were wanted in Venezuela.
As spring turned into summer, it seemed that there was no place on earth that was not opening its borders to refugees. Except the United States of America.
Every morning, when Martha went to collect the mail, she would search through the pile for a letter from Arnie. But nothing came. His lack of response was a daily torture. Almost worse than an outright refusal to start divorce proceedings. She didn’t know if he’d moved on from the address listed in the telephone directory or was just being bullheaded.
The mood of hope and expectation that had overtaken the camp was marred by tragedy one morning in May. After watching a convoy of trucks depart with DPs bound for Holland, an elderly man went off into the woods and hanged himself.
Stefan was the one who went to cut down the body and carry it to the mortuary. He came back to Martha with the documents he had found in the man’s pockets. Martha’s eyes blurred with tears as she stared at the dog-eared papers lined up on the desk. The dead man was “Displaced Person No. 235,452,” Georgi Konrad, born in Kraków in 1877. A former plant-breeding expert with a degree from the University of Warsaw. “It’s as if he wanted to save us the trouble of identifying him,” she murmured. “Why did he take his life?”
“He was seventy years old,” Stefan replied. “He had no son or daughter to take him to a new country.”
Martha had to call zone headquarters in Munich to inform them of the death. She was told that she must file an incident report. There was a particular form, which she found after a search through the filing cabinets. When she started to write in the details, she saw that there was a box in which she was required to specify the motive for the suicide. After pausing for a moment to consider, she wrote, “Despair.”
The following afternoon, Martha sat alone in the chapel when the funeral service was over. Stefan had stayed by the graveside to help shovel the earth back in after the coffin had been lowered into it. She couldn’t face returning to the office. She needed to be alone for a while.
As she gazed at the flowers on the altar table, the word she had written on the incident report hung over her like a thundercloud. It was all too easy to understand why Georgi Konrad had taken his own life. For him, there had been no hope. To the emigration officials, he was less a person, more a burden. For him, the future would have consisted of shifting from one dwindling camp to another until the last one closed and he was turned loose to survive in Germany as best he could.
Despair.
She had seen it on so many faces in the two years that she had been in Germany. How na?ve she had been to think that, in coming here, she would be able to make everything right. It was like fighting with your arms tied behind your back: a constant battle against red tape and the decisions of faceless politicians in countries thousands of miles away. How could she go back to America, leaving people like Georgi destitute and without hope?
The quiet of the chapel was broken by the sound of footsteps. She turned to see Father Josef walking toward her. Without saying anything, he sat down beside her.