Kitty opened one of the drawers, then another. “There are some blank forms here,” she said.
Martha wrote down the woman’s date of birth and city of origin as Kitty translated. She pressed the stamp down on the paper, imprinting the word “Seidenmühle” in red ink. “Can you ask her how she’s going to get to the camp her daughter’s in?”
“Pójd?,” the woman replied to Kitty’s question.
“She’s going to walk,” Kitty said.
“How far is it?”
The woman told them it was around thirty miles. “Tell her I’ll ask the major to arrange transport. And when the baby’s born, we’ll bring all three of them back here to live. It’s inhuman that she was separated from her daughter in the first place.”
When Kitty relayed this news, the woman darted around the desk and planted a kiss on Martha’s cheek. As she withdrew, Martha felt the wetness of tears on her skin. The woman said something to Kitty, her words punctuated by sobs.
“She says she was told there was no room for her daughter, that the camp’s full already.”
“Nonsense,” Martha replied. “We know for a fact that there are empty cabins next to ours. They can move into one of those.”
As Martha handed over the pass, the major’s warning rang in her ears. You gotta learn to distance yourself, or they’ll break your heart. She could imagine him rolling his eyes when he heard what she’d done.
“There’s about twenty people in the line now,” Kitty called from the doorway.
Martha took a deep breath. Twenty people. Each one carrying a burden of sorrow she could only guess at. And this was just beginning. How on earth were she and the others going to cope? Three women caring for nearly three thousand DPs—in a country where she didn’t speak the language and was going to have to find the resources to keep them alive in the coming winter?
She closed her eyes, struggling to quell the rising tide of fear. And she made a silent prayer: Please let me do right by these people. Help me to be wise. “Okay,” she called to Kitty. “Show the next one in.”
To reach the hospital, Major McMahon took Delphine along the main cobbled road, past the kitchens, where the smell of freshly baked bread hung in the air. It made her stomach rumble. She hadn’t eaten as much as she could have at breakfast—her insides seemed incapable of dealing with the quantity of food she had been used to before the war. She wondered if she would ever be able to manage a substantial meal again.
Past the kitchens was the warehouse, and beyond that the first of the twenty blockhouses where the DPs lived. Delphine was surprised to see ducks and chickens pecking about outside the long wooden buildings. And there were shoots of what looked like lettuce sprouting from earth-filled rubber tires. She asked the major how the camp inmates had managed to get vegetable seedlings and where they’d acquired the poultry.
“You can get pretty much anything on the black market if you’ve got something to trade,” he said. “We turn a blind eye if it’s harmless stuff like this. What you have to watch for is the cattle rustling.”
“What?” Delphine looked at him, mystified.
“They steal livestock from the local farms. Butcher it in the woods at night, then trade it around the blockhouses. It’s caused a lot of bad feeling because the Germans are already obliged to hand over a percentage of what they raise on their farms.”
“Have you caught anyone?” It occurred to Delphine that the German farmers might be making it up, that pretending their livestock had been stolen would be a way of holding on to what they were supposed to be handing over.
“Not yet,” the major replied. “But we’ve found plenty of evidence: cow horns and hides don’t grow on trees.” He stopped and waved his hand toward a square concrete building set on the edge of the camp. “That’s the hospital,” he said. “The surgeon’s name is Ignatz Jankaukas. You can’t miss him: he’s six foot four.”
“Does he speak English?”
“Not much.”
“French?”
The major shrugged. “Don’t worry, you’ll make out fine. The Polacks don’t care what language you speak, so long as it’s not German.” With a grunt he cocked his head back toward the blockhouses. “I have to go now—okay if I leave you to it?”
“Yes, of course.” She was aware that the pitch of her voice had risen, that she sounded shrill. The way he spoke about the DPs implied a lack of respect. Perhaps it was unintentional, but it offended her.