Delphine didn’t often blush, but she could feel her throat and cheeks turning pink. In all her years of nursing, she had never received such a flattering welcome. She complimented him on his French and asked him where he had learned it. He told her that he’d studied it in college, alongside medicine, that he’d been offered a post at a hospital in Lille, but the war had prevented him from taking it.
She asked who else was helping at the hospital, explaining that she’d already met Wolf and needed someone to prepare a bottle for the baby she’d left him holding.
“There is a woman from the camp who comes in to wash and feed the men,” he replied in French, “but she refuses to care for the women.” He cocked his head toward the door to the maternity ward.
“Why?” she asked.
He told her that it was because many of the babies being delivered were fathered by the Nazis who had run Seidenmühle when it was a slave labor camp. The DPs didn’t want anything to do with the mothers of German bastards.
Delphine clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Et le gar?on?” She wanted to know why Wolf was willing to help when others had refused.
Dr. Jankaukas explained that Wolf was an orphan. He spent his days helping at the hospital because he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up. “Pauvre petit,” he said, shaking his head. Poor little one. Clearly, he thought this a forlorn hope.
“Montre-moi où tu gardes le lait,” she said. Show me where you keep the milk. That was her first priority: to get some nourishment into the poor thin baby next door. Then she could start working out how on earth to get this place running as it should.
By the end of the morning, Martha felt as if a stone had lodged itself in her throat. It was the effort of suppressing emotion, of swallowing back tears. It was as if she and Kitty had opened the door to a tidal wave of human misery, the wreckage of lives torn apart by war. The people in the camp had washed up in a place far from home, desperate for any comfort, any meaning, they could find. One man, who had been an opera singer before the war, had opened his mouth wide to show the stumps of his teeth, which he said had been smashed by the Nazis. He was asking for a pass to visit a dentist in the town downriver and planning to pay for the treatment by selling his mother’s wedding ring. Another man—wild looking, with a mud-spattered shirt and torn trousers—had said he wanted a pass to go to the woods outside the camp. At first, Martha had suspected that he might be one of the black marketeers the major had warned her about, but on further questioning, he had broken down in tears and explained that he had lost his wife and all three of his children in the war. In his previous life he had been a botanist—and all he wanted now was to be allowed to wander the forest, searching for wildflowers. The look he had given Martha when she’d handed over the pass had been utterly heartbreaking.
Some of the people who had lined up outside the office had simply come to beg for help to locate missing relatives. Kitty had once again surprised Martha with a maturity beyond her years when she explained that there were lists published each week by the Red Cross and that she would get them sent to the camp and display them for everyone to see.
“How did you know about those lists?” Martha asked when the last person in line had left the office.
“I heard about them in England.” Kitty turned away, opening a drawer in one of the filing cabinets to replace the remaining forms. “Someone I worked with in Manchester was trying to trace family in Germany.”
Martha nodded, staring at the rubber stamp on the desk in front of her. She knew that she was going to have to put everything she had seen and heard out of her mind if she was going to get through what needed to be done: there were the blockhouses to inspect, the supplies in the warehouse to check out—and she wanted to talk to the people who worked in the kitchens to find out how the food was distributed to the DPs.
Talk. The word mocked her. How was she going to run this place if she couldn’t even communicate with the inhabitants of the camp? She could hardly expect Kitty to follow her around like a dog on a leash, always on hand to translate.
“I want you to have the time to help people find their relatives,” Martha said. “Apart from food and shelter, it’s the single most important thing we can do for them. But this morning has shown me how little I can do without a translator.” She gave Kitty a wry look. “How long would it take for you to teach me Polish? Just the basics . . .”
“That depends,” Kitty replied.
“On what?”