“On how many hours a day you put in. And if you have an ear for languages. But there must be people here who speak some English.”
Martha nodded. “We just have to find them.” She picked up the receiver of the field telephone—a strange-looking contraption like a large battery with bells on top. She turned one switch, then another, before she heard a crackly voice say: “Command post.”
“Hello . . . it’s Assistant Director Radford here. Can you put me through to Major McMahon?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am; he’s on his way to Munich.”
“Oh.” She hesitated. “Who am I speaking to?”
“It’s Sergeant Lewis, ma’am.”
“I wonder if you can help me, Sergeant? Do any of the DPs in the camp speak English?”
There was a moment of silence at the other end of the phone.
“No one?”
The line crackled. Then she heard the sergeant clear his throat. “Sorry, ma’am, got a supply truck wanting to come through the gate. You could try the DP they call Chance; he speaks English.”
The line went dead.
“Chance?” Martha turned to Kitty. “Is that a Polish name?”
“Not one I’ve ever heard,” Kitty said.
“He said, ‘Try the DP they call Chance’—would it be a nickname?”
Kitty frowned. “Hmm. I wonder if . . .”
“What?”
“Ksi?dz. Sounds like chance. It means ‘priest’ in Polish.”
“Really?” Martha frowned. “A priest who speaks English? How would someone like that wind up in a place like this?”
Kitty shrugged. “Want me to find him?” She grabbed her bag and headed for the door.
A woman in the camp kitchen, who was tossing shredded cabbage leaves into an enormous pan of soup, told Kitty that there was a little chapel in the woods, built by the DPs themselves, where she might find the priest.
Kitty nodded. The smell of the soup was making her salivate. She wondered how many of these gigantic pans it took to provide enough for almost three thousand hungry people. She listened as the woman told her the way to the chapel—the description punctuated by slurps and the shaking of salt into the bubbling liquid.
The route took Kitty along the river, past the huge weaving shed where the Nazis’ slave laborers had worked day and night, producing artificial silk. Some of the windows had been smashed in. She peered through a gap in the glass. The shadowy shapes of the looms were like rows of giants standing guard over the place. The thought of someone losing fingers in one of the machines was horrific. To make silk.
For Kitty, that word carried bittersweet memories. Silk had been her parents’ livelihood, the business that had sustained them until the fateful night in November 1938 when—like the broken panes she was looking through now—the windows of Blumenthal’s had been shattered by flying bricks.
Her parents hadn’t been there because it had happened after dark. If her father had been in the shop, he would surely have been dragged out and beaten, as so many of Vienna’s businessmen had been that night. Clara, who lived in the upstairs apartment and helped with the tailoring, had described it to them the next day. Kitty remembered her mother asking Clara if she had been afraid. And she could still recall Clara’s mumbled, hesitant reply: “Not really, Mrs. Blumenthal . . . because I’m not . . .”
Not a Jew. Kitty’s father had finished Clara’s sentence. And just five weeks later, Kitty had boarded the train that would take her away from everything and everyone she’d ever known.
The memory of her father’s words brought something else to mind—something that had been troubling her ever since she and the others had left Munich. The UNRRA officer had said that the people working as slave laborers at the artificial silk mill had not been Jews. But surely there would be Jewish refugees among those who had been brought to the camp since the war ended. Kitty had assumed that every DP camp in Germany would house Jews, that there would be people she could talk to from Vienna or who might have met her parents during the war. But what if she’d been wrong about that? What if there was no one here to help her in her search?
She took in a deep breath, stepping back from the derelict weaving shed. She could smell the wildflowers that grew along the banks of the river. The sun was high in the sky, making it hard to tell which direction she was facing. But she remembered from studying the map that the river ran from south to north. So, she must be looking east—toward the border with Austria. She thought of Sinaida Sikorsky, the woman who had been prepared to walk thirty miles to get to her pregnant daughter. Vienna was at least four times farther than that. How would she get there?