The man had slunk out of the office, muttering words she didn’t understand—obscene Polish curses, she guessed. He’d been the last in line for passes, and she’d grabbed a coffee when the door closed, thankful for a few minutes’ peace. But as soon as she’d drunk it, she was riffling through the filing cabinets. There was something she’d been wanting to do since she’d first set foot in the office. The files contained the details of every person in the camp. Somewhere in those drawers there must be a list of names—a document that would reveal in a matter of minutes whether there were any Jewish DPs in Seidenmühle.
It didn’t take Kitty long to find what she was looking for. The names were not in alphabetical order; the list had a randomness that suggested people had been added as they’d arrived. The columns were dominated by common Polish surnames: there were dozens of Kowalskis, Nowaks, and Wozniaks. She searched for the familiar names of her childhood. For a Klein, a Bergmann, or an Adler. But no such names jumped out of the rows of black type. She read through the list a second time, just to be certain, then sat down heavily in the chair. It seemed impossible. Poland was a place that many Jewish people called home—her mother had been born there—so why were there none in this camp?
Kitty picked up the phone. Sergeant Lewis—the officer Martha had spoken to the day before—answered in the guardhouse that doubled as the camp switchboard.
“I need to put through a call to the Red Cross office in Munich,” she said.
“I can look up the number and get back to you when I have them on the line,” he said. “By the way, did you manage to track down that guy yesterday?”
“Yes, thank you,” Kitty replied. “It took us a while to work out that he was a priest.”
“Sorry—I should have explained. Things were going a bit crazy down here when your boss called.”
“I found him in the chapel.” Kitty hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she should reveal that they were concealing Bo?ena and her child in their billet house, and were about to convert the other two cabins into a mother-and-baby home.
“Did he tell you he was in Dachau?”
“No.” The flesh on the back of Kitty’s neck prickled. “He didn’t say anything about his past. We did wonder, though, how he came to be here.”
“He didn’t like what the Nazis were doing and wasn’t afraid to speak out in public,” the sergeant replied. “He was lucky: they sent hundreds of guys like him to Dachau—only a handful survived.”
“H . . . have you been there?” Kitty felt the tremble at the back of her throat. “Is that how you know?”
“We liberated the place.” His voice betrayed no emotion. “Around a quarter of the men in this camp were prisoners there. The rest were slave laborers—either here or in factories across Germany.”
A host of questions filled Kitty’s head. All she knew about Dachau was what she’d read in British newspapers. The reports had contained horrific images but precious little detail about the prisoners. Had there been women survivors? How many of those liberated were Jewish? Were any of them from Austria? And—most important of all—where were they now?
“Hello? Are you still there?” Sergeant Lewis broke the silence.
“I . . . I’m sorry. Someone’s just arrived. Have to go.” She replaced the receiver, her hand shaking, cursing herself for not having the nerve to come out with what she wanted so desperately to know.
A light drizzle was falling as Martha followed Stefan Dombrowski along the cobbled main street to the blockhouses. The first thing she noticed as he opened the door was the smell. It was a mixture of damp wool and woodsmoke, with a hint of something unsavory—the sort of sour odor that wafted out of the entrance to the Marcy Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.
There was a list inside the door of everyone who lived there—145 names. At first sight, the interior of the blockhouse resembled a fabric warehouse. Dombrowski explained that the DPs had divided what was basically a large barn into minuscule apartments, using nothing but suitcases, piled on top of one another, and blankets suspended by ropes from the wooden rafters.
It reminded her of something she’d seen in New Orleans as a teenager. The Mississippi River had flooded, and hundreds of homeless families had been brought to warehouses near the docks. She and her grandmother had gone to take food donated by the neighbors. Climbing up to where the grain and cotton were stored, she’d been mesmerized by the faces peering over walls made from piles of sacks.