“This place is for families and married people.” Dombrowski paused in front of a blanket that had been tied back with what looked like a dressing gown cord. A wizened old woman in black clothes and a white headscarf sat on a three-legged stool, guarding her little domain with a look as ferocious as a mountain lion. From inside the dark interior space, Martha could hear children’s voices.
Dombrowski had a brief conversation with the woman. Although Martha understood none of it, she saw a look of alarm cross the woman’s face before her expression softened a little.
“She thought we came to bring more people to live here,” he said. “She said: ‘No room!’ I told her we are just looking around—we haven’t come for that.”
“How many in her family?” Martha asked.
“Six people in here,” he replied. “She is the grandmother. There is also her daughter, her daughter’s husband, and three children. The daughter works in the laundry. The husband is in the kitchen. He bakes bread.” He cocked his head toward the old woman. “She looks after the children.”
Martha frowned. “Is there no school in the camp?”
“Some days they have school. Not today. The teacher is sick.”
“Just one teacher? For . . . how many children?”
“Maybe two hundred,” he replied. “It grows each week—we get more families. Trains come to Fürstenfeldbruck, full of DPs. The army brings them here.” He swept his hand over the rows of makeshift cubicles. “They are happy to see new people because maybe some might be from their village in Poland, have news of family they have not seen for years. But they are afraid, too, because there is not enough room for more people.”
Martha nodded. “I understand.” As she followed him along the central passageway toward the back of the blockhouse, the hot, fusty air made her feel faint. The idea of cramming still more people into this place was out of the question. What on earth was she going to do if the army brought another trainload?
At the far end of the building, a single potbellied stove sat in a space festooned with washing that hung on lines strung from one wall to another. On the stove was a steaming pot, which smelled revolting. It was being stirred by a woman who could have been the twin of the one they’d just seen. Her clothes were identical and her expression grew equally fierce when she saw them coming.
After another exchange in Polish, Martha’s guide explained that the pot contained not food but soiled diapers. “She’s boiling them to make them clean. She says she doesn’t have enough to send to the laundry: it’s too long to wait to get them back.”
Martha shot a sympathetic glance at the woman. She’d witnessed similar scenes in the tenements on the Lower East Side: families so poor they had nothing but rags to bind around their babies—rags that were boiled on a stove every day until they fell apart.
“Where do the people go to wash themselves?” she asked.
“Out there.” He pointed to a door to the left of the stove. “They get water from a pump. And there are lavatories.”
“Can I see?”
He went over to the door and opened it, stepping back to allow her inside. Martha tried not to gag as she counted the cubicles—just six for the 145 occupants of the blockhouse. They were screened from each other by shoulder-height walls of plywood. The water pump separated the cubicles from a concrete gully that appeared to be the men’s urinal.
“Are all the houses like this?” she asked, as she came out, shutting the door behind her.
He nodded. “Some are for men only. Some for women. One is for children with no mother or father.”
“How many children like that?”
“Thirty. Forty.” He shook his head. “Really, I don’t know.”
“Who takes care of them?”
For a moment he didn’t answer. She heard him clear his throat. Then he said: “The ones who . . .” He hesitated. “They have lost a child.” His eyes seemed to change color—from the clear blue of a summer sky to the burning blue at the heart of a flame.
Martha remembered what Father Josef had said the previous evening, He lives in the same blockhouse as me: number fifteen. That would be for single men if a priest lived there. She wondered if, like so many others in the camp, her new translator had been separated from his family and longed for news of them.
“Come,” he said. “I will take you to another place.”
Delphine arrived at the office as Kitty was speaking on the phone.