“And the pigs?”
“They’re in the kitchens, being cooked as we speak. It would be wicked to waste that meat—but only the women and children will get to eat it. You see, I don’t know for sure who stole the animals. It was the only retribution I could think of, apart from cutting the cigarette ration to blockhouse five to allow for what we’re giving the farmer.”
“How will you stop it from happening again?”
“I don’t know. That pork would have been worth a lot on the black market. I just hope the fact that the carcasses have been confiscated will put off whoever was responsible. They took a big risk, sneaking onto the farm. If the farmer had spotted them, they could have been shot.”
“It’s like the war’s still going on,” Delphine said. “Germans versus Poles, but now it’s food they’re fighting for. And we’re stuck in the middle.”
“It’s so hard, trying to be fair to everybody.” Martha shook her head. “I guess we’re just making it up as we go along, and it isn’t easy to know if you’re getting it right.”
Making it up as we go along. Her words echoed in her head as she made her way to the clothing storeroom. She had to start sorting through the piles of coats, trousers, skirts, and sweaters the army had dumped there, work out if there was enough of everything to clothe the influx of new DPs who would be arriving any day.
The smell of stale sweat greeted her as she pushed open the door. Everything was going to need washing, and what couldn’t be washed was going to have to be hung out to air. It was going to be a mammoth task. The women in the laundry had enough to do, trying to keep up with the washing created by the people already in the camp. She was going to have to work out some way of getting hundreds of garments clean and dry before they ran out of time.
She leaned back against the wall, suddenly defeated. It wasn’t just the clothes. How were they going to stretch their meat supplies, which were already so pathetically inadequate, to feed yet more hungry DPs? What had she been thinking, coming here? Believing that she could help these people?
She’d come to Germany because she wanted to run away from home—from a life she could no longer tolerate. What would the families in the camp make of that? This was their reality: the cast-off clothes, the lack of decent food, the overcrowded blockhouses. It had been one thing to read about the war in the papers, quite another to find herself face-to-face with the men, women, and children who had suffered unimaginable horrors and had no home to return to.
She felt a powerful urge to cut and run: to pack her bags and leave. Now she understood why the spearhead team had deserted the place. It was too much. An impossible task. The realization made her legs crumple under her. She slid down the wall and slumped onto the cold concrete floor. She felt paralyzed. Tears blurred her vision. She tried to blink them away. A sea of brown met her eyes. She saw that it wasn’t clothes, but boots. Dozens and dozens of pairs of army boots, stacked beneath the tables. Most were caked in desiccated mud. And some were smeared and spattered with something else. As she stared, she realized the dark stains were dried blood.
It dawned on her that these boots had almost certainly belonged to the Allied troops who had fought their way up through France and Germany and had died in battle.
And you’re going to run away. Again.
It was Arnie’s voice. It might have been cowardly, running out on him. But how much more cowardly would it be to run away from the people the owners of these boots had given their lives to save?
CHAPTER 10
Two days later, the phone in the office rang to announce that a trainload of DPs was on its way.
“That was Major McMahon,” Kitty said, as Martha came through the door of the office. “He says four hundred people are coming to us. They’re due to arrive at Fürstenfeldbruck this afternoon.”
“Four hundred,” Martha gasped. “But we can’t fit more than two hundred in the stables!”
“What can we do?” Kitty shook her head. “He wants us there by three o’clock to meet them off the train.”
Martha blew out a breath. “We’ll have to talk to the blockhouse leaders. Tell them they’ll have to make room for more people.”
“But there’s already . . .”
“I know,” Martha cut in. “Hardly any space in any of them. But we’re going to have to persuade them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Extra cigarettes? We’ll have to squeeze at least ten more people in each house.” Martha burned with anger at the thought of the major ladening them with so many more DPs than they had been expecting. It was as if he were setting her up to fail.