“Partly,” Delphine replied. “I’d already decided that I had to leave Paris. For me it was a place full of ghosts. Not just Claude and Philippe. So many others were gone—and there was so much destruction. When I applied to work for the refugee organization, they asked me if I had any preference as to where I would be sent. I knew that Dachau was in Bavaria . . .” She trailed off, taken aback by the matter-of-fact tone of her own voice. She sounded as if she were talking about picking a vacation destination.
“Have you been there?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know where it is, only that it’s somewhere near Munich.”
“It’s not far from here, just a few miles to the north. It’s been taken over by the Allies as a prison camp for SS officers.”
Delphine closed her eyes. It took a moment to process this. All she could think was that if only the Allies had come sooner—if they had reached Dachau a few months earlier—Claude and Philippe would have been saved. They would still be alive.
“Would it help you if you went there?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” She’d thought of it many times. Part of her longed to see the place where they had died. There would never be graves to visit. If she could lay flowers at the place where they had spent their last days, that would be something, wouldn’t it? But another part of her recoiled at the idea. Wouldn’t it be better to remember them as they were, to not have their memory defiled by allowing the death camp to burn its image into her brain?
“Is it even possible?” She was staring at her hand, still gripping the bench, at the blue veins showing through the thin, translucent skin.
“You can drive up to the gates,” he replied. “You can’t go in, of course. But you can stand by the fence and look through the barbed wire.”
“You’ve been back there?” She glanced up at him. “Why?” She couldn’t conceal the astonishment in her voice.
“I didn’t want to.” He let out a long, slow breath. “After I’d been here for a while, I realized that I needed to. I had many friends there—men who didn’t survive. I never got the chance to say goodbye to them.”
She nodded. “That’s how I feel. But I don’t know if I could face it. The thought of seeing a place like that, of actually knowing it was real . . .”
“Think about it,” he said. “If you decide you want to go, I’ll take you there.”
“Thank you.” She could hear people outside. Any minute they would be coming through the door. “I must be getting back.” She stood up. Her legs still felt shaky. As she made her way out, she thought about what it would be like to make that journey. She’d been there many times in her nightmares. Always she had gone there alone. Would it be less traumatic with someone by her side?
She nodded and smiled at the people going past as she walked back toward the hospital. The mask was firmly back in place. But she felt as if a little of the weight had shifted off her heart.
Kitty stared at the pile of paper on the desk in front of her. She was making files for all the new arrivals, translating details from dog-eared documents that had barely survived the long train journey from Czechoslovakia. Some had been lost, which meant visiting each blockhouse to search for the people on the transport list for whom no identity papers existed.
She pushed back the chair and went to pour herself some coffee. It was lukewarm, but the caffeine gave her the boost she needed. She stood by the window while she drank it, watching people going past outside. Most were heading for the path that led to the chapel. She glanced at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. They must be on their way to Mass.
She thought of Father Josef, dressed in his priest’s robes, waiting for them. She hadn’t spoken to him since the day the Red Cross lists arrived. She was sure he would have come to find her if he’d had any response to the letter he’d sent to the bishop of Vienna. With a long sigh she put down her mug and went back to the desk. It had been kind of the priest to write that letter, but it seemed a slim hope. Kitty longed to go to Vienna herself. It would be grim, seeing the places she had known and loved. The search for news would be daunting and could well be fruitless. But it would be better than this endless not-knowing.
She picked up the document on the top of the pile and tried to focus on the smeared, near-illegible writing. How could she even think of leaving the camp to make a trip to Vienna? If any one of them disappeared for more than half a day, there would be chaos.