“It must have been so hard,” he said, “being all on your own, not speaking the language.”
“It was,” she replied. “But the worst thing was the guilt. I was safe in England, but my parents were stuck in Austria. I’d tried—and failed—to get them work permits. If only they . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Father Josef says he feels like that,” Charlie said. “He stops by here sometimes when I’m on duty. He once told me there are days he wakes up and wishes he’d died, because he feels so bad for surviving when so many didn’t make it.”
“I remember when you were telling me on the phone about Father Josef being in Dachau. You said you were there when Dachau was liberated.” Kitty looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of an abyss. She didn’t want to hear what horrors Charlie had seen—and yet she felt compelled to find out what he knew about the place.
Charlie nodded. “I don’t talk about it much. Only to Father Josef—I think he talks to me because I saw Dachau, but I wasn’t a prisoner.” The desk creaked as he shifted his weight. “I can’t imagine how awful it must be for you, wondering if your parents wound up in a hellhole like that.”
“He told me there were Jews at Dachau, but they were kept in a separate section, so he never got to see them. I know there were people from Vienna in the camp, so my parents could have been sent there.” She felt her throat constricting with emotion. Talking about them was like swallowing broken glass.
“There were Jewish survivors—men and women.” Charlie was looking at the floor. Kitty could only guess what images had come into his mind’s eye. “They were taken to other camps. I don’t know where they would be now.” He glanced up. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help you.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “You have helped, just by letting me talk. I didn’t mean to rattle on—it’s just that I’ve been keeping it in for so long . . .”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to apologize. It helps me, too. The guys at the base, you know, they don’t like it if you go on about things you’ve seen. They say: ‘We all had a lousy war—what makes you so special?’”
Kitty gave him a rueful smile. How strange, she thought, that those men sounded just like Fred.
The next morning, Martha was on the phone to Munich for more than half an hour. She was eventually put through to a lawyer who acted on behalf of UNRRA—and who, thankfully, spoke good English. After listening to Martha’s description of what had happened to Jadzia, the lawyer told her there was a statement she could enter on the incident report that would result in the military taking no further action: she was to say that Jadzia had ended her baby’s life due to temporary derangement caused by the agony of giving birth.
After she’d put the phone down, Martha stared at what she’d jotted down—just a handful of words that would, hopefully, change the course of Jadzia’s life. The lawyer had promised she would not be arrested or imprisoned. Once she had recovered physically, she could make a fresh start. Quite how that could be achieved was another matter. Perhaps, like the mothers of the babies fathered by Nazi officers, the best thing would be for Jadzia to be transferred to another camp where no one knew what had happened in the past. It remained to be seen whether she would be mentally strong enough to cope with such a move. Meanwhile, Martha thought, all they could do was keep a close eye on her.
When she left the office, Martha went to look for Stefan. She found him in the woods behind the chapel. He was carving something from a tree branch. A spade was stuck into the ground a few yards from where he was sitting.
“It’s a cross,” he said when she asked him what he was doing. He tilted his head toward the spade. She saw the pile of earth and pine needles beside it. “And then I will make . . . a box—how do you call it in English?”
“A coffin.” She stared at the place where the grave would be. The image of the baby, so pale and still on the hospital table, was etched inside her head. It would remain there always, paired with the memory of that other tiny body, Cecile—the baby girl she had named after her grandmother—who had come into the world too soon.
“Coffin,” Stefan repeated. He gave a broken sort of sigh.
“Stefan?” Martha caught her own pain reflected in his eyes, as if, somehow, he’d read her mind and understood her sorrow.