by Celia Rees
Instead, she hopped on a wagon and went south to Budapest. Here she met Tibor. He took her from the café where she was working and made her his mistress. She was sixteen. How old had he been? Fifty when she first met him? It had seemed impossibly old to her. He was also impossibly rich. He took her to his house in Buda, overlooking the Danube. There he taught her the Art of Love, as he put it, and much else besides.
When he was sent to Poland on a diplomatic mission, she went with him as his secretary. Things didn’t go well in Warsaw. She’d outgrown him, absorbed all he could teach her and more. It made him jealous, possessive in a way he hadn’t been before. He didn’t like to see her slipping out of his control. She began an affair with Andrzej Taczanowski, an officer in the 15th Poznanń Uhlans Regiment. He was a Count, but then they all were. “Polish Counts are ten a penny, my dear,” Tibor had told her. What really irked him, what he really hated, was Andrzej’s youth. That punctured his vanity. He could not compete with young flesh. It left him impotent in every sense of the word, and he hated her for it. When he was recalled to Hungary, it was a relief for both of them.
Dori and Andrzej were married, but it didn’t last. Someone else had walked back into her life. Bobby Stansfield, an RAF officer in Poland to train pilots. She had met him before, in Budapest, 1936. He’d turned up with a letter of introduction from Tibor’s cousin in Vienna. He’d been traveling on foot and on horseback. When she first saw him, he was dressed in a long brown hooded coat reaching to his ankles, high-backed trousers tucked into boots, an embroidered waistcoat over a homespun linen shirt. He looked like a goat herder, smelled like one, too, but so beautiful. Like an angel with dirty hands and face. The next time she saw him, he’d had a bath, a haircut, was wearing borrowed evening clothes, and Dori was in love. They danced the night away, but after several wonderful days and equally magical nights he was gone.
She wasn’t going to lose him a second time. They fled through the chaos of Poland falling. Andrzej was killed on the first day, cut down by machine-gun fire in a skirmish with German infantry that became famous as the Riding of Krojanty. There was never any charge, Polish sabers and lances against German tanks. That was a myth, but Andrzej would have enjoyed the glory of it. All she’d thought at the time was, “Now I’m free to marry Bobby.” God forgive her for that.
Their happiness had been all too brief. Within a year, he was dead too. It was what had brought her here. She watched her notes blacken and curl. Memory, drifting up with the smoke in some kind of alchemy, had brought her full circle.
She stood up, wiping her cheeks with a quick sweep of her thumbs. Enough of this woolgathering. She fed the last note into the Aga. It was good to know that the system was working, although she was greedy for more than tantalizing tidbits. They didn’t add up to a great deal: a contact that might, or might not, lead to Elisabeth von Stavenow. Doings on the black market. Goings on in the billet. Not much but something. Definitely something. That’s how it was, she reminded herself, a patient gathering. A foraging, a nosing up of morsels. Edith was proving to be good at that.
Dori went up to the hall and put on her coat and hat. She had places to be, people to see. Vera had discovered that the girls they had been searching for, the ones who ended up in Natzweiler, had been on a transport of prisoners from Paris to Karlsruhe. She was going to the prison where they had been taken to try to establish their exact identities. Meanwhile, Dori was to track down any others who might have been on that transport or kept in that prison and could have seen the girls or heard their names. It was a patient piecing of information; a matching of statements, interviews, diary entries. They had to find out exactly what had happened, and the girls had to be identified beyond doubt. They had that duty to the mothers and fathers, the husbands, sisters, brothers who were waiting, still waiting, writing anxious letters asking for any news, still clinging to the last shred of hope that their girl would walk through the door, just as they had so many times before, rather than having died a hideous death in a concentration camp.
16
Landestrasse Schule, Lübeck
25th January 1946
Prison Camp Soup
Fish bones and skin
Water
Kasha (buckwheat) or whatever else you can get
Luka’s Recipe--we have no equivalent unless you count the Irish a hundred years ago, reduced to eating grasses in the Famine.
“Where are you off to?” Roz looked up from her typing.
“Frau Holstein.” Edith had been steeling herself for that surprise visit.
“Her Persilschein checks out. Clean as a whistle.”
That was as may be. Edith went by gut instinct, not documentary evidence.
“Wish I was coming with you.” Roz blew on her chilblained fingers. It was getting colder, if anything, and the heating was off again.
“You can if you like.” Edith stopped by the door. This was not going to be easy. “I could do with some support.”
“Got to get this lot finished while I can still type.” Roz spun back on her chair. “If it goes on like this, Jeff says, the Baltic will freeze. He’s promised to take me out to Trevemünde,” she added through a rapid rattle of typing. “A sight to see, apparently. Damn!” She ripped the paper from the roller. “How are you supposed to work?”
“I’ve got some fittle in the back,” Jack said as Edith got into the car. “Spuds, and that.”
Jack had set about finding extra provisions. Each day he opened the trunk on new riches: a sack of potatoes, carrots, swedes; catering-size tins of meat, powdered milk, sacks of oatmeal, bundles of kindling, a sack of coke. Edith never asked where any of it came from. Fallen off the back of a truck, misdirected from the docks, or some warehouse or depot. No questions asked. Edith didn’t know and didn’t care. A few weeks ago, she’d have been petrified in case someone found out. Now, she saw it as entirely necessary. A duty. How could you teach starving children? How could a child learn if he or she was hungry and cold?
They arrived as the children were being fed Milk Soup: skimmed milk, sweetened a little and thickened slightly with porridge oats. Frau Holstein gave grudging thanks for the extra provisions.
“An appetite for learning is what matters,” she said with her thin smile. “Too much food makes a child sluggish. Too much heat makes them sleepy.”
Frau Holstein kept her classroom the wrong side of chilly. Edith asked Jack to bring in more coke for the stove.
Edith stayed for the morning classes. Before lunchtime, she told them a story while the staff got the soup ready. Thanks to Jack and his sacks, it would be a good meal that day. Like all children, they loved to be told stories. Edith was careful to tell them something full of adventure but set far away, in a different time and place.
While she was talking, a boy sidled into the classroom. His age was difficult to determine through the coating of grime and the bundled layers of clothing. He wore a Red Army greatcoat that had been roughly cut down to fit but still reached his feet, and men’s boots wrapped around with layers of sacking like puttees. He looked young, but his eyes were old, sunken, his face etched with lines crisscrossing the patina of dirt. His skin was wind roughened and weather-beaten from living outdoors in sun and cold. Hanks of fairish hair stuck out from under his matted fur hat.
He stood at the back, listening. When she had finished, all the children lined up with their bowls for soup, but he did not move to join them.
The boy watched steadily as she came toward him.
“Hello. I’m Miss Graham.”
“My name is Lukasz,” he said. “They call me Luka.” He looked around. “I want to know what you do here.”
“It’s a school,” Edith said to him. “Come and see.”
He had been attracted in by the smell of the soup, but he did not go to the tureen or grab the chunks of coarse bread. Instead, he went to the makeshift desks, touched one of the slates, looked up at the blackboard, tracing with his finger how the letters were written.
The children ignored him. Too busy with their soup. The staff eyed him with suspicion.
“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”
Empty questions. Of course, he was. Of course, he would.
He looked at the steaming vat of soup, his nostrils flaring, but said nothing.
“Join us. There’s plenty.”
Edith nodded to Frieda Brandt, the young teacher who was doing the ladling. He took his bowl and hunk of bread and sat down at the end of a bench. He produced a spoon from deep inside his clothes and put it down carefully. A prized object. He dunked his bread in the soup and began to eat. Not hungrily, not wolfing it, but with careful, savoring deliberation. He wiped the bowl to a polish.
“Do you want more?”
Frau Holstein frowned her disapproval.
Edith was determined to fill him up, however much it took.
He ate another bowlful, keeping his bread, stowing it inside his clothes. “Have more.” Edith offered the heel of the loaf. “For later.”
He accepted with the gracious bow and smile of an aristocrat. Which he well might have been. Who knew his origins among the conquered peoples? The war had been no respecter of station or status. He probably didn’t know himself. He looked around, as if making his mind up about something.
“I like it here,” he said finally. “I stay.”
Frau Holstein could contain herself no longer. “This school is for German children,” she hissed. She spoke loud enough for the boy to hear, as if he were an animal, without language. “Not displaced persons. They have their own—places.”
Lukasz ignored her. He spoke directly to Edith.
“I will look after,” he announced. “Sweep up. Clean board. Clean slates. Tend fire. Find fuel. Sleep here.”
He indicated a space by the stove.
“You can’t let him do that! This is a school! Not a camp. Look at him! He’s filthy.” Frau Holstein shuddered. “Probably diseased. We must think of the other children. These people are not to be trusted. They steal everything.”
Edith looked round. What was there to steal?
Lukasz stared back at Frau Holstein, but his eyes showed nothing. He was completely still, as if any movement could tip some kind of balance.
“All he needs is a little soap and water,” Edith said mildly, “and a decent meal.”
“Then he should be on his way. This school is for German children,” she said again. “He’s Polish, if I’m not mistaken. There’s no room for his kind here.”
“He’s a child!” Edith said. “As such he is as deserving of education, food, clothing, as any here. He stays.”
“Frau Graham, I really have to disagree. To receive such a—boy—is, well . . .” She gave a whinnying, condescending laugh, “completely against regulations.”
She glanced about, seeking allies among the staff, but found no help there. They looked from the boy to the two women. There was going to be a battle here.
Edith’s mouth set in a thin line, her gray eyes grew flinty. It was a battle she had to win. Not just to establish her own authority but for the children, for Luka and the others like him.
“Frau Holstein,” she said quietly. “I’d like you to collect your things and leave. Immediately. Fraulein Brandt, you will take over.”
Frau Holstein’s eyes widened. Her mouth gaped. Shocked into speechlessness, it took a moment for her to gather herself, but Edith put up a hand to stem her spluttered protests.
“Go. Now. Or I’ll have you removed.”
Frau Holstein looked toward Jack, who was frowning, arms folded, and then back to Edith. There would be no argument, and she knew it. Edith held all the power here. She had no other choice except to go. She hesitated for a further second, then moved to her desk. She packed her bag in pin-dropping silence, all eyes upon her.
“My Persilschein . . .”
“That stays. Falsifying information carries serious consequences, as I’m sure you well know.”
Frau Holstein took one last look at her prized certificate and moved with measured slowness through her former domain. As she got to the door, she turned with hatred in her eyes. Edith held her stare in the quiet stillness of the room.
At last, Frau Holstien left. Edith turned to the expectant faces gazing at her with new admiration. They thought she’d won, although she felt no triumph. She knew that Frau Holstein lived with her mother and an invalid brother and would be the only one working, but sometimes one had to be ruthless. Edith would not take it further. Frau Holstein would get some sort of job, but not as a teacher. She would brook no discrimination. The children were the ones who mattered. Their education was too important to be contaminated by the likes of Frau Holstein.
Luka’s account of what had happened to him was sketchy. Taken east by the Russians, he’d ended up in a camp somewhere.
“Hungry, all the time hungry.”
This was all he remembered. And soup. Fish bones and skin and water. Sometimes a little kasha. Later, he was taken west again. “Why?” Who knows why? His shrug described the enormous irrationality, the supreme stupidity of war. When the Germans came, he ran away and joined the partisans, then the Red Army.
“Then I leave. Come to here.”
That was as much of his story as he was prepared to tell. He had been caught like a feather on the great gusting breath of war, picked up and put down again. This would be the last landing place. Here he was going to stay.
Edith gave Frieda Brandt cigarettes for the widow who lived next door to the school. She would clean him up.
When Edith returned the next day, she hardly recognized him. A good scrub and a haircut made him a different child. The widow had taken quite a shine to the boy, even giving him clothes belonging to her son who had been killed on the Russian Front. She would have let him stay with her, but he preferred to sleep in the school.
“I stay here,” he said. “In case no-good DPs get in and steal.”
When Edith visited a week later, he was back in his army coat and battered fur hat. The new clothes didn’t smell right, Luka announced. “They smell of dead boy.”
He kept his promise. The floors were brushed, the slates cleaned, the stove glowing. Luka was good at finding anything combustible. He wandered the town in his old uniform, roving the ruins, moving in and out of the different camps and communities, passing from one group of DPs to another. This was where he liked to be. Before he’d wandered into the school, he’d been living in the ruins; one of the troglodyte dwellers in the caved-in basements; wisps of yellowish smoke, seeping through the tumbled bricks, signaled where they lived. How old had he been when the Russians came to his village? Four? Five? For him, war was the natural state of things. It was peace that he was finding difficult. It was the same for the other children: roaming the streets, playing on the bombsites, living in the ruins, filching coal from the railway yards, hanging about the camps and temporary shelters, picking up cigarette ends—that was the life they knew. They’d be lost forever if they weren’t brought into schools soon.
“Could you help get them in?” Edith asked, offering Luka a packet of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke them. Cigarettes weren’t for smoking. They were currency. Luka slid them into one of his many pockets. He’d see what he could do.
True to his word, Luka began to bring children like a ragamuffin Pied Piper. A few at first, then more, lured by promises of food, warmth, and stories. He took to waiting for her outside the office, ready to tell her of his successes, offering to carry her briefcase. When Sergeant Jack wasn’t around, Luka had appointed himself her guardian.
“It is dangerous for you,” he said as he fell into step. “Many bad people about. No-good DPs everywhere.”
At first, Edith had taken Luka’s warnings with a pinch of salt. There was no let-up in the stream of refugees, most of them Volksdeutsche thrown out of countries where they’d lived for centuries. Edith didn’t
think this sad caravan of the dispossessed represented any threat, but there were Criminal Elements, as the Brigadier put it, already resident. She didn’t exactly feel in need of protection, but she welcomed the boy’s company when she had to walk home alone. A couple of times lately, she thought she’d heard footsteps behind her, crunching on the snow, crackling on the icy pavements. One night, a motorbike growled, faster then slower, not quite catching up with her, then roaring past as she turned for home.
“What you thinking?” Luka asked as they walked down to the Rehderbrucke.
“Oh, nothing. Just glad for your company.”
Luka smiled. He liked being needed.
“I was wondering . . .” Edith started.
Her efforts to find Elisabeth had completely stalled. Magda knew more than she was saying, but inquiries were met with that quick shake of the head. The Germans were uncommunicative. Uncooperative might get them into difficulties, but they didn’t volunteer information. Roz’s Jeff had found nothing. Luka might prove more useful.
“I wonder if you could help me with something,” she said as they crossed the bridge. “I’m looking for someone. A lady. She’s likely to be with people from East Prussia.”
