But the German money bought little food; nor was there much food to buy. Frau Schmidt took out the sheets from the bombed-out village — so long ago that seemed — and made Helga a blouse and new skirts and Johannes a new shirt. Her sewing was so fine that women and men came to her with ragged clothes, asking her to mend them, to turn two old dresses into one that looked almost new.
Frau Schmidt sat in the sunlight, as the breeze blew through the leaves, and showed Helga how to hem and embroider. The sewing earned them cigarettes and chewing gum and cans of corned beef, more valuable than paper currency.
But, most of all, the work made Frau Schmidt live in the world again, talking to people about whether they’d like long sleeves or short, and what shape pocket, coming to the dining room to eat, and even to the concerts the inmates put on. There had been violins and flutes and even a banjo and a trombone in the ragged bundles carried to the camp.
Vati tried to organise a school, though no one else, it seemed, thought that important, and he could not run a school and the hospital as well. But an old man who had been a professor of mathematics before he was sent to a labour camp agreed to teach Johannes and Helga in return for one cigarette a day. He sat with them out in the sun. Paper was scarce, and ink and pencils even more so, but the professor filled a box with sand and found three straight sticks in the forest.
‘This is what the ancient Greeks used to teach their students,’ he said. ‘If it was good enough for Plato’s school, it will do for us.’
Soon other people joined them: a woman who had worked for an English firm before the war gave them English lessons, not for cigarettes, but for something to do. A sailor taught them geography, which was really stories about all the ports he’d seen. ‘But not about the women,’ said Frau Schmidt sternly. She was much better now.
A researcher who had a degree in physics; a chemist; and Herr Schmidt taught them geometry and the basics of engineering. It was a strange school. But, remembering his lessons of what was now over a year earlier, Johannes thought he learned far more there in the camp than he had sitting at a desk. No dull exercises in dull books. Just questions, conversations in the sunshine. Helga drank in knowledge too. It was as if they learned hand in hand, as they had been so often since the barn. But this was excitement as the world beyond the camp unfolded in the words of their teachers. He had never had a partner in learning before, one with a mind as sharp and enquiring as his own.
After a month, Helga shyly asked Mutti and Vati if they might teach at the ‘school’ too. And so lessons in anatomy were added, the bones of the foot outlined in their sand ‘textbook’, or the different areas of the brain, and what various viruses looked like — or would, if they were vastly bigger, and drawn with a finger or a stick.
The school moved inside to the Schmidts’ bunk when autumn came. Christmas — snow, decorations made from scraps of coloured paper, and even canned ham served for midday dinner, with potatoes and peas. Vati and Mutti gave Johannes and Helga books they had traded for cigarettes from the Red Cross parcels; Helga gave each of them a hemmed handkerchief; the Schmidts gave Mutti and Helga blouses made from patchwork pieces of cloth and Johannes a shirt that was new, even if the blue cloth was faded, and he had last seen it in a woman’s skirt. Johannes gave everyone notebooks he had made from brown wrapping paper.
The New Year came, with more snow. The men took it in turns to hunt for fuel in the forest, but there was little to be had, for so many others had looked for fallen wood too, and no one had cut timber for over a year, so none was dry enough to burn. The barracks grew cold again, the stoves only lit at night. They wore all their clothes all of the time, and were still cold.
That was when Herr Schmidt sat on his bunk with Frau Schmidt and Helga and Johannes one night and said, ‘I must become a single man.’
‘No,’ said Frau Schmidt faintly. ‘Please . . .’
He took her hand. ‘I must. It is the only way to get a home for us. The English, the Americans and the Canadians are only taking single men. I have my engineering papers — I am sure one of those countries will take me. If I go as a single man, then one day soon, surely, they will change this stupid rule and allow families to those countries too. I can send for you. And, in the meantime, I can send you money.’
Money they could exchange for better food. For fabric, for Frau Schmidt to make into clothes to sell. For books, for Helga — and Johannes — to study.
Frau Schmidt was very quiet. She took Helga’s hand and held it tightly. And then she said, ‘Yes. You should go. Go to America, with all its food. And when you can, send for us.’
Helga put her arms around her mother, and kissed her cheek. ‘I will take care of you,’ she said softly.
‘You always do,’ said Frau Schmidt, and she managed to smile at her daughter and her husband.
Herr Schmidt left in the back of a truck the next day, heading for another camp where they wouldn’t know he was married and had a family. A letter came from him, three weeks later. Frau Schmidt opened it, read it, and then looked up at Johannes and Helga.
‘Not America,’ she said. ‘It would take six months before he could go to America, so many want to go there. But the men at that camp say he can go to a place called Australia now.’
Australia! Johannes remembered the sailor’s lessons. ‘That is on the other side of the world! Not just one ocean to cross, but lots!’
Frau Schmidt bit her lip. ‘If he thinks Australia is best, then it must be. And if it’s not good, then one day we can maybe go to America instead.’
You could stay here, thought Johannes. Your home may be under Russian control now, but there are other places in Germany. So much must be rebuilt now that surely you would find a home in a few months, a year at most, and Herr Schmidt would find a job.
But he said nothing. For Frau Schmidt, Germany would always be the land of war, of loss. And Herr Schmidt knew it.
And Helga?
Johannes realised he had never heard Helga mourn the loss of anything, or any place or any person, except for Hannes. It was as if Helga had wiped the professor’s box of sand smooth, with no memories left on it at all.
Chapter 27
JOHANNES
GERMANY, 1948
Yet another year in the camp for those labelled DP. More refugees had come. More had left. Notes of hope and names and longing still hung on doorposts, even trees. Every day someone in the camp learned of a relative alive, and cried for joy, or one who had died, or one who had been alive a year ago and might . . .
So many, many ‘mights’.
The food was a little more plentiful, with potatoes and corned beef and carrots in the midday stew, and bread that was bread, instead of bran and sawdust, and sometimes even a scrape of butter or margarine.
But little else changed. There were too few places, it seemed, for the displaced to go.
Helga and Johannes still attended the makeshift school, with teachers stripped of all but their learning and their wish to share — to give, perhaps, a chance of life to those who were young, and still might have a life to live beyond the DP camp.
Sometimes a few other young people joined them, but not often. Most young people lived for the day, scavenging beyond the camp for goods to trade, or to brighten small grey lives. Others lived in no time, but simply sat and stared: children unable to bear the past, who had no future to imagine, who found even the present terrifying, waking each day not knowing what new faces might arrive, what familiar ones might vanish. Whether, among the new faces, old tormentors might appear, for even Nazis and concentration camp guards could now be called displaced. What could you do, if a demon from your past appeared?
Nothing. Eat your bread and margarine. Drink your stew, your ersatz coffee, sleep in your bunk; accept the nightmares of day as well as darkness. And so children sat unmoving, not looking up or even glancing at the tears upon their mothers’ faces, as they tried to spoon in food or water, to wake their children into the land of now.
Frau Schmidt still sewed. She had earned a small store of jewellery, which kept its value better than German paper money. Helga helped her and so did Johannes, in the days they did not help at the hospital. It was embarrassing for a boy to hold a needle, so he helped make patterns from old newspaper and cut cloth and unpicked seams from rags that might become new dresses or shirts, or unravelled and rolled the yarn of jumpers. Old blankets could become coats, embroidered till they looked bright and even fashionable, the designs discovered in newspapers or magazines months old by the time they saw them. Old handbags, boots or lederhosen could be cut into small patches of leather, sewn together and remade as new.
But where Helga worked, so did Johannes. Where Johannes worked, Helga came too. Partly it was to talk English together, for Helga would need English if — when — she and Frau Schmidt could join Herr Schmidt in Australia. But mostly it was because they had faced death together and chosen life, and worked out how to keep it; and every day that they survived in this camp was another that they survived together.
We fit together, me and Helga, thought Johannes. Not just what we have been through, but the way we want to learn things, the way we both find work satisfying. A whisper inside him said, ‘Working helps keep nightmares away.’
Perhaps it did for Helga too.
A letter arrived from Herr Schmidt in Italy, and then one from Malta, and then one posted in a town called Fremantle in Australia and, finally, from a place called Eucumbene, way on the other side of the big island continent.
Dear Marta and Helga,
I hope you are both well, as I am well. You will be as surprised as I am to see the address on this letter. I am working as a labourer on a project to build a tunnel through a mountain to channel water from a river called the Snowy River to make hydro-electricity and then irrigate the dry land to grow vegetables. There is much dry land in Australia.
It seems that despite what the men from Australia told me, Australia does not recognise my engineering papers. I will have to do more exams, but to do them my English must be better. Till then, I work here, and I practise my English. But the Australian engineers here are friendly and have lent me their textbooks, so I hope that before the year is out I will be an engineer again.
Meanwhile we live in huts, and it is cold. But the food is plentiful, though always sheep or rabbit, but we have meat and butter at every meal, and white bread, and any man may have as much food as he wishes to eat. There are men here from every country on earth.
This is not a place for families, although Sister Bernadette is setting up a school for the camp children. But when I am an engineer and have engineer’s wages, not a labourer’s pay, we can rent a house in Cooma, which is a bigger town, with better schools, and when my three years are up working in the country we can live in Sydney. I saw it only briefly but it is a beautiful city, and I am sure we can be happy there. Surely by then families will be allowed to join their men in Australia. The government cannot be so cruel as to keep us all apart!
I remain,
your loving husband and father,
Ernst Schmidt
‘I wonder if he has seen a kangaroo,’ said Helga. The sailor had told them about kangaroos, and savage koalas that dropped on your head and tried to smother you, and things called boomerangs that Australians threw to hit each other on the head, but then the boomerang came back to the hand of the person who had thrown it.
Australia sounded odd. But there had been no bombing in southern Australia, no occupying troops, no bands of soldiers looting. Boomerangs sounded better than rifles and machine guns.
Australians played cricket too, the sailor had said, and all went to the beach in swimming costumes and played in the waves. Herr Schmidt had not mentioned any of those.
‘Do you think he is happy there?’ whispered Frau Schmidt.
‘I think he misses his family,’ said Helga softly. ‘But he can see a future now. A good one. A home in a city he says is beautiful.’
Frau Schmidt smiled at her. ‘And good schools for you.’
Helga met Johannes’s eyes. ‘I think our school here is the best one in the world.’
Vati and Mutti sat with Johannes in the dining room that evening after dinner, when most of the others had left.
‘Herr Schmidt has his engineer’s certificate,’ said Vati. He took Mutti’s hand. ‘And even then they will not let him work at his profession. All we have are pieces of paper that call us DPs. Nothing to prove our qualifications at all.’
‘But you work as doctors now!’ cried Johannes.
Vati shrugged. ‘We are allowed to work here because other doctors do not want to work in a DP camp, for Pfennigs and turnip stew. If the Australians will not let Herr Schmidt be an engineer, even on a project that so badly needs engineers, they will not let us practise medicine.’
‘And why would we want to go to Australia?’ asked Mutti. ‘It is a land of convicts, English prisoners sent out to a land no one else wanted, a land of desert and savages.’
‘Herr Schmidt says Sydney is beautiful,’ began Johannes.
‘Herr Schmidt wishes to give his family hope,’ said Mutti gently. ‘He is in Australia now, and must make the best of it.’
‘How many million DPs must Australia sort through until they say welcome to families?’ said Vati. ‘Will it take ten years? Never, perhaps. But if I go to England as a single man, I can work for two years, and get my residency, and then I can send for you. Or I might go to America or Canada or Brazil.’
‘They would all be better places to live than Australia,’ said Mutti.
‘Can we really never go home?’ asked Johannes in a small voice.
Vati took his hand. ‘There are bad stories from new refugees who have escaped from the Russian territories. There are gangs of ruffians and even less food than here. Whoever has the land where our hospital and home were may think we have come back to claim it and denounce us as criminals or traitors, to be sent to a Russian prison camp. It wasn’t safe three years ago; it is even less safe now.’ He met Mutti’s eyes. ‘We survived a German extermination camp. Would we survive a Russian one?’
‘But what if America or Canada or Brazil will not let you be doctors?’ demanded Johannes.
‘They are older nations than Australia, more civilised. There would be more choice of jobs there. Perhaps I might be a salesman for medical supplies.’ Vati lifted his chin. ‘We have survived, Johannes. Whatever is before us now, we will survive that too.’
‘And one day,’ said Mutti quietly, ‘we will have a new home.’
‘A house,’ said Vati, ‘a house of our own. A cat . . .’
For a moment Johannes thought he meant a cat to eat, if they were hungry. But then he remembered Maus. A cat who you fed, because there was so much food a cat could eat some too.
‘England would be good,’ he ventured, remembering the English major who had been kind. ‘Or America,’ remembering the American who gave him chewing gum. There would be more to eat in America, perhaps . . .
But Vati did not go to America. For a letter came from Frau Marks.
Chapter 28
FRAU MARKS
ENGLAND, SEPTEMBER 1947
Mrs Marks sat in the library café and read the letter again. She sat there every morning now, eating toast and tea. It was all she did: eat slowly, through the day. Miriam said she needed building up. She must be strong for Georg.
But Georg was gone. Gone forever. Had she been so silly that she had dreamed she would hold him in her arms, her little boy?
Little boys grow up. The little boy had vanished. Not just from childhood, but from England, to Australia at the other end of the world, where Miriam had sent him to be safe.
She wanted to be angry with Miriam. She could not. Miriam had done what must be done. If Georg had stayed in England, he might have died in an air raid; might have been imprisoned as an enemy if the British had found out he was Georg, not George.
Georg was safe in Australia. No, George was safe. Georg w
as gone.
‘Another cup of tea, love?’
‘Yes, please.’ Mrs Huntley was so kind. The tea would be mostly hot water, vaguely burned-toast colour, but it helped her to swallow the bread. Soon she would have false teeth, Miriam had promised, and would be able to eat more than toast soaked in tea, and soup, which was all she could manage since her teeth had fallen out from starvation in the camps.
‘Is that a letter from your boy, love? George? George used to come into my library every day, till it was bombed and we moved the books in here. I write to him at Christmas still, and send him a book too. He loves his books.’
She tried not to be jealous of this woman who had known her son when he was ten, eleven. Months, years, gone from her life. Time she could never have.
‘Yes. It’s from Georg . . . George.’
‘Well, I would never have guessed he was German. But it explains things too. He was such a quiet one. Give him my love.’
No hatred because Georg was German. None for her either. But they had been rejected by Germany, both of them — perhaps that meant something to this woman here. Or maybe, like Sister Columba, she gave love instead of hate.
Mrs Marks looked down at the letter once again, the letter she had read a thousand times since he had sent it to her two years ago, would read a thousand more, would read to this kind woman here just for the joy and pain of hearing her son’s words aloud.
Dear Mutti,
I am so glad you are alive. I knew you were, but it is good to know for sure. Mud always said you were alive too. She cried when Aunt Miriam sent the telegram, and so did Auntie Thel. I cried too. You will like Auntie Thel and Uncle Ron and Mud, and her family too.
Uncle Ron says that Aunt Miriam may have told you this already. It will be easier for you to get a ship to Australia than for me to come to England. Ships go from Australia to England full of machinery and wheat and wool, and so there is much more room on them on the way back here than when they go to you. Aunt Miriam thinks you might be able to get a passage to Australia by the end of the year, but it might be two years before I could come to you in England.
Goodbye, Mr Hitler Page 9
