‘You will,’ Kris told her, ‘there's more than enough. Chickens and potatoes and carrots.’
‘We haven’t had butter for a long time,’ Kitty said, ‘but I cook the chicken fat and it’s delicious and so healthy.’
‘Oh, yes please, a chicken,’ Jo said, thinking how pleased they would be when she unpacked it. ‘Elsie can’t keep the stove going for long, but she made a box with straw in it to put hot food in.’
‘That’s what our ma did,’ Kris exclaimed. ‘That was a long time ago, fancy Elsie remembering!’
‘What was that?’ Stella asked.
‘You boil up the food and then put the pot in the straw inside a box, and it goes on cooking for hours.’
‘Oh, that’s clever!’
‘Elsie is.’
Yes, she was. Everything she could get her hands on was useful. In this warm kitchen, the table and the laughing family around it, Alf feeding scraps of food to the dog, all of that and the soft light of candles and logs burning in the fireplace, it was as though she had been transported to another world or was dreaming about the past so vividly that it seemed real.
‘You’re falling asleep again,’ Kitty told her. ‘Come on, you and Merel both, upstairs with you.’
‘We’ll get an early start,’ Cal said. ‘I’ve figured out a way to get us through. Go to bed, you’ll see how smart I am in the morning.’
* * *
When she came downstairs, Gunther was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea with Kitty. He was wearing his uniform, his gun and holster on the table along with his cap. Cal was sitting near the fire, pulling his boots on over two pairs of socks.
‘Sit down, Jo,’ Kitty said, ‘and eat as much breakfast as you can get down. I’ve made sandwiches for on the way.’
‘It’ll be a snap,’ Cal said. ‘Gunther is going to get us there, aren’t you, pal?’
‘And back, I hope. I don’t want to get recruited again.’
While Jo ate porridge and drank hot milk, he helped Kitty cover two baskets of food with canvas bags and rope them to the bikes. Stella came down with a winter coat and a thick scarf and gave them to Jo to wear over her own and, kissing Jo on both cheeks, said, ‘It’s almost over. Next time you come it will be for a holiday.’
Cal said it was shorter if they kept to the road along the river, colder maybe, but quicker. After a few hours, they began to see people coming toward them from the city with empty baby carriages, bikes with crates strapped on them, wheelbarrows, some people with nothing more than empty burlap sacks they hoped to bring home full. When they saw Gunther, they moved aside to let him pass, and they looked at Cal and Jo and saw collaborators, friends of the enemy. There was no way to explain, she felt guilty and ashamed, but she looked at Gunther walking ahead of her and thanked him silently.
The first roadblock was at the bridge over the Rhine Canal, where three Green Police were watching the tired procession going east. When a woman stumbled and fell against one of the soldiers, he pushed her off and asked, ‘Why didn’t you take the train?’ and the other two laughed.
Gunther laughed too, saluted and said good morning in German, then they were over the bridge, and he said, ‘As easy as that!’ and clapped Cal on the shoulder. ‘Die Dummköpfe, idiots! No wonder they’re losing the war!’
But it wasn’t easy all the way. It began to rain so hard that the road was soon a sheet of water that soaked their boots. In Diemen, they tried to avoid the main streets and the police and got confused, turned off from the main road and lost a half-hour of daylight. When Jo recognized the little church where she’d sheltered, they stopped to eat their sandwiches out of the rain. ‘It’s getting dark, I wonder how late it is.’
‘That clock hasn’t been working for years.’ Cal pointed up at the tower. ‘Somebody stole the hands!’
‘Everybody steals everything,’ Gunther said mournfully. ‘I don’t know what this world is coming too.’
That was funny but Jo was too tired to do more than smile, too cold and too wet to think of anything but how far they still had to go. It was hard work pushing the heavy bike and trying to keep it upright. Gunther took it from her for an hour or two, but she had to take it back when they approached a bridge. It wouldn’t be right for a German soldier to be helping his prisoners.
The rain and wind had discouraged the police from staying out after dark, and the streets of the city were empty by the time they got to Elsie’s. They leaned the bikes against the wall and Jo opened the door.
‘It’s me,’ she called out, ‘It’s me and Cal and Gunther, we’re here,’ and she sat down on the floor and began to cry.
26 Pam, August 1945
‘You must write home,’ Galya said. ‘Tell them you are safe.’
‘I don’t have anybody to write to.’
‘Your friend Jo, what about her? With all you have told me, dorogaya, dear friend, she is mourning you so long as she does not know. Write!’ Handing Pam a child’s notebook and a pencil, she apologized, ‘This is all we have at the moment, but I have also an envelope, and the colonel has promised stamps.’
They were sitting in the sun on the castle’s crumbling stone terrace, below them the ground sloped down to fields where women and children stooped to harvest potatoes and, farther out, boats appeared and disappeared on a broad slow river. It was like a silent film, the harvesters and their long shadows moving slowly, the landscape changing almost imperceptibly, everything lit dramatically by an intense August sun.
Galya had given Pam the wide brim of a straw hat, under which she draped a large kerchief tied loosely under her chin. They sat for hours on the wall, talking sometimes, more often silent. They could hear low voices in the rooms behind them, and sometimes Galya would hum or sing softly.
‘You sound like bees,’ Pam told her. ‘Buzz, buzz, there’s honey here.’
‘That is true, isn’t it, for you? This is honey-time?’
It was a good way to describe what it meant to be here, in this castle in the Crimean countryside. The colonel had told her the war was over in the West and, as soon as they could arrange her papers and tickets, back she would go. In the meantime, she was being strengthened for the long journey home.
On the train from Lublin to Odessa, a few hundred miles in three days, she had slept curled up on two of the torn plush seats, or looked out, leaning her head on the window, at the forests, fields and villages they passed. She thought of Nachman Chaim, the young Nathan who had escaped his fate as a rabbi at the hands of the Cossacks. He’d left one of these villages, or one just like them, and brought himself, her grandfather, her father and herself to what he thought was a safe place for Jews.
A man traveling with her said they were lucky to have survived Majdanek but, he told Pam, ‘I think our luck has run out as fast as it ran in. What do the Russians want with us, except to put us to work rebuilding what the Germans destroyed?’
‘Didn’t you hear what the colonel said? That we would be sent home?'
‘The KGB in army uniforms, you mean? You trust them?’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said, so disbelieving that he stood up and left her. Why not trust the people who had freed their camp, given them food and blankets, handed out the identification cards the Polish Red Cross supplied. The military doctor had asked to see the five children she was taking care of, told her what to feed them and how much and then arranged to have them sent to a hospital in Warsaw. ‘Can’t they stay with me?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been a sort of mother ever since their own,’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand, but they need to go to a hospital. I think they have tuberculosis and, in any case, they are seriously malnourished and underweight. And you will be leaving soon for a place where they do not take children.’
‘Another camp?’
‘Oh, no! To a safe place in the east. And when the war is won in the west, you will go home, to Holland, yes? Are these Dutch children?’
She shook her head, unable to tell him where they ha
d come from, whose sons and daughters they were. They spoke Polish, they were Jewish, that’s all she knew.
‘The Germans destroyed many of the records before they ran away,’ he said. ‘But perhaps our men will find something. When they get out of hospital, Jewish families can be found to take them.’ He didn’t sound confident, but it was a plan at least.
* * *
One morning, she and the other women were given canvas bags and told to choose clothes for themselves from the tailor shop they’d been working in, warm things to travel in and summer clothes for where they were going. Everything she tried on was too big. She looked down at herself in a dress, stockings and leather shoes with soles and laces, felt the clean cotton underwear against her skin, and thought of Marcus. She felt a hundred years old, but she looked like a girl again.
In Odessa they were met by Galya, another military doctor, and her team of soldiers, and taken to the castle. At the first meal, Pam found herself between an Englishman and a Belgian, both of whom had been shot down over Germany and had spent several months in army prison camps. Speaking English was so strange, so wonderful, that she hardly ate.
The Englishman, Graham, circled her wrist with two fingers and said, ‘Stop asking questions and eat, Pamela. You’re here to be fattened-up.’
‘It’s going to be a while before it’s safe to go home,’ the Belgian said. ‘Let’s enjoy this while we can.’ He lifted his glass of water and said, ‘This is as good as any wine back home, this sausage and sauerkraut the equal of my mother’s. A votre santé!’ and they clinked glasses and toasted the Russian Army.
When Galya heard Pam speaking English and discovered she had studied Shakespeare, her own passion, Pam became her favorite patient. She took her upstairs to a hallway where her family’s portraits hung. ‘I want especially to show you my great-grandmother,’ she said. ‘We are sure she was Jewish, her name was Rebecca, so of course! Look!’
Rebecca had been a beautiful woman or at least the artist had made her beautiful. Upswept black hair, a broad high white forehead, large dark eyes, and a chin lifted defiantly or proudly, hard to say which. There was nothing of her in Galya, who was as broad as she was tall and as blond as Rebecca was dark. She looked like a peasant, but she was a countess and a doctor, and she had studied English history and literature.
‘I am going to the city,’ she said that afternoon. ‘And, when I come back, you will have your letter written. Tell your Jo you will be ready to come home soon.’
In the empty dining room, Pam sat down near a window and looked at the notebook. On the cover, there was a picture of Stalin and some words in Cyrillic, inside were thirty-six pages of grey paper with blue lines. Enough for thirty-six letters to Jo. This might be the time to put down everything that had happened to her and then forget it. Perhaps that was what clever Galya had intended when she gave her all that paper.
She began, ‘Dear Jo’, laid down the pencil, leaned back and looked out the window at the cloudless blue sky. She could write that she was well and happy, that was almost true, that she looked forward to coming home to Amsterdam, though she wanted to stay in this refuge forever, that she had missed Jo, whom she hadn’t thought about for months. ‘And Marcus? No!’ she thought, ‘not yet,’ and he was gone again.
She would start and see what happened. ‘Dear Jo,’ she read and, taking a deep breath, wrote, ‘We are here together, I writing and you reading. If I look up, I can imagine you sitting across from me, though I am not sure I know how you look now. Different, I think, from when I kissed you goodbye in your room. I think this because I look so different. Galya told me I weighed only 80 pounds when I came here to her castle. We eat a lot of butter and cream and chocolate, I can’t imagine where it all comes from, so I look more like a human being now, but not like the fortunate Pam you knew.’
There were no mirrors in the barracks where she and a hundred other women and the last few children had slept, but she knew that she was as thin and bent as they were, her skin as yellow from exhaustion, her eyes blurred. Her hands had been cut and bruised by the sewing machines and scissors she worked with for twelve hours a day, her body raw with lice and flea bites, and a guard had knocked a tooth out of her mouth when she tried to help a woman who tripped and fell on the way back from roll call one evening.
'I hope you understood when I left so abruptly that morning. I was sure it was just a question of time before Hannah's Gestapo lover found me, and then all of you would have been arrested. What I did then, to my shame, was to go to Marcus. Conrad found us, they took Marcus away, and Conrad took me to the prison on the Leidseplein. He said he would have to decide where to send me, there was choice enough. Galya says there are thousands of camps. I was transferred three times, each time farther east, before I finally ended up in Majdanek. People who were too sick or worn out to work were sent to us from factories and other camps, and they were shot and their bodies burned. If you arrived still able to do it, there was plenty of work. One of the women told me, ‘Don't pray that they won't hurt you, pray they won't kill you.’ So I did. You believe in prayer, don't you, dear Jo? Conrad wished me luck, and I had that, because here I am.'
That was enough about the camp. Who would want to know about the dogs, the beatings, the disinfecting and the shaving of all their body hair when they arrived, the cold showers once a month, if somebody remembered to approve it, the clothes they were given that were too big, too shabby, a dead woman's clothes. Would Jo like to know the number that replaced her name? What kind of soup they ate twice a day and how hard and dry the bread was? It was over, it was history, let somebody else find the evidence and record the statistics. She’d seen the Russian officers taking pictures, that would do.
* * *
When Galya came for her, she had written one page. ‘I’ll do another tomorrow,’ Pam said, closing the notebook. ‘I’ll be here that long, won’t I, thirty-five more days?’
‘Perhaps yes. A whole page? That’s very good, dorogaya, and it hasn’t made you sad? It’s a good therapeutics?’
‘Therapy.’
‘Yes, thank you, therapy.’
‘What does this say, here on the cover? This is Stalin, isn’t it?'
Galya ran her finger across the letters, ‘Young Stakhanovite, be diligent. You know Stakhanov? No? One of their propaganda figures, a coal miner who loved Stalin so much, he dug 30 times as much coal in one day as his quota. You believe that?’
‘Is it so that school children learn diligently? That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course, for Papa Stalin and Mother Russia, why not! But we Ukrainians have never felt much love for Mother Russia. We weren’t even sure we wanted to fight the Germans, who would perhaps help us liberate ourselves from Moscow.’
‘But that’s not why they came here.’
‘Oh no, not at all.’
Simon had been right, this was Germany’s Lebensraum, the wide, fertile fields in the east.
‘Were you here?’
‘No, lucky for me I was with the army in the mountains, my parents too, but my brother Maxim was here and, when the Germans required this building, they arrested him and all our peasants. Do you know what they called us? Ungeziefer, vermin! They made us feel the boot!’
She had never seen Galya angry before, and it was strange to watch her face redden and her fists clench.
When she’d climbed into that freight car in Amsterdam, Pam had told herself not to feel anything, not to hope, not to despair, not to miss anyone or mourn for what she was about to lose. She had discovered that staying alive took all your energy, there was nothing left over for feelings. What would it be like to be angry again? At whom? About what? To what purpose?
‘Enough,’ Galya said, laughing at herself.
Some women had come in to set the tables for dinner, and she stood up, put her hand out to Pam and said, ‘Come for a walk in the sun, there’s just enough time.’
That was Pam’s schedule, her mornings for mild exercises, a
bath, reading and falling asleep over her book. After lunch with Graham and Dominique, the greedy gourmet Belgian, she had time to write her letter to Jo before Galya came to get her for a walk. She numbered the pages and made herself fill each one. ‘I must tell you about the children,’ she wrote on page eleven. ‘I think they forgot who their mothers were, there were so many women in our barracks, and we were all willing to share our bread with them. It was important that we keep them alive, they were all we had of the future and, if we let them die, the future would die with them.
‘I took them to the sewing room every morning, they played a little but mostly they slept. One little girl, the oldest, six perhaps, looked like my Sara and even thought, like her, that she had to help care for the little ones. That meant keeping them quiet when the guards came in to bring sacks of clothes and take others away. The guards must have known they were there, maybe they thought that, if they didn’t see them, oh, that’s what that general said, didn’t he? But this time it was true and the children survived, all five of them.’
Nobody would ever understand what kept some of the prisoners alive and others not. Some of the women became so weak, they couldn’t get up at dawn for roll-call. Whoever stayed behind disappeared. She couldn’t write that or that people who disobeyed orders were beaten and then had to be helped by the rest of them to go to work. No, not something to write about.
‘Dear Jo,’ she wrote on page nineteen, ‘Galya and I have been taking walks every afternoon. It is hot, but we go to a small forest at the very end of her estate and walk in the shade of old thick-trunked trees. Neither of us knows what they are. She doesn’t ask a lot of questions, sometimes we walk the whole way there and back without speaking. I like that. There are so many things I haven’t thought about since I left Amsterdam, things I didn’t want to think about, I mean, that now the only way I can start is to write about them in this little notebook. Galya understands.
The Time Between Page 31
