Now, several hours later, my driver has dropped off everyone else but me. He pulls to a stop off to the side of a gravel road and says I’ve reached Foehrenwald. But I don’t see a sign or anything to orient me.
What I see instead are fields, flat and brown. Dozens of men and women in farm clothes till the soil. Several hundred meters behind them, I see the pitched-roof buildings of a town.
I look back toward the man who drove me here to see if he has any other guidance, but he’s already pulled away, too far for me to catch him. So I pick through a neat row of dirt and pause at one of the working women. Spade in hand, she’s depositing seeds into the ground.
“Pardon, but I’m looking for the camp?” I ask in German. “For displaced persons. Is it close by?”
Her face is blank; she hasn’t understood my question. I switch to Yiddish and then Polish and still get no reply, but with the last language, the woman’s face lights up, and she beckons over another women, gesturing that I should ask her instead. This new woman answers in Polish, friendly but with a heavy accent that I think might be Italian.
“Foehrenwald is here,” she says. “You’re already on the boundaries.” She nods her head backward toward the structures on the horizon.
“Which buildings?”
She laughs. “All of them.”
“I’m here,” I whisper. I’ve done it.
The girl regards me curiously after this last statement, but for a minute, I can’t say anything else. I’m rooted to the ground with quivering limbs because I’ve actually done this crazy thing. For better or for worse, I’ve spent more than half of the money I had on train tickets and food. There’s no way to turn back now, no way to get home. My stomach clenches in brief fear, but I’ve done it; it’s done.
“The administration building is probably what you are looking for,” the girl continues, a bit carefully, noticing my silence. “It’s in the middle of the camp—keep walking toward that road, there. Michigan Street. Once you get close, someone else will be able to help.”
I force a smile to look bolder than I feel, and I try to repeat the street name she’s just said. It doesn’t sound Polish or German or even Italian. “Mi-chi-gan,” she pronounces again. “It’s an American province. All streets in the camp are named after American provinces.”
“Thank you.”
The dirt road she pointed me down leads me farther into Foehrenwald, which is less and less what I was expecting. I’d pictured rows of long barracks laid out on a grid, the architecture of war. I’d steeled myself for this war architecture, steeled it to make my mind unravel.
But I can now see that Foehrenwald looks more like a small town, organized like a wheel with spokes. I breathe a sigh of relief.
Michigan is a street on the perimeter; others, with names like Illinois and Indiana, lead toward a hub in the center of the camp. Whitewashed cottages with pitched roofs line all the spoke streets, while the larger buildings in the middle—the administration buildings, I presume—are blockier and more industrial, clustered around a central courtyard.
At the front doors of administration, a group of people stands outside, smoking and talking. After my exchange with the Italian woman in the field, I’m not surprised to hear different languages, but I am surprised by the variety: Hungarian. Czech. Slovenian and Dutch. Most of the people are my age or a little older; a smaller number are my parents’ generation, and smaller still are the very old, the age of the man on the train. Nobody is younger. Nobody who could be Abek.
I clear my throat, gripping the handle of my valise. “Excuse me. Is there a person in charge?” I ask in German, the language I hear most.
A sandy-haired boy interrupts his conversation. “Of which division?”
Division. I hadn’t expected something so formal. “Of—I’m looking for someone in the camp. Another prisoner—refugee, I mean.”
He nods to a smaller, adjoining building. “Then you want to go there. Ask for Frau Yost.”
I don’t have to ask for her, though. Inside the building, modern and with linoleum floors, a small woman with wire-rimmed glasses approaches me almost as soon as I walk through the door. She’s wearing a plaid shirtwaist dress, foreign-seeming in a way I can’t place my finger on, and when she shakes my hand, it’s businesslike.
“Englisch?” she asks. “Deutsch?”
“Ja,” I tell her, explaining that I am Polish but can speak German. “My name is Zofia Lederman. Frau Yost?”
She nods. “That’s me. I’m so relieved you speak German.” Her own is accented, American or Canadian. “To communicate with a Hungarian woman the other day, I had to go through someone who spoke French.”
I expect that she’ll ask me what I’m doing here, or invite me to sit down, but instead, Mrs. Yost takes a hat hanging from a hook on a wall and pins it on her head as she ushers me back toward the door I’ve just entered.
“I told them nobody had time to clear out that much housing.” She holds the door open. “But we did the best we could—a bed here, a bed there, but we’re already doubled up and desperately short on blankets. You knew that, right? In terms of food, with all the extra people, we can manage for maybe a week without additional rations. The gardens help.”
“Mrs. Yost—”
“And your official ration cards will be eventually transferred over, I believe, but because absolutely nothing is working yet in this country—”
“Mrs. Yost, I’m so sorry, but—”
Finally, she breaks off, noticing that I haven’t followed her through the door. She steps back inside. “Feldafing?”
“Pardon me?”
“You’re from Feldafing?”
I shake my head. “No, outside they told me to ask for you in here.”
She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m so sorry. We received a telegram saying that the camp in Feldafing was overcrowded and that some residents would arrive by the end of the week. A representative was supposed to be here now to see to the accommodations. It’s not normally my job, but I’m the only one who could take the meeting.”
She reaches for the door handle again. I sense that if she were wearing a watch, she would be checking the time. “But, anyway. You’re not from Feldafing, because of course you’re not. Whom do you represent?”
“I came here on my own. I’m looking for my brother.”
“Do you know what cottage he’s in?”
“My family is from Poland. Abek and I were separated in our first camp, but I heard prisoners from there were sent to Dachau, and then the prisoners from Dachau came here.”
“So you don’t know what cottage he’s in. Do you know for certain that he’s here at all?” She has a pointed, matter-of-fact way of talking that makes me feel automatically foolish.
“No. But I think he is. I heard the prisoners from Dachau came here.”
“Some of them did.”
“So I came here. My name is Zofia Lederman. My brother is Abek Lederman. He would be twelve, but we told him to say he was older. He could be saying he’s as old as fifteen, and—”