Eventually, when nobody else comes through the door, Josef gets his own plate and takes it, as Breine predicted, not to us but to an unoccupied table. He eats quickly, shoulders hunched over his plate, eyes down.
Whatever familiar thing I thought I saw in him has disappeared. He’s just a boy now. But I’m trying to square the excessively polite boy keeping himself to the back of the line with the one I saw earlier, viciously punching another man’s throat. I would wonder if I’d imagined it, but he’s wearing the same shirt, rust-colored bloodstain on the hem.
Breine notices me watching all this and nudges Chaim. “Zofia says Josef got in a fight.”
“He d-did. B-but it was with Rudolf.”
The rest of the table groans; this information means something to them it doesn’t to me.
“Who is Rudolf?” I ask.
Breine squeezes Chaim’s arm. “Tell her,” she encourages.
“Y-you can.”
“I like your voice better.”
Chaim shakes his head, but he’s smiling. I see him reach for Breine’s hand under the table. She waits another beat to be sure Chaim isn’t going to speak. “All right. Nobody cares if Josef got in a fight with Rudolf, because he’s a collaborator. He volunteered his house to the Gestapo. They kept him fat the whole war. He’s only here now because his street was bombed when the Allies came. Honestly, that’s the thing about Josef’s fights. You know they’re terrible. But then you find out whom they were with, and you wish you’d done it first.”
I’m confused. “The Germans let Rudolf stay in his house? They didn’t just take it over? Did he bribe them?”
In my town, even at the very beginning of the war, if the Gestapo wanted something a Jewish family owned, they didn’t ask to share it with you. They just decided it was theirs.
Breine has taken a mouthful of cabbage, so she motions for Esther to answer instead. “Rudolf isn’t Jewish,” Esther says, cutting her food into small, neat bites.
“What do you mean?”
Breine coughs. “Several people here aren’t. Technically, this isn’t a facility for Jewish people, it’s only a facility for displaced people. Technically, Rudolf has been displaced from his home. And so have other Germans whose homes were bombed in the Allied invasion.”
“Do all of them—did all of them…”
“No,” she says, sensing my question. “They didn’t all work for the Nazis.”
My mind’s still reeling from this. Maybe they didn’t all house the Gestapo, but some might have turned us in, revealed our hiding places in exchange for money or a favor. Or placed swastikas in their potted plants. Some might have been surprised we were back, because they thought they’d never have to see us again.
But they do. And now we’re supposed to live with people who either wished for our deaths or looked the other way while it happened.
I sneak a glance at Josef, head still down, mechanically finishing the food on his plate.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Esther offers.
“Zofia is here looking for her brother,” Breine tells the table. “Abek. All of you ask your friends here if they know any boys named Abek.”
“And you—are any of you still looking for people?” I ask, thinking of the binders and papers spread over Mrs. Yost’s desk.
A hush falls over the table. Chaim and Breine look down at their plates; she already told me her uncle was the last family they had.
“I haven’t seen my wife since they separated the women at Dachau,” says one man who looks too young to have a wife. “Her brother and I are both staying here until I learn what happened to her.”
“My father was going to send for my mother and me when he got to England,” says a pretty woman who introduced herself to me as Judith, an occupant of the front room of our cottage. “I’m trying to send word that my mother is—that he can still send for me.”
“You know that he got there, though?” I ask.
“The last round of visas,” she says. “I haven’t been able to talk to him yet, but I saw him get on the boat myself.”
We go around the table. Esther’s parents are dead. A boy named Nev is still trying to find his. A man named Ravid has stopped looking, and so has his fiancée, Rebekah, whom he protectively places his arm around.
“It happens sometimes, though,” Breine says. “Zofia, the girl who stayed in your bed before you—Chaya. She found her mother and a brother. It happens, for some people.”
A chair squeaks. It’s Miriam, Judith’s roommate from our cottage, a short, freckled girl about my age, abruptly rising from her chair. “I need to write my letters,” she mumbles, hastily grabbing her tray. “Please excuse.”
“Miriam,” Judith starts, reaching out a hand and speaking quickly to her in Dutch.
“No, I must go,” she insists, and though the rest of her sentence is in a different language, I can understand the guilt and panic on her face, the sense that she hasn’t written enough letters.
She walks off quickly, heels clicking on the floor. The mood at the table—I’ve ruined it with my question. We all watch Miriam leave.
“I shouldn’t have asked that,” I say. “She didn’t want to talk.”
Judith clears her throat. “Her twin sister,” she explains. “Doctors did experiments on both of them. Miriam was the control; her sister was the one they hurt.”
My throat starts to close. The one they hurt.
“At liberation, her sister was taken to a hospital to get better,” Judith continues. “But Miriam was given the wrong information about where, and she hasn’t been able to find her since. And now she writes—”
“Ten letters a day,” I finish.
Ten letters a day. Miriam must be the woman Mrs. Yost mentioned earlier. She saw her sister only months ago, but now it’s as if she vanished.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Esther says again.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I shouldn’t have—”
“You didn’t know.” She puts her hand on my arm.
“Don’t apologize,” Breine reaffirms. “We all want to talk about it and not talk about it all the time. We hate talking about it, and we don’t know how to talk about anything else.”
Chaim puts his arm around her and smiles at his fiancée through watery eyes.
“For now, we’ll just talk about something else, though, yes?” She looks around the table for approval, and everyone nods. “I could, for example, tell you about my wedding.” The table groans; Breine’s joke has the intended effect of lightening the mood. “Or, we could play the happier game: What are you going to do when you leave here?” She turns to me. “Zofia, you’re newest. You start.”
“When I leave here,” I start slowly. “When I leave here, it will be with Abek, and we will go home to Sosnowiec.”
“Where I may or may not have distant cousins,” Breine supplies.
“Where will you all go?” I return the question. “Chaim and Breine, after your wedding, whose homeland will you return to?”