Eli asked for Ann Stewart, the name given to him by Major Donnelly. She was a tall, thin British woman dressed in a white blouse and a fitted dark blue skirt. Her brown hair was pulled back and styled in a low ballerina bun. She had a businesslike way about her.
“Major Donnelly gave me your name,” Eli said. “He thought you might be able to help me find my wife, Esther Rosen. I think she was sent to Ravensbrück.”
She shook Eli’s hand with a strong grip. And then, curiously, she chuckled. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I don’t mean to make light of your request or to be disrespectful. It’s just that the mention of Wild Bill Donnelly makes me smile.”
“Wild Bill?”
“Oh yes. Most definitely so. Wild Bill.”
“I guess I don’t know that side of him. I worked an operation with him at the Landsberg camp. When I told him about my wife, he suggested that I talk to you.”
“I could give you stories about Bill Donnelly that would make your ears burn. He’s one of a kind. Where is he now?”
“Garmisch.”
Together they walked down the hall toward a records room. She waved her hand at a wall of boxes and said, “That’s the children’s wall. There are two hundred and fifty boxes of records. Parents seeking missing children. Children found without their parents. We’re trying to reconnect two hundred fifty thousand children. In the next room will be the boxes from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. You know, it wasn’t originally designed to be a death camp. It was a work camp built exclusively for women. Some worked in textile shops; some, in munitions and rocket-building factories. It was overcrowded, with very little room to sleep, and provisions were paltry. Many were beaten, poisoned or subject to depraved medical experiments. I’m sorry, but that’s the sad truth. One hundred and thirty thousand women passed through that camp, and the majority of them were Polish.” She looked at Eli, whose lips were tightly clamped. “Really, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to…”
“It’s okay. I was at Buchenwald. I know what the camps were like.”
She nodded. “I was just trying to say that the conditions were quite bitter, and that most of the women who the Germans recorded as entering Ravensbrück did not survive.” She pulled a Ravensbrück box off the shelf and opened it. “Unfortunately, the Germans destroyed some of the records right before the camp was evacuated, as if destroying the documents would destroy the truth.” Inside the box was a dark red book labeled TOTENBUCH.
“In this book, the Germans listed the names of deceased prisoners, their date of death and the cause of death. Each page lists thirty to forty names. As you can see, most of them say ‘cardiac failure,’ ‘intestinal inflammation’ or ‘tuberculosis.’ Near the end, before the Ravensbrück death march, the Nazis constructed a gas chamber, because Himmler said they weren’t killing the prisoners quickly enough. For obvious reasons, the book does not attribute any death to poison gas.”
Chills went through Eli’s body. He began to think that maybe this was a mistake. Maybe it was better for him to hope that Esther had survived and was living somewhere in Europe than to know that she had died a torturous death at Ravensbrück.
Ann walked Eli into another, smaller room where there were boxes and boxes of alphabetized cards. She pulled out a box and rifled through cards. “We list several women named Rosen as deceased, but none named Esther. There is a Ruth, a Golda, a Fanny, a Vera. But we don’t have a deceased record for Esther Rosen. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean…”
“Understood.” Eli breathed a slight sigh. “If Esther did survive and she is living somewhere…”
Ann smiled. “Then you get to the heart of what we are trying to do here at Bad Arolsen. On the one hand, for the families of the deceased, we are trying to give closure, but on the other, for the survivors, we are trying to put families together. There are a million displaced persons on the Continent. People looking for people. Let me take some information from you, and we’ll put it into the system.”
Eli looked around at the hundreds of workers and thousands of documents and thought, Into the system, a million people, what’s the chance? Nevertheless, he spent the next few minutes telling Ann everything he thought would be important. Esther was a seamstress. She would have entered the camp with the women when the Lipowa camp was closed. “She was a strong woman, and if anyone could survive, it would be my Esther.”
Eli was about to leave when Ann said, “At the end, when the Russians were closing in on Ravensbrück and there was no more time to use the gas chambers, the guards marched twenty-five thousand women into northern Mecklenburg. After a time, the march broke down, and some women escaped. Some found their way into Denmark. We heard recently that one was working in a hospital there.”
Eli’s heart leapt. “Hospital? My Esther is a nurse. What hospital?”
Ann smiled sympathetically. “I’m sorry. It’s not Esther; it’s a different woman, but we’ll make inquiries of the hospitals in that area. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
FÖHRENWALD DP CAMP
AMERICAN ZONE
MAY 1947
By the time warm weather arrived in Bavaria and daylight lingered a little longer, Eli was able to find more time to spend with Izaak, who was once again back on the football field. Or, as he would remind Eli, the soccer field. With Adinah on the sidelines, Izzie’s cheering section had doubled. The Föhrenwald tuberculosis contagion had slowed considerably, and there had been no new cases reported in the past four weeks.
Eli continued to check on the status of his visa applications, but without a sponsor or a relative in the United States, prospects were limited, and he was constrained to consider other options. There was hope that Jewish immigration into British Mandatory Palestine, blocked by Britain’s 1939 White Paper, would soon be opened. Three months ago, Britain had announced its intention to terminate its Palestine mandate and leave the future of the region up to the United Nations. Just last week, the UN had formed a special committee to study the situation, prepare a report and make a recommendation. The newspapers reported a strong possibility that the region would be partitioned into two separate states, one for Arabs and one for a Jewish homeland. People in Föhrenwald regarded the news as a breakthrough, a reason to rejoice, and it was cause for a celebration party at the assembly hall.
The party was well attended, and Adinah, by popular demand, led the residents in song. Eli smiled as they danced and sang, ate and drank, stood by the refreshment table loudly debating politics and breathed the free mountain air. They were reconstructing their community, reestablishing their identity. For people who had lived in a state of dependency for so long, true liberation was on the horizon. There was a palpable joy in the hall that night.
Eli, Adinah and Izaak walked home under a clear mountain sky, ablaze with billions of stars. Izaak and Adinah held hands until Izaak stopped, pointed straight up and stated proudly, “There. Look there—that’s the Big Dipper. It points to the North Star, the bright one.”
Adinah smiled lovingly. “You know what Jiminy Cricket says…”