Chapter 26 Dorotha
Dorotha
Dorotha thought her heart was about to burst through the paper walls of her chest. She wondered whether she should ask Gabriele to help her out of her wheelchair and onto the chintz settee, but it was too late now, for Joyce was walking in and letting her eyes adjust to the watery-green light in the living room.
Joyce. Her dear Joyce was actually here!
The ivy-smothered windows kept out natural light, so an old oil lamp, a little like the one’d they’d had in the ghetto, sputtered out a thin flame.
Dorotha had waited thirty years for this moment; running and then hiding in the comforting embrace of this wild land to battle her demons.
As Joyce walked in, Dorotha saw her take in the wheelchair and the tray next to the settee covered in pills and bottles. A thousand questions flew into the space between them as Joyce paused, disbelief etched on her face. And then she ran towards Dorotha, collapsing to her knees and moaning.
‘Dorotha . . . Dorotha, it’s you.’
She clasped her face in her trembling hands. ‘Is it really you?’
Dorotha could only nod, speechless. Joyce’s hair – once the colour of lemons and sunshine – was faded silver, but the hesitant, gentle voice hadn’t changed, and she still smelt of lavender talc and old books.
Joyce leaned forwards, past the arms of her wheelchair, and hugged Dorotha so fiercely it knocked the breath from her body. She had feared recrimination, anger, maybe even a slap, but all she felt in that embrace was pure, unconditional love, and that was more demolishing than any blow.
Oscar coughed. ‘Dorotha, would you like Gabriele and me to stay or leave?’ For the first time, Dorotha became aware of the room. Joyce’s companion, her husband Dorotha supposed, looked to her as well.
‘I think, if it’s all right by you, Joyce, you could all stay? Oscar, you can help fill in some gaps.’
Joyce nodded, stupefied as she slumped into the nearest sofa to Dorotha.
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ Gabriele said. ‘Please, let me take your coat, and won’t you sit down,’ she said to Joyce’s husband.
Harry sat down protectively next to Joyce, placing a hand on her knee.
‘Thanks, bubbeleh,’ Oscar said, patting Gabriele lovingly on the arm as she passed.
Joyce stared at Gabriele as she left, vaguely seeming to recognise her, before turning back to Dorotha.
‘How?’ Joyce asked, bewildered. ‘Your name was on the transport list to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We . . . we all thought you were dead.’ She stumbled on the words, all the while staring at Dorotha like she was a ghost. Which, actually, in many ways, Dorotha was.
‘I never went to Auschwitz,’ Dorotha admitted.
The name felt like poison on her lips. ‘I swapped identities with my dear friend, Ruth Mordkowicz. She’d been chosen to stay behind in the clear-up squad.
I suggested we trade places so she could stay with her mother, Rebecca.
There’s not been a single day in the last thirty-one years that I haven’t regretted that decision. ’
‘But why?’ Joyce gasped. ‘If you hadn’t, then surely Gabriele would’ve died? I assume that lovely young woman fetching the tea is the same Gabriele you wrote about in your diary.’
‘That’s right. So, you have read my notebook?’
‘Every single word,’ Joyce insisted.
Dorotha nodded approvingly, and felt a chink of light open up inside her as she thought of her beautiful, sensitive, storytelling girl. ‘Yes, that is the same Gabriele Kamiński.’
‘Wait. The Gabriele Kamiński, acclaimed, international bestselling author of The Lost Librarians? We stock her in my local library.’
‘Yes, we’re incredibly proud of her writing success. In many ways, her stories in the ghetto kept us all alive, and now, she makes a living from it.’
Joyce was staring at Dorotha in pure astonishment.
‘So, you saved a child’s life, and look at her now, an author and an educator. A woman of real power. You saved many people’s lives in a way through your library. What you did . . . Why, you’re a hero.’ Joyce’s speech was rushing now and Dorotha was shaking her head.
‘No . . . no . . . NO! ’ Her voice rose, shrill in the small room, and Oscar flinched.
‘Sorry but no,’ she went on, lowering her voice. ‘Please don’t ever call me that, Joyce. I don’t even feel deserving of the title survivor.’
‘But what happened to Ruth and her mother, it’s not your fault,’ Joyce insisted. ‘It’s not your fault they were murdered.’
This confrontation with her past brought the tumultuous events of August 1944 vividly rushing back. The ultimate dilemma. Hide or go. The heat and fear shimmering through the ghetto streets. Ruth, her mother and Oscar trudging to the wagons.
‘We didn’t know where those transports were going,’ she acknowledged. ‘No one did. We’d been systematically starved, dehumanised and stripped of our dignity. The Nazis took the last thing we had left – our hope – and weaponised it against us.
‘But the fact remains, I’m only alive because I swapped places with a dear friend and she died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Can . . . can you imagine her last moments?’
Dorotha wondered if Joyce could see it . . . the trauma that circled her neck like an invisible noose. She touched the pale flesh on her throat and tried to slow down her breathing. ‘It’s impossible to describe how I felt when I was liberated.
‘I was very sick when Soviet soldiers found us in the library. I’d been shot, you see, and the bullet wound became infected.
The infection turned to sepsis. They had to amputate from the knee down on my left leg to stop the infection spreading further.
’ She ran a hand over the blanket covering her lap.
‘I was broken. Physically and mentally.’
She looked over at Oscar. ‘If it weren’t for that man and Gabriele, I’d be dead.’
Oscar nodded. ‘Trust me, Joyce. If I hadn’t found Dorotha and Gabriele alive when I was liberated, I’m not sure I’d have made it either. It was a desperate time for those of us who survived, you see.’
For a moment, Dorotha turned and locked eyes with Oscar, and a current of understanding and love passed through her.
‘It was months before I was discharged from hospital; so many months, in fact, I’m not even sure I was registered as a survivor.
‘Oscar found rooms in the displaced persons’ camp in ?ód? and took over the care of Gabriele while we waited for news of our loved ones. He was helped by a dear friend of ours, Mrs Cohen, who’d gone into hiding with her son.’
‘Did anyone come back?’ Joyce asked quietly, and Dorotha shook her head.
‘Apart from my dear Oscar, no one. Gabriele’s parents.
My parents. My bubbe and zayde. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends.
Ruth and her mother. Oscar’s whole family.
All murdered in the Shoah. Most people we knew were murdered in the ghettos and camps.
Oscar only survived because he was sent from Auschwitz to work as slave labour in a camp in Bavaria called Kaufering. ’
Oscar nodded. ‘From there, I was sent on a death march to Dachau, where I was liberated by American forces. If it hadn’t been for Dorotha and Gabriele, I would have given up all hope, believe me.’
Joyce leaned into Harry and closed her eyes.
‘Oh, Dorotha, I wish you’d reached out to us, instead of running. You did have family. Adela . . . Well, it’s been complicated, but she needed her big sister.’
At the mention of her sister, Dorotha’s fingers started to tremble. They did that a lot.
‘I wanted to, Joyce, believe me. I wrote her letters, hundreds of them, but I could never send them.’
‘Why?’ Joyce implored, sitting forward in her seat. ‘Why hide here?’
‘Look at me! I didn’t want to burden her with this, looking after a sick, angry, broken woman. I honestly believed that if she thought I was dead, she’d have a better life with you.’
Joyce was shaking her head, but Dorotha was determined to finish her story, the words bleeding out of her.
‘Please listen and try to understand. We saw a British newspaper, in the displaced persons’ camp, about the disbanding of your mobile library. There was a photo of her standing next to you, looking so happy and content, and I decided that it’d be a cruelty to saddle her with me.
‘Better to have her believe I was dead. And to be honest, Joyce, the old me did die.’
Joyce stared hard at her, and Dorotha could see she was working hard to contain her frustration.
‘I’m so sorry for your suffering, Dorotha, truly I am, but I think you underestimate Adela’s resilience. She’s been through a lot herself. She could’ve coped.’
‘I’m not the same woman you once knew, Joyce,’ she repeated, more quietly now.
‘So, what happened next?’ Harry asked, clearly desperate to join up the dots. ‘How did you end up here in the Lake District, of all places?’
‘Whilst in the displaced persons’ camp, Oscar was offered a place on a British rehabilitation scheme.
He was assigned to help care for child orphans who’d survived the ghettos, camps and death marches, and were brought to Lake Windermere to help them recover.
He wanted to do it to honour his sister’s work.
She ran the orphanage in the ghetto, you see. ’
‘Miss Weiss, who you met whilst reading The Secret Garden to the children?’ Joyce gasped.
Dorotha nodded and heard a gunshot ricochet through her mind. She flinched as she remembered Miss Weiss pleading with the Nazis to spare the orphans’ lives.
‘Maybe we should take a break?’ Oscar suggested.
‘No!’ Dorotha said more forcibly than she intended. ‘Sorry, but no. I’ve waited a long time to tell Joyce this story. I must finish.
‘The children were brought to Lake Windemere to help repair the damage and trauma inflicted on them,’ she went on. ‘Gabriele was one of them.
‘Oscar and I married, and I was offered a place on the scheme too, thanks to my work as a librarian, so we were lucky in that respect.’
Gabriele walked back into the room at that moment, carrying a tray of tea and Eccles cakes.
‘Do tuck in, please,’ she said.