Chapter 26 Dorotha #2
‘Gabriele loved it here in the beauty and peace of the Lakes,’ Dorotha said, trying to see her through Joyce and Harry’s eyes. The tall, willowy red-head, who looked like a typical English rose. You’d never guess she’d been raised in the filth of a Nazi ghetto.
Gabriele’s face lit up as she took over from Dorotha and talked about their arrival in the Lakes.
‘I had a bed, a chest of drawers, soft cushions and food on my plate. Things I hadn’t known existed,’ she said, pouring them all tea into rose-patterned cups.
‘We children swam in the lake, hiked in the hills and learnt to speak English. It was the first freedom many of us had ever known, it was heaven after hell, but for Mama . . .’ She gently placed a cup and saucer into Dorotha’s hand. ‘It wasn’t so easy to adapt.’
Dorotha saw Joyce’s face register Gabriele’s use of the word ‘Mama’. Nothing ever did get past her. Dorotha owed her the whole truth.
‘I . . . I had a breakdown after we arrived,’ Dorotha confessed. The cup started to tremble in her hand, sloshing tea, and without a word, Gabriele took the cup and gently set it down on the side table.
Dorotha watched as the tea stain spread over her blanket and waited for the emotions to kick in. Yes, there they were. Helplessness and shame, her loyal companions.
‘I’d worked so hard the past six years, to keep alive, to keep Gabriele alive, to recover from my surgery and the loss of my family,’ she said, dabbing at the stain. ‘As soon as I got to a place of safety, my body shut down.’
‘What does a breakdown actually look like?’ Joyce asked. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, Dorotha.’
‘When we arrived, the place we were all billeted at was a former aeroplane factory, and it was harder than I thought it would be to get around in my chair.’ She remembered her frustration at trying to get about the sprawling wartime housing complex, the dawning horror that her lack of mobility and independence was for ever.
It had proved the final nail in the coffin.
‘I’d such plans to set up a library there, and instead, everything started to crumble.
‘Every night I had terrible dreams, and then I’d wake and the nightmares would begin. Visions. Hallucinations. An SS officer sitting at the end of my bed. As real as the hand in front of me.
‘Every knock at the door was a gunshot. Every face at the window, the Gestapo. The floor under my chair would break apart and I’d fall into an open grave. I can see it now, a great jagged chasm.’
Her throat was beginning to tighten. ‘And I could never run. Never get away.’
She knew she was shaking again, tremors running down her body.
‘I lost my mind, Joyce. The pills helped. A little. They dulled the roar. In the end, Oscar moved us out here, to this little cottage, for the peace and quiet.’
She knew Joyce would have seen the wild roses and soaring mountaintops outside the window, but she couldn’t see the piles of rubble she sat amongst. She wasn’t just frozen in her memories; she was drowning in them.
‘We’ve been here ever since,’ Oscar continued. ‘Dorotha’s only been out a handful of times, and then only to Keswick, when our dear friend from the ghetto, Mrs Cohen, and her son Moishe, visited from Australia.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ Joyce breathed, shaking her head.
‘So, you understand why I could never have let Adela see me like that? It would’ve destroyed her,’ Dorotha insisted.
‘And here’s the thing, Joyce. People talk of liberation, but I’ve never been free, not truly. My eyes are dry, but my heart weeps daily. So please don’t look to me for warm lessons of hope, humanity or forgiveness, for I’ve none to tell. I cannot hide my anger or my pain.’
Oscar nodded. ‘Ninety-five per cent of the prisoners who passed through the ?ód? ghetto died. Only a tiny minority of us survived, mainly through luck and hope. It was the most isolated and longest-running of all the Nazi ghettos.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about the ghettos,’ Joyce admitted.
‘Not many do,’ Oscar replied. ‘Many people assume that Jewish prisoners were sent straight to the camps, but there was a life before Auschwitz. And believe you me, Joyce, it was a living hell.’
There was a silence, and when no one filled it, Oscar went on.
‘There were over a thousand ghettos in the occupied eastern territories. The ?ód? ghetto had over two hundred factories and was a major centre of production. Our slave labour was making a small fortune for the Reich, hence why we were kept alive longer than any other ghetto prisoners.’
He paused, took a sip of tea. ‘Rumkowski’s pandering to the Germans—’
‘Collaboration,’ Dorotha snapped. ‘Let’s call it what it was.’
‘Either way. His assertion that work would keep us alive was partly true. Not that it saved him from Auschwitz.’
‘And Hans Biebow?’ Joyce ventured. ‘What happened to him?’
‘After the war, he fled to his home in Bremen, but was recognised by a survivor of the ghetto and extradited. He was executed by order of a Polish court in ?ód? in 1947,’ Dorotha said.
‘Dorotha’s diary formed part of the evidence against him,’ Oscar said proudly.
‘He deserved a slower death,’ Dorotha snapped, feeling the tremor in her hands start up again.
Gabriele slid her arms around her.
‘Mama, I really do think you could use a break now.’
‘I agree,’ said Oscar. ‘And I’m sorry for labouring the point, Joyce and Harry, but when I asked you to come here today, partly I wanted to explain that surviving where so many millions didn’t comes with a heavy burden attached.
I guess, what I’m saying is, that we survivors are still reckoning with that past. Trying to make sense of how we forge a meaningful life.
‘It’s important that you both understand that we who bore witness may have left the ghetto, but the ghetto never left us.’
Dorotha nodded. ‘That’s right,’ she whispered. ‘I was forced to dig my own grave in the ghetto.’ She looked down at the stain on her lap. ‘Some days, I wish I was in it.’
She expected Joyce to look appalled, but instead, she gently placed her palms on the blanket over her knees and rested her forehead on them, as if she were bowing before her.
The gesture melted something in Dorotha that had been frozen for such a long time. She had built such a careful scaffold around her world. Almost convinced herself that it was normal to live her life as a recluse. She had Oscar and Gabriele. Her books. What else did she need?
But seeing Joyce here, now, she started to see it for what it really was.
Another prison. She remembered the person she’d been before the war.
Just. The girl who loved theatre, sitting in cafés with friends chatting for hours over coffee, her job in the library.
The war had killed that person. Hadn’t it?
Harry, who until that point had been staring at the floor, looked up suddenly and broke the silence.
‘My struggles pale in comparison with yours, Dorotha, but I think I understand what you’re saying,’ he said, his voice low and gravelly. ‘Many of us are still fighting a war in our heads.’
‘So why did you come down to London, Oscar?’ Joyce asked.
‘Because we have to start trying to move forward and seeing a life beyond Rose Cottage,’ he replied.
‘It’s been thirty years now since the war ended.
We are in our fifties. God willing, we still have time to make good memories.
’ He looked at Dorotha and his voice softened.
‘The Nazis took so much from us. We can’t allow them to steal our future too.
‘Dorotha always told me that you were just about the kindest person she’d ever met, and I figured, who else but you? Then, when I heard your daughter Virginia being interviewed about your book on the wireless . . .’
‘It’s called a radio now, Papa,’ Gabriele said, with an indulgent smile.
‘Pfff, potayto, potarto. When I heard about the launch of your book, I thought to myself, Oscar, this is bashert, pre-ordained.
‘I confess though, I didn’t tell Dorotha. I took her diary, which we rescued from the library, and I booked a coach down to London.’
‘I was furious with him, Joyce, and then . . .’ She smiled a little. ‘I found myself hoping that you’d come. It was the first time in years where I found myself actually feeling that emotion. Hope.’ A tiny bubble of light opened up inside her as a warm smile spread over Joyce’s face.
‘I haven’t slept for the past three nights, wondering whether you’d come or not. Crazy no, given that I waited thirty years.’
‘Oh, Dorotha. You must’ve known I would always come,’ Joyce said, laughing and crying at the same time.
‘Like I say, I hoped. That’s why I had Oscar go to Keswick and get this engraved.’
She handed Joyce a package, tucked down the side of her chair.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it and see.’
The wrapping fell away to reveal a beautiful watch, with an old leather strap that looked as soft as butter.
Joyce turned the watch face over and read out loud.
‘Good friends remain timeless.’
She looked into Joyce’s hopeful gaze and, suddenly, it was 1936, and they were two idealistic young librarians determined to make their mark on the world.
‘I’m never without a watch,’ Dorotha said. ‘I have dozens.’
‘Libertatem per Lectio 181. If I survive until we are liberated please God, the first thing I shall buy myself is a watch,’ Joyce said.
‘You’ve read that bit too?’ she asked, stunned.
‘I told you. I read the whole thing. And I have so many questions about your library.’
‘As I do yours.’
‘We have a lot of catching up to do,’ Joyce said.
‘I tell you what, Harry, would you like to pop down to the local pub and leave these two to it?’ Oscar asked. ‘They do a fine pint of ale.’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
The energy in the room shifted, lightened, as the men stood up.
Gabriele picked up the tea tray. ‘I’ll get started on dinner. Joyce, you and Harry will stay? It’s far too late to think about driving back to London.’
‘We’re booked at a local B but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,’ Joyce said, quoting their favourite line from A Room of One’s Own, before venturing: ‘Can you see a life in which you might be free, Dorotha?’
Could she? She thought of the tightrope of trauma she faced daily, knowing that one false move could topple her into the abyss. Then she looked into the gentle, accepting face of an old friend whose enduring love was so strong that maybe, just maybe, it could pull her back.
‘I hope so. Joyce . . .’ she hesitated. ‘I’ve no right to ask this of you I know, but . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘Adela. The Secret Society . . .’
‘Love you,’ Joyce finished fiercely. ‘Have always loved you. And I’ll help you find a way back to them. To explain.
‘I know.’ Joyce fished around in her bag and came back with a pen. ‘You have paper?’
‘Of course,’ Dorotha said, leaning over to the side table and picking up her notepad.
‘Write to them. I’ll take it back to London with me. The timing is perfect, in fact. Your sister’s in London from Canada, where she now lives. Start the conversation. It’s never too late,’ she said, smiling softly as she handed over the pen.
Dorotha met her smile, understanding.
‘Libertatem per Lectio,’ she wrote.
Bulletin No. 434
Dear friends . . .
Outside, the cuckoo called.