They Went Left - Monica Hesse Page 0,22

life,” I tell her.

“Good for you.” Her voice is full of bitterness. She keeps her eyes ahead, bringing her hand to her throat and rubbing there. “That’s really good for you.”

My limbs ache; my skin is creased with sweat and dirt. No lice, though, I remind myself. No bedbugs. No empty stomach. No room left to complain. I have been through worse.

The old man whose name I never learned rode the train all the way to Munich. He said his daughter was meeting him there, and when we reached the station, he was met by a slim, red-haired woman who shared his nose and broad shoulders. They held each other and didn’t let go, and I didn’t stay to say goodbye. I didn’t have a role in this family reunion.

Then, in the chaotic marketplace of the train station, I found a stand of drivers for hire. Trucks mostly—men calling out destinations and grouping passengers by the direction we’re traveling in.

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’