piles of paper out of the way, Mr. Ohrmann lays the book on top.
I can see now that it’s copies of pages from a ledger, with rows and columns. On the page it’s opened to, lacy penmanship travels two-thirds of the way down one page, and then strong, inky script replaces it for the final third. A different person’s handwriting.
“These are arrival records to Dachau, the period of time that trains from Birkenau would have come,” Mr. Ohrmann says.
My mouth is cotton, dry and thick. “Where is he?” I bend in so quickly that I jostle Mr. Ohrmann as I try to make out the names on this page of the ledger.
“Often, the Nazis kept very good records,” he says, moving the book just slightly away, forcing me to look up at him for this next part. “But what we’re learning is, not always—it varies from camp to camp, or from commander to commander. And sometimes it depends on the guard: How much education he’s had. How familiar he was with the languages spoken by the prisoners arriving that day. If he’s not familiar with the language, he’s more likely to spell prisoners’ names wrong.”
He hesitates, looking to Mrs. Yost for confirmation before continuing. “I just want to explain all this. I’m not sure any of it is worth raising your hopes. We don’t have a record for an Abek Lederman arriving to Dachau,” he says.
Only now does he push the ledger back toward me again. His neatly manicured index finger travels down the page until the line before the spidery handwriting stops. Toward these last rows, the end of the guard’s shift, the writing becomes messier; the dots of the i’s become smudged and uneven.
“Here,” he says. “Alek Federman. Age fourteen.”
The realization comes to me slowly. “You think the guard spelled the name wrong?”
Mr. Ohrmann doesn’t say anything.
“A cursive l can look like a cursive b,” I say.
“And Alek is a far more common name, at least in Germany,” he breaks in, though his voice is reluctant, like he doesn’t want to give false hope. “And Federman is an equally common last name. It might be possible for someone to misspell it that way.”
Is this my brother? My brain doesn’t leap to embrace the possibility as quickly as I thought it would. Part of me thinks this sounds too desperate: People shouldn’t be able to find or not find their brothers based on whether they can know or not know Alek is the more common name in Germany.
But I want to believe it. At the very least, I know it’s possible. If the arrivals at Dachau were anything like the arrivals at the camps I was sent to, of course there would be room in that hell for a mistake. It was all a mistake.
I run my own fingers over the dry, finicky handwriting. “What happened to him next? Where did Alek Federman go?”
Mr. Ohrmann lowers his head apologetically. “I don’t know. So far I’ve found only the reference to his coming into the camp. He’s not in the roster of prisoners present for the liberation.”
“So he came in, but he didn’t go out?”
“He’s not included on lists of the dead,” he adds quickly. “He’s just not on other lists at all.”
“So he could have gone anywhere. He could have gone to any other camp in Europe?”
“Not anywhere,” Mr. Ohrmann carefully corrects. “By the time these arrivals happened, Russia had moved through eastern Poland, America had come through France. The Reich was shrinking. Alek Federman, if he was transferred to another camp before Dachau was liberated, he couldn’t have gone to any of them.”
“I see.” In my mind, I picture a map of Europe with a circle lain over top. And then I try to picture that circle getting smaller. I only have to look inside the circle. I only have to figure out how much land is inside. “So where do I go next?”
Mrs. Yost now leans forward to rejoin the conversation. “Next, you should write letters. I’ll give you a list of all the organizations we know of. The one for Mr. Ohrmann’s organization, you can leave with him tomorrow, but then we can get you started on—”
“I’ll do that tonight, but then where do I go next?”
“The letters are your best solution.”
“Like Miriam?” I break in, more pointedly than I meant to. “Like Miriam writing all her letters about her sister? I’ll write the letters. I’ll write letters until my fingers are raw. I don’t sleep