Page 45 of The Lies We Leave Behind

45

May 1945

The hospital we were brought to was a haven compared to where we had just been. Clean and bright and sterile. Not that I noticed much of it, my body and mind so weary and weakened, I was only able to stay awake for a couple hours at a time as fluids were pumped into me through an IV, Willa in a small bed beside me with her own bag of fluids.

I missed her nestling against me constantly. But the nurses reassured me as I stared down at her downy hair and pale skin, the pink returning slowly to her cheeks, that she was fine and that I needed to rest and regain my strength for the both of us.

At first we’d all been frightened to get on the trucks that had been brought in to transport us. We didn’t trust anyone. Not the soldiers who brought us clean water and small portions of food, not the nurses and doctors who greeted us when we arrived.

We clung to our possessions, meager as they were, not wanting to hand over the uniforms we wore or the tiny trinkets we’d managed to hang on to. It was all we had in the world anymore. Giving them up was letting go of the last things we owned. But they were filthy, bug-ridden, and in the end, it was almost a relief to let them go. A last reminder of what we’d endured, gathered and burned and forgotten.

“Wait!” I said, reaching for the little dress Paulina had made my daughter out of fabric I’d worn as a girl. I held it to me, my fingers digging into the soft material. “Not this. Please.”

The days were a blur. I was often confused, unsure whether it was day or night. Sometimes I didn’t recognize my roommates, even Jelena who was in the bed next to me. Sometimes I forgot who I was, where I’d been, and where I needed to go. My mind had been plagued by the distraction of starvation, my body using whatever it could just to stay alive—so that I could keep Willa alive. I hadn’t even realized how much I had changed until I was helped to the restroom and saw my reflection in the mirror, and then my legs as I pulled my gown up to use the toilet.

I was skin and bones, any evidence that I’d been pregnant only a month and a half before now gone, my stomach concave, my once full breasts depleted but still aching with the want to feed my child.

As the hours became days, and the days became weeks, I was taken on walks in a wheelchair into the fresh air. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Jelena limping beside me, Willa swaddled against my chest. Eventually, I began to take short walks without the wheelchair, visiting with the other women I’d survived with, Jelena and Willa and I forming what the nurses caring for us called a happy little tribe.

It was during a rare walk alone that I wandered past an open door and heard someone call my name, the voice familiar. I stopped and turned, my gaze meeting another across the threshold.

“Brigitte?” I said, my breath catching in my throat.

We began to cry at the same time as I moved as fast as my legs could carry me to her bed, my arms wrapping around her thin body as she wept.

“What happened to you?” I asked, sitting in the chair beside her.

She shook her head, her eyes haunted.

“They made us walk. Forever. No stopping. If we stopped we were shot.” She looked away for a moment, gathering herself before she continued. “No food. No bathroom breaks. We were to just walk...until we couldn’t anymore. They were walking us until we died. Women would just stop suddenly, one minute standing, the next on the ground. It was only if the guards stopped that we could, but we had to stay standing. If they caught someone kneeling...” She shook her head. “It went on for days. And then one day...they left. We were in the middle of nowhere, no town in sight. A trail of women dead behind us. We didn’t know where to go or what to do. Some of us had just decided we’d go on ahead and try to find a town or a house...anything. And then the Red Army arrived.”

“Agata?” I asked, but she shook her head.

I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer for my old bunkmate, remembering the sweet doll she’d made for Willa that I’d had to give up when I got to the hospital.

“I wonder what they’ll do with us now,” Brigitte said. “Once we’re healthy enough to leave. Are we free? Do we get to go home? How do we get there? What if there’s no one left?”

It was something I’d only just begun to think of myself, now that I was able to concentrate on more than my daughter and just making it through the day alive. How would I explain I wasn’t the woman they had listed. That I wasn’t German. Except that I was. If I said I was American, would they think me a spy? Would that hinder my ability to get home? To get in touch with my aunt and uncle?

I remembered the letter I’d written. Had it ever been mailed? And if so, had they received it? Were they looking for me? Had they figured out my hidden messages? And William...how did I find him now? Was he still based in France? Was he in England? Had he gone home to Seattle? Was he looking for me...wondering what had become of me when the letters stopped? Was he...alive?

I sighed and shook my head, squeezing Brigitte’s hand.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all we have now is each other.”

She asked about the baby then and I told her I’d bring her with me the next time I visited.

Two weeks later we began to meet outside, Brigitte brought out in a wheelchair, me under my own steam, Willa in my arms, Jelena charging ahead. The four of us would sit in the shade while Willa fed from my breast, dreaming of what our lives would be like once we left. Brigitte would go back to France, find her sister and parents, meet a nice man and fall in love. Jelena was desperate to get back to Yugoslavia.

“And you, Lena?” Brigitte asked.

“Home,” I said, closing my eyes. “And William.”

They thought by “home” I meant Hamburg. They’d asked once how William and I had met and I’d had to scramble to come up with a vague lie.

“Oh, you know,” I’d said, waving a hand as if it wasn’t that special. “He was a soldier stationed nearby my home. I thought he was handsome.”

They didn’t ask me to elaborate, it was a story told over and over again round the world. And they didn’t ask what I’d do if I found out he hadn’t survived the war, letting me keep my fantasy alive. Instead, they imagined having their own daughters, and got excited at the idea that maybe they’d become friends one day.

“They can be pen pals,” she said.

“I had a pen pal once,” I said, a secret grin on my face. But she was too busy imagining what our daughters would teach one another about their cultures to notice.

Eventually the women who’d made it to the hospital were well enough to leave, family members coming to collect them in some cases, others leaving of their own accord, a small bag of secondhand clothes they’d been given in one hand, a train ticket in the other.

Jelena was among them.

There were promises of keeping in touch, hugs, and a lot of tears, her hands shaking as she hugged Brigitte, gave Willa a last kiss, and then held me to her.

“Thank you, Lena,” she whispered. “I will never forget you and your unfailing kindness and bravery.”

My body shook as I sobbed. This woman had become my lifeline in our last weeks at the camp. She had delivered my baby. Her presence had saved my life in more ways than one. Saying goodbye felt impossible.

We watched her go, stepping onto a bus with several others, her face appearing in a window as she waved, the tears streaking down her face as the door closed and she was driven away into another unknown.

As more and more women left, the rooms becoming emptier, I grew nervous. I was still recovering, my body ravaged from malnutrition and giving birth. And I was scared.

“Have you sent your letter?” Brigitte asked me as we once more sat outside in the shade.

I’d written to my aunt, telling her where I was now, but I was scared to give the letter to the nurses to send. The war was over, but what if someone saw the address and asked questions? Was anyone still reading and censoring content? What if the letter was read and I was reported? What if it was found out that I was a German who had posed as an American for years? Would they make me stay here? Would I go back to jail? What would happen to Willa? Without my American passport to switch to at the borders, I would be seen for what I was, a German. And I couldn’t imagine that would get me home to New York. I had no idea where I stood post-war in a country that was mine, but that I’d rejected.

“I wrote it,” I said. “But I haven’t sent it yet.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged, averting my eyes.

“Lena...”

I nodded. “I’ll send it tomorrow,” I said.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

The following day I held the letter in my hands, flipping it over, reading my aunt’s name and the address below.

“Is that for me?”

I looked up to see one of the many nurses entering my room. She smiled and pointed to the envelope in my hand. Hesitating, I stared down at the letter, then back at her. I nodded.

“We’ll get it out in today’s post,” she said, removing it from my fingertips before I could have second thoughts. She glanced at the address. “Ooh. New York. I’ve always wanted to go. You have family there?”

I held my breath and nodded. “I do. The only family I have left. Besides Willa.”

But if the nurse was suspicious, she didn’t show it. “Well,” she said. “Let’s hope this gets to them soon then.”

After tucking it in her pocket, she checked my vitals, moved aside as my breakfast was brought in, and promised to be back shortly with Willa.

“Would you like a room for just the two of you?” she asked as she took my temperature.

“Is that a possibility?”

“We just had a single clear out.”

“I’d like that.”

“Then it’s yours. We’ll move you after your morning walk.”

It was early June when Brigitte left. She’d been sick when she arrived. Starved, and nursing a sprained ankle. But she’d made contact with her sister and as soon as the doctor said she was fit to leave, there was a train ticket in her hand.

“Write to me,” she said, hugging me close. “And take care of this sweet girl of ours.” She bent to kiss Willa’s head.

“I will.”

“Get home soon, Lena. Find a way. Even if you never hear from your aunt. Or go straight to Seattle. Get to your William.”

I nodded and hugged her again.

On a stormy spring night, I’d finally told her the truth. Who I was. Where I’d come from. My childhood and how my aunt and uncle had saved me. The work I’d done to become Kate, the degree in nursing and subsequent service, first in the Pacific, then in England and France. Meeting William.

Catrin.

“It was stupid,” I’d whispered. “Had I not gone...” I pictured my sister. As a girl. As a woman. Tears welled in my eyes.

“Erase those thoughts from your mind. What’s done is done. You are alive. You have Willa. And soon you will have William again too. Things are looking up for us, my friend. Just keep looking forward. Keep looking toward the sun.”

It was something she’d begun to say a lot. A sentiment found on a painting in her hospital room. “Look for the light. Seek the sun. Feel its warmth on your face.”

I smiled and hugged her now again. I thought of the friends who had gotten me through so much. Tilly, Char, and Paulette in the Pacific. Hazel in England. Brigitte, Agata, and Jelena here. And another. The first. The one who had been with me at the beginning.

Ruthie.

But Brigitte was the only one I thought I’d keep in touch with. The others I felt so far from already. Time and distance and circumstance now separating us. I was excited to hear about Brigitte’s life. Where she’d end up living, what job she would find, what man she would love.

“Travel safe,” I said.

“Get home, Kate,” she whispered.

The next few days were lonely without my friend. We’d grown close during our time at the hospital and I felt adrift without her. There were others I could visit with, and sometimes did. But I mostly kept to myself. Just me and Willa, walking in the sunshine, playing on a sheet in the grass that one of the nurses provided, singing German lullabies Nanny Paulina used to sing to me.

It was a late June evening when I gathered the sheet we’d spent the past two hours lying on, me reading a book one of the nurses had loaned me, Willa gurgling happily beside me, kicking her tiny limbs at the sky.

“Time to go in, little one,” I said, pulling her to me and sighing as her downy-soft head tucked beneath my chin. I kissed her, breathing in the scent of her, and walked slowly back to our strange home, smiling as we passed other patients yet to leave as well.

I turned down a corridor, then another, waving to the familiar faces as I walked past the many rooms.

“Someone needs a bath tonight,” I whispered to Willa as I turned into our room and then stopped, not understanding for a moment what I was seeing.

“Kate.”

I stood, my mouth open but no sound coming out as I stared at my aunt Victoria, her eyes filling with tears as she rushed toward us, taking both me and Willa into her arms.

I couldn’t move at first, staring over her shoulder at Uncle Frank who was standing beside Willa’s bed, his own eyes red with emotion.

And then the shock was gone and I was holding on to my aunt for dear life.