Moltkestrasse Tea
Pine needles chopped fine
Boiling water
Used to ward off hunger by those who have nothing else.
Edith directed Jack to the address that Seraphina had given her, a warren of flats down the Moltkestrasse. Every room was crammed with displaced persons, from all over Europe, refugees from the East, ex-slave labourers, POWs whose countries were now under Russian occupation and who didn’t want to go home.
They shared a concrete box with very little light. The windows were covered with rotting cardboard. The stove in the corner leaked smoke but gave out little heat. It was barely warmer than outside. Black mould peppered the wall above a tide line of green slime. There was a powerful smell of damp.
A woman swathed in layers of clothing stirred a pot on the stove. She did not look up when they came in, just hunched deeper into herself. She was making soup from vegetable scraps and water. There was a battered can boiling next to the pan. She threw in a handful of something. Pine needles added their fragrance to the cold, damp air, permeated with wood smoke. The woman was no relation, Seraphina explained, they just shared the room. Her son lived there, too. He’d been hurt in the war. Seraphina tapped her temple.
He was out, and pine tea would stave off his mother’s hunger. The soup was for him when he came back from scavenging for food scraps and wood.
The Germans were supposed to receive 1,500 calories a day although it worked out at more like 1,000. These people were getting far less. 600, if that. That meant malnutrition, even starvation. But coffee was being served in the Mess at this moment with complimentary toast and jam. Then lunch, always substantial, often four courses. Everyone tucking in, girls complaining about their waistlines.
They deserve it – that’s what they’d say – but no one deserved this. Since when did two wrongs make a right? And these girls were victims, for goodness’ sake. Would they never find any escape?
The sister, Anna, lay on an improvised bed in the corner, a wooden pallet covered with a straw mattress and a mound of threadbare, ragged blankets. She was huddled under a filthy quilt.
Seraphina apologized as Edith went over to examine the girl. ‘I have no way of washing, of cleaning.’
‘That’s quite all right, Seraphina.’ Edith bent down. ‘Let’s take a look at you.’
The girl’s eyes flickered open. They were a most astonishing china blue. Edith pushed back her long fringe. Her forehead was cold and wet, her fair hair dark with sweat. There were fever spots on her cheeks; her breathing was laboured, difficult, with a worrying whistling note to it. Edith was no nurse, but this child was clearly very ill.
Edith nodded to Jack. ‘Let’s get her out of here.’
‘Let’s be having you, chook,’ Jack bent down and picked the girl up as if she weighed no more than a bundle of sticks. ‘There’s blankets in the back of the Humber.’ He gave the keys to Edith. The child stirred in his arms. ‘There, there. Ssh. We’ll soon have you wrapped up and warm.’
‘Your sister is fair,’ Edith turned to check on the girl in the back of the car, wrapped in brown army blankets, her head on Seraphina’s lap.
‘Yes. She is different, with blonde hair, blue eyes. Pretty.’ She gave the ghost of a smile. ‘Not like me. It saved us, really. We lived in Prague. My father worked in the University.’
‘Did he teach you English?’
Seraphina nodded. ‘And I learn, learnt,’ she corrected, ‘at school. When the Nazis came, they arrested my papa. We were taken to Theresienstadt. My mother died there. My grandfather, grandmother also. Then they took us to Auschwitz. I did not see my father, or my brother. I don’t know if they live. My sister stayed with me. There’s a doctor on the ramp from the train. He sees her. He pulls her out of the line. She has hold of my hand and won’t let go. He calls a guard to split us up. Take her. Send me to the gas chambers. Then he asks if we are sisters. Yes, I say, twins although we look different. He is interested in this, so he takes me, too. He does all kinds of experiments on us, measuring, photographing, taking blood, other things, too … but we survive.’ Seraphina broke off. Edith had never heard her speak about herself, what had happened to her. Perhaps she felt freer now she was outside Frau Schmidt’s house, released by the offer of some kind of hope, however small. ‘Then the Russians are coming, so they move us first to Buchenwald, then Dachau. Sometimes we walk, sometimes in trucks. I say to Anna, “We can’t give up now. The Germans are losing. We will be free soon.” Then the Americans came and set us free.’ She said this without a trace of irony. ‘My sister saved me. Now I must save her.’
‘Where are we going?’ Edith asked.
Jack was taking the road out of Lübeck, heading for the autobahn. As soon as they were out of the town, he put his foot down.
‘Not to the local krankenhaus, that’s for certain. It’s full to busting. She’s proper poorly. She goes in there, she won’t be coming out.’
The hospitals were crammed, according to Roz who billeted with someone in Public Health. Row after row of waxy pale patients suffering from T.B., pneumonia, God knows what infections brought on by the winter and the living conditions. Either that, or suffering from some form of starvation: extreme emaciation or the distended limbs of hunger oedema, the flesh indenting like putty when pressed. ‘I’m taking her to Hamburg. To my wench, Kay.’
‘Your lindyhopping partner?’
Jack grinned. ‘That’s her.’
‘How do you know they’ll treat Anna? It’s a long way to go to find out the hospital is British Only?’
‘It’s mixed. Mainly us but there’s a wing for the Krauts. They’ve got this programme going on. Sharing Knowledge to Save Lives, they call it. The Krauts don’t know about penicillin, so our docs are filling them in. Better than using it all on squaddies with the clap.’
The hospital in Hamburg was bigger and better equipped than anything available to them in Lübeck. Jack’s friend, Kay Winston, was tall and spare, her dark hair pinned back under her starched headdress. She appeared capable, even severe in her grey dress, scarlet cape, white cuffs and cap but her blue eyes were kind. She wore a silver service badge on the right lapel of her cape and two scarlet bands above the cuff signified her rank. Service stripes showed her time overseas. The effect was daunting. Edith could imagine Jack’s squaddies quailing.
Her greeting was cool, professional. Jack introduced Edith.
‘Miss Graham. I’ve heard a lot about you.’ Her look was sharp, shrewd, the twist of her mouth hinted at humour, but it required a considerable stretch to see her lindyhopping with Jack. ‘Let me look at the child. Lay her down there.’
Jack took Anna into a cubicle and put her gently on the bed.
Sister Winston’s examination was deft and sure. She called a doctor to her, a fair-haired young man in army uniform under his flying white coat.
He nodded to the nurse for the curtains to be drawn. Seraphina wouldn’t leave her sister and she wanted Edith to stay with her.
‘Very well, they can stay.’
The doctor took Anna’s pulse then listened to her chest, her back, asking her to breathe in and out.
‘Again. And again, please.’
He tapped, two fingers on two fingers and listened, his forehead creased in concentration.
‘What do you think?’ Edith asked.
‘Sounds like pneumonia. Perhaps T.B. She’ll be in for a while, either way.’
‘What are her chances?’
The doctor shrugged. ‘Who knows? Fifty fifty? Less.’ He took her wrist again and turned it to show the numbers tattooed there. ‘She’s gone through a lot already by the looks of this. We’ll do our best.’
He moved to a nearby sink to wash. Seraphina had been watching him: his face, his hands, the movement of the stethoscope across Anna’s thin body, with some intensity. Her gaze had shifted to their faces, following the exchanges, but she said nothing until they came to take her sister away.
‘Where are they taking her?’ She turned to Edith.
‘To another part of the hospital.’
‘I must go with her.’
‘That might not be possible, Seraphina. They are going to make Anna better. You have to trust them.’
‘No.’ Seraphina’s thin hand gripped the metal rail of the trolley. ‘We stay together.’
‘You can stay.’ Sister Winston spoke in German to Seraphina. ‘We need helpers on the wards to clean, help with the beds. Can you do that?’
Seraphina nodded. It was the first time Edith had seen her smile.
‘Very well.’ She turned to Edith. ‘The German nurses have a hostel. I’ll see if I can get her in there.’
‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Edith replied. ‘She’s a good girl. Hard working. She—’
‘She’ll be fine. We’ll look after her and her sister.’
‘Will you let me know, one way – or the other?’
‘Of course. I’ll send a message with Jack.’
‘I’ll be back when I can. Meanwhile—’
‘She’s in good hands. We’ll do everything we can.’