Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online Page A

spoken.
    “You are looking for me?” the redheaded woman asked Jack, in English.
    “This one!” Maria said. “Take this one away! Put in prison where she belong!”
    Jack ignored her. “What’s going on here?” he said to the redhead, in English.
    “Maria is Kapo of this stairway. While this gentleman was away, she evicted the other Jews from this apartment and turned it over to her friends. People are afraid of her, so they do what she says. For some reason, this gentleman seems less afraid than most.”
    “You called her a liar,” Jack said. “Are you saying she wasn’t a forced laborer?”
    “Perhaps she was. Perhaps the women here who survived Ravensbrück, and say this lady was a guard there, are mistaken.”
    Maria caught the name, and her face fell. “No!” she said in German. “Not Ravensbrück! Forced labor! I am prisoner, too.”
    “What is Ravensbrück?” Jack asked.
    “A camp in northern Germany,” the redheaded woman said. “For women only.”
    By the time the war had ended, it was as though someone had picked up the crazy quilt of Europe by its corner and shaken it, sending people tumbling to all ends of the continent. There were millions of forced and slave laborers conscripted from Poland and Russia, Denmark and Holland, from every corner of the Third Reich’s empire. Joining in these streams of humanity winding through the rubble left from the war were anti-Communist eastern Europeans fleeing the advancing Russian army, hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians forced by Hitler’s armies to evacuate rather than surrender to the advancing enemy, and Volksdeutschen, the ethnic Germans who had celebrated Hitler’s invasion of their countries and eagerly assumed dominion over their neighbors and who now abandoned their homes in fear of reprisal. Former concentration camp prisoners constituted only a very small fraction of the humanity packed into the DP camps, and in and among them hid concentration camp guards like Maria, trying to sneak back home before their crimes came to light.
    “If it’s true, why hasn’t she been denounced?” Jack asked.
    “She has. More than once. But your military government, they like her. She is disciplined. Efficient. She keeps the others in line.”
    He turned to Maria. “Where is your room?”
    “Ach! Never mind,” Maria said, her voice saccharin sweet. “No problem. They stay. We go.”
    Casually, without menace, Jack shifted his body to block the door.
    “She lives on the ground floor,” said the redhead. “Behind the staircase.”
    “That’ll do,” he said.
    He called the GIs in and ordered them to help the crippled man and the two small boys down the stairs. He took Maria by the arm and frogmarched her down ahead of him. She refused to unlock the door of her apartment, but he saw the key tied to a loop on the webbed military belt that she wore where her waist would have been, had she had one. With a snap of his wrist he yanked the key free and unlocked the door himself. This room, unlike any of the others, still had its hotel furniture. Two large beds made up with actual sheets, even pillows, a dresser missing only one drawer, a cupboard, a table and two chairs, even a scrap of carpet.
    By the time the GIs showed up with the crippled man and his nephews, Jack had tossed all of Maria’s belongings—her clothes and her stacks of linens and blankets, her extra boots and her packages of soaps and cans of kerosene, her sacks of potatoes and flour, her side of cured meat, her cooking pots and dishes—out into the hall. He left the beds, complete with their linens, the dresser and the cupboard, the table and the two chairs.
    “This is your room now,” he said, handing the key to the young man from Buchenwald. Jack slung the sack of C rations he carried onto the floor, opened it, pulled out half of what he’d brought, and dumped it on the bed. Maria stood in the hallway kneading her skirt in her hands, keening bitterly.
    The man