She knew Joyce would have seen the wild roses and soaring mountaintops outside the window, but she couldn’t see the piles of rubble she sat amongst. She wasn’t just frozen in her memories; she was drowning in them.
‘We’ve been here ever since,’ Oscar continued. ‘Dorotha’s only been out a handful of times, and then only to Keswick, when our dear friend from the ghetto, Mrs Cohen, and her son Moishe, visited from Australia.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ Joyce breathed, shaking her head.
‘So, you understand why I could never have let Adela see me like that? It would’ve destroyed her,’ Dorotha insisted.
‘And here’s the thing, Joyce. People talk of liberation, but I’ve never been free, not truly. My eyes are dry, but my heart weepsdaily. So please don’t look to me for warm lessons of hope, humanity or forgiveness, for I’ve none to tell. I cannot hide my anger or my pain.’
Oscar nodded. ‘Ninety-five per cent of the prisoners who passed through the Lódz ghetto died. Only a tiny minority of us survived, mainly through luck and hope. It was the most isolated and longest-running of all the Nazi ghettos.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about the ghettos,’ Joyce admitted.
‘Not many do,’ Oscar replied. ‘Many people assume that Jewish prisoners were sent straight to the camps, but there was a life before Auschwitz. And believe you me, Joyce, it was a living hell.’
There was a silence, and when no one filled it, Oscar went on. ‘There were over a thousand ghettos in the occupied eastern territories. The Lódz ghetto had over two hundred factories and was a major centre of production. Our slave labour was making a small fortune for the Reich, hence why we were kept alive longer than any other ghetto prisoners.’
He paused, took a sip of tea. ‘Rumkowski’s pandering to the Germans—’
‘Collaboration,’ Dorotha snapped. ‘Let’s call it what it was.’
‘Either way. His assertion that work would keep us alive was partly true. Not that it saved him from Auschwitz.’
‘And Hans Biebow?’ Joyce ventured. ‘What happened to him?’
‘After the war, he fled to his home in Bremen, but was recognised by a survivor of the ghetto and extradited. He was executed by order of a Polish court in Lódz in 1947,’ Dorotha said.
‘Dorotha’s diary formed part of the evidence against him,’ Oscar said proudly.
‘He deserved a slower death,’ Dorotha snapped, feeling the tremor in her hands start up again.
Gabriele slid her arms around her.
‘Mama, I really do think you could use a break now.’
‘I agree,’ said Oscar. ‘And I’m sorry for labouring the point, Joyce and Harry, but when I asked you to come here today, partly I wanted to explain that surviving where so many millions didn’t comes with a heavy burden attached. I guess, what I’m saying is, that we survivors are still reckoning with that past. Trying to make sense of how we forge a meaningful life.
‘It’s important that you both understand that we who bore witness may have left the ghetto, but the ghetto never left us.’
Dorotha nodded. ‘That’s right,’ she whispered. ‘I was forced to dig my own grave in the ghetto.’ She looked down at the stain on her lap. ‘Some days, I wish I was in it.’
She expected Joyce to look appalled, but instead, she gently placed her palms on the blanket over her knees and rested her forehead on them, as if she were bowing before her.
The gesture melted something in Dorotha that had been frozen for such a long time. She had built such a careful scaffold around her world. Almost convinced herself that it was normal to live her life as a recluse. She had Oscar and Gabriele. Her books. What else did she need?
But seeing Joyce here, now, she started to see it for what it really was. Another prison. She remembered the person she’d been before the war. Just. The girl who loved theatre, sitting in cafés with friends chatting for hours over coffee, her job in the library. The war had killed that person. Hadn’t it?
Harry, who until that point had been staring at the floor, looked up suddenly and broke the silence.
‘My struggles pale in comparison with yours, Dorotha, but I think I understand what you’re saying,’ he said, his voice low and gravelly. ‘Many of us are still fighting a war in our heads.’
‘So why did you come down to London, Oscar?’ Joyce asked.
‘Because we have to start trying to move forward and seeing a life beyond Rose Cottage,’ he replied. ‘It’s been thirty years now since the war ended. We are in our fifties. God willing, we still have time to make good memories.’ He looked at Dorotha and his voice softened. ‘The Nazis took so much from us. We can’t allow them to steal our future too.
‘Dorotha always told me that you were just about the kindest person she’d ever met, and I figured, who else but you? Then, when I heard your daughter Virginia being interviewed about your book on the wireless...’
‘It’s called a radio now, Papa,’ Gabriele said, with an indulgent smile.
