‘Sorry,’ I say as I walk along the rows of bunks, peering at the faces in the gloom. ‘Sorry.’
After a while I stop saying that and say Mum and Dad’s names instead, in case anyone knows where they are.
Nobody even recognises the names.
You can’t blame them. If I was sick and in pain, my eyes would probably be glazed over and I’d probably be having trouble remembering people’s names too.
‘Son,’ screams a woman’s voice.
I freeze.
A woman is staggering towards me, her arms open wide and her mouth open wide too. She’s got big bones and a red face.
It’s not Mum.
In the second shed, I stop saying Mum and Dad’s names and start saying the name of our town instead. Yuli explained that the people in this camp are from all over Europe, so it’s probably best to find people from our town first and then ask them about Mum and Dad.
These people must be from a lot of different places because nobody even recognises the name of our town.
I keep going.
Bunk after bunk after bunk.
Shed after shed after shed.
I don’t know what I’ll do if they’re not here.
Yes I do. I’ll start again. Go through all the sheds again. Just in case I missed them.
I pause for a rest. I’m almost at the end of a shed. I’ve said the name of our town so many times it doesn’t even sound like our town any more. I lick my lips and try to swallow so my voice won’t be so croaky.
I say the name of our town again.
A hand comes out of the gloom and grabs my wrist.
I look down.
It takes me a few moments, but then relief flows through me like penicillin as I recognise the face.
Mr Rosenfeld.
Mr Rosenfeld takes a lot longer to recognise me. I don’t blame him. We haven’t seen each other for seven years. He looks a bit older, but I probably look totally different. I was only six when we stopped being neighbours.
‘Felix Salinger,’ I say again.
‘Felix Salinger?’ repeats Mr Rosenfeld again, still puzzled.
I nod again.
‘From the bookshop,’ I say.
Mr Rosenfeld’s eyes widen.
‘Felix Salinger,’ he says.
It’s not a question any more. It’s something that sounds as if it amazes him.
‘I’m so pleased to see you, Mr Rosenfeld,’ I say.
I hardly dare say the next thing.
‘Have you seen my parents?’
Mr Rosenfeld stares at me for a while.
Then his face droops.
Suddenly I feel scared and anxious. I don’t want to hear what he has to say, but it’s too late.
‘I’m sorry, Felix Salinger,’ he says. ‘Your father died.’
I just stand there, holding on to the bunk.
Oh Dad.
Slowly I start breathing again and it hurts.
You knew, I say to myself. You knew he couldn’t be alive. You’ve known that for two years and seven months and quite a few days. Why are you torturing yourself? Why did you come here? Why didn’t you go Nazi-hunting with Yuli?
‘But your mother,’ says Mr Rosenfeld. ‘I think your mother might still be alive. She’s here in this camp. Last time I saw her she was alive.’
Mr Rosenfeld insists on taking me to find Mum.
It’s very kind of him because he can hardly walk. He has to hang on to bunks. And between sheds he has to hang on to me.
I’m feeling so excited I have to hang on to him too sometimes, to slow myself down.
I hate going this slow. I want to run ahead. I want to sprint through the sheds yelling Mum’s name. I don’t want to waste another second. We have so much to catch up on, me and Mum.
I want her arms round me now.
When you go this slow you can’t help noticing that some of the people in the bunks aren’t moving.
Or breathing.
Please, Mum. Don’t be one of those poor people.
Please Richmal Crompton, don’t let her be.
I know Mum will probably be sick. I know she’ll probably need medical attention. But that’s alright because I’ve got Doctor Zajak’s scalpels and other stuff with me and there’s a town quite close to this camp. Towns have pawnshops, and good quality scalpels are probably worth quite a lot these days so I’ll be able to buy Mum lots of medicine.
‘There,’ says Mr Rosenfeld.
He’s pointing with a shaky hand.
I peer at a bunk where an old lady is lying curled up breathing noisily. I look more closely because most of the bunks have several people in them, so Mum must be behind the old lady somewhere.
She’s not.
I start to cry.
It’s not an old lady, it’s Mum.
Mr Rosenfeld took me to Mum, he told me he’d be fine to get back to his shed on his own. Normally I would have helped him, but I didn’t.
I can’t leave her now.
Not after all this time.
‘Thanks, Mr Rosenfeld,’ I say.
Mum.
Mum, it’s me, Felix.
At first I can’t make the words come out. When I try to they just come out as sobs.
She’s so thin. Even her skin is thin. Her hair is grey. She’s not even old and her hair is grey.
‘Mum,’ I whisper. ‘It’s me.’
She looks up. It’s nearly seven years since we saw each other, but she knows. She knows instantly.
‘Felix,’ she whispers, her eyes shining.
Her voice is quieter than a whisper. It’s not even as loud as her breathing.
I kneel down and me and Mum put our arms round each other. Because she’s so thin she feels smaller than me, but only at first. Then she feels bigger than me and it’s the best feeling in the world.
We stay like that in the dusty twilight of the Nazi shed for a long time.
A long, long time.
Then I tell Mum everything.
I tell her about Barney and Genia and Gabriek and Yuli. I tell her about Zelda. I tell her so much about Zelda.
Only then, when I’ve paused for breath because talking about Zelda always takes my breath away, do I really notice Mum’s breathing.
What a struggle it is for her to do it.
How she winces every time she does.
And only then do I realise how much pain my mum is in.
‘You’ve got to help her,’ I yell at the first Russian army doctor I can find. ‘She’s my mother.’
I know it’s rude of me and I know it’s unfair. This shed is full of people in pain like Mum, some of them moaning with it, but I’m desperate and I don’t care.
‘She’s my mum,’ I shout at him again.
I can see the Russian army doctor doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He doesn’t understand Polish, not even when it’s very loud.
He says something to me in Russian, which I don’t understand. I hope it’s something about speeding Mum to a special military hospital and giving her all the medicine she needs to make her better, but I doubt it.
The Russian army doctor takes me to another Russian army doctor.
‘I speak Polish,’ says the second doctor.
She has a strict face but kind eyes. I’m starting to think I was wrong about the Russian army. They’re not all thugs.
I tell this doctor about Mum.
She listens, and comes with me to examine Mum.
Well, not examine her, just have a quick glance at her. Then she takes me outside the shed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Your mother is going to die.’
I know she’s wrong. I explain to her that I have extensive medical experience, and if she tells me how, I can stay with Mum and help make her better.
The doctor doesn’t listen. She tells me that when people spend years in Nazi concentration camps, starvation and disease ruin their insides and when it gets as serious as it has with Mum, nothing can stop them dying.
&nbs
p; ‘She would probably have died today,’ says the doctor, ‘if you hadn’t come along.’
Exactly.
I have come along.
And I’m going to save her.
‘Probably now that you’re here,’ says the doctor, ‘she’ll hang on for a few days. In agony. For your sake. If you want that.’
The doctor’s eyes aren’t kind any more. She’s looking at me with a hard expression and biting her lip.
I want her to be wrong about Mum being in agony, but she’s not.
‘Mum wouldn’t be in pain if you gave her something to take it away,’ I say.
‘If we had anything, we would,’ says the doctor.
I show her Doctor Zajak’s scalpels.
She agrees they’re good scalpels, but when I ask her how much she thinks I’d get for them in the local town, or how much medicine I could swap them for, she says I wouldn’t get anything because the people in town are starving and they want food not scalpels.
I put the scalpels away.
The doctor looks at me for a moment more, her face very sad now, then she goes.
I stand there and think about everything she said.
I stand in the cold evening wind for a long time.
A long, long time.
I finished thinking about what the Russian army doctor said, I went back to Mum and lay down with her on the bunk and put my arms round her. As soon as I did, I knew the doctor was wrong.
Mum has nodded off.
Her breathing is gentler and her face has started to relax.
She’s starting to get better already.
Then she wakes up with a jolt as if she’s just remembered something and her breathing gets loud and painful again and she turns and stares at me anxiously.
‘It’s alright, Mum,’ I say. ‘I’m here.’
Mum coughs.
Not just a little cough, a big one that makes her whole body go stiff and I can see she’s crying with the pain.
‘I won’t leave you,’ she whispers when the cough finally stops. ‘I won’t leave you again.’
I hold her as tight as I can without hurting her more.
‘Dad didn’t want to leave you,’ she says. ‘When he died, the last thing he said was your name.’
We lie there, Mum struggling to breathe, me struggling to keep my tears as quiet as I can. I’m crying partly for poor Dad, and partly for poor Mum, and partly because I know I’m wrong.
The doctor is right.
And now I know what I have to do.
I think about the first time Mum and Dad left me. How hard it must have been for them to take me to that Catholic orphanage and leave me there. How much they must have wanted to hang on to me.
But they didn’t.
They let me go.
For my sake.
I kiss Mum gently on the cheek and tell her a story.
It’s a story about Gabriek. How well he’s looked after me. How he’s going to look after me again now the war’s over.
I tell her how good he is at mending things. I tell her about lots of the things he’s mended. I tell her how we’re going to meet up soon and mend things together.
It’s mostly a true story, but like all stories it has some imagination in it.
Some make-believe.
I don’t tell her that me and Gabriek won’t ever see each other again.
By the time I’ve finished, Mum is asleep.
I finally went to sleep, still with my arms round Mum, I had a dream.
Mum waking up.
Me already awake.
‘Bye Mum,’ I whisper to her. ‘I’ll always love you. Thanks for waiting, but you don’t have to any more.’
‘Goodbye, dear Felix,’ she whispers back, her voice so quiet, so frail, so loving. ‘Thank you for coming into our lives.’
Dreams are like stories. We have them for the same reason we have stories.
To help us know things and feel better about them.
I woke up, and saw my dream had come true, I stayed with Mum’s body for a long time.
So still, so peaceful.
No more painful breathing.
No more coughing agony.
Just my tears.
My friend Zelda once said that tears are how we give love a wash, so it doesn’t go mouldy.
Bye, dear Mum.
If you see Zelda, tell her she’s right.
I tell the Russian army doctor, the one who speaks Polish, what’s happened.
She squeezes my shoulder and gives me a kind look. She explains that this camp has two funerals a day, and she can fit Mum into the morning one.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
I don’t feel quite so thankful when I see that the grave is a big pit that has been dug by a bulldozer, and that the bulldozer is also what they use to put the bodies into the grave.
‘No,’ I say.
I go and pick up Mum’s body and carry it down into the grave and lay it gently in one corner away from the tangled bodies.
I kiss her one last time.
‘Thank you for being my mum,’ I whisper. ‘And for giving me my life.’
Then I scoop up handfuls of earth and gently cover her with it so when the bulldozer fills in the grave, she won’t have great lumps of dirt dropping directly onto her.
I stand at the edge of the grave watching the bulldozer doing its work.
All those people, all those families, all gone.
I close my eyes. I try to have happy memories of me and Mum and Dad, but I’m not ready for that.
I do some more crying instead.
I don’t know why everyone gets so ecstatic when a war ends. People keep dying anyway. When I think about that, what I really feel like doing is finding a hole somewhere and hiding away from all the sad things in the world.
A hand touches me gently on the shoulder.
It must be Mr Rosenfeld. That is so kind. I saw him at Mum’s funeral, even though walking over here would have been very difficult for him.
I turn to thank him.
But it’s not Mr Rosenfeld.
It’s the Russian army doctor who speaks Polish. She’s holding something out to me.
My compass.
‘This was on your mother’s bunk,’ she says with a sympathetic smile.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
As she goes, I stare at the compass in my hand. I think about Gabriek. I think about the other people I’ve met who are like him.
Kind people.
Mending people.
Suddenly I don’t want to hide away after all.
I explained to the kind Russian army doctor what I wanted to do, she checked with her superior officer and after a bit of discussion and quite a lot of frowning he nodded and I started work.
As a medical assistant.
Well, more of a nurse really.
The Russian army doctors don’t really like being assisted, so I work mostly on my own. Trying to help some of the people in the sheds feel a bit better.
Helping them have a wash if they want one.
Helping them eat some food if there is any.
Talking to them if they feel like it.
Holding their hand.
‘Felix.’
I wake up.
My head is resting against the upright plank at the end of a bunk.
I feel terrible. The man whose hand I’m holding today is Mr Rosenfeld. He wants to talk but I must have nodded off.
I apologise and explain that I’m not getting much sleep because my bed is in the hut where they keep the spare parts for the bulldozers and it’s very noisy because the bulldozer mechanics often have to work at night.
Mr Rosenfeld manages to smile. After a while, when he stops wheezing and can speak, he says he understands.
He’s nice.
He reminds me a bit of Dad. Even when Mr Rosenfeld’s having pain, his eyes are gentle like Dad’s were. But I never saw Dad this thin or with such sore skin or trembling hands.
We talk for a wh
ile, and after that I go and get Mr Rosenfeld some more water, but when I come back he’s unconscious.
I fetch a Russian army doctor who looks at Mr Rosenfeld and shakes his head. I sit with Mr Rosenfeld for a long time, holding his hand as it slowly goes cold.
Then I go outside to cry.
The kind army doctor who speaks Polish has explained to me that crying is important when you work with people who die. If you cry each time, it helps you keep going.
Each time I go to the same place.
The corner of the big grave where Mum is buried.
I’ve made a little headstone for her and Dad out of wood, in the shape of a book.
That’s where I do my crying.
I hope the people who die don’t mind me sharing my tears.
‘Beautiful compass,’ whispers Misha.
He should know, he’s a sailor, which is pretty unusual. There aren’t many Jewish sailors. I’ve worked in this camp for nearly two weeks and Misha is the first one I’ve met.
I’m glad I’ve got the compass to show him because when I told him my name he got upset. He tried to get out of his bunk, but he’s not strong enough.
I didn’t understand at first why he was so upset. Then Misha told me his father was called Felix too and was a sailor as well before the Nazis burned him to death in a synagogue.
Misha is nineteen, but his hair is completely grey.
Sometimes he sees things.
‘Daddy,’ he yells, grabbing my arms and staring at me, his eyes so big I can see where his eye sockets bleed a bit sometimes.
We’ve only been talking for about an hour, but this is the third time he’s done that.
‘Misha,’ I say gently. ‘I’m not your father, I’m your friend.’
Misha starts crying.
Then his sobs turn into shudders, big ones, and they don’t stop and I look around for a doctor but before I can find one it’s too late.
I close Misha’s eyes and fold one of his hands around the compass and I try to get up and go outside but I can’t so I just sit here.
I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I want to be a kind person and a mending person, but I don’t know how much longer I can do this on my own.