“It seems incredible now, that everyone let it go. That there wasn’t more outrage.”
“That’s because you think like someone of the modern generation,” Ginette Harrison said, and the gentle English chiding in her voice gave away that she was older than Fiona had thought, perhaps over fifty or sixty. “To do the research I do, you must understand the mind-set of those times. There was no Internet, no way to raise outrage via a Twitter campaign, no digital cameras with which one could take a photo and send it worldwide in seconds.”
And that left Ravensbrück abandoned and dismantled, forgotten. “This girl,” Fiona said, trying to stay on track again. “Sonia. The body we found. The coroner didn’t find any old injuries to the bones or the teeth.”
“Then she escaped some of the physical torture,” Ginette said. “But Ravensbrück, like many other camps, was a battle of endurance. It was a matter of living long enough while those around you died.”
“She was small for her age.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. If she was malnourished at the camp, then it could have affected her growth. I’m not a doctor, however, so I can’t say for sure. If she survived Ravensbrück, however, she must have had some strength.”
“You said the Russians liberated the camp,” Fiona said. She sensed that Ginette Harrison was busy, politely growing impatient, and she wanted as much information as possible. “Did they keep any records?”
“Not that we’ve located. The Red Cross has some records of prisoners who ended up with them in the chaos, but I already have those, and I went through them. Your names did not appear.”
“But she came to America in 1947 with the support of distant relatives,” Fiona said. “Somebody, somewhere, gave this girl aid and helped her get in touch with her family in America. She was ten when the war ended. She could not have done it alone.”
“It could have been anyone,” Ginette said. “A fellow prisoner, a sympathetic family, a hospital. I’m sorry. We have no way of knowing. You’re looking for her family, are you not?”
“I’m looking for anything,” Fiona confessed. “Anything at all.”
There was a pause. “Miss Sheridan, may I offer a purely personal opinion?”
“Please do.”
“You have a young girl, far from home. She has come from a camp in which every record was obliterated. Every member of her family has been killed. And now she is alone, in a strange country, with no one looking out for her but the impersonal staff of an uncaring boarding school.”
“Yes,” Fiona said.
“There is no one to look for her if she disappears. No one to care. And as far as the authorities are concerned, if anyone knew of her background in a concentration camp, frankly, they would assume she was a Jew.” She paused. “This was 1950, in a rural area, you understand.”
“What are you saying?” Fiona asked.
“I’m saying,” Ginette Harrison said, “to put it bluntly, that if one was looking for a victim to murder, one could not find a better candidate.”
Fiona swallowed. “You think she was chosen.”
“It’s a thought that strikes me,” the other woman said, and Fiona could tell she was trying to soften her voice. “I don’t wish to alarm you. But this girl disappeared without a single trace for over sixty years, and no one ever looked for her. If you were hunting for someone to murder, what better person could you choose?”
Chapter 20
Sonia
Barrons, Vermont
November 1950
Telling the story to her friends was freeing, and she could feel the pieces of her mind slowly moving, rearranging themselves. But the best day came when she got the notebook.
It was CeCe’s; she’d received it from her rich father, a careless Christmas present perhaps chosen by his secretary and mailed to his bastard daughter at her boarding school. Sonia could hear the command in her head: Send my daughter something nice. I don’t know—just pick something. What do girls like? Here’s some money. And now CeCe had this notebook, an expensive thing, with a hard cover decorated in flowers and thick lined pages inside, making a creamy flip-flip sound as you leafed through them, their weight bending and flopping satisfactorily as you ran your thumb along the edge. A good notebook.
CeCe had emptied a drawer one afternoon when she was almost late for physical education, looking for her socks. The notebook had landed on the floor in a pile of detritus, most of it forgotten or never noticed in the first place by its owner. Sonia had picked up the notebook.
“Oh, that,” CeCe said, glancing over as she opened the next drawer. “I’ve never used it.”
Of course CeCe hadn’t. This was a notebook made for a girl who liked to write, who took each word seriously and put it down with care. CeCe was not a writer, which was why Sonia knew it was a gift from her father. Anyone who knew CeCe even for a few minutes would know this was not the gift for her.
“Here they are,” CeCe said, pulling her socks from her bottom drawer. She glanced at Sonia again, holding the notebook. “Do you want it? Take it.”
“I can’t,” Sonia said. “It’s expensive.”
CeCe laughed. “It isn’t my money.” She had a harder edge to her now, since she’d told them the story of her mother and the water. But a hard edge, for CeCe, was still soft as butter. “I’ll never use it, honestly. Take it. I have to go.”
So Sonia took it. She found the pretty pen that had been sent with the book—it was sitting in the pile on the floor that CeCe hadn’t put away in her haste. She’d never miss it; she’d likely forgotten she ever received it. So Sonia picked it up and opened the notebook. She dipped her head down into the book’s spine, inhaling deeply of the thick papery scent, feeling something strange and calm move down the back of her neck, into her shoulders, her spine. She felt small, prickling sparks in the top of her brain. What will I write in this beautiful book?
She carried the book to class for the rest of the day, and that night she put it under her pillow, still blank. She liked it blank right now, liked to know that it was waiting, listening. Just like her friends.
In the end, she told the book the same story she’d told her friends. The only story she knew, really. The only story she had to tell. And she added pictures.
She had been fair at drawing before the war. She’d drawn her mother dozens of times, as she sat reading or sewing. There had been so many things in those days that kept a person still, that required perfect concentration for hours on end. It had been easy to draw portraits. Her mother, her father, the cat who came to the window looking for food. Then, when she got quicker, her teachers and classmates.
That had stopped. But now she uncapped her pen and wrote in her private notebook, and she told it everything, page by page. And alongside the words, she drew pictures. She drew her mother from memory, and then her father. She had to stop for a day after that, but then she got the itch again, and she opened the book and wrote down what she remembered.
She drew Ravensbrück.
Once she started, she couldn’t stop, the edges of her memories sawing at her as she sat at her lessons, as she did her homework and ran pitifully around the hockey field and ate her tasteless meals in the dining hall. The memories weren’t the overwhelming ones she’d had that had made her sick. These were like a violin bow grinding along the edge of a single string, shrill, waiting for some kind of resolution to make it stop. The only thing that worked was writing.
She mapped the camp. She drew it from several vantage points, looking over the dormitory buildings, looking toward the crematorium with its plumes of smoke. She drew every face she remembered: inmates, women who came and went, blockovas, guards, her mother. Her mother. She drew the man who came to inspect them, the tall man with the silver SS on his uniform collar and the long black coat. She drew the landscape in summer and winter, the bodies. She drew the face of the first person she’d seen the day the camp was liberated, a man in a Soviet uniform with a wide, fat face. She’d fled from him on sight, running barefoot as far as she could. She’d wanted nothing to do with soldiers.