The lieutenant looked at his clerks, who looked as mystified as he did. He turned back to Maurice. “You’re not German?”
“No.”
“You’re wearing a coat made for the German army.”
“Yes, I know. I found it.” Maurice realized this interview was not going well. He pulled out his Dominion of Canada birth certificate again and showed it to the officer.
The American just shook his head. “Sorry, that means you’re not entitled to food from this camp.”
Maurice was stunned. He couldn’t even think of anything to say.
“This camp is for German and other national refugees, not for personnel of Allied countries,” he explained. “It’s the beginning of a reconstruction project to rebuild Germany.” He leaned closer, an angry look beginning to form on his face. “Now, see here, I don’t know why any Allied soldier would do such a thing in Germany these days, but if – “ he leaned closer “ – I say, if you are absent without leave from the Canadian army, I suggest you hightail it back to your unit!”
Maurice backed away, terrified. That was just too close to the truth. “No, no, I’ve never been in the army,” he said, suddenly aware that his voice was too loud. “I am a Canadian, I was born in Montreal, and now I just want to—to get back home.”
The blond lieutenant looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Look, you can stay tonight, get a meal. But tomorrow, you go find your unit in the Canadian army, wherever it is.” He dismissed Maurice with a “Next!”
“Thank you.” Maurice turned and walked to another lineup, this one leading to a huge open-air kitchen where more Americans were giving out soup and bread. His heart was pounding. The American lieutenant had accused him of deserting—which was technically true, at least the way the Soviet Red Army was bound to see it. I never deserted my comrades during the fighting, no matter how tough the Germans were, he told himself.
The camp was minimal. Over a parish hall, the Americans had hoisted their national flag, alongside another, red one. Maurice had to look at it for more than a minute before he recognized the image: the face of a gigantic black cat, eating a tank. He did not know it, but he had come upon the vaunted 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, the unit whose accurate artillery fire had allowed American infantry to cross the Rhine, and was the only unit to breach the Siegfried Line twice.
The senior officers had commandeered a large house near the parish hall as their headquarters, the junior officers were in nearby houses, and the enlisted men slept in the hall itself, or in tents erected on the church lawn. They gave the refugees tents in a large park they had fenced off. Others found corners in abandoned sheds and barns to sleep in.
Maurice wandered around the camp, looking for a dry, warm spot to sleep and listening to the conversations of small groups of people. They were all glum and wary. They would look at him only until he looked back, then turn away, unwilling to make contact. For them, the war was not over.
He found a shed that held gardening tools, presumably to maintain the park that was now a refugee camp. He and another young man stacked the shovels and rakes against the wall outside. Maurice spread his coat on the floor. The other man sat in a corner, leaning against the wall, and closed his eyes.
It’s not as bad as the prison camp in Kharkiv, Maurice thought, lying on his side with his head on his arm as a pillow.
He and the other man had not exchanged a word.
Breakfast the next day was porridge. When he first looked at the unappetizing mess in his bowl, Maurice hoped it would be something like his mother’s kasha, or buckwheat porridge. One taste dashed that hope. But at least there was tea, albeit without lemon.
After breakfast, Maurice wandered around the camp, simultaneously bored and worried that the lieutenant who had warned him that he could not stay long would see him and throw him out. He knew, though, that he would eventually have to find Canadian authorities if he hoped to get home, and avoid being taken by the Soviets again. They will shoot me for sure.
The camp hummed with activity. More refugees lined up at the gates, GIs hammered together structures to house them, trucks and jeeps came and went, children ran and their parents moved like tides, pestering every officer they could find for information.
In the park near the parish hall, a small boy climbed an oak tree while four adults sat in the shade beneath it. As he got closer, Maurice realized they were speaking Ukrainian. He squatted among them. “Good morning!” he said in Ukrainian, forcing a cheer he did not feel. “Where are you from?”
Two middle-aged men, one old woman and a girl who was probably twenty but looked older stared at him, wary. “Poland,” said one of the men, a small, thin man with a pointy chin and nose, close-set eyes and heavy dark eyebrows. His workman’s cap had a hole in the top, the cuffs of his jacket were badly frayed and his pants were stained and torn. He chewed bread slowly.
“What a coincidence—so was my mother.”
“It’s not such a coincidence,” said the man. “Half the people here are from Poland.”
“Where are you from?” the young woman asked. She had limp light brown hair that looked as if she had cut it short herself. She wore men’s clothes, as tattered and stained as her companion’s.
“Montreal. In Canada,” he answered. The group looked at him, questions in their eyes, then at each other and then back at him again.
“What are you doing here?” asked the first man with the pointy chin.
Maurice sighed. He hoped that the story he had come up with in the weeks since he had left Berlin would sound believable. “I was in the army and got captured by the Germans. I escaped before the end of the war, and I haven’t been able to find my unit since.” The Ukrainians’ eyes grew wide when he mentioned escaping. The men exchanged a look and leaned closer. “The trouble is, I’m not an official ‘displaced person’ according to the Americans here. So they won’t let me stay here.”
The group looked at Maurice for a long moment, then at each other. Finally, the man with the pointy chin asked him his name and began telling him their story.
They were the Tkacz family, from a farming community outside L’viv. He was Jaroslav, and the younger man was his son, Basil. The old lady, Perenye, was his aunt. Lana was her daughter and Jaroslav’s niece. In 1941, the Germans had confiscated their farm and forced them to work on it to feed the Wehrmacht. When the Red Army advanced into western Ukraine in 1944, the Germans loaded them and thousands of other slaves onto trains and sent them west. “They put us in a factory near Munich, making bullets,” Lana, the young woman, said. “We worked from dawn to dusk, and only stopped because they turned out all the lights at night.”
“Because of the bombing,” said Jaroslav. “They had blackouts to try to hide from the bombers. The Americans and the English bombed nearly every night.”
“A bomb hit the factory,” said the old woman, Perenye.
“That’s how we got away,” Lana continued. “One night, we heard the airplanes coming closer, closer, closer. Then we heard the explosions, the bombs coming closer. And then one hit, boom! and blasted a big hole in the wall of our barracks.”
“Our prison, you mean,” said Jaroslav.
“Yes. The bomb killed a lot of the guards and we could run away from there.”
“It killed prisoners, too,” said Jaroslav.
“Do you smell smoke?” said the younger man, Basil.
They saw a black cloud billowing out of a window of the parish hall. Maurice and Basil ran toward the half-open rear door.
The back half of the hall was a large kitchen, which the GIs had taken over for the enlisted men’s mess. Maurice and Basil charged in to see smoke rising from a frypan on one of three stoves. No one else was around.