“Mine looks like a movie star,” Meredith said, smiling. “She seems okay. She wears makeup and smokes and reads movie magazines. I think she came here to meet boys.”
“She won’t meet any here,” Claudia said, laughing, referring to the all-girls school.
“She wants to go to the mixers. Her mother got engaged while she was here, and I think she has the same thing in mind.”
“I didn’t really want to come to a women’s school, but my mother went to school here, so they insisted,” Claudia said cautiously.
“So did mine. I’d rather be in a school with men too, not for romance, but it’s just more interesting to have a male point of view in class. And I like having men friends. I’m tired of being with women all the time. I went to an all-girls high school in New York. I had much more fun in school in Germany.”
Claudia didn’t respond to that, and by then, they had reached the math building and she had to go.
“Do you want to have lunch?” she asked Merrie before she left, Meredith nodded, looking pleased. She liked Claudia, and they had more in common than she did with Betty the blond bombshell.
“I’d like that.” They made a date at the dining hall at noon, and then both of them hurried off to their classes.
Meredith found her English class far less interesting than her German literature class, and the professor very dry. Her mind was wandering for the second half of the class, and she almost fell asleep. She left quickly when it was over and hurried to the dining facility, where Claudia was already waiting for her.
“The professor let us go early,” she explained. They went to choose their meal then. The food looked adequate and wholesome, and they came back to the table after they’d both signed for their lunch with their campus account.
Claudia asked Meredith about life in Germany right after the war. Meredith told her she hadn’t been there since 1949 when they’d left, but she had loved living there.
“They did a lot of reconstruction while we were in Nuremberg. The city was very badly hit and almost destroyed by the Allied bombing raids, but the rebuilding went pretty quickly. The Germans are hard workers.”
“Some of them,” Claudia said cynically. “Did your father do business there?” She was intrigued by Meredith and how well she spoke German, as though she had always lived in Germany or been born there.
“No, he was in the army. He’s a lawyer. He was on the legal commission of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. It kept him there for four years.”
“They did a good thing bringing the Nazi criminals to trial,” Claudia said with feeling.
“I thought so too,” Meredith agreed. “I was very proud of him, and he loved it. He didn’t talk about it much at home. And my brother was very young. He’s only eight now. He was born in Germany. But he’s forgotten all his German. Do you still have relatives there?” Meredith asked her conversationally. Claudia looked at her with eyes that told a thousand stories, and then finally she spoke in her soft voice.
“I was liberated from Auschwitz at the end of the war,” she said quietly. “My whole family died at the camp. Two sisters, a brother, and my parents. I don’t know how but I was the only one who survived. Perhaps because I was old enough to be strong, and not so young they sent me to the gas chamber. I was ten when the camp was liberated. I was placed with an organization that was sending Jewish orphans to America and finding families to adopt them. At first we were all so sick, they couldn’t send us to America for a while. I was adopted when I was better by a wonderful family in New York. My new mother gets upset when she thinks I’m too attached to my German roots. She wants me to forget all about them, but I can’t. It would be a dishonor to my family not to remember what happened to them.”
Meredith couldn’t help wondering how she had survived it, and was silent for a long moment, in awe of this girl.
“My father was among the American soldiers who liberated Dachau,” Meredith told her. “He said it was the most horrifying thing he’d ever seen.”
“It was,” Claudia confirmed. “But now it feels like it happened to someone else. I’ve been here for nine years. That’s a very long time. I’m nineteen, how old are you?”
Meredith was stunned into silence for a moment by what Claudia had told her, and then said she was eighteen. Claudia lifted up the sleeve of her sweater then, as they talked, and showed Meredith the number tattooed on the inside of her forearm. Merrie stared at it in respectful silence. Claudia said she had been out with her nanny when the whole family had been picked up. Neighbors had hidden her for nearly a year, but they had been afraid they would be discovered and had moved her to a different location, where she was found anyway and sent to the same camp as her parents. Her mother and two younger sisters and grandparents had been dead by then, gassed almost immediately after they arrived. Her older brother and father had been forced to do hard labor, and both had died of typhus shortly before the camp was liberated. She had lost them all and had no other family. Eventually, after the war, she had been sent to America, to be adopted by the Steinbergs. They had two daughters who were close to her age, slightly younger. Claudia said they had been nothing but kind to her, but she could never forget her own family and how they had died. She thought about them every day.
“I feel guilty in places like this,” she admitted to Meredith. “Everyone is so comfortable and so spoiled, and they don’t know how lucky they are. I want to write a book about the war, but not until I’m older. I want to be a journalist after I graduate. I will write the truth about what it was like one day.” Meredith nodded, bowled over by her. Claudia was so real and so honest, yet still so gentle and had suffered so much. But she didn’t seem angry or bitter, or even shattered by it. She was a testimony to the strength of the human spirit, and Meredith sensed something very powerful within her to have survived it. After what she’d been through, nothing could hurt her or stop her or destroy her. It was an inspiration to listen to her, and painful to imagine what had happened to her. And now this slight, quiet girl was here, a survivor of one of the worst camps. It made everything else seem insignificant, and a girl like Betty and her pin curls and movie magazines ridiculous, and yet Claudia had gone on to lead a normal life.
“I don’t usually tell people,” Claudia said, looking faintly embarrassed. “My American parents don’t like me to. But I can’t be silent about it. People need to remember what the Nazis did to the Jews, little children and old people and women. They took everything from them, their jobs, their homes, their families, their lives. That should never be forgotten.”
“No, it shouldn’t,” Meredith agreed with her solemnly.
“One day, I will put it all in a book,” Claudia repeated, looking thoughtful, and Meredith nodded. It sounded important to her too.