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| Individual Displacement 4 by Beatriz Gonzalez |
During the occupation we were sent to a small German town near a camp for Displaced Persons, where all the DP’s were women, and someone had the bright idea of sending a truck down to invite any interested women to a dance we were giving—with musicians and food, too!— and when the truck filled with girls arrived, we brought out the schnapps and food, and soon there were couples making out in the bushes outside the cafe and everyone was as drunk as raw schnapps can make you, but then as I was drunkenly dancing with a pretty girl, I suddenly realized that I clearly understood every word she was saying because was speaking to me in Yiddish, so after that I sobered up pretty quickly and listened as she explained to me that no one in the camp knew she was Jewish because she carried the identity papers of Pole (she had jumped off the moving freight train carrying her to a death camp, found a young Polish woman who was roughly her size and coloring, and then she killed this woman, took her identity papers and lived as a Pole in a Nazi work camp) and that she had come to the dance to try some Yiddish phrases on everyone she danced with and finally succeeded in making contact with me (quite a miracle since there only two Jews in my battalion and the other one was not at the dance), and all I could think to do was to take her back to my quarters and give her every bar of soap and carton of cigarettes I could find, however, that kind of backfired because when she returned to the DP camp laden with my gifts, she was immediately the center of hostile attention—no other girl had been so lavishly treated and suddenly suspicions rose: she was different, she was a Jew—and the officer running the camp saw the ruckus, knew she had to be separated, and phoned our HG to tell us what happened, so then I made some calls and found a quartermaster truck that was going south to a Mediterranean port, put the girl on it and got the GI driver to agree to put her on board a ship to Palestine, but later I learned that the British turned back all the Jewish refugees trying to get to Palestine, so I guessed she must have ended up stranded in some French waterfront town, and I still wonder if I did enough (I never heard another word about her because the very next day I was given a two-week pass for the French Riviera).
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