Free Too Many Men by Lily Brett Page A

hospital with gleaming white tiles and polished chrome and stainless steel equipment. It had taken Ruth half an hour, in Stuthof, to find the hospital.
    She had wandered around Stuthof with a map, trying to match what was left of the camp with the details on an old plan of the former death camp.
    Ruth had finally found the hospital. The hospital in Stuthof, like the rest of the buildings in the death camp, was preserved exactly as it was found.

    [ 4 6 ]
    L I L Y B R E T T
    There were no tiles or stainless steel in this hospital. The hospital was built with the same cheap wooden boards as the barracks. Two broken operating tables were in the middle of one room. Some empty shelves stood in a corner. A few old implements were scattered around. Several broken lights were on the wooden floor. There had clearly been no need for hygiene in this hospital. It was so bare and so barbaric. There was no pretense that anyone was going to be cared for in this hospital. Ruth had wept and wept.
    How could she have imagined white tiles and stainless steel? She had read enough to know that that was absurd.
    She had read hundreds of books on the Holocaust. Books by survivors.
    Books by historians. Despite all the books Ruth bought and read, part of her could still not imagine the truth. Part of her still wanted to believe that it couldn’t have been that bad. That her beautiful mother hadn’t really slept in the middle of corpses, and been left for dead, many times. Part of her wanted to believe it was all a bad dream.
    When Ruth had got back to the Marta Hotel, after Stuthof, she had showered for over an hour. She hadn’t been able to get out of the shower.
    She hadn’t been able to wash off whatever it was that she was trying to wash away. She had showered until all of her skin had wrinkled.
    Ruth was exhausted. Warsaw airport was nearly deserted. It was almost ten o’clock. Where was Edek? How could he do this to her? Just run off. What was he doing? A priest walked up to Ruth and asked her if she would donate some money to a children’s charity. Ruth said no. She didn’t want to give anything to a Polish priest. She didn’t like priests and she didn’t like Poles. Her father didn’t express much resentment toward Poles. He knew, firsthand, what the Poles had done to the Jews, he knew from his own experience how Polish people hadn’t been able to wait to get rid of the Jews. But he didn’t dwell on it. He didn’t express much anger at the Germans either. Ruth couldn’t understand why he didn’t hate Germans. She realized that neither Rooshka nor Edek expressed a lot of anger at what had happened to them.
    What Ruth did see, in her mother and father, was anguish and shock.
    They were still shocked. As though neither of them could quite believe what they had lived through. Ruth saw her mother’s and father’s guilt, too.

    T O O M A N Y M E N
    [ 4 7 ]
    A guilt at their own survival. The guilt of still being alive when everyone else in their world was dead. Maybe Edek and Rooshka had seen too much base behavior to want to be overtaken by a lesser emotion like anger, she thought. Getting through each day seemed to take all the emotional energy her mother had anyway. There was not a lot of room left for anger.
    Edek got through his days by working and reading detective fiction when he came home from work. Edek loved working. In the four years since he’d been back in Australia, he’d applied for over twenty jobs. Jobs as a cutter in a clothing factory, a pattern maker for a shirt manufacturer, a shop assistant in a pharmacy, and a job as the manager of the shipping department of a sporting goods store. Edek knew nothing about sports and even less about sporting equipment. The only products he could identify were the exercise bikes. He was a quick learner, he told the baffled owner who interviewed him. He didn’t get the job.
    He didn’t get most of the jobs he interviewed for. He couldn’t understand why. “I think you’re