Chapter 16

Sophia was back in the kitchen the next morning, looking around. All the cooking utensils were there. They were dusty, but everything was serviceable. In the dining room, the three long refectory tables that the nuns ate at were there. They were covered with sheets. The nuns' sitting room was intact too. She went from room to room, and all was as it had been when she left, arrested by the SS. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust from the bombings. There was plaster dust from the ceiling, when the house was shaken by the bombs falling.

She went from room to room after that and saw that the nuns had what they needed. It was all there, but the house required a thorough cleaning. She went back to the kitchen just as Charlie came up from the basement. His clothes looked rumpled but clean.

"I'm going to start scrubbing the house today," she told him.

"Do you think they're coming back this soon? I think they'll wait a while until things calm down here. It's been pretty rough. You came back early."

"At least we can get it ready for Mother Regina when she comes back, and the sisters." He gave her an odd look then.

"She's not coming back," he said, and Sophia looked stricken.

"Did they kill her?"

"No, she died of liver cancer two years ago, before they left. It was very quick. I think that's part of why they moved the sisters to Cologne then—they didn't have anyone to replace her. I don't know who will take her place now."

"Well, we need to clean the house anyway," Sophia said firmly, sad to hear the news of the Superior she had loved so much and who had been a comfort to her.

Sophia cleaned all the cells on the top two floors that day. There were twelve cells on each floor, and a bathroom. The next day, she cleaned the next two floors, and beat the mattresses and the curtains. Charlie turned the electricity on, and the lamps worked in every room. The rooms were spartan, each with a single mattress, a narrow bed, and a small chest of drawers, and in a few of them there was a desk and a straight-backed chair. There were forty-eight cells in all, for an equal number of nuns, which gave them beds for forty-seven women in the meantime, since Charlie didn't think the nuns would be rushing back any time soon. Sophia needed someone's permission to do what she wanted to do, but she didn't know who to call, and Charlie didn't have the phone number of the house the sisters were in now in Hamburg. He said they were only there temporarily, as both their other convents had been bombed in Dresden and Cologne. She wondered too how many nuns there still were, or had left the order or died in the bombings.

It took Sophia and Charlie four days to get the house clean, working constantly. Charlie had managed to buy some meager food supplies, enough to feed them both for a few days if they ate sparingly, and he said it had cost him a fortune. She gave him the money she had and told him to use it for food, the next time he ventured out to the black-market vendors on the streets. They were selling food for extortionate prices. And then she asked him to come with her to the Red Cross, and to the headquarters of each of the supervising armies. It took them almost all day to find the right offices, but by nightfall Sophia's mission was accomplished. In each case she told them that there were single cells for women who had nowhere to sleep at the Sisters of Mercy Convent, and she left the address with them. The officials asked how much she was charging, because scams to exploit homeless women had already crossed their desks.

"Nothing, it's free. We have no food, but we have beds, and if they buy their own food they can cook it in our kitchen," she said simply, and in each case the person she was speaking to looked at her like she was crazy. She had put her spare habit on to make the rounds, because the one she'd cleaned the house in was filthy. She washed it that night, and the next day the women started coming. The British sent four young women who had no parents, no family, and no home. They were between eighteen and twenty and could fend for themselves. The Americans sent three older women, and the Red Cross sent four women who had been released from Auschwitz in January and had no place to live and no money for an apartment or a hotel. Eleven of the rooms were occupied by that night. They each brought very little food with them, which they were afraid to leave in the kitchen for fear someone would steal it.

Sophia tried to call Theresa in Switzerland again but the lines were still overloaded and she couldn't get through.

Sophia wrote a letter to the convent in Hamburg to tell them what she was doing, until further instructions from them. Two nuns from the order arrived three days later. She didn't know either of them, but they were impressed and couldn't believe what she'd done. The house looked clean and orderly, and the women staying there were polite and grateful. One or two new ones showed up every day. The nuns went back to Hamburg and promised to come back in a few days and bring two more sisters with them to help her. It was exactly what she had wanted to do, provide housing for women who were homeless and had no money for a safe place to stay until they got on their feet. Most of them were looking for their families and had asked the Red Cross to help them. There were so many people coming out of the concentration camps, and they didn't have full access to the records yet. The Red Cross was trying to help people locate their families and lost loved ones.

Sophia was in the kitchen, making a short list of things they needed, when one of the young women the British had sent came to find her.

"There's someone asking for you, Sister," she said. She lowered her voice then, "She looks very fancy. I don't think she wants a room." She smiled and Sophia went out to the front hall to see who it was.

The woman standing there had on a red silk coat over a white dress. She wore fashionable high heels, which Sophia knew wouldn't get her far in the rubble and debris still on the streets from the bombings. She was wearing a beautiful straw hat, and diamonds glistened in her ears. Sophia couldn't imagine what she was doing there. There was something familiar about her, and as she turned and Sophia saw her face, she gasped. She was still as beautiful, and all grown-up now. Sophia hadn't seen her in five years. It was Theresa. Theresa burst into tears the minute she saw Sophia, and they flew into each other's arms, and then Sophia backed away.

"Oh, don't hug me, I'll get you dirty. I've been cleaning in the kitchen." Neither of them could stop crying, and Sophia led her into Mother Regina's office so they could be alone. "What are you doing here?" Sophia asked her.

"I came to find you. I didn't have an address for you, or a phone number, but I knew you'd come back here eventually. I wanted to see if one of the nuns knew where you were."

"I was living at a convent in the country for the last three years, with false papers. I escaped from Ravensbrück, and I was afraid that if I wrote to you someone would find me." They sat on chairs next to each other, holding hands and hugging. And then Sophia told her sister the bad news about their father. "Papa died in Dachau four years ago," she told her, and Theresa nodded, dabbing at her eyes.

"I know. The Red Cross told us. The city is such a mess. You can't be safe here." Theresa looked worried, and Sophia could see that she was more beautiful than ever. She had grown into her beauty. She was only twenty-four, and Sophia felt decades older as she looked at her. Theresa had been comfortable, safe, and pampered throughout the war, compared to the hardships her older sister had endured.

"I'm safe enough. Our old handyman is living here. And the Mother House is sending four nuns to help me. I'm running a hostel for homeless women who have no place to stay. We'll have about forty free beds once some of the nuns come back. It's not much but at least it's forty fewer women in danger on the streets."

Theresa looked at her like an angel fallen from Heaven. "Do you have food? Everyone says it costs a fortune. Do you need money?" Sophia looked at her sister and decided to be honest with her.

"Actually, I do. No one can afford to eat—they're living on stale bread crusts and rotting fruit. I can't afford to feed the women here, and Charlie, our handyman, and I are sharing whatever we can get." She'd been living on apples for the past week, and some of them had worms in them. Charlie had come back with carrots one day, and a rotten banana, which they cut in half and ate.

"Heinrich thought that would be the case. He brought money with him. He's outside in the car, he didn't know if he should come in."

"Of course he can come in. I haven't seen you two in five years. How many children do you have now?"

"Four," Theresa answered proudly. She took pictures out of her bag, handed them to Sophia, and went back to the car to get Heinrich. He looked the same as ever, a little fatter and more prosperous. He was wearing a handsome dark suit. They looked like they had walked off a magazine cover. The whole city was either in uniform or looked like vagabonds, and they looked exquisite and immaculately clean. "We have two girls and two boys," Theresa told her when they got back, and Heinrich had hugged his sister-in-law and looked at her seriously.

"You saved our lives. I'll never forget it. You have to visit us, for as long as you like, or live with us. We're going to stay in Zurich. Berlin will be a mess for years." Sophia couldn't imagine visiting them in her ragged, dusty habit, or even in a new one. The difference between them had become even more extreme after the last five years. Theresa was what she had always dreamed of being, an elegant baroness, with beautiful clothes and jewels and a wealthy husband. And Sophia was who she knew she was meant to be, reaching out to save whatever lost souls she could, housing them and nursing them and comforting them, with no care about how she looked or how shabby her habit was. As she thought about it, Heinrich handed her a fat envelope filled with bills. She was too embarrassed to count it, but needed it too much to refuse. She had no shame since it was to help others.

"Thank you, Heinrich. I promise you I'll put it to good use."

"I know you will, but spend some of it on yourself too. We were afraid you had a rough time." They had been afraid too that she'd died, as they had had no news for years.

"She was in Ravensbrück," Theresa said, lowering her voice, and he looked shocked.

"Thank God you survived."

"She escaped," Theresa filled him in.

"You have to come to Zurich and we'll talk about all of it," he said, and glanced at his gold watch.

"Where are you staying?" Sophia asked them. She didn't think any of the good hotels were open yet. "You can stay here if you like," she offered.

"We're going back to Zurich tonight, now that we've found you. Heinrich thinks it's too dangerous to stay here."

"He's right," Sophia confirmed. "Come back when it's a decent city again, and not a bomb site. Or I'll come to you. I want to see your children, before you have ten of them and I can't remember their names," she said, and they laughed.

"We named our oldest daughter after Mama," Theresa said. Their firstborn son had been named after her father, their second after Heinrich's father, and their two daughters after their mothers.

They spent another hour together, and then Theresa and Heinrich left. All three of them cried when they said goodbye, but they were tears of joy this time to have found each other. Heinrich had shared that he knew his parents had died in Sachsenhausen. They had been killed days after they got there, too old and too unsuited to hard labor. But he had his brother, and Theresa and Sophia had each other. It seemed like a lot now, compared to people who had lost everyone and everything, their children, their spouses, their parents, their homes. Sophia stood outside and waved as they drove away, and then went back inside to see how her residents were doing. There were sixteen women there now. As she walked back into the convent, she noticed that the hem of her habit was torn, from the rubble on the ground, and didn't care. She would sew it when she had time.

When she went back to her cell, feeling greedy and mercenary, she counted the money Heinrich had left her. It was the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars in Swiss francs and it would take care of everything she needed for the house, and even feed the women she was helping, and she could pay back the small sum she had borrowed from Mother Paul to come to Berlin. Heinrich had given her Swiss francs because German marks were useless now. She locked it in a drawer in Mother Regina's office and would put it in the convent account when the banks were open again. Some of them already were, but not many. Heinrich had been very generous with her, and she suspected that he also felt guilty that they had spent the war so comfortably, and she had suffered so many losses. Theresa would never have survived what she had, but she didn't have to. She had Heinrich to protect her. And Sophia had God and herself. And so far, in her opinion, He hadn't let her down yet. She was still standing and had survived everything that had happened to her. And St. Blaise had been a safe refuge for her after Ravensbrück.

The nuns who had promised to come back and help her arrived five days later, and were stunned at how efficiently Sophia had organized everything. The new Mother Superior who had taken Mother Regina's place had approved everything Sophia was doing from the temporary house in Hamburg. Eventually they would want to fill the convent with working nuns again, but they weren't ready to move back from Hamburg yet, and didn't think they would for a year, until it was truly safe. In the meantime, using the building to help displaced women suited the mission of the order and they thought it was a wonderful use for their convent in Berlin. They were perfectly satisfied to let Sister Anne run it, since she had set it up so well. All through the war, it had been her dream to come back and do this, and now it was happening.

The four sisters who came from Hamburg cooked and cleaned and helped the women staying there get organized. Most of them had nothing to wear, and they opened their old closet of clothing donations for the poor that they had kept. The clothes weren't beautiful by any means, and some were quite ugly, but they were clean and practical and allowed the residents to look respectable again. For an instant, it reminded Sophia of the closet of confiscated gowns and furs the SS had run through Ravensbrück for her to check before they distributed them to the wives of the High Command. The clothes that the Sisters of Mercy gave away had been given, not stolen, and served a worthy cause, giving back devastated women some sense of self-esteem. Some of them had nothing but the filthy, ragged clothes they wore when they arrived.

Sophia used Heinrich's money carefully, but it allowed them to run the house smoothly and do a few repairs. They needed some new towels and sheets, and most of all, they needed food, which was in short supply and being sold for extortionate prices all over the city, particularly on the black market. Thanks to Heinrich, they were able to feed the women who stayed there at least one meal a day. For many, it was the only meal they had.

A month later, in July, Sophia was going through the clothes closet to look for some summer dresses for new arrivals. She found a few. They weren't fashionable but the women would look nice in them. She even found a new straw hat for one of them. She was coming out of the closet with an armload of the clothes to offer them, when Sister Mary, one of the Hamburg nuns, came to find her.

"There's an officer to see you, Sister," she said. A few of the military had come to check out the convent to make sure it was everything she said, and they'd been pleased at the clean, good conditions and safety the convent offered.

"Which army?" Sophia said, laughing.

"I'm not sure," Sister Mary looked embarrassed, "British or American, I think. He speaks English, and mine isn't so good."

"Where is he?" Sophia asked her, and handed her the pile of clothes and told her who they were for.

"In the Superior's office. I didn't know where else to put him."

"That's fine." She hurried into the familiar office and saw a man standing at the window with his back to her. He was tall and slim, and she recognized the uniform. He was American, and she gasped when he turned to face her with the long slow smile she knew so well. It was Ted Blake. He stood there, admiring her for a minute, and then walked toward her. "How did you find me?" she asked, breathless as she looked at him. She didn't expect to see him. She hadn't seen him in just over two years.

"I went to St. Blaise, and Mother Paul told me you left a month ago. I should have guessed. I thought you'd let the dust settle here for a few months, but I should have known better. Hello, Sophia," he said softly, and she could feel everything in her tremble, as she invited him to sit down in the straight-backed chairs. "How are you?" He didn't reach out to her or touch her. He was afraid to.

"I'm fine. Are you still based in Paris?" She hadn't heard from him in eleven months, since the liberation of Paris. With the war still on in Germany, he knew he couldn't visit her, or even contact her.

"I am. Billeted at the Ritz, that's hard to beat. They were going to send me home in August. But they just extended me to December. I'll be home for Christmas. I'm trying to get assigned to the war crimes trials here in Germany. They haven't organized them yet. It's still pretty fresh. I may have to ask you to give me German lessons to convince them. I want to be in on the trials. What are you doing here?" His eyes were drinking her in while they caught up, and he wanted to reach out and put his arms around her, but he didn't dare.

"I'm running a residence for displaced women. Most of them are still looking for their families. Everything is still a mess here, but the convent is a perfect place for them and it's safe. Some of them were sleeping in the streets, or in the camps set up in the bomb sites. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and it's working. When I got back here the convent was empty and the nuns were gone. They had moved to Dresden and Cologne and got bombed out there. The order is in Hamburg now. But there are five of us here."

"So you opened it all by yourself?" She nodded. It didn't surprise him. It was so like her.

"How's your ankle?"

"Fine. You and Dr. Strauss did a very good job. It's working great."

"What are you doing here, Ted?" she asked him gently.

"I came to see you. I told you I would. Have you taken those final vows yet?" he asked, his stomach fluttering as he asked her, afraid of what the answer would be, now that she was back in her home convent again, with her own order.

"No, there's no Mother Superior here right now. The one I knew died. And the new one is in Hamburg, and they won't do it just for me. It'll be a ceremony with a number of nuns doing it. I don't know when the next one will be."

"Are you planning to enlist, whenever it is?" She nodded in answer, which was the answer he had feared. She looked busy and happy and was following her plans. "Are you sure?"

"I am. This is the life that I was meant for. I need to help people. It's the only thing that's meaningful to me."

"There are other ways you can do that. You're a nurse. You've helped run an orphanage. You transported kids out of danger at great risk to yourself. You saved four other women by planning an escape from a concentration camp. There has to be some way to channel all that knowledge and courage and energy into something other than giving up everything else to be a nun."

She smiled at him. "You sound like Mother Paul. She said something like that to me before I left. It's different in wartime. You do heroic things without thinking about it, because you have to, and if you don't, you or someone else might die. I don't know what I'll do in peacetime. Go back to nursing, I guess. The nuns here will want their convent back eventually, but right now I have forty-three beds to give homeless women until they find their feet again."

"And what about you? When does someone get to take care of you?"

"I don't need to be taken care of. I take care of others, that's the whole point of being a nun."

"What if you had both? Someone to care about you, and the people you take care of. There are lots of poor, needy people in the world. You can't take care of all of them, but you can help some." It was what she was doing now. "It doesn't have to be in a convent, and you don't have to be a nun." She didn't answer him. He was echoing Mother Paul's words to her.

"My sister came to see me. She's more beautiful than ever, her husband adores her, she looked like the cover of Vogue. They have four children and she wants more. She goes to lunch with her friends, and to parties with her husband. She's adorable and I love her, but I would die of boredom with a life like hers, and feel guilt for the people I wasn't helping."

"So would I," he said, laughing at the description. He could envision her perfectly. "And with all due respect, I'd go nuts married to a woman like her. What do they talk about? Their next vacation or the next dinner party? I want the same things you do, Sophia. To help people. I want to nail every single one of those bastards who tortured you and everyone in Germany, and killed millions of Jewish men, women, and children. That's how I want to contribute. You can run shelters for poor women if you want, or kids, or orphans, or abused women. There are lots of ways for you to give without giving up yourself."

"I can't, Ted," she said sadly. "This is who I am. I think I was born to be a nun. I'm happy here." It nearly broke his heart when she said it.

"Okay, if that's it, I respect it. I just had to ask one more time. I told you I'd come back to see you." He took one of her hands and held it to his lips. "I love you, Sophia. This might be the last chance I ever have to say it to you, so I am. Even if it's not appropriate to say to a nun. If you ever need me, call, and I'll be there, no matter what else is going on. I'll be in Paris at the Ritz till Christmas, and I'll give you my address in New York before I leave." He stood up then. There was nothing more to say. He had her answer. The one he had dreaded and feared most.

"Thank you. I know this sounds crazy and confusing, but I love you too. The convent just got there first, and I want to honor what I started. Even though I haven't taken my final vows, I should have by now, and then it wouldn't be a question at all." He looked at her for a minute and thought of something.

"Did it ever occur to you that ‘He' didn't want you to take your final vows? If He had wanted you to, you would have. And you wouldn't have met me. I think we met for a reason two years ago. Maybe He has something else planned for you." She thought of that for a minute herself. The possibility had never occurred to her and then she smiled.

"I think it was just a wartime delay in taking my vows, like a late train."

"Don't be so sure. There are no accidents in life. He had to drop me into a tree in Germany so I could break my ankle and meet you and spend two months being nursed by you. Sounds like a hell of a plan to me, and I'm not complaining." He smiled the familiar smile she loved, and he gave her a hug. And then she walked him to the front door, and a minute later he walked away and was gone. He had said he was taking the morning train back to Paris. His dreams were dead.

She felt sad after he left, and bereft, as though she had lost something precious that she would never find again. And what if he was right, and she wasn't meant to take her final vows, and she had been meant to meet him instead? But there was no way to know. And she wanted to finish what she started, make her final vows, and be a nun. She knew she had made the right decision, but it hurt so much. She told herself that he was a sacrifice she had to make for the religious life, and the commitment, that meant even more to her than Ted. She was willing to give him up for the life she had now. This was her destiny. She was sure it was why she had survived Ravensbrück, to serve others as she was doing, not for him. There was some comfort in knowing that now. She was sure.