My Name Is Eva

by Suzanne Goldring

Can you believe there’s currently something like eleven million people in this country who didn’t ask to be here? All those poor beggars who survived those ghastly camps and the factories that ran on slave labour.’

what I can’t stomach is man’s inhumanity to man. I thought our country was on the side of the angels and now I feel that all men are capable of being equally ruthless and cruel.

‘But if you’d seen what this country was like immediately after the war ended, you’d think this was a breeze, kid. All the roads were heaving with foreign slave workers trying to find their way back home. Everywhere we went there were distraught parents trying to find their children and lost kids trying to find their mums and dads. And on top of it all, there were goddamn scared-shitless Nazis sneaking back and trying to find a place to hide away and pretend it was nothing to do with them.’

‘They brought seven million slave workers into Germany from eastern Europe. They wanted cheap labour for their plane and ball-bearing factories, their textile mills and mines, and workers for their sugar beet and cabbage fields. And they were all given the same basic card, lumping them wholesale into one indistinguishable group.’ ‘Seven million… It’s hard to imagine.’

‘Those damn Germans didn’t care where they came from originally. They didn’t think of them as individuals with a past, a culture and a heritage, they were just OST – a person from the east. Their original province, their town, their village, none of that mattered to the master race. They just printed OST in thick black letters beneath their photograph. The only ones who didn’t get given OST cards are those from the concentration camps and their ID is tattooed or branded on the inside of their right arm.’

‘Those poor bastards were denied their identity for nearly six years, ever since the first Nazi blitz into Poland and elsewhere. And they stayed that way until the Allies renamed them. It might not seem much, calling them displaced persons, but it’s a damn sight better than just OST.’

So many dreadful scars, broken noses and teeth. And the tattoos are awful, but some of them were branded with red-hot irons. They’re left with the most hideous, livid red scar tissue that’s disfigured the whole arm, from the wrist to the elbow. How could they have done that to their fellow human beings? They’re just ordinary people like them.’

‘The wretched aftermath of war,’ she murmured. ‘But seeing all this, I know it’s all been worthwhile. Even for those of us who’ve lost loved ones. It balances the books, somehow.’

‘I can’t help remembering the words of those American Baptist pastors who visited,’ Eva said. ‘They were trying to get a bill through Congress to admit displaced persons. I heard them speaking to camp residents and they said, “You are not strangers to us. America was founded by the voluntarily displaced. We are a nation of the displaced from all the lands.” It’s such an enormous huge country. Surely they could relax the rules and take many more people.’

‘You’d think so,’ Sally said, ‘but America only wants the fittest to come. They want workers who are completely healthy. They need farmers and strong labourers. Why on earth would they want many of the people here? We may have done our best to feed them up and get them fit, but after their years of deprivation so many are not good enough for the United States. Or they’ve got relatives who are in a poor state of health, or children with handicaps. America doesn’t want to be burdened with people like that.’ ‘At least everyone leaving today is stronger and healthier than when they first arrived here. We’re sending them back in better condition.’ ‘Yes, but they’re not the same people who left their villages all those years ago,’ Sally said. ‘Look around you. In every car there are tired mothers with demanding babies and grandmothers weakened by years of starvation and gruelling labour. They may all be happy to be going home, but not everyone of them is able to dance with the energy of those girls.’

‘Why is it,’ Eva said in a quiet voice, ‘that all humanity and kindness virtually disappeared? Or perhaps the capacity for cruelty is always present in mankind, just hidden beneath a facade of civilisation.’

know. It’s bad enough to hear them claiming they were just following orders, but to hear about the sheer mindless brutality as well – oh, it makes my blood boil, it really does.’ ‘So many dead, so many ruined lives.’

I despise those who hate mankind and cannot love their fellow human beings.

It was time at last for all to go home.

He was just one of thousands of disturbed young men, recently returned from the war, who couldn’t settle back into the lives they’d led before the conflict.

It reminds her of the madness of Mrs Rochester in the attic in Jane Eyre.