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them to come and visit Dachau after the liberation.
    Their heads hanging low, protesting their innocence, the Germans were led through the rotting barracks filled with dying men, women, and children.
    The Germans were shown the rows of gallows, where men, women, and children had been hanged; the torture racks and laboratories; the crematoriums still packed with human ashes, the last attempts to exterminate a few more.
    It was UNRRA that eventually found shelter for some two hundred Dachau children at the Kloster-Indersdorf monastery, due north of the death camp.
    Among the children survivors was three-year-old Alix Rothman.
    The monastery experience was a sad and unreal one, too.
    Little bald children, their stomachs swollen from malnutrition, followed the UNRRA people around constantly—telling their personal stories over and over. Though there was sufficient food at Kloster-Indersdorf, the children continued to steal.
    The Dachau children said they couldn’t help it. A few of them who broke the habit early would leave the dining refectory proudly showing the nurses that they had empty hands and pockets.
    In bizarre contrast to the actual DP camps, a photo essay appeared in
Life
magazine in 1945. In eighteen photographs, two pretty little “Heidi-types” were shown having a “typical” camp experience. The girls were then followed across Europe as they bravely hitchhiked (with their
Life
photographer, of course) back to their homes. The pretty blond girls were shown “making friends with an American doughboy”; having a medical exam—“their hair is washed and well brushed”; being given an “extra hot chocolate” before they began their cross-country jaunt.
    No wonder that so many Americans came to believe that the death camp and DP camp horror stories had to be bizarre exaggerations.
    When Alix was three and a half, her aunt and uncle finally came to Kloster-Indersdorf to claim her. They took the little girl to America, the land of
Life
magazine. Where Alix was told “to blend into the melting pot”; where she was told “to forget all those terrible things that happened”; where she became Rothschild instead of Rothman.
    “I just can’t do this anymore,” Alix muttered to herself, standing in front of Bendel’s. Then, suddenly, she announced it to the large commercial crew.
    “Do what, love?” The director started to walk toward her.
    “I can’t sell any more perfumes. Or wash-your-hair-once-an-hour shampoos. Or automobiles. Or anything. I’m sorry.”
    Alix began to push her way out through the film crew.
    “Please excuse me. Please. Please
don’t touch me
.”
    With that, the actress hurried away down Fifty-seventh. She turned onto Fifth Avenue in her Halston gown.
    A spring wind was coming up the street. Alix was feeling a little better now, able to breathe at least. She tried to forget about Dachau and Buchenwald.
    As she walked, Alix looked down at her feet—size 10-B—and she wondered why she had ever thought they looked good in white “rowboats” from Charles Jourdan.
    Alix Rothschild also wondered why people thought she was at all pretty.

CHAPTER 14
    Nestled midway between Albany and New York City, ten miles northwest of beautiful Mohonk and Minnewaska, the famous Strauss Family Hotel was set high in the Shawangunk Mountains. The multiwinged and turreted hotel was somebody’s fantastic idea for an American-style castle.
    With more than 550 rooms, Cherrywoods Mountain House was actually
two
great, sprawling hotels, one building on either side of three-hundred-foot-high shale cliffs separated by a shimmering black lake.
    Because they were originally constructed in stages over sixty years’ time, the “Houses” combined several conflicting styles of European and American architecture. In fact, approaching the Mountain House from the main gravel road, the near wing and livery stable looked not so much like one style, but rather like ten or twelve different styles, and the buildings