By Blood A Novel

96.


Neither mother nor daughter spoke for several seconds. The tape whined and hissed. Finally the patient said:

But now I am really confused.

Yes? replied Michal.

Confused by what you just told me. You suddenly found—joy, I suppose is the right word. Joy in being part of the group. In being one of them. A Jew. So why wouldn’t you want that for me?

Michal laughed softly but said nothing.

The singing of “Hatikvah,” said the patient, it happened right after Liberation, in April. And I was born in late December. By then, you didn’t want me to be a Jew. That’s why you gave me away, you said, so I would not be a Jew. So how did this change, then change back, so quickly? All within eight months, eight and a half months.

The situation changed, said Michal. Everything changes.

But so quickly.

Yes. Quickly. It was a time of extremes. Anything could change into anything in a moment.

At that, the session came to an end.





97.


Monday night found me sitting restlessly in the dark, reading by flashlight. The sessions were ticking away. The possible loss of my office loomed over me like the blinking pink neon sign of the Hotel Palace.

I had arrived at the office early, at six in the evening. Dr. Schussler had left for her dinner break. When suddenly there came a sharp rap on the door.

Saw you come in! yelled out the voice I had hoped never to hear again.

Let us in! went on the man who had represented himself to me as the manager.

Us? I wondered. Who else was with him?

The sharp rapping came again.

Hey, fella! Let us in.

I thought, What chance did I have? I opened the door.

Reading in the dark again? said the little man with the bulging eyes and wild eyebrows and twisted-down mouth.

Behind him were two men in overalls.

They need to measure the space, said the manager person. And, he said with emphasis, they will need to turn on the lights.

At that, his hand flew to the wall plate.

The overhead fluorescent bulbs winked to life—let Dr. Schussler not be in the street now! I prayed; let her not look up!—and the two workmen shunted me to one side of the room then another as they stretched out their metal tapes and called out the numbers to the manager, who recorded them in a spiral-bound notebook no larger than his hammy palm.

Now move over there, said one workman as he pushed me to the wall behind the door, which was fortunate—provident! I might say—for not two seconds later came the limping tread of Dr. Schussler.

She stopped at the opened door.

Is that office to be leased? she asked, looking into the room.

I pressed myself against the wall. Could I hide in this narrow V behind the door? Please do not see me! I cried out in my mind.

Then a second fear rose up behind the first: Mr. Manager! Please do not say that the room is already leased!

It seemed he said nothing for minutes—hours! Had he not heard her?

I hung in time, a dead man.

Then the manager’s brusque voice said: Huh? What’s that?

And Dr. Schussler replied: I said, is the room to be leased?

He coughed—another delay!—and finally said, The engineers in 805 are thinking of expanding into here. I think they’re going to use it for their copy equipment.

(Thinking of it! Then it is not settled, I dared to hope.)

Said Dr. Schussler: You mean I will have to hear the thump and clack of Xerox machines all day? Not to mention the smell.

Well, if it becomes a problem, said the manager, we can always move you, find you a more accommodating space. Nothing available right now. I’ll let you know if something suitable opens.

(Even Dr. Schussler might move! I thought. Everyone moving. Everything fluid. What kind of place is this?)

Well, replied the doctor, I certainly hope not to move. It disorients the patients. And then there is the problem of one’s preprinted stationery and all.

Oh, there might be a room on this floor, said the manager. You never know. And if there is, you can take your number 804 with you.

The doctor said nothing, only gave a sort of humph, and took the two steps to her own door.

The workmen lashed in their measuring tapes and left. Then the manager said to me, I’ll let you know, fella.

My legs were trembling. My mind, however, kept clear its workings. If I said nothing in reply, I thought, only nodded, Dr. Schussler could believe one of the workmen was still in the room, might believe the manager was talking to one of his men. So I therefore stepped out from my little enclosure behind the door, raised my chin to acknowledge him, and turned out the lights as he left the room.

I was still safe, I told myself. For now. She still did not know I was there.

But a sword hung over us, I knew.





98.


The patient remained skeptical about her mother’s sudden embrace of Judaism, and the rejection that had followed just as suddenly. Yet Michal persuaded her daughter to suspend disbelief, as it were, until she could continue her story. And the patient complied.

Michal then moved quickly through the early days of Belsen’s establishment as a D.P. camp (which speed gave me some hope that I might yet hear the end before losing my beloved Room 807). Within several weeks of Michal’s arrival in Belsen, British soldiers marched the survivors up the road to what had been a Panzer training school. Clean and deloused, she emphasized. Then the army burned down the original camp.

The British goal was to “get out of the D.P. business,” as Michal described it in American slang. They wanted everyone to be repatriated as quickly as possible.

But as for me, said Michal to her daughter, where was “home”? Germany? Was I going to knock on the door of my former father-in-law? The door of Albrecht’s cousins who had hated me? They would throw me into the street.

The life I had led in Berlin had been demolished. So what was I? A person without an identity, someone with a made-up name. Stateless. I was exactly where I was supposed to be: in a displaced-persons camp. I had no choice but to accept the fact that the next turn of my life would take place in Bergen-Belsen.

The tape rolled on through a period of silence before Michal finally said:

One day shortly after I was settled in the new camp, I was summoned by a British soldier. Two soldiers, she corrected herself. They walked me to a building they called the Round House. It was in a wooded area, on a rise by a small lake, lovely, mid-morning of an exquisite spring day, of the sort you never forget: the aroma of the greening earth, the scent of blooming hyacinths like a drug.

The building rose before me like a vision from a former time—my life in Berlin—an imposing structure with rounded wings at each end. We walked up a porticoed entryway, across a wide foyer, the wood floor creaking and echoing, finally to a room of palatial proportions. And for a moment my knees went weak. One young soldier accompanying me—he had a pencil mustache and deep-set eyes, very sympathetic—had to hold me up, because a sudden hallucination had come over me: I believed I was walking into the ballroom of our grand house in Berlin.

Then I saw a desk and three side tables. Four seated officers. Three or four more junior soldiers. A ledger, papers, pens. Light dancing in the shine of the wooden floor. Dancing exactly as dancers do, swaying, and swirling, so that for a moment the hallucination of the house and the ballroom returned. I think it must have been the effect of near starvation—thin soup, a little bread, was all we had to eat—inducing moments like this one, when I did not know who I was, where I was, what I was doing there.

Someone spoke. The question to be addressed, he said, is your status: Are you an enemy collaborator or a victim of the Nazis?

This question gathered up my senses, focused my attention, dissolved the vision of the dancers. And immediately I answered, Victim! I was in a labor camp, arrived on one of the last transports, was dumped into Belsen three days before liberation, taken by a Hungarian guard, raped.

Raped: Once more I should not have said the word. Again a man circled me. Once more a man eyed me, evaluated me, looked me over from my head all the way down—no, this man stopped at my ass, much diminished in appeal by that time. I was skinny, wan, my hair like dead grass. Huh.

She paused.

It occurs to me just now—now as you sit before me—that I was already carrying you—

Me.

—was pregnant by then. Not yet started on special rations, so—

Me, repeated the patient.

Yes. You. A tiny ball of starving cells inside me as I stood there, thin and tired and frightened, barely able to nourish myself, let alone you, as this British officer circled me and circled me. And discussed me, and questioned me. And eventually decided: Victim. I must have been a victim.





99.


The patient, having heard the first mention of her earthly existence, seemed to grow more relaxed. During long stretches in the narrative, she allowed Michal to go on without interruption. In fact, we barely heard the patient’s voice on the tapes during the next two sessions.

And Michal seemed to be more relaxed as well.

Now, she said, we come to the almost happy time of my internment in Belsen.

I was young, she said, dazzled by the camp leaders, fascinated by their audacity, their ferocious determination to take control of their own lives. The best, the strongest among them, was Yossele Rosensaft—see, my dear? Now he truly enters the story. And not far behind Rosensaft in resolution was his second-in-command, Norbert Wollheim—a cultured Berliner like myself. They and their followers opened schools and kindergartens; organized the hospital; set up a commissary; formed a theater company, writing and acting in their own plays, giving performances of cabaret—cabaret in that place!

Above all, the camp leaders demanded that Jews be recognized as a group, which the British had refused to do.

Internees had been housed by nationality, said Michal, meaning Polish Jews were locked up with Poles, who were more Jew-hating than even the Germans. Or maybe they just lacked “German discipline,” unable to control what came out of their mouths.

The good Brits had thrown me into a barracks with German women, said Michal, half of them non-Jews. These women had been sent to Belsen by the Nazis because of “suspicious political activities.” But somehow they still believed they were part of the master race. One night I woke up and walked around the barracks, not able to get back to sleep. And this—all right, you know the word—this bitch starts muttering under her breath, I thought Hitler got rid of all of you.

The leaders organized, marched, made demands, and soon released us from this humiliation. Jews came to live with Jews. And the leadership fought and won the battle to get aid from Jewish agencies into the camp. We were no longer beggars at the feet of the British; we took care of one another.

Again Michal thought, who are these people? What sustains them?

Most of them were Polish Zionists, she learned, young people who, before Hitler, had spent their summer-camp days learning Hebrew, marching in the forests with wooden rifles, training to be soldiers who would fight for a Jewish state.

Maria (as she was still named) moved into a barracks with ten other Jewish women of various ages. They cleaned and scrubbed; found bits of cloth, made curtains; picked wildflowers that grew at the foot of the fence that imprisoned them and brought them indoors to cheer themselves. Maria was popular. Because of her language skills, and relative health and energy, she was elected to be assistant block captain, which meant she went about the camp wearing a little blue-and-white armlet with the Yiddish words Segan Hablock. She attended committee meetings; helped distribute clothing and shoes; painted scenery for the Yiddish theater.

Gradually, she became integrated into the life of the camp, while the camp itself began to take on the characteristics of a town. There was a main plaza, called Liberty Square, with a loudspeaker giving news and information in Yiddish. The Jews formed their own police force, to counteract the bullying of the Polish police that had ruled the camp. Couples married; groups formed themselves into kibbutzim and gave parties. Along the streets, small stores, called “canteens,” were set up in an ad hoc fashion, offering shoe repairs, haircuts, cleaning, tailoring. Business was done on the barter system: Individuals traded the rations they received from aid agencies for goods and services. The gold coins of the realm were coffee and cigarettes.

This will sound very strange to you, Michal said to her daughter. There I was an internee. But somewhere around the fourth or fifth month in the camp, it came to me that I had somehow healed a bit, healed from … all that.

You felt better because …

Because for the first time in my memory, even going back to when I was fifteen—for the first time, my life was under my own volition, my own direction. I wanted to join in these activities. I wanted to contribute. I wanted to be one of those brave, strong people who had snatched life from the Nazi hell.

There was a Yiddish newspaper, said Michal. I do not know how they did it. Found paper. Mimeographed the pages. People rushed up to grab a copy, overcome at the sight of this newspaper that seemed to have materialized out of nothing.

One day I found myself standing before Rafael Olevsky, said Michal, one of the founders of the newspaper, saying to him, Please. Teach me Yiddish. Teach me to read and write Yiddish.

What is your name? Olevsky asked me.

And I was embarrassed to answer. What was a Maria doing there in the camp? He would never teach such a Maria.

Miriam, I answered him. Miriam Gerstner.

(Joy! My trail of names had come true. Maria to Miriam, as told by Michal.)

And that was it? asked the patient. Nothing more formal? No papers? No ceremony?

Michal laughed. Do you think I should have applied to the magistrate in Celle? Asked the Germans to allow me to be a Jew?





100.


Let me show you how far we came in a short time, Michal continued. How quickly we took control of our lives.

Just six months after the British had come upon the thousands of living corpses abandoned in Belsen, the bastards who ran the camp were put on trial in a nearby town called Lüneburg.

The camp’s doctor, Hadassah Bimko, testified before the tribunal, Michal told the patient. Before Belsen, she had been at Auschwitz, and she identified commandants and guards from both camps.

And then Bimko exposed a truth that shocked the world: the existence of the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

This revelation made her famous, said Michal.

Then she laughed.

Also infamous in the dens of the Holocaust deniers. I think one of them called her “The Heroine of the Holocaust.”

Then, six days later, Michal went on, just six days after the commandants and guards had faced their fate, the First Congress of the She’erit Hapletah took place in Belsen, the First Congress of the surviving remnant. Remnant. You must think what this means to a people. Torn. All that is left.

At this congress, we elected a government—our own government—to lead the camp.

I remember the closing day exactly. I was sitting in the last row. Just as the meeting was getting started, Bimko came in late, shaking hands while she made her slow progress to the auditorium stage.

Let me describe her, said Michal. She was “stout” and “plump,” as the newspapers described her, which was true; she was a stub of a woman. Which did her no good when she was cross-examined by the attorney for the defense at the Lüneburg trials, whom the British had appointed.

Michal laughed.

The story of what happened at the trial went around the camp. In her testimony, Bimko described the deprivations of the prisoners in Auschwitz and Belsen. Then the defense lawyer asked: And were you subject to these deprivations, Dr. Bimko? Were you emaciated at the time of liberation?

Since it was impossible not to notice that Bimko was not at all thin, not at all recovering from emaciation, the underlying point was to question whether she was a victim or a member of the camp staff. She had worked under the evil Josef Mengele. She was well fed and healthy. What was she, victim or perpetrator?

I always knew I was a prisoner, Dr. Bimko replied.

We came to the end of the congress, said Michal. We held elections for the heads of the various committees. Hadassah Bimko became the official head of the Health Committee. Of course Rosensaft was chosen to be the leader of the Central Committee, Wollheim to be his second.

Rosensaft gave the closing speech: We are now entering an era when we must fight for our rights, he said. We have been slaves, but now we are free. May we be blessed to convene our next congress in Eretz Yisrael.

The newly elected leaders shook hands with one another. Rosensaft embraced Bimko. Everyone rose for the singing of “Hatikvah.”

Michal was silent for some seconds—moved by the memory of the moment?

Then she said:

I stood up. Dizzy, sweaty. I was six months pregnant. My belly getting big. I nearly tumbled over.

Because of me inside you, said the patient, neither asking nor asserting.

Michal said nothing for two or three seconds, then answered in a bright voice, Yes, my dear daughter. You were there! You were at the very first Congress of the She’erit Hapletah!





101.


Michal’s voice was too bright. And the patient knew it.

I’m what changed things for you, aren’t I? Your being pregnant with me.

No! How can you say that?

You were dizzy and sweaty and about to faint—

I did not say faint.

All right. Fall over.

No, no, no.

Now you have to tell me so I believe you. How did you go from your “almost happy time” in the camp—that great Zionist creation—to giving me away so I wouldn’t be a Jew? How?

As I told you, it was a time of extremes. Changes. Quick turns. Reverses.

That’s not an answer.

Michal hummed through a pause, took a breath.

Yes. Not an answer. Yes, I suppose I must go on and tell you, all of it. This will be difficult, for you as well as for me. But yes, having begun, I must go on to the end.

Get to the part where you give me away, said the patient. Don’t click your tongue at me, Michal. That’s what you did: You gave me away.

Listen, my dear. If you remain so angry, you will stand in the way of the story. I will run through quickly, and you will never understand what happened.

All right.

You must reserve judgment.

All right.

All right, said Michal. Now …

I can only say that the change came slowly. Over months. Creeping up until I looked around one day and said to myself: I must leave this place.

There must have been arguments from the beginning, differences over the sort of aid we needed. Of course there were differences. These went on quietly. The general mood was one of cooperation.

But—sometime soon after Rosensaft was elected to lead the Central Committee—sometime around then, the arguments broke out into the open. Battles between ideologies: Should we go back and rebuild our communities? Refuse to have our European home taken away from us? To which the Zionists replied: Home! There is no home for us in Europe. Europe is a grave. Our only home is in Eretz Yisrael!

And then came the fiercest of battles: for control over the aid flowing into the camp. Which was growing daily into a great pile of money and goods.

She laughed. Greed. Greed on all sides. Like everyone and everywhere. Greed for money and greed for power.

The rabbis wanted funds dedicated to religious purposes, she went on. Improving the rooms and buildings used as Schulen—synagogues. Also more money for religious instruction, Torah studies, not just the teaching of Hebrew as an everyday language, but the ancient Hebrew of the Torah. They wanted scholars to be paid for their studies, as other leaders received subsistence living allowances. Newer Torahs in better condition, which, it turns out, are very expensive. And then there were the ritual baths for women.

Ritual baths? asked the patient.

Yes. You see, we bleed with our periods, and religious Jews consider us to be dirty—all that blood—which has to be “cleansed” afterward, to make us “pure” again.

Do not laugh, Michal said to the patient. This is true.

And the faction against the rabbis? asked the patient.

Rosensaft, Wollheim, the Central Committee. They did not care to spend funds on religious objects, beyond what was necessary for services. The idea of paying men to pray and study, while we were freezing and hungry, seemed ridiculous. They wanted shoes, clothes, food, fuel.

She laughed.

It was good they won. I was pregnant and undernourished. It was a cold, cold winter. You were born in the middle of it. Without the fuel and the warm clothes and the food, it is not certain you could have survived.

The patient breathed in and out, but said nothing.

But over time …

Over time?

Michal sucked in a breath.

I think it was the coffee and cigarettes that made everything fall apart.

Rosensaft pressed for larger and larger donations of cigarettes and coffee. Again, it was good in the beginning. They were used for barter in the canteens and everywhere else, between the people inside. Coins of the realm, as I told you. Trade.

But then the amounts coming in doubled, tripled. A black market sprang up. Of course, what could anyone expect? You lock up a bunch of people, give them no means of earning a real livelihood, pour into the camp the sorts of things the good Germans around it haven’t seen in years—coffee, a Nazi-loving farmer would swear undying love for any Jew who could get him real coffee—and what do you think will happen?

There were police raids, to stop the black marketeering. In no time, the trade would come back, as if nothing had happened to stop it.

Rosensaft was the driving force behind this. I cannot prove it. But I believe he was. I also believed—still believe—that the underlying push came from Bimko. Hadassah and Yossele took up together. They got married eventually. And I think she poisoned Rosensaft. He was—had been—truly a man of the people. He came from a poor family. Survived on his wits and force of character.

But she, on the other hand, came from a rich family, something to do with gold, gold dealers, I think. And when Rosensaft took up with her, he was somehow corrupted. They got rich in the coffee and cigarette trade—that was generally believed. So where did she get all those cigarettes? She was lighting one cigarette from the tip of another while other people had to save up six packs for a pair of five-time recobbled shoes. Bimko. That stinking, chain-smoking little troll.

I do not have the facts, said Michal. I cannot tell you for a fact that Rosensaft and Bimko got rich off purloined coffee rations. All I know is the result. They eventually moved out of the camp into an apartment. And when the camp was closed, did they go to Eretz Yisrael? Did they join all the orphans Hadassah led into Palestine like some Moses? Did they go to the place to which we all had been urged to go, as our duty, our only hope, our God-given destiny? The place they had battled the world to create? Oh, no, no, no. The big Zionists moved to Switzerland. Schweiz! That pretty, neutral country with placid lakes and snowy mountains. They lived in Montreaux, on Lake Geneva. What a nice life! They also had a house in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera, the Riviera dei Fiori. And for a while in New York, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, where your precious Renoirs and Gauguins hung on the walls.

All this I learned later from a Bergen-Belsen survivors’ group. The members remained in communication and knew where many of the internees had gone, particularly the leadership.

Even then, while still in Belsen, I did not see a future in the camp. Belsen was quickly becoming a place of rich and poor, the well-connected and everyone else.

In the end, it was a scandal. Of all the camp leaders, only one, Rafael Olevsky, the cofounder of the newspaper, settled in Israel. All the others made easier lives for themselves. Wollheim went to America and became an accountant—an accountant! Trepman went to Canada. Laufer went to Canada. Rosenthal to Philadelphia. Oh, they all sent money to Israel. They all felt “deeply connected” to Israel. Ha! One of the Orthodox rabbis even had his dead body shipped here from Europe, so he would have his final rest in Israel. But did they live in the place they were demanding for all the rest of us? Did they settle here? Take up the hard life of building Israel? What brave pioneers!

She spat.

It was becoming clear that the leadership was doing far better than everyone else, she said. There were grumblings. About Rosensaft. Accusations that Rosensaft and his cronies controlled the coffee market. I cannot say if it was true one way or another, but where did he get the money to rent an apartment in Celle while we were all behind barbed wire?

And there were complaints about Rosensaft’s near-dictatorial powers. No one questioned his motives. It was the concentration of his authority that was at issue. His insistence that all aid be funneled through the Central Committee, which he ruled. That all major political decisions be approved by the Central Committee, which he commanded. That the organization of the camp itself be under the control of the Central Committee, of which he was the undisputed king.

Her voice was suddenly bitter.

Behind his back, she said, people called him Little Stalin.





102.


Stalin! I thought as the session came to an end. How quickly did Rosensaft, who had dazzled and fascinated the young Miriam, become Stalin!

Something was wrong. Michal’s bitterness, her cold cynicism, was too strong to be caused by mere politics. But what lay behind it? The patient did not press her mother. And, in the next series of sessions, Dr. Schussler did not intervene to discuss the question.

To make matters worse, Michal’s narrative at this point became oddly disjointed, proceeding by theme, not by chronology. It would have been no matter if she were relaying only a brief portion of the story. But she was portraying eight months of her internment in Belsen: three months from the First Congress in late September 1945 (the establishment of Rosensaft’s power, Michal had said), to the patient’s birth in December. And then another five months until Michal left Belsen in May 1946.

Michal told and retold the events of this period, going over and over the time that followed “the almost happy days.” But the story came in lightning strikes, a phrase here, a paragraph here, wild spikes in random order. Rabbis were “fat, bearded, crabby old men.” Wollheim, whom she had described as aristocratic and learned, became “Rosensaft’s poodle.” The joint leadership of Rosensaft and Wollheim was “autocratic,” “unscrupulous,” “tyrannical,” “self-serving.” She laughed and jeered, spat and snorted and clicked her tongue. Something more than camp politics had to be behind this bitter, bitter mood.

And what emotional swordplay was responsible for the most drastic change in Michal’s characterizations: the transformation reserved for the doctor? Hadassah Bimko, who began as the ministering angel saving the camp from typhus, became the heartless rich girl, Rosensaft’s corruptor. Finally to become “that stinking, chain-smoking little troll.”

Why did Dr. Schussler not probe her client? How could she not notice the fundamental change in Michal Gershon’s narrative? Two weeks went by, and I awaited her entry into the therapeutic conversation, to no avail. And it came to me that she had not said anything of consequence for some time. Had the doctor fallen victim to the sweep of Michal’s narrative? Was her guilt preventing her from intervening? There was no telling, as I heard none of the usual indications of boredom, no creaking leather as Dr. Schussler shifted about her seat, no slishing stockings as she crossed and recrossed her legs. She simply maintained her silence for reasons I could not divine.

As a consequence, a powerful need developed within me: I had to hear her voice once again. The shushing Ss and spat-out Ts that had first intruded upon my consciousness; that had first informed me of the doctor’s existence—that had lured me into my relationship with the patient!—I must hear them again. Yet the therapist persisted in her all-too-brief ritual phrases, good morning, good afternoon, as-we-were-saying-last-week, our time is up.

Come back to me, Dora Schussler, I thought. But the silence wore on; and the longer the doctor remained mute, the more her passivity seemed hostile, a willful withdrawing from me. For she had turned me into her creature, a sort of patient. Not one of my many therapeutic practitioners had ever cured me of a bout of obsession, yet Dr. Schussler had accomplished just that. I had come to trust her, need her—she had engendered in me this trust, this need—and now where was she?





103.


The last of these sessions drew to a close. Given my agitated state, I dared not move until Dr. Schussler was safely out of the office. Then I quickly gathered my things and left.

Despite our having arrived at autumn, it was a blistering hot day. (I had utterly given up all attempts to understand San Francisco’s climate; aside from summer fog, the good people of the city inevitably described whatever weather was present as “very unusual for this time of year.”) The days were shortening, however, and I soon found myself strolling toward Union Square in the cooling air of approaching sundown.

I came to a bench (perhaps the very one from which I had followed the Indonesian girl and boy, all those many months ago). And suddenly it was as if a veil had fallen from my eyes; or, more accurately, a muffler from my ears.

For no sooner did I feel the cool of the stone beneath me than Michal Gershon’s story leapt into clarity. It was exactly as if the recording of her voice had been cut into a hundred pieces and then reassembled as a coherent, linear narrative. And I knew the precise instant when Michal’s feelings toward Belsen had changed, the fulcrum moment that had bred Miriam Gerstner’s hatred toward Rosensaft, Wollheim, and Bimko. And I understood Dr. Schussler’s silence, how blessed it was; why she had not pressed this understanding upon her patient.





104.


The fulcrum moment came, I was certain, on the closing day of the First Congress of the She’erit Hapletah.

I could all but see Michal, then Miriam, sitting in the last row, watching Hadassah Bimko shaking hands, nodding hellos, being adored, as she made her way to the stage.

As Michal described Bimko’s entrance, why did she feel obliged to mention the doctor’s testimony at the Lüneburg trial? Bimko’s being stout and plump? Her near-humiliation by the defense counsel? The implication that Bimko might have been not a victim but a collaborator with the infamous Josef Mengele; her collaboration accounting for her survival and good health? Why use the lawyer to defame her?

And then the story of the congress’s final minutes. All the newly elected leaders shaking hands. Rosensaft and Bimko embracing on the stage.

Miriam rises to sing “Hatikvah.” She is pregnant and dizzy and sweating—and watching the embrace. She nearly tumbles. And then I understood: It was not merely her physical balance that was lost. It was the moment when her life in Belsen—the first time she had ever wanted to be a Jew—turned back upon itself.

From the moment I had first heard the story, I knew that something was wrong, off. But I could not bring it to consciousness, could not understand exactly why I was so discomfited. And immediately thereafter, Michal had begun to relate her story in fractured pieces, as I have said. Straining to understand her, I did not have time for reflection, review. And I was preoccupied with Dr. Schussler’s absence from the conversation.

But now, as I sat upon the bench in Union Square, it was as if each fragment of Michal’s story glared at me nakedly from within the circle of its own spotlight:

A mention of a “difficult pregnancy.” Something about “spotting,” premature contractions, fluctuations in blood pressure. Waiting in endless lines for extra rations. Resentful stares, jealousy, as she received additional food. These details had been dropped like salt grains into other stories, and thereby quickly dissolved in the overall wash of events. And, as if she had not already obscured the story sufficiently, into this mix she stirred suggestive mentions of Rosensaft and Wollheim and Bimko. The presence of Dr. Bimko in a tale of a difficult pregnancy was to be expected. But what did those men, Yossele Rosensaft and Norbert Wollheim, have to do with the gestation of my dear patient?

I sat in the square and reviewed the other clues Michal had left behind, over the course of many weeks, traces that had resided in parenthetical remarks, asides, snickers, bits of dialog, flashes of anger. The mufflers having fallen from my ears (so to speak), my review required but fifty or sixty seconds; after which the real thread of the story revealed itself to me. The secret lay in five separate scenes, previously mentioned by Michal weeks apart, cut away from the broken time line and aligned in narrative order.

First was a brief interaction between Miriam Gerstner and Yossele Rosensaft. It came following some committee meeting. She said something personal to him. Personal how? She did not say. And she felt quite hurt when he was dismissive, or else he had dismissed her; in any case, she felt dismissed, dispensed with, discarded.

The next scene is more elaborate, again played by Miriam and Rosensaft. The place: a camp building, a hall, after a wedding. Miriam danced with Rosensaft. Afterward she took his arm, wanting to walk out for a breath of air. He dropped the triangle that had supported her arm, turned to her, looked into her eyes, then—as she returned his gaze—he gave her “a little chuck under the chin.” After which he “walked away laughing.” If this was not bad enough, he returned to the floor, danced with another woman, to whom he also gave “a little chuck under the chin.”

Lothario, Michal had whispered on the tape.

Had Miriam been romantically interested in Rosensaft? The third and fourth and fifth scenes, all involving Norbert Wollheim, brought the question into relief. It was not clear where those interactions took place—Michal reported only shards of these conversations with him. In one, Wollheim is saying that she can have “no claims” upon Rosensaft’s time (or else he said she had “no claims” upon Rosensaft himself; Michal spoke too quickly for me to hear it clearly). In the next scene (also played upon a blank stage) Wollheim says something on the order of: You and I have more in common than you have with Yossele. And finally, on another bare stage, he tells her: “Rosensaft is with Bimko. They are going to be married.”

Suddenly it was all so clear. How could I not have seen it? Hidden beneath the dry brush of political meetings and committees, underneath the passions of Zionism and the debates about the future of the Jews, another story smoldered: Wollheim wanted Miriam; Miriam wanted Rosensaft; Rosensaft wanted Hadassah Bimko. The eternal tale that could play itself out anywhere: a prosperous city, a country estate, a displaced-persons camp.

What a sad story it was, I thought, as evening came on and Union Square began to bustle with office workers hurrying home. For the longer I contemplated my scenario, the more convinced I was of its veracity:

A woman survives what seems a lifetime of horrors and is surprised—stunned—to find herself still healthy, young. She begins to discover a new identity, a new life, one in which she is popular, active, involved; in which she learns new languages; where she is valued for skills she never imagined she possessed. She falls in love, reaches out for a husband when she discovers she is carrying a child, most likely his child. Then her new identity as Miriam is slowly forced to shrink, as if her range of motion must contract in proportion to the expansion of her belly. She is envied for her special foods and rations, and her popularity fades. The man rejects her. Her difficult pregnancy keeps her from the activities in which she was engaged. She has to give up her places in groups and committees. Slowly, what overtakes her is a sort of nineteenth-century confinement, literally a confinement in the hospital, wherein she falls under the care of Dr. Hadassah Bimko, the lover of the man she desires. And it is precisely at this point—when she is forced to remain bedridden, overseen by her rival—that the good doctor, that angel, becomes “that stinking, chain-smoking little troll.”

I whispered a passionate “thank you” to Dr. Schussler. And this gratitude was for her gracious silence; for relinquishing her therapist’s imperative to probe, and probe ever deeper; and, most of all, for allowing the patient some degree of ignorance about the story of her inception. The patient certainly had intuited the starkness of her origins. But it would have been cruel to inflict upon her the knowledge that her very existence had snuffed out a nascent life. For Maria-become-Miriam was barely born when her newfound joy was drained from her. Her moment of belonging, of wanting to be a Jew for the first time in her life, was taken from her by the being she called “a tiny ball of starving cells.”

It was not the patient’s fault, of course. But she had come along when she had come along. Her mother was about to be judged: Was she truly a victim? She was hallucinating from hunger; barely able to stand. And inside her was the tiny patient, her starving cells awash in her mother’s fear.

The patient grows toward birth, submerged in the noxious brew of the dying Miriam’s emotions: a flood of vengefulness, bitterness, hatred, cynicism, sorrow, and despair. O my dear patient! Even in your pre-life: consigned to the tribe of the inherently unhappy.

I put my head in my hands and cried. People walking by me in Union Square gave me a wide berth, as I sobbed uncontrollably, how long I do not know, only that night came on, and the square filled with frightening characters, and yet I wept. I was overwhelmed with the depth, breadth, urgency, and sheer inescapability of my kinship with the patient. We were born to darkness. It was our task—our imperative!—to think, plan, use our minds (the only strength that remained to us) to fight for the life of our flesh. And—to hell with our ancestors; we will show them; they do not rule us—to thrive! Or, at the very least, remain alive.