By Blood A Novel

TWO





49.


I began my search at the San Francisco Public Library, which was not as useful as I had hoped. Their literature of the postwar period was entirely focused upon the Marshall Plan: heroic tales of America saving Europe from chaos, financial backing, food aid, and so forth.

There was but a single volume about European displaced persons. It was not a scholarly work but a personal account by a Polish Jewish woman, one Anna Sobieskva. She had survived the Sachenhausen concentration camp, and after liberation she returned to the Polish village in which her family had lived for more than three hundred years. The town was named Kielce (pronounced KYEL-chuh, she helpfully advised the reader). Before the war, the town was home to a Jewish community of twenty-seven thousand people. Those who returned numbered two hundred.

They were not exactly welcomed by their former Polish neighbors, many of whom were living in the houses of dead Jews. All the same, these stragglers, whom the author called “the remnant,” struggled to rebuild their community hall, in which they also lived until they could reconstruct their lives. Then, on July 4, 1946 (while we in America were preparing the rockets’ red glare of our first postwar Fourth of July), thousands of the Polish villagers surrounded the Jewish community house. They were armed with knives, pitchforks, hunting rifles. Whipped up into an anti-Semitic frenzy, they invaded the hall and killed forty-two of their former neighbors. Fifty more were seriously wounded, meaning about half of the returning Jewish people were killed or maimed. Meanwhile, the police stood by and watched.

This was not the only pogrom against Jews returning to Poland, the author informed us. In the two years after the war, thousands of Jews were killed by their former neighbors.

The survivors of the Kielce pogrom—the “remnant of the remnant,” the author now called them—tried to make their way to the Western democracies. But the policy agreed upon at the Yalta conference was that displaced persons should return to their countries of origin—a disaster for the Jews of Kielce, an impossibility for most Jews. Not until 1948 did the United States begin admitting refugees of any sort. The British limited emigration to Palestine to about two thousand. With nowhere to go, the former residents of Kielce fell under the protection of the Allied Forces: in displaced-persons camps, once again behind barbed wire.

What a story! Why had I never heard any such thing before? Like all Americans, I was shocked and horrified by what we learned after the concentration camps were liberated. (I myself had not served in the armed forces, having been rejected as “unfit for duty” due to my psychological history.) But once VE Day was declared, I confess I stopped noticing Europe, as if that matter were settled, especially since our country still faced the prospect of a bloody war in the Pacific.

I was now determined to learn more about the postwar experience of Jewish survivors—the patient’s mother among them. Given my university credentials, I was able to obtain library privileges at San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University, a difficult but worthwhile commute an hour and a half south of San Francisco.

I soon learned that, by the time three years had passed after V-E day, a quarter of a million Jewish survivors found themselves in situations like that of the Kielce survivors: interned in displaced-persons camps in Germany.

I did not know how, amidst this mass of suffering humanity, I might find the patient’s mother. It seemed that all of Europe was on the move, Poles returning to Poland, Sudeten Germans trying to go back to Germany, the French to France, Spaniards to Spain. Each type to his own; Slavs to Slavs, Greeks to Greeks. But the Jews: If not in Palestine, where did the Jews belong?

Now I understood that a whole new disaster had befallen them. Their former lives were gone. They were no longer Poles or Germans or Austrians; they were stateless. They were free neither to live in Europe nor to emigrate to the United States nor to join their fellow Zionists in Palestine. They were stuck in the mud of the camps.

The more I learned of this period, the more I despaired of conveying it to the patient. Even if I should find a method of getting my research to her—which seemed wholly unlikely—what effect could it have but to depress her spirits further? The information could only show the futility of finding her mother. Among the quarter million stranded in Germany: Where was Maria G?

Thus we came to April, to the end of the Easter break. The patient had not gone anywhere during the holiday, reasoning she was better off with the routine of work than some imagined (and disappointed) pleasure amongst millions of carousing college students. She had not heard from Dorotea; she was not in communication with Charlotte. Her good friends Andie and Clarissa had sustained her (to my relief, as week by week I learned of their steady support). The rains had gone on unusually late in the year; we lived under the unnatural extension of daylight savings time; the continued rains made the afternoons as dark as night. Our whole environment seemed unreal, a stage that had been set by a bored and irritable god.

It was the weekend following the spring break. The sands of Ocean Beach were suddenly littered with medical waste—used syringes, tubing, IV bags—that had washed up on shore from some mysterious source. I walked along, believing that some overwhelming disaster had befallen the Western world, that our way of life was on the verge of extinction. Oil crisis, unemployment, stagflation, a fruitless war in Vietnam slowly coming to an end. San Francisco seemed a dark and frightening place. Patty Hearst’s kidnapping. White people all over the city had been murdered in the Zebra killings. The Zodiac serial killer was still at large.

When all at once, as my footfall squeezed fluid from an IV bag and I was overcome with disgust, a memory surfaced. It was the patient’s adoptive mother speaking: Somewhere in the story she had told her daughter. The part about a form she had found in the locked desk. Information about the birth mother. Date of birth: May 17, 1921. Place of birth: Berlin. Last known residence: Celle.

Celle! I raced back to the cottage, to the wall where I had hung up a map of Europe, pins in every place where there had been a D.P. camp. Celle! The British called it Celle Camp or Hohne, but the internees insisted upon calling it by the name that had dishonored the place: Bergen-Belsen.





50.


I had found the patient’s mother! Amongst all the million refugees crisscrossing Europe, there she was: in the Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp. There could be no other explanation for her last known residence being Celle, for it was both a British name for the camp and the largest nearby town. I was certain: It was to Belsen she had come after surviving the war, and it was there that she had surrendered her child—my child, as I thought of her. My dear patient.

This alone should be enough to cheer her, I thought. Having an avenue of investigation would rejuvenate her spirits, reignite the intelligence that was her rope line, the faculty that always saved her from the depths. How like me she was, I thought: never properly loved, not trusting therefore, believing only in the picture of the world constructed by her analyzing mind.

My problem was how to communicate my finding. There being no mechanism immediately revealing itself to me, I decided to continue my investigations, reasoning (optimistically, against all my native impulses) that such a moment would appear. It seemed impossible to me that I might be in a position to help my dear patient yet not find a way to reach her. I believed I was her sole hope, as I have said, and, to my surprise, I found that being so needed was a tonic for the personality, drawing one away from contemplation of the abyss and into the daylight of necessity. Normal people know this, of course. They have begotten children and are, in turn, needed by them. And in like manner, I had adopted my child, my dear patient.

I therefore passed my days at the various libraries, first reviewing newspaper photographs, listening to recordings of BBC radio reports, and watching the films made by the British brigade who were first to come upon Bergen-Belsen and liberate the camp, on April 15, 1945.

All the horror I had felt when first learning of the camp came back to me. The forty thousand unburied corpses. The living scarcely more alive than the dead. The picture of a local German boy strolling pleasantly down a country road, bodies lining the margins like a hedgerow made in hell. A woman crouched among the dead, naked. The dead all around her. The dead children.

The dead, the dead, the dead. As the Nazis retreated from the Red Army, they tried to cover up their crimes. Any inmate still living was forced to move west: to walk, most dying along the way; to ride, shoved like cargo into boxcars. In the last week before Belsen was liberated, the Germans dumped thirty thousand human beings into the camp. Then, three days before the British reached Belsen, they abandoned them. The living corpses were left to their own devices: No water. Little food. The only thing available in great abundance was typhus.

The British soldiers were overwhelmed. Many to whom they gave food died of eating it, their wasted bodies unable to digest it. The typhus epidemic raged. The dying continued their short path to death. In the first week after “liberation,” ten thousand more died. A BBC journalist reported what he had seen and ended his broadcast with “This is the worst day of my life.”

And yet there was also the miraculous: Five days after liberation, a Friday, the Jewish Sabbath, a religious service was held in the open air, reported the BBC. For most of those attending, it was the first time in a decade that they had prayed in safety as a congregation of Jews. Knowing they were being recorded, the group of survivors, many still too weak to stand, gathered to sing the Hebrew song “Hatikvah.”

I sat in a carrel; I put on headphones; I listened to the recording.

At first it seemed they would not be able to sing. There was a rumble, low voices in many keys, the words unformed, a confusion. Then one woman’s strong voice emerged: Kol od ba’le’vav. How long had that voice waited to sing this song? How brave she was in her reach for the high notes! The others followed her, found the key, found unison, breaking now and then into aching harmonies. I found a translation of the words. Od lo avdah tikvateinu. Our hope is not yet lost.

I was in tears before the song ended. I sobbed in the library carrel as I had not cried since my boyhood, with a sorrow that seemed as clear and pure as the bravery in that voice. Now I looked anew at the films and photographs, for there was more to see than horror and death. There was life to come, and hope. Somewhere was the patient’s mother. Some photograph might show her. Her face might appear in the British-army film, flashed by as the camera scanned the crowd. There she might be, very much alive, healthy, strong enough to bear a child. Our child. The patient.

There was one photograph I returned to again and again: a group of women in a rustic room, peeling potatoes. One woman, her hair covered by a scarf, is smiling at another. It was the sole image in which a camp inmate was smiling. In my mind, this was Maria G. This was the mother who had endured. If not she exactly, then someone like her. I decided I would send this picture to the patient, should find some way to deliver my findings, for through this woman’s smile, the patient would be able to see beyond the horrors of the camp.

Two more weeks went by: two patient sessions during which her life force continued to ebb, the therapist unable to kindle in her a motive for living. Please God, let her not attempt suicide! What a torture it was for me to know that I had information that might help her—and no means to convey it. Why did Dr. Schussler not direct the patient to parse her adoptive mother’s words more carefully? The answer was there, right there in front of her: Celle! But the doctor now had a more difficult task before her: keeping her patient alive. Both sessions ended with tremulous calls to Dr. Gurevitch.

Such was the situation as we came to April 16th. The session ended. Dr. Schussler left for her luncheon break, then I, too, left the office.

A piece of paper was lying on the floor in front of the elevator. It was a letter, I saw, as I drew closer. I glanced down casually, as anyone would. Then a name caught my eye: Charlotte. I knelt down. It was an envelope. Addressed to one Charlotte Cage. There was a penned slash through the address, and a hand-scrawled notice: Moved. Forward.

Charlotte.

Moved.

Forward.

This Charlotte had to be the patient’s ex-girlfriend! She who had maneuvered the patient into ending their affair, this coward’s mail still being delivered to the patient’s house, an affront. Now goodbye, Charlotte. Slash! Moved! Forward!

I picked up the envelope, then stood staring at it. The very words on the envelope penned by my patient, her mighty slashes ripping the paper. In my hand: my dear patient’s current and actual address.





51.


In my hand, I also held danger. The patient’s address: a temptation beyond all others. There could I follow her; there could I wait for her; there could I watch through the windows and hunger at the doors. This had to be the perverse work of the crows. They had flown through the very air of the building; dropped at my feet this bit of paper: to tempt me, to mock at my attempts to stay away.

I let the letter fall from my hands. It fell face up, the address staring at me: 732 Alpine Terrace. I stepped over it, into the elevator that had finally arrived, hoping to leave that street and number behind. The cab lowered me down the shaft and finally disgorged me into the bright white of the lobby. The guard turned his handsome face upon me. He must have seen the turmoil in my eyes, in my body. I stumbled stupidly into the street.

732 Alpine Terrace—the address would not leave my mind. The N Judah rocked westward, the numbers and letters as if engraved on the opposite wall, as if written on every billboard and sign. I locked myself in my cottage. I ate delivered pizzas and Chinese food; I drank only water. I feared that, if I left the house, I would, against all my better wishes, find my way to 732 Alpine Terrace.

The weather was indistinct, hazy, neither warm nor cool. So fair and foul a day I have not seen, I thought, as I gazed from my window, feeling as toyed with as Macbeth had been: the Fates dropping their hints to test us, to see if we could resist the deeds that would lead us to damnation. In a kitchen drawer was a map of the city; somewhere on it was the location of Alpine Terrace. The work of the crows in my very house! I was afraid even as I reached for the folded paper. I burned it and watched, still in fear, until there was nothing left but ash.

Five days went by. I could not sleep, fearing my own dreams. Desolation came upon me as the hours ticked away. Then, on Monday, as the world was awakening around me, a plan announced itself in my mind.

How simple!

I would pretend to be one of the agencies the patient had contacted. Any one of them would do; none had replied to her. Given all the time that had passed since her query, I reasoned that I could assume they never would reply. I merely had to choose a suitable agency name.

I hurried to the public library’s reference room and took down the Chicago yellow pages. Between Adjusters and Adult Care came the heading Adoption Services. Approximately thirty agencies were listed; only four advertised themselves as Catholic. And then a name leapt out at me: Greater Chicago Catholic Adoption Services. The patient had written to them!

I knew at once the identity I was to assume: a helpful clerk at this agency on Madison Street in Chicago. It did not matter that I did not know the patient’s name. I would simply address the envelope and letter using the formal and impersonal “enquiree,” claiming some excuse of confidentiality.

I rushed to a stationery store to order a letterhead and envelopes large and small, using the correct address for the agency in case the patient had maintained a list of her attempted contacts. The man who took my order paid no mind to the Chicago location, indeed helped me to pick out a font and a logo from his stock set of symbols. I chose Palatino Linotype and the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus.

I spent the night feverishly gathering the materials to send. I chose the image of the women peeling potatoes; another of children in the Bergen-Belsen nursery, one swaddled baby in the arms of a British nurse. Of course I would have to include a few pictures of the camp as the British found it, but I felt I could minimize the depressing effect by writing a cover letter emphasizing the hope that had grown out of such desolation. And of course I would send a cassette copy of the voices singing “Hatikvah”—this above all would comfort her.

The stationery was ready early the next morning, a Wednesday. Using a typewriter at the library (which had a room reserved for just this purpose), I composed the following:

Dear Enquiree:

I am in receipt of your query concerning the circumstances of your adoption. I hope you will excuse the impersonal address, “enquiree.” It is used to ensure confidentiality among the office staff.

While we cannot at this time provide you the specific details of your own origins, from the information you provided us, we were able to discern the following:

Given your mother’s last residence in Celle, Germany, and your statement that she was an inmate in a displaced-persons camp, we can state almost certainly that the camp in question was Bergen-Belsen, otherwise known as Hohne Camp, in the British Zone of Occupation. British soldiers came upon the Belsen concentration camp and liberated it, thereafter administering it as a displaced-persons camp.

I have enclosed a brief outline of the camp’s history, photographs, and what I think you will find most moving: a cassette recording of inmates singing the Hebrew song “Hatikvah,” which is introduced by a reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation. While the images of the camp, as it was first found by the British soldiers, are disturbing, I would urge you to listen to the enclosed recording and to notice the hope in the voices of the survivors. One might indeed be your mother.

I will continue to research your situation and will send along any new information as I uncover it. As I shall be traveling extensively, it is best to wait for my correspondence, rather than sending mail to me, which may be lost amidst the piles of paper that will gather in my absence.

Sincerely yours,

Colin Masters

Archive Clerk,

Greater Chicago Catholic Adoption Services

I had spent a great deal of time deciding upon my name, in the end choosing one sounding formal and “English.” I gave myself a lowly title; it did not seem likely that a higher-up would bother with such a matter. I placed the letter, photographs, and cassette in a large envelope (wrapping the cassette to cushion it); then I stood in a long line at the post office. How I feared I would not reach Room 807 in time for the patient’s session! I worried over the postmark: Would she notice the letter had come from San Francisco? I fought to keep my worry at bay, reasoning that her excitement would overcome any impulse to scrutinize the postage.

Finally it was my turn at the counter. The postal clerk weighed the envelope; I paid; I saw the postage strip applied; I watched as Colin Masters’s reply fell into a bin. And I felt I had achieved a great triumph. I had not given in to my demons. I had not followed the patient home. I was helping her to find her origins, which I hoped would soothe her.

I reached the office in time. But the patient’s session was sorrowfully like the recent ones. How hard it was to hear her despair, knowing that my parcel was on its way but not yet in her hands. It would reach her next Monday or Tuesday, before her next session on April 30th. And now there was nothing for me but to wait—wait to see just what sort of deed I had done.





52.


The patient was early. The ten o’clock client still had eight minutes remaining in his session; then the therapist would take her ten-minute intersession break: eighteen minutes to wait, during which there was nowhere for the patient to be but in the hallway, marching up and down that long, dim corridor, under the watchful eyes of the marble sentries.

I thought I heard the crinkling of paper. Yes: Surely she carried the envelope I had sent her. In her very hands the paper I had held! Was hers a march of anxiety or excitement? Each time she retreated down the corridor, I feared it was the former, anxiety, and I rued sending the envelope so precipitously. But as the patient turned back toward me, I encouraged myself to believe that her early arrival, so unusual and uncharacteristic, was a sign of happy anticipation.

Up and down she walked, my spirits rising and falling, when finally the door to Dr. Schussler’s office opened. She bade goodbye to her ten o’clock, then, seeing the patient, said:

I will be just a few minutes. You can go in if you like.

The sound machine went silent. The doctor left. The door was open. The patient went in, took her seat. The envelope rustled in her hands.

For ten minutes we sat, the patient and I, each on our respective side of our common wall—this time with the door to the corridor open. I could hear each breath she took, each slight sniffle, each tiny crease of the parcel she held—my parcel! I had no choice but to sit absolutely still, for surely, should I even breathe deeply or shift a leg, she would hear me just as clearly as I was hearing her. It was a delicious intimacy: this side-by-side anticipation.

At last I heard the doctor’s limping footfalls on the carpet. At last she crossed the threshold of her door, closed it shut behind her. And in that instant the patient said:

I got something!

Yes?

I got something back from one of the agencies, about my adoption!

(It was a cry of happiness!)

Let me read this to you, she said to the therapist.

Then she read aloud the letter from “Colin Masters.”

(My words in her mouth!)

The therapist gasped upon hearing the name “Bergen-Belsen.” Then she sat immobile until the letter’s end.

Isn’t that wonderful? said the patient. I know where my mother was. I know where I came from. The Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp, in Celle, Germany. And maybe he’ll send me more information. Here. Look at the pictures he sent.

I could hear the rest of the papers being withdrawn from the envelope, the sound of the doctor shuffling through them.

Finally Dr. Schussler said: Some of these pictures are quite shocking. Are you sure you are not dispirited by them?

No, said the patient. Not at all. I looked at the women preparing food, at the babies. One of them might be me! I can’t explain my excitement. Here. I existed here. I don’t come from some vague unknown gray space in the universe, but from this particular place, a place on a map. I can’t explain it. I felt a kind of realness that I had never experienced before. Physical realness.

She paused.

And I wish I could play for you the cassette I received, she went on. It’s a recording of the just-liberated inmates singing a Hebrew song. I have never heard anything so … heartbreaking in my life. If one of the voices was my mother’s, I couldn’t be prouder of her than if she’d been—I don’t know who, the Queen of Sheba. Do you understand? I come from these extraordinary people, I realized I am … overwhelmed with … Oh, God. I can’t express it.

The patient stuttered softly, as if she was considering, then discarding, words that might describe her state. Joy! I wanted to supply. Joy is what you are feeling!

The therapist said nothing for a full minute, which allowed her patient to experience the moment silently, a change of technique for the doctor, for in the past she would have pressed in by now with “Any words?” or “Do you feel this is related to…?”

Then, being the horrid woman she was, she said:

Have you told your parents?

Huh? said the patient, awakening from her joyous dream.

Your mother and father, your adoptive parents. Have you told them about your news?

The patient bolted upright in her chair.

No! she said in a dark, ugly voice, one that seemed to come from a creature other than the young woman just finding her happiness. Why should I tell them? she went on, speaking as a dybbuk. Mother forbade me to discuss this matter further. “Forbade”: her word.

Well, said the doctor, because they are the ones who raised you and think of you as their daughter. And I do not believe it is in your interest to keep shutting them out of your thoughts.

How dare the doctor do this! The patient immediately reverted to the depressed creature she had been. Her joy was banished; her newly found life was roped to the old one; her sense of being real suddenly made false again. It had to be the work of Dr. Schussler’s guilt, I decided. All that angst over her Nazi father’s misdeeds—the moment Dr. Schussler saw the pictures of Bergen-Belsen—up it rose.

It was more than I could bear. I shut my ears to the rest of the session!





53.


I was more determined than ever to get information about her mother to the patient. I could not leave her alone in the clutches of that Nazi daughter. The therapist’s professionalism had crumbled at the very idea of Bergen-Belsen. I thanked God that the patient had not been adopted out of Drancy, the transit camp into which the doctor’s Obersturmbannführer father had dumped the Jews of France. Who knows what ugly motives hide in the shade of guilt?

I continued my research and soon found information I believed would hearten the patient.

After liberation, the camp disappeared from the news. Then it reappeared in dramatic fashion: with coverage of the “Lüneburg trials,” British military tribunals at which the guards and commandants of Bergen-Belsen faced justice. It was not the content of the trials I wished to communicate—the transcripts made for grim reading—but an event that happened concurrently: a meeting in Belsen of hundreds of Jews from the British zone.

The organizers did not ask for permission from the British; it would have been refused in any case. But a Jewish leadership had arisen spontaneously, in the earliest days after liberation. Taking advantage of the Lüneburg trials and the arrival of many foreigners, they organized the “First Congress,” as they called it. By the time the meeting was over several days later, the Jewish internees had elected their own leadership, their own governing councils, their own committee members. At the head of this “government” was one Yossele Rosensaft.

I thought it remarkable that the survivors should outwit their British overseers and establish, so quickly, a self-governing community. It was this dynamism I hoped to convey to the patient. Perhaps she could see that this Bergen-Belsen, the D.P. camp, was no longer Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp.

There was a newspaper photograph of Rosensaft. It shows a compact man in a dark suit whose body, in another life, might have been that of a gymnast. His hairline is receding; his brow wide and noble; his head and face distinctly triangular in shape; his eyes intense. The reports describe him as a charismatic, a “man of the people.” I thought the patient would be proud to know the stock from which she came—rebels, organizers, fighters.

I quickly assembled this information, including copies of news reports and photographs, and mailed it to the patient the day after her session. But the postal clerk could not promise delivery by the following Wednesday morning. It might not arrive before her next session!

I therefore passed a fitful week. Temptation lured me into thinking that it might be best, in the future, to deliver the parcels directly to her door, even to risk her noticing the complete lack of a postal cancellation. There would be no time lag, whispered my demons. You could reach her before she gets back to that Nazi-daughter doctor. You will arm her with hope! they declaimed in my mind.

But I was stronger than they were; the patient was my shield; the demons did not ensorcell me. I put my energies to better use, continuing to assemble information about Belsen, also contacting the agencies that had provided aid to the camp. I wrote to them as a professor doing research for a biography. Did they have any records pertaining to a Belsen internee whose name was given only as Maria G.? I told them all I knew of her—her birth date, the birth date of a child born to her in the camp, the date she surrendered the child for adoption, anything I could recall from the adoptive mother’s story—and begged them to provide any further details their files might reveal.

Still, as busy as I was, the demons kept up their whispering. What will you do, they chided, if Wednesday comes and the patient still has not received your envelope? Will you finally heed us and go to her?





54.


I got another parcel! the patient said gleefully.

(Thank God! I thought.)

She had barely sat down when out came the envelope.

It’s fascinating, she said. What happened there. Amazing!

(I nearly cried aloud with relief.)

The patient withdrew the photographs and passed them to the therapist, all the while relaying (quite accurately) the information I had sent her, going on to extol the achievements of the Belsen internees, their endurance, their determination, their bravery.

The therapist—for once—kept her own counsel. Aside from a few polite invitations for her client to continue—Yes? Really! How interesting!—she said nothing, allowing the patient to talk without interruption for nearly the entire session. The result fulfilled all my hopes: the patient now heartened, able to see beyond the darkness of the Holocaust into the time that followed, the time and place from which she came, about which she could feel pride. And since the information was new to the doctor as well (I presumed), there was nothing she could say to mediate the patient’s newfound happiness. Perhaps it even lightened her own sense of guilt: to know that the remnants of Europe’s Jews were not an entirely defeated people, that her father’s work had not achieved its exterminating goal.

Finally the patient ended her soliloquy, sitting quietly for several minutes, breathing deeply. Until she said:

I had no idea they—we—had such heroism. It’s not something you normally associate with Jews, is it?

The therapist started in her chair, shaken from what seemed her imposed detachment.

Are you referring to me, personally? she asked. Something I do not associate with Jews?

No, said the patient, with a laugh. You. One. It’s not something one associates with Jews, is it?

The therapist paused before answering.

There is the stereotype, she said. Such as those we have talked about. The stereotype of the weak Jew, yes.

Lambs to the slaughter, said the patient. Isn’t that what everyone believes, that the Jews went to the Holocaust like lambs to the slaughter?

The therapist gasped. Then coughed.

Excuse me, she said. No, they did not go to the slaughter, she said in a hard voice. They were taken by force.

Of course, the patient said. What was I thinking?

Patient and doctor sat without speaking for a full minute, the tension between them palpable through the door. This therapist has to reveal her bias! I thought. She must not leave the patient with this sense of being unfeeling and uninformed. Just when the patient was making progress in her self-identification as a Jew—how dare Dr. Schussler presume to lecture the patient about the sufferings of the Jewish people!

But the damage was not complete, thank God. The material I had sent the patient prevailed. I heard the rustling of paper, then the patient saying:

Don’t you think I look like him?

The therapist hummed. Let me see again, she said.

Look at the shape of his head, said the patient. Triangular. Like mine. The same narrow chin. Also the brow: very broad, like mine. And the eyes: deep set.

(Yossele Rosensaft!)

Of course he’s darker than I am, the patient went on. But I keep coming back to that distinctive head. It’s rare. So much like mine. It’s what always made me feel like an alien in my family—nobody but me has this weird triangular head. You can’t imagine how hard it is not to look like anyone. And then I saw this picture and … don’t laugh.

She paused.

It came to me that he could be my father.

When the therapist said nothing immediately, the patient jumped in to say:

Or some relative of his. I mean he may not exactly be my father, but … It seemed to me I was part of this family.

(I was filled with joy. How much better that the session was over and the therapist could do nothing to ruin the moment.)

Ah, but look at the hour, said the doctor. We will have to discuss this next time.





55.


All of this was happening too quickly, I thought when I returned home. I was delighted at the patient’s reaction to Rosensaft. Yet her sudden identification with him—the need to see him as her father, instantly, with the evidence of just one photograph—communicated to me the urgency with which I had to find Maria G. The patient had to know her relatives, have hard information about them, what had happened to them, and soon, or else begin to drift into fantasy; thence, I feared, back into depression.

She had said to Dr. Schussler: You can’t imagine how hard it is not to look like anyone.

And I thought of my dear boyhood friend Paul, whose singularity had been a release from oppressive parents—or so I had always supposed. Now, in light of the patient’s words, I relived that distant summer afternoon with Paul’s clippings from his boot boxes. I now considered what anguished energy had driven him to create that collection of aging family faces, in secret, over the course of years: what hard work had gone into convincing himself that looking like one’s kind was not a comfort but a nightmare.

My motives fell into confusion. I had posited Paul as an icon for the patient, and for myself, an image of the self-created individual, freed from the ownership implied in the inheritance of one’s parents’ genes: You are not of them; they do not own you; you owe them only the normal gratitude for having been raised up and fed by them; you may become what you need to be.

Yet now I wondered: Was I doing the right thing in aiding the patient’s search for her mother? I thought of her twenty-ninth birthday. Celebrated in Puerta Vallarta. Quietly? Privately? Not telling the sexy Dorotea? The patient did not say. On the day of her birthday, December 26th, I had sat alone in my office, pondering her experience of that singular day: the first in which the “birth” portion had acquired flesh.

Now she knew she had come out of the body of a particular woman, a Maria G., in a physical act, at a specific time, in a specific place. Did this fact overwhelm all the prior birthdays? Did the old birthdays suddenly seem to be vaguely superfluous affairs, parties with cakes yielding over the years to dinners with wine, all the while detached from their origins, the physical facts, from the blood and guts of birth?

At none of her prior birthday parties could her mother—the woman she called Mother—at no time could this woman embarrass the patient with tales of her hard labor, the hours of pushing and breathing, the pain of the child actually coming out of her loins, the months following wherein she knew she would never again have that taut belly, those pert breasts. Therefore she had no guilt to lay upon her adopted child, who did not owe anything to this woman for a body robbed of youth.

But now there was a body, a mother to whom a physical debt was due. And not just any mother, but a Jewish one. The patient was thereby lashed not only to Maria G. but, through her, to an entire tribe, thousands of years of history, familial relationships going back in time—if one believes it—all the way to Avram, who took the name Abraham as he accepted the One God.

Was it wrong of me to abet the patient’s search, to “flesh out”—literally—the reality of Maria G.? It had all happened stepwise, I told myself. The adoptive mother was cold and rejecting. The patient was alone. The therapist could not divert her client from a quest for origins. The patient had fallen victim to the dark, circling birds of depression. And I had to help her; I was the only one who could help her. And now that I had stepped upon the path of information-giver, whetting her appetite, it was more urgent than ever that she receive an answer to the question she had posed above all others: Where did I come from?

I spent the night feverishly assembling another packet. I had to send something—anything, to extemporize until I had the hard information I needed. Fortunately I had already gathered information related to the orphaned children at Belsen. The patient herself was not an orphan. As far as we knew, her mother was very much alive when she had been surrendered. Yet I thought the patient would feel closer to her origins if she saw the photographs of the children at Belsen, and their caregiver, the camp doctor, Hadassah Bimko.

In the summer of 1945, Jewish institutions in Britain tried to move some of Belsen’s children to England, in a humane gesture. Yet Bimko and the rest of the camp leadership ferociously fought this plan. They wanted their children to go to Eretz Yisrael or else stay with their own people in the camp. And they achieved their goal of emigration. In April 1946, about a year after the camp’s liberation, the British issued special certificates for children, and Hadassah Bimko led a hundred of Belsen’s orphans to Palestine.

I thought the patient would be cheered by this story and moved by the example of Hadassah Bimko (the only woman in the camp’s leadership, as far as I could tell). The next morning, Thursday, as soon as the stores opened, I rushed to make xeroxes of the photographs at a copy shop, and then was first in line at the post office with my envelope. I had enclosed a note saying, “From the information you have given us, we do not believe you were orphaned in the Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp. However, we thought you might wish to see what happened to other youngsters who, like yourself, had spent their early days in the camp.”

That would hold the patient for a week, I hoped. Then what relief I felt when she did not begin the next session with questions about her mother. Instead there came a panicked cry about her work.

It’s pandemonium! she said. You’d think the world had come to an end. May Day, May Day! everyone keeps shouting, because the change took place on May 1st, and we feel like we’re going down.

Evidently there had been some change in rules surrounding brokerage trades. If I understood the patient correctly (something that required great concentration on my part, as I had never traded stocks and bonds in all of my life, an inexperience shared with most of the United States population), commissions on securities sales had been a fixed percentage, no matter how large or small the trade. Now, however, the percentages could vary and could be negotiated. I did not see how this mattered so very much, but to the patient and her colleagues the change was “momentous” and “deal-changing” and “a jolt to the industry.”

We will need to recalculate everything, she exclaimed.

But the therapist—damn her!—did not allow the patient to continue talking about this “momentous” change in her client’s working life. All too soon, Dr. Schussler posed the how-are-you-really question. And the patient replied: I got another packet in the mail. About a woman in the camp. Bimko, Hadassah Bimko, a doctor. Of course I wondered, despite myself, if she knew my mother. And if I should try to find this Bimko.

How would you go about it? asked Dr. Schussler.

I’ll write to that nice Colin Masters, she said, to see if he knows anything about where Bimko is.

No! I thought. She could not write to the agency—of course there was no Colin Masters there.

I could no longer wait for replies from the agencies I had contacted; I had to make progress, and quickly. I began making phone calls: to each agency, to different departments in each agency, to different people in the different departments—I would make a pest of myself, I decided, until I found someone with information about the mysterious Maria G.

The days went by. I did not go to the office; I stayed home in my bare, mean cottage with my telephone. My calls became more urgent. Another week passed. I put together some random information for the patient—pictures of the camp schools, youngsters doing calisthenics—any photograph showing a child in Belsen, buying myself further time. My efforts were successful; the patient spoke favorably of the parcels. Yet concurrently with her growing knowledge of the camp there grew in her a surging desire to know the true facts of her origins. She became impatient with the therapist; she was annoyed by her work; she was restless and anxious. She began to question the motives of “that Colin Masters.” Why was he being so helpful? she wondered. What role had he played in my abduction? I was afraid for her, for myself; I kept up my calls.

Then, after two weeks of telephoning and being transferred from extension to extension, I reached a Mr. Linder in the New York offices of the Jewish Agency. It was nine in the morning New York time, and I found him at his desk. I told him I was working on a biography of a woman who had lived for a time in the Bergen-Belsen displaced-persons camp. I knew but a fragment of her name: Maria G. I explained I wished to chronicle her experiences after her release.

Great! he said. Terrific. You professors haven’t done much about what happened to Jews after the war. So what you need to do is send a request letter on university stationery. I think to a Mrs. Knobloch in Tel Aviv. Wait. It’s just about four p.m. in Israel, and she might still be in. It’s no problem to call her—we make calls to Israel at the drop of a hat; we have everyone’s number. If she’s there—or an assistant or a secretary—I’ll found out if she’s the right contact. And I’ll get her address.

A request on university stationery.

I panicked while I waited three long minutes until Mr. Linder came back on the line. Did I have any university stationery with me? Yes, I told myself, yes, I would find it, somewhere in my dreadful cottage, I would find it. But if the stationery is not there! Make a fake letterhead, I told myself. Like the one for the Chicago agency. A print shop: a fake. Better yet, I would say that I had already delivered my formal letter of request—to whom? Whom else had I called? The Immigrant Hebrew Aid Society. Why not? Yes, I’ll say that.

Thus somewhat becalmed by the last resort of deception, I did not fear Mr. Linder’s return to my call.

I talked to Mrs. Knobloch, he said. A meeting ran overtime, so she was there. She’s the right one. I told her what you wanted. And she laughed. Said we should go ahead right away. Said someone must’ve made sure of you, or no one would’ve transferred you all around to get me. I mean me, who you’re talking to.

Of course her surmise was wrong. But there was no need to say that.

Mr. Linder said, Hold on. I’ll transfer you.

In no time at all, a woman’s cheerful voice with a Hebrew accent came on the line. Hello, Professor! she sang out. Please to wait a little. Some papers I must sign now. Please to hold.