Deadly Pedigree

19



Nick held in his hands–trembling from excitement–a mass of photocopied evidence proving that Zola was indeed of the Balazar family, but the daughter of concentration-camp survivors. They had been part of Hyam’s collateral line–from an uncle who never emigrated–and thus distant cousins of Natalie Armiger. Had been, because Natalie Armiger let them die. She had refused to sponsor them in their petition to immigrate to America, in those years of anguish, confusion, and desperation after the WWII.

Nick wondered how Corban had come to possess the documents he found in the thick envelope. There were communications from resettlement and repatriation groups Nick had never heard of, along with the expected ones. The story these copied documents told was vivid and moving. Nick came to understand the motives of the broken old man a little better, too. It wasn’t merely his stock-market losses that had driven him to confront Armiger, though that might have pushed him over the edge: with a single-minded determination and bravery, he was one man fighting an immortal dragon. Nick thought of his own moral waffling and felt a new pang of self-revulsion.

While Zola slept peacefully in the dim light of his desk lamp, he sat down, stuggled to stop his inebriated head from spinning, and pondered the material Corban had died to transmit.



Among the millions of displaced persons throughout Europe in 1946, there were three sick, emaciated young Jews, standing together in a line for food at a refugee camp in Germany. Max Corban, meet Maurice and Erna Balazar. Teenagers, who had seen things adults shouldn’t. All three were from the southwestern part of the country, Maurice and Erna having lived near Baden-Baden. Maurice and Erna had just been married.

Nick learned that Maurice Balazar was descended from Hyam’s uncle, who had remained in Europe; a copy of Maurice’s Nazi-issued ahnenpass proved the link.

That love should survive in a human being after that descent into Hell; that, before their bodies and minds had begun to heal, before their thoughts could readily go beyond the next bowl of gruel, these shaved skeletons held hands and were able to love–strange and wonderful!

What a paradoxical species we human beings are, Nick thought: capable of such intense cruelty and such beauty of spirit.

The three refugees became close friends as they slowly recovered their health, more or less, and got a modicum of sanity back. Their bewilderment and grief began to give way to an awareness of their new freedom–and their new dilemma. Should they go to their old homes? Or to Israel, where there was renewed talk of statehood and where they could expect welcoming arms but perhaps no greater stability and safety? Or to the United States, always the beacon of freedom and opportunity? Where? How?

Corban had wanted Nick to know everything, and he’d included personal letters to flesh out the story. Nick felt closer to the old man than ever, as he read far into the morning.

Maurice and Erna missed the ancient towns and the mountains, but, following the lead of the rough-and-ready Corban, they decided to try for sponsorship from relatives they vaguely knew of from family legend, a branch of the Balazar family in New Orleans.

Corban had long before made up his mind; he’d lined up firm support from relatives in New Jersey. Alone, he must have been willing to wait for his friends, but soon he met and married a young woman, and their future called as the months passed and their own cases inched along through the labyrinthine process of getting into the United States. Corban and his bride were transferred to another refugee camp and eventually they made it to the promised land of America; they had their own lives to worry about and were unaware of the growing troubles for the Balazars.

Almost every family brags about a relation who’s made it big, no matter how distant. At first, the Balazars had only a rough approximation of their American relatives’ surname from garbled stories passed down through the generations of Maurice’s family. The ultimate discovery of the prominent and wealthy Armigers of the swanky Garden District of New Orleans must have made Maurice Balazar proud and hopeful.

But the problems for Maurice and Erna multiplied after the Corbans left: the New Orleans family would have nothing to do with them. The State Department and the Review Committees turned down four subsequent willing sponsors in other parts of America; the Board of Appeals reinstated one. The red tape got worse and worse.

According to the documents, the Balazars would endure a succession of displaced-persons camps until late 1951, when they finally returned to their war-damaged town. They entered a protracted legal battle to reclaim Maurice’s family house and property, which had been taken over by Christian neighbors who naturally thought–and seem to have hoped–that the Balazars had gone up in smoke in the concentration camps. A daughter was born in 1958, the same year someone threw a grenade into Maurice and Erna’s rented room, killing them. The daughter miraculously survived the blast. Zola, that daughter, became a ward of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. And things began moving much faster.

There were urgent requests from a New Orleans couple, Jock and Natalie Armiger, to adopt the child. The agency put up a fight, claiming they had refused to shelter the family in the first place. Several angry letters were exchanged. Finally, Armiger found the right price, as she had done with Nick and her other pawns. Had she bought off the right senator or representative? Whatever the reason, with her power and wealth she was able to cut through the deliberate visa and immigration difficulties the State Department and Congress had erected to keep Jewish refugees out of the America–before, during, and after the war. Had she only done so while Maurice and Erna still lived! The adoption was accomplished after just a few more weeks of further wrangling.

Awhile back, Nick had “borrowed” from Freret’s Hichborn Library The Abandonment of the Jews, by David Wyman. Quietly, he checked that book now, to make sure Corban’s material seemed genuine. It did.

Nick finally understood what was really driving Natalie Armiger. She had chosen him to tidy up the local past because these records of her European cousins were beyond even her reach. She couldn’t waltz into the State Department, the Red Cross, the U.N., and the Jewish and Christian refugee agencies, to scissor the existence of three people–Maurice, Erna, and Zola Balazar. Three people who, having emerged phoenix-like from the most horrendous conflagration of human history, were now part of probably the most exhaustively documented group in human history. Armiger could do nothing directly about this damning evidence.

Yes, it was indeed damning. Nick read nothing that implicated her in the deadly grenade attack; but her refusal to be one of the required two sponsors for Maurice and Erna branded her as complicit in their deaths. How would Zola react to that? Any parent who loved her child would fear such knowledge; and the Natalie Armiger Nick knew would do anything–anything–to stop her from finding out.

Armiger dealt in the possible. As an entrepreneur of extraordinary abilities, she was good at expending the least amount of energy to resolve a problem. Thus Nick’s little scavenger hunt; and probably a similar one on the part of the unfortunate Polish librarian whose life ended in the brackish water of Lake Pontchartrain. No troop of private investigators, no team of hotshot lawyers; way too public. But if an opportunity arose to collect the governmental and agency evidence she lacked, quietly and anonymously, like a cat removing the choice morsels from the garbage at midnight, she would take it.

Armiger was destroying her Balazar past, brushing over the tracks of history so that no one–especially Zola–could accuse her of consigning her own flesh and blood to a tragic death. Everything else was secondary. With a chill Nick recalled what she had said about survival.

When the paradigm shifted, as it did when Corban threatened her with something she couldn’t buy or steal, calling into question the authenticity of her role as beloved mother of beloved daughter, her response was commensurately more drastic.

Which explained to Nick why he was alive, and why Corban and the Polish librarian weren’t.

Natalie Armiger could only be pushed so far, before she pushed back, hard.



The next morning, Zola had left by the time he woke. She too must have had a terrific hangover, but society girl that she was, even in her extreme discomfort she hadn’t forgotten the de rigueur thank-you note. Her “Had a great time. Let’s get together again soon. Thanks,” written on the back of her business card, was very shaky.

After a breakfast of three-day-old McKenzie’s donuts and four cups of scalding coffee, Nick threw on some clothes, and, following Corban’s example, mailed the Zola papers to his P.O. box.





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