“We learned English bit by bit, the way children do, and really, we forgot our German. After a time, maybe it was nine months or even a year, they started finding homes for us, people wanting to adopt us. They decided we were mentally recovered enough that we could stand the pain of losing one another, although how can you ever stand that pain? The loss of my special playmate, my Miriam, it haunts my dreams to this day.”
His voice broke. He used the napkin Don had put under the water glass to blow his nose. “One day this man arrived. He was large and coarse-faced and said he was my father and I should go with him. He wouldn’t even let me kiss my little Miriam good-bye. Kissing was weibisch—a sissy thing—and I must be a man now. He shouted to me in German and was furious that I didn’t speak German anymore. Over and over as I was growing up he would beat me, telling me he was making a man out of me, beating the Schwule und Weiblichkeit out of me.”
He was crying freely, in obvious distress. I handed him the glass of water.
“That must have been very horrible,” Max said gravely. “When did your father die?”
He didn’t seem to notice Max’s sudden appearance in the conversation. “You mean, I presume, the man who is not my father. I don’t know when my birth father died. That is what I am hoping you can tell me. Or perhaps Carl Tisov.”
He blew his nose again and stared at us defiantly. “The man who stole me from my campmates died seven years ago. It was after that when I started having nightmares and became depressed and disoriented. I lost my job, I lost my bearings, my nightmares became more and more explicit. I tried various remedies, but—always I was being drawn to these unspeakable images of the past, images I have come to recognize as my experience of the Shoah. Not until I started working with Rhea did I understand them for what they were. I think I saw my mother being raped and pushed alive into a pit of lime, but of course it could have been some other woman, I was so little I can’t even recall my mother’s face.”
“Did your foster father tell you what became of—well, his wife?” Morrell put in.
“He said the woman he called my mother had died when the Allies bombed Vienna. That we had lived in Vienna and lost everything because of the Jews, he was always very bitter about the Jews.”
“Do you have any idea why he tracked you down in England? Or how he knew you were there?” I was struggling to make sense of his narrative.
He spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “After the war—everything was so unsettled. Anything was possible. I think he wanted to come to America, and claiming he was a Jew, which he could do if he had a Jewish child in hand, that would put him at the head of the queue. Especially if he had a Nazi past he wanted to conceal.”
“And you think he did?” Max asked.
“I know so. I know so from his papers, that he was a vile piece of drek. A leader of the Einsatzgruppen.”
“What a horrible thing to uncover,” Don murmured. “To be a Jew and find you’ve grown up with the worst of the murderers of your people. No wonder he treated you the way he did.”
Paul looked at him eagerly. “Oh, you do understand! I’m sure that his bestial behavior—the way he would beat me, deprive me of food when he was angry, lock me in a closet for hours, sometimes overnight—all that came from his terrible anti-Semitism. You are a Jew, Mr. Loewenthal, you understand how ugly someone like that can be.”
Max sidestepped the remark. “Ms. Warshawski says that you found a document in your—foster father’s—papers that gave you the clue to your real name. I’m curious about that. Would you let me see it?”
Ulrich-Radbuka took his time to answer. “When you tell me which one of you is related to me, then perhaps I will let you see the papers. But since you will not help me, I see no reason why I should show you my private documents.”
“Neither Mr. Tisov nor I is connected to the Radbuka family,” Max said. “Please try to accept that. It is a different friend of ours who knew a family with your name, but I know as much as that person does about the Radbuka family—which I’m sorry to say isn’t a great deal. If you could let me see these documents, it would help me decide if you are part of the same family.”
When Radbuka refused in a panicky voice, I intervened to ask if he had any idea where his birth parents came from. Apparently taking the question as agreement to his Radbuka identity, Paul recounted what he knew with a return of his childlike eagerness.
“I know nothing whatsoever about my birth parents. Some of our six musketeers knew more, although that can be painful, too. My little Miriam, for instance, poor soul, she knew her mother had gone mad and died in the mental hospital at Terezin. But now—Max, you say you know the details of my family life. Who of the Radbukas would be in Berlin in 1942?”
“No one,” Max said with finality. “No brothers, nor parents. I can assure you of that. This is a family which emigrated to Vienna in the years before the First World War. In 1941 they were sent to Lodz, in Poland. The ones who were still alive in 1943 were sent on to the camp where they all perished.”
Paul Ulrich-Radbuka’s face lit up. “But perhaps I was born in Lodz.”