After the war, Isaac Belasco had received convincing proof of the fate that had befallen Alma’s parents in a Nazi death camp near the town of Treblinka in northeastern Poland. Unlike the Americans elsewhere, the Russians did not document the camp’s liberation, and officially little was known of what had happened in that hell, but the Jewish Agency calculated that 840,000 people had perished there between July 1942 and October 1943, 800,000 of whom were Jews. As for Samuel Mendel, Isaac established that his plane was shot down in the occupied zone of France, and according to the British war records, there were no survivors. By then Alma had heard nothing about her family for several years and assumed they were dead long before her uncle confirmed it. When she was told, Alma did not weep for them, as might have been expected, because during that time she had learned to control her feelings to such an extent she had lost the ability to express them. Isaac and Lillian thought it necessary to bring closure to this tragedy and took Alma with them to Europe. In the French village where Samuel’s plane was shot down, they put up a memorial plaque with his name and the dates of his birth and death. They did not obtain permission to visit Poland, which was then under Soviet control; Alma was to make that pilgrimage many years later. The war had finished four years earlier, but Europe was still in ruins, and huge groups of people were still wandering around in search of a homeland. Alma concluded that her entire lifetime would not be enough to pay for the privilege of being her family’s only survivor.
Shaken by this stranger’s declaration that he was her brother, Samuel, Alma sat up in the car seat and gulped down the coffee and aspirins in three swallows. The man looked nothing like the brother she had seen off at the Danzig quayside, a youth with rosy cheeks and a playful expression. Her real brother was that blurred memory, not this person standing beside her, lean, dry, with hard eyes and a cruel mouth, sunburned skin, and a face lined with deep furrows and a couple of scars.
“How do I know you’re my brother?”
“You don’t. But I wouldn’t be wasting my time with you if I weren’t.”
“Where are my clothes?”