By Blood (19 page)

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
.

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.

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:
 

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.