By Blood (32 page)

Neither mother nor daughter spoke for several seconds. The tape whined and hissed. Finally the patient said:

But now I am really confused.

Yes? replied Michal.

Confused by what you just told me. You suddenly found—
joy
, I suppose is the right word. Joy in being part of the group. In being one of them. A Jew. So why wouldn’t you want that for me?

Michal laughed softly but said nothing.

The singing of “Hatikvah,” said the patient, it happened right after Liberation, in April. And I was born in late December. By then, you didn’t want me to be a Jew. That’s why you gave me away, you said, so I would not be a Jew. So how did this change, then change back, so quickly? All within eight months, eight and a half months.

The situation changed, said Michal. Everything changes.

But so quickly.

Yes. Quickly. It was a time of extremes. Anything could change into anything in a moment.

At that, the session came to an end.

Monday night found me sitting restlessly in the dark, reading by flashlight. The sessions were ticking away. The possible loss of my office loomed over me like the blinking pink neon sign of the Hotel Palace.

I had arrived at the office early, at six in the evening. Dr. Schussler had left for her dinner break. When suddenly there came a sharp rap on the door.

Saw you come in! yelled out the voice I had hoped never to hear again.

Let us in! went on the man who had represented himself to me as the manager.

Us
? I wondered.
Who else was with him
?

The sharp rapping came again.

Hey, fella! Let us in.

I thought, What chance did I have? I opened the door.

Reading in the dark again? said the little man with the bulging eyes and wild eyebrows and twisted-down mouth.

Behind him were two men in overalls.

They need to measure the space, said the manager person.
And
, he said with emphasis, they will need to turn on the lights.

At that, his hand flew to the wall plate.

The overhead fluorescent bulbs winked to life—let Dr. Schussler not be in the street now! I prayed; let her not look up!—and the two workmen shunted me to one side of the room then another as they stretched out their metal tapes and called out the numbers to the manager, who recorded them in a spiral-bound notebook no larger than his hammy palm.

Now move over there, said one workman as he pushed me to the wall behind the door, which was fortunate—provident! I might say—for not two seconds later came the limping tread of Dr. Schussler.

She stopped at the opened door.

Is that office to be leased? she asked, looking into the room.

I pressed myself against the wall. Could I hide in this narrow V behind the door?
Please do not see me!
I cried out in my mind.

Then a second fear rose up behind the first:
Mr. Manager! Please do not say that the room is already leased!

It seemed he said nothing for minutes—hours! Had he not heard her?

I hung in time, a dead man.

Then the manager’s brusque voice said: Huh? What’s that?

And Dr. Schussler replied: I said, is the room to be leased?

He coughed—another delay!—and finally said, The engineers in 805 are thinking of expanding into here. I think they’re going to use it for their copy equipment.

(
Thinking of it!
Then it is not settled, I dared to hope.)

Said Dr. Schussler: You mean I will have to hear the thump and clack of Xerox machines all day? Not to mention the smell.

Well, if it becomes a problem, said the manager, we can always move you, find you a more accommodating space. Nothing available right now. I’ll let you know if something suitable opens.

(
Even Dr. Schussler might move!
I thought. Everyone moving. Everything fluid. What kind of place is this?)

Well, replied the doctor, I certainly hope not to move. It disorients the patients. And then there is the problem of one’s preprinted stationery and all.

Oh, there might be a room on this floor, said the manager. You never know. And if there is, you can take your number 804 with you.

The doctor said nothing, only gave a sort of
humph
, and took the two steps to her own door.

The workmen lashed in their measuring tapes and left. Then the manager said to me, I’ll let you know, fella.

My legs were trembling. My mind, however, kept clear its workings. If I said nothing in reply, I thought, only nodded, Dr. Schussler could believe one of the workmen was still in the room, might believe the manager was talking to one of his men. So I therefore stepped out from my little enclosure behind the door, raised my chin to acknowledge him, and turned out the lights as he left the room.

I was still safe, I told myself. For now. She still did not know I was there.

But a sword hung over us, I knew.

The patient remained skeptical about her mother’s sudden embrace of Judaism, and the rejection that had followed just as suddenly. Yet Michal persuaded her daughter to suspend disbelief, as it were, until she could continue her story. And the patient complied.

Michal then moved quickly through the early days of Belsen’s establishment as a D.P. camp (which speed gave me some hope that I might yet hear the end before losing my beloved Room 807). Within several weeks of Michal’s arrival in Belsen, British soldiers marched the survivors up the road to what had been a Panzer training school. Clean and deloused, she emphasized. Then the army burned down the original camp.

The British goal was to “get out of the D.P. business,” as Michal described it in American slang. They wanted everyone to be repatriated as quickly as possible.

But as for me, said Michal to her daughter, where was “home”? Germany? Was I going to knock on the door of my former father-in-law? The door of Albrecht’s cousins who had hated me? They would throw me into the street.

The life I had led in Berlin had been demolished. So what was I? A person without an identity, someone with a made-up name. Stateless. I was exactly where I was supposed to be: in a displaced-persons camp. I had no choice but to accept the fact that the next turn of my life would take place in Bergen-Belsen.

The tape rolled on through a period of silence before Michal finally said:

One day shortly after I was settled in the new camp, I was summoned by a British soldier. Two soldiers, she corrected herself. They walked me to a building they called the Round House. It was in a wooded area, on a rise by a small lake, lovely, mid-morning of an exquisite spring day, of the sort you never forget: the aroma of the greening earth, the scent of blooming hyacinths like a drug.

The building rose before me like a vision from a former time—my life in Berlin—an imposing structure with rounded wings at each end. We walked up a porticoed entryway, across a wide foyer, the wood floor creaking and echoing, finally to a room of palatial proportions. And for a moment my knees went weak. One young soldier accompanying me—he had a pencil mustache and deep-set eyes, very sympathetic—had to hold me up, because a sudden hallucination had come over me: I believed I was walking into the ballroom of our grand house in Berlin.

Then I saw a desk and three side tables. Four seated officers. Three or four more junior soldiers. A ledger, papers, pens. Light dancing in the shine of the wooden floor. Dancing exactly as dancers do, swaying, and swirling, so that for a moment the hallucination of the house and the ballroom returned. I think it must have been the effect of near starvation—thin soup, a little bread, was all we had to eat—inducing moments like this one, when I did not know who I was, where I was, what I was doing there.

Someone spoke. The question to be addressed, he said, is your status: Are you an enemy collaborator or a victim of the Nazis?

This question gathered up my senses, focused my attention, dissolved the vision of the dancers. And immediately I answered, Victim! I was in a labor camp, arrived on one of the last transports, was dumped into Belsen three days before liberation, taken by a Hungarian guard, raped.

Raped: Once more I should not have said the word. Again a man circled me. Once more a man eyed me, evaluated me, looked me over from my head all the way down—no, this man stopped at my ass, much diminished in appeal by that time. I was skinny, wan, my hair like dead grass. Huh.

She paused.

It occurs to me just now—now as you sit before me—that I was already carrying you—

Me.

—was pregnant by then. Not yet started on special rations, so—

Me, repeated the patient.

Yes. You. A tiny ball of starving cells inside me as I stood there, thin and tired and frightened, barely able to nourish myself, let alone you, as this British officer circled me and circled me. And discussed me, and questioned me. And eventually decided: Victim. I must have been a victim.

The patient, having heard the first mention of her earthly existence, seemed to grow more relaxed. During long stretches in the narrative, she allowed Michal to go on without interruption. In fact, we barely heard the patient’s voice on the tapes during the next two sessions.

And Michal seemed to be more relaxed as well.

Now, she said, we come to the almost happy time of my internment in Belsen.

I was young, she said, dazzled by the camp leaders, fascinated by their audacity, their ferocious determination to take control of their own lives. The best, the strongest among them, was Yossele Rosensaft—see, my dear? Now he truly enters the story. And not far behind Rosensaft in resolution was his second-in-command, Norbert Wollheim—a cultured Berliner like myself. They and their followers opened schools and kindergartens; organized the hospital; set up a commissary; formed a theater company, writing and acting in their own plays, giving performances of cabaret—cabaret in that place!

Above all, the camp leaders demanded that Jews be recognized as a group, which the British had refused to do.

Internees had been housed by nationality, said Michal, meaning Polish Jews were locked up with Poles, who were more Jew-hating than even the Germans. Or maybe they just lacked “German discipline,” unable to control what came out of their mouths.

The good Brits had thrown me into a barracks with German women, said Michal, half of them non-Jews. These women had been sent to Belsen by the Nazis because of “suspicious political activities.” But somehow they still believed they were part of the master race. One night I woke up and walked around the barracks, not able to get back to sleep. And this—all right, you know the word—this bitch starts muttering under her breath, I thought Hitler got rid of all of you.

The leaders organized, marched, made demands, and soon released us from this humiliation. Jews came to live with Jews. And the leadership fought and won the battle to get aid from Jewish agencies into the camp. We were no longer beggars at the feet of the British; we took care of one another.

Again Michal thought, who
are
these people? What sustains them?

Most of them were Polish Zionists, she learned, young people who, before Hitler, had spent their summer-camp days learning Hebrew, marching in the forests with wooden rifles, training to be soldiers who would fight for a Jewish state.

Maria (as she was still named) moved into a barracks with ten other Jewish women of various ages. They cleaned and scrubbed; found bits of cloth, made curtains; picked wildflowers that grew at the foot of the fence that imprisoned them and brought them indoors to cheer themselves. Maria was popular. Because of her language skills, and relative health and energy, she was elected to be assistant block captain, which meant she went about the camp wearing a little blue-and-white armlet with the Yiddish words
Segan Hablock
. She attended committee meetings; helped distribute clothing and shoes; painted scenery for the Yiddish theater.

Gradually, she became integrated into the life of the camp, while the camp itself began to take on the characteristics of a town. There was a main plaza, called Liberty Square, with a loudspeaker giving news and information in Yiddish. The Jews formed their own police force, to counteract the bullying of the Polish police that had ruled the camp. Couples married; groups formed themselves into
kibbutzim
and gave parties. Along the streets, small stores, called “canteens,” were set up in an ad hoc fashion, offering shoe repairs, haircuts, cleaning, tailoring. Business was done on the barter system: Individuals traded the rations they received from aid agencies for goods and services. The gold coins of the realm were coffee and cigarettes.

This will sound very strange to you, Michal said to her daughter. There I was an internee. But somewhere around the fourth or fifth month in the camp, it came to me that I had somehow healed a bit, healed from … all that.

You felt better because …

Because for the first time in my memory, even going back to when I was fifteen—for the first time, my life was under my own volition, my own direction. I wanted to join in these activities. I wanted to contribute. I wanted to be one of those brave, strong people who had snatched life from the Nazi hell.

There was a Yiddish newspaper, said Michal. I do not know how they did it. Found paper. Mimeographed the pages. People rushed up to grab a copy, overcome at the sight of this newspaper that seemed to have materialized out of nothing.

One day I found myself standing before Rafael Olevsky, said Michal, one of the founders of the newspaper, saying to him, Please. Teach me Yiddish. Teach me to read and write Yiddish.

What is your name? Olevsky asked me.

And I was embarrassed to answer. What was a Maria doing there in the camp? He would never teach such a Maria.

Miriam, I answered him. Miriam Gerstner.

(Joy! My trail of names had come true. Maria to Miriam, as told by Michal.)

And that was it? asked the patient. Nothing more formal? No papers? No ceremony?

Michal laughed. Do you think I should have applied to the magistrate in Celle? Asked the Germans to allow me to be a Jew?