By Blood (33 page)

Let me show you how far we came in a short time, Michal continued. How quickly we took control of our lives.

Just six months after the British had come upon the thousands of living corpses abandoned in Belsen, the bastards who ran the camp were put on trial in a nearby town called Lüneburg.

The camp’s doctor, Hadassah Bimko, testified before the tribunal, Michal told the patient. Before Belsen, she had been at Auschwitz, and she identified commandants and guards from both camps.

And then Bimko exposed a truth that shocked the world: the existence of the gas chambers in Auschwitz.

This revelation made her famous, said Michal.

Then she laughed.

Also infamous in the dens of the Holocaust deniers. I think one of them called her “The Heroine of the Holocaust.”

Then, six days later, Michal went on, just six days after the commandants and guards had faced their fate, the First Congress of the She’erit Hapletah took place in Belsen, the First Congress of the surviving remnant. Remnant. You must think what this means to a people. Torn. All that is left.

At this congress, we elected a government—our own government—to lead the camp.

I remember the closing day exactly. I was sitting in the last row. Just as the meeting was getting started, Bimko came in late, shaking hands while she made her slow progress to the auditorium stage.

Let me describe her, said Michal. She was “stout” and “plump,” as the newspapers described her, which was true; she was a stub of a woman. Which did her no good when she was cross-examined by the attorney for the defense at the Lüneburg trials, whom the British had appointed.

Michal laughed.

The story of what happened at the trial went around the camp. In her testimony, Bimko described the deprivations of the prisoners in Auschwitz and Belsen. Then the defense lawyer asked: And were you subject to these deprivations, Dr. Bimko? Were you emaciated at the time of liberation?

Since it was impossible not to notice that Bimko was not at all thin, not at all recovering from emaciation, the underlying point was to question whether she was a victim or a member of the camp staff. She had worked under the evil Josef Mengele. She was well fed and healthy. What was she, victim or perpetrator?

I always knew I was a prisoner, Dr. Bimko replied.

We came to the end of the congress, said Michal. We held elections for the heads of the various committees. Hadassah Bimko became the official head of the Health Committee. Of course Rosensaft was chosen to be the leader of the Central Committee, Wollheim to be his second.

Rosensaft gave the closing speech: We are now entering an era when we must fight for our rights, he said. We have been slaves, but now we are free. May we be blessed to convene our next congress in Eretz Yisrael.

The newly elected leaders shook hands with one another. Rosensaft embraced Bimko. Everyone rose for the singing of “Hatikvah.”

Michal was silent for some seconds—moved by the memory of the moment?

Then she said:

I stood up. Dizzy, sweaty. I was six months pregnant. My belly getting big. I nearly tumbled over.

Because of me inside you, said the patient, neither asking nor asserting.

Michal said nothing for two or three seconds, then answered in a bright voice, Yes, my dear daughter. You were there! You were at the very first Congress of the She’erit Hapletah!

Michal’s voice was too bright. And the patient knew it.

I’m what changed things for you, aren’t I? Your being pregnant with me.

No! How can you say that?

You were dizzy and sweaty and about to faint—

I did not say faint.

All right. Fall over.

No, no, no.

Now you have to tell me so I believe you. How did you go from your “almost happy time” in the camp—that great Zionist creation—to giving me away so I wouldn’t be a Jew? How?

As I told you, it was a time of extremes. Changes. Quick turns. Reverses.

That’s not an answer.

Michal hummed through a pause, took a breath.

Yes. Not an answer. Yes, I suppose I must go on and tell you, all of it. This will be difficult, for you as well as for me. But yes, having begun, I must go on to the end.

Get to the part where you give me away, said the patient. Don’t click your tongue at me, Michal. That’s what you did: You gave me away.

Listen, my dear. If you remain so angry, you will stand in the way of the story. I will run through quickly, and you will never understand what happened.

All right.

You must reserve judgment.

All right.

All right, said Michal. Now …

I can only say that the change came slowly. Over months. Creeping up until I looked around one day and said to myself: I must leave this place.

There must have been arguments from the beginning, differences over the sort of aid we needed. Of course there were differences. These went on quietly. The general mood was one of cooperation.

But—sometime soon after Rosensaft was elected to lead the Central Committee—sometime around then, the arguments broke out into the open. Battles between ideologies: Should we go back and rebuild our communities? Refuse to have our European home taken away from us? To which the Zionists replied: Home! There is no home for us in Europe. Europe is a grave. Our only home is in Eretz Yisrael!

And then came the fiercest of battles: for control over the aid flowing into the camp. Which was growing daily into a great pile of money and goods.

She laughed. Greed. Greed on all sides. Like everyone and everywhere. Greed for money and greed for power.

The rabbis wanted funds dedicated to religious purposes, she went on. Improving the rooms and buildings used as
Schulen
—synagogues. Also more money for religious instruction, Torah studies, not just the teaching of Hebrew as an everyday language, but the ancient Hebrew of the Torah. They wanted scholars to be paid for their studies, as other leaders received subsistence living allowances. Newer Torahs in better condition, which, it turns out, are very expensive. And then there were the ritual baths for women.

Ritual baths? asked the patient.

Yes. You see, we bleed with our periods, and religious Jews consider us to be dirty—all that blood—which has to be “cleansed” afterward, to make us “pure” again.

Do not laugh, Michal said to the patient. This is true.

And the faction against the rabbis? asked the patient.

Rosensaft, Wollheim, the Central Committee. They did not care to spend funds on religious objects, beyond what was necessary for services. The idea of paying men to pray and study, while we were freezing and hungry, seemed ridiculous. They wanted shoes, clothes, food, fuel.

She laughed.

It was good they won. I was pregnant and undernourished. It was a cold, cold winter. You were born in the middle of it. Without the fuel and the warm clothes and the food, it is not certain you could have survived.

The patient breathed in and out, but said nothing.

But over time …

Over time?

Michal sucked in a breath.

I think it was the coffee and cigarettes that made everything fall apart.

Rosensaft pressed for larger and larger donations of cigarettes and coffee. Again, it was good in the beginning. They were used for barter in the canteens and everywhere else, between the people inside. Coins of the realm, as I told you. Trade.

But then the amounts coming in doubled, tripled. A black market sprang up. Of course, what could anyone expect? You lock up a bunch of people, give them no means of earning a real livelihood, pour into the camp the sorts of things the good Germans around it haven’t seen in years—coffee, a Nazi-loving farmer would swear undying love for any Jew who could get him real coffee—and what do you think will happen?

There were police raids, to stop the black marketeering. In no time, the trade would come back, as if nothing had happened to stop it.

Rosensaft was the driving force behind this. I cannot prove it. But I believe he was. I also believed—still believe—that the underlying push came from Bimko. Hadassah and Yossele took up together. They got married eventually. And I think she poisoned Rosensaft. He was—had been—truly a man of the people. He came from a poor family. Survived on his wits and force of character.

But she, on the other hand, came from a rich family, something to do with gold, gold dealers, I think. And when Rosensaft took up with her, he was somehow corrupted. They got rich in the coffee and cigarette trade—that was generally believed. So where did she get all those cigarettes? She was lighting one cigarette from the tip of another while other people had to save up six packs for a pair of five-time recobbled shoes. Bimko. That stinking, chain-smoking little troll.

I do not have the facts, said Michal. I cannot tell you for a fact that Rosensaft and Bimko got rich off purloined coffee rations. All I know is the result. They eventually moved out of the camp into an apartment. And when the camp was closed, did they go to Eretz Yisrael? Did they join all the orphans Hadassah led into Palestine like some Moses? Did they go to the place to which we all had been urged to go, as our duty, our only hope, our God-given destiny? The place they had battled the world to create? Oh, no, no, no. The big Zionists moved to Switzerland.
Schweiz!
That pretty,
neutral
country with placid lakes and snowy mountains. They lived in Montreaux, on Lake Geneva. What a nice life! They also had a house in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera, the
Riviera dei Fiori
. And for a while in New York, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, where your precious Renoirs and Gauguins hung on the walls.

All this I learned later from a Bergen-Belsen survivors’ group. The members remained in communication and knew where many of the internees had gone, particularly the leadership.

Even then, while still in Belsen, I did not see a future in the camp. Belsen was quickly becoming a place of rich and poor, the well-connected and everyone else.

In the end, it was a scandal. Of all the camp leaders, only one, Rafael Olevsky, the cofounder of the newspaper, settled in Israel. All the others made easier lives for themselves. Wollheim went to America and became an accountant—an accountant! Trepman went to Canada. Laufer went to Canada. Rosenthal to Philadelphia. Oh, they all sent money to Israel. They all felt “deeply connected” to Israel. Ha! One of the Orthodox rabbis even had his dead body shipped here from Europe, so he would have his final rest in Israel. But did they live in the place they were demanding for all the rest of us? Did they settle here? Take up the hard life of building Israel? What brave pioneers!

She spat.

It was becoming clear that the leadership was doing far better than everyone else, she said. There were grumblings. About Rosensaft. Accusations that Rosensaft and his cronies controlled the coffee market. I cannot say if it was true one way or another, but where did he get the money to rent an apartment in Celle while we were all behind barbed wire?

And there were complaints about Rosensaft’s near-dictatorial powers. No one questioned his motives. It was the concentration of his authority that was at issue. His insistence that all aid be funneled through the Central Committee, which he ruled. That all major political decisions be approved by the Central Committee, which he commanded. That the organization of the camp itself be under the control of the Central Committee, of which he was the undisputed king.

Her voice was suddenly bitter.

Behind his back, she said, people called him Little Stalin.

Stalin! I thought as the session came to an end. How quickly did Rosensaft, who had dazzled and fascinated the young Miriam, become Stalin!

Something was wrong. Michal’s bitterness, her cold cynicism, was too strong to be caused by mere politics. But what lay behind it? The patient did not press her mother. And, in the next series of sessions, Dr. Schussler did not intervene to discuss the question.

To make matters worse, Michal’s narrative at this point became oddly disjointed, proceeding by theme, not by chronology. It would have been no matter if she were relaying only a brief portion of the story. But she was portraying eight months of her internment in Belsen: three months from the First Congress in late September 1945 (the establishment of Rosensaft’s power, Michal had said), to the patient’s birth in December. And then another five months until Michal left Belsen in May 1946.

Michal told and retold the events of this period, going over and over the time that followed “the almost happy days.” But the story came in lightning strikes, a phrase here, a paragraph here, wild spikes in random order. Rabbis were “fat, bearded, crabby old men.” Wollheim, whom she had described as aristocratic and learned, became “Rosensaft’s poodle.” The joint leadership of Rosensaft and Wollheim was “autocratic,” “unscrupulous,” “tyrannical,” “self-serving.” She laughed and jeered, spat and snorted and clicked her tongue. Something more than camp politics had to be behind this bitter, bitter mood.

And what emotional swordplay was responsible for the most drastic change in Michal’s characterizations: the transformation reserved for the doctor? Hadassah Bimko, who began as the ministering angel saving the camp from typhus, became the heartless rich girl, Rosensaft’s corruptor. Finally to become “that stinking, chain-smoking little troll.”

Why did Dr. Schussler not probe her client? How could she not notice the fundamental change in Michal Gershon’s narrative? Two weeks went by, and I awaited her entry into the therapeutic conversation, to no avail. And it came to me that she had not said anything of consequence for some time. Had the doctor fallen victim to the sweep of Michal’s narrative? Was her guilt preventing her from intervening? There was no telling, as I heard none of the usual indications of boredom, no creaking leather as Dr. Schussler shifted about her seat, no slishing stockings as she crossed and recrossed her legs. She simply maintained her silence for reasons I could not divine.

As a consequence, a powerful need developed within me: I had to hear her voice once again. The shushing Ss and spat-out Ts that had first intruded upon my consciousness; that had first informed me of the doctor’s existence—that had lured me into my relationship with the patient!—I must hear them again. Yet the therapist persisted in her all-too-brief ritual phrases, good morning, good afternoon, as-we-were-saying-last-week, our time is up.

Come back to me, Dora Schussler, I thought. But the silence wore on; and the longer the doctor remained mute, the more her passivity seemed hostile, a willful withdrawing from me. For she had turned me into her creature, a sort of patient. Not one of my many therapeutic practitioners had ever cured me of a bout of obsession, yet Dr. Schussler had accomplished just that. I had come to trust her, need her—she had engendered in me this trust, this need—and now where was she?