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?
100.
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