to darkness. It was our task—our imperative!—to think, plan, use our minds (the only strength that remained to us) to fight for the life of our flesh. And—to hell with our ancestors; we will show them; they do not rule us—to thrive! Or, at the very least, remain alive.
105.
The next session confirmed—indeed made me certain—that I had arrived at the truth about the patient’s birth.
The patient had barely settled in when she said to Dr. Schussler: Michal told me I almost didn’t make it.
Make it? asked the therapist.
Almost didn’t get to live.
(Not one of us moved, none drew breath; as if we, too, if not careful, might fail to achieve life.)
I was thin, Michal told me. Lethargic. Cranky. Irritable. In her exact words: I was “delicately devoted to being alive.”
There the patient stopped; and the doctor asked:
And how did you feel when your mother said this?
The patient laughed. That all my emotions now made sense, she said. It’s just as I am now. I’ll never change. I’ll always be stuck in this irritable self, unsoothable and uncomfortable in my skin. I’ll always have a delicate devotion to being alive.
(No! I thought. You must resist this thought. We can, must, overcome the life of the womb.)
The therapist hummed, as if deferring a response.
Michal said I was born in a freezing Kinderbaracke.
Children’s barracks, said the doctor.
Well, of course you’d know the word, said the patient.
Dr. Schussler sighed. She was not about to be drawn into another discussion of her German heritage.
It was the dead of winter, of course, the patient continued. Born in December: a very bad idea if you’re in a displaced-persons camp, in a freezing children’s barracks. With a mother who was glad to be rid of you.
What makes you say that? asked Dr. Schussler.
She told me she had no milk. She had to beg one woman, then another, to nurse me. Beg. Because those other women also had children at risk, if not as delicately devoted to being alive as I was. Wet nurses! Was this some nineteenth-century novel? But Michal claimed—she swore!—my fragile state had nothing to do with why she gave me away.
Again the doctor deferred a response.
She claimed it had to do with that Hadassah Bimko, the camp doctor, the only woman in the Central Committee.
(Now here is indeed the nub of it, I thought.)
According to Michal, it all started with something I’d read about in one of the packets from the Chicago agency. Some British Jewish organization wanted to take Belsen’s orphans to England, where they’d find homes for them with Jewish families. But the camp leadership protested, saying the children would either stay with them or else go to Palestine. As I said, I’d read about it—which surprised Michal. Anyhow, it was considered a big victory when the British caved in and granted emigration visas for the children.
Here. I’ve cued the tape. Where Michal’s reaction startles me.
Shameful! said Michal as the recording began to play. Using those poor children as pawns in their Zionist games! The children would have been much better off in Britain. England was not in great condition after the war, but at least the war was over there, finished. Imagine those children toddling in peaceful English gardens, she said, on the stoops of friendly streets. Now picture them in Palestine, where the Irgun is blowing up British installations, where there is a nasty little war brewing between Jews and Arabs. Why would they take those poor orphans there if not to make a political point? It had nothing to do with the welfare of the children!
So, Michal continued, Bimko travels with a hundred orphans from Belsen, and then she’s given another thousand children who came from God-knows-where in the British zone. And when she gets to Palestine, she is suddenly enraged to find various Zionist organizations interviewing the children, trying to send them to appropriate homes. Bimko wanted them to stay together. But she’d arrived without a plan, and what did she think was going to happen? That the children would be placed in an instant kibbutz?
And there she is, said Michal, that savior, that great leader, taking eleven hundred children into a war zone for the glory of Zionism—or for her personal glory?
Michal paused, then said: It was Bimko’s trip to Palestine that made me decide.
Decide what? asked the patient.
To give you up for adoption.
I don’t understand.
I refused to let you be a pawn in the Zionist cause.
106.
I saw no future for anyone, Michal went on. I had lost