it.
Mrs. Knobloch, I said to her, I very much appreciate the scrupulousness of your reply. But I do believe—
You want to believe?
Yes. I do believe I am very close to finding the woman I am seeking.
She laughed. Who am I to tell you what to believe?
59.
Stung by Mrs. Knobloch’s sarcasm, I returned to the libraries, as I am always pleased to do, there to find several authoritative histories of German Jews during the Holocaust. I learned there was an order (if one may use the word “order” in this context), a sequence the Nazis followed in their attempt to eradicate European Jewry.
Jews outside of Germany were taken as those nations were conquered. But the murder of the German Jews was done in stages, a “slowly closing noose,” as one source said. There were some suggestions that Hitler delayed taking German Jews en masse to avoid horrifying his own citizens—who preferred order and rules: Ordnung. Therefore he took his own Jews step by step, to spare the “sensibilities” of “good Germans.”
Within Germany, the Nazis established a perverse hierarchy of Jewish “privilege.” The least privileged, those taken first, were Jews who had come into Germany fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe—Ostjuden, as they were called. The sensitive German citizens saw them as a sort of insect invasion; therefore any horrors visited upon them were not disorder, in their eyes, but a pest extermination.
Taken later, over a year or more, were German Jews who were “useful” to the Nazis: those working in defense industries, in labor camps.
Going up the line of privilege were Jews who were married to so-called Aryans.
Rounded up last were those German Jews, primarily women, who were married to good Germans, had converted to Christianity, and assumed their husbands’ Christian names. But in the end, marriage or conversion or name-change meant nothing. They, too, were taken.
I was about to shelve the last volume I had consulted—its proper place right before me—when a series of thoughts rushed into my mind, thoughts as orderly as a logic proof.
First, Maria G. surrendered her child in Belsen, in Germany.
Let us therefore assume she was a German Jew.
Then, I asked myself, which of the German Jewish women were most likely to have survived the Holocaust and found their way to D.P. camps?
Those taken last.
German Jewish women Christian converts married to “Aryans.”
And a calm certainty washed over me. I had found her.
Maria G.
She was no Polish Catholic going home to Poland. She was Jewish, she had married a German, converted, and changed her name.
The name: The name was the clue! I read further and learned that many survivors in the camps took back their Jewish names. And it was just as Mrs. Knobloch had said. Miriam: a common name for Jewish women. Gerstner: a good last name for a German Jew.
The clues fell into alignment. My deductions had brought me to a firm conclusion:
A converted Jew named Maria G. comes into the camp then takes back her Jewish name—which is exactly why Maria G. disappears.
She reappears as Miriam Gerstner.
Next clue: Miriam Gerstner left Belsen the day after the surrender of my dear patient. This could not be a mere coincidence.
And I was sure: Miriam Gerstner and Maria G. were one and the same.
She was the mother. I had found her.
Then, in just a tiny slice of time, my hopes evaporated. I thought: Wait. Wait. There is no record of Miriam Gerstner ever having been in Palestine, later Israel, or anywhere else, for that matter. The evidence trail goes cold. Mrs. Knobloch’s words returned: dead end.
Defeated—I felt the past had defeated me. History refused to yield its secrets. Oh, I cannot help her, I thought, I cannot help my dear patient find her mother. “Colin Masters” must give off writing to her; Dr. Schussler would have to manage the wreckage.
But then, against my lifelong habit of racing to the bottom reaches of pessimism (my love for the patient propelling me up and forward), I forced mysef to persevere. Go on, I thought. There is one last M.G.
Gershon, like Gerstner, left Belsen the day after the patient’s surrender, making her a candidate. And this M.G. does not disappear. We know she is in Israel in 1948. But where to go from there? Was there truly a chance the Jewish Agency would find her?
I knew my only hope was the library, to read on. The librarian of Berkeley’s reserve section was my genius, my guiding star. Half an hour after I had queried her, she handed me a monograph: an