But how is it you stayed in Germany when your whole family left?
Ah! she said, with a long breath. Then she gazed out the window for some seconds. Finally she turned her cool light eyes on me and said:
Start up again your little machine.
Now comes the first part of the story.
80.
My grandfather was a smart businessman, said Michal on the tape. He understood the firm was about to be “Aryanized”—stolen from us. So he and Dieter Gerstner, one of his plant managers, came up with a plan: I would marry Dieter’s son, Albrecht. I would convert. And the firm would be assigned to the Gerstner family, good Catholic Germans since the dawn of time.
I should say that I once loved Albrecht, in the romantic way, when we were in Gymnasium together. He was fair-haired, tall, athletic: a quite beautiful man in the Germanic sense, which was also my ideal. I truly believed that such a blond god of a man was superior to the dark Jews who lived in the Scheunenviertel district, who had been filtering in from the east, from Poland and Russia. They were uneducated, poverty-stricken. I was embarrassed by their horrid black hats, their ugly clothes, their poverty—yes, I was embarrassed to see the naked face of Judaism in those people.
Don’t be shocked. We all felt that way. We were, after all, the Rothmans, rich and cultured and fair-skinned. Look at my hair, my eyes. Many of us were like this. You could not tell us from the most Aryan of Germans. Even Hitler said so. Ha! So perhaps that is why I did not protest my grandfather’s plan too very strongly. Maybe that embarrassed part of myself, stupid girl that I was, welcomed it: my chance to be German, not German of Hebrew heritage, but simply a German German.
She laughed, sighed, called out for more tea and whiskey.
Then there came the sound of the coin slapped on the table.
The patient stopped the tape.
Gerda rattled dishes behind me, said the patient to Dr. Schussler. And I sat there, again seeing myself through the eyes of my birth mother—through the eyes of the woman who bore me. I was too Jewish! No wonder she gave me away. I nearly laughed out loud. I thought it was only my WASP mother who could feel this way.
If not for Gerda standing over me with a sweet smile, I think I would have run from the house and never returned. But events have a way of keeping you in rooms you wish to leave, don’t they? Just when you think you’ve had enough and are going to run away, right then normal life—teacups and creamers, two sugars or one—cement you in place. And you have no choice but to say please and thank you and just go on with what you hate, the life you’d like to abandon, the people who don’t love you and you’d like to leave.
I went ahead and took my tea. Michal took hers with a shot of whiskey, and then I turned on the recorder.
So I converted to Catholicism and married Albrecht, said Michal. The conversion was not at all taxing. By then the priests had had a great deal of practice converting Jews, and were all too happy to capture another soul about to marry into a Catholic family. I agreed to read three books. I learned four prayers in Latin. I was tested in a recitation of the Credo, which of course I already knew from all the great choral music of Mozart and Beethoven and so on. The priest prayed over me. I accepted the trinity of God, Jesus as God’s incarnation on earth, the holiness of the Virgin Mother. The sign of the cross was sketched above my head. A little sprinkle of holy water, and it was done. I was now Maria. And then I married and became Maria Gerstner, wife of Albrecht Gerstner.
(Ah! I thought. There you are, my little German Jewish convert. My elusive Maria G.)
Well, said Michal, sighing. Grandfather executed all the paperwork to assign the business to me and Albrecht and Albrecht’s father. Then my family packed up and left. My mother, father, sister, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, cousins—everyone went to Amsterdam.
There came the sound of tea being sipped, once, twice.
Weren’t you sad when they were all gone? the patient asked her mother. Terrified? Desperate?