my illusions about the Zionists. Power was concentrated in a very few hands, as I have told you. Also about Bimko poisoning Rosensaft.
(Said the woman who had lost her lover to her rival.)
The only course was to leave Belsen. And the only possible place I could go was Palestine. And I did not want that life for you. Every time I thought of taking you there, the image of Hadassah Bimko and her orphans rose before my eyes, and I decided, each time, that I would find a better future for you.
(Bimko again, I thought sadly. If only I could find a way to tell the patient how this Bimko had changed her mother’s life.)
There was a Polish woman I had befriended in the camp, said Michal. A Catholic, therefore free to roam about and find her postwar fortune. She had found employment of a sort at a nearby … monastery, convent, I cannot remember which. They donated food to Belsen, and because I volunteered in the kitchen, I spent time with her. Her name was Bibianna Lobzjeska. One day we were working side by side in the pantry, and she began talking about some group that was gathering up Jewish children who had been left with monasteries and convents before the war.
I know about this group, the patient on the tape interrupted her mother.
You know this group?
Yes, the patient replied. My mother—my adoptive mother—told me about it. That they essentially stole the children. Before any Jewish people could come for them, they farmed them out, clandestinely.
I did not know that! Are you sure? I thought the children were truly orphans, that no one had come for them, and—since the children had been baptized and had spent the better part of their lives as Catholics—it seemed logical and generous to find them Catholic homes.
No, said the patient. Not all of them. Some had people looking for them, maybe aunts or cousins, not parents but relatives. But unless it was the actual parent, they refused to give up the child. Sometimes not even then.
My God! But you see there were hundreds, said Michal. Hundreds of children given over by parents who were being rounded up by the Germans, parents who hoped their children would survive even if they did not. Well. I have to say, if the choice was between a good Catholic home and some distant cousins in a displaced-persons camp or a dusty farm kibbutz in Palestine where the children would have to learn to shoot rifles, I would choose the Catholic home. Otherwise, it is no better than what Bimko did: put children in harm’s way for the sake of a principle.
For the sake of a religion, said the patient quietly.
There was silence on the tape.
Pooh! said Michal finally. Pooh on religion.
You mean the Jewish religion.
Her mother said nothing for several seconds.
Knowing only what I knew, knowing only what I could know, said Michal finally, I asked Bibianna to put me in communication with the group.
And they came and got me.
Yes.
And how long until they came?
One month.
So quickly?
I was glad. I was relieved. I put you into the hands of a priest and told him I had been baptized as a Catholic, that your father was a German Catholic, and that I wanted you to be baptized and raised within the Catholic faith.
Wait! said the patient. You said you didn’t know who my father was.
That is only what I told him. I wanted to be sure they would give you to a good family. I wanted to be sure they did not see you as just another spawn of a converted Jew. It was not as if anti-Semitism had disappeared with the death of Hitler, you know.
Oh, I know, said the patient to her mother. I know. Anti-Semitism is why I am with my parents, my adoptive parents, and not with some insane, Jew-hating, fundamentalist Catholic sect.
What are you talking about?
Oh, yes. I didn’t tell you, did I? That nice Catholic life you put me into? I was first adopted by the man who is the father of my adoptive father. He was the chief nutcase in a fundamentalist Catholic cult that was about to remove itself from the sin of the cities to some compound in rural Illinois. And when he found out I was Jewish, that I had a Jewish mother, he wanted to dispose of me.
My God! whispered Michal.
Yes. God. It was all about his “God.” My father and grandfather were completely estranged, and somehow