Sobieskva. She had survived the Sachenhausen concentration camp, and after liberation she returned to the Polish village in which her family had lived for more than three hundred years. The town was named Kielce (pronounced KYEL-chuh, she helpfully advised the reader). Before the war, the town was home to a Jewish community of twenty-seven thousand people. Those who returned numbered two hundred.
They were not exactly welcomed by their former Polish neighbors, many of whom were living in the houses of dead Jews. All the same, these stragglers, whom the author called “the remnant,” struggled to rebuild their community hall, in which they also lived until they could reconstruct their lives. Then, on July 4, 1946 (while we in America were preparing the rockets’ red glare of our first postwar Fourth of July), thousands of the Polish villagers surrounded the Jewish community house. They were armed with knives, pitchforks, hunting rifles. Whipped up into an anti-Semitic frenzy, they invaded the hall and killed forty-two of their former neighbors. Fifty more were seriously wounded, meaning about half of the returning Jewish people were killed or maimed. Meanwhile, the police stood by and watched.
This was not the only pogrom against Jews returning to Poland, the author informed us. In the two years after the war, thousands of Jews were killed by their former neighbors.
The survivors of the Kielce pogrom—the “remnant of the remnant,” the author now called them—tried to make their way to the Western democracies. But the policy agreed upon at the Yalta conference was that displaced persons should return to their countries of origin—a disaster for the Jews of Kielce, an impossibility for most Jews. Not until 1948 did the United States begin admitting refugees of any sort. The British limited emigration to Palestine to about two thousand. With nowhere to go, the former residents of Kielce fell under the protection of the Allied Forces: in displaced-persons camps, once again behind barbed wire.
What a story! Why had I never heard any such thing before? Like all Americans, I was shocked and horrified by what we learned after the concentration camps were liberated. (I myself had not served in the armed forces, having been rejected as “unfit for duty” due to my psychological history.) But once VE Day was declared, I confess I stopped noticing Europe, as if that matter were settled, especially since our country still faced the prospect of a bloody war in the Pacific.
I was now determined to learn more about the postwar experience of Jewish survivors—the patient’s mother among them. Given my university credentials, I was able to obtain library privileges at San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University, a difficult but worthwhile commute an hour and a half south of San Francisco.
I soon learned that, by the time three years had passed after V-E day, a quarter of a million Jewish survivors found themselves in situations like that of the Kielce survivors: interned in displaced-persons camps in Germany.
I did not know how, amidst this mass of suffering humanity, I might find the patient’s mother. It seemed that all of Europe was on the move, Poles returning to Poland, Sudeten Germans trying to go back to Germany, the French to France, Spaniards to Spain. Each type to his own; Slavs to Slavs, Greeks to Greeks. But the Jews: If not in Palestine, where did the Jews belong?
Now I understood that a whole new disaster had befallen them. Their former lives were gone. They were no longer Poles or Germans or Austrians; they were stateless. They were free neither to live in Europe nor to emigrate to the United States nor to join their fellow Zionists in Palestine. They were stuck in the mud of the camps.
The more I learned of this period, the more I despaired of conveying it to the patient. Even if I should find a method of getting my research to her—which seemed wholly unlikely—what effect could it have but to depress her spirits further? The information could only show the futility of finding her mother. Among the quarter million stranded in Germany: Where was Maria G?
Thus we came to April, to the end of the Easter break. The patient had not gone anywhere during the holiday, reasoning she was better off with the routine of work than some imagined (and disappointed) pleasure amongst millions of carousing college students. She had not heard from Dorotea; she was not in communication with Charlotte. Her good friends Andie and Clarissa had