I PONDERED THE MATTER for several weeks, wondering what to do next. That process was interrupted by an e-mail from Sandra Seiler on Long Island. She too had been thinking about her grandfather Emil Lindenfeld, thinking about the Viennese photographs of Rita and Emil Lindenfeld, taken in a garden in 1941. She’d spoken with a friend; a thought had emerged.
“The idea that something might have been going on between them made perfect sense,” she wrote. Like Rita, Emil Lindenfeld chose to remain in Vienna, after his wife and a daughter left, in 1939. The two of them were alone in Vienna, without spouse or child. Three years passed, then Rita left. After the war, Emil was alone; he went in search of Rita.
“I dwelled on that thought all day,” Sandra wrote.
Sitting in Sandra’s living room a few months earlier, peeling photographs off the pages of Emil’s album, we had touched on the possibility of a DNA test, “to be sure.” It seemed a disloyal idea, so we pushed it away. Yet it lingered.
Sandra and I continued to exchange e-mails, and the subject of a DNA test returned. I’d explored the possibility, I told her. It turned out to be complicated: learning whether two people shared a grandparent was not an altogether straightforward exercise; it was much easier if you were trying to establish whether the two shared a grandmother. A shared grandfather was a more complex matter, in the technical sense.
I was referred to an academic at the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester, a specialist in the exhumation of mass graves. She introduced me to a company that specialized in these matters. A test was available to assess the likelihood that two individuals of different gender—Sandra and I—might share the same grandfather. It worked by comparing matches among segments of DNA (in units known as centimorgans). The test took the number of matching segments and then the sizes, as well as the overall total size of the matching segments (or blocks) between two or more individuals. From these centimorgans and blocks, it was possible to estimate whether two individuals are related. The test was not definitive, only an estimate, merely the assessment of a probability. It required nothing more than a swab of saliva.
After some reflection, Sandra Seiler and I agreed to proceed. The materials arrived from the company. Having paid a fee, you received a kit, scraped the inside of your cheek with a cotton swab, placed the scraper in a sealed plastic container, posted the packet off to America, then waited. Sandra was braver than I. “I scraped rather vigorously last night and put it into today’s outgoing mail,” she wrote cheerily.
I waited two months before scraping, not sure whether I really wanted to know. Eventually, I scraped, posted, waited.
A month passed.