“Others believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals . . . a subhuman species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.”
—General George S. Patton
TWELVE PEOPLE IN THE NEW YORK area died from heat-related causes, a workman on the site collapsed from dehydration, the weather finally broke, and I kept returning to Dr. Gabor. What choice did I have? I could not go through life without a voice.
“Let’s go back to the war,” he said on my next visit.
“I do not remember much.”
“You said you were in Amsterdam for most of it.”
I nodded.
“Your father was with the occupation?”
“I told you, my father was Dutch. We moved back before the war. June 1937.”
“Why?”
“Business opportunities.”
“And when the war came?”
He would not let go of it. What did a Dutchman who had lived in Germany do in Amsterdam during the war?
“I was in Auschwitz.” My voice rasped like a key turning in a rusted lock.
He looked up from the yellow legal pad. “As a guard or a prisoner?”
The fucking son-of-a-bitch.
“A prisoner.”
The son-of-a-bitch blinked. The features rearranged themselves into the look. I had not seen it in some time. The war had been over for seven years. I was not the only one eager to forget it. But there was a time when I knew that look like the back of my hand, or the number on my arm. It was full of pity, and shame, and one thing more. Dislike. He did not hate me as he had when he imagined me turning in Jews and beating up Dutch, but he did not like me for having been there either.
Just remember, where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, it’s not going to endear you to people.
“I thought you said you were in Amsterdam.”
“I was. Until August of ’44. August fourth, to be precise. I was arrested and sent to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz.”
“For what reason?”
“You think they needed a reason?”
“If you were Jewish, no, but if you weren’t, there was usually some pretext. Political activity. Homosexuality.”
“Not that.”
He put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. “Political activity?”
They had rounded up thirty or forty resistance fighters, but somehow word got out that there was a Jew among them. The SS came crashing through the cars of the train, swinging their rifles, using their fists, howling take down your pants, take down your pants. Only in German, which I refuse to speak, even in my head.
“Political activity,” I agreed.
“Tell me about it.”
I shrugged. “I really cannot remember. Whether you believe me or not.”
“I believe you. It’s a common phenomenon among people who have been in the camps.”
“I am not like them,” I rasped.
“You mean you’re not Jewish?”
“I mean I refuse to live in the past. I do not talk about it. I never even think about it. When my mind travels back, it stops at the gangplank to the ship I came over on.”
“All right, tell me about that.”
You could not understand, Doctor. You, who arrived before the war with your medical degree and your steamer trunks and your books. Or did you have to leave the trunks and the books behind? Were you only a step ahead of Hitler? But still in the nick of time, you clever Hungarian devil. For those of us who came after, it was a different story.
The sun beat down from a white sky and sparked off the oily river. Gulls shrieked like mad old women, the ship’s whistle split the salt-smelling air, and people shouted at each other in a babel of languages. Even if you could not understand the words, you interpreted the excitement, and the terror. I was sure someone was going to be pushed overboard or trampled underfoot in the rush to get down the gangplank and onto American soil.
It was even worse in the customs shed. The sound of scraping wheels and thudding suitcases and human voices rattled the tin walls. Men moved through the heat like underwater swimmers. Women fanned themselves with hats and handkerchiefs and documents. Children cried. An old man fainted. And at the far end of the shed a shaft of sunlight poured through an opening in the metal wall. It was blinding. It was America.
The crowd churned. People searched for the proper queue. Officials pointed here and directed there and called for interpreters. Volunteers from a dozen different agencies tried to help, lost their patience, and shouted at the terrified people they had come to aid. I found my place at the end of a line. It moved a few inches, then stopped as men and women hunted for documents in satchels and pockets and linings of coats too heavy for the heat-dizzy morning. Suddenly a woman began to keen. She wanted her child. Where was her child? Women shouted. Men rushed to the openings for the gangplanks and looked frantically down at the engine-swirled water. A shout went up from the other side of the pier. Here he is! Here he is! The woman raced to her child, scooped him up, put him down, shook him, embraced him, shook him again. People turned away. They had troubles of their own.
The line continued to crawl forward. The longer I waited, the more jittery I became. Something could always go wrong. Rules changed. Papers that were adequate when the boat left Bremen might be insufficient by the time it docked in New York. I kept taking out my documents and checking them. I had not been able to keep from doing that on the ship, and the papers were smudged with fingerprints and wrinkled from being carried close to my body. The Certificate of Identity in Lieu of a Passport was in the worst shape. You see, Doctor, some of us did not have the real thing. At the time, I still considered it a lack. It never occurred to me it would be an advantage.
This is to certify that Peter van Pels . . .
I had held my breath as the secretary in the camp typed the information into the blanks.
. . . born at Osnabruck, Germany on 8th of November, 1926, male, unmarried, intends to immigrate to the United States of America.
Height 6 ft. 2 in.
Hair Brown Eyes Blue
Distinguishing marks or features: scar on right arm above wrist.
They had listed the scar from the rat bite on my right arm, but not the number on my left. There had been too many of those to be distinguishing.
Applicant declares he has never been convicted of breaking any laws.
The hinges of the barn door creak. Animals stir and snort and paw. The old man snores.
But I had never been convicted of anything.
I put the papers back in the breast pocket of my jacket, safe from harm, ready to be produced on demand.
There were still half a dozen people in front of me. Perhaps I had contracted a disease aboard ship, and some telltale sign would give me away. Perhaps someone had lodged a complaint against me. People were always making up stories. This one had been a capo. That one was a communist. So-and-so had run a thriving black market operation. They did it to advance themselves, and settle scores, and because they had to find somewhere to rest the backbreaking rage they carried around with them.
I was getting close now. There was only one person in front of me. The customs officer took the man’s passport and visa and stood staring down at the documents. “Wishwzzz . . .” His voice trailed off in a buzz of consonants. He shook his head. “That’s not a name, it’s a curse.” He wrote something on the documents, stamped them, and handed them back. “Welcome to the United States, sir.” He hissed the last word, but the man simply took the papers, nodded several times to show his gratitude, and moved away. I stepped up to the table and handed over my papers smartly, but not too smartly. No hint of clicking heels or snappy salutes. I did not want to give him the wrong idea.
He took the Certificate of Identity from my hand that, to my amazement, was not shaking and looked down at it. “Van Pels. Now, there’s a good American name. As American as Stuyvesant. New York used to be Nieuw Amsterdam, you know. Brooklyn was originally Breuckelen. Harlem, Haarlem.” He murmured something else. He was still looking down at the certificate, and he had spoken under his breath, but I knew the words. I knew them in English and French and Dutch and German. I could probably recognize them in half a dozen other languages I did not speak.
“Not one of the chosen people,” he had muttered.
I wondered if it was a joke, or a test. I watched as he went on studying the Certificate. When I had first seen it, I had been surprised. I still could not get over it. German and Dutch papers, even DP documents, listed the religion of the bearer. The Certificate of Identity in Lieu of a Passport issued by the United States Consulate General recorded only how tall I was, and whether I had any distinguishing marks on my body, and if I had been convicted of a crime. What a country!
The officer looked up from the document. I waited for him to realize his mistake. On the boat they had all taken me for one of them.
“You spend enough time in this place, Mr. van Pels, you begin to think we’re nothing but a dumping ground for the world’s garbage. Makes you wonder what our boys fought for.” He stamped the Certificate of Identity. “I must have processed a hundred immigrants this morning, and you’re the first one I might let marry my sister.” He winked and held the document out to me. Take it, Mr. van Pels. Take your good Dutch-American name, and your Certificate of Identity that lists no religion, and go out into America as one of the people not chosen.
I had been thinking about it for years. I had made up my mind a dozen, perhaps a hundred times. I had calculated the odds, and considered the dangers, and figured the practicalities. But I had never expected the option to be handed to me so easily. There was no proof of what I was. There was not a trace of who I had been. The Red Cross did not even list me as a survivor. According to their records, I had probably died on the forced march, or just after it in Mauthausen. They might have been right, if the German soldier, who looked no less Aryan than the SS officers driving us west, no more humane than that bastard of a farmer in the barn, had not, on some whim I will never understand and he probably did not comprehend at the time, given me that moldy piece of bread. Or maybe he did understand. The end of the war was in sight. Maybe he was making his own bargain with the future. But it was all speculation, about the man’s motives, about the fate of a boy named Peter van Pels.
I lifted my arm to take the Certificate. My sleeve pulled back only an inch, not enough to reveal the number to the officer, but I knew it was there. They had not listed it on the Certificate,because it was not a distinguishing feature, but it could still give me away. I wondered what the smirking officer who muttered anti-Semitic slurs under his breath would say if I took off my jacket, and rolled up my sleeve, and showed him that I was just another piece of the world’s garbage. But not everyone in the camps had been Jewish. The number told where I had been, but not who I was. Someday I could even have it removed. I had heard there were doctors who did that.
I stood staring at the thumbed documents in the customs officer’s hand. I did not believe in God. How could I, after where I had been and what I had seen? I did not even recall the trappings.
The sweat beaded my upper lip, and poured out of my armpits, and ran down my sides. My shirt was drenched. My underwear was a wet rag sticking to my belly and buttocks and the real problem. The proof of who I was. The cut of Abraham,the sign of the covenant, the incision of my infancy, the missing foreskin, the incontrovertible proof of me.
I stood staring at the man in the uniform who had mistaken me for a gentile, remembering other men in uniform who had been just as inefficient. No, not remembering, because the story did not belong to me, though somehow in the retelling and reimagining it had become mine.
The man who told the story had been rounded up and put on a train in a sweep of Polish resistance fighters—some communists, some Catholics, all anti-Semites, the teller had sworn—but word had gone through the cars that there was a Jew among them. And right behind the word came the officers, shouting obscenities, slamming rifle butts, howling at the men to drop their pants. The man who had told the story had sprung to the front of the line and begun tugging at his buttons. A rifle butt had crashed into his chest. He had fallen to the floor and rolled back into the huddle of bruised, beaten, uncircumcised resistance fighters, undiscovered.
But I was in America now. Here men in uniform did not order other men to take down their pants. Here men in uniform smiled, even while they muttered insults under their breath, and said welcome and good luck and you are going to feel right at home.
But sooner or later I would take down my pants. I could still see the Life magazine picture of the sailor bending the nurse over backward. Sooner or later, I would give myself away. Jew-hating knew no sex. There was a man in the camp who had been turned in by his Aryan mistress. Probably more than one, but he was the one I knew.
That was what I was thinking the first time I saw Susannah. Or maybe I was thinking that because I had already seen her out of the corner of my eye.
How long in this Bible-reading till we get to the story of the bathing Susanna?
And what do they mean by Sodom and Gomorrah?
Anne, Peter, will you two be serious!
The first thing I noticed was her hair. It had taken me longer to get used to seeing women with hair than it had to seeing women without it. What do you make of that, Doctor? Susannah’s hair was dark blond and silky. She wore it long then, so it spilled over one velvet-lashed eye, like the pictures of Veronica Lake from before the war. I had read, in Life again, that at the beginning of the war, the movie star, in a patriotic gesture, had shorn that silky curtain every man wanted to get his hands in. Not since Samson had a haircut had such dire consequences. Overnight Veronica was a has-been. But Susannah had hair like Veronica’s before she cut it, and a small sweet nose that stopped just short of snub, and those straight white teeth that would have made Dr. Pfeffer weep with wonder. The teeth, as I said, ran in the family. She was smiling down at a boy, whom I recognized from the group of orphans on the boat, and in that smile I saw a large and loving clan that had been smiling back at her since infancy. There was an identification pin on her small pointy left breast, though I was not close enough to read her name or that of the agency where she volunteered. Later we would argue about that. No, not argue, disagree.
She must have felt me watching her, because she looked up. My eye caught hers. I saw the color seep into her cheeks.
Is Mouschi a boy or a girl?
He’s a tom, Anne.
That was when it came to me. A mistress might know. A whore would know. But a nice girl would not have an inkling. I could take down my pants and still keep my secret.
I took the Certificate of Identity in lieu of the real thing from the customs officer, put it in the pocket of my sweat-limp trousers, and started toward the square of blinding sunlight at the end of the shed. As I stepped outside into my new life, I felt curiously weightless. I felt light enough to float away. That was what I did when Werner Pfeffer asked me for news of his late father.
“I know nothing of a Fritz Pfeffer or a family called Frank,” I said and disappeared across Twelfth Avenue into America.