Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

"I just realized a few days ago that my parents got married right before Dad's court-martial. Did you know that?"

"I should say so," answered Bear. "I'm the one who arranged it."

"Arranged the wedding?"

"Not their meeting," said Bear. "But getting the military authorities to allow them to wed, yes, that was my doing. Your father was concerned, quite rightly, that when he was convicted, as was inevitable, he would be transferred immediately to a military prison in the U. S. He was therefore desperate to marry before the proceedings, so that your mother, as a war bride, would have the right to immigrate to the States. She had remained an inmate in a displaced persons camp that had been erected after burning down the Balingen huts. The conditions were far better, of course, but she was anything but free. It required countless petitions to the Army and the Occupation Authorities, but eventually your mother and a rabbi, also held at Balingen, were allowed to visit your father for half an hour at Regensburg Castle for their wedding. I was the best man. In spite of the circumstances, it was quite touching. They appeared very much in love."

Bear said only that and glanced down to the pages I'd handed him, allowing me to work my way through this information in relative privacy. Despite the horrors of the camp, or Mom's unfamiliarity with the military, or even her limited English at the time, someone as innately canny as she was couldn't possibly have failed to grasp the essentials of Dad's situation. She knew he was under arrest, and as such, had to be gravely concerned for her new husband. Clearly, then, Mom recalled a great deal more about Dad's court-martial than she'd been willing to acknowledge to me. Yet even at that moment, my first impulse was to accept her reluctance as a way of honoring Dad's desire for silence.

But somehow my mind wandered back to the question that had perplexed me for half a year now. Why did Dad say he desperately hoped his children would never hear his story? Out the paned windows of Northumberland Manor's sitting room, there was perfect light on the red maple buds just showing the first sign of ripening, and beholding them with the intense museum attention Dad wrote of, a moment of concentrated sight, I found the truth hanging out there, too. It was simple. My father's remark about keeping this from his children was not philosophical. It was practical. Dad had not wanted the truth to emerge at his trial, or to survive it, because it would have imperiled his wife and the lie she was to be obliged to live. That is why it would have been a disaster to call Gita Lodz as a witness. That is why he hoped we never heard the story-because that silence would have meant they had made a life as husband and wife.

Bear's head was wilted in his wheelchair while he read, and I reached out to softly clutch his spotted hand and the fingers crooked with disease.

"She's my mother. Right? Gita Lodz?"

Bear started, as if I'd woken him. His cloudy eyes that still reflected the depth of the ages settled on me, and his lower jaw slid sideways in his odd lopsided smile. Then he deliberated, an instant of lawyerly cool.

"As I have said, Stewart, I was not there when you were born.

"But the woman you saw my father marry-that was Gita Lodz?"

"Your father never said that to me," he answered. "Anything but. It would have compromised me severely to know that, inasmuch as I had spent months begging the military authorities for permission to allow David to marry a concentration camp survivor of another name. I would have been obliged to correct the fraud being perpetrated. I believe that was why he never contacted me once we were back in the U. S. A.-so that I didn't have to deal with any second thoughts about that."

Despite failing on the uptake for months, I now bounced rapidly along the path of obvious conclusions. I instantly comprehended why Gita Lodz, hero of the French underground, came here pretending to be the former Gella Rosner (whose name was Americanized as Gilda), David Dubin's war bride, allegedly saved from the Nazi hell called Balingen. In the spring of 1945, my parents had every reason to believe that OSS would never have permitted the sidekick of Robert Martin, suspected Soviet spy, to enter the United States. Indeed, as someone who had repeatedly abetted Martin's escapes, Gita stood a good chance of being prosecuted if OSS and Teedle had gotten their hands on her. A new identity was the only safe course. One that could never be disproved amid that ocean of corpses. One more role to add to the many the would-be Bernhardt had already played flawlessly. And one that guaranteed that Gilda would be welcome in David's family. A Jewish bride. As his parents wished. And as Gita herself, when she was younger, had once wanted to be.

And, probably not insignificantly, it was also a weighty declaration for my father. When I had changed my last name in 1970, Dad had never really responded to my implication that I was reversing an act of renunciation from decades before. There was only one thing he cared to be clear about.

"Do not doubt, Stewart," he said to me once, "that Balingen made me a Jew." Since I knew he would never describe what he'd witnessed there, I did not pursue the remark. On reflection, I took it as one more way of telling me how devoted he was to my mother. And even now I'm not completely certain of the precise nature of the transformation he was alluding to. I don't know if he meant that he had realized, as had been true for so many in Germany, that there was no escape from that identity, or, rather, as I tend to suspect, that he owed the thousands annihilated there the reverence of not shirking the heritage that had condemned them. Certainly, there was a touching homage in Gita's new persona, which allowed one of the millions who perished to be not only remembered, but revived. But I see that Dad was also making an emphatic statement about himself, about what an individual could stand for, or hope for, against the forces of history.

I, on the other hand, who had proudly reclaimed Dubinsky, who sent my daughters to Hebrew school and insisted we have shabbas dinner every Friday night, I now reposed in the nouveau-Federal sitting room of a Connecticut nursing home realizing that by the strict traditions of a religion that has always determined a child's faith by that of his mother, I am not really Jewish.

These are the last pages of my father's account:

I emerged again from the dungeon darkness into the brilliant day and terrible reek of Balingen. I suppose that humans recoil on instinct from the rankness of decaying flesh and I had to spend a moment fighting down my sickness again.

Grove was waiting for me. I thought he wanted to know how it had gone with Martin, but he had other news.

"Roosevelt is dead," he said. "Truman is President."

"Don't be a card."

"It's just on Armed Services Radio. They say FDR had a stroke. I kid you not." I had been raised to worship Roosevelt. My mother, who regarded the President as if he were a close relation, would be devastated. And then I looked to the nearest mound of broken corpses. At every one of these instants of paradox, I reflexively expected my understanding of life to become deeper, only to find myself more confused.

I asked the MP who'd accompanied me if we had an estimated arrival time on the half-track that would carry Martin back, but the news about Roosevelt's death seemed to have brought everything to a halt for a while. Nonetheless, I wouldn't countenance the idea of spending the night within Balingen. Whatever hour the convoy arrived, I said, I wanted Martin transferred. We could bivouac with the 406th Armored Cavalry a mile or two away, nearer Hechingen.

An hour or so later, vehicles reached the camp, but not the ones I awaited. They carried the first Red Cross workers. I watched with a certain veteran distance as these men and women, accustomed to working tirelessly to save lives, began to absorb the enormity of what they were confronting. A young French doctor passed out when he saw the first hill of bodies. Inexplicably, one of the wraiths moving vacantly through the camp, an elderly man who had somehow lived to liberation, fell dead only a few feet from the unconscious doctor. As with everything else, we all seemed bereft of the power to react. If the sky fell, as Henny Penny feared, we might have had more to say.