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“No, I feel the same way you do.”
She climbed into her bed, which was now next to mine, and I couldn’t see her expression in the dim light. She was quiet as if giving my question more thought. “The only place where we could really start over again is in America,” she finally said. “We could put all of the sad memories behind us there.”
“I think you may be right.” Even though America seemed very far away and a daunting destination to try to reach. “If you’re sure, Ruthie, I will move heaven and earth to get us there.”
“Yes,” she said after another long moment. “I’m sure. It’s where Mutti and Vati wanted us to live.”
“Good. I’ll ask Jim to help us find out about our visas and if we’re still on the waiting list. But just so you know, they’re telling everyone that it could take as much as three years to immigrate to America. Can you stand living here for that long?”
“I guess so.”
But I already knew that even one year in this place was too long. We weren’t exactly prisoners, but it often felt like it. I worried that my sister was already starting to die inside. It happened when you lost hope. I wrote to Jim the next day, telling him what Ruthie had decided and asking for his help. Two weeks later, he returned to the DP camp with bad news.
“You and Ruthie will need to apply for immigration all over again because you no longer have your father as your means of support in the United States. I also checked to see if your nursing degree could be transferred, and it can’t. You would need a degree from an American nursing school in order to work.” Jim could tell that I took this news hard.
“Walk with me,” he said. “I always think better when I’m walking.” It was midday and the DP camp was alive with activity. I greeted people I knew as Jim and I walked past them, but I was still trying to absorb his bad news about immigrating.
“My other news is that I’m being demobilized and sent home in mid-January,” Jim said. “Nearly everyone else in my unit has already been discharged, but I signed on to stay longer to work at the hospital. Now my time is up again.”
“That should make you happy, Jim. Why aren’t you smiling?” In fact, I couldn’t recall ever seeing him smile.
“Can I be honest with you?” We had been walking slowly but he halted near the main gate and faced me. The only word that could describe his expression was tormented. “I don’t think I can bear to return home, Gisela. Everything there will be the same and I’m not the same person I was before the war.”
“Tell me who you were before the war.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “A naive country boy who lived in a world that made sense. A fool who had faith in the goodness of God and in humanity. I was going to be a veterinarian like my father, live in the town where I grew up. I had started studying to do that in college. But then I was deployed to France, and as the bombs exploded around me, my world blew up along with them. None of what I had believed was real. When I went to war, I saw real life for the first time and more death and human suffering than I ever could have imagined.”
The ragged bitterness I heard in his voice surprised me. I turned to look at him and it was like seeing a stranger. I had been so involved with my own problems, so worried about my sister that I hadn’t noticed how thin and haunted-looking Jim had become these past weeks. He had been my rock ever since he’d saved me at Buchenwald. Now he seemed to be crumbling like a tower of sand before my eyes. He stared past the gate as he continued talking, his eyes shining with tears.
“I tried to keep pretending at first. I babbled Bible verses and told my friends that God must have a reason why their arms and legs had been blown off. They needed to trust Him, I said. I wanted desperately to keep believing in God, believing that He would miraculously intervene and put an end to the evil and show us how to make sense of it all. Then my best friend died in Bastogne. And a young Belgian nurse named Renée Lemaire who had volunteered to work in our aid station was also killed. She had been planning her wedding, and she didn’t even have to be there, helping us. The more I watched people suffer and die, the harder it was to pray. Thousands of innocent civilians were dying. Elderly people. Women and children... But the moment I stepped through Buchenwald’s gates, I stopped praying altogether.”
His voice trembled with emotion as he struggled to continue. “That was when I saw the truth about the unchecked evil in this world and man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. And I saw God’s indifference to it all.” He wiped his eyes with his fist. “I’m sorry if I’m insulting your faith in God—”
“You aren’t, Jim. I’m Jewish by birth but I no longer believe.” My own bitterness rose in my throat like bile. “The God I learned about in the Torah wouldn’t have turned His back and allowed this to happen. Vati used to believe the same thing you did—that God had a reason for everything that happens. But there can’t be a reason for Buchenwald and Auschwitz. The people who suffered and died there must have prayed. I know that my parents prayed. But all of those prayers went unanswered. Millions of what the Torah calls God’s chosen people were brutally murdered. And the God I once believed in looked the other way.”
Jim wiped his eyes again. “I was taught to believe in a God of love and compassion,” he said. “A God who is also our Savior. The God I once worshiped couldn’t have let millions of innocent people be slaughtered without mercy. The only conclusion I can come to is that He was a childish illusion, a fairy tale, like Santa Claus. And that the Bible was all lies. But even if I’m wrong and God does exist, I have nothing to say to Him.”
We turned away from the gate and started walking slowly back toward the barracks. His words chilled me. I longed for the right words to help him but I had none to give. “You need to leave this place and go home, Jim. Your family must miss you terribly.”
“My parents are people of faith. I don’t know how to tell them that I don’t believe in God anymore. It wouldn’t be fair of me to destroy their faith by questioning it and talking about my doubts. I can’t shake off the darkness that I’ve experienced over here, and I don’t want to bring that darkness home with me. I love them too much to contaminate their idyllic world with the world of my nightmares. I’ll go home for a visit and see them briefly, but I don’t want to stay there and poison them.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stopped walking and wrapped my arms around him and hugged him tightly. I needed the embrace as much as he did.
“In the meantime,” he said when we pulled apart again, “I’m running out of time here, and your visa process is moving too slowly. I feel like my work here is still unfinished. I can’t stand the thought of leaving you and Ruthie here.”
“It’s not your responsibility, Jim. We’re not your responsibility.”
“But you are! I care about you, Gisela. I care about what will happen to you and your sister. It’s hard for me to go home to a comfortable life in America and leave you in this place. I can’t bear it that there are still millions of suffering people like you who have no place to go. My work as a medic, then in Buchenwald, and now helping you is the only thing that keeps me sane.”
“But it’s time for you to rest and regain your own strength—”
“I can’t abandon you with no place to go and no family to turn to. I have to help you get to America. I want to make sure you and Ruthie are taken care of.”
I wanted that, too. My hope of finding Sam alive was fading every day. Jim and I weren’t in love, but I felt safe with him. He had helped me, and now I wanted to help him in return but I didn’t know how. “Don’t you think that once you’re home with your family, you’ll see things differently?” I asked.
Jim stared into the distance as if he hadn’t heard me. Worry wrinkles creased his troubled eyes. Several minutes passed. Then he looked at me again.
“Gisela, I think I know of a way for you and Ruthie to get to America... if you’re willing to trust me.”
