Breine glows as she looks at Chaim. “As soon as Britain loosens the immigration laws, we’re going to Eretz Israel. Most of us are, actually—most of us at the table.”
“Palestine?” I ask.
She fans her soil-filled fingernails in front of me. “That’s why we’re learning to farm. We want to be ready to farm our own land when we get there.”
Chaim affectionately brushes his knuckles under Breine’s chin. “She’s b-bad at it.”
“Excuse me. I had never even been on a farm until I came here.”
“I’m w-worse than she is.”
“That’s why we’re practicing now,” says one of Chaim’s roommates, the serious-looking man who introduced himself as Ravid. He clears his throat, quieting everyone down, and then turns to me, raising his glass. “I hope you find your brother soon. May we all find what we’re looking for soon. L’Chaim.”
L’Chaim.
The phrase hits me with such a sharp, unexpected pang it nearly takes my breath away.
We used to toast this way at weddings and birthdays, at happy events. One night in Gross-Rosen, a night when I couldn’t sleep from the gnawing in my stomach and the lice on my skin, one of my bunkmates, a woman I barely knew, threw her arms around me as I writhed in agony on the wooden pallet. “L’Chaim,” she whispered. “It’s my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary today.” Then she laughed bitterly.
“L’Chaim,” the table repeats now. Breine with her mouth full again, and Chaim with his shy blush, and Esther, serious and earnest.
We raise our glasses.
To life.
AFTER DINNER, INSTEAD OF WALKING BACK TO THE COTTAGE with Breine and Esther, I walk to the administration building to check the admission records Mrs. Yost has already told me will have no trace of Abek.
I try to expect nothing. I try to expect less than nothing, if it’s possible to expect that. I remind myself that Miriam’s twin sister was alive, and survived, and was still vanished without a trace, leaving Miriam alone to write endless letters.
The Missing Persons Liaison office, which I thought messy before, is now in complete disarray. Piles of papers teeter not only on Mrs. Yost’s desk but also on the floor—some handwritten, some typed with notes scribbled in the margins. She’s not alone, either. A man is sitting in the chair where I sat before. He’s slender with caterpillar eyebrows, holding some kind of heavy book.
I knock lightly on the doorframe but stay just outside the threshold. “I can come back later.”
“No, come in now,” she says, rising from her own seat and gesturing me into it. “This is Mr. Ohrmann. Mr. Ohrmann, this is Miss Zofia Lederman.”
“How do you do?”
“Mr. Ohrmann works with one of the organizations I mentioned earlier—the Missing Persons bureau in Munich,” Mrs. Yost continues. “He comes here once a week to go over open cases, and I also introduce new ones. Today I told him about yours.”
“Oh?”
“As you might expect, there are a lot of open cases,” she says. “A lot of leads that seem promising but don’t go anywhere at all.”
Mrs. Yost, so direct and frank when I spoke with her this afternoon, now seems as though she’s avoiding something. A nervous swell begins to grow in my stomach.
“Are you saying there is a lead?” I ask.
“Well,” she begins, looking slightly pained. Mr. Ohrmann clears his throat, signaling that he’ll take over.
“Frau Yost probably also told you there is no central system for locating missing persons; it’s not a scientific process. And with your case, we’ve found something that complicates the situation even further. A piece of… ambiguous information.”
My heart is already thudding. “I don’t understand. How can the information be ambiguous? Have you found my brother or not?”
He sighs. “I suppose it’s easiest to just walk you through it.”
He motions me closer to the desk and, as Mrs. Yost sweeps piles of paper out of the way, Mr. Ohrmann lays the book on top.
I can see now that it’s copies of pages from a ledger, with rows and columns. On the page it’s opened to, lacy penmanship travels two-thirds of the way down one page, and then strong, inky script replaces it for the final third. A different person’s handwriting.
“These are arrival records to Dachau, the period of time that trains from Birkenau would have come,” Mr. Ohrmann says.
My mouth is cotton, dry and thick. “Where is he?” I bend in so quickly that I jostle Mr. Ohrmann as I try to make out the names on this page of the ledger.
“Often, the Nazis kept very good records,” he says, moving the book just slightly away, forcing me to look up at him for this next part. “But what we’re learning is, not always—it varies from camp to camp, or from commander to commander. And sometimes it depends on the guard: How much education he’s had. How familiar he was with the languages spoken by the prisoners arriving that day. If he’s not familiar with the language, he’s more likely to spell prisoners’ names wrong.”
He hesitates, looking to Mrs. Yost for confirmation before continuing. “I just want to explain all this. I’m not sure any of it is worth raising your hopes. We don’t have a record for an Abek Lederman arriving to Dachau,” he says.
Only now does he push the ledger back toward me again. His neatly manicured index finger travels down the page until the line before the spidery handwriting stops. Toward these last rows, the end of the guard’s shift, the writing becomes messier; the dots of the i’s become smudged and uneven.
“Here,” he says. “Alek Federman. Age fourteen.”
The realization comes to me slowly. “You think the guard spelled the name wrong?”
Mr. Ohrmann doesn’t say anything.
“A cursive l can look like a cursive b,” I say.
“And Alek is a far more common name, at least in Germany,” he breaks in, though his voice is reluctant, like he doesn’t want to give false hope. “And Federman is an equally common last name. It might be possible for someone to misspell it that way.”
Is this my brother? My brain doesn’t leap to embrace the possibility as quickly as I thought it would. Part of me thinks this sounds too desperate: People shouldn’t be able to find or not find their brothers based on whether they can know or not know Alek is the more common name in Germany.
But I want to believe it. At the very least, I know it’s possible. If the arrivals at Dachau were anything like the arrivals at the camps I was sent to, of course there would be room in that hell for a mistake. It was all a mistake.
I run my own fingers over the dry, finicky handwriting. “What happened to him next? Where did Alek Federman go?”
Mr. Ohrmann lowers his head apologetically. “I don’t know. So far I’ve found only the reference to his coming into the camp. He’s not in the roster of prisoners present for the liberation.”
“So he came in, but he didn’t go out?”
“He’s not included on lists of the dead,” he adds quickly. “He’s just not on other lists at all.”
“So he could have gone anywhere. He could have gone to any other camp in Europe?”