Spared Remnants

Malka sits just outside the kitchen door peeling potatoes, breathing the damp air and looking across the clotted fields to the woods beyond. The treetops tinged with first green tease her, as if offering shelter. When her paring knife skims the surface of each tuber, her fingers grow sticky, making her impatient for the rinse that will come as she releases each stripped potato into a pail of cloudy water at her side. She wipes her hands on her apron, fashioned from threadbare towels, and wonders at the curve of her thighs, once parchment over bone.

In the distance, lorries crawl along the road from Nuremberg, sending up trails of dust. Americans, hale and bulky, bearing canned goods, powdered milk, cigarettes, and chocolate. Powdered milk to a dairy farm. She has to laugh at their clumsy generosity, their eagerness to please, their mouths filled with excellent teeth. Hopefully, today’s entourage will include Beckman, his tilted lope and casual winks. Bringing a curl of potato peel to her lips, she runs her tongue over its roughness, tastes its salt, its starchy bitterness, glad for the absence of rot.

Riding shotgun in the U.N. relief truck, Beckman knows the landmarks as the convoy rumbles westward from a guarded warehouse near the Nuremberg Palace of Justice toward a displaced-persons camp set up to run like a farm, a teaching site for Jews dreaming of a pioneering life in Palestine. They roll through Furth, past the smashed and toppled tombstones of its Jewish cemetery, and into Cadolzburg, where an...