A Perfect Madness

by Frank H. Marsh

THIRTY-ONE

  Anna, Prague, 1992

  Anna placed the box holding her mother’s ashes on the night table and stretched out on the hotel bed for a short nap before going to the Old Jewish Cemetery. The long journey from America to Prague had included two unexpected side excursions, leaving her exhausted and emotionally drained from all that had taken place. It was only through the last of her mother’s stories, told shortly before she died, that the day as it was, came about.

  With the war over, when Julia came to Angie McFarland’s for Anna, she stayed two weeks waiting for the last of the spring lambs to be born so Anna could name them as she had done for the past three years. The days were filled with a glorious nothingness that Julia could hardly describe, the kind where only unbounded love exists. They went together as a family, one last time, to Angie’s old Presbyterian church and listened to the same minister preach on forgiveness, except he never said who they were supposed to forgive. The war had been over barely two weeks and no one had started to heal, least of all those who had lost someone precious. Julia felt it strange to hear talk of forgiveness when the world hadn’t had time to stop hating.

  At night, with Anna asleep, Angie would place before Julia a large stack of notebook paper, penciled on every line each memorable moment in Anna’s young life that Julia had missed. Angie would talk of them to Julia through stories, and Julia would come to know each moment as if it were she who had been there watching Anna, not Angie. Later, when Anna was older in years, it would be Julia who would tell her of Angie so she would know who had cared for her, filling her with a love that had no end. “She was the purest of the pure,” Julia would always say, when Anna would ask about Angie.

  Years later when Angie died, which many in her church said came from a broken heart, Julia and Anna began lighting the Yahrzeit candles on the day of her death, as they did for her parents and her brother Hiram and for her sister Miriam, who died so young. After Julia moved to America with Anna and became a doctor, graduating from John Hopkins, she would plan each year to go back to Scotland to visit Angie but never did. Nor could she persuade Angie to come to America. The healing power of distance was a wee too fragile to allow her eyes to see Anna’s face again, she would say. “It’s best I stay in the hills of Scotland, where the memories will always be fresh.”

  So Anna went back this day to Angie’s small Eden forty-seven years later, to fulfill the first of two new promises to her mother before making the final stop in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. Carrying a small spoonful of Julia’s ashes in a medicinal bottle, Anna climbed once more the long rocky road leading to Angie’s home from the village below, now grown quite large. Nothing was really there that she could remember, except the small barn where the spring lambs were born. When a lamb died during birth, Angie taught her that it was the hope new life brings that she should always remember, not the dying. The ancient stone house, though, strangely held no memories for her and seemed ready to collapse at any moment. Walking to the hillside she had run down many times laughing and squealing in the spring, chasing butterflies with Angie, Anna tossed the spoonful of ashes into the warm wind rising from the valley below, watching them for several seconds as they rode the endless breeze across the green hills. No words were said. That they would come to rest, in this wonderful place of goodness, was all that was necessary for her. Anna waited several more minutes before turning to leave, fixing her eyes for the last time on the stoic beauty that surrounded her. The Scots got it right a long time ago, living here where the air was as clean and pure as new falling snow and heaven always seemed a little closer.

  Of her promises to Julia, it was where Anna would go next that bothered her the most. Martin Drossen was from Mainz, and the moment Julia shot him, he left behind a young widow named Maria. They had been married but a few days before his unit left for the Eastern Front. At the time, killing Martin the way she did, shooting him in the face with his eyes frozen on her when he died, left Julia crying inside. It was not the dying that bothered her so much, but the picture she took from Martin’s body, of his young bride in Mainz whom he would never see again, nor she him. Looking at the photograph, with so much love in Maria’s eyes for Martin, Julia had to believe he was a good German who just happened to be on the wrong side—that is, if there were such a thing as sides when it comes to killing. But in the end, it didn’t make much difference which side you were on in the war; either way you were dead and gone from this world. It was just Martin’s generation’s turn to become warriors and go off and fight and die alone somewhere far away from those they loved.

  Julia had kept Maria’s picture all these years, thinking some day she would go and find her in Mainz and tell her the full story of Martin’s death. She had killed many other Germans after Martin, but it was always his face she would see. So completing Anna’s promise to Julia to bury her ashes beside Rabbi Loew’s grave would have to wait one more day.

  Mainz was a much bigger city now than it had been in 1939 when the war began, a time when Maria and Martin were lovers. Finding a Maria Drossen was possible but not probable; yet in one quick glance in the telephone directory, there was Maria’s name listed among a page full of Drossens. She would go to her, not call, in case she was mistaken, or in case Maria cared not to see her.

  Maria’s tiny second floor apartment had been her mother’s and had been left to Maria along with the furniture and her clothes and wedding ring a year before the war ended. The poor area she lived in then was even poorer now. The shop beneath Maria’s apartment had been rented on and off over the years, but stood empty now, much like most of the nearby store buildings. When Anna left the taxi, she asked the driver to wait for her; it was not the best of places to be left alone where she knew no one. She had never seen this side of Europe, believing the slums belonged only to America.

  Anna knocked on the door several times, waiting anxiously, unsure of what she should say, or if she should even be there. With her knowledge of German very limited, the best she could hope for was to lift a few words from an English/German dictionary to help make sense of her mother’s story of Martin Drossen’s death. When the door opened, Anna faced a middle-aged woman whose appearance and facial features shocked her. It was as if she knew the woman from somewhere in the past but had no way of making the connection. Bent over and leaning heavily on a walker, the woman studied Anna for a few seconds, then spoke in broken English, “You are American tourist, yes?”

  “Yes. Thank you for speaking English. I know very little German,” Anna replied.

  Beckoned by the woman to come in, Anna followed her as she shuffled along slowly through the living room to a small kitchen. The woman was greatly deformed. Her spine twisted and bent and gathered into a large mass to one side, all resting on legs and feet no bigger than matchsticks. When the woman reached the kitchen, she sat down in an old wheelchair pushed up against the wall, then looked up at Anna, waiting for her to speak.

  “Why do you come here?” she asked, speaking haltingly.

  “If you are Maria Drossen, I have an old photograph that my mother said belongs to you. There is also a story to go with it,” Anna said, handing the picture to the woman.

  Reaching for the picture, Anna noticed that even the fingers of the woman’s hand were horribly gnarled and deformed, making it difficult for her to hold the picture steady. Looking at the picture, the woman smiled sadly.

  “This is of my beautiful mother, Maria, given to my father before he went to fight.”

  “Your father was Martin Drossen?”

  “Oh, yes. I am Elka Drossen. Now tell me, please, why you have this picture.”

  Anna’s story suddenly came easier for her. Though eager to learn of her father’s death, Elka had shared no past with him, and Anna’s words seemed empty of the loss that had fashioned itself so vividly and for so long in Julia’s mind through the years. When she finished her narration, Anna waited for some reaction, or release of emotion from Elka, but none came. Sensing there was nothing mo
re to say to her, Anna stood to leave.

  “There must be hundreds of war stories like your mother’s,” Elka said softly, nodding to Anna to sit again. “That was a terrible time and both sides did terrible things to each other, didn’t they?”

  Anna sat in silence, not wanting to be drawn into a discussion about the good and bad of a time and war she knew nothing about; but Elka kept talking, slowly searching for the right English words that would make better sense of what she was trying to tell Anna. What came next from her was so unexpected that it was Anna who sat spellbound, like a child listening to a beautiful fairy tale. Born at home, Elka’s birth and terrible deformities were kept secret by Maria from the authorities, who would have taken her to be euthanized in the same killing wards at Görden where Maria worked next to a troubled young doctor. When he was transferred to Auschwitz, Maria returned to Mainz the next day, never to return to Görden. She had helped the young doctor kill hundreds of malformed babies and hundreds of the crazies, but something snapped inside when Elka entered the world as she did. From then on, Maria believed Elka’s terrible afflictions were God’s way of combining punishment for her sins with a chance for redemption. So Maria hid Elka from all eyes until the end of the war. And even then, she allowed but few of her neighbors to learn of her existence. Crippled beyond help, she had lived most of her life in the apartment, except on sunny days, when Maria would take her to the Rhine River for a joyous picnic. Later she would watch the boats moving slowly back and forth on the ancient river, loaded with tourists from America, all waving frantically to anybody who might look their way. After Maria died, three years back, Elka never left the apartment again. Instead she became even more a recluse, existing on what meals the church would bring, reading and watching an old television through the day and into the night. She would die soon, too, Elka told Anna, and death would be welcomed. God’s punishment for her mother’s sins had been with her too long. There was little Anna could say that would make any sense to Elka at this time, who somehow felt it was her given purpose in life to suffer for the sins of her mother, and had reluctantly accepted the role of doing so.

  Anna looked at her watch. She had been here for over an hour, enthralled by Elka’s unexpected life story, rather than talking about the reason for her visit, of Julia’s killing of Martin Drossen, an event that seemed incidental now and of little interest to Elka. Walking quickly to the kitchen window, she saw the Mainz taxi still parked by the building, the driver fast asleep, and motioned to Elka that she was leaving. Elka pulled herself up on the walker and shuffled slowly alongside Anna towards the apartment door. As they did, Anna glanced to the right at a small end table, barren except for a framed picture. From where she stood, Anna recognized the young woman as Maria, but it was the man’s face and eyes that captured her.

  “This must be Martin,” she said, walking over to the table and picking up the picture.

  “No, that is Dr. Erich Schmidt, the doctor with whom Mother worked at Görden during the war. They were very good friends.”

  Anna was stunned. Was he her mother’s Erich? Closing her eyes for a second, her memory brought up the face of the stranger who had spoken to her a year ago on the Charles Bridge in Prague. The stranger’s face was old and wrinkled with years then, nothing like that of the young man in the photograph. But their eyes were the same. And Elka’s, too, as Anna now realized for the first time, looking carefully at her faded listless eyes that once were bluer than a summer sky. Even as old as she was, the sharpness of her features produced a striking resemblance to the man, the deep-set eyes and sharp nose. Anna struggled desperately to understand and accept the truth of what was unfolding. Who Elka could be and her relationship to Erich Schmidt overwhelmed Anna, and she asked if she might have a drink of water. The only thing Anna knew for sure was that Martin Drossen was not Elka’s father, though she claimed him to be.

  “Are you ill?” Elka asked, taking a bottle of cold water from the Frigidaire and pouring a glass for Anna.

  “No, I am tired, I suppose, from too much traveling. Tell me, do you ever hear from this Dr. Schmidt?”

  “Not anymore. He used to call and ask how I was getting along and send a little money to buy groceries and medicine, but it’s been over a year now without a call from him. Perhaps he is dead.”

  Anna could listen no further to Elka and all that was being said and walked quickly to the door. Pausing for a second to look at Elka’s strained and puzzled face again, Anna thanked her for the time spent and left as quickly as she had come.

  Living through the conflicting emotions of the long day had left Anna too exhausted to sleep. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she looked at the lonely box holding all that her mother had been and began to cry softly. The time was near when she would go to the Old Jewish Cemetery with her mother’s ashes for burial next to Rabbi Loew’s grave. In many ways, Anna’s journey to fulfill the promise to Julia seemed almost as magical as that of Julia’s, because she had lived through the many stories told by Julia as if they were her very own. But it was the last story Julia whispered to Anna, the afternoon she died, that gave meaning to what had happened the night they were in Prague one year earlier. Julia had said nothing to Anna then, nor wanted to, shielding her as she had always done from any unnecessary hurt that might come her way.

  From Abram’s last letter to Julia, she had had great difficulty containing the joy leaping out from his words that Erich was, indeed, very much alive. There was a possibility that he too would be going to the medical conference in Prague that she and Anna were planning to attend. Yet Abram’s words carried a somber tone when he said there was much they should talk about before she saw Erich, suggesting they meet privately away from Anna. However, in her excitement, Julia paid little attention to such a private meeting—a lost love that had simmered in her heart for fifty years had grabbed her tired imagination, wiping out all thoughts of dying. It was not the time to do so, she stubbornly insisted to Anna, who felt reluctant to travel such a great distance with Julia so ill. But to see Erich’s face and hold him close once more warmed her tired body with a gentle love long dormant in her. They would meet, she fantasized, where they said their goodbyes fifty years earlier, two old lovers in the Old Jewish Cemetery by Rabbi Loew’s grave. For many years after the war, she had written letters to him, sending them to his Dresden address and the German Medical Association and any other place that might keep old records, but nothing came of them. No one knew of an Erich Schmidt. In time, she thought him dead from the war, until the letter from Abram arrived.

  Julia met Abram, as he requested, at the Continental Café, where she found him sitting alone, far back in the crowded, smoke-filled dining room. He was not smiling, nor did he try to when Julia approached. There would be room only for the tears that truth often brings. Julia heard little, nor wanted to, after Abram simply stated, “Erich was a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz.” Still blinded by her love for him, Julia tried at first to offer a feeble defense for such a terrible accusation, arguing that he was simply one of many swept up at no fault of their own by the extraordinary time and place they found themselves in. And it was so long ago.

  “No one, not you or I, can say with certainty what we would have done had we been there, too,” she said, fighting back the tears. “It’s too easy to judge fifty years later.”

  “He was a selector, Julia, on the ramps at Auschwitz. I watched him for two years, though he never recognized me, sitting like God choosing who would live or die each passing day,” Abram responded, reaching to take Julia’s hand.

  Putting her hands to her ears to shut out Abram’s voice, Julia shook her head back and forth.

  “Stop it, stop it, not my Erich, he was too gentle and compassionate, we both know that.”

  Abram lit up another cigarette, ignoring the finality of the harm it would bring to lungs already ravished by tuberculosis, inhaled once, then looked straight at Julia.

  “I came to Auschwitz with your mother and father and was near them
when they stood before Erich and were selected for death by him.”

  “My mother and father and Erich, together at Auschwitz?” Julia cried, as Abram’s words crumbled the remaining walls of denial she had built to keep the truth away.

  “Yes, they went together to be gassed, immediately after passing him.”

  “Did he know who they were?”

  “I think so, but he said nothing to them, not even their names.”

  There were no tears from Julia this time. No thoughts of the terror her mother and father faced in the moments before their death. Too many had experienced the same to say one death was worse than another. It seemed so long ago that it was difficult to imagine what it was like, or if it ever really happened, by those that weren’t there. But Abram was. And the smell of the burning bodies was written on his soul like the serial numbers on his arm. It was the betrayal by Erich of her parents that thickened Julia’s blood now with a hatred that was as distant from who she was as the earth was from the sun. This was so because only those who know love can be betrayed. And he had been loved beyond reason by her and her mother and father. Julia slid her chair back from the table to leave. She wanted no more words from Abram about Erich.

  “I must go. Anna is waiting and will be worried if I’m too late. Promise me, dear cousin, you will think long and hard about coming to live with us in America,” she said, hugging Abram, perhaps for the last time, then leaving him sitting alone again.

  Arriving back at the hotel, Julia immediately walked to the bulletin board for posting messages and calls, scribbled out four words, “Rabbi Loew ten tonight,” on a piece of notepaper, wrote “Erich Schmidt” on the backside, and pinned it to the board. If he is here, he will come, Julia muttered to herself, leaving the room.

  The time was nine-thirty. She would walk to the Old Town square and watch the vendors hawk their wares, especially those offering the brightly painted marionettes with their joints dangling like wet noodles from a host of strings. She had done so many times on Sundays as a child, enthralled as a marionette was brought to life by its owner, only to die again when he became tired with the play. Then she believed, maybe her life and everyone else’s dangled from a thousand strings held in God’s great hands as He looked down on the world’s stage. But as she grew older, she knew it wasn’t God who held the strings, but a thousand hands of people whose faces she would never see who set her course. How many times had she sat here in the Old Town square with Erich and her father, talking about this very thing. Life was much simpler then, full of an innocence and wonder few people today come to know or care to remember.

  The medieval apostle’s clock struck ten, and Julia watched while the hordes of tourists crowding the square rushed to see the march of the apostles across the face of the huge clock, a mechanical marvel that still seemed like magic to her after all these years. Turning away, she hurried towards the Old Jewish Cemetery, where she would be before the great clock sounded ten bongs.

  Fifty years had passed, and everything seemed smaller and darker to Julia as she entered the cemetery. But his voice was the same when he called to her softly from the stillness that those long buried there demanded.

  “Julia, I am here, by Rabbi Loew.”

  “I know,” Julia responded firmly, slowly inching her way through the mass of gravestones to where he was standing. The dark shadows cast across the graveyard by the night lights of the synagogue played on his face like small moving stage lights, adding an eerie dimension to the unfolding scene.

  When she drew near, Julia stopped. And though Erich reached out to her, she would come no closer to him. All she could see was his face, but that was enough. With age, everyone’s face becomes their story, their history, and it was no different with Erich. All that he had done and all that he became fifty years ago was there to be seen. Frail and wrinkled beyond belief, with eyes no longer alive, Erich stood before Julia more than a broken man because he had no soul. Julia searched his face for one tiny trace of the noble spirit that had captured her own soul, but there was none. Only a thousand rivers of sadness could be seen that once were wrinkles of joy. Though her heart was crying at what he had become, she would not let him know.

  “You are still beautiful, Julia. Age has been kind to you. You seem quite well,” he said, wanting to move closer to her.

  “I am dying, Erich, slowly, but with certainty from congestive heart failure. Two years, perhaps less, is my time. It has been a good life, though, and I am ready when God is. But tell me about all that has happened in your life. Have you married?” Julia asked deliberately, hoping Erich would begin to talk about his dark past.

  “No, I never married. And you?”

  “The same. I was unable to find you after the war. Where have you been living?”

  Erich thought a minute before answering Julia’s question, then responded slowly as if he had rehearsed his words. “I sort of holed up in Triberg to get away from everything and everybody. The war left too many scars, especially in my family. A lot of veterans would come there to soak their crippled bodies in the springs. I figured it was a good place to set up my psychiatry practice. It never did get big, though.”

  “Did you try and find me?”

  “Yes, many times, but I got nowhere. I went back to Prague several times looking for you, but thought—”

  “That I had died with the rest of the Jews? That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?” Julia said curtly, interrupting Erich.

  “No, but what you say will do.”

  “You have a beautiful daughter, you know, with your ocean blue eyes and sharp nose.” Julia blurted out, frustrated at Erich’s guarded manner.

  Then Julia told him of Anna and Scotland and Hiram’s death over Dresden and all she had done during the war, including the killing of Martin Drossen. But when she mentioned the photograph and Maria’s name, Erich became restless, clenching his hands tightly, as if the first of many stories carefully wrapped and long hidden in the past was about to be opened. Julia could not help but see the sudden agitation in him.

  “Did you know a Maria Drossen? She was from Mainz.”

  Erich paused for a second before answering her question, carefully selecting his words.

  “Perhaps. There was a Maria Drossen with me at Görden Hospital.” Erich hesitated, then stopped talking, realizing what he might have revealed.

  Julia knew of Görden and the euthanizing of handicapped children and mental patients there, and the black horror of Erich’s sudden confession quickly cleared her mind of any compassion she still felt for his pitiful humanity. The love for the Erich she once knew was still there, but she hated the man standing before her.

  “You killed babies at Görden, and people who were mentally ill. How could you, Erich?” Julia demanded.

  “Things just changed, got all mixed up. I was a good doctor who began treating people by putting them out of their miserable existence. Isn’t that what you and I were trained to do as doctors, to ease suffering?”

  Julia remained utterly stupefied and silent, looking at Erich, a man she no longer knew. What he had done so long ago was lost somewhere deep down inside of him, playing games with his mind, keeping him believing that what had happened never did. To him, what he and others had done was so totally unbelievable that he was incapable of believing it ever took place.

  “I know you were at Auschwitz, Erich. And I know you murdered my mother and father. That is why I hoped you would come, so that you could hear these words.”

  At first, Erich looked puzzled by Julia’s strong words and accusations for several seconds, but then began to cry. He had come looking for his soul in the only place it might be found, with Julia. And she had shut the door, leaving only God to open it.

  “I was only a doctor, Julia, nothing more. My hands killed no one there.”

  “They loved you and took you into their home and broke bread with you, Erich, and yet you denied them their last shred of humanity by refusing to speak to them, to even say
their names before they died. How could you be so cruel?”

  “I had no choice, Julia, with the children at Görden, or with your mother and father. They would have died anyway,” Erich said, sobbing loudly.

  “No, I won’t accept that. There were many choices for you.”

  “Not when one is afraid of dying, as I was. It’s a terrible thing to live with fear, and surviving was all that mattered to me then, to live and see you again.”

  “An either/or always exists. God has seen to that. You should know that as a good Lutheran. You could have at least fought as a soldier for your country. I could have accepted that.”

  “You don’t understand. All I want is forgiveness from you,” Erich cried, sinking to his knees.

  “I understand very well,” Julia said, her voice trembling. “I can forgive you for what you are and have become, but only those that are dead can forgive you for what you have done. And that is between you and God to work out.”

  With Julia denying him forgiveness, Erich struggled to his feet, leaning on Rabbi Loew’s gravestone, and shouted out in anger, “What about Dresden? Shouldn’t you and the world and even Hiram ask forgiveness for that terrible night of hell? My mother and father were burned alive, too, with thousands of others, all for nothing.”

  Erich’s words hit Julia hard. He had become the accuser, and she had no ready reply. Whether or not the bombing of Dresden, as it was done, was wrong, she didn’t know. She had killed Germans, too, but they were soldiers, and in war that should lift the mantle of guilt a little, even though it never does for some. All that she did know now in listening to Erich was that there was nothing left of who he once was as a man.

  “I am sorry about your parents. Perhaps their deaths were wrong, I don’t know, but a thousand Dresdens would never excuse what you and all the other doctors did, hiding behind the mask of Hippocrates. They were only Jews, Erich, nothing more, trying to live their lives out as God intended for them,” Julia said, almost in a whisper, as if trying to calm the soul of Rabbi Loew, whose grave they were standing on.

  His anger stilled, Erich looked around at the shadows bouncing off the gravestones by passing lights, as if those buried had suddenly come alive to play for a while. He had watched them many times before when he and Julia would secretly huddle here, unafraid of what any tomorrow might bring. But for fifty years he had been afraid, and that was his life. Looking back at Julia as the shadows crossed her face, too, for one brief moment he remembered how innocently beautiful she was when he looked at her the very first time. And it was still there, unmarred by her aging wrinkles. Speaking now in a soft voice, tinged with a strange finality, he said, “Those moments of forever that we shared so long ago really did exist, didn’t they?”

  “Perhaps, I don’t know. Memory can make a thing seem more than it was or ever could be. I must go now, Erich,” Julia responded coldly, turning to leave the cemetery. Pausing at the small gate, she looked back one last time at the man she still loved.

  “To me they did exist,” she said, then left.

  When Julia finished with the story, the last she would ever tell Anna, or anyone else, she took Anna’s hands and placed them over her dying heart. Fighting for each breath, her voice barely audible to Anna, she whispered, “Erich was your father, Anna. I loved him more than life itself, but he betrayed me. And, like Papa, I will never know why. We were only Jews.”

  It was the only time Julia ever acknowledged that Erich was Anna’s father, though Anna had always believed it to be true. But the words from Julia made her love her mother that much more. Taking Julia in her arms, Anna held her close, just as her mother had done with Eva, until she passed from this world, speaking Erich’s name with her last breath. Perhaps, Anna thought, looking at the gentle, still face of her mother, one can love completely without a complete understanding. And Julia knew enough to know that for her it was enough to have loved him.

  It was night now, and the throngs of visitors to the Holocaust Memorial at the Pinkas Synagogue and cemetery would be gone, leaving those buried there once more alone. Anna left the hotel with the box holding Julia’s ashes and walked the six blocks to the cemetery. Her long journey home was nearing an end. Unlatching the small gate, she stepped gingerly into the graveyard, immediately feeling the soft and lumpy sod beneath her feet. With each step she stood on a grave, quickly becoming lost among the thousands of stones rising before her like ghosts from the darkness. Standing still, Anna tried to recall where Rabbi Loew’s grave was located and began making her way slowly through the maze of graves surrounding her until she finally came upon the sacred plot.

  Kneeling down, she took a silver tablespoon from her purse and lifted a small square of the soft sod next to Rabbi Loew’s grave and cleared away several inches of the rich, black soil beneath it. For a few seconds she held the box of ashes close to her breast, caressing it softly before sprinkling the contents into the shallow grave. After covering the ashes with the plug of sod, Anna leaned forward and kissed the tiny grave and whispered, “There really was a golem when you were young, I know.”

  She left, feeling good about all that had happened today in satisfying the promise to her mother. The heavy spring rains would come soon to Prague, and Julia’s ashes would sink deeper, nourishing and bringing new life to the soil around her, as she had done so often to all who knew her.

  As her final story, Julia had come to rest at last among a hundred thousand Jews who knew her not and her dear childhood friends, the golem and Rabbi Loew. She would remain here for eternity, Anna believed, in her most sacred place.

  ###

  About the Author

  Frank Marsh was a trial attorney for twenty-five years and then a university professor of philosophy, law, and bioethics. He has published six books in bioethics, numerous articles, and scripted documentaries dealing with medicine, genetics, and law. He is also the author of the novel Rebekka’s Children.

  Other Books by Frank Marsh

  Fiction

  Rebekka’s Children

  Nonfiction

  Biology, Crime and Ethics

  Medicine and Money

  In Defense of Political Trials

  Punishment and Restitution

  Children in Treatment for Mental and Physical Catastrophic Diseases