My last name at birth was given as Engelbach, which was my mother’s maiden name—apparently because my parents were married within the synagogue but not at the time under Polish civil law.

Thus I was quite literally a mamzer until my parents legally wed a year later, as is notated in the record. At that time, I took on my father’s name of Epstein. You’ll read in a later chapter how my surname changed again, to Edelstein, in the aftermath of the war. 

Later, word came back through the emissaries about what had happened to poor Uncle Elio. We still attended cheder during these days. I was there with my little cousin Dov, Elio’s son, doing our Hebrew exercises, when he learned the news of his father's death at Borki-Wielke. I will always remember how brave he was. We ran home from cheder together so he could be there to comfort his mother.

You could also say that I was a mamzer by the circumstances of my birth. As part of the research for this book, in 2016 I engaged a lawyer in Warsaw who was able to obtain the release from the state archives of my original Polish birth record information, which had previously been unavailable to me. There were a few surprises. 

We sailed aboard the USS General C.W. Langfitt, a decommissioned troop carrier that had seen war service in both Europe and Asia and was now assigned to refugee transport. Tens of thousands of DPs left Europe on the General Langfitt between 1948 and 1952, when it was put back into military service for the Korean war. 

One day I was standing in the rynek when a Polish woman went running past screaming something about Jews and the blood of children. She was chased and soon apprehended by two policemen, and it turned out she had stolen merchandise from a Jewish shop. Her preposterous “blood libel” accusation was shown to be just that. 

In Szczecin, formerly the German city of Stettin, we were placed with rough-mannered but kindly Brichah guides aboard Russian trucks and driven to the border, which was nominally controlled by Polish guards. The cover story was that we passengers were a load of expelled Germans returning to the Fatherland. We were told to keep quiet in our covered truck bed but were not hidden under straw or anything like that. 

An old man sat hunched by my spot and watched what I was doing. He helpfully bent down and whispered that he would lift the wire to make it easier for me to roll under. And that is just what happened. I waited for the right moment when the sentry had passed. On my signal, the old man lifted the wire and I scooted under it. In a second, I was out! 

Focusing our urge to never forget what we had lost in the Holocaust, the charitable giving of many American Jews shifted to the astounding or even miraculous event that happened soon after. A Jewish State, the State of Israel, had been born in 1948 and, against staggering odds, had defeated the Arab armies that tried to destroy it. 

Zionist activities at Eschwege were intense. Each of the numerous Zionist parties fielded candidate slates in elections for our camp self-government. We also elected a representative to a district council and sent a delegate to a body in Palestine. My father voted mainly for the Revisionists. I supported them as well, although I was too young to vote.