Blood (27 page)

So evolved is the field of bloodstain analysis that there is even an organization called the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts. Thanks to modern science, we can tell if a bloodstain comes from a human or an animal. We can tell the blood type of the person who left the stain. The criminal may have washed clean the crime scene, but investigators can find traces of blood that are unapparent to the naked eye or are out of sight. Forensic analysis may well give the police many clues about who you are, what you used, and where you stood when you fired that gun or used that knife. And if they get a look at your own blood, they can extract information you may have kept secret: what you drank, what drugs you took, who your children and parents are, and what diseases lie hidden in your veins.

What the
DNA
analysis of blood tells us about a crime, however, is far from straightforward, or foolproof. It is open to interpretation. When O. J. Simpson stood trial for the 1994 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, disputes about the reliability of
DNA
evidence extracted from blood samples came to be known as the “
DNA
Wars.” Simpson’s lawyers, arguing that the police had handled the blood evidence carelessly, succeeded in winning his acquittal in court. (Two years later, however, a civil court in California found Simpson liable for the death of Goldman and the battery of Brown Simpson.)

In the end, it appears that the results of
DNA
testing of blood are similar to other forms of evidence introduced in criminal or civil courts: they may be used to acquit or convict. And the higher the stakes, the more likely the blood will be subject to competing analyses. Blood adds to the picture, and it complicates it, but it does not lessen the need for other forms of evidence.

BLOOD CAN CONTAIN MANY
SECRETS
. Some may never be revealed, and others may be exposed after lying dormant for decades or centuries. Given the endless obsession with separating people into artificially defined racial (or blood) groups, as outlined in chapter three, it is no wonder that thousands of individuals have attempted to “pass” into safer, unpersecuted groups.

In his memoir,
The Color of Water
, American essayist and saxophonist James McBride describes growing up black in the housing projects of Brooklyn, never having met his biological father, and having been raised with eleven siblings by a mother who he had always assumed was a light-skinned black woman. It was not until his adulthood that McBride discovered his mother had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family. After taking up with a black man, she had hidden the fact that she was Jewish and allowed neighbours, friends, and her own children to believe that she was a light-skinned black woman.

McBride recalls asking his mother whether God was black or white. He did not yet know his mother’s family history, but had noticed her skin was lighter than his. She prevaricated brilliantly:

“God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit.”

“Does he like black or white people better?”

“He loves all people. He’s a spirit . . .”

“What color is God’s spirit?”

“It doesn’t have a color,” she said. “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

Does this mean that James McBride’s mother was indeed not black, during all those years that people assumed she was? What made her white or black, or Jewish, for that matter? We now know her secret, but for the longest time her fictional identity was “real” for the children who must have thought they knew her best.

It is possible — indeed, not at all rare — for a person to suppress or hide one identity and to offer another to the world. Sometimes, one does so as a matter of personal choice, as in the case of James McBride’s mother. In other cases, passing out of one race or religion and into another can be a matter of life and death.

Just as those responsible for repressing and killing Jews and Muslims during the time of the Inquisition were fixated on the purity of Catholic blood, the same notions emerged during the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf
, which spews religious and racial hatred for nearly seven hundred pages, linked his so-called “Jewish menace” to what he considered to be the impurity of Jewish blood, the nobility of so-called Aryan blood, and the polluting dangers of miscegenation (procreation between people of different races). In the chapter entitled “Nation and Race,” Hitler wrote: “Historical experience . . . shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples, the result was the end of the cultured people.” Hitler’s own words remind us how deeply genocide can be linked, in the mind of the perpetrator, to notions of blood.

It is no wonder that during the Holocaust, some Jews attempted to escape extermination — and some even succeeded — by adopting Christian identities. In 1999, Edith Hahn Beer published her memoir,
The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust,
which recounts how she grew up in a non-observant Jewish family in Austria but passed for a Christian to avoid being killed during the Holocaust. She married a Nazi party member named Werner Vetter, who became a wartime officer. He knew that she was Jewish, and when she was pregnant he often told her “that the Jewish race was stronger, that Jewish blood always dominated,” but that he still looked forward to the arrival of the baby.

Hahn Beer kept her true identity hidden until the war’s end. But she recounts a 1943 meeting with a Nazi official to obtain a marriage licence. For this, she had to prove that she was “German blooded.” She had some false papers, but not all that she needed. When the official interrogated her about her maternal grandmother, Hahn Beer lied and said that she was unable to obtain her grandmother’s racial papers. The official scrutinized her, said it was obvious from looking at her that she “could not possibly be anything but a pure-blooded Aryan,” and stamped a form asserting that she was “German blooded.”

When Hahn Beer gave birth to her daughter, she refused sedatives in order to stay alert and avoid making any accidental reference to her Jewish identity. After the war, she had her daughter baptized as a Christian to satisfy her husband and ensure he would accept his daughter. But he said the baptism had no effect on him because it was the child’s “Jewish blood” that counted, and they soon divorced. Later, Hahn Beer moved to England, where she married a fellow Jewish Austrian. They lived together for nearly thirty years. After he died, Hahn Beer moved to Israel.

What if the Holocaust and World War II had continued well beyond 1945? What if Edith Hahn Beer had remained a Christian to virtually all those who knew her, until she died naturally? How would people who knew nothing of her identity have identified her religion? In a world where being seen as a Jew was a death sentence, would being perceived, treated, and even buried as a Christian have made her a Christian? As long as her secret remained intact, she would have remained a Christian to everyone except herself.

Edith Hahn Beer was not alone in her strategy. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition
Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust
notes that many Jewish children were baptized into Christianity, adopted Christian identities, and rigorously suppressed their Jewish ancestry in order to avoid extermination. Being divorced from their families, culture, and religion carried a steep emotional cost. But it saved their lives, and some were able to reintegrate with surviving family members after the war.

As the museum exhibition explains, many children had to wait until the end of the war to discover that their parents had been killed. Others were kept hidden from their parents after the war, and in some cases the families had to pay “redemption fees” to reclaim their children.

One of the children featured in the exhibition is Lida Kleinman (later Lidia Siciarz). Born in Poland in 1932, Lida was sent at the age of ten into hiding to live as a Catholic in orphanages, where she survived until the end of the war. The exhibit records her adult remembrance of that time: “We went to Warsaw . . . we were dispersed in different homes . . . Sister Sophia called me and said to me, ‘There’s a priest over there and you have to go and take communion . . . he is going to ask you . . . if you are Jewish. . . .’ She simply told me, ‘you just have to lie and it’s not going to be a big sin, God will understand.’”

Simon Jeruchim — who in 2001 published his memoir
Hidden in France: A Boy’s Journey under the Nazi Occupation
— was one of the thousands of other Jewish children who passed for Christian to survive the war. He was born in Paris in 1929. During the Nazi occupation of France, Simon and his younger siblings were sent into hiding on farms in Normandy. He was reunited after the war with his brother and sister, and in 1949, they began new lives in the United States. However, they never saw their parents again, and would have to wait half a century before learning that they had been killed at Auschwitz.

In a recording available on the museum’s website, Simon recalls working as a farmhand for a devoutly Christian family in Normandy:

These people were very religious . . . They didn’t ask any question whether I was a devout Christian or not, but it was taken for granted that I would be a Christian, so every night we had to pray . . . this was a hard floor, you get on your knees, and without long pants it is tough on your knees . . . Of course at the beginning I would mumble . . . Eventually I borrowed — I won’t say I stole — I borrowed a prayer book when I was guarding the cows and just memorized everything in one sitting . . . and then I knew all the prayers even better than they did . . . We went to church once a week . . . I don’t think she ever thought I was Jewish . . . they didn’t even know what Jews would look like. They were so backwards . . . They didn’t read newspapers. Those who had radios were the rare ones. Of course they knew there was such a thing as Jews but for them they bought into the myth that Jews had horns and since I didn’t have horns or a tail, I was okay.

The suppression of one’s blood or ancestral identity — even if it is voluntary — can exact a serious price. Hahn Beer writes about her painful efforts to reintegrate with the Jewish community in the immediate aftermath of the war. She met Jewish men who had been held in concentration camps during the war and spewed vitriol at her upon learning that she had survived by marrying a Nazi officer.

In other cultures and racial groups too, the act of passing can create great pain, either for the ones who have passed or for their children. The Canadian writer Wayne Grady, author of numerous non-fiction books, recently released his first novel,
Emancipation Day
, which dramatizes the psychological toll exacted by passing. The protagonist, Jack Lewis, has grown up in a black family in Windsor, Ontario, but when the novel opens he is passing for white in Newfoundland during World War II. Lewis falls in love with a local white woman, marries her, and after the war moves with her back to Windsor — without coming clean about his family background.

Emancipation Day
draws its title from a day by the same name in Canada — August 1, which is celebrated by many African-Canadians as the anniversary of the British abolition of slavery in 1834. Grady’s novel hinges on the tension created by Jack’s secret, and by his active suppression of the truth about his own family. Grady wrote the novel years after discovering, in mid-life, that his own father was black and had kept this secret from his son.

“I was about fifty when I learned that my father’s family (i.e. my family) were members of Windsor’s black community, and that my father had passed for white during the war,” Grady said to me in an email. “I was never able to talk to my father about my discovery: I tried, but he continued to deny any knowledge of his family’s history. ‘News to me,’ is all he would say. How did I feel? Right from the beginning I was fascinated, overjoyed is not too strong a word here: I had grown up with no extended family, since my father’s passing meant that he had turned his back on his parents and brothers and sister, and I had never met any of them except when I was too young to ask awkward questions. I felt I had suddenly been given a past. I was angry with my father for having denied me a family, a history, and I was further angry with him for continuing to refuse to tell me anything about his own past. I understand it — passing involves an enormous capacity for self-deception and denial — but it still frustrated and angered me. In fact, that anger got in the way of writing the novel for a good ten years. I had to get over my anger at my father and treat Jack Lewis as a character, with enough good qualities to explain why Vivian would fall in love with him in the first place, and stay with him when the truth began to come out.”

One of the emotional problems related to passing is that, to succeed, you must eradicate your past and convince all people who matter of the “truth” of your new, fictional identity. In the case of surviving the Holocaust, escaping slavery, or avoiding the ravages and restricted possibilities associated with racial hatred and racial segregation, the act of passing is serious business. You have to succeed. If you are caught, the consequences may be severe. You must be on guard at all times against the possibility of being betrayed by your blood.

For example, Belle da Costa Greene — librarian to the American financier and art collector J. P. Morgan, and the first director of the Pierpoint Morgan Library — was born of African-American parents in Washington, D.C., in 1883. After her parents separated, Belle and her mother and siblings passed for white, changing their names. Her mother changed her maiden name to Van Vliet to pretend that she had Dutch ancestry, and Belle took on the middle name da Costa as a way to explain her looks, considered by some to be exotic. For a woman who developed a reputation as an effective and influential librarian, and who was committed to preserving records — not destroying them — Belle da Costa Greene took an unusual step shortly before she died in New York City in 1950: she burned her personal papers. Imagine how strongly one must want to incinerate one’s secrets to expunge them not just from the living record but posthumously as well.