Beth Blacksin introduced herself and Paul Radbuka, then let the camera focus on the other woman. “Also here this evening is Rhea Wiell, the therapist who has treated Mr. Radbuka and helped him recover his hidden memories. Ms. Wiell has agreed to talk to me later tonight in a special edition of ‘Exploring Chicago.’”
Blacksin turned to the small man. “Mr. Radbuka, how did you come to discover your true identity? You said in the meeting that it was in going through your father’s papers. What did you find there?”
“The man who called himself my father,” Radbuka corrected her. “It was a set of documents in code. At first I paid no attention to them. Somehow after he died I lost my own will to live. I don’t understand why, because I didn’t like him; he was always very brutal to me. But I became so depressed that I lost my job, I even stopped getting out of bed on many days. And then I met Rhea Wiell.”
He turned to the dark-haired woman with a look of adoration. “It sounds melodramatic, but I believe I owe my life to her. And she helped me make sense of the documents, to use them to find my missing identity.”
“Rhea Wiell is the therapist you found,” Beth prodded him.
“Yes. She specializes in recovering memories of events that people like me block because the trauma around them is so intense.”
He continued to look at Wiell, who nodded reassuringly at him. Blacksin stepped him through some of his highlights, the tormenting nightmares that he had been ashamed to speak of for fifty years, and his dawning realization that the man who called himself his father might really be someone completely unrelated to him.
“We had come to America as DP’s-displaced persons-after the Second World War. I was only four, and when I was growing up, this man said we were from Germany.” He gasped for air between sentences, like an asthmatic fighting to breathe. “But what I’ve finally learned from my work with Rhea is that his story was only half true. He was from Germany. But I was a-a camp child, camp survivor. I was from some other place, some country under Nazi control. This man attached himself to me in the confused aftermath of the war to get a visa to America.” He looked at his hands as if he were terribly ashamed of this.
“And do you feel up to telling us about those dreams-those nightmares-that led you to Rhea Wiell?” Beth prompted him.
Wiell stroked Radbuka’s hand in a reassuring fashion. He looked up again and spoke to the camera with an almost childish lack of self-consciousness.
“The nightmares were things that haunted me, things I couldn’t speak out loud and could experience only in sleep. Terrible things, beatings, children falling dead in the snow, bloodstains like flowers around them. Now, thanks to Rhea, I can remember being four years old. We were moving, this strange angry man and I, we were first on a ship and then on a train. I was crying, ‘My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,’ but the man who kept saying he was ‘Vati,’ my father, would hit me and finally I learned to keep all those cries to myself.”
“And who was Miriam, Mr. Radbuka?” Blacksin leaned toward him, her eyes wide with empathy.
“Miriam was my little playmate, we had been together since-since I was twelve months old.” Radbuka began to cry.
“When she arrived at the camp with you, isn’t that right?” Beth said.
“We spent two years in Terezin together. There were six of us, the six musketeers I think of us now, but my Miriam, she was my special-I want to know she is still alive someplace, still healthy. And maybe she remembers her Paul as well.” He cupped his face in his hands; his shoulders shook.
Rhea Wiell’s face loomed suddenly between him and the camera. “Let’s finish here, Beth. That’s all Paul can handle today.”
As the camera pulled back from them, Dennis Logan, the station anchor, spoke over the scene. “This sad, sad story continues to haunt not only Paul Radbuka but thousands of other Holocaust survivors. If any of you think you know Paul’s Miriam, call the number on our screen, or go to our Web site, www.Globe-All.com. We’ll make sure Paul Radbuka gets your message.”
“How disgusting,” Carl burst out when Morrell muted the set again. “How can anyone expose himself like that?”
“You sound like Lotty,” Max murmured. “I suppose his hurt is so great that he isn’t aware that he’s exposing himself.”
“People like to talk about themselves,” Don put in. “That’s what makes a journalist’s job easy. Does his name mean something to you, Mr. Loewenthal?”
Max looked at him quizzically, wondering how Don knew his name. Morrell stepped in to perform introductions. Don explained that he had come out to cover the conference and recognized Max from today’s program.
“Did you recognize the guy-Radbuka, wasn’t it? The name or the person?” he added.
“You’re a journalist who would like me to talk about myself to you?” Max said sharply. “I have no idea who he is.”
“He was like a child,” Carl said. “Utterly unself-conscious about what he was saying, even though he was recounting the most appalling events.”
The phone rang again. It was Michael Loewenthal, saying that if his father had Calia’s dog to please come home with it.
Max gave a guilty start. “ Victoria, may I call you in the morning?”
“Of course.” I went into the back to get a card from my case so that Max would have my cell-phone number, then I walked out to the car with him and Carl. “Did you two recognize the guy?”
Under the street lamp I saw Max look at Carl. “The name. I thought I recognized the name-but it doesn’t seem possible. I’ll call you in the morning.”
When I went back inside, Don was in purdah again with a cigarette. I joined Morrell in the kitchen, where he was washing Carl’s brandy glass. “Did they tell all away from the prying ears of journalism?”
I shook my head. “I’m beat, but I’m curious, too, about the therapist. Are you guys going to stay up for the special segment with her?”
“Don is panting for it. He thinks she may be his career-saving book.”
“You’d better believe it,” Don called through the screen door. “Although the guy would be hard to work with-his emotions seem awfully volatile.”
We all returned to the living room just as the “Exploring Chicago” logo came up on the screen. The show’s regular announcer said they had a special program for us tonight and turned the stage over to Beth Blacksin.
“Thank you, Dennis. In this special edition of ‘Exploring Chicago,’ we have the opportunity to follow up on the exciting revelations we heard earlier today, exclusively on Global Television, when a man who came here as a boy from war-torn Europe told us how therapist Rhea Wiell helped him recover memories he had buried alive for fifty years.”
She ran a few segments from Radbuka’s speech to the convention, followed by excerpts from her own interview with him.
“We’re going to follow up on today’s extraordinary story by talking to the therapist who worked with Paul Radbuka. Rhea Wiell has been having remarkable success-and started remarkable controversy, I might add-with her work in helping people get access to forgotten memories. Memories they’ve usually forgotten because the pain of remembering them is too great. We don’t bury happy memories so deep, do we, Rhea?”
The therapist had changed into a soft green outfit that suggested an Indian mystic. She nodded with a slight smile. “We don’t usually suppress memories of ice-cream sodas or romps on the beach with our friends. The memories we push away are the ones that threaten us in our core as individuals.”