"No. There is no Jewish blood in our family." I thought of Dad's Quakerism and smiled. I wondered what he would have said if he had been there.
"Then why have you such sympathy for them?" He looked at me narrowly, as though he had me there.
"Because they are suffering."
"Tck." He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in the most skeptical fashion.
He took up my letter, translated into Russian, and went through it. The whole thing was a farce. I answered the questions he asked me, but they didn't get us anywhere. Of course, everything I knew about the Jewish detention camp I had written in my letter. All I could do was to repeat what I had said there. And when he asked questions like, "Who said five old men had been killed along the way?" or, "How did you know throwing the bodies into the Dnieper had brought cholera into Kiev this summer?" I could only reply, "I was told it." "Who told you?" "I forget."
When he got up to go he said:—
"This letter makes your case a very serious one. Of course, we can't have such things as that published about us. Have you ever written before?"
I said, "No."
"You aren't reporting for any journal?"
I assured him it was only a letter I had written my mother and father.