Character Analysis
Gemma was a woman of many aliases, including Briar Rose, Gitl Mandlestein, Dawna Stein, Genevieve, and Grandma. (That's a lot of mystery for just one old lady, don't you think?)
Even Gemma's own family wasn't sure about her real name. "I was lucky she told me her daughter's name when we met," Dr. Berlin, her son-in-law, told Becca. "A great woman for secrets, your grandmother." (4.31)
As it turns out (according to Josef's story), Gemma herself probably didn't know her real name. Traumatized by her experience in World War II, and perhaps brain damaged by poisonous gas, Gemma escaped from an extermination camp without any memory of her prior life:
"After they realized she could speak, they questioned her: what was her name, where had she come from, who had been with her. She shook her head. 'I do not know. … I have no memories in my head but one.…A fairy tale.'" (29.86, 19.87, 29.89, and 29.91)
We'll give you one guess which fairy tale she had in her head.
Secret Identity
Before Gemma died, her family thought that she had immigrated to the U.S. before World War II. But the papers they find with her belongings after her death suggest otherwise. "The data on that entry form is August 14, 1944," Becca observes. "She didn't get here until the middle of the war." (4.92)
The Berlins were apparently not a very curious family, having asked no questions of Gemma about her personal life when she was alive. Unlike Shmoop, who would have been all up in her business, 'cause we're nosy like that.
Gemma kept her experience during the Holocaust a secret from her family for her entire life, sharing it only in the coded form of her favorite fairy tale (and one memory, apparently), Briar Rose. As we see through the book's flashbacks, telling that story seemed to be of some comfort to Gemma, but it also caused her anguish on occasion.
Whether she kept her secret because she thought she was protecting her family, or because it was too difficult to talk about, or both, is an open question that the story doesn't try to answer.
We finally learn what happened to Gemma during the war through the character of Josef Potocki, who was her rescuer. Even the details he can provide are pretty thin, but we do learn that she briefly had a husband named Avenger. (No, he wasn't a wrestler or a superhero; that was just his wartime codename.) We think that one detail makes up for Josef's general lack of info.