It was Molly Goldman’s last revenge – these $585 monthly reparations checks mailed to her from the German Finance Ministry.

She would hand the check to her son, Stanley, to take to the bank because the quicker it was cashed, the sooner the ministry would know that Malka Repstein – slave laborer at Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp – was still alive.

Living out her life in Los Angeles as Molly Goldman, remarried with one son. Still cashing their checks of guilt, but never, ever willing to forgive or forget.

She had lost a husband and two young children, a mother and father, eight brothers and sisters, and all her cousin’s, nieces and nephews in the Nazi gas chambers.

There wasn’t enough money in all of Germany to compensate her for that.

“The arrival of each check was a small victory for my mother, and her continued survival to collect them was her last revenge,” says her son, Stanley Goldman, who has written a powerful, meticulously researched memoir of his mother’s years in the concentration camps and their life together.

He was born five years to the day after his mother waited to enter the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

“Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream – The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother,” is the book’s title. Goldman is a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a Fox News Channel legal editor.

“Like many survivors, she almost never spoke of the specifics of how she had outlived a war to give birth to me in Los Angeles,” Goldman says. “She remembered the suffering all too well, but she never learned that her life had actually been saved by a bizarrely improbable and little known bargain struck between a single German Jew and the worst mass murderer of the Third Reich.”

For his mother, there was never any forgiveness, he writes. Her bitterness ran deep, and for years longer than the doctors had predicted, she held on.

“Although she never cursed the descendants of her tormentors, neither did she wish them well,” he says. “When the Berlin Wall fell and Germany formally reunited, my mother mourned. She could not bear watching them rejoice.”

Molly Goldman’s last check from the German Finance Ministry arrived in the mail on the 29th of the month. She died on the 30th. Two months later, Goldman received a letter from the German government asking for that month’s payment back.

She hadn’t lived to the end of the month, one more day, to be eligible for it. Goldman could hear his mother’s voice in the back of his mind, “Stanley, don’t you dare send that check back.”

He didn’t, and they never asked again.

“Sometimes I wonder how my mother would have felt about my writing this book,” Goldman says. “I think there would have been some pride that her story was being told and that I cared enough to tell it.

“If nothing else, she would have approved of my effort to keep the subject alive.”

The reparations checks may have stopped coming, but this book is now Molly Goldman’s last revenge.

Dennis McCarthy can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.