Ordinary Heroes

by Scott Turow

  "I will," she answered. "I will. But here's my bottom line. Leave Mom in peace. If you show her one page of this, I'll never speak to you again. And if you so much as talk to anyone else about this while she's alive, I swear to God, I really will sue you."

  Mom, by then, was suffering. Within a year of my-father's death, in an eerie reprise, she began to develop symptoms of most of the diseases that had killed him. There was a spot on her lung and serious vessel damage around her heart. The body contains its own brutal mysteries. How could an organic illness be aggravated, as it clearly was, by Dad's absence? The surgeons took a lobe from her left lung. Cancer showed up on the scans again within two months. We'd been down this path with my father. She was brave and philosophical--as he had been. But her time was dwindling. She had good days and bad. But having watched Dad slide over the cliff, I knew that if I was ever going to say anything to her, it had better be soon.

  I checked on her every day, bringing groceries and other necessities. She resisted a caretaker, but we had someone coming in for a few hours each afternoon. One morning, when Mom and I were alone in the kitchen, having our usual daily discussion, which wandered between family gossip and global affairs, I brought up my book about my father.

  "I've decided to put it aside for a while," I told her.

  She was next to the white stove, where she'd been making tea, and faced me slowly.

  "Oh, yes?"

  "I think I've gotten what I wanted to. Maybe I'll go back to it someday. But I'm doing a lot of freelance stuff now and I don't really have time to get to the end."

  "This, I think, is wise, Stewart."

  "Probably so. There's just one thing I'm curious about. You may not remember."

  She was already shaking her gray curls, the same stark refusal to be quizzed I'd dealt with for nearly two years now.

  "Well, just listen, Mom. This might be something you want to know."

  Sighing, she seated herself at the old oak kitchen table, where the history of our family was written in the stains and scratches. She was shrinking away inside her skin, a small person now reduced to the minuscule. I recited the one paragraph my sister, after months of my begging, had given me clearance to utter, my prepared statement as it were.

  "There was a woman Dad knew," I said, "named Gita Lodz. She was amazing, Mom. Brilliant, beautiful, a commando who worked underground with the OSS. She'd been orphaned in Poland and made her way to Marseilles. She was like Wonder Woman. She was ten times braver than most of the soldiers who won medals. I think she was probably the most remarkable person I learned about."

  Mom peered across the table, the same obsidian eyes my father often described.

  "Yes?" she asked. "What is your question?"

  "I just wondered if Dad ever talked about her?"

  She must have been someone he knew before he came to Balingen. I never heard her name from him once we were together there."

  Disowning herself, she remained utterly serene, the same would-be Bernhardt who had saved Martin a hundred times. But the truth, as I'd recognized, was that the life she'd claimed was the life she'd lived. Who are we, she'd once asked, but the stories we tell about ourselves and believe? She had been Gilda Dubin now since 1945, nearly sixty years, far longer than she had been Gita Lodz, the firebrand and ingenue who'd cast her spell over my father. Gita, like millions of others, had been incinerated in Europe. As Mrs. David Dubin, she had raised me and loved me. She'd been to hundreds of Holocaust remembrances and synagogue services, had worked tirelessly at the Haven to aid Jews in need, most of them survivors or Russian immigrants. Her identity was assumed as a matter of necessity, but she was loyal to it, just as she had been to my father.

  True to what Sarah and I had resolved in advance, following that brief excursion I let the subject go. I'd said what I meant to. I checked her pill counter to be certain she'd taken her medications, and prepared to leave. As usual, she asked me about Nona, whose past-tense status Mom refused to accept, even though I'd begun seeing someone else.

  When I moved toward the door, she spoke up behind me again.

  "Stewart," my mother said. You know Emma Lazar?"

  "Naturally, Ma." Emma was my mother's closest friend, a survivor of Dachau.

  "Emma remembers every day. Every day she recounts something. She walks down the street, she is remembering--someone who was raped by a guard, a man who died from eating a scrap of rotten meat he'd found, the moment she last touched her father's hand as they were pulled apart. This is what she lives. She must, of course. I do not blame her. But that is a crippled life. To go no farther. That is the brutal scar the Nazis laid upon her.

  "When I came here, I promised myself a new life. A life that would not look back. This is life." She touched the wood of the table and then reached for a perfect orange atop the mounded fruit bowl that was always there. "Right now. This is life. You know the philosophers? The present never stops. There is only the present. You cheat life to live in the past. Isn't that so?"

  "Of course.,, "The past is beyond change. Good or bad. I am your mother, Stewart. That is the present and the truth. And your father was your father. That, too, is the truth. Whom he knew, or didn't know, I never dwelled upon. He saved me. He chose to love me when that was the bravest possible choice. From there, we both vowed to go forward. For me he was a hero."

  "To me, too, Mom. More today than ever. I see him as a hero. But you were a hero, too, Ma. An amazing hero. You are both my heroes. I just want you to know that."

  When the word 'hero' was applied to my mother as a camp survivor, she rigidly refused to hear it, citing the greater bravery of millions. And she rejected the title again today.

  "I knew people, Stewart, who aspired to be heroes, to live beyond human limits because they found routine life a misery, and who were therefore doomed to disappointment. But I am an ordinary person, Stewart, who was fortunate enough to realize she wanted an ordinary life. Your father, too. In unusual circumstances, we did what we had to in order to preserve our chances to return and live normally. We all have much more courage than is commonly imagined. Every day, Stewart, as I get older, I marvel at how much bravery it takes to go on, to bear the blows existence so often delivers. I bore mine and was lucky enough to survive to have the ordinary life I desired with your father and Sarah and you, a life that means far more to me than anything that went before. Does that," she asked, in a way that made me think she actually expected an answer, "does that make me a hero?"

  They are both gone now. To quote a favorite author, "Death deepens the wonder."

  As I have acknowledged, over many months I edited, reshaped, and occasionally rewrote many of the passages in Dad's account for the sake of publication. At this stage, with the manuscript having been put aside while I waited for my mother to make her rocky passage from this world, I frequently cannot remember whose lines are whose when I turn the pages.

  I could go back to my father's original manuscript to sort that out, but, frankly, I don't care to. I've done my best. This is as real as I can make my parents, as fully as I can imagine them, as honest as I can stand to be with others, or myself. There are inevitably limits. When our parents talk about their lives, they relay what they think is best, for their sake or ours. And as their children, we hear what we want, believe what we can, and, as time lengthens, pry and judge and question as our needs demand. We understand them in that light. And when we tell our parents' tales to the world, or even to ourselves, the story is always our own.

  *

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  This book is a work of imagination, inspired by the historical record, but seldom fully faithful to it. Although I began from reported events, the action throughout the novel is my embroidery, undertaken by characters who, except for the largest historical figures, are entirely fictitious.

  My principal imaginative starting point was stories about World War II, which I heard from my father when I was a boy, before he put away those experiences and retreated into silence.
My dad, Dr. David D. Turow, trod much of David Dubin's path through Europe as commanding officer of the 413th Medical Collecting Company, which was attached to the Third Army after October 1944. From my father, who was a field surgeon at the Army hospital established in the Sisters of Notre Dame convent at Bastogne, I heard many tales that stayed with me: about that loose-sphinctered parachute jump into Bastogne; being taken captive by German troops who needlessly executed his driver; the horror experienced by the initial medical teams to enter Dachau and BergenBelsen.

  My father's stories are grossly transmogrified in Ordinary Heroes; they provided only a point of departure. David Dubin is in no way a portrait of my dad. For those who might wonder, my mother, Rita Pastron Turow, was a schoolteacher in Chicago during World War II. I owe profound thanks to her for lending me my father's files and photographs and letters (from which I borrowed several lines appearing in the letters in the novel), since they inevitably revealed many things a child would never otherwise know, including the depth of Dad's devotion to my mother as a young husband. To Peggy Davis, who added the photos and memories of her father, Technical Sergeant Donald Nutt, my dad's clerk, I owe special thanks.

  After a television appearance in which I said that my next novel would concern World War II, Mr. Robert Freeman of Tequesta, Florida, contacted me at the urging of his wife, Julie Freeman, to offer me free use of a variety of materials he had retained relating to his cousin Carl Cohen, an infantryman who was found starved to death in a Paris hotel room at the war's end. I am grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Freeman, and to Carl Cohen's sister, Dottie Bernstein of Bennington, Vermont, for sharing these materials with me, even though I have contributed nothing to solving the mystery of how Cohen fell into Nazi hands, or why his death was misreported by comrades who said they saw him die on the battlefield.

  On slender historical footings like these, the novel was then imagined. All of Robert Martin's activities, for example, are invented, although they occasionally hark back to reported operations of the OSS. There was no ammunition dump at La Saline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe. A team of U. S. . Soldiers made unsuccessful efforts around December 22, 1944, to rescue a stranded ammunition train outside Bastogne, but not in the precise manner set forth in the novel. Heisenberg did run from Hechinger, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR's death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945. Und so weiter. A concentration camp was situated at Balingen, but it was much smaller and not as heartless as what I have portrayed, which is drawn instead from accounts of Bergen-Belsen.

  With all of that said, I have tried to be mindful of the larger historical record, especially the chronology of the war, and the movement of forces, and to accurately reflect the individual experiences of American soldiers. A bibliography of the sources I consulted is posted at www. ScottTurow. Com.

  My research was enormously aided by several persons whom I must thank. Colonel Robert Gonzales, U. S. Army, Ret., a former Army JAG officer now employed at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, shared with me the manuscript of his excellent history of the JAG Department during World War II, which incorporates interviews of numerous JAG Department members of that period. I reached Colonel Gonzales at the end of a lengthy bucket brigade of helpful hands that began with Carolyn Alison, Public Affairs Officer for the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Department of the Navy. With the grace of her boss, Rear Admiral Michael F. Lohr, the Navy's Judge Advocate General, Ms. Alison put me in contact with a number of able Army historians, starting with Colonel William R. Hagan, U. S. Army, Ret., another former Army JAG Corps member, who is now a civilian employee at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and who was of continuing aid. Bill Hagan went far out of his way to acquaint me with a number of his colleagues, to whom I am indebted, including Mitch Yockelson of the National Archives and Records Administration. Dan Layering, the Librarian at the Army's JAG School Library in Charlottesville, Virginia, was particularly generous in providing me with materials, including copies of The Judge Advocate Journal, the JAG Department's newsletter during World War II, and the 1943 revision of A Manual for Courts-Martial, U. S. Army. Mary B. Dennis, Deputy Clerk of Court for the Army Judiciary, responded to my requests to obtain a court-martial record as an exemplar. Alan Kramer, Director at the Washington National Records Center at Suitland, Maryland, was a kind host and guide when I visited. I also must acknowledge research assistance from my friends at the Glencoe (Illinois) Public Library and the Western New England College of Law. Great thanks to Henri Rogister and Roger Marquet of the Center of Research and Information on the Battle of the Bulge (CRIBA) for responding to my questions. And to Michel Baert, formerly of the Belgian Tourist Office, who guided me on a trip in 2004 along David Dubin's route, I am especially grateful. He was both remarkably well informed and a congenial traveling companion.

  Several veterans of the European campaign offered comments on the initial drafts of this novel that kept me from making even more mistakes: my law partner Martin Rosen of New York; Sam L. Resnick of Bayside, New York, President of the moth Infantry Division Association; and Harold Tauss of Wilmette, Illinois. Thanks, too, to Bill Rooney and the other members of the World War II Round Table, as well as the librarians at the Wilmette Public Library.

  I had incisive literary comments from several early readers: Rachel Turow, Jim McManus, Howard Rigsby, Leigh Bienen, Jack Fuller. Dr. Carl Boyar answered medical questions, as he has often before. My assistants, Kathy Conway, Margaret Figueroa, and Ellie Lucas, kept me on my feet, with Kathy making a number of special contributions, ranging from proofreading to compiling the posted bibliography. My agent at CAA, Bob Bookman; my law partner Julius Lewis; Violaine Huisman; and my French publisher, Isabelle Laffont, each contributed many corrections to my ersatz French, for which I'm sure I still owe apologies to French speakers around the world. Thanks to Sabine Ibach for correcting the tattered remains of my high school German. Robert Marcus was chief consultant on Things Jewish. Eve Turow was a valued sounding board about many questions connected to the book's presentation. And of course the edifice stands only with my three pillars--my editor, Jonathan Galassi; my agent, Gail Hochman; and, at the center, my wife, Annette.

  I will not even begin the mea culpas for the errors I must have made, notwithstanding my substantial efforts to avoid them. I hope none of these mistakes are taken to diminish my admiration for the men and women who fought that horrible and necessary war. I can only paraphrase the remark of my old mentor, Tillie Olsen, which is quoted at the novel's end: Time deepens the wonder.

  S. T.

  Table of Contents

  Book Cover:

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  PART VI

  PART VII