[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  “Here,” the woman said, pulling the wedding ring off her finger. “Why don’t you take mine? Maybe it will bring you luck.” She pressed the ring into Lucyna’s palm.

  A group of refugees from Lublin were living on nearby Mila Street, once a lively hub of Jewish life in prewar Warsaw. Though a dozen families were squeezed into a single apartment, Lucyna, Feliks, and David were offered a spot in a corner of a room. There had been no offer of shelter from Lucyna’s uncle, and they quickly accepted. The first night as a married couple, Lucyna and Feliks shivered on a canvas sack that Feliks covered with straw and topped with towels.

  Feliks joined a work detail that left the ghetto every morning to haul coal at the train station. He returned at night with as much coal as he could carry, stooped over from the weight of it, and traded what he had on the black market for bits of carrots or cabbage, favoring calories over heat. Still, they were constantly hungry and suffered from miserable bouts of gastritis and fever. Feliks worried most about David, who wore a dazed expression whenever someone mentioned his parents.

  “Just let me die like all the other Jews,” Lucyna whispered to Feliks late one night. “You get shot and it’s all over with.”

  Feliks understood. It was the dead of winter, and the apartment was frigid.

  “Kot kotek,” he whispered to his young wife, using the Polish phrase for kitty cat. “Kot kotek.”

  IN THE GHETTO, rumors had spread about the fate of the Jews, leaks from a place called Treblinka.

  Vernichtungslager. Annihilation camp.

  Even after the violence in the ghettos, the thought of mass murder took Feliks’s breath away. It seemed surreal, impossible. During deportations, the Germans had been telling families to take their clothing and keepsakes, letters and photos and scrapbooks tucked inside satchels.

  Still, the rumors persisted.

  In the frigid early months of 1943, the ghetto’s young Jewish leaders were forging plans to fight back. The Polish Underground had smuggled in guns and ammunition, and bunkers were being built beneath apartment houses, a subterranean maze connecting sewers to alleyways. Already, Jewish fighters had staged a daring resistance, attacking German soldiers when they had entered the ghetto in January for another round of deportations.

  Feliks just wanted to get out. Lucyna and David needed light and fresh air, the chance to see ordinary people again. One afternoon on his work detail in the train depot, Feliks spotted a familiar face, a Jewish friend in a uniform who was working on the tracks.

  “Aren’t you from Lublin?” Feliks asked carefully.

  “Pretend we don’t know each other,” his friend whispered.

  The man had false papers and was living with his family on the Aryan side of Warsaw.

  “I want to get out,” Feliks pleaded. “What can I do to get out?”

  “Come back again tomorrow, same time.”

  In the station the next day, Feliks’s friend said, “I can get you out of the ghetto, but it will cost a lot of money.”

  All Feliks had was a few scraps of coal. He thought quickly. Once, back in the Lublin ghetto, his father had pointed to the ground near his office. Deep in the earth, he had buried a metal box with the family’s jewelry and gold. “Whoever survives,” he told Feliks, “can live the rest of their life on it.”

  Feliks hadn’t thought much about his father’s promise in the awful months that followed, but now he studied his friend. Feliks described the metal box. They could go look for it together.

  “If you are willing to talk to your people and they are willing to take a chance, whatever they find, half is theirs. I only need a little to survive.” Feliks paused. “Who are your people?”

  “Polish Underground,” his friend answered and disappeared into the bowels of the station.

  A few days later, as a work detail left the ghetto, three Polish men whisked Feliks, Lucyna, and David outside the gates and into the city. They rode together in one streetcar and then another and were eventually shown into an apartment house where members of the Polish Home Army were meeting. It was the first time in months that Feliks had been in a house outside the ghetto, and when he heard rapid banter in Yiddish, he was momentarily disoriented. He peered into the next room, where a dozen Jewish people were hiding.

  Lucyna and David would stay in the house while Feliks traveled back to Lublin with two members of the resistance, disguised in railway uniforms.

  The city of his birth was bustling when Feliks arrived the next day. Work crews crowded the old Jewish ghetto, searching empty apartment houses for jewelry and valuables hidden away by the families who once lived there. Feliks quickly recognized the place where his father said he had buried the metal box. The spot had been a grassy clearing, but now it sat in the middle of a busy street.

  He pointed.

  “But that’s a street,” one of the men said.

  Feliks was certain.

  They stayed overnight in the home of a local member of the Polish Underground. The next morning, Feliks watched, astonished, as men wearing fake work-crew helmets set up a tent and detour signs and started digging in the street. Worried about being recognized, Feliks watched from inside a nearby building. The men promised to light a torch if they found anything.

  Please, Feliks thought. His new friends needed money for weapons and ammunition, and Feliks, Lucyna, and David needed to find a way to stay out of the ghetto. An hour passed and then another. Finally, one of the men lighted the torch. Feliks slipped outside and watched as they pulled the box from the ground, just where Feliks’s father had promised it would be. They lifted the lid.

  Feliks sucked in his breath. The box was empty. Everyone in town knew that Lublin’s Jews had buried gold and jewelry, and someone had clearly gotten there first. Feliks cursed his bad luck. He looked at his keepers, but they were silent.

  “I guess we can’t afford to be outside the ghetto,” he said on the train back to Warsaw. “We cannot pay.”

  “What would you do in the ghetto?” one of the men replied. “You would perish in the ghetto. Maybe you can help us.…You can work for your upkeep.”

  Feliks nodded. He would do anything. Back in Warsaw, the Polish Underground helped Lucyna, with fair skin and a command of proper Polish, secure false identity papers and rent a one-room apartment, where Feliks and David would remain hidden.

  Feliks fashioned a hiding space behind a toilet that led to the snarled, concrete guts of the building, which had been struck by a bomb during the German invasion of Warsaw. Feliks and David would come out only after dark, when their footsteps would be hushed by the bustle of day’s end, doors opening, pots clinking, wooden chairs pushed back from dinner tables. It was bound to be a miserable existence, but at least they were no longer living in the ghetto.

  A few weeks later, the sky over Warsaw turned red. The Jewish uprising, months in the making, had begun.

  Night after night, Feliks and Lucyna stood on a hilltop overlooking the burning ghetto, knowing that all that separated them from certain death was a single piece of paper that had turned seventeen-year-old Lucyna into a Christian and not a Jew.

  LUCYNA AND FELIKS couldn’t see inside the ghetto’s charred walls, where members of the same brutal unit that had liquidated the ghetto in Lublin months earlier were now assisting the Germans, throwing tear gas into cellars where Jewish families were hiding, and standing over the bodies of the dead.

  The German commander in charge of the operation would soon send a detailed report to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, pronouncing the destruction of the Jews and “bandits” and praising his loyal forces: SS staff, police leaders, engineers, and the members of the unit from Lublin.

  They were called the Trawniki men.

  Part Two

  United States

  1978–1992

  Chapter Four

  Proper Work

  New York City and Washington, D.C.

  1978–1980

  On a bustling corner in Brooklyn, in a ground-floor apartm
ent with a view of the back alley, Peter Black turned over in bed and reached for the telephone. He had been tempted to ignore the ringing, content to stay under a blanket, cursing the kidney stone that was languishing in the lower half of his body and the inertia that had so far vexed his early career as a World War II historian.

  It was just after Labor Day in 1978, and city streets hummed under a late summer sun. Brooklyn was recovering from a parade and a party, boisterous crowds of revelers who had danced down Eastern Parkway in rhinestones and feathers to celebrate Caribbean culture. In a fit of self-pity, wracked by waves of pain, Black decided that he had simply been born too late.

  Stuck in bed, he had imagined himself at the Nuremberg trials in the mid-1940s, casting light into shadows alongside a generation of preeminent historians whom he would never come to know. Instead, he was working for five dollars an hour at a data-entry job in a warehouse the size of a football field and struggling in an overheated cubicle at Columbia University’s library to finish the first chapter of his doctoral dissertation about the director of the Reich Main Security Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had succeeded the notorious Reinhard Heydrich.

  Half of Black’s 150-page first chapter was unusable, a tangle of extraneous facts.

  “Are you Peter Black?” the voice on the other end of the line inquired.

  Black squinted, cocked his head closer to the phone. “Yes, this is Peter Black.”

  “Have you heard of Boleslavs Maikovskis?”

  Black instantly recalled the name. In 1942, Maikovskis, a police precinct commander in German-occupied Latvia, had carried out orders to arrest and slaughter more than two hundred villagers and burn their houses to the ground. Black had watched a 60 Minutes report on Maikovskis, who had been discovered on Long Island, a resident of three decades. Active in Latvian organizations, Maikovskis had once served on a committee to help reelect President Richard Nixon.

  The voice of the man on the phone was clipped and efficient. The US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York wanted Maikovskis removed from the United States, and federal prosecutors needed a temporary historian who spoke German to help pursue the deportation case.

  “Would you be willing to come in for an interview?”

  FOR A WORLD WAR II historian, Peter Black was on the young side, not yet thirty, with a mop of brown hair, a Boston accent, and eyeglasses that in moments of deep concentration slipped down to the middle of his nose, near a neatly clipped mustache that he had started to grow back in college. His parents had wanted him to study economics, but Black was consumed by the past, by the inhumanity that seemed to seize even reasonable people during times of war.

  He had been something of a loner growing up in Newtonville, Massachusetts, content to spend long afternoons in his bedroom reading about the movement of armies, the slow, plaintive notes of the Five Satins playing on a suitcase turntable and a dog-eared copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sitting on his nightstand. Black played Wiffle ball in the driveway and pickup football games in a field behind the high school, but it was history that moved him, kept him awake at night in a bedroom filled with Mad magazines and comic books that at times seemed silly, given how war could turn ordinary people into murderers.

  One day, Black decided in middle school, he would study the history of Nazi Germany. By the time he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1968, Adolf Hitler had been dead for twenty-three years. But to Black, the need to understand the decisions of national leaders bent on mass murder seemed more urgent than ever in a world that had stumbled into a nuclear age.

  Black was drinking his first legal beer at a college bar on a cold night in January 1969 when a sandy-haired girl in a wool sweater walked by with a friend. Her hair was cut to the line of her jaw, and Black found himself gazing at the prettiest eyes he had ever seen, shaped like a new moon when she raised her lower lids into a squint. Mary Mattson had grown up in a small Wisconsin town along the Mississippi River, the youngest of three sisters and a voracious reader who had often recited her favorite stories to the patient family mutt, Jenta.

  Over long conversations with Mary, Black often talked about his studies in German history. At times of war and conflict, were human beings capable of deciding that it would be better to die a good person than to live as a killer? Mary listened in earnest, pointing to similar themes about human behavior in the writings of William Shakespeare.

  Black studied in Bonn, Germany, during his junior year of college. But the relationship with Mary thrived, and they married before a local judge just before graduation in 1972. Black enrolled in Columbia University to study history.

  With a doctorate degree, he figured he would one day become a history professor. But good positions were hard to come by in the late 1970s, and after a year in Germany researching his dissertation, Black took the data-entry job instead, writing his thesis at night and living with Mary in a freezing railroad flat in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In 1978 they upgraded to a $275-a-month apartment that faced an alleyway, occupied on most afternoons by the superintendent’s snarling German shepherd.

  The call from the federal prosecutor was an unexpected break. Later, Black would thank the history professor at Columbia who had recommended him to the US Attorney’s Office.

  “I would love to come in for an interview,” Black told the lawyer on the line. “But I’m lying here with a kidney stone. Can you wait a few days?”

  Black had heard whispers for years about Nazi perpetrators who had made their way to the United States alongside great masses of European war refugees. In the 1960s, a New York Times reporter working off a tip from famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal identified a housewife in Queens who had used the soles of her jackboots to beat and torment prisoners at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland.

  In the mid-1970s, a journalist who wrote for a Ukrainian-American newspaper exposed a factory worker in Waterbury, Connecticut, who had forced Jews down a narrow alley known as the Schlauch, or tube, to the gas chambers of the Treblinka killing center, built in a pine forest northeast of Warsaw. Nine hundred thousand Jews had perished in thirteen months.

  A Cleveland autoworker stood accused of terrorizing and torturing doomed prisoners as they walked naked to their deaths at Treblinka.

  All hiding in plain sight, Black thought, in America’s cities and suburbs.

  In college, he had studied the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials, in which twenty-two top Nazi leaders were tried by Allied prosecutors. Twelve were sentenced to death. Police officials, civilian collaborators, and concentration camp personnel at all levels were taken to court at subsequent trials that were held in both sides of divided Germany, the Eastern European Communist Bloc, and the Soviet Union.

  Still, Black knew that thousands of Nazi perpetrators had gotten away in the chaos that consumed Europe after the war, slipping into Brazil, Chile, Argentina, the Middle East, Australia, and the United States. Some simply went back to their native countries to resume their lives. Simon Wiesenthal and a few other prominent proponents of justice spent decades tracking them, but as the Cold War raged, Communism became the greater threat and the search for Nazi perpetrators all but ended in most of the world.

  Nazi hunting in the United States had for years fallen under the jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but the agency drew criticism for showing little interest in pursuing immigrants from European towns that few Americans had ever heard of. “Half-hearted, dilatory investigations,” berated Brooklyn congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who had pressed in 1977 for congressional hearings on the matter.

  When Black got the call from the US Attorney’s Office in New York, Holtzman had helped pass legislation that made it easier for the federal government to deport anyone found to have participated in Nazi persecution, striking down a series of exemptions long provided under immigration law. She had also pushed to create a new unit within INS singularly focused on Nazi investigations and would soon convince the federal gov
ernment to take its most significant step yet, one that would change the course of Nazi hunting in the United States.

  The operation would be moved to the powerful Criminal Division of the US Department of Justice, expanded to include dozens of lawyers and investigators, and given a new name: the Office of Special Investigations.

  On the cusp of a new decade, more than thirty years after the war’s end, the United States government was promising to track, expose, and deport Nazi war criminals who had found refuge in America. A breathtaking mission.

  Black thanked the lawyer on the phone, hung up, and went back to bed. Two weeks later, he passed the kidney stone and accepted the job, quite certain that he had just become the luckiest guy in Brooklyn.

  ON A LATE summer morning in 1979, Black stood before the headquarters of the fledgling Office of Special Investigations.

  He had spent the better part of a year hunched over a Selectric typewriter in the prosecutors’ offices in New York, forming thoughts in German and English about the Latvian police commander under investigation for war crimes. And now, rather suddenly, Black found himself in Washington, called to town to interview for a permanent job at OSI.

  The city still had the feel of summer, lush and green. Paddleboats bobbed in the tidal basin, and tourists in tank tops and denim lingered at the base of the Washington Monument, which soared more than five hundred feet over the National Mall. Schoolchildren milled about the National Archives, a sprawling building located halfway between the White House and the Capitol, with seventy-two Corinthian columns and a statue of a gazing old man holding a book that paraphrased Confucius. Study the past.