The Best of Reader's Digest

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  After Eichmann’s capture, Malkin and his team spirited their prisoner out of Argentina on a plane to Israel. Eichmann stood trial, and on December 11, 1961, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, war crimes and membership in criminal associations. He was hanged on May 31, 1962.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1973, on assignment in Athens, I received a midnight phone call from Aharon. “Your mother is ill,” he told me. “She broke her hip and is in the hospital.”

  I was all she had left. Yechiel had died the year before.

  “Is it serious?” I asked.

  “Peter, at this age you never know.”

  I rushed out to the airport. At that hour there were no commercial flights, but I discovered a British Airways cargo plane due to leave shortly for Jerusalem and hastily explained the situation to the captain. He was apologetic, but firm. The policy was no unauthorized personnel on board.

  I offered him every reference I could think of. “Please,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll give you the necessary waivers.” At last he agreed.

  My wife was waiting for me at Lod Airport, and we raced to the hospital. It was just after dawn, hours before visiting time, and I had to make my own way in.

  I located my mother’s room, and as I did, I knew that Aharon had been right to call me. My mother was dying. Her color was bad, her breathing labored. I made my decision then. In almost 15 years, it was the first time I would ignore the Mossad’s gag order.

  I knelt beside her bed and took her hand. “Mama,” I whispered. “Mama, it’s me, Peter.”

  The elderly lady in the next bed turned toward me. “She doesn’t talk,” she said loudly in Yiddish.

  “Mama, I want to tell you something. What I promised, I have done. I captured Eichmann.”

  There was no response. “Mama, Fruma was avenged. It was her brother who captured Adolf Eichmann.”

  I repeated it.

  “Quiet,” said the other lady, “she doesn’t hear.”

  But suddenly her hand began to squeeze mine.

  “Do you understand, Mama? I captured Eichmann.”

  Her eyes were open now. “Yes,” she managed in a whisper. “I understand.”

  Originally published in the February 1991 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Israeli secret agent Peter Malkin died on March 1, 2005, in New York City. He is buried in the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv.

  Some Sort of Magic

  by Annette Foglino

  This extraordinary horse had a rare gift for helping troubled kids.

  On a crisp fall morning, Michele Davis opened the barn door to feed Mac and brush him up. As sunlight streamed through the barn, the horse was wide awake and waiting in his stall, blowing steam through his nostrils in the chilly air. “There’s a little girl coming to see you,” Michele told him. “And she really needs your help.”

  Later Teresa and Jeff Freshcorn came up the driveway toward Michele’s home in West Mansfield, Ohio. With them was their four-year-old daughter, Jessika, who had withdrawn into her own impenetrable world. Her condition, delay onset autism, could not be effectively treated. But when the Freshcorns heard that Michele owned an old horse who had a special way with kids, they decided to give him a try.

  You really do work some sort of magic, Michele thought as she stroked Mac’s neck. Indeed the horse had touched many lives over the years—and none more than her own.

  Back in 1979 Michele, then 32, was teaching Latin American literature at Ohio State University in Columbus. She often recalled how much she had enjoyed riding horses as a little girl. One day she decided to splurge on horse-jumping lessons at a local riding stable. She was paired with a black saddle horse, called Skunk for his distinctive white legs and white tail.

  Again and again Michele came back to ride and jump with the horse. She loved how he’d leap over fences without ever faltering. So when Michele learned he was for sale, she was thrilled—but confused. “Why are you letting such a good horse go?” she asked the owner.

  The owner explained that he guessed the horse was about 17 years old. “I want to find a good retirement home for him,” he said. Michele knew that many horses don’t live past 20. But the owner was asking only $1,500. Michele thought it a fair price, and bought him.

  She immediately rechristened him McDougall—a name that matched his dignified demeanor—and called him Mac for his easy-going nature.

  * * *

  In the next few years Mac continued jumping with ease. Meanwhile, Michele was intrigued that many people in the area seemed to recognize him. “I can’t believe he’s still around,” they would tell her. “He must be pretty old.”

  Michele traced Mac’s birthplace to Columbus. There she found an old ranch hand who had worked at the stable where Mac was born. “It was 1948,” he told her. “The owners bred that horse for color. They wanted a parade horse.”

  The owners named him Mr. Tie & Tail for his shiny black coat and white flourishes. Michele also learned of Mac’s subsequent names: Whispering Winds, One-for-the-Road, Houdini (for his ability to get out of a locked barn, a talent Michele discovered one night when he let all her horses out) and then Skunk.

  It was amazing: Mac appeared to be about 30 years old. To get a veterinarian’s assessment, Michele consulted Dr. Ronald Riegel of Marysville, Ohio. When he finished with his exam, he shook his head and whistled. “This is the oldest horse I’ve ever seen,” he said. Riegel, too, thought the horse was about 30.

  Michele marveled that Mac was still standing. When she rode him as a show horse in parades, he never missed one of her signals as she steered him into formation. Mac was a walking miracle. In 1986 Michele needed her own miracle. She had lost her university job and was broke. Eventually she was forced to sell Mac.

  The first two times she did, however, Mac got sick and the new owners returned him. Once back with Michele, Mac quickly got better.

  When a third buyer came around and handed Michele a check for $300, Mac collapsed. “What’s wrong with him?” asked the shocked buyer.

  “I think he’s dying,” Michele said, giving the buyer back his check.

  This time Mac was seriously ill. He lay sprawled in the barn, trembling and sweating with a fever.

  Over the next few weeks neighborhood children would come by to check on Mac and talk to him. One little boy brushed his mane, and a little girl read to him. One afternoon when Mac heard the children coming up the driveway, he went to the window by his stall and whinnied. That’s when Michele knew he was going to make it.

  * * *

  As Mac got better, however, Michele’s problems intensified. Although she found another job at the university, she was still struggling to pay her bills. One day a neighbor phoned her at work to tell her that her barn was on fire.

  One day a neighbor phoned her at work to tell her that her barn was on fire.

  By the time Michele reached home, nothing remained but a pile of cinders. Rushing out into the pasture, she found her three surviving horses; among them was Mac.

  “When we opened the barn door, two horses tried to run back in,” a firefighter told her. “But that old horse kept pushing them out into the field.”

  Mac and Jessika

  The fire made Michele think she was jinxed. Unable to sleep one night, she went for a walk, ending up near the makeshift barn her neighbors helped her build. As she sat lost in thought, she looked up to see Mac standing quietly at her side. “You’re old reliable, aren’t you?” she said. “You’d never desert me.”

  As Michele sat under the stars with Mac, she thought about how much he had endured. Time and again he had shown her how miraculous life could be.

  Michele resolved to press on too. Pursuing an interest in natural health, Michele began to work with children who suffered from various disorders. When word about her gentle old horse got around among the parents, she invited them to bring their children to visit Mac. It was then that Mac’s special skills started
to blossom.

  There was four-year-old Samuel, who suffered from hyperactivity. His parents found that after each visit with Mac, he would calm down for weeks. And shortly after three-year-old Payton started visiting Mac, he stopped wetting his bed. “How did you do it?” Michele asked the little boy. “I dreamed Mac told me not to,” he said proudly.

  * * *

  Mac’s best magic, however, has been worked on little Jessika. When Teresa Freshcorn first contacted Michele, she was desperate. Jessika had stopped speaking, and her eyes never met anyone’s. She only slept for 20 minutes at a time, and when she awoke, she’d retreat to a corner. One of the things that hurt her parents most, however, happened when Jessika’s seven-year-old brother, Tyler, would give his sister a hug: invariably she drew away.

  Michele suggested that seeing Mac might help. Upon arriving at Michele’s house, Jessika just stared off into the distance. “Come into the barn,” Michele said to her. “There’s someone who wants to meet you.”

  Despite Mac’s slight swayback, the Freshcorns thought he looked quite dignified. Teresa asked Jessika, “Do you want to sit on the pretty horsey?” The child already seemed transfixed with Mac, but when her father tried to pick her up, she squirmed away.

  Mac walked slowly toward Jessika and put his head way down so she could pet him. The little girl who never seemed to notice anything stared at him with wide eyes. Then Jessika’s father placed her on Mac’s back. She let out a squeal of delight, but Mac remained calm.

  Suddenly the girl quieted down and with curiosity began looking all around. Then came the most wonderful sound the Freshcorns had ever heard. A tiny voice called out, “What is that?”

  The voice came from Jessika—the same little girl who hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence in over six months.

  “It’s… it’s a beautiful horse,” Teresa sputtered tearfully.

  Jessika laid her back flat against Mac’s, letting her arms dangle at his sides. That night, for the first time in over a year, she slept without waking up once. The next day she spoke two more sentences. First she asked for water, then she announced, “I want to play!”

  Today Jessika visits Mac at least once a month, and her progress continues. She communicates more regularly. Recently she tested normal for her age in alphabetical and numerical skills.

  One day while visiting Mac, Jessika began singing. Then noticing Tyler nearby, she motioned for him to come over and play. As he did, Tyler gave his sister a hug. This time, instead of recoiling, Jessika hugged him back.

  Originally published in the August 1998 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Jessika worked with Mac until his passing in 1998. Jessika completed high school and now lives and works with her mom on the family farm. Over the years, she has continued having enriching friendships with animals including: Penny and Cardigan, a pair of miniature sheep; Calamity Jane, a miniature horse; Penelope, a rascally kitten; and Andy, her mom’s standard poodle.

  Humor Hall of Fame

  For the second week in a row, my son and I were the only ones who showed up for his soccer team’s practice. Frustrated, I told him, “Please tell your coach that we keep coming for practice but no one is ever here.” My son rolled his eyes and said, “He’ll just tell me the same thing he did before.” “Which was?” “That practice is now on Wednesdays, not Tuesdays.”

  —ANNETTE OLSEN LAYTON, UTAH

  My young son declared, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you, Mommy.”

  “You can’t marry your own mother,” said his older sister.

  “Then I’ll marry you.”

  “You can’t marry me either.”

  He looked confused, so I explained, “You can’t marry someone in your own family.”

  “You mean I have to marry a total stranger?!” he cried.

  —PHYLLIS SHOWERS SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  Cartoon by Bill Abbott

  “He’s outside setting up a tent for the kids.”

  Cartoon by Roy Delgado

  “Go sit in WHAT corner?”

  Whoever coined the phrase “the pitter-patter of little feet” clearly never heard a four-year-old walk.

  —TWITTER@MYMOMOLOGUE

  Mail from the bank was piling up for my daughter, who was away at college. So I called her. “Open one up and see what it is,” she said. I unsealed an envelope. “It says your account has insufficient funds.” “That’s got to be a mistake,” she said. “I still have plenty of checks left.”

  —PATTY HAPPY GRANVILLE, NEW YORK

  Just as I got out of the shower, my three-year-old son walked into the bathroom. As I frantically grabbed for my robe, he quickly assured me, “It’s OK, Mom; I won’t laugh.”

  —ELLA ROBBINS MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

  A friend knew that she’d overdone it with the gifts last Easter when her kid woke up to all the booty and shouted, “This is the best Christmas ever!”

  —CHRIS MCDONOUGH WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

  • YOUR TRUE STORIES •

  BLUE LAUNDRY

  Twenty-three years ago, I became a firefighter’s wife. I was told that it was going to be tough, but no one told me about the blue laundry. Tons of blue laundry, saturated with the smell of smoke, sweat and other things. It seemed an endless cycle, year after year, he would bring home more blue shirts and blue pants and all I could say was “No! Not more blue laundry!” Then September 11th, 2001, happened. As we sat in the living room watching his firefighter brothers rushed into a flaming building, I turned to him and said, “Why would they run into that!” He turned to me and said simply, “Because that’s our job.” So that night as I put yet another load of blue laundry in the washing machine, I decided that maybe a little blue laundry was not such a big deal after all.

  —Teri Jones Richfield, Ohio

  THE QUALITY OF CIRCLES

  Sitting on her mother’s lap, reading The Book of Shapes, my daughter came to the triangle page. “What’s this shape?” her mom asked. Wheels of cogitation began to spin (signified by a mouth scrunched to one side) and after a brief pause (and with the certainty of a jury foreman) she said, “A circle.” Mom asked her, “Are you sure?” (As she did whenever an answer was incorrect.) But my daughter, sensing that something was amiss, said, “Yep,” and then pausing, added, “but it’s not a very good one.”

  —Bruce May Smyrna, Tennessee

  My Fourteenth Summer

  by W. W. Meade

  A boy thought his father’s cure for what ailed him was just a ploy.

  One evening I sat in Miami’s Pro Player Stadium watching a baseball game between the Florida Marlins and the New York Mets. During the seventh inning stretch, I noticed a teenage boy and his father one row in front of me. The father was a Mets fan, by the looks of his cap; his son’s bore the Marlins’ logo.

  The father began ribbing his son about the Marlins, who were losing. The son’s responses grew increasingly sharp. Finally, with the Marlins hopelessly behind, the boy turned to his father in a full-bore adolescent snarl. “I hate you!” he said. “You know that!” He spat the words as though they tasted as bad in his mouth as they sounded. Then he got up and took the steps two at a time toward the grandstand.

  His father shook his head. In a moment he stood and squeezed out of his row of seats, looking both angry and bereft. Our eyes met. “Kids!” he said, as though that explained everything.

  I sympathized—after all, I was a father now. But I knew how father and son felt. There was a time when I, too, had turned on the man who loved me most.

  * * *

  My father was a country doctor who raised Hereford cattle on our farm in southern Indiana. A white four-board fence around the property had to be scraped and painted every three years. That was to be my job the summer after my freshman year of high school. If that wasn’t bad enough news, one June day my dad decided I should extend the fence.

  We were sitting at the edge of the south pasture, my father thoughtfully whittling a piece of wood, as he o
ften did. He took off his Stetson and wiped his forehead. Then he pointed to a stand of hemlocks 300 yards away. “From here to there—that’s where we want our fence,” he said. “Figure about 110 holes, three feet deep. Keep the digger’s blades sharp and you can probably dig eight or ten a day.”

  In a tight voice I said I didn’t see how I could finish that with all the other stuff I had to do. Besides, I’d planned a little softball and fishing. “Why don’t we borrow a power auger?” I suggested.

  “Power augers don’t learn anything from work. And we want our fence to teach us a thing or two,” he replied, slapping me on the back.

  I flinched to show my resentment. What made me especially mad was the way he said “our” fence. The project was his, I told him. I was just the labor. Dad shook his head with an exasperated expression, then went back to his piece of wood.

  I admired a lot about my dad, and I tried to remember those things when I felt mad at him. Once, when I’d been along on one of his house calls, I watched him tell a sick farm woman she was going to be all right before he left or he wasn’t leaving. He held her hand and told her stories. He got her to laugh and then he got her out of bed. She said, “Why, Doc, I do feel better.”

  I asked him later how he knew she would get better. “I didn’t,” he said. “But if you don’t push too hard and you keep their morale up, most patients will get things fixed up themselves.” I wanted to ask why he didn’t treat his own family that way, but I thought better of it.

  * * *

  If I wanted to be by myself, I would retreat to a river birch by the stream that fed our pond. It forked at ground level, and I’d wedge my back up against one trunk and my feet against the other. Then I would look at the sky or read or pretend.