by Ilsa J. Bick
Of note is the fact that Witek had recently been named as the union’s representative in ongoing negotiations. As of ten days prior to the murder, however, talks had broken down and the foundry faced the near-certainty that Witek would recommend that the local call a general strike. News of the union’s intentions sent Eisenmann Manufacturing stock tumbling and created a ripple effect throughout the region, angering many. There is the widespread belief that the Jewish-dominated union local, most of whose members hail from Eastern Europe, is taking advantage of the nationwide shortage of skilled laborers and might be behind the recent call to close Camp Winter.
“You have no idea how much we depend on that foundry,” says Edith Werner, owner of Werner’s Bakery on 13th and Main. “We serve the foundry people. Sure, there’s the farmers, but there’s no way I could stay in business if I had to rely on seasonal farm labor. Mr. Eisenmann’s family has been the best thing to happen to Winter. Without them, we wouldn’t even be on the map, and there are some of us thinking of circulating a petition that we rename the town after the Eisenmanns. It’s really their town, and we’re their people. If that foundry shuts down for more than a week or so, I’ll go under. Those union people, those Jews, I’ve heard about the trouble they’re making in Chicago and New York. They like the Socialists so much? Let them go back to Russia.”
“That’s ludicrous,” says Saltzman, when informed of the prevailing attitude. “We’re Americans. Our people have faced persecution after persecution. Our parents came to this country for the freedoms and opportunities for which this nation was founded, and those of us who came a decade ago were fleeing the very oppression for which our soldiers have fought and died. None of us wants to return to that. One of the beauties of America is the freedom to insist upon social justice, and that’s what we’re doing.”
In line with Mr. Saltzman’s assertion, it is of interest to this reporter that prevailing opinion has not stopped the synagogue’s board of directors from continuing to show support for union officials. An emergency meeting of union members is planned for this coming Sunday, a move that has outraged certain members of the Christian community.
“Sunday is God’s day,” declares one pastor, who asked to remain anonymous. “For these people to hold their meeting on the Sabbath is an affront to every decent Christian in this town.”
Several church groups have suggested that they would organize their own vigils.
Synagogue officials had no comment.
“Wow.” Sarah dropped into a chair. “I didn’t know anything about this, did you? The murder and the unions . . . there was a synagogue here?”
“That’s what it says. Do you realize that there may not be any other Jews left in town except Mr. Witek?”
“I can believe it. I’ve never met any that I know of, and the mayor has a meeting every other month with all the pastors and stuff to talk . . . I dunno . . . religion or something. Dad’s never mentioned any Jewish people.” She ran her gaze over the story again. “And a prison? I didn’t know that either.”
“Me either.” To say that I was stunned is putting it kind of mildly. Reading that newspaper article was like opening some forgotten closet and having all this junk spill out. Remembering my list, I read the article through again. At the article’s mention of Marta, I wrote Sister, age 17 and next to David, I penciled age 8.
“What are you doing?” Sarah peered at my list. “Hey, you already knew some of this.”
“Not really. I’d just heard it around.” I was busily penciling in new items now: unions, Chana Witek, Albert Saltzman, Beth Tikva . . . and Camp Winter? What was that? The prison? I said, “Hey, isn’t there a way to print out a copy of this?”
Just as Sarah showed me what to do, Miss Maynard stuck her head in the door. “I’m closing up in five minutes. You two need to wrap things up.”
My eyes jerked to the wall clock: quarter to five. “But you close at five. We’ve still got a couple minutes. Ten, at least.”
Her face hardened. “There are things that need doing that I always do in a certain order. Miss Schoenberg here has never complained. Now I’m sorry, but if you want to use our resources, you will abide by our rules.”
She didn’t sound sorry. Sarah jumped in: “No problem. We’ll be out in a few minutes.” Sarah waited until she was gone and then hissed, “Don’t piss her off.”
“Sorry.” I wasn’t, though. “There’s just so much stuff. I mean, we got a bunch of things.”
“Well, you did. Too bad we can’t just get a key and do this on our own time. I didn’t get anything done.”
“I’m sorry.” This time, I meant it. “I took up all your time.”
She patted my shoulder. “That’s okay. Really, I could be at this forever, figuring out who owned the house when— and that’s not even counting if maybe there were boarders or which servants were here when and all the renters. Better for me to wait until the forensic anthropologist gives us an approximate date.”
I was reaching forward to unlock the microfiche from its holder when my hand accidentally knocked the rewind button. Several pages blurred by before I shut the action down, and when I looked again, I was on August 22. My gaze snagged on a small headline in the bottom right corner: Camp Winter to Close.
And beneath, in much smaller type: Prisoners to Head West.
I glanced at the copy of the October article I’d just been reading. That had mentioned a Camp Winter too, and I wondered again if that had been the name of the prison. I reached forward to center the page, but then Maynard appeared right at my elbow, like a schoolteacher.
“We are closing now.” She reached forward to unlock the film holder.
“Sorry,” I said, beating her to it. “I’ll get it. I just want to . . . ” I quickly hit Print, the machine chugged, and three seconds later, a copy of the newspaper page slid into a holding tray. Without even glancing at the paper, I jammed it into my pocket and hit the rewind. In twenty more seconds, the spool of film was back in its box, and Sarah and I were heading out the door.
“Thank you,” Sarah called over her shoulder. “See you maybe tomorrow?”
Maynard gave a wintry smile. “I don’t work on Fridays,” she said and locked the door behind us.
Walking to our bicycles, Sarah said, “Witch. What did you get?”
I told her and then said, “I’m not sure I really got it. I didn’t have time to center the page in the viewer.” I fished the crumpled paper from my hip pocket and smoothed it out on my bike seat. I saw at once that the print was horribly crooked, tilted on a left diagonal. But the story was there, the letters a little smeary but legible. I scanned the article—and that chill finger tripped up and down my spine once again.
“What’s the matter?” Sarah touched my arm. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Not a ghost.” I turned the paper around for her to see. “But just about as bad.”
Sarah’s eyes widened as she read. “Oh my God,” she said.
XX
Dr. Rainier scowled. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true.” I pulled out the copy of the news article.
She read straight through, her scowl deepening. When she reached the end of the story, she turned the paper over, saw that it was blank and then looked up at me. “Where’s the rest?”
I was chewing the side of my thumb. “I didn’t get a chance to read the rest. Heck, I barely got that; the lady was so hot to get us out of there. Ten more minutes, I’d have gotten the rest and maybe found even more. But . . . I mean . . . I didn’t know anything about this. No one in town has ever talked about it. Uncle Hank’s never said anything.”
“Your uncle hadn’t been born yet. He was born in . . . what? Late sixties, early seventies?” She tapped the paper with a fingernail. “This would’ve happened more than twenty years before, and from what I can gather, it sounds like something you might not want to publicize.”
“You think?” I gave a disbelieving laugh. “So here’s the
thing: just when, exactly, did the Nazis come to town?”
Okay, “Nazis” was a bit extreme. Maybe.
See, I was right about one thing: Camp Winter was a prison, but not just any old prison. Camp Winter was for prisoners of war—and the PWs who came to live and work in Winter were Germans, captured overseas and shipped stateside.
Kind of explained the swastikas, though.
There was tons of information on Google. Dr. Rainier read.
“Well, it says here that between the years 1942 and 1945, there were about half a million prisoners of war in the United States. They weren’t all Germans; there were Japanese and Italians too. Apparently, we started bringing prisoners over here in 1942 because there were rumors that Hitler was going to air-drop weapons to all the PWs in Britain—”
“Why do all the articles keep calling them PWs and not POWs?” I asked.
“If I had to guess, I think it’s about propaganda. Germans kept POWs. We just held prisoners. It’s all about semantics.”
“Wow. I didn’t know any of this. No one’s ever talked about this kind of thing here.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s kind of a theme around here,” said Dr. Rainier. She tapped her computer screen. “Anyway, it says here that since the Allies were planning an invasion of North Africa, the U.S. agreed to take custody of all PWs captured from November 1942 on. They shipped the prisoners back here on liberty ships and housed them at military installations.”
“But there are no military bases here—at least, not in Winter. I mean, there’s the National Guard, but . . .”
“Hang on, I’m getting there.” Click-click. “Hmmm. The first camp selected was Camp McCoy down in Monroe County. McCoy served as a base camp but eventually housed most of the Japanese prisoners and . . . oh, this is interesting. The very first prisoner of war to arrive in the United States went straight to McCoy, a guy named Samaki Kazuo captured at Pearl Harbor.
“Anyway, the military established other base camps around the state, wherever there were manpower shortages. A bunch of PWs worked in canning factories; others worked in the fields. They would stay until the work was done—sometimes only a few months—and then move on.”
I thought about my vision—when I’d been David Witek— of men bent over rows of beans—and then of the other two uniformed men with rifles on horseback: guards.
Dr. Rainier was still talking: “But there were also requests made to loan out prisoners to other industries. In fact, it says here that there were prisoners farmed out to every single state except Nevada at one point or another. The pay was minimal, about eighty cents a day, but the theory was that you kept people busy and gave them some money in their pockets so when they were released, they could go back and start their lives fresh. As near as I can make out, there were prisoners of war in the U.S. until late 1946 . . . so, more than a year after the war was finally over.”
She made more interested-sounding noises. “Well, this might explain why no one knows. This paper—guy out of Madison—says that the whole thing was kept very low-key: virtually nothing in the national newspapers. Because of various shortages, small-town newspapers weren’t published as regularly, a lot of news got diluted, and even on those rare occasions when prisoners escaped—”
“Escaped?” I was thinking of my time trip: one guard per truck, the prisoner driving. “Like got away?”
“That’s what it says.”
“Did they catch everyone?”
She studied the paper a few seconds and then shook her head. “Doesn’t say. You know, I’m not sure you would report something like that back then. Can you imagine the response? Can you imagine it now? People in Wisconsin love their guns. They’d shoot each other on general principle.”
“Yeah. Some lady might’ve blown her husband coming back from second shift.”
“Exactly. Anyway, in a lot of cases, when prisoners escaped, the story was never really circulated because by the time the paper came out, it was old news and the guy had been caught. You know, I’m amazed these communities tolerated the prisoners at all.”
“Are you kidding?” When she turned a surprised look in my direction, I went on: “You’re not from here, so you don’t know. Most everyone in town is German or just about, one way or another. That’s one thing I do know about Winter history: the first Eisenmann went out of his way to make Germans and Austrians feel right at home, and most of them stayed.”
“Well,” said Dr. Rainier, thoughtfully, “I’ll bet some of those German PWs would’ve felt right at home.”
“You know, though,” I said, “one thing I don’t get. The article from August says that Camp Winter was supposed to close. But if you look at the article from October, it’s still open. So what changed? Why would it still be open? If they’re working the fields . . . well, that’s all done. There’s no work left to do in Winter except . . .” I stopped.
“Except in the foundry,” said Dr. Rainier. “Except for Eisenmann.”
We stared at each other a moment. “Would Eisenmann have done that?” I asked. “Used the Germans?”
“To break the union?” Dr. Rainier cocked her head. “He’s a businessman. They’re cheap labor. Why not?”
“Boy.” Dr. Rainier huffed out a breath. “Imagine being Jewish and knowing what’s gone on in Germany, and then the richest guy in town brings in German soldiers. No wonder the Jews here were upset.”
“Yeah, but where did they all go? How come there aren’t any left?”
“Well, there is one.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe I’m so stupid. I’ve walked by that mezuzah on his door every day and never really looked at it.” I’d never heard the term before, and Dr. Rainier explained and then said, “But, of course, that’s what it is. Makes me wonder how many other people even know that he’s Jewish.”
“Or why he came back. Maybe he’s always been here.”
“I don’t think so. Like you said, it’s a small town. Granted, I haven’t gone over his entire chart, but he’s been at the home for the last ten years or so and fairly incompetent for the last four.”
I said, “Once he’s gone, then they’re all gone. Forever. When Mr. Witek dies, it’ll be like the Jews were never here.”
“You know what they say: History’s written by the winners.” Dr. Rainier tapped the newspaper story about the murder. “Sounds like there was a fight brewing between the union local and Eisenmann. In this case, it sounds like the town pretty much identified the union with the Jewish community. That’s understandable, considering that the union met in the synagogue. But I’ll tell you what really bothers me—that little bit about some church groups being upset about the meeting on a Sunday. Maybe . . .”
“What?”
She chose her words carefully. “Maybe things got . . . out of hand.”
I went cold all over when Dr. Rainier said that. “Like, maybe there was a fight. A big one. And the Jews lost.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” said Dr. Rainier.
XXI
We were nearly through the hour when Dr. Rainier said, “I don’t know if this is the right time to bring this up, but I’ve been doing some digging myself and found some pretty interesting stuff—at least as it concerns Mr. Witek.
”My mind was still grappling with the image of German prisoners
the prisoners are staring out through the open boxcars
marching down Main Street and so it took me a second to focus.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Dr. Rainier folded her hands over her knees. “You asked me if I believed in ESP, and I said no. But then I got to thinking about what you’d said about when you drew that picture, the one that’s the same as in Mr. Witek’s room, and so I did a little research of my own.”
“On ESP?”
“Sort of. On brain injury and changes in function following such an injury. Mr. Witek’s stroke happened about a month ago. About a week before you came to the home, he had another . . . event. I don’t
really know what you’d call it, but his brain showed a sustained and very intense burst of activity. If I’m not mistaken, it happened right around midnight, and I recall that when I looked at the record the next morning and went over it with the neurologist at the hospital, we both agreed: it looked like a variant of high-intensity REM activity but predominantly right-sided.”
“REM sleep. I’ve heard of that. Isn’t that when you dream?”
“That’s right. There’s so much about the brain we don’t know, and when a patient’s in terminal-stage Alzheimer’s, you’ve got widespread dysfunction. Some regions of the brain may actually be disinhibited.”
“Disinhibited . . . You mean, they wake up?”
“That’s a good way of putting it. Newborns have a whole repertoire of reflexes we adults don’t. That’s because their brains are immature. As you grow, you develop more function that covers over these primitive reflexes.”
“So, in Alzheimer’s, it’s like the brain goes into reverse.”
“Somewhat. So, maybe, some brain capabilities we never fully appreciate come to the fore—not just the return of primitive reflexes but perhaps other functions and abilities. . . .” She paused for a beat, as if for emphasis, then continued, “Faculties we would never see otherwise.”
Other abilities. Other faculties. I knew where she was going with this. Abilities like . . . telepathy? Like my brain as some kind of receiver?
She said, “Now, it’s a fact that sleep architecture is greatly disturbed after you’ve had a stroke. Some patients barely sleep at all, and this, of course, leads to a lot of post-stroke confusion and disability. What happens to dream sleep after you’ve had a stroke is pretty interesting too. Depending upon which side of the brain you have your stroke, you can either dream more or less. Mr. Witek had a left-sided stroke. People like him dream more and for longer periods of time, and it doesn’t take as long after they’ve fallen asleep for REM sleep to begin.”
