The Things We Cherished

by Pam Jenoff

  Roger walked inside, looking straight ahead as he passed the guards’ desk, trying not to run. A moment later he stepped off the lift at the second floor. Koch’s office occupied a corner suite that had once belonged to the deputy mayor.

  “Dykmans,” he said by way of introduction to the receptionist, who seemed to be packing her belongings for the day. The woman, blond and too heavily made up, raised an eyebrow. Roger took a deep breath. “Hans Dykmans.”

  “Is Gauleiter Koch expecting you? It’s rather late.”

  “Yes,” he lied again. As the receptionist disappeared through a door behind her desk, Roger tapped his foot impatiently, trying not to pace. In the corner, a grandfather clock ticked noisily. Watching it, Roger felt his anxiety rise—each second that passed put Magda farther away, lessening his chances of getting to her.

  The office door swung open and a short, thick man walked out wearing his overcoat. “Guten—” Koch stopped his hearty greeting in mid-sentence, caught off guard by a visitor other than the one he had expected.

  “I’m Roger Dykmans, Hans’s brother,” Roger said, stepping forward quickly and shaking his hand. Struggling to keep his voice calm, he continued before the man could protest the fraudulent introduction. “I’m sorry to call unannounced, but it is a very urgent matter. It will only take a moment.”

  “Come in,” Koch said reluctantly. The office was adorned with Nazi paraphernalia, and photos of Koch and various people whom Roger assumed were important in the Reich. Behind the desk, wide windows offered a panorama of the city below, steeples etched against the late-day sky as the sun sank low to the rooftops. “What is it?”

  “My brother’s wife, Magda, has disappeared.” He swallowed. “Their daughter, too. I came home to find them gone.”

  Roger could tell from Koch’s expression that the news did not come as a surprise. “They are Jews.” It was not a question.

  Roger hesitated. “I don’t know,” he lied. “She may have some Jewish blood. But my brother, as you know, does not.”

  Koch sat down in his chair, exhaled impatiently. “The orders have been to round up all the Jews now, even partial Jews or those who intermarried.”

  “Surely you can make an exception for Hans, find out where she has gone.” He could hear his voice rise with urgency in spite of himself. “The press coverage of a diplomat’s wife being imprisoned would not be favorable.”

  Koch paused, seeming to consider the point. “I have no idea if this woman was arrested or not.”

  “You could make inquiries,” Roger pressed.

  Koch whistled through his teeth. “And I should do that why?” Before Roger could answer, he continued. “Perhaps I could help. That is, if you could do something for me.”

  Roger stared at the man, puzzled. What could he possibly do that would be of use to the German? “Of course, if I can be of assistance—” he managed.

  “I want information on your brother’s operations.”

  Roger swayed as the floor seemed to drop out beneath him. “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t bother trying to deny it,” Koch said bluntly as he played with the humidor that sat at the edge of his desk. “We’ve long suspected that Hans Dykmans is involved with resistance activities, but we haven’t been able to prove it.”

  Roger blinked. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But Koch continued as though Roger had not spoken. “And because your brother is so well-known he’s been somewhat, let’s say, untouchable. But if I could produce some evidence …”

  It would, Roger finished silently for him, make his career. Inwardly he seethed. This man was trying to barter Magda’s and Anna’s lives for a promotion.

  “My brother has never shared with me any information about his work,” Roger managed, concentrating on sounding earnest. It was not entirely a lie.

  Koch shrugged. “Okay. It makes no difference to me whether the woman and her child are freed or sent to the camps.”

  An image flashed through Roger’s mind then of the Jews who were rounded up in the synagogue courtyard, the man he’d seen beaten. Bile rose in his throat. “What is it you want?”

  “Information about your brother’s operations that would demonstrate that he is involved. Something that would allow us to catch him in action.”

  A hand seemed to clutch Roger’s chest, making it impossible to breathe. “I don’t know …”

  Koch turned his chair so he was facing away from Roger, who stifled the urge to leap across the desk and throttle the man’s fat neck. “It’s up to you.” Koch gestured out the window. “But I would act quickly, as the transport to the camps leaves tomorrow at dawn. You can contact me at my residence this evening with your decision.” He handed Roger a card. “Think about what your brother would want.”

  A minute later, Roger stood on the street shaking. His mind reeled. Koch was insisting that he give up information that would implicate Hans. Even if he had access to those kinds of things, how could he do it? His existing transgressions notwithstanding, Hans was still his brother and the notion of such a betrayal was unthinkable. But at the same time, he could not lose Magda and Anna.

  As he started back toward the house, Koch’s last words reverberated through his mind: What would Hans want him to do? The question was more complex than the German had known. Hans was, as Magda had once said, married to his work, and it was unlikely that he would give up a valuable operation, even to save his wife and child.

  But Hans was not here, Roger concluded. This was not his call. And it was not, in point of fact, his child.

  What would Magda say? he wondered, as he reached the front door, still ajar from his earlier flight. She, like Hans, would say not to do it, that her life was not worth compromising operations that could help many. At least that was what she would have said if it were just her life at stake. But with their child, whom she loved above all else, surely it would be a different story.

  Roger saw Anna as she had looked that morning, arms outstretched upward to him, and he knew that he had no choice. In the foyer, he paused uncertainly. What could he give Koch that would be of value? Then he remembered the papers he had seen. He raced to the study and opened the drawer. He picked up some of the money, momentarily considering going back to Koch with a bribe. But he could tell even from his brief interaction with the man that his greed was not of the pecuniary kind. Only the information that could make his career would suffice.

  Roger set aside the cash and pulled out the papers. As he scanned them, his jaw dropped. He had known instinctively that his brother was somehow part of the resistance. But he had no idea of the scope of his work. How was it possible that his brother, just a few years older than he, had been able to do so much? Hans, it seemed, had engineered the rescue of thousands of Jews, producing documents to allow them to emigrate from Poland and Germany and several other countries. But the documents all related to operations that had already taken place; those would be of no interest to Koch.

  He continued further down the stack. Between the yellowed sheets was a letter detailing the visit of a delegation to a camp in Czechoslovakia—Theresienstadt, it was called. The plan seemed to involve helping some people leave the camp under pretense of an exchange. The documents were dated just two weeks earlier, and they appeared to reference events that had not yet taken place. Was this what Koch had in mind? He searched the rest of the drawer and found nothing else of interest. It would have to do.

  As he started to leave the study he paused by the window, looking down at the courtyard of the synagogue below. The people Hans was trying to save in that camp were just like the Jews that had been taken before his eyes. If he turned over the plan, they would surely never be free. Could he risk the lives of so many strangers to protect the two people he loved most in the world?

  Still deliberating, he folded the document and started to put it in his coat pocket. As he did, his hand brushed against something thick and woolen. He pulled out the mitten t
hat Magda had knitted for him and held it aloft, fingering the rough material. He had to find a way to save her and Anna, but to do so without casting aside the lives of the others and becoming a man she would despise.

  A telegram, he decided finally. He would give the documents to Koch, then as soon as he had Magda and Anna he would send Hans an urgent message letting him know that the operation had been compromised, allowing his brother time to regroup. Surely Hans had a contingency plan he could implement. Then everything would be fine. Satisfied, he tucked the documents away once more and hurried from the room.

  Eleven

  MUNICH, 2009

  “Charley,” Jack said in a low voice as they walked from the car to the prison. “Are you okay? You’ve been acting really strange.”

  “I’m fine,” she replied coldly, not looking up, fighting the urge to confront him about his conversation with Brian. To deny that anything had taken place between them, that was one thing, but how dare he speak so condescendingly of her after all that they had been through together? She wanted to ask him if the other night had arisen out of some sort of pity too. But there was no time—Brian was rushing up behind them, pushing toward the conference room and Roger.

  They hesitated at the door, none of them wanting to go first. “We’re confronting Roger about the truth,” she remarked. “Again.”

  “It’s beginning to feel a bit familiar,” Jack conceded. “Kinda makes you wonder why we’re working so hard to help someone who we can’t trust.”

  “Not exactly,” she replied, before Brian could protest. “It makes me wonder why he can’t trust us. What has him so scared?”

  Jack did not answer, but strode into the conference room. “You lied to us,” he blurted out as Roger started to rise, with a lack of control more reminiscent of his brother’s demeanor than his own.

  Roger looked as though he had been slapped. “I beg your pardon—”

  “Easy,” Brian hissed as he brushed past Charlotte, putting himself between his client and Jack. “I think what my brother means to say—”

  “Is that the clock was empty,” Jack finished, interrupting. “There was nothing inside.”

  Roger’s eyes widened. “I don’t understand. You found the compartment?”

  “On the bottom, yes. It was empty.”

  Roger stared at Jack, not responding. His confusion appeared to be real, Charlotte observed with an appraising eye she usually reserved for witnesses. He genuinely seemed to believe that the clock should have contained the answers.

  “It’s been so many years,” Brian offered. “Perhaps someone removed whatever it was that you were looking for.”

  Roger shook his head. “Impossible.”

  Possible, Charlotte corrected silently, but unlikely. The compartment was so well hidden, it would have been almost undetectable unless one knew it was there.

  “Herr Dykmans,” Jack said, his voice softer now. “Why don’t you just tell us what you expected the clock to hold?”

  The old man sat back, his hands trembling as he reached for the cup of tea Brian slid in his direction. His shoulders slumped. “There should have been a document showing that I never intended to go through with it.”

  “Through with what?” Charlotte said, dreading the answer even before her question was complete.

  “The plan to sell out my brother to the Nazis.”

  The room was silent. So he had done it after all, Charlotte thought, the full realization creeping up on her. She recalled a photograph she had seen in one of the case files of the children from the camp, the ones who had perished because of what he had done. Then she looked across the table at Roger’s hands, which now seemed covered with blood.

  “So you did it?” Brian asked bluntly, no longer remembering his own admonition to be delicate. Jack and Charlotte exchanged cringing looks, bracing themselves for the one answer that, as Roger’s criminal defense team, they did not want to know. Charlotte considered telling him not to answer, then decided against it. It was too late to hide these things anymore.

  “Yes … I mean, no, that is, in a sense.” Roger swallowed. “Let me explain. I’ve already told you about Magda, no?” Charlotte nodded, wondering if his memory was failing him or he was simply stalling for time. “One day, I came home and found Magda and Anna gone.”

  “Anna?” Charlotte interrupted.

  Roger nodded. “Magda’s child.” Charlotte was surprised at this, the first mention of a child. But Roger did not, she noticed, say whether the child was Hans’s or his own.

  “It was my worst nightmare come true. Almost all of the other Jews had already been taken from Breslau to the camps. But few people knew that Magda was Jewish, and so we hoped because of that and the fact that she was Hans’s wife, she might be spared.”

  He lowered his head, running his hands through his hair as he continued. “When Magda and her daughter disappeared, I was frantic. I searched the house, even the secret hiding place where I thought they might have gone. I knew I couldn’t reach my brother in time, so I went to one of the senior Gestapo officials for our city, a man called Koch. I thought that because he was acquainted with Hans he might help me find out where Magda had been taken, perhaps even secure her release. Koch claimed he could help me get her out. But then he said something that stunned me—that the Nazis knew about Hans’s work for the resistance. I always thought he had been so careful. Koch told me that the only way he would help me was if I provided concrete information about Hans’s operations.”

  “So you agreed?” Jack asked.

  Roger nodded. “I agreed.”

  “But you said Hans always kept you out of his work,” Charlotte interjected.

  “He did. Once, though, right before the end, he showed me a drawer where he kept some money and information on how to make contact with him in case of an emergency. I knew that there were papers in that drawer, so I searched there for something I could give Koch that would satisfy him. I found documents referring to an operation in Czechoslovakia, a plan to get some people out of a camp under the pretext of an exchange program.”

  Children, Charlotte thought, a lump forming in her throat. Roger had to know, as she had from the documents in the case file, that it was a youth exchange and that children were the collateral damage of his actions. “And you gave them to Koch?”

  “Yes. But my intention was that as soon as I found Magda and Anna, I would send Hans a telegram through his contacts, telling him that his plan had been compromised so that he could change it. I thought I could give the information to Koch but still get to my brother in time. That way I would save Magda and our, I mean, her daughter.”

  So the child was his after all, Charlotte thought. Roger continued, “That way, no one would be hurt.” He paused to rub his eyes.

  “But it didn’t work,” Jack said, prompting him.

  “No. Koch took the information, then claimed that Magda had already been removed from the city, that she was at a transit camp outside Munich. I raced there, but it was a lie, or too late. Magda was gone.”

  Charlotte swallowed. “And Hans?”

  Roger shook his head. “Arrested. He and his associates, and all of the people …” He still could not bring himself to call them children. “All of the people that Hans was trying to save were killed.”

  “So you never sent the telegram,” Jack said flatly.

  “I tried,” Roger replied in a tone that suggested he had tried to convince himself of the fact many times over the years. “Before I left to find Magda, I wrote a telegram to Hans, telling him the plan was compromised. I intended to send it as soon as I returned.”

  “And you hid the telegram in the clock?” Charlotte asked.

  “Yes, and I hid the clock in a hole in the wall that Magda had made as a possible hiding place. I knew that if the Nazis came to the house again, they wouldn’t look there. And if I couldn’t get back, I could get someone to find the telegram and send it for me.”

  “Who?” Jack asked.

&
nbsp; “There were neighbors next door, the Baders, who were known to be sympathetic to the Jewish plight. I left them a note asking them to please send the telegram for me if I didn’t return in two days’ time.” His shoulders sagged. “But I guess they never did.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “After I made inquiries at the transit camp, I was detained by the Gestapo. They wanted to know why I was nosing around, and they thought I had more information about Hans’s work. Eventually they realized that I didn’t know anything and let me go. But by then it was too late.”

  Too late, Charlotte thought. If only Roger had taken the time to send the telegram before racing off after Magda, things might have been so different.

  “As I told you the other day,” Roger continued, “I searched and searched for Magda, and my brother too, of course, though we soon learned the truth about his fate.”

  “But you never found out what happened to Magda?”

  “No, though at one of the deportation camps, I heard a story about a girl escaping and I thought …” His voice trailed off.

  A rumor, Charlotte thought, so vague it could have been about anybody. Yet it had fueled Roger’s hope for all of these years. She and Jack exchanged uneasy looks over Roger’s head. They now had the very piece of information Roger had sought for decades. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we learned that isn’t what happened.”

  “Oh?” Roger’s voice trembled.

  “Yes. I’m afraid that Magda died in the camps.”

  Roger’s face turned stony. “How?”

  She hesitated. But even as she dreaded telling the old man the gruesome truth about his one love, she knew that he needed to hear it in order to believe that it was true. “The gas,” she said simply.

  Roger’s jaw slackened slightly, his expression turning from shock to disbelief as he digested the news and the truth replaced the hopes and assumptions he’d carried with him for so long. He leaned forward, dropping his head to his hands. Then he sank to the floor so swiftly that Charlotte wondered for a second if he might have passed out. But then he began heaving with great sobs.