Under the Egg

by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

  “Turn that TV off, will you? I must have fallen asleep during the baseball. What was your name again, sweetheart?”

  “Theo Tenpenny.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll just forget it again. The old short-term memory is shot.” He scratched under his yarmulke. “But I can remember something that happened fifty years ago like it was yesterday.”

  Bodhi and I exchanged a look.

  “That’s why we’re here.” I switched off the surfing and pulled up a chair. “I just found out that Jack—that’s Jack Tenpenny, remember?—was in the war. Maybe in the Berga camp. I’m wondering if you were there together.”

  “Well, sure. We were the only New Yorkers in our platoon, so we hit it off right away—even though he was a Yankees fan. I was a Dodgers fan, but when they left for Hollywood, I switched my allegiance to the Mets.” He gestured to the pennants over his bed. “Do you know the score of the game, by the way?”

  Bodhi checked her phone. “6–2, Red Sox. Tough luck, Mr. Novak.”

  He sighed. “Red Sox. How did their luck change all of a sudden? Hey, call me Mo, why don’t you? My grandchildren do.”

  “So, Mo,” I broke in, “you were with my grandfather when he was captured?”

  “Yep. We got picked up trying to scout a better position for the Krauts to shell us.”

  “Were you sent to the POW camp then?”

  “Yes, but that was Stalag IX-B. Nice accommodations there. Two hundred and fifty men to one drafty wooden barracks. Cracks an inch wide in the middle of January. And some of our boys without overcoats.”

  “No coats? How did you—”

  “How did we stay warm? We didn’t. We froze our tuchuses off. A couple of times a day we got some coffee made out of acorns and some ‘grass soup,’ we called it. And once a day we got a loaf of bread to share among four men: a paperweight made of flour and sawdust.” He shuddered to remember it. “And you wouldn’t believe the folks here who complain about the turkey tetrazzini.”

  “That sounds awful.”

  “The turkey tetrazzini? Nah, it’s not so bad.”

  “No, the food at the camp.”

  “I tell you what was awful. That soup moved right through you. Two hundred and fifty guys with dysentery to one latrine. You couldn’t even call it a latrine—just a hole in the ground. No baths. No showers. Not even toilet paper.”

  Now I shuddered. “But you didn’t stay there?”

  “No, not long. After about a month, the guards told our officers to turn over any Jews in the camp. Our guys told them where to go, of course. Word spread not to answer any questions about your religion. Some Jewish guys buried their dog tags. Our dog tags had an H on them for “Hebrew,” you see. But then the guards started pulling anyone with a name that sounded Jewish or anyone who looked Jewish and moving them to a separate barracks. I went ahead and volunteered.”

  “You volunteered?”

  “Yes, I did. I went in the army as a Jew. I fought for the right to be a Jew. If I was going to die, it was going to be as a Jew. And honestly I thought, how much worse could it be?”

  “But Jack isn’t—wasn’t—Jewish. How did he end up with you?”

  “The guards didn’t have enough Jews to fill their quota, so they added in some troublemakers, and then just pulled men at random. I think Jack was one of the last recruits.

  “They loaded us into boxcars. Five days with no heat, no food, no water. Only the snow that fell through the barred window.

  “When we finally got to Berga, it looked like the same kind of setup we were used to, except there were these inmates at this camp; we called them ‘zombies.’ They looked like the walking dead. Like skeletons in pajamas. One of them wandered up to me and asked me a question. I answered him without even thinking about it, and then I realized we were speaking Yiddish. He was a Jew, like me. That’s when I understood what was happening to the Jews of Europe. And what was going to happen to us.”

  “But isn’t that why you enlisted?” I asked. “To fight for the Jews?”

  “Bring me another oxygen tank, will you, honey?” Mo gestured to a collection of tanks in the corner, and I dragged one over. He labored to breathe as he made the switch. “We knew the Jews were being persecuted under the Nazis. We’d heard about some synagogues and businesses being burned. But we didn’t know they were being slaughtered. We didn’t know the plan was to work us to death.

  “See, the Germans were getting desperate. They needed labor to work the mines up in the mountains there. That’s where we came in. And those inmates in pajamas? Transfers from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. We didn’t know about those places yet either.

  “We were sent to these mines to break rocks, shovel debris, hand drill holes for dynamite. We carried rocks and dug holes with our bare, chapped, bleeding hands.” Mo lifted his wrinkled hands and looked at them. “No gloves. No masks. Just breathing that dust filled with rock particles, in and out, ten hours a day. That’s probably how I ended up with this thing.” The oxygen tank gave off a clang as he flicked it with his finger. I realized that Jack’s asthma wasn’t something that kept him out of the war—it was something he’d brought back from it.

  “If you moved too slow, you got a beating. If you dropped a load of rocks, you got a beating. If you stopped to catch your breath, you got a beating. Trouble was, we were on starvation rations. Even less food than we got at Stalag IX-B. None of us were in any condition to work at all, let alone hard labor. So you could count on a beating every day.

  “We were all starving, all the time. But lucky for us, Jack and I got pulled up for kitchen duty. That’s why we survived, I’m sure of it. The work was still tough: it took four men to pull these wagons with fifty-gallon vats of soup down a steep hill to the camp, and then back up the hill again. If you spilled any—”

  “You got a beating,” finished Bodhi.

  “Right,” said Mo, and he smiled a bit to see that we were actually listening. “But it was worth it. We got a bit of extra food here and there. And the best part was that, when we were pulling the cart, we could actually talk. Three of us, at least. The other guy only spoke Serbian.”

  “But the other three of you spoke English?”

  “Yep. Mostly we talked about food. Meat loaf and pot roast and pies and my grandma’s kugel and Thanksgiving turkey and fresh-split watermelon. And coffee, real coffee.” Mo seemed lost in a reverie, but then remembered something. “You girls want some cookies?” He produced a tin lined with waxed paper. “My niece brought rugelach. Cinnamon.”

  I could relate to Mo’s food fantasies. Even with a belly full of beets, I thought constantly of the foods I wanted but couldn’t have. I also understood Jack’s lifelong obsession with our pantry’s state of readiness. As I eagerly selected a flaky pastry, Bodhi elbowed me. “The painting.”

  I’d almost forgotten. “Did Jack ever talk about a painting?”

  “No,” said Mo as he helped himself to a rugelach. “No, that was Max.”

  “Who’s Max?”

  “Oh, I haven’t mentioned Max?” Mo brushed the crumbs off his stubbled chin and clapped his hands together. “Max Trenczer. Everyone knew Max. He practically ran the camp.”

  “He was a guard?”

  “No, he was a prisoner! A real wunderkind, this one. Polish by birth, I think, but he’d been some rich big shot in Paris before the war. He spoke a bunch of languages, all of them fluently. He would joke with the guards in perfect German, and they’d laugh and look the other way when he slipped extra bits of food in his pocket. He knew how to keep them happy, you see. If you had something of value—some of the prisoners still had watches or rings or even money somehow—you’d bring it to Max, and he’d trade it to the guards for extra food or cigarettes or clothing. He’d take a little off the top, sure, but he always made a fair trade.”

  “But he talked about a painting, you said?�
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  “Yeah. When we weren’t talking food, Max and Jack talked art. Max had had a gallery in Paris before the Nazis got it. So Max and Jack talked about the paintings in his gallery, the ones he’d seen in all the big museums. And there was one in particular he talked about a lot.” Mo’s voice trailed off.

  “Could you describe it?” I nudged gently.

  “Sure I can.” His voice caught in his throat, and he turned toward the window, with its view of a neighboring brick wall. “See, we were surrounded by ugliness. Up to our ankles in waste, surrounded by beatings and hunger. This was part of the Nazis’ plan, do you see? To make even us believe that we had no place on this earth. But then the ugliness, the brutality would be pierced by this ray of beauty, and you’d think . . .”

  He began again. “I remember in this painting there was a bird, a bird flying. And one day, as Max described it for the hundredth time, I heard a songbird up in the trees—maybe a lark? I don’t know; I’m a city boy, I only know pigeons. But whatever it was, this bird sat and sang on that tree as the snow dripped in the sun, and there was spring in its song. Spring was coming, and I saw that if I could just make it till spring—well, the Allies were closing in. So every day, as I was pulling this wagon of slop, I would listen for that bird. And I would tell myself, ‘Just one more day.’”

  “A bird?” Now my voice caught in my throat. “Did the painting have a bird with a mother and child?”

  “Yes, that was it.” He looked back at me. “Did Jack tell you about it?”

  I pressed on. “Did Max still have it? In the camp?”

  “No, that was the thing. He’d traded it. When the Nazis rounded up the Jews in France, they said they’d just take the adults and leave the kids. But who knew how long that would last? Max had a little girl, about four or five years old. He was crazy about her. When he wasn’t talking about the painting, he was talking about Anna. Anna this, Anna that. Anyway, when Max got word that he and his wife were being sent east, he promised the painting to some Nazi officer he knew—I’m telling you, he knew everyone—if the guy could get his daughter to safety. There was something about the painting that made him think the Nazi would do anything to get his hands on it.”

  “Did Anna get out? Where did they send her?”

  “He didn’t know. Probably Spain. Maybe Switzerland. Max and his wife were sent to Auschwitz, where the wife was gassed immediately. He figured out soon enough that his family back in Poland was gone, too. Max was a big guy, so they kept him for labor, and pretty soon he’d gotten himself transferred to Buchenwald and then to Berga. He could make any trade, like I told you.” Mo sighed. “But he died without ever knowing if his daughter was safe.”

  “He died in the camp?”

  “He died with your grandfather! Making that escape almost got the rest of us killed.”

  “You were there when my grandfather escaped?”

  Mo looked proud. “There? I knew all the plans! Your grandfather knew the Americans were getting close. He figured that with his Aryan looks and Max’s German they could bluff their way through the countryside, all the way to the Allied lines.”

  “Did you go with them?”

  “They asked me to, but I said no. I thought I had a better chance waiting it out in the camp kitchen than in some German farmer’s barn. Max got his hands on a couple of Nazi uniforms, and every night after roll call, they’d put them on under their clothes. The guards turned off the electricity during the night air raids, you see, and Max and Jack would be able to crawl under the electrified fence and slip into the forest.

  “So finally one night there was a raid, and they ran for the fence as soon as the guards cut the juice. But Max got his jacket caught on the wire, and by the time the lights went up, there he was. And it was all over. One shot.”

  “But Jack got away?”

  “He got away, although how, I’ll never know. They sent guards and dogs out after him. Of course, the rest of us at camp bore the brunt of his punishment. They cut our rations in half for the next week.”

  “Cut your rations? In half?” Bodhi sputtered. “But half of nothing is—”

  “Bubkes. And when the Allied troops started to close in, the guards packed us up and marched us east for two weeks. By the time the Americans finally caught up with us, I weighed a hundred pounds.” Mo chuckled softly. “And to think my mom always said I was too skinny.”

  I gasped. At my last physical I’d weighed a little over a hundred pounds. Me, a thirteen-year-old girl. Not a soldier keeping the world safe for democracy.

  “What did your mom say when she saw you?”

  “The docs fixed me up before shipping me home, and I never talked about it. At the hospital, they made me sign a piece of paper, saying that I couldn’t talk about Berga. For ‘wartime and peacetime security,’” Mo shook his head bitterly. “Even then I knew that was a load of bunk. They just didn’t want any bad blood while they tried to lure all of Germany’s best scientists to the States.”

  “You sound angry.” And it was no surprise. Knowing what happened at Berga, I understood why Jack stole back a painting from his friend’s killers and hid it away for years. “I think my grandfather felt the same way.”

  “Angry? Nah. I don’t believe in anger. Only revenge.”

  “How did you get your revenge?” asked Bodhi, looking around the room for another painting, waiting to be discovered.

  Mo gestured with one shaky hand to the photos that covered his wall: a patchwork quilt of weddings, bar mitzvahs, and family reunions; generations of baby pictures mixed in with vacation photos and more than one snapshot of someone receiving a plaque or presenting a giant check. “Genesis Fifteen. ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars. So shall be your descendants.’” Mo smiled. “That’s enough revenge for me.”

  • • •

  Bodhi and I were quiet on the ferry back to Manhattan. Partly, I think, we were enjoying the salty harbor air on that hot afternoon. But as the Statue of Liberty approached, we both lingered at the railing as she passed by.

  “So the painting belonged to that guy, Max?” Bodhi finally broke in.

  I nodded.

  “How did it end up with Hitler?”

  “I’m guessing that the Nazi officer, whoever he was, gave it to Hitler. Or maybe gave it to his boss, who gave it to his boss, all the way up the line. That book on the Monuments Men said that all the Nazis collected art, and they used it to get promoted and stuff.”

  “So the painting really belongs to Max.”

  I thought about it. “I don’t know. He did trade it, fair and square.”

  “It’s only fair and square if Anna made it out alive.”

  “Who?”

  “Anna. Max’s daughter.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Bodhi tapped my head with her finger. “You know, you should really be writing this stuff down.”

  She was right. I dug in my sweater bag for a pen and some old homework pages.

  “Okay,” I scratched, “Max was at Berga—”

  “And Auschwitz and Buchenwald, too,” Bodhi added.

  “Okay . . . Buchenwald . . . got it. March–April 1945, Max, what was his last name?”

  “Trenczer?”

  “Right, Max Trenczer, daughter Anna Trenczer . . .”

  “I wonder if she did make it out. I wonder if there’s an Anna Trenczer out there somewhere.” Bodhi hung her shoulders over the railing, her braids dangling, her hands reaching to catch the boat’s spray. “We should try and find her before it’s too late.”

  I looked up from my notes. “Wait . . . what?”

  Bodhi stood up and raised her voice over the drone of the engine. “I said, we should find Anna Trenczer before it’s too late.”

  Anna Trenczer. Before it’s too late.

  Not “and a treasure.” Anna Trenczer.

 
; It’s just what my grandfather asked of me in his dying moments. To find his letter—and Anna Trenczer—before it’s too late.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I didn’t exactly race out and search the four corners of the earth for Anna Trenczer. I sat with this revelation and mulled it over for a day or two.

  Okay, it was five.

  I’m not proud of this. What I was, as Jack would say, was cheesed off.

  Nothing against Miss Trenczer. I’m sure she was a lovely girl, or as lovely as a four-year-old could be. No, my growing sense of injustice was reserved for my own grandfather.

  Here we have a painting that Jack sat on for sixty years. Did he try and sell it? No. Did he leave me its sales history or background so that I could sell it? No. Did he turn it in himself and claim some kind of reward? No. Did he at least leave me with a clear record of this girl’s name and story so that I could find her, if that’s what he cared about so darn much? No.

  Instead, he promises me a “treasure,” but leaves me with a gurgled mission to find some girl he’s never met and give her the painting. Her.

  So rather than embarking on the Great Search for Anna Trenczer, I spent the next few days dedicating myself to the house. If I couldn’t find a treasure, I’d have to do the hard work of making our money—and our house—last.

  I brought a panicked determination to my chores. I canned, I pickled, I jellied. I snaked the kitchen sink. I plunged the upstairs toilet. I hauled the remaining Tenpenny silver—now just a jumble of obsolete tongs and prongs—to a pawnshop, netting a much-needed $78. I even ransacked Jack’s armoire, the one blocking the leftover connecting door between our house and Madame Dumont’s, for loose change. (Jack pushed it there after Madame Dumont complained about his loud snoring. I think he really believed she was going to sneak in and smother him in his sleep.)

  All the while, my mom scritch-scratched away on her legal pads.

  With one ear always listening for the door, I worked through my to-do list. I also nurtured a fantasy where I’d meet Lydon, the cops, and their warrant at the door with the painting: “It belongs to someone named Anna Trenczer. Good luck finding her.” Slam.