Sarah was catching her breath and wiping her cheeks. She blew her nose on a hand towel that was already wet. Rabbi Bohmer dipped another towel in a bowl of water and handed it to her. He sat back in his chair, folded his hands, and waited, watching her with an encouraging smile. She wiped her brow, face, and hands and lay back with a sigh.
After a minute’s pause she said, “So I can leave in a few days.”
“Yes, that’s what the nurse said. How do you feel about that?”
“I wonder what the doctor wants to talk to me about. The nurse said it was important.”
The rabbi nodded. “It can’t be anything bad. The nurse said you can leave in a few days.”
“I’ll go to Heidelberg as soon as I can. Will that be difficult, do you think?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. There are about thirty Jews here in Frankfurt that we know of, they all survived one way or another—married to Christians, by hiding like you, a few were hidden by nuns through the whole war, an extraordinary story. Do you know how many Jews there were in Heidelberg before the war?”
“About a thousand, I think. A few more.”
“The U.S. Sixth Army is based there now, they took over the Wehrmacht barracks. If any Jews have come back they’ll have gone there for help. Or at least the chaplain there may know about them.” He wondered how many Jews there were, like Sarah, who had survived the Nazi evil. How correct Roosevelt had been when he called on the nation to come together to defeat the Hitler scourge. Look at this young woman, so attractive, so tired, so defeated, and yet her eyes, her dark eyes, they’re burning. With what? Fever? The pain of her outburst? No. She’s burning with hopeless love. For a man she knows is dead and for a baby that never lived. Poor thing.
He heard himself say, “I can check, if you like. About Jews. In Heidelberg.”
* * *
Sarah climbed back into bed after wandering the corridor, looking into small rooms with eight cots each, greeting nurses in white frocks and caps, and doctors with white coats over their military uniforms. A general visiting the wounded had caused a commotion by telling a soldier with no visible wounds yet kept weeping, to stop faking it and get back to his unit. The soldier had not responded but one nurse, no doubt a civilian seconded to the army, for who else would have dared, muttered so that everyone could hear, “How dumb can you be?” Even Sarah heard her from outside the room.
She hated the sharp, bitter smell of chloroform and antiseptic and cleaning liquid. Tomorrow I’ll leave, she thought. But first, the doctor. What could he want to tell her? She would be seeing him in three hours, not during his regular rounds but by appointment, in his office.
In bed she dozed, a small smile on her lips. She was thinking of her home, the animals, Willi the family goat, the farmyard smells, their friends, the games they had played. And then she had gone to Berlin to study and work, which had saved her life. She became sad and wondered, yet again, why she seemed to accept so calmly the deaths of her parents, let alone her aunts and uncles and cousins. She knew they would not come back, couldn’t, had known it for years, since they had been taken by the Nazis, and that in a strange way had helped her. She had accepted it long ago. It was the not knowing that must be so painful.
It seemed like only minutes had gone by when she made out a distant voice and a tapping on her shoulder. “Wake up, honey,” the nurse was saying, “time to see the doctor.”
But later, when Sarah had returned to her bed, it seemed that the wall clock had stopped, that the minutes would never pass. When Rabbi Bohmer dropped by on his rounds, it seemed as if she had aged by ten years, yet the clock showed she had been back in bed for barely an hour. The rabbi was smiling and held out an apple. He was thinking that maybe the next part of her life would be good, as her dream had portended. But Sarah looked different. She was pale. She didn’t greet him. She stared past him, her face set.
“What is it? Did you see the doctor?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, went on, “I heard from Heidelberg.”
Her eyes flickered in his direction.
Normally the rabbi would have picked up on her change of mood. Everyone said how perceptive he was, especially for such a young man, how he always knew exactly how to talk to everyone. But now he was too excited.
“Chaplain Monahan with the Sixth sent me a message. From Heidelberg.” He waited for her response but Sarah stared past him.
“The pastor did not see the person but he has heard.” He waited, pleased with himself, but when he was still met by silence, he continued: “There is a Jew in Heidelberg. One.”
Now he had Sarah’s attention. “Who?” she asked in a tiny voice. “What name? A man or a woman?”
“He didn’t know the name, just that a Jew had come for help and then left.”
Sarah asked, “A man or a woman?”
“A man.”
ELEVEN
“I really don’t like it,” Yonni said as he guided the jeep slowly around a bomb crater in Hesselstrasse. “In fact, I hate it.”
“Too bad,” said Ari. “Because we’re doing it. That’s why we came.”
“It isn’t right,” Yonni said again.
“Yes, Yonni,” Omri said from the backseat, watching the slight woman holding the little boy’s hand. “I think we got the message.”
The woman turned left at the pile of twisted tram tracks on the corner, while they drove straight by until they took the next left, and left again. Now they approached her from the front as she disappeared into the open stairwell of the apartment block.
“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Ari said. “After she drops him off, after whatever she does next. As she turns into her building, I’ll come out of it.”
Each morning for three days they had watched the woman leave her home, walk around the corner to Hesselstrasse, and drop her son at school. Each morning she next ran an errand before returning home. The first day, she had waited in line with her ration card at the grocery store and walked home with her little bag of food. The next day, she came out with a bucket and, after depositing her son, had collected water from the pump and taken it to another building nearby. They knew from Blue at Intelligence: She took the water to her father, who couldn’t leave home. He had lost his legs in the First World War and, with all the trouble, there was nobody to carry him and his wheelchair downstairs.
And that morning she had gone to the police station; they didn’t know why.
There didn’t appear to be a man in her life. She lived alone with her hyperactive son, a cute blond kid about six years old. That’s what was upsetting Yonni. The boy couldn’t pass a pile of bomb debris without jumping on top and at every corner he played traffic cop, waving his arms and pointing, although it was two minutes between vehicles.
“Who’ll look after him, that’s what I want to know,” Yonni kept saying.
“Who gives a monkey’s?” Omri said. He enjoyed the English slang he was picking up in the Jewish Brigade.
“I do,” Yonni said.
“Oh, for God’s sake, drop it, Yonni,” Ari said. “Do you think you’re the only one with a conscience? Just remember, she isn’t a woman, she’s a witch.” A better phrase came. “She isn’t a mother, she’s a murderer.”
They drove to the woods where they would spend the night. Sometimes they would show their papers and travel passes and sleep in an army base, but rarely in the town of a kill. Leave no pattern, no coincidences, no trail.
Not that anyone cared if a few SS war criminals were murdered. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands who would never face justice.
As their secret unit grew, as their reach spread, their goals became clearer and more specific. They weren’t killing the Nazis for justice, or even morality. No. It was a matter of honor. That’s why it wasn’t good enough to report the Nazis to the Allied war criminal sections.
First, they wouldn’t do anything anyway, they were too busy with the leaders.
And second, and most important, Jewish honor d
emanded Jewish vengeance.
For who else would punish the bastards, the sadists? Not the leaders, but the cogs in the machine. Those men who laughed at the naked women and beat them with their guns and made them run on all fours and bark like dogs? Those who pushed them into vast pits while they were still alive and covered them with tons of earth so that witnesses said that for days the earth writhed and moved and groaned.
We can’t punish them all, the Avengers said, but we can punish some so that their descendants will know forevermore that no evil deed will go unpunished.
“But what about the boy?” Yonni said yet again. “He’ll be an orphan.”
“Better to be an orphan than dead. They killed one and a half million of our kids. And now, for God’s sake, enough,” Ari said. “Don’t go on about it again. That’s an order. If you do, I’ll report it to the boss and you’re out of the unit. And if you breathe a word of this outside the unit, you’re next.”
“A bit of advice,” Omri added. “Don’t think about what you’re doing. Think about what she did.”
On the dot of eight a.m. the boy skipped and bounded out of the building followed by his mother, who was carrying a tray. Two American jeeps drove by, and then came a British one, a little more slowly. “She’s been baking,” Omri said.
“Her last meal,” Ari said.
Her errand that day was back at the police station.
“Twice in two days. Nobody does that,” Ari said. “If you ask me, she’s planning something. To do with papers. Getting travel papers, or a new ID card. What else would she be doing there two days in a row? I bet she’s leaving. We’re just in time.”
“And leave her father?” Yonni said.
“Sure. He’ll want his daughter to be safe. After what she did,” Omri said.
“She probably got it from him,” Ari said. “Let’s steal his wheelchair.”
They drove to her apartment building, where Ari got out, went into the stairwell, and waited. He nodded at other tenants as they came and went. They glanced at him and quickly looked away. He wore a hat low over his eyes and a shabby suit, and over that a long leather coat. He looked like a Hollywood Gestapo agent. It would confuse her just long enough to take her. In his right pocket he held his seven-inch blade, his favorite: short enough to hide, long enough to kill.
At ten thirty-seven Yonni pushed the clutch and slipped into first gear. He had kept the engine running for an hour, to make sure when the time came there was no problem starting. Two hundred meters ahead, fifty meters from the building, the woman had appeared around the corner and was walking home. Driving slowly, Yonni depressed the clutch and moved into second gear. It would take her forty-five seconds. A slow-moving jeep was not unusual. Everyone was careful to avoid craters and debris. She held the empty tray in her hand. The metal glinted in the light. Its hard, thin edges looked lethal. Yonni glanced at Omri, who nodded. He had seen that too. He held his pistol by the open window, ready to lean out and shoot, in case she surprised Ari with the sharp-edged metal—not that anything ever surprised him.
As she turned into the drab garden, with its broken wall and dusty bomb debris piled on a flattened hedge, Ari emerged from the stairwell toward her and tipped his hat.
“Frau Adler?” he asked with a smile, in his native German. Nice touch that, she’d taken a Jewish name. “Here,” he said, taking the tray from her hand, “please allow me to help you with that.” She looked surprised. “We’ve been looking for you from the Bund.” The federation. Another nice touch, this time his. Bund meant nothing at all these days, but it was generic enough to hint at the good old days when every Nazi social outfit was Bund this and Bund that.
Two women in kerchiefs and coats were chatting in the next-door garden. They looked at the man in the leather coat. Is he police? Ari nodded to them. “Guten Morgen.” May as well be polite. They fell silent and watched.
With his other hand he took Frau Adler’s elbow and turned her around and guided her back to the street, talking all the way. “You see, some of us are getting together, there are some changes afoot, with some travel included…” Keep talking. Distract her. “So of course, we thought of you, you know, because…”
At the street, with his arm at her elbow, he felt her begin to stiffen, she was about to resist. “Wait a moment,” she said, “who…”
At that instant the British army jeep jerked to a halt beside her, the tailgate flew open, and Ari grabbed her around the shoulders, heaved and pushed, and fell on top of her on the backseat while Omri leaped out from the front, gave their legs a powerful shove, slammed the door, jumped back in, and Yonni accelerated smoothly away.
Her scream was muffled by a rag in her mouth and a hood on her head.
The two women in kerchiefs and coats in the garden next door covered their mouths in horror until the jeep had disappeared from view. They looked at each other and quickly parted. Their silent advice to each other: Mind your own business.
In silence the Avengers drove to their woods, past a convoy of three-quarter-ton trucks with the insignia of the U.S. 11th Armored Division, past groups of tattered refugees pushing carts and carrying cases.
The woman struggled in desperation, kicking and hitting out with her elbows, but Ari had switched places with Omri, who pushed her head down out of sight and whose one-handed grip clamped her thin wrists like a vise.
Yonni followed a road that became a trail as it entered the woods; narrowed into a beaten, grass-covered track; and ended in a clearing on the bank of the Wertach River. The grass was flattened where they had slept the night.
In better days it must have been a beautiful secluded picnic spot, perfect for young lovers.
Today it was a good place for a killing.
Omri picked up the squirming, grunting woman and carried her from the jeep to a tree. Yonni tied her hands behind her back and bound her with another rope to the trunk, with loops around her throat, chest, arms, and legs. Ari took the hood from her head. He left the rag in her mouth. She struggled against the ropes and blew through her nose to clear hair from her nostrils. A high-pitched whine came from her mouth as she tried to shout and plead through the gag.
“Lucky we tied her up,” Omri said. “She’s going mad.”
While Yonni looked out for chance strollers, Ari peered into her face, breathing on her, and said quietly, in German, “I have something to ask you, please be quiet for a moment.”
She slumped against the ropes, her head lolled forward, exhausted by the struggle.
“Frau Adler? Frau Sophie Adler?”
She looked up, a ray of hope entering her eyes. She nodded. Yes. She kept nodding, and sounds emerged from her throat as she tried to talk. Yes, yes.
Ari said to her, “Although born Alberta Braun?”
Her head shook violently.
Yonni said, “You want to take the gag out of her mouth?”
“Not a chance,” Ari said, “they’ll hear her in Berlin.”
He took her by the chin and forced her to look into his eyes, and breathed into her face, “Alberta Braun, Oberaufseherin, Third SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, Konzentrationslager Mauthausen.”
Her jaw dropped so far that part of the sodden cloth gag slipped out and dangled like the body of a snake. She shook her head and tried to talk. Since half the gag was out of her mouth Ari could make out her garbled words. “Ich bin Mutter, Mutter, mein Sohn!” I’m a mother, a mother, my son!
But centimeters from her face he said only, “Alberta Braun, you are a sadist and a murderer. Do you speak English?”
She shook her head, her eyes wide with fear. Her body was trembling, straining against the ropes. He said to her, “We are Jews.”
She went pale. She stopped struggling. She nodded, once, as if to herself.
They had sworn never to say these words in the German language. He took her by the hair, pulled her head back, and whispered in her ear, in English, “In the name of the Jewish people, I sentence you to death.”
Ar
i put his ear to her mouth to make out what she was trying to say through the gag. It was muffled but clear, even in her terror. She kept saying, over and over, into his ear: “Please look after my son.”
Ari took his knife and slit her throat. Within a minute Alberta Braun suffocated. It was terrible to see.
As her body sagged and strained against the ropes, Yonni, staring into her still open eyes, which were turning gray, like water over a stone, asked, “What did she say, what was the last thing she said?”
“Nothing,” Ari said. “Nothing important.”
They untied her and dumped her body in the river.
TWELVE
Heidelberg,
May 17, 1945
Jacob sheltered from the rain under a shop awning, squeezed together with a dozen other men, all hunched up in the cold. He pulled up the collar of the jacket he had bought earlier in the market for eight cigarettes. One of the shivering men said, “Good jacket, what do you want for it?”
“What have you got?”
“I’ve got a fever, that’s what I’ve got.”
“Where are you from?
“Alsace-Lorraine. French border. Prisoner of war.”
“You got anything to give for it?”
The man stretched out his arm. Jacob took his wrist and examined the watch. “Nice,” he said. “Longines. Where did you get it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Jacob took off his jacket and put on the watch.
When the rain stopped Jacob walked back to the old bus station, where hundreds of refugees gathered each morning. It was the poor man’s black market. With his three shirts on he wasn’t too cold—yet.
He needed to make some money for another jacket. He understood how, the first time he saw a Pole selling ten cigarette butts for five dollars. The Pole was saying it was a bargain. “You can make three smokes from ten butts and sell them for two dollar fifty each. For five dollars you get three smokes worth seven-fifty!” Business was brisk.
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