The Nazi Hunter
Page 1
THE NAZI HUNTER
ALSO BY ALAN ELSNER
GUARDED BY ANGELS:
How My Father and Uncle Survived Hitler and Cheated Stalin
GATES OF INJUSTICE:
The Crisis in America's Prisons
A NOVEL
THE NAZI HUNTER
ALAN ELSNER
Copyright © 2007, 2011 by Alan Elsner
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Elsner, Alan.
The Nazi hunter : a novel of suspense / Alan Elsner.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-61145-056-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. United States. Dept. of Justice. Office of Special Investigations--Fiction. 2. Nazi hunters--Fiction. 3. Ex-Nazis--United States--Fiction. 4. War criminals--United States--Fiction. 5. Germans--United States--Fiction. 6. Belzec (Concentration camp)--Fiction. 7. Militia movements--United States--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3605.L76N39 2011
813’. 6--dc22
2011001772
Printed in the United States of America
To my mother, Helen, who gave me music
THE NAZI HUNTER
1
Why do I pass the highways by
That other travelers take?
—“THE SIGNPOST” BY WILHELM MüLLER, MUSIC BY FRANZ SCHUBERT
NOVEMBER, NOT APRIL, is the cruelest month. At least, it is in Washington, D.C., in an election year.
This year, 1994, was especially cruel for Democrats. The Republicans had won control of both houses of Congress, and now the halls of the Capitol and the federal government were quaking. You couldn't turn on the TV without seeing the pudgy, self-satisfied face of Mitch Conroy, newly elected speaker of the House, promising to shake things up. His nasal Texas twang filled the airwaves. Big government was in retreat. Heads were about to roll. You could hear the reverberations even on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice, where I worked.
It was one of those late Novembers, just after Thanksgiving, when the rain is pouring down outside your window and it's getting dark and the office becomes more and more stuffy until you feel your eyelids drooping and you catch yourself reading the same phrase three times without taking it in. I was looking forward to hitting the treadmill at the health club and cleaning out the cobwebs.
It had been a typical day, punctuated by at least five cups of coffee. Nine o'clock staff meeting, ten o'clock budget meeting, noon briefing with lawyers, twelve thirty homemade sandwich at my desk (tuna with lettuce and tomato), and then two hours reviewing files for a deposition the following week. My mouth tasted like the inside of a coffeepot. I was thinking of going for a sixth cup.
There was a knock on the door. A middle-aged woman poked her head in. She wore a tattered raincoat and carried a sopping umbrella in one hand and a large, battered old pocketbook bulging at the seams in the other.
“Is this the Office of Special Investigations?” she asked in a heavy German accent.
The security guards in the lobby and the receptionist were supposed to protect me from members of the public wandering in from the street, but the receptionist had left early because her kid had strep. “Can I help you? Who are you looking for?” I asked.
This woman looked harmless—tired, with gray hair escaping from beneath a faded scarf—but you never know; she had snuck past the guards. I reached for the phone, ready to call security.
“I am looking for Marek Cain, the Nazi hunter,” she said. “I have information.”
To this day, I still get a kick out of those words. Nazi hunter! They summon images of fearless adventurers tracking down ruthless Gestapo torturers to fortified jungle hideouts in South America. If only it were even a little like that. The truth is much less glamorous. I'm an attorney, not an adventurer, not a secret agent, not even a private investigator. I wear dark suits and sober ties. I spend my days in archives going through microfilm, and in meetings, and occasionally in courtrooms. The Nazis I deal with—far from being dangerous warlords—usually turn out to be gray little men in their seventies or eighties leading dull, anonymous lives in the suburbs of Cleveland or Detroit, tens of years and thousands of miles away from the horrors they committed as young men. But there was no need to tell her any of this. If she wanted a Nazi hunter, I was her man.
“I am Marek Cain, the deputy director. How can I help you?”
She scrutinized me through watery eyes and seemed reassured by what she saw. Her eyes jumped to my knitted black kippah—the yarmulke I wear on my head—lingered there for a microsecond, and then met mine again.
“I have important information, Mr. Cain. And there are documents, many documents.” Her hands were trembling. She looked at the chair in front of me, silently asking permission to sit down. I nodded, and she dropped into it, unbuttoning her coat. Stale steam rose from her clothes as they began to dry out.
“Before you tell me about the documents, perhaps you should tell me who you are,” I said, picking up a legal pad to take notes.
“Why are you writing?” she asked.
“I always take notes during meetings. It helps me remember.”
She hesitated, wheezing, and removed her scarf, revealing more gray, unkempt hair, damp around the edges from the rain. I'd say about forty-five, maybe a little older. She wore no makeup; her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and I noticed how yellow her teeth were. Her fingers were stained almost brown with nicotine, a rare sight these days. She wore a deep ruby-red brooch pinned to her sweater, her one decorative touch.
“Do you speak German? It's more easy for me. You know German, ja?” she asked.
“Naturlich,” I said, switching to her language. “What is your name?”
She took a deep breath. “My name is Sophie Reiner.” It meant nothing to me.
“Tell me something about yourself, Frau Reiner. Where are you from? What do you do?”
“Ach, there isn't so much to tell. I'm from Germany, as you see. A tourist in your country. As for what I do, call me a lover of German songs.”
A strange reply, but I didn't pursue it. I wanted her to feel comfortable before I started grilling her. “How did you find out about me, Frau Reiner?”
“It's Fraulein Reiner. You have been interviewed by our German newspapers,” she said. Again I let it pass. The New York Times had run a profile of me a month earlier, but I had been quoted overseas only rarely. My boss, Eric Rosen, a self-made man who worshipped his creator, usually insisted on handling interviews himself.
“Mr. Cain, these documents are important,” the woman said. “I hope you will not turn me away before you have seen them.” Her voice trailed off. She looked at me like a shaggy dog hoping for a biscuit.
“I wasn't going to turn you away. What is the nature of these documents?”
A pause, then she wheezed,“They have to do with Belzec. Have you heard of Belzec?”
Asking someone who deals with the Holocaust about Belzec is like asking an opera buff if he knows where La Scala is. Belzec was an exterminatio
n camp in eastern Poland where the Nazis murdered half a million Jews in 1942 alone. My own grandparents were among its victims.
“I've heard about it,” I said, keeping my voice level.
“This concerns Belzec and someone who was there. The truth has been buried very deeply for many years. It has been well hidden. I can no longer stand aside and let this continue. You will surely understand what I am talking about when you see the material.”
She mispronounced the name of the camp. In Polish, the word sounds like “Beljetz.” This made me wary.
“Please tell me more,” I said. Despite its notoriety, scholars know less about the inner workings of Belzec than those of any other Nazi death camp. Few of the Germans and Ukrainians who served there were ever identified. Even fewer were brought to trial. If there were new documents, I wanted them. And she knew that.
“This is difficult for me to explain,” she said. “I have not known what to do. I thought perhaps there was another way. But there is not. The world must know.”
As I listened and scribbled notes, it occurred to me that maybe she was a kook. But I'm not a judge or psychotherapist. Strange people sometimes know strange things. I looked up at her. “Truth is indeed of the highest importance, Fraulein Reiner,” I said, matching her formal tone. “Perhaps if you show me one of these documents, I could examine it and offer you an opinion.” A brief glance would probably be enough to see if there was anything to them.
“I didn't bring them. I wanted to meet you first.”
“I see. And may one ask, where are they?”
“They are safe. I didn't know if I could trust you. Now I think maybe I can. I could bring them tomorrow.”
As the Book of Proverbs tells us, “Let the wise man hear and increase his understanding.” I smiled and stood up. “Very well, Fraulein, it shall be as you say.” I glanced at my appointment book and saw that the morning was taken up with meetings. “Tomorrow afternoon would be best for me, shall we say at four? Come back with these documents, and I will be happy to examine them.” I extended my hand, but she just nodded, picked up her umbrella, and strode out of the room, leaving a damp patch on the seat.
I thought about her on and off the next morning, wondering what she might bring. But she never showed up. My work is full of false trails and clues leading nowhere. I figured this was just one more.
I was wrong.
So this is Washington, D.C.; I thought it would be bigger. While I was waiting to get paid, I started walking around, checking out targets. This city disgusts me. Five blocks from the White House or the Capitol, and you find yourself in creepy alleyways strewn with syringes, baggies, cast-off condoms. The city teems with druggies and panhandlers—the dregs of the dregs. They're everywhere, sleeping over grates, curled up on park benches, slumped in doorways, pushing supermarket carts piled with junk, feeding on the city like maggots on rotting flesh. “Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come.”
They approach you with hands outstretched and demand money; you look into their faces; you see their rheumy eyes and rotting teeth and you smell them—stench of piss, booze, and vomit. This one tells you he's hungry. He looks like a guy I used to know in jail, Dwayne Robertson, except scrawnier. How sweet it would be to shove a knife between his ribs and twist. I'd be doing him and the world a favor.
Last night, I dreamed of Dwayne and woke up in a cold sweat. I must have been yelling in my sleep, because someone in the next room was banging on the wall, shouting at me to shut the fuck up.
Half the city is looking for me. I strike and melt away, another face in the crowd. To them, I'm nothing. Shorty, Squirt, Shrimp, Tiny, Runt, Midget—I've been all of them. Nobody gives me a second look. I wrapped the knife in her scarf, stuffed it in her pocketbook, and left it on top of a trashcan for one of the lowlifes to find.
Each night in my hotel room, I read. Apart from the Bible, my favorite is The Turner Diaries, especially when they blow up the FBI. I must have read it a thousand times, wondering if it really could be done. Yesterday, I scouted the building out. It's huge, spread over three blocks. You could never get close enough with a truck to do much damage. That's the difference between fact and fiction. Half the buildings around here belong to the federal government. It's just a question of finding the right one.
I have begun writing my Statement to the American People. I want everyone to understand why I did it.
2
The first graves were dug by around 100 Jews brought to Belzec from nearby towns. After the graves were dug, these Jewish workers were shot.
—TESTIMONY OF EDWARD LUCZYNSKI
THE OFFICE OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS was created in the late 1970s when America finally woke up to the fact that thousands of Nazi war criminals were living quiet, respectable lives here. My job was to identify them, gather evidence of their crimes, bring them to court, strip them of their U.S. citizenship, and send them back to wherever they came from.
By 1994, I'd been doing this for ten years. I first wandered in for a summer internship after my second year of law school, but now the work was getting to me. At first, I was excited by the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of bringing evil men to account. The Torah tells us to pursue justice, and I was doing just that. Each time I nailed one, it was a small measure of revenge for what the Nazis did to my family. But lately, I'd been having nightmares. The scenes usually came to me just before dawn when I was halfway between sleep and waking. They were in black and white, like wartime footage. Faces, terrified, puckered with cold. Sometimes I thought I glimpsed my mother. Guttural shouts, the dull thud of gunfire—and I jerked awake in a cold sweat. I tried seeking calm through prayer, saying the familiar words of Modeh Ani , with which all religious Jews begin their day: “I gratefully thank you, O living and eternal king, for You have returned my soul within me with compassion. Abundant is Your faithfulness.” The prayer was intended to bind me to God in a way that would make me continuously aware of His presence throughout the day. But with dreadful images still in my head, it was hard to achieve the proper mindset for prayer—what we Orthodox Jews call kavanah. I tried to empty my brain of extraneous thoughts and direct it upward and inward. I tried hard, but I didn't always succeed.
I thought of seeking counseling, but I was ashamed of my weakness. I considered talking to my rabbi, but he was a new guy, three years out of rabbinical school, hopelessly naive and idealistic. I had no one else to confide in. My most recent girlfriend had dumped me six months ago.
“That's the trouble with you,” Jennifer had told me in one of our final and most hurtful fights. “This Nazi-hunting thing has taken over your life. All your anger is channeled into it. You're relentless. There's no room in your head for anything else except that and religion. When was the last time we did something fun together? You're always working, always scribbling on your legal pads, filing your files, building neat piles of papers. I can't live like this anymore!”
There wasn't much I could say. We'd been dating on and off for almost a year, but it wasn't working. Jennifer Osterman was an editor in a small publishing house that specialized in books about self-esteem—where it comes from, how it grows, how you lose it, how you get it back. Jennifer read them all as if they contained spiritual manna from heaven. On paper, she was perfect for me. My mother, dead these twenty-two years, would have loved her. My father approved. She said she was willing to live a traditional life, keep kosher, observe the Sabbath, give our children a religious education. But something held me back. I knew she wasn't the one. Where was the passion, the look, the touch that would make my pulse race? In Genesis, when Jacob met Rachel, his muscles bulged with the superhuman strength to move a giant boulder from the mouth of a well. And then he kissed her and lifted up his voice and wept for joy. I wanted that same fervor, not a pale imitation from a self-help book.
So Jennifer left and found herself someone else. Mutual friends expected an engagement announcement any day.
/> She was right about one thing, though. My work obsession was unhealthy. I needed to separate myself from the job, but the beasts who had murdered my grandparents might be living in comfort, right here in the United States. If I couldn't sleep at night, why should they?
Whenever one of those hateful dreams wrenched me awake, as it did two days after my meeting with Sophie Reiner, there was no going back to sleep. I got up, said a prayer, splashed my face with water, and went for a run. My usual five-mile circuit took me through Rock Creek Park, just under forty minutes. After that, there was still time to do the laundry, iron some shirts, vacuum the living room, and read the Washington Post over breakfast. I poured out my granola, added skim milk, waited for my first coffee of the day to brew, and sat down. That's when I saw what had happened to Sophie. She was on the front page, below the fold.
As had been the case for most of the past month, the lead story covered the new House speaker, Mitch Conroy. He was promising to shut down two or three government departments. He had his eye on Energy and Education. He could hardly dismantle Justice, so my job was probably safe. The ceasefire around Sarajevo was holding, but the Serbs were still slaughtering Bosnians in other enclaves, while the world looked on and did nothing. There was talk Jimmy Carter might fly to the region on a peace mission. Then, a smaller headline, near the bottom of the page:“Woman Found Dead Near Museum.” I scanned the first couple of paragraphs and suddenly felt queasy. The cup in my hand started shaking. I thought I was going to throw up.
The woman was about fifty years old. She carried no identification, and the police were appealing for anyone who might recognize her description. She had been wearing a trench coat and a red pin. She had been sitting in my office, droplets of rain still caught in her hair. Someone had slashed her throat. Her body was found under a tree a couple of blocks behind the Air and Space Museum. There were no witnesses.