The Locket

by Evans, Mike

  “Any idea when this was? What year?” “Not really. It was before the uprising.”

  “What happened to the women? Do you know?” “All of them were killed.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I saw them when they were selected, but I was not at the camp.” “How did you avoid being sent to the camp?”

  “My father shaved my head and dressed me in boy’s clothes.” She tugged at the sleeves of her top. “I was very slender then. I passed myself off as a boy.”

  “Did you live out the war in the ghetto?”

  “No. They sent me to a manufacturing plant. We made bombs.” Tears began to flow once more. “The bombs we made were used to keep the Nazis in power. We sabotaged as many as possible, but when we didn’t meet our quota they would grab fifteen or twenty of us at random and shoot them. So we tried to only make sure we kept just within the margin of allowed error.”

  “And your family?”

  “My younger brother was killed when they came for the children. My father and older brother died in the Warsaw uprising.”

  “They participated?”

  “Yes. Very much so. Before the children were removed, everyone thought that if they cooperated everything would be all right. And many people continued to think that way after they took the children, but then they came back for the women and a few days later we learned what really happened to them.”

  “To the women?”

  “Yes. We received news of what really happened to them and that changed everything.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They were killed at Auschwitz the day they arrived, as were the children earlier. One of the women escaped. She was eventually found and shot on sight by an SS trooper, but before they found her she told someone what she’d witnessed. After that, no one wanted to cooperate any longer with the Nazis.”

  “And your father was part of the resistance.” “He helped organize the revolt.”

  “Was he killed in the fighting?”

  “Not directly. There were battles and skirmishes. Unlike what some have said, we didn’t just go blindly to the camps and gas chambers. We fought back, but the Germans had so many more resources. Eventually they overwhelmed us and when that happened they came through the ghetto and killed all the participants they could find and many more besides. Then they made the few people who survived pick up the bodies.”

  “You were there? You saw this?”

  “Yes. I was one of those who cleaned up the bodies. I found my father on the street corner, two blocks from our apartment.” She started crying again. “Two women helped me throw his body onto a truck.” She looked at me with desperation in her eyes. “I threw my own father’s body on that truck with my own hands.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He was not located for several days, then someone found his body in the basement of one of the buildings. He had small round burns all over his body where he had been poked with something hot. His eyes were gouged out and his hands and feet were cut off. They covered his body before they disclosed the discovery and would only let me see his head. One of the men in our group was a doctor. He told me that my brother bled to death.”

  “They tortured him.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “My brother knew the names of almost everyone involved in the revolt. The location of their weapons and supplies. He had a good memory and kept the details in his head. The Nazis were trying to make him give them that information. But I do not think he talked.”

  By the time I finished with Nadia, I was an emotional wreck. She talked until well after dinnertime, and it was late when I returned home. David was already in bed, and Eli was once again seated in the living room, reading a book. We sat together at the kitchen table while I ate supper. We continued to talk while I showered and dressed for bed. It seemed like a normal night and I was looking forward to a few hours of rest. But while I slept, things began to happen in my dreams.

  As if transported back in time, I was standing in the hallway outside the door to our apartment in the Vienna ghetto. Around me people were plodding toward the stairs, all in a straight line, each one following the one in front. I fell in line with them.

  When we reached the first floor, we shuffled through the doorway and stepped outside to the street. Then, from out of nowhere, German soldiers appeared and began shoving people along, shouting and yelling for us to hurry, only no one paid them any attention. The line continued to move at the same pace. I wanted to hurry, but an elderly man ahead of me wouldn’t get out of the way, and my feet seemed incapable of moving any faster.

  A soldier appeared and pushed his way past us. He carried a rifle with a bayonet attached. Without a word, he rammed the bayonet through the old man’s back. Blood squirted out as he crumpled and fell. The soldier looked back at me and laughed.

  I screamed and shouted at him and flailed the air with my hands, trying to hit him, but he was always just out of reach. Others around me were oblivious and continued past as if nothing happened, heads down, eyes focused on the pavement beneath their feet.

  The soldier stared at me in disbelief. “You would shout at me?” He pointed to the insignia on his uniform. “I am an officer of the SS.” He lunged toward me, and suddenly I bolted upright in bed, wide awake, my gown wet with sweat.

  Eli awakened beside me. “What’s the matter?” I was panting, trying to catch my breath and calm my racing heart. “The dreams?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I nodded as I threw back the covers and climbed from the bed. I walked to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. Eli followed me and stood in the doorway. He just stood there, not saying anything, and finally I looked over at him. “It’s those people,” I sighed.

  “What people?”

  “The survivors. Their stories. Every day I read their statements and it all comes back. Today, listening to Nadia, it was finally just too much. It’s like I’m back in the ghetto, back in the camp, and I can’t turn it off. It played over and over in my mind all the way home.”

  “And when you finally got to sleep…” “I saw them in my dreams.”

  “Is this the first time? Recently?”

  “It started last night,” I admitted reluctantly.

  Eli took me by the arm and led me into the kitchen. “Come on.” He put on the kettle and we sat at the kitchen table, not saying much of anything until the tea was ready. Then, as we sipped from our cups, he looked at me and asked, “So, what was the dream about?”

  “I was in the ghetto and the soldiers were moving us out of the apartments. An old man was walking in front of me, only he was slow and the guards got frustrated and one of them stabbed him in the back with a bayonet.”

  “What made you wake up?”

  “I yelled at him. The soldier got mad and lunged toward me.”

  Eli took a sip of tea and slowly swallowed. “Back when we went through this before,” he said finally, “and you went to see the rabbi and things started to get better—did you tell me everything that happened to you?”

  My eyes darted away. “I don’t know,” I sighed. “Don’t put me off.”

  “I’m not putting you off. I don’t know if I told you everything because I don’t know if I remember it all. I told you everything I remembered. But I don’t know anymore…”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “These last few weeks, reading statements from other survivors. We all shared common experiences, but they remember horrible things I—” Just then a scene flashed through my mind of a baby suspended in midair, then the sound of a gunshot and I jumped. Eli laid his hand on

  my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I think so.” But my mind was filled with images and I struggled to make sense of them.

  Eli stared at me. “What did you see?”

  “I…I saw a baby,” I said softly. “And then there was a gunshot and the baby’s body exploded.”

  “What was it?”

  Tears
ran down my cheeks as I remembered. “Tomer, one of Stephan’s friends.”

  “The guy who showed you the sewer.”

  “One day after Stephan was missing and I moved in with Yardina, I was with a group on the street corner and I kept going on about how awful it was that my father served on the council and how he was selling us out. Amos Lurie, one of the resistance leaders, actually took up for Papa and told Tomer to show me what happened at the other side of the ghetto. He took me to the back wall.”

  “Where they shot the women.”

  “But after they shot the women, something else happened.” “What?”

  “There were babies lying on the ground at their feet. I didn’t see them before. I guess some of the women were their mothers. After they shot the women, the soldiers took the babies upstairs and threw them out of the building. Another soldier on the ground shot them while they were sailing through the air. The bullets ripped their little bodies in half.” I looked over at him. “The soldiers just laughed.”

  “They were—”

  “And now I remember something else,” I interrupted him. “When I arrived at Mauthausen, after Adolf had me taken away, they were shooting little babies the same way.” I looked at Eli as if in a dream, my mind so preoccupied with the horror of the memory. “What kind of person would do such a thing?”

  “Evil lives in the world,” he said calmly.

  “I know that, but it does not answer my question. God lives in the world, too. He knows everything.”

  “He sees everything,” Eli offered.

  “Yes,” I agreed at once. “So how could He let them do that to us? To me? How? I did nothing to deserve that misery. This misery that I bear even today. They did nothing to deserve it. He had the power to stop it and He did not.”

  Eli took my hand. “Life is filled with choices.” “I don’t—”

  “Listen to me. I don’t know if this will help, but this is what I know. We were created b’Tzelem Elohim—in the image of God. Part of that image means we have the ability to choose. And not just Jews have that but everyone. What we do with those choices is, mostly, our responsibility. Evil choices are human acts, not the acts of God. Human acts don’t diminish the character and nature of God. They only call into question the morality of the men who make those choices and do those acts.”

  “But God could have set it right,” I argued.

  “Yes, but that is not the world He created. If He stepped in every time someone did something wrong, He would violate His image that He instilled in us. He could have kept our ancestors from being enslaved in Egypt. He could have kept them from being taken captive by the Babylonians. But He did not. Instead, He gave us a history and a present that is as alive as man himself. He isn’t totally outside history, or totally inside it, either. It’s this movement of a relationship back and forth between God and man. We act, He acts. He acts, we act. We are all like Him in that respect. We get to act. We get to participate. The Germans you encountered chose to do wrong. You and many others paid the price for it. And in the end, the Germans paid a price for it, too.”

  I was astounded at what I heard coming from his lips, and profoundly moved by it. He was right. They made bad choices, and those choices had consequences that ultimately came back to them, just as it came to us. I knew that would be their end when I first went to work for Adolf at his office and realized how contradictory their culture of hate really was. Now, on the other side of that Shoah, I was beginning to see things come back together again, and while Eli spoke to me, the weight of the past few weeks rolled away, just as it had when I talked to Rabbi Meir.

  I looked across the table at Eli and smiled. “How did you get so smart?”

  “I have a smart wife,” he quipped. “I have to work hard to keep up with her.”

  “Is this what’s in all those books I see you reading at night?”

  He leaned over and kissed me. “I knew this was the real question for you. I wanted to help you find the answer.” He took my hand. “Come on. Let’s go back to bed.”

  * * *

  At the office, I continued the process of locating and interviewing witnesses on an informal basis, usually at their homes. While doing that, I also began to take witness depositions at the office, formal statements from the first people I vetted. These were given under oath and recorded by an official court reporter. Bureau 06 was moving forward with trial preparation, even though we still did not know for certain whether Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann.

  A few weeks into the deposition process, Metzger came to me at my desk. He held a plain white envelope. We talked about the witness interviews and touched again on the order we might use at trial. Then he closed the office door and gestured with the envelope. “I have some pictures I want to show you. Tell me if you recognize any of the people in these photographs.”

  He took out six photographs from the envelope and spread them on my desk. I looked at each one for a moment and then pointed to the third one from the left. “That is Adolf Eichmann. He’s older. And he has less hair. But that is Eichmann.”

  Metzger turned over the photograph to reveal the name Ricardo Klement written on the back. My heart skipped a beat. He smiled. “One of our agents took this photograph three days ago. Eichmann is living in a suburb of Buenos Aires, just as you and Simon Wiesenthal suggested. He is using the name Ricardo Klement.”

  “We found him?” I grinned.

  “We have found him,” Metzger nodded. “Now the only question is how to get him out.”

  It seemed almost surreal, like my first meal in the hotel in Zurich after I escaped. One minute Eichmann was an unknown, and the next he was within our grasp. Still, there was much to be done and I forced myself to think like a lawyer. “Will Argentina extradite him to us?”

  “I don’t know, but even asking them is a big risk. I’m not sure they would take him into custody on the evidence we have. And I’m even less sure I want to show it to them. The German community is very influential in Argentina. Rather large investments have been made there by German individuals and corporations. I’m afraid if they pick him up, he would simply disappear again.”

  “You were thinking of simply taking him?”

  “It is one of the options being discussed,” Metzger admitted. “But you must not breathe a word of it to anyone.”

  “Certainly. But wouldn’t that set a bad precedent?” “What do you mean?”

  “We have many enemies,” I argued. “They take hostages from time to time and we condemn them for it. Wouldn’t we be engaging in the same conduct?”

  “Perhaps you can find a solid legal argument that distinguishes the two.” He collected the photographs from the desktop and returned them to the envelope. “I’ll tell Operations that you have confirmed their identification of him. Let me have your thoughts on the ramifications of taking him without resorting to legal process.”

  “Executive extradition.”

  “I like that,” he smiled. “Executive extradition. But we still have to get him home.”

  “We can’t simply fly a plane to Argentina and bring him back?”

  “We have no regular air service directly to that country. Sending our own plane without a bona fide reason would raise too many questions. They would get suspicious very quickly.”

  “Then we need an official delegation,” I offered.

  Metzger looked puzzled. “For what?”

  “For an excuse to send a plane. Set up a conference with someone. Create a reason to send officials to something. There must be something they can attend or discuss.”

  Metzger was intrigued by the suggestion. “Diplomats are good at meetings.”

  “They could meet about agricultural issues. We have plenty of farms here that would welcome the opportunity to enter a new market. Cooperate on new farming techniques.”

  “A group of our agricultural officials come to check out some kind of development in farming. I’ll see what I can do with it.” He turned to leave and I called a
fter him. He stepped back to my doorway.

  “Eichmann will be prosecuted in our courts, won’t he?” I asked. “Most certainly.”

  “Will you lead the prosecution?” “Yes.”

  “Any possibility I could participate? As part of your in-court staff, I mean.” It was a lot to ask. I was fresh out of law school. Many on our staff had worked as lawyers for years. But this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had to ask.

  “We’ll see,” Metzger replied. “Get to work on that executive extradition memo.”

  Three weeks later, I took the extradition memo to Metzger in his office. He glanced at it and laid it aside. “Tell me what it says.”

  “The crimes for which Eichmann could stand trial—murder, execution, enslavement, plundering of private property—are all defined as war crimes by the Nuremberg Principles, established to guide trials before the International Military Tribunal.”

  “We don’t want to suggest that we are actually an extension of that tribunal,” Metzger cautioned. “We want to try him under Israeli law.”

  “I understand. My point is, no one doubts that Eichmann should stand trial for his participation in the German treatment of Jews. He’s included on the ‘wanted list’ of the UN War Crimes Commission and almost every law enforcement agency in the world. The only question is the legality of our acquiring him through nontraditional means, and that is a political problem, not a legal one.”

  “You’re sure about that?” “Yes.”

  “The manner in which we bring him here won’t affect our right to try him?”

  “Not legally. Once we have him on Israeli soil, the manner of how he came to be here is irrelevant to the Israeli court.”

  “Interesting point.”

  “I suggest we ask him to waive his right to trial in any other jurisdiction and agree to stand trial here.”

  “I doubt he’d go for it.”

  “It’s a long shot but if he agrees, we have an answer to the jurisdiction argument.”

  “We’ll consider it,” Metzger offered.