“It is time,” Sam said to the gathering, “for Arabs and Aryans to join forces against their common enemy. This documentary is the first step in what I hope will be a long and successful collaboration. My contribution to the battle against the Jews will not be another suicide bombing like my brave Palestinian brothers, who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the cause. No, I intend to demolish not just a few bricks of the State of Israel but the very foundation upon which it stands. No gas chambers, no Israel!”
The room erupted into applause.
Trudy, the bartender, looked from the television to Sam and back, slowly realizing that she was seeing the same man in both places.
“It’s over,” Sam said to Ott. “They’re probably out looking for me right now. I’ve gotta go.” He left twenty dollars on the table and walked out with Trudy looking after him.
Ott turned back to the television to see Harlan Hurley’s face twisted into a shape as ugly as the swastika on the flag at the meeting. Hurley said to Bo: “Sometimes people got to stand up for what’s right and fix what’s wrong. One day you’ll understand that I’ve been doing both, and the people of this school district will make me a goddamned hero. Now get the hell out of my office.”
37
How bizarre it is for me to see life through a man’s eyes. Through my murderer’s eyes.
How bizarre to experience his moods and obsessions, his sorrows and joys. To see a baby and not ache to hold her but to see a beautiful woman and crave her with every nerve. How bizarre to be Ott Bowles as he shoots a bullet into the seat next to Sarah and to hear her screaming. To feel the intense, almost sexual gratification of exercising complete dominance and control over me and to see the terror in my eyes. To see the small movements of my head as I drive down the road, to feel the softness of my body through the gun in the backseat, to feel contempt for me and everything I stand for but, at the same time, to be physically attracted to me and to imagine what it would be like to make love to me. How bizarre to listen to me pleading for my daughter’s life and my own and, for an instant, to feel sympathy for me and question whether I should have kidnapped a mother and her daughter. To count down the last days of my life on death row, to come to peace with my death, to contemplate and confront its presence, and then to be delivered into it, strapped into a chair, electrocuted.
How bizarre it was to see how incredibly insignificant Sarah and I were inside Ott Bowles’s life, how little we really mattered. To Ott Bowles, Sarah and I were symbols, not human beings, a means to an end, nothing more than that.
And so, gazing back through my murderer’s eyes, I could appreciate the logic of a kidnapping, because through those eyes I could see how all hope for the Rabuns of Kamenz vanished when my husband aired his tape of Harlan Hurley and Samar Mansour carving their initials into the tree of history with the crooked iron spikes of a swastika.
Those days had been so different for us, so magical and glorious. The story was picked up by the national networks, and we threw a party to celebrate. We never considered the impact of the story on Hurley, Mansour, or the other members of Die Elf, because they were symbols, not human beings, for us. They represented our unseen enemy: the bully around the corner, the false prophet in the pulpit, the subversive thought rotting the fabric of society. Like a little David, my Bo had slain the great beast, and we were proud. We had no idea that at the same time we were celebrating this wonderful victory, Samar Mansour was sealing a videocassette copy of his documentary into a padded mailing envelope with the following note:
Ott,
The truth is what we want it to be.
We may never see each other again.
Plant the seeds.
Your friend,
Sam
—
BY THE NEXT MORNING, the police have arrested Harlan Hurley on multiple counts of theft, mail and wire fraud, and racketeering. A manhunt for Samar Mansour ends with confirmation that he has fled the country, probably to Lebanon. Two days later, Ott receives the videocassette in Buffalo and inserts it into the tape player in his bedroom after his mother goes to sleep.
Sam Mansour’s documentary is very well constructed and very well produced, just as he had promised. It begins with a grim, catatonic river of historic black-and-white photographs appearing and disappearing on the screen: men in Nazi uniforms, the frightened faces of women and children being loaded onto train cars, electrified fences around concentration camps, prison barracks, showers, mounds of decaying corpses, smokestacks, incinerators. The images flash by faster and faster, finally trailing off to a screen of black.
From this darkness emerges the mournful cry of an oboe. This is the first sound we hear on the documentary, playing a dirge to accompany the slow march across the screen of hundreds of titles of articles, books, and films about the Holocaust—every title Sam Mansour could find during his research. As the last of these scroll across the screen, the oboe is swallowed by the symphonic roar of Wagner’s Die Walküre, and then the sneering face of Adolf Hitler consumes the screen. Finally, the title of the documentary appears in white letters superimposed over an aerial shot of Auschwitz, swooping down onto the reddish vein of rusting train tracks leading into the camp and the platform where millions of feet beat their last steps: What Happened?
Sam Mansour stands on this platform as the camera zooms in. He is wearing the same black pants and blue shirt he had been wearing at Trudy’s, the color of the shirt matching his eyes. His thick, dark hair is carefully combed, and he is waiting for us, the audience, to join him. His voice suits the role—educated, evocative, authoritative, believable. Ironically, he looks and sounds more like a rabbi than a Palestinian doctoral student attempting to disprove the Holocaust. Smiling, he introduces himself as Sam Mansour. He seems affable, unbiased, dispassionate. He asks the audience a very serious question: “What happened?”
He begins walking to the fateful showers. The camera follows. As he walks, he explains the purpose of the film and assures us that he has no agenda other than the truth. As his proofs unfold, he asks us to leap with him the many gaps in logic and evidence that must be leaped, but he keeps coming back to the “truth,” always the truth, insisting on it, demanding that we believe he is acting in our best interest.
As a matter of cinematography, with the parabolic camera angles, haunting guard-tower lighting, and echo-chamber sound effects—as if everything is being spoken inside a concentration camp shower—the documentary is exceptionally good at creating the impression of actually being there during the dark days. Watching it for the first time in his bedroom, Ott is mesmerized. The filmmaker’s skill, and Ott’s own desperate desire to believe, help Ott to overlook the warnings implicit in Sam’s pleas for trust and the baseless allegations of conspiracy and cover-up that strain reason as the documentary unfolds.
I can see now that only Ott’s frantic race to vindicate the Rabuns of Kamenz by refashioning a new happy ending for Germany and the Jews could have led him to betray the carefully embalmed body of recorded Nazi history that he so gingerly and faithfully exhumed during the long years of Nonna Amina’s imprisonment. I can see now that only under the craving for and influence of justice, this most intoxicating and dangerous of drugs, could Ott Bowles have been led to deny, as if life and death themselves are merely a matter of one’s shifting whims and subjective fancies, the mass slaughter of 360,000 Jews at Chełmno, 250,000 at Sobibór, 600,000 at Bełzec, 360,000 at Majdanek, 700,000 at Treblinka, and 1,100,000 at Auschwitz. This is how Ott Bowles came to see within Sam Mansour’s “documentary”—if it could even be loosely called this rather than a mere propagation of lies—exactly what he wanted to see: the vindication of his family unfolding before him like a sweet dream.
—
BO HAD WAITED until after the interview of Harlan Hurley aired to tell me that the weekend nights he supposedly spent on call at the station were actually spent camped out in a rented pickup truck, in the woods outside Die Elf’s compound, with a cell phone in h
is hand and one of my grandfather’s shotguns across his lap, waiting for Bobby Wilson, his producer, to come out alive with the damning video—and ready to go in after him if necessary. I made him promise never to do anything that stupid again.
As a reward for the success of the investigation and the risks they had taken, the station promoted Bobby to senior producer and offered Bo the anchor position on the morning news, with the promise of moving him up to the noon and five o’clock time slots as soon as his desk skills improved. We were ecstatic. People at the grocery store and mall began stopping Bo for autographs. Suddenly I was the wife of a local celebrity. These were happy times: my law practice was growing, our daughter was thriving, and Bo’s dream of becoming an anchorman at a major-market television station, or even on one of the national networks, looked more promising than ever.
—
DURING THE CONFUSION surrounding Hurley’s arrest and Sam Mansour’s flight from the country, Ott had the presence of mind to gather up the Die Elf backup computers, encryption codes, and passwords and store them in a safe location. The idea of kidnapping Sarah and me to force the networks to air the documentary came later. To his credit, he never planned to harm us. That was Tim Shelly’s idea.
38
The building in the woods to which Ott Bowles and Tim Shelly drove Sarah and me that Friday night in October 1994 was the original mushroom house on the old Shelly farm near Kennett Square. It was built by Tim’s great-grandfather Clifton Shelly in the 1930s, when most mushrooms were harvested in the wild and people were just learning how to grow them commercially.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Clifton Shelly was a dairy farmer. He began experimenting with mushroom farming when he saw the demand for the edible fungi far exceeding the supply provided by the trained gatherers who roamed humid forests with sacks, looking for mushrooms sprouting in the shaded compost beneath trees. To re-create and better control these conditions, he erected a windowless block building at the bottom of an isolated ravine, away from prying eyes and near a pond where water would be plentiful and ice could be harvested during the winter to cool the mushroom house in the summer. Soon he was producing sizable crops of the fungi and taking them to market, stunning grocers and mushroom gatherers alike with the volume and consistency he produced. As fungiculture techniques advanced and profits grew, he replaced his milking parlors and corncribs with mushroom houses and abandoned the original mushroom house at the bottom of the ravine because it was too small and remote for large-scale production.
Tim Shelly was certain that nobody knew of the existence of the old mushroom house—particularly not the large California-based agribusiness conglomerate that purchased his family’s mushroom farm at auction after his father died. It was far removed from the rest of the buildings and secluded deep in the woods, now overgrown with heavy brush. He suggested it to Ott when Ott told him about his plan to kidnap Sarah and me. In such a remote location, Tim reasoned, there would be virtually no chance of detection, and with masonry walls and no windows, there would be virtually no chance of escape. Ott looked the building over and thought it would do, but to be certain he drove in and out at different hours of the day and night, and he even stayed for a few days in an outbuilding next to the mushroom house to see whether anyone would notice. No one did.
This outbuilding, which was basically an old wooden storage shed with a couple of windows, is where Ott and Tim stayed after the kidnapping. They stocked it in advance of our arrival with food for several weeks, plus a generator, two of Die Elf’s computers, a satellite telephone, and several crates filled with assault rifles and ammunition taken from Die Elf’s compound. They covered the car we arrived in with a tarp and shoveled mushroom soil over it so it couldn’t be seen from the air. It was from near this outbuilding, and from one of these computers, that Ott sent an e-mail message to Bo when we arrived, attaching a digital photograph he had taken of Sarah and me in the mushroom house.
Ott made no attempt to conceal his identity—he wanted the world to know exactly who he was and why he was doing what he was doing.But he did use encryption software to conceal our location, routing his e-mail from server to server around the world, deleting the message headers and identification tags, and making it appear as though the transmissions originated from somewhere in India. Ott’s only stated demand in the e-mail was to have Sam Mansour’s documentary aired during prime time by a national television network. If that happened, he promised, Bo and the world would witness our safe return and Ott’s voluntary surrender to the authorities. He explained in the e-mail that a videocassette copy of the documentary could be found in the rear footwell of my car, which was parked in a grove of pine trees just off the old logging road in Ardenheim. He made no demands for money or even for Hurley’s release from prison. He asked only that the world consider the possibility that the Nazi gassings had been a fabrication, and that his family and the German people had been wrongly convicted of genocide. Since Bo was a television news reporter, this simple request shouldn’t be too much. He gave Bo three days to make the necessary arrangements.
Ott made no express threat against our lives, and in his heart he never thought it would come to that. So convinced was he of the objective merits of the film that he believed the networks would jump at the chance to air it when they saw it. And he was perfectly content to serve time in jail for kidnapping in exchange. The thought of becoming a martyr for a cause gave his life a higher purpose and deeply appealed to him. He fully expected a reply message from Bo within hours with the airdate and time, and he had a portable television ready, from which he could watch the documentary when it aired and monitor news reports of our kidnapping.
Despite being kneed in the groin during my attempted escape, Ott was delighted with how well things had gone that first night. Sarah and I were locked away in the mushroom house, and an e-mail reply from Bo came within an hour, telling Ott he was doing everything possible to have the tape aired and begging him for our safe return. Two hours later, all the television news networks were carrying the story of our kidnapping, with photographs of Sarah and me, and photographs of Ott, Harlan Hurley, Tim Shelly, and Sam Mansour. The fact that Bo was a television news reporter and that I was an attorney—and that Sarah and I had been kidnapped by a white supremacist attempting to disprove the Holocaust—touched off a media firestorm. The prospect of a mysterious Holocaust documentary, an international manhunt for a fugitive Arab, and Ott’s skillful use of computer technology to communicate while concealing our location made the story into a sensation. By the next morning, the television newscasts were featuring experts on neo-Nazi groups, the Holocaust, hostage negotiations, and the Internet, together with mediated debates among Christian, Jewish, and Islamic scholars and leaders brought together to confront the underlying pathology of groups like Die Elf. It was exactly the kind of international media attention Ott wanted.
The only thing that worried Ott in all this was how his mother, Barratte Rabun, was handling the news. She refused requests to be interviewed by the reporters staking out the mansion in Buffalo. But, to Ott’s surprise, by Saturday afternoon some of the networks were airing balanced and even sensitive background reports about Barratte, Amina, and the Rabuns of Kamenz, explaining how Amina had saved the Schriebergs in Germany, how the Rabuns had been gunned down by Soviet troops and Amina and Barratte had been raped, and the litigation over the Schriebergs’ theaters and property. Some commentators even began to create an almost sympathetic picture of why Ott might have kidnapped us for the sake of a Holocaust documentary, causing Ott to believe more deeply than ever that he had done the right thing.
All he wanted in the end was justice. He started comparing his actions to the courageous exploits of Amina herself in Germany—at an age not much younger than his. He even began viewing Sarah and me the way Amina had viewed the Schriebergs, “heroically” providing us with the necessities for our survival—water, food, baby formula, diapers—and an austere but safe shelter in the woods.
Two vulnerable fish among lethal sea anemones. He asked himself, Am I not protecting this woman and this child from those who would harm them? From men like Tim Shelly and the members of Die Elf who would one day hunt them down and murder them? Will they not be safer when the truth of the documentary is known?
—
SARAH SLEPT WHILE I stayed awake, worrying during our first day of captivity in the squalid, stinking mushroom house. The only light came from small gaps and cracks around the door, and the only bathroom facility was a bucket in the far corner. I knew nothing about the documentary and was convinced we had been kidnapped as part of a plot to extort Harlan Hurley’s release from prison. I assumed by now that the police and FBI agents would be searching everywhere; we just needed to hang on until they found us, and do nothing to provoke Ott and Tim any further. I prayed to God to deliver us from our enemies. And to smite them.
When Sarah woke, I fed and changed her and sang “Hot Tea and Bees Honey” to her over and over. I whispered stories to her about her daddy and her grandparents and great-grandparents, and even her great-great-grandmother, Nana Bellini. I hadn’t thought of Nana Bellini in a long time, and her memory calmed me. We played patty-cake and cuddled in our sleeping bag. Sarah was so good and so brave. She didn’t fuss or cry. I think she enjoyed the close contact and the darkness, which might in some way have reminded her of being inside my womb.
Ott and Tim took turns checking in on us. Like the subjects in the famous Stanford psychology experiment with college students assigned the roles of prisoners and guards, Tim Shelly reveled in the role of jailer. He shoved me around, barking orders and obscenities at us, throwing our food on the floor. He obviously held no firm convictions of his own. He acted only on what others told him, but he would die for those others—for anyone to whom he could attach his childlike adoration in the vacuum created by his father’s death and Harlan Hurley’s arrest. He was a mercenary, not a martyr.
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 28
