“Don’t say that, Jacob,” Rudy begged.
In a voice charged with anger, Jacob replied, “Rudy, you think we live in a hard world, but you are still very innocent. Terrible, unspeakable acts happened while I was there: live babies thrown into bonfires, old people beaten, medical experiments conducted on us like we were guinea pigs, and yes, the gas chambers and the crematoriums. What kind of human beings can do those things? I still don’t understand it after decades of living with those memories.”
After a time, Jacob cleared his throat, and in a quieter voice said, “I suppose I never will. Only God can understand the complexities of each human heart and will judge accordingly.”
“Do you still believe in God, I mean, after all that you went through?” Rudy asked tentatively.
“That’s a big question for a young man. But the answer is easy: with all my heart, Rudy. I’m afraid He may be disappointed in me, however. I stopped going to temple when I could not rid myself of the nightmares, even though I knew it was not God that did this to us. It was human beings who made a pact with the devil. I know that God wept with us in our bondage and marched with the Allies and rejoiced when we were liberated. It was God that helped me live on when I didn’t know if I wanted to, who steered me to this house, next door to two men who would understand me and help me and fill my loneliness; it was God that whispered your name into Frederick’s ear and who sent you to pull down this fence. Oh, yes, Rudy, I believe in God.” Jacob studied Rudy’s face trying to read his thoughts.
“Sometimes in searching for answers to things we can’t understand, we humans find it easier to blame God instead of our own free will. But you have asked a big question which you will have to answer for yourself. You’re a smart boy, Rudy. Just look around, and you will feel the answer in your soul.”
Rudy thought of his mother dragging him to church each Sunday. He had seen her praying a million times and thought it was nonsense, but now he wondered if maybe God really did exist, did listen to prayers. If Jacob and Frederick and Yoshito all believed after what they had been through, perhaps there was something to it. Maybe he would listen more closely the next time he went with her, listen more to what the pastor said. Jacob interrupted his thoughts.
“But let me continue. My father and I were issued striped work clothes that were not nearly warm enough, and we were housed in overcrowded barracks, hundreds of men to a barrack, several to a bunk. Everyone received a tattooed number on their arm. That’s all we were, a number,” he said, as he showed the now familiar inside of his forearm to Rudy.
“My father and I were lucky that we were healthy and strong. We were put to work almost immediately after getting there. We dug pits mostly, for the dead. It was a horrible job, but we knew as long as we worked hard and stayed out of trouble, we might survive and not end up in the pit or gas chamber ourselves. That is, if we could avoid the illnesses in the camps. There was so much death, so many diseases: dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus, and then just exhaustion from being malnourished and being worked to death. Someone might have a broken bone or a cut, but with no medical attention, the infection could kill them. You could only pray to God in heaven to die quickly if that was your fate, otherwise you would end up in the pit—alive or dead—or later on in the crematorium. The smell of death was everywhere; even outdoors it seemed to live in your uniform, stay permanently housed in your nostrils. It is something I will never forget.
“On the second morning after walking out of the camp gates forever, I was finally far enough away that when I went outside and breathed in fresh air. I finally did not smell burning flesh and rot. Do you know what I did, Rudy? I wept for joy. I cried and cried and cried. I was so happy, yet so sad. I think some of those tears were also for my family.” Again, Jacob paused, trying to reign in his emotions.
“But I am moving ahead in my story. My father and I somehow survived for years without too much incident. Oh, we got very skinny, just bags of bones, but we were able to keep relatively disease-free. We saw terrible things being done to others, but somehow we were able to stay under the radar. My father suffered great depression over Blanca’s death. I think he blamed himself for keeping us so innocent for so long, saying that Blanca may have coped better had she been more aware of what was happening. I tried to reassure him and refocus his thoughts on what life would be like after the war, but even that was a challenge. We had heard nothing of my mother.
“There was a lot of turmoil going on the last months before the war ended. In October 1944, SS soldiers began rounding us up telling us we were moving to another camp and that we were walking for part of the way, another train for the remainder of the trip. The sick and the children were being left behind, to die no doubt. These evacuations were called the death marches. It was extremely cold outside, and my father and I wondered if we could survive. We didn’t understand what was happening then, but we know now that the German military leaders were getting scared. They wanted to leave the scene of the crime and take as much of the evidence with them—and hoped that we would die along the way. The journey was brutal; we lost half the number we started with. Men were left to die if they were weak or sick, or were shot along the way. There was little food, and the temperatures were freezing. We ate snow for water. My father made the trip, but his strength and stamina clearly deteriorated. We ended up at Bergen-Belsen, another concentration camp.
“Although there was always talk of the war ending, most of it was wishful thinking to keep us alive. But after the move from Auschwitz, the rumors seemed more believable than ever; yet, how could we get our hopes up? Right around Chanukah, my father caught pneumonia. He was very ill but still went out on work detail. Each night we said our prayers which were so dear to my father. You asked if I believe in God? At that time, secretly I wondered where God had gone. I did not yet understand the complexities of free will and to what extent Hitler had mesmerized so many German people.
“Each day, I covered for my father as much as possible, but finally the time came when he could no longer get out of bed to go to work. I pleaded with him, encouraging him with hope that the war would soon be ending and we would be reunited with my mother. He would say, ‘Yes, yes, my son. We will be together soon,’ but I believe he knew he would not be there for that reunion. On the last morning of his life, he patted my cheek before I left for work detail. He said, ‘Jacob, my only son and now my only child, you are a good boy and will be a good man. God is good. Remember that.’ All I could say was, ‘Yes, papa. God is good.’ I wished I had told him that I loved him, that he had been a good father, that he had kept me alive all these years; but I didn’t. When I returned that night, his body was gone—to the pit, to the crematorium, I never knew. That night, I wept myself to sleep, but I resolved to live to find and take care of my mother.
“In January of 1945, we did not know it, but Soviet armies were closing in on Auschwitz. In those last days, SS soldiers were told to blow up the crematoriums—you know, get rid of the evidence. There are still some there to this day, a testament to what occurred. On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated us at last. They found sixty thousand survivors and twenty-seven thousand unburied corpses piled in heaps. I found out in the days that followed that my mother had died of tuberculosis within one year of coming into the camp. How could that be, I asked myself? I had only stayed alive to take care of her once my father had died. Now, I was left on my own. The grief, anger, and hopelessness were almost unbearable. Now, I had only one goal: to go home and get to the Reinholms’ as my father had instructed. Maybe it was a mistake, and Momma would be there waiting for me, to hug me and comfort me the way she did when I was a small boy. With every last ounce of strength and determination in my body, I made my way back to Berlin, even though I had heard so much of the city was destroyed. Some buildings were barely standing, others unscathed. Very few people had stayed in Berlin, yet some had nowhere else to go. Still, I was determined. I h
itched rides with army trucks. I walked and I accepted help and warmer clothes from strangers. I must have looked like a half dead skeleton when I knocked on the Reinholms’ door. I was so thin that my bones protruded everywhere; my head was shaved and I had open sores on my body. Mrs. Reinholm answered the door and didn’t recognize me at first; she thought I was a scavenger. When I addressed her and asked if my mother had made it back, she looked at me hard, and then said, “Oh, my God, Jacob, what have they done to you? She took me in her arms and led me into the house screaming for her husband. They immediately gave me food and drink and then sent me upstairs for a hot bath—the first I had taken in almost five years. Then I slept for two days.”
“Your mother never came, did she?” Rudy asked, knowing the answer. Jacob shook his head.
“While building back up my strength and putting some meat on these bones, I waited for her, looking out the window, jumping every time someone came to the door. Of course, my mother was dead. I came to accept that with the help of the Reinholms. They were very good to me. They let me stay with them for as long as I wanted. Our home had been next door, but there was nothing left. In those years we were gone, everything had been ransacked. The Reinholms did manage to sneak in the night we were taken and get some of our belongings out before the authorities and pillagers came through. I was grateful to have something that my parents and Blanca had touched: my mother’s shawl, a picture they had admired, a clock from the hallway, the brush and mirror from Blanca’s room, some old photos, my father’s embroidered handkerchiefs. I walked through the house once, but it no longer felt like home. There were dark and unexpected shadows in places I seemed to remember as being bright and gay. I was only in there for a few minutes before I was burdened with such sadness. Berlin itself was not the city I had left, so much of it destroyed and bombed.
“In the months following the end of the war, as Berlin began to rebuild, I got a clerical job in one of the businesses where the owners had known and liked my parents, and I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. I think they felt sorry for me. But I was grateful and accepted their pity. I think they may have also felt a little guilty as well. What had been done to me was the least of what their great führer had done. I somehow had survived that madman’s lunacy. But I did not want them to regret their kindness toward me. I worked hard, was good with numbers, and made myself useful. I think in the end, they were sorry to see me leave.
“I had been with the Reinholms just under two years on the day that I told them I had bought a ticket to America. Mr. and Mrs. Reinholm cried; they thought of me as a son. They then brought out an envelope and handed it to me. Years before our evacuation, after it was too late for our escape out of Germany, my father gave the Reinholms the equivalent of two hundred dollars—a lot of money for that time. He asked them to hold it, in case any of us survived the war. If none of us came back, it was theirs for helping us. Without any thought of their own gain, they gave it to me, telling me they had known this day would come and that I would need the money to start a new life. How we hugged that day. They wished me well and told me to keep in touch. I promised I would.
“As good as the Reinholms had been to me, there was nothing to keep me in Germany any longer, and how could I stay and not be haunted by memories of what had been? My family was all dead. I needed to move far away.
“My mother had a cousin who lived in Los Angeles, and I had written to him asking if I could stay with him until I got settled. He was more than generous and happy to hear that someone from his extended family had survived the war. It was a long journey, but every mile that passed by my window on the ship, the train, and the bus seemed to distance me from the camp and from the country I could not call home any longer.
“I came to America and spent another year with my cousin. I got a job and went to school, saved some money. America was very good to me; she adopted a poor, beaten-down immigrant, and made him her own. Don’t ever underestimate what you can do in this country, Rudy… what you can be if you work hard. I’m not saying it will be easy. What would be the point if everything was just handed to you? You see the circumstances I came from and how I was able to create a future, buy this house. You know, at one time, this was considered a good neighborhood. Now I want you to succeed, be anything you want to be, but don’t expect it to drop in your lap. But I do promise you that everything you can dream of is out there waiting for you, if you try. Promise me you will try, that you will try very hard, Rudy.”
Rudy thought about it. He was not used to thinking about working hard as a good thing or that obstacles served a purpose. But he found himself nodding and saying that yes, he would try. He would not give up. If Jacob could do it, so could he—and he found he actually believed it.
“So, now you know it all, Rudy,” he said as he let out a big sigh of relief. “I am glad I told you. Blanca helped me today—yes, I think that must be so.” Rudy just nodded.
“Were you ever married, Jacob?”
“Ah no, unfortunately I was not lucky in the romance department. It was my own fault. I was always afraid to get too close to people. Afraid I would lose them and not be able to endure it. So I pushed everyone away. I see this all clearly now that I am an old man. You will find many decades from now that your eyesight will fade as you get old, but your inner eyesight will see things more clearly than when you are young. You gain a wisdom that in earlier years you cannot possess because you have not experienced enough, seen enough. When you are old like me, that is when you finally understand your own heart and soul. Yet, I see that even now I am still learning. You see, I was afraid of you and your friends, Rudy—you made me confront the past. And I find that finally standing up to it with you next to me has made me feel freer and lighter and… I think happier than I have in years! I feel as if a great burden has been lifted off my chest, a fear gone from my heart; fear that has been replaced with hope. So you see? There is still much for me to learn even as an old man.”
“You’re not afraid of me anymore, are you Jacob?”
“No, my fearless friend; in fact, I thank you.” With great emotion, he continued. “I know now that I can talk about Blanca without my heart breaking. I think you did that for me.”
Rudy returned Jacob’s smile. Rudy felt elated. He had done this for Jacob—a poor, know-nothing, fatherless kid in the bad part of town. This is what it felt like to give. As long as he lived, Rudy never wanted to forget these moments with Jacob.
Jacob took a deep breath in his lovely garden. The air smelled fresh and clean and fragrant. As he looked around, the colors popped. How much he loved this place.
Near the back of the property, the remaining feet of fence hung to one side, barely holding on. “Ah, I hear the birds again. It must be close to dinner time. Let’s call it a day, Rudy. I’m afraid I am all worn out. I think I may sleep well tonight. You’re a good boy. Now go on home to your mother and tomorrow… well, tomorrow, we will finally tear down the rest of that damn fence.”
Chapter 13
The next day, Rudy and Jacob worked on pulling down the last few feet of the fence. Frederick and Yoshito both came to help where they could. It was the end of a great battle, and the war was over.
Jacob seemed like a young man again. He seemed more vibrant, more alive, rejuvenated.
“How’d you sleep, Jacob?” Rudy asked.
“Like a baby in the arms of an angel,” he replied with a wink and a smile. Frederick and Yoshito noticed the change in Jacob too.
“Jacob, if you were a younger man, I’d say you were in love!” Frederick laughed.
“Don’t be silly, Frederick. What? Can’t a man be happy? Can’t a man take pleasure being in his yard with nature and God all around, working side by side with his best friends?”
Yoshito saw the smile on Rudy’s face and responded, “Of course, Jacob. We are happy to be here to see the final stages of the fence coming down; we hav
e all waited for this occasion. We have a great feast planned to celebrate this evening. Rudy, we thought you should invite your mother. Would she like to join us for dinner here in the yard? You can show her how hard you worked this summer.”
Rudy looked at the others. “Well, yeah, I’d like that. Is it okay with all of you?”
“Of course!” Frederick replied enthusiastically.
“And you Jacob, it is okay with you?” Rudy asked.
“Rudy, it’s about time I met the woman that has done such a fine job raising you. And she probably would like to meet me and Yoshito; see if we measure up to Frederick. She probably would like to see who you have been spending your time with all summer.”
Rudy smiled broadly. “Okay, great, I’ll let her know. Do you mind if I use your phone to call her at work?”
“No, go ahead. Just watch those dirty hands of yours. Wash them in the sink before you use the phone. It’s in the living room. Go on.”
Rudy ran to the back door and entered. He was smiling. His mother knew Frederick from church, but he wanted his mother to meet the others and really get to know them as he had.
The Compass Page 9
