Beyond the Shadow of Night

by Ray Kingfisher

  Asher reached down and grabbed Stefan’s other arm. He tried to pull, but could only hold Stefan steady. He looked farther ahead and saw a guard running up toward the gate. He grunted as he strained to pull Stefan up, then heard a bullet whistle past his ear.

  That was when he let go of Stefan and threw himself back. Both men hit the ground at the same time, Asher outside the gate, Stefan inside. Blood spewed from Stefan’s mouth, but still he looked at Asher and held a grasping hand out.

  Save yourself, Asher told himself, save yourself, and he raced away into the woods, darting left and right as the gunfire continued behind him.

  Fires blazed at every corner of the camp. Only the brick buildings were untouched. The prisoners had done their best to wreck the sturdy gas chamber block, but burning the wooden doors and dislodging a few bricks with grenades was hardly recompense for the deathly offenses against human decency inflicted there.

  The door that they knew held the secret—the source of the killing fumes—was bombarded and battered, but personal freedom was more important, and soon they either escaped or were shot by guards.

  Inside the engine house, one Mykhail Petrenko cowered in a dark corner behind the oily mass of the engine, in no doubt as to what was happening outside and what would happen to him should they break through. He’d been dragging the last of the victims out of the chambers when the fighting had started. He’d heard shots, then grenades, then seen guards shot by prisoners, and had run back into the safety of the engine room before the fires and major explosions started. He’d shoved everything movable—tables, tools, fuel containers—against the door to barricade himself in. He’d heard guards ordering him to open up, then heard gunfire, then heard the mob trying to break the door down.

  Like a cornered animal, Mykhail sat in his own personal darkness, knees to chest, rocking his lonely figure, trembling and wide-eyed, and mumbling nonsense to himself.

  By now the mob had left, and he could only hear the crackle and roar of an inferno, but in his head Mykhail still heard the voices demanding vengeance, telling him to open the doors, screaming that they would break them down and kill anyone inside.

  He was to hear those voices for a long time.

  Chapter 23

  Parking lot, Allegheny County Jail, Pittsburgh, August 2001

  Diane slumped into her seat, and slumped a little more before reaching for her seat belt. “Thanks,” she said.

  “How’d it go this time?” Brad replied.

  “Let’s just get out of this place,” she said, pointing to the exit.

  They’d traveled a mile before either of them spoke again.

  “Is everything good?” Brad asked.

  He spoke as sympathetically as he always did when she was giving him the silent treatment. And she knew she was giving him the silent treatment right now, but felt powerless to do anything about it. As always, he accepted it, and it seemed to work, without either of them getting upset. He would just wait; she would eventually give in.

  They stopped at a set of lights. She gave in.

  “I’m going to live with Mother in Baltimore for a while,” she said. “I mean, in a few days, when I’m done listening to that murderer back there and done dealing with Father’s house.”

  “Okay.”

  She glanced right. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

  “It . . . it means it’s fine with me.” The lights changed and he set off again. “It’s just . . . I thought you might want to stop longer at my place, perhaps even make it permanent.”

  “I need a bed in Pittsburgh while I sort out Father’s stuff, and I’m really grateful it’s yours, but eventually I’ll go stay with Mother.”

  “And her new husband.”

  “So she’s remarried. So what?”

  “Nothing. But you know I’d like you to move in permanently—when you want to, that is. And there’s your job here to consider.”

  “Screw my job.”

  “All right. As long as you know the offer’s there. Just promise me you’ll consider it.”

  “I am considering it—right now. And I’ve just told you, I’m . . .” She let out a long, frustrated breath. “Brad, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m grateful for all you’ve done, really, but I think I owe it to Mother.” They drove another few hundred yards before she continued. “I don’t expect you to understand, but we missed out on a lot of time together because of Father. And as for moving in with you permanently, thank you again. Perhaps one day. I don’t know. I’m a mess at the moment. You may have noticed.”

  “Whatever works for you. It’s not a now-or-never offer. I could visit you and your mom in Baltimore at weekends—that is, if you’d like that.”

  She laid her hand on his arm. “Hey, that’d be lovely. And I’m sorry I’m such a pain in the ass right now.”

  “Hey, will you cut that out? You’ve had a hard time. Just do what you feel you have to. If you really want to move in with your mom, then move in with her. It’s not gonna kill me.” He grimaced. “Sorry. Unfortunate choice of words.”

  Once Diane had given that some thought, it brought a smile to her lips, which brought a smile to his lips.

  “I guess you’d like to know what just happened back there?” she said.

  They stopped at another set of lights, and he looked to the right. “You don’t need to tell me the details, just whether it was worth it.”

  “Worth it?”

  “Did he tell you what you wanted to know?”

  “Hmm . . .” She pursed her lips tightly.

  “I’m guessing he didn’t, right?” Still he got no answer, so he said, “On the other hand, if you’d rather not tell me anything at all . . .”

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s not that. I’m thinking. He did talk. He talked a lot. But it was all about him and Father growing up together in Ukraine and what happened to them during the war years. I never realized Father had such a hard time of it. It’s so easy to forget that your parents had a life before you were born. I guess that’s a pretty universal thing.”

  “I get that,” Brad said. “Does that mean he didn’t tell you why he killed your father?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Uh, so you’re going back?”

  Diane nodded. “I need to find out, and he sounds like he needs to tell me. But it’s good. It was quite friendly, considering what he did. And we talked about what Father was like.”

  “What he was like? In what way?”

  “Whether I really knew him.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m beginning to think . . . well, perhaps I didn’t. At least not as well as I thought I did. And I have to admit he knows a hell of a lot about my father’s life, considering there was such a long time when they didn’t see each other—over sixty years.”

  “You always told me your father never really liked to talk about the old times. You said you assumed it was all too painful for him and he wanted to put it behind him.”

  “That’s what I thought. I asked him once what happened to him during the war and why he came to America. He said the whole thing was horrible and I didn’t want to know. I told him I did, that he should try talking about it. He got angry with me, like he was about to have some sort of fit or breakdown, so I backed off, told him to forget it, and I never broached the subject again.”

  Brad shot her a glance. “You never told me that before.”

  “Sorry.” Even after all this time, she wasn’t sure why she was still unable to tell Brad the whole truth about her father.

  Another few minutes of silence passed. During that time, the things Diane hadn’t said about her father ran through her mind. There was the trick he would pull whenever she hinted—as she had once or twice a few years before—that she was thinking of moving in with Brad. There was the tiredness that seemed at odds with his ability to walk miles every day. There were the continued reassurances—announced in a weak, throaty voice—that he’d be okay on his own because he li
ked his own company and no longer felt wanted by the world anyway. Most importantly, there were also the nights—anything up to three of them a week throughout his life—when he would talk in his sleep, spouting out seemingly random words of Ukrainian in a deep and threatening tone. Diane had faint memories from when she was a little girl of asking him why he talked in his sleep, and how he’d told her never to talk about his “episodes” to anyone—even him. When her parents split up she’d even thought that it might have been a factor. It was only soon afterward, when she stayed with her mother, that she found out the truth, which was much worse. Perhaps, she’d mused many years later, she stayed with him to prevent him having some sort of breakdown—to stop those truths coming out. Moreover, perhaps he knew the threat of that might just make a good reason for her to stay. So, had it been her concern to keep the peace at all costs, or his emotional blackmail? She could take her pick: both were partly true.

  Back at Brad’s place, he cooked, and they talked all evening. They talked about the place where they’d worked together and about coworkers past and present. They talked about the vacations they’d shared. They talked as they walked around Brad’s flower garden—the one Diane had planned and planted largely on her own.

  They didn’t talk about Diane’s parents, or Baltimore, or the murder case, or what she was going to do and say at the county jail the next day. That was good.

  Chapter 24

  Treblinka, Poland, 1943

  It might have been an hour since Asher escaped from Treblinka or it might have been three, but he stopped, exhausted, and fell to the forest floor. He’d heard gunfire, horses, and vehicles on various occasions, but had evaded all of them, running when he had the energy, walking when he didn’t.

  Now he was utterly spent, and the sun was going down. In the near darkness he climbed a tree and tied his jacket to a branch for safety, thanking God this wasn’t one of those bitterly cold nights. He fell asleep immediately, and was woken before dawn by a rain shower. It was welcome, and he collected and drank the water as best he could. Before daylight broke he got down and started moving again.

  This time, weak and stiff, he could do no more than stumble between the trees, but he eventually reached a river. He looked long and hard at the rushing torrent, listened to its hypnotic thunder, and concluded it would probably kill him, and hence would be a last resort. He turned back under cover of the forest and started walking alongside the river.

  Soon he spotted a building between the veil of tree trunks and slowed to a stealthy prowl. It was a farmhouse on the edge of the forest, with a small field beyond. His eyes were drawn to the cattle in the field, to the chickens to the right of the farmhouse, but mostly to the small orchard next to the wooden barn on the left, which backed onto the edge of the forest.

  Within minutes Asher had entered the orchard’s edge via the forest and was picking plums, pears, and small apples, cramming what he could into his mouth, storing more in his pockets and in the crook of one arm. He heard a door open and ran into the barn. On one side was a ladder leading up to a hayloft. He climbed up and headed for the darkest place, where he sat in silence. He heard nothing, so ate, gorging himself on sweet fruit. Then, as bloated as a medieval king, he fell asleep.

  Asher’s slumber was peppered with dreams of fire and nightmares of the dying, but they paled to nothing as he stirred, disturbed by something heavy crawling on his outstretched legs. As he started to wake up he sensed pressure on his chest and heard close breathing.

  He gasped, and the nightmares were forgotten as he woke to the rancid breath of a dog. He grabbed the thing by its wiry hair and was about to push it away when his eyes met with something just beyond—the muzzle of a shotgun.

  It took him a moment to look at the other end, where he saw an elderly woman in dirty gray clothes and a headscarf. She was staring right into his eyes, her finger poised on the trigger. She whistled, and the dog hopped off Asher’s chest and trotted away to sit by her feet.

  “Polish?” she said.

  “Ukrainian,” Asher replied in a croaking voice.

  She asked whether he was a Jew. The black holes of the rifle barrels forced the answer back down his throat. Should he lie to save himself?

  As he considered his reply, the woman’s eyes bobbed down to the side of his leg—to the dark red streak on his pants.

  “Treblinka?” she said.

  Asher gave a single nod and held his breath. The muzzle of the rifle stayed where it was, and Asher closed his eyes and prayed. He prayed for whatever was going to happen to happen quickly.

  He couldn’t hold his breath long, and let out a wheeze and some tears as he opened his eyes.

  The muzzle was still there, and her eyes were still on him.

  Then her eyes moved to the side, to where he’d thrown the plum stones.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in his most polite Polish. “I was so hungry.”

  Her nostrils twitched, and the tip of her tongue peeped out between her cracked lips and lodged in the corner of her mouth. Slowly and steadily she backed away. “Stay where you are,” she said, and climbed down to the barn floor.

  Asher crept over, conscious he was disobeying but unable to resist. He poked his head far enough over to see her standing in the doorway below him.

  She called out toward the house, and soon a man joined her. She talked to him while he wiped his hands on a rag, and at one point she cast a hand back in Asher’s direction. There were heated voices, hand gestures, after which the man strode past her and approached the ladder.

  Asher quickly threw himself back to where he’d been told to stay, and the man’s head appeared seconds later. He climbed up and walked over to Asher.

  “You’re Jewish?” he said. “Escaped from the camp?”

  Asher nodded, not taking his eyes off the man. “I’m Ukrainian. I was in Warsaw, then Treblinka. I escaped from there. I don’t mean you any harm. I’m just desperate.”

  Then the woman appeared again at the top of the ladder.

  The man glanced back to her and said to Asher, “We’re the Malinowskis.”

  “Asher Kogan.”

  “On your own?”

  Asher nodded.

  “You can stay with us,” he said. “But not in here.”

  “Thank you,” Asher said, heaving a sigh. “I’ll repay your kindness.”

  Now the woman was standing next to the man. He put his arm around her. “Forgive my wife,” he said. “The farmhouse belonged to our son and his wife. They took in a family of Jews two years ago, sheltered them. The Nazis found out and shot them all. They said we should think ourselves lucky they let us have the farm.”

  Then the man’s eyes grew heavy; he blinked to hold back his tears.

  Asher looked at the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really.”

  She nodded and said, “Me too, but thank you.”

  “Anyway,” the man said, “we’re old now. It hardly matters. We’ll protect you, and if it kills us . . . so be it.” He shrugged. “Not that we won’t fight.”

  Back at the camp, Mykhail had listened from his cocoon to the fires burning themselves out and the shouts turning to talk. He knew he’d probably slept but couldn’t be sure, his mind having hopped from reality to nightmare and all stages in between. But he would starve if he stayed in the engine room.

  The first things he saw on removing the barricades and opening the door were rifles pointed at him. As one guard searched him for weapons, he cast his eyes over the scenes of the prisoner uprising. Dead bodies—a mix of guards, prisoners, and fellow Trawnikis—were strewn about. Blood tainted the earth everywhere. Most of the buildings still smoldered, smoke lazily drifting above. It was so quiet compared to what he’d heard during the revolt.

  “Did you know anything about the prisoners’ plans?” the guard asked him.

  Mykhail shook his head.

  The guard briefly spoke with his superior, then turned back to Mykhail. “You have to clear up,” he said.

>   Mykhail nodded. Whether he understood or agreed or was just relieved not to be shot, he wasn’t quite sure.

  Over the next few days he worked all the daylight hours. People who had been shot in the uprising were divided into two: bodies of guards were shipped out for a proper burial; those of the prisoners simply added to the mass of bodies. With no prisoners, it was left to the Trawnikis and guards to do the dirty work. Prisoners who had been shot, prisoners who had been recently gassed, and exhumed bodies all had to be dragged away and loaded onto the enormous pyres. The men scattered the resulting ashes far and wide, digging them into the sand and earth. They weren’t told why they were doing this, but they all knew because they’d heard the rumors: the Soviet troops were advancing, and the Germans wanted to cover up what had been happening. They were even told to dismantle and destroy what remained of the camp buildings, effectively erasing all traces that it ever existed—bodies, buildings, records, everything.

  Eventually the place was restored to nothing more than a forest clearing. The only clues as to what had happened there were to be found a few inches below the surface.

  A few miles away, on the farm, Asher took a few weeks to do nothing more than rest and eat. It turned out that there was a large gash along the outside of one leg, the pain of which had been covered by adrenaline and exhaustion. But Mrs. Malinowski dressed the wound daily and it recovered, along with his body weight.

  Mr. Malinowski constructed a compact hiding hole behind the log pile in the storeroom just off the kitchen. Asher went there whenever there was a knock at the door, ready to squeeze into it if he heard the code word that signified the presence of Nazi guards. Additionally, Mrs. Malinowski would spring into action, ensuring there were no giveaway signs such as a third plate or cup on the table, and rolling up Asher’s makeshift bed and storing it away. Their efficiency sometimes made Asher slightly fearful—but so grateful.

  They asked for nothing in return, and after one particular visit, once the Nazis had gone, Asher asked Mrs. Malinowski why she was helping him, risking her life when there were much easier options. “It’s what our son would have wanted,” was the reply.