Islands of Deception

by Constance Hood

  She cleared her throat and took a deep breath.

  “Why are you sorry? Drinking too much, or seeing me again?”

  “Not – sorry … to see you again.”

  “Never mind. It was a long time ago. I waited days for you to call, but I also knew why you didn’t. You just left.”

  The combination of a hangover and tranquilizers had stolen his wits. He had to say something. “I decided to join the army.” Hopefully that would suffice.

  His eyes came into focus on her face. “So, you work here now? At this hospital?”

  “Yes, I joined the army as well. Once I got my nursing degree, I went to Ohio with my husband.”

  “You are married then.” She certainly didn’t act like a married woman.

  “I’m widowed. Ron died in Normandy.”

  Hank grasped her wrist. They sat quietly in the ward holding hands as the sun began to rise through the windows. Her co-worker rushed through the open room, waking patients, and getting breakfast trays ready. Greta straightened her cap, and began to help men move from their beds. Her duty would be ending very soon. He wasn’t sure if she had just been nice to him, or if there could ever be a way to repair all the damages that had been caused by others. A new nurse brought Hank a breakfast tray. On the tray was a slip of paper with a telephone number. The note said “Do you still like meatloaf?” He recognized the writing.

  The doctor came by and moved the stethoscope around Hank’s chest and abdomen. “Breathe.”

  “You did not have a heart attack. Sometimes we can have anxiety attacks. They are very real, and they can be dangerous.”

  “It’s important that you don’t work for three days. I’m going to notify your C.O. You need to get away and relax a little.”

  Those were words that Hank did not want to hear. He had been fleeing for six years – from Amsterdam to New York, to Noumea, and back. Wherever he had gone, he had brought his own thoughts, his own desires, his successes and disappointments. The idea that someone would “get away” for relaxation seemed like a false promise. He couldn’t imagine a day without work, a day where he didn’t know what to do. He put her note in his wallet as he dressed.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Upstate New York

  May 1945

  “In an old Dutch Garden where the tulips grow

  That’s where I first whispered that I love you so.”

  ­~ Glenn Miller song

  Hans paced the hall at the rooming house. At the end sat a small telephone table with a lamp, beckoning him. He never called anyone. If he did talk to Greta what could he possibly say? He wouldn’t lie to her, but he certainly couldn’t tell her everything he knew. The pacing and worrying made him feel weak again. He sat down on the chair by the table. After a few deep breaths he pulled out her note and dialed. Maybe she wouldn’t be home anyway. He would give it five rings, and then go outside.

  She picked up the receiver on the second ring.

  “Greta, it’s Hank.”

  “I thought it might be. How are you doing?”

  “I’ll live. It wasn’t a heart attack. And, yes, I still like meatloaf.”

  Two nights later he showed up at her door with a large bouquet of red tulips. She kissed him on the cheek and put the flowers into a coffeepot filled with water. A saucepan with ice in it held a bottle of White Niagara. She handed him the corkscrew. He opened the wine and poured two glasses of the chilled New York sunshine. A plate of Dutch cheese and German Rye crackers sat on her coffee table.

  “Greta, how did you end up in the U.S. Army?” He had been debriefing Germans for weeks, and none of them had been as dangerous as her brothers.

  “I married about a year after I finished nursing school, and when Ron joined, I decided to go with him. He was a regular American boy.” A soft smile contrasted with the sadness in her eyes. “An engineer. We had gone to high school together. And you?”

  “Hard to say. I was in the Pacific.” He had nothing more to say. His hand froze around the stem of the glass, and he set it down.

  “Hank, you have to tell me the truth.”

  He hadn’t thought of it quite that way, but he would want an honest wife.

  She continued. “I went to your home. Your landlady didn’t know where you had gone. You even left your clothes. I went to Rosenbaum’s. He said that you had not come in to work, ever again. What happened?”

  His head was down, trying to sort the information. She was right. He had to share something, and it had to be true. Yet, if he told all the truth, he would lose her again.

  “Greta, you asked me something yesterday, something about worry. What happened to your family?”

  “If you mean my parents, they bought a farm in Pennsylvania. Papa talks to his cows, raises a few pigs for meat, and mother sells eggs to the grocers. She has a couple hundred chickens. It is a busy, good life for them both. I talk to her every month, but I only see papa at Christmas.”

  “What about your brothers?”

  “My brothers are both drunks. Mean drunks. They hate everybody, but they don’t visit at all. We don’t speak.”

  Hank was in the midst of a wrestling match with his conscience and his desires, angry about her brothers, jealous that she had already known love, and frustrated by his need to keep secrets.

  “I don’t know what to say about your brothers, but I can tell you this. I was an immigrant, and they had Nazi sympathies. Do you realize that if I were caught around any of you, I could have been deported?” He left out the fact that if he had been deported, he would have ended up in the work camps as a Jewish prisoner.

  When their eyes met, both saw hurt and regret. He took her hand, immaculate and smooth. There were no long nails to scratch; nothing was chewed or bitten, she did not use lacquer to cover imagined flaws. She was strength and beauty, warmth and comfort. He lifted her hand to his face and kissed it. She startled, and stood up, quickly wrapped an apron around her dress and retrieved the meatloaf from the oven. They were both ravenous. He watched her as she sliced the meatloaf, and scooped the mashed potatoes onto his plate.

  “Do you still like to dance?” He couldn’t think of a future, only of things they had known together. She picked up the dishes, and pirouetted toward the sink. A bowl of fresh strawberries appeared. He arranged the two wine glasses and the tulips on her coffee table. Just as he poured, she dropped a strawberry into his glass and smiled. He fished it out, and popped it into her mouth, a little juice dripping toward her chin. He started to grab a napkin to wipe it away, then leaned in and kissed her instead. She was moist, sweet, and ripe.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Brooklyn, New York

  July 1947

  “Four of the world’s great powers sit in judgment today on twenty top Germans whom the democratic nations charge with major responsibility for plunging the world into World War II.” ~ Nuremberg Trials, New York Times

  Esther, now Susani Lutz, regarded the little cat in her open window. Warm summer sun streamed into the room, and the orange tabby seemed to be playing with the rays of light speckling the balcony. The tiger was hunting once more. She was fascinated by the actions, some quiet and stealthy and some bold and larger than life. How does the cat know which strategy to employ?

  The little kitten had located its prey, a small butterfly. At first it carried the beautiful creature in its mouth, and then it decided to seize the wings as a toy. Once the butterfly stopped moving, it was no longer of interest to the kitten, which went on to find another creature. The young woman smiled and remembered looking out of her bedroom window in Amsterdam. As she went to pick up the dead butterfly from its place in the corner, it moved slightly in her hand. Setting it down on the windowsill, she watched the butterfly take off into the air. Playing dead had given it one more chance at life.

  Susani and Georg Lutz lived in Brooklyn, in a cheery apar
tment with flowered drapes and carpets, a heavy cushioned sofa and a leather easy chair, all purchased on installment plans. She had picked it because the building on the corner of Prospect Place was yellow, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life in the sun. A grocer’s and a baker’s window were across the street, displaying their wares.

  Sometimes she would go to the Jewish delicatessen for the makings of a cold supper, or perhaps a piece of poppy seed cake. There, customers sat at little round tables speaking Yiddish and German. She did not sit with the women for long conversations. They were talking of their new appliances and their children. Babies with bottles and pacifiers firmly attached to their faces wandered around the shop and occasionally opened up their mouths for a piece of zwieback to chew on. Mornings were best. After lunch, noisy school aged children in the shop begged their mothers for cookies or sweets to take home.

  The European environment of the deli was the closest thing she could find to the dairy and meat markets of Amsterdam, the Kosher bakery and the greengrocer. Holland had disappeared into the flood of news about America’s uncomfortable rivalry with Russia and U.S. efforts to repair Germany and Japan. German and Dutch collaborators were seizing property all over Europe. If the home at 94 Herengracht was still standing, it was a valuable property. The diamonds and silver hidden inside the walls could sell for a small fortune. The problem was that she saw this as property that was rightly hers, and Lutz saw it as war booty.

  Sometimes new acquaintances were curious about the young couple – the silent woman and her self-possessed husband. People would ask how they met, and she would smirk and respond, “In prison.” Nobody asked anything more than that. Her green eyes often gazed off into a distance, far removed from the noise and energy of New York. The American dream was all over the magazines that Susani loved to look at, but it was far away from their Brooklyn neighborhood. She was picking up English quickly, but Georg was struggling with the language.

  After he had drunk a couple beers at the German club, Susani occasionally heard his voice spouting old propaganda. He lacked the courage to mention that he had not planned to join the German Army in the first place. No one had planned to join any of the armies, so that was a moot point. It would be reprehensible to mention that he had been an SS officer, and he did not wish to end up hanging like a broken puppet at Nuremberg. In his mind it wasn’t wrong to act against personal will, in the service of a greater cause. It wasn’t as if he had had a choice. She hated him for his cowardice. If you don’t see a choice, make one!

  Lutz might have earned a hydraulic engineering degree in Austria, but with his German accent he was one of thousands of immigrants looking for work. He had finally found a position with a plumbing supplies manufacturer, and spent his days putting toilets together. The laborer’s daily pay barely covered their rent and groceries and there had been countless arguments over money.

  Now Georg had a second job. He had befriended the superintendent of this apartment building, offering his mechanical expertise to make antique radiators simmer with new energy. When the superintendent left to buy a farm upstate, Lutz was recommended for the job. People trusted him, his easy smile and his attention to their problems. Both of Georg’s employers were Jewish, at least two generations away from Eastern Europe. He did not grasp the idea that his employers were now Americans. They left one foot in the immigrant world of the last century, and were not particularly aware of the recent efforts to destroy the Jewish people. In their rational world it was possible to hire a German mechanic.

  In private discussions he would share his concerns about money, and about his employers. “The capitalists started the whole war. It was all about their greed.” His tirade was one of dreams not realized and bitterness with no bottom. A sympathetic ear would get more than it bargained for. “Jew Capitalists caused the depression. Even the English knew that. Roosevelt knew it, but then he let them ride roughshod over our countries.” If the conversation didn’t halt at those comments, the bigger ideas would come out. “Hitler was our only chance against the capitalists and against the communists. We could have shown the world an ideal society.”

  He knew his wife was the daughter of “Jew capitalists” but she remained quiet during these comments. She was not rich. Due to his efforts, she was alive. It was enough that his wife’s family had been sacrificed on the flaming altars of commerce and war.

  Susani was learning to type, and to write simple inquiry letters in English. There was a Dutch consul in New York. She would need to persuade Lutz that a claim on the Herengracht home would be worth pursuing. Either they would be happy together, or she would be independent. At the consulate she stood in line and filled out several stacks of papers. An efficient clerk suggested that she stay updated on developments in Europe and the status of Dutch assets. Jewish homes were being seized as “abandoned property” and were now sold for pennies on the guilder. European families were starving, and a particularly cold winter had covered the Northern Hemisphere in ice that disappeared into floods. No one would want a four-story house to heat. The downstairs marble ballroom alone would consume fuel rations for the entire winter.

  ***

  November 1947

  Weeks later, in Amsterdam, Dinah Engels was filing letters for the Red Cross. She had sorted the letters in alphabetical order. Stacks of file cards listed the names of the senders and the names of recipients in alphabetical order. Another set was organized by address. The shards of families were scattered around the world like thousands of broken clay pipes, delicate, fragmented and too minute to reassemble. It was not possible to fill in the blanks. In front of her was a stack of cards tied to the valuable houses along the old canals. They had been occupied by Germans, the British and by every type of relief worker. Squatters filled in the spare rooms and attics. The street had escaped significant damages. She was to open each inquiry and to file the information on persons of interest.

  Hans Bernsteen (Hank Burns) Rochester New York, USA. Mr. Bernsteen appeared to be quite industrious. He had written every three months since 1945. Like so many others, there were no other Bernsteens who had written to this address. A few blocks away in a legal office lay a letter and forms inquiring about the same address. A Mrs. Susani Lutz from Brooklyn, New York had formerly been known as Esther Bernsteen, or so she said. This would not be the first time that someone with dubious credentials was claiming title to an estate. The legal secretary checked with the Red Cross to see if there were any other family members who might have rights to the intact property.

  Miss Engels rolled two sheets of paper and a sheet of carbon into her typewriter. “Dear Mr. Bernsteen (Burns): We have been unable to locate any of the persons you describe. Titles to the property are held in trust. We are in receipt of correspondence from a Susani Lutz, who claims to be Esther Bernsteen. Enclosed please find her documents from the Royal Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C.”

  Hans sat in the red leather easy chair in his Rochester apartment. It was his one luxury, a place to read and relax after workdays. After three years of writing letters, Hans held onto the thin sheet of paper, staring at it in disbelief. His sister would not have married a Nazi. By now he knew that Nazis and Dutch collaborators were seizing any unclaimed property, hoping to turn fast profits. He consulted an attorney in order to prevent Susani Lutz from claiming the property in Amsterdam. He also decided that he would make contact for identification purposes only. “Please do pass my forwarding information on to Mrs. Lutz. It is imperative that she not be identified as Esther Bernsteen until I meet with her myself.”

  Susani received the official notification from the Red Cross about six weeks later. That evening she set down a plate of potatoes and cutlets, as well as an excellent beer. Lutz complimented her on her clever bargaining with the grocers. She smiled, and brought out a piece of warm apple tart.

  Then she commented, “I may need to go to Amsterdam.”

  “Susani, you do not need to
go anywhere.” He wiped his napkin across his face, and dropped it beside his plate. “There is nothing in Holland. The war is over.”

  “Would you like some cream?” He looked at her in amazement, and took the pitcher from her hand. “Georg, I need to meet someone, a Mr. Bernsteen, who claims to be my brother. Our parents’ house in Amsterdam is worth hundreds of thousands of guilders.”

  He looked up, spoon in mid-air dripping the cream onto his dessert plate. “Did you say ‘hundreds of thousands’? What do you need to do to claim the estate?”

  She sat down, appealing to her satiated man. “If my brother is alive, he and I need to file the claim together. Otherwise, both of our claims go to the state and we get nothing. Surely you want me to have what is mine?”

  His mistrustful look covered the silent space between them.

  “When did you know this?”

  “I received a letter yesterday and had to have it translated. It is in English.”

  Lutz thought for a moment. He needed money and his Jewish wife might be able to provide it. Then he could invest in a business.

  “An agent can sell your house and wire us the money.”

  Esther looked at her husband. She had concealed her identity – marriages had been destroyed when a husband or wife found out that his mate had been born as a Jew. Lutz had evaded the tribunals. She now attended Catholic mass with him. God knows what he said at his confessions. She would never confess anything, and she had never hurt anyone.

  “Mr. Bernsteen does not even believe that I am alive. He had been writing the Red Cross in Amsterdam for two years looking for me. Now he has retained a lawyer and blocked all action on our property until I identify myself. Hans and I must present ourselves in the New York courts, and possibly in Amsterdam as well.”

  Chapter Forty