I liked the way Rick was already so familiar with Tamsen’s schedule. “Then call her. I’ll wait out in the lobby for you to finish up and then I’ll drive you home.”
While I waited for Rick, I checked my college email on my phone. What did we do before we were so tethered? I was able to answer a couple of messages without even opening a computer.
“I spoke to Tam,” Rick said, when he walked out of the ER door. “You were right, she expected me to call her instead of you. She’s going to come over later and check in on me.”
“Good. Be sure to get in some of that stress relief the doctor was talking about.”
As we drove back to Stewart’s Crossing I told Rick what I’d learned from Saul Benesch. “I think he knows something more than he’s telling,” I said. “I can’t say how—just a feeling.”
“Maybe I should give Mr. Benesch a call,” Rick said.
“No, hold off for a day or so. Let me work on him first. There is someone you ought to talk to, though.” I told him about the young woman with the Medusa hair that Gail had mentioned the night before. “Gail was worried she might be trying to take advantage of Daniel Epstein.”
“Great. Racial profiling?”
“I don’t think the girl’s race matters. The way Gail described seeing them together made her uneasy. That’s all.”
“I’ll give her a call. Epstein’s son gave me his father’s phone records so maybe I can match her up to someone he was in contact with recently.”
I dropped Rick at his house and retrieved Rochester, and then drove up River Road to Friar Lake. The willows along the river had lost most of their leaves, and I could see the water between the barren branches. Winter was coming.
And I had some hacking to do.
25 – What’s in a Name
After a cursory glance at incoming emails and my own to-do list, I knuckled down to make a plan. What did I know, and what did I want to know?
First on my list was the mysterious person Joel Goldberg had been emailing with, NotwhoIthinkIam. Who indeed?
I started surfing through a list of genealogy websites, hoping that Notwho had used the same handle in various sites. I found that he’d posted on several threads. The most interesting concerned people who had changed their names after the Holocaust.
Some had changed for pragmatic reasons – difficulty in spelling, or a desire not to wear their Jewish name in a world that had proved hostile to their people. Others had patriotic reasons – film producer Menahem Golan had changed his surname from Globus in honor of the Golan Heights. Others had changed as a way to start over again in a new place, leaving their old identity behind.
NotWho had asked Joel if he knew anything about someone named Karl Kurtz, and Joel hadn’t been able to find anything. But I had a few more tricks up my sleeve than Joel did. My fingers tingled with the thrill of hacking as flexed them, then hunted through my hard drive for a program that could break into a poorly-guarded database.
I was doing exactly what had sent me to prison in the first place—breaking into places I didn’t belong in service of what I believed was a greater good. I hoped that I’d learned a few things since then—how to hide my tracks better, for example. And this time I was determined that I would take down this killer before anyone else died.
Once I had the program initiated, I entered the addresses for several databases and told the program to search for both Kurtz and Feinberg, then pop up a message with the results.
While that worked in the background, I went to one of the forums where NotWho had participated. With a couple of keystrokes, I was able to view the information the user had provided when setting up the ID. I was stunned to find that the email address used belonged to Saul Benesch.
Was that what Benesch was hiding? That he wasn’t who he thought he was? And what did that mean, anyway?
I needed to talk to Benesch again, but I didn’t know him well enough to call him or drop in on him. I didn’t even have the connection that I had with Henry Namias, who had known my mother. I’d have to wait until the Talmud study group on Wednesday.
Suddenly my laptop pinged with an incoming alert from the website where I’d left the query about Kurtz earlier. The name Karl Kurtz had been found in a database for a displaced persons camp called Feldafing, near Munich, in what was in those immediate post-war years the American zone of occupation.
The record was skimpy. Kurtz said that he was a Jew aged twenty-two, a native of Berlin, and that he had been living underground under an assumed name. He wanted to emigrate to the United States.
That was it. No record of whatever happened to him.
When I looked up, Rochester was on the floor with the translation between his paws. “That does not belong to you,” I said, pulling it away from him. Fortunately he hadn’t chewed it, though there was a big drop of drool on the page, nearly covering the name Kalman Feinberg.
Why did that name resonate with me? I read through the document carefully. Aaron Feinberg had died at Auschwitz soon after he, his brother and Hafetz had been locked up there, but Kalman and Hafetz had been put to work.
My brain finally made the connection. Aaron Feinberg was the president of Shomrei Torah. Was he descended from Aaron and Kalman Feinberg?
But he couldn’t be. According to Hafetz, Kalman had died at Auschwitz about six months before the camp was liberated. I remembered the photo I’d found that included my mother, the one from a speech by a Holocaust survivor named Kalman Feinberg.
Had to be a different man. Feinberg was a common Jewish name, as was Aaron. Kalman was less familiar to me, but perhaps it had been popular in Berlin at the time. I had certainly seen certain names recurring in my classes at Eastern – Jessica, Kyle, Justin and so on.
The Feldafing database was still open on my laptop, and on a whim I typed in the name Kalman Feinberg. I was stunned to see a result, a form filled out when someone left the camp.
Kalman Feinberg, a Jew aged twenty-three and native of Berlin, had been granted a visa to emigrate to the United States. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had found a place for him to live and a job.
In Trenton, New Jersey.
My brain buzzed with connections. This was the man, then, who had spoken to the youth group my mother belonged to about his experience during the Holocaust. The father of Aaron Feinberg, president of Shomrei Torah. He had been in Feldafing at the same time as this mysterious Karl Kurtz. Did they know each other? They were the same age, both Jews from Berlin.
Could Myer Hafetz have been mistaken, and Aaron Feinberg survived? Perhaps he’d simply been transferred to another camp, and Hafetz had lost track of him.
I went back through the database looking for an entry form for Feinberg, but couldn’t find one.
I looked at Rochester. “Kurtz went into the camp but never left. Feinberg never entered the camp, but left it.”
He looked up at me, then rolled back on his side. “Don’t you see it, puppy? Maybe Kurtz and Feinberg are the same person. And Kurtz was German, not Jewish.”
He yawned.
Was his disinterest because I was on the wrong track? Or just that he wanted to take a nap?
When he entered the camp, Kurtz admitted that he had been living under a different name in hiding. Perhaps during his stay he had merely reappropriated his own name? Or like many others, he’d chosen a new name to go with his new life. Nothing illegal or immoral about that.
I had too many ideas buzzing in my brain and I needed to talk to Rick. How was I going to tell him that I’d gotten this information? Should I be honest? After all, he’d asked me to work my online mojo. He knew that meant hacking, didn’t he? Or was he so certain that I was following a straight and narrow path that he hadn’t warned me to be honest?
I left Friar Lake early and headed to Rick’s house. “I’m fine,” he protested, as he opened the door. “Tam was here for a few hours. She cleaned up and made me dinner to heat up later.”
Rochester romped past me to play with Rasc
al, and I followed Rick into the living room. “I’m glad you’re better because I need to talk to you,” I said.
By then I had decided I’d tell Rick how I had searched the databases, without mentioning that I’d had to break in. If he asked, I’d be honest. But I didn’t want us to get sidetracked in a discussion of my problems if I didn’t have to.
I laid out the situation between Kurtz and Feinberg. “One man comes into the camp, another goes out,” I said.
“Wasn’t one of them the guy in that document you had translated?” he asked.
I pulled it out of my messenger bag. The spot of drool Rochester had left on Kalman Feinberg’s name was dry but still discolored. I handed the paper to Rick.
“See here?” he said, after he’d read for a moment. “This guy Hafetz says that Kalman Feinberg died at Auschwitz. So how did he end up at this Feldafing place?”
I looked at the paper with him.
“Hold on,” I said after a minute. “Suppose Kurtz was lying about being Jewish when he entered the camp. I read about it, and it was the first all-Jewish displaced persons camp set up. Once you got in there, you had a golden ticket to go to Israel or the United States.”
“So Kurtz pretended to be Jewish to get in,” Rick said. “But isn’t there a basic problem with pretending something like that?”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to the place in Hafetz’s testimony where the police had forced him to drop his pants. “Wouldn’t they check that in the camp?”
“You mean to see if he was circumcised?” I turned to my laptop. “Hold on a minute.”
I did a quick search, then turned the screen so Rick could read. “This says that some German Jews didn’t circumcise their sons because they wanted to be modern. He could have said that.”
“OK. So this Kurtz, a German, not Jewish, shows up at the camp and convinces them to let him in so that he can take advantage of the immigration options.”
“And he changes his name to someone he knew back in Berlin who died. Maybe to honor his memory or hide his background. Maybe just because it was easier.”
“And he comes to Trenton as Kalman Feinberg. Then what?” Rick asked.
“He gets a job, he gets married. And then Myer Hafetz shows up.”
“Who was also from Berlin, and knew that the real Kalman Feinberg died at Auschwitz.” Rick nodded. “But why does that matter to Kurtz-slash-Feinberg?”
“Because he lied,” I said. “He married a Jewish woman. He named his son after the dead man’s brother. In the two years before Hafetz arrived, he had become a big shot at Shomrei Torah.”
“It’s a big step from that to killing someone – to killing two people,” Rick said. “And right now this is all just conjecture. We could be totally on the wrong track.”
“I need to talk to Saul Benesch,” I said. “He might have the key here. Why was he looking for Karl Kurtz now?” I told Rick about my plan to speak with Benesch at the Talmud study group on Wednesday morning.
“Be careful what you say,” Rick said. “You don’t want to be the next one in this killer’s crosshairs.”
26 – Everything Lost
The dogs were still having fun and Rochester resisted my call to get him to leave. Twice. The third time I walked up to him and grabbed a hank of fur from the back of his neck. “March, mister,” I said. He looked up at me with those soulful big brown eyes, like I was destroying all chance of him having happiness in this world.
I relented, as I almost always do. “Fine. You can have five more minutes of play.”
I released my grip on him, and he immediately went down on his front paws in the play posture. Rascal yipped, and then they took off.
“Puppy whipped,” Rick said. Then he held up his hand. “And before you say anything, I know, I’m just as bad as you are.”
Five minutes turned into ten, as Rick and I sat and talked about nothing in particular. When Rochester was momentarily tired out, he and I left.
When I got home, Lili wanted to know about Rick. “He seems to be okay, but he’s got to take some pills for stress.”
“He’s got to ask Tamsen to marry him,” Lili said. “She’ll take care of him.”
It was funny – I’d thought Rick and Tamsen were a good match, because he had a caretaker personality, and as a young widow with a son, she needed someone to take care of her. But she was a strong, independent woman, accustomed to being a mother, and I realized that they could take care of each other.
Lili and I were each other’s best friend, backup and sounding board, and I knew first-hand that the stress relief Dr. Chen had prescribed for Rick was very therapeutic.
Sadly, Lili was still catching up on all the work she’d missed while she was in Florida, so there was no kissing or cuddling for us. Instead she went up to the office to grade papers online, and I stayed downstairs with Rochester.
Lili was pragmatic about my hacking. She understood that I had a compulsion to sneak into places online where I shouldn’t be, that I was trying my best to control behavior that might get me sent back to prison. So I did my best not to do things in front of her that might upset her or provoke an argument.
With her safely upstairs, though, I could I turn on the laptop that contained my hacking tools. As I did, I thought about the conclusions I’d come to. How could I verify that Karl Kurtz, who entered Feldafing camp, was the same man as Kalman Feinberg, who left it? There was no exit record for Kurtz, or entry record for Feinberg, but that was just the starting point for a hypothesis.
I went back to the results of the database program I had set up to search for Kurtz and Feinberg. I’d stopped paying attention to it when I discovered the reference to Kurtz at Feldafing, but now I check the full results, which had been saved in a text file on the laptop’s hard drive.
There were no more records of the Karl Kurtz who had been born in 1922 in Berlin after his entry into the Feldafing camp. I did find a couple of places that had mentioned someone by his name as one of the guards at Auschwitz, but I dismissed those, because the Kurtz I was looking for was Jewish, and I’d already established that the name Kurtz could be used by Jews and non-Jews alike—as long as they had a short ancestor.
The Kalman Feinberg who had been born in Berlin that same year had a much fuller life story. He had been recorded as entering Auschwitz, though his name was not among those on any list of prisoners freed.
I looked at Rochester. “What do you think, boy?” I asked. “Did Feinberg slip through the cracks? Maybe his record is here, but his name was misspelled.”
Rochester woofed and shook his head.
“No? Then you think he died in the concentration camp?”
He woofed again, louder, and this time he went down on his front paws in the play posture. I got up and fetched him a treat from the box in the kitchen, and he sat beside me crunching noisily.
I looked back at the screen and the name Auschwitz jumped out at me. I couldn’t hear or say that name without a bit of a shudder, and a thank you to the Lord who had thus far kept me from suffering that kind of horror.
Auschwitz. Auschwitz.
I went back to the records on Kurtz and looked at the statements by survivors that said he had been a guard there. Suppose that was true, and that after the war was over Kurtz had appropriated Feinberg’s identity. They were the same age, after all, both from Berlin. How hard would it have been during that chaotic time after the camps were liberated to step up and pretend to be someone else?
Someone whose whole family was dead. Who was left to know of the deception? He had known Feinberg as a boy, knew that Feinberg’s whole family had been killed.
The answer came to me in flash that felt almost like the onset of a headache.
Myer Hafetz knew. He had known both Feinbergs in Berlin and seen both die at Auschwitz. Then he had the bad luck to be sent to Trenton, New Jersey, where a man was pretending to be his old friend.
A man who had been a guard at the very camp where his fr
iend had died.
What would Hafetz do if he discovered Kurtz masquerading as Feinberg? Write up the testimony for Yad Vashem? Then use that paper to confront Kurtz?
Kurtz had already started a new life by then. I checked the records and discovered that he had married by then, a woman named Hina Levine, and begun working in the furniture store owned by his father-in-law.
I knew that eventually Hina’s father would die, that Kalman would inherit the company and rename it Feinberg’s Fine Furniture, that he would become president of Shomrei Torah.
But back then, he was a young man with a terrible past that anyone would want to forget, and a bright future ahead of him. If Hafetz told the community who he really was, he might be arrested for his role in the camp. Tried, sentenced, deported. Divorced.
Everything lost. If only there was some way to keep Hafetz quiet.
Kurtz had found that way. But what if before he died, Hafetz had confided in Rabbi Sapinsky? That was very believable – who else would Hafetz be able to confide in?
With Hafetz dead, the rabbi might have spoken with Kurtz himself—which triggered his death. Because of the tensions between immigrants and natives, it was logical to me that the rabbi would have tried to solve the problem within his community, rather than involve the police.
But that didn’t explain why someone had killed Joel Goldberg, or Daniel Epstein. Kalman Feinberg – or Karl Kurtz – was long dead, and beyond any earthly punishment.
Unless I was wrong about something. I went back to the mysterious online individual who billed himself NotwhoIthinkIam, and had used Saul Benesch’s email address. What was Benesch’s connection to this whole business?
He had been a boy in Trenton at the time of the two deaths, and I found it hard to believe he was guilty of them. Could he have discovered somehow that his father was not the man he believed, but Karl Kurtz instead?
That would explain the online moniker. But why commit murder over it?
“I am so glad to be caught up,” Lili said, from the top of the stairs, and I quickly shut down the laptop.
Dog is in the Details Page 17