Bill Gwynne and I could be thanked for administering the almost-lethal dose. Acting out of a sense of continued debt and gratitude for what Amina had done for the Schriebergs in Kamenz, my mother-in-law, Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson, did not follow through on the threat made by her former lawyer, Robert Goldman, Esq., to sue Amina and Barratte Rabun in nineteen seventy-four. But in nineteen eighty-six, I, as a freshly minted lawyer married to Katerine’s only son—who was also a rightful heir to the Schrieberg fortune—convinced her to reconsider. The Rabuns had not only stolen Katerine and her brothers’ inheritance—which perhaps could be overlooked because Amina had saved them from certain death—but they had also stolen the inheritance of Katerine and her brothers’ children and grandchildren. This could not be overlooked. These future generations were entitled to their share of the estate created by their ancestors. As a potential mother of the next generation, who as a Christian had spoken to Katerine about converting to Judaism, and who happened to work for one of the most respected and aggressive lawyers in the nation—my arguments on this point received added weight. Bill Gwynne also loved the idea—not only because the contingency fee if we won would be substantial and I would be earning my keep as a new associate—but because it was a high profile international case filled with broader implications for the recovery of assets confiscated by the Nazis. After much prodding and encouragement by Bo, Bo’s father, Katerine’s surviving brother, and me, Katerine reluctantly consented.
Bill and I promptly initiated the lawsuit, making it every bit the publicly embarrassing spectacle for Amina and Barratte Rabun promised in Mr. Goldman’s letter. Bill was a master, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion. I watched in awe, helping him behind the scenes. This was the type of case lawyers wait for their entire careers, but there I was, working on it fresh out of law school. From a torrent of Hague Convention subpoenas, we obtained from German archives copies of contracts signed by Amina’s father for the construction of the crematoria at Osweicim and Majdanek. Although these documents bore no direct legal relevance to our claim for recoupment of assets derived from the Schriebergs’ theaters and home, they made sensational copy. Soon the publisher of the award-winning Lockport Register was being tried in the media as a war criminal—and Jewish groups were calling for a boycott of her bloodstained paper and the bloodstained books of Bette Press.
These war contracts were the first solid pieces of evidence Amina and Barratte had seen of their fathers’ involvement in the Nazi death camps, and they were devastated. Even so, they had been through far worse during the war, and in facing this new common threat they found again the mutual love and trust for each other that had sustained them during those terrible days, weeks, and months after Kamenz. Plus, now, there was young Ott to think of. With Amina’s refusal to bear children, Barratte’s twelve year old son held the only hope for a new generation of Rabuns. With the survival of the family at stake, the cousins held each other and turned their backs against the coming storm, unyielding even when Bill and I convinced the Buffalo Evening News to print portions of Patentschrift Nr. 881 631, Verfahren und Varrichtung zur Verbrennung von Leichen Kadavern und Teilen davon, issued in 1941 to Jos. A. Rabun & Sons. This patent, also obtained from German archives, had been secured by Amina’s father, Friedrich Rabun, to prevent his competitors from using his improved crematoria design, first installed at Osweicim, that utilized better airflow management, ash removal conveyors, and new refractory materials to elevate temperatures and increase capacity. In the accompanying technical drawings, Amina recognized the shape of the brick sandbox built by her father for her and Helmut. This vulgar resemblance, and the photographs of thousands of cadavers in the camps, haunted Amina’s dreams the rest of her life.
Yet, the Rabun women fought back against even this disgrace. In interviews and editorials, they explained how Amina had saved the Schriebergs at great personal risk; how the purchase of the theaters had been for fair value at the time, giving the Schriebergs the money they desperately needed to survive; and how just a few hundred yards from where the Schriebergs lived under her protection, the Russians raped her, Barratte, and Bette and murdered their family. Coming from the mouths of the accused, however, and countered by the damning archive documents and the Rabuns’ great wealth, these stories did little to change public opinion. Amina and Barratte Rabun were tried and convicted not for wrongfully withholding the Schriebergs’ money, about which no one seemed much concerned, but, symbolically, for perpetrating the Holocaust itself.
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The final, nearly fatal blow to Amina and Barratte Rabun came not from Bill Gwynne and me but from Amina’s once-loyal secretary, Alice Guiniere. Wearing her finest go-to-church print dress one early autumn day, Alice recounted under oath before a grand jury the mysterious visit to her employer’s office by a Mr. Gerry Hanson—a man known formerly, she believed, as SS Colonel Gerhardt Haber. During this testimony, she produced galley proofs of five United States passports bearing the Habers’ new identities, collected from a waste bin in the print shop of Bette Press. Dabbing her eyes, she explained that something just didn’t seem right that day and she thought she ought to save the proofs, just in case. It was a sense of patriotism, she insisted—not vindictiveness for her recent firing by Amina in an attempt to reduce expenses and save the paper—that compelled her to come forward now after all these years.
The grand jury indicted Amina, the Habers, and Albrecht Bosch; and the United States Attorney held a press conference. Standing before a nearly-hysterical throng of reporters and photographers, the ambitious prosecutor confirmed Gerhardt Haber’s status as an international fugitive and war criminal and unveiled several easels attached to which were fiendish photographs of the SS Colonel in full black dress uniform and photographs of the identical man, Gerry Hanson, dressed in civilian clothing, together with the galley proofs of the forged passports and the front page of that day’s Lockport Register. Amina and Albrecht were charged with obstruction of justice, harboring fugitives, and forging official documents, for which they each could be sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. The prosecutor also disclosed that discussions were being held with the Department of State about extraditing the Habers to Germany or Israel. Not lost on a few sympathetic newspaper editors was the harsh irony that for assisting the Schriebergs in Germany in the same manner that Amina had assisted the Habers in the United States, she could have been hanged. “No good deed goes unpunished,” one editorial concluded, and “whether a deed is good or not appears to be a matter of opinion at the time—primarily the opinion of those operating the levers of state.”
With all energies turned to the criminal defense, Amina’s lawyer called Bill Gwynne with an offer to settle the civil litigation. In light of everything that had befallen Amina, and everything that had happened in Kamenz, Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson instructed us to accept the offer—seventy-five percent of our original demand—and end the litigation immediately.
All this had a profound impact upon young Otto Bowles, who helplessly witnessed the systematic destruction of the people he loved. The unraveling for Ott began when his mother and father divorced. The marriage was somewhat unusual and had never been stable. Barratte and Tad had met in a nightclub in New Jersey where Barratte, aged thirty-nine and still quite attractive, served drinks. Something in the younger Tad Bowles’ sad brown eyes and embarrassed smile made her want to hold and protect him. At twenty-six years of age, he vaguely reminded her of her older brother, who had been executed by the Russian soldiers in Kamenz, and he seemed so different from the other young men at the bar who, having finally been given a voice by the alcohol they consumed, had nothing to say but “feed me,” “where’s the bathroom?” and “sleep with me.”
Even so, the attraction between Barratte and Tad was primarily physical, and this began to wither for both of them when Barratte’s narrow waist and flat stomach expanded after she became pregnant unexpectedly. That they married so far apart in age,
background, and outlook could only be attributed to loneliness, not love, and to the sense that the making and nurturing of a child might become a panacea for the problems of the past. It wasn’t to be. Until the morning Barratte delivered Ott, she had viewed men only as game to be hunted and collected, stalking them like a poacher and mounting their dumb, wondering heads on the paneled walls of her memory. After the birth of her baby, men generally, and Tad in particular, were not worth even this to her, and marriage meant only hanging up her gun. She had already harvested what little the male of the species offered the world—that precious fertilizer they squandered so recklessly. Young Ott became her finest trophy, her beginning and her end. Each contraction of her womb breathed new life into her dead family, whose existence now depended upon her sacred labor. Not for one day during Ott’s childhood would she allow him to forget that the survival of the Rabuns of Kamenz depended upon him; he was the irreplaceable link to all those who had come before, and all those who would come after.
Ott accepted this responsibility, but his father, in no way a Rabun, was never let in on the important secret. Tad Bowles, looking always into the hyperbolic mirror of his own father, believed his wife’s distance was caused by his own luminance, and he took this to be a sign that he was finally in control and, like his father, in position to wag his finger while indulging his own indiscretions. He had an affair with another woman just after Ott’s first birthday, as if to mark the occasion. Barratte knew instantly; the pall of guilt smothering him could not have been missed. But she tolerated the infidelity because she expected nothing less from an animal, and because it allowed her to devote more attention to Ott, which only confused Tad; he would have been happier if she had thrown him out, as he had wanted his mother to do to his father. Worse still, he mistook Barratte’s indifference for his mother’s forgiveness, leading him to believe she actually cared and might even love him.
Then came the Schrieberg lawsuit, served with all the solemnity the Sheriff of Middlesex County, New Jersey could muster. The startling revelations about Jos. A. Rabun & Sons came as a complete shock to Tad. Barratte had told him only that her family was killed during the war, that she inherited a modest sum, and that a cousin in Buffalo had helped her escape from Germany before the Soviets closed the Iron Curtain. That Barratte’s father and uncle had been wealthy, that they had accumulated this wealth from the death camps and the extortion of Jews, that Barratte had been raped by Russian soldiers and her family murdered, and that she had concealed all this—badly frightened him. He had never understood a woman to have such abilities to conceal the truth and to deceive. Yet the scare also had the effect of inflating Tad’s damaged ego, because Barratte’s lack of emotion in the marriage could now be explained by reasons other than his own inadequacies. He had married a fraud, and perhaps much worse, so it was he who pressed for a divorce even as he purchased his fourth new automobile in as many years with tainted Rabun money. Of course, Barratte would have divorced Tad eventually, just as Amina had divorced George Meinert. Tad threatened to seek custody of Ott—and might have won, given Barratte’s history and the allegations against her—but she threatened to destroy him if he tried it, and he knew she could—and would. One week after Ott’s twelfth birthday, Barratte packed their things and moved from their home beside Tad’s insurance office in New Jersey to Amina’s small mansion on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo to begin life again.
Ott tolerated the move to a new home reasonably well despite being held back a year by his new school and the difficult work of making new friends—and having to explain to them his lack of a father, whom he missed deeply in spite of the way he had sometimes been treated. Amina recognized Ott’s loss and made up for it as best she could. The role of grandmother suited her well. With Barratte saddling Ott with the burden of resurrecting their family, Amina became the fairy godmother who could afford Ott the luxury to be who he wanted to be—and to love him without condition and guide him gently along the path of his dreams. She encouraged but never insisted, so that when Ott showed no interest in playing baseball, football, or hockey (a heresy in a city just one bridge-length from the Canadian border), she abandoned these without judgment. When Ott showed interest in music, Amina purchased for him a piano and retained the services of a private instructor; when he showed fascination with birds, she erected for him a small aviary behind the garage of her house. Although he was a bit old for it, she read to him nightly, in German and English, and took him to museums, aquariums, amusement parks, and movies. She also brought him to her office at the newspaper on Saturday mornings, as her own father had done in Dresden. There, her friend Albrecht Bosch—who had moved out of the mansion several years earlier after taking a new male lover—showed him how to print books and cards, and how being “different” need not necessarily mean being lonely and unhappy.
Amina and Ott thus became best friends, and she shielded him from his mother’s excesses. Consumed by the past and what might have been, Barratte insisted that Rabun men should make their living excavating dirt and pouring concrete, and have their fun hitting each other on fields and killing animals in the woods. Ott’s inability to live up to that standard was a constant source of disappointment, and, in this way, Barratte assumed the role of perpetrator that Ott’s father had abandoned.
The details of the civil litigation with Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson were easily concealed from Ott, but the criminal indictment exploded inside his life like a bomb, detonating upon the arrest of his beloved Nonna Amina. In an instant, he lost his dearest companion and was forced to endure his family’s humiliation alone in a school, like all schools, where mercy is in short supply. What little compassion that remained at home in Barratte was depleted quickly by the ordeal of defending her cousin and operating the newspaper in her stead. Ott’s only other potential source of support, his father, had remarried and was expecting another child with his new wife, leaving little room for his oldest son, who had become one of those mistakes of passion best forgotten. The time between visits to New Jersey grew longer until there was nothing left but time.
Ott turned in on himself then, to a mostly silent world narrowed to manageable proportions and insulated from causes, effects, and accusations. From this place he would emerge only as necessary, to respond to his mother when her threats became real, to scribble answers to exam questions that demonstrated a grasp of numbers well beyond his classmates, to correspond weekly with Nonna Amina and visit her once each month at the prison for women near Rochester. But Nonna Amina had become a different woman. Devastated by the betrayals of Katerine Schrieberg and nearly everybody else in her life, disgraced by her father’s Nazi past, despised by the public, imprisoned, scorned, and nearly bankrupted, she became embittered, morose, and began displaying the symptoms of clinical depression. Moreover, although a plea bargain would set her free in three years instead of thirty—on the weekend of her sixty-seventh birthday, to be exact—handing over Hanz Stossel to the Nazi hunters in exchange had nearly killed her. It was not that she believed Nazis were guiltless or deserving of special protection; Amina held the more radical belief that all people deserved compassion and somebody must start somewhere. For the sake of that naïve idea, she had risked her life to help a Jewish family when they were being persecuted, and, later, a Nazi family when their turn had come. What harm was there in that? Had she shown favoritism? The prosecutors forced her to reveal confidences to gain her own freedom, and that act of treachery cut as deeply as it would had the Gestapo forced her to turn over the Schriebergs. She owed everything to Hanz Stossel; he had helped her escape East Germany and given her the opportunity to lead a new life in a new country. But on the basis of her own grand jury testimony, he was captured while on vacation in London and extradited to Israel. He lost his home, his family, his law practice, and his fortune. He died of pneumonia in an Israeli jail cell several years later.
Otto Rabun Bowles, now at the age of fifteen, had become a thoughtful, perceptive boy. He understood the significance of
much of what had happened; but to make sense of it, he used the same strategy he had been taught in mathematics of simplifying equations and reducing fractions to their lowest common denominator. In his new, simplified, equation of life, Nonna Amina suffered because she had tried to help two families, one Jewish and one German. Because, in the final analysis, she was German.
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It was the injustice of Nonna Amina’s imprisonment that caused Otto Rabun Bowles to embrace his German heritage, raise it up from the filth in which he believed it had been trampled, and carry it forth for all Rabuns. Like his father before him, who in the name of honor entered the darkness of his own father’s sins, young Ott, in the name of honor, entered the darkness of the Rabun past. Also like his father, however, he never quite returned from the journey.
Ott’s letters to Nonna Amina in the penitentiary soon became interviews for the story of redemption he was writing in his mind. He asked her to recount in the smallest detail the lives of their fallen family, beginning with Joseph Rabun, the patriarch and founder of the company that bore his name and that had been a source of such pride and, now, shame. Amina resisted Ott’s inquiries at first, finding the memories too painful to explore; but Ott was persistent and, gradually, Amina opened up, discovering that writing about her past was an effective therapy for the deep depression into which she had fallen.
Forgiving Ararat Page 24