Screaming in pain, Felix at first couldn’t think why the police officer was attacking him. Then he knew. “The ring! The ring is in my wallet,” he cried out.
“What ring?” the officer demanded.
“The stolen ring! It’s in my wallet!”
“Thanks for the tip,” the officer said. “Now, pay attention, ’cause I’m going to read you your rights, and then my partner and I are going to haul your ass down to the Forty-eighth.”
7
MARLENE JUMPED UP FROM THE COUCH WHERE SHE’D been talking to Lucy when the security-door buzzer went off. “Sorry, honey,” she said, looking back down at her daughter, who was dabbing at tears, “I think this is the Sobelmans. Can we pick this up later?”
Lucy nodded. “Sure. It’s not something we can do anything about on a Sunday morning. I’m just having a moment.”
Marlene hesitated. The “moment” was actually a continuation of the discussion they’d been having since Lucy had shown up unexpectedly from Santa Fe a week earlier. Given her new occupation as a translator and sometimes field agent for a secret antiterrorism agency headed by former FBI special agent in charge and family friend Espey Jaxon, the unannounced comings and goings were not unusual. However, this time was different; it was personal.
When Lucy called from the airport to say that she was in town and would be coming home, Marlene thought maybe it was to get help in sending out announcements and other wedding incidentals. Instead, she got home, waited until she was alone with her mom, and then said she was calling off the wedding.
At first, Marlene assumed that Lucy and her fiancé, Ned Blanchett, must have had an argument. Made sense; Lucy could be pretty hotheaded and Ned was a stubborn cowboy, and planning a wedding was stressful. She’ll blow off steam, he’ll call to apologize, she’ll put him through the wringer, and then she’ll be on the next plane to New Mexico. Wedding’s back on, only now there’s even less time to get everything together.
However, Marlene had misinterpreted Lucy’s reasons. She wanted to marry Ned, but “not now.” The world and their roles in it, she said, were just too crazy and dangerous to be thinking about marriage, settling down, and having kids.
Ned Blanchett was a former ranch foreman and skilled sharpshooter. He had been recruited onto Jaxon’s team, and having never worked for a government agency before, he was an “unknown” in spy circles. And although Lucy wasn’t allowed to tell her parents about their work, there were indications that some of it took them overseas into dangerous situations.
Apparently, from Lucy’s hints, Ned was on such a mission now and she didn’t know when he would be coming back.
Marlene had tried to console her. “Ned’s pretty tough, baby. Ever since he got hooked up with this crazy family, he’s come through time after time in some terrible situations. He can take care of himself.”
“Until something happens he can’t take care of,” Lucy retorted. “He’s not Superman, Mom … he’s not faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. He can be killed, and for that matter, so can I, though he’s in harm’s way more than I am.”
Marlene didn’t quite know how to answer that. And it was clear that her daughter wanted to talk, not debate.
Lucy went on. “But it’s not just that. We’re both dedicated to what we’re doing with Espey. We’re willing to take the risks because we think it’s important for our country and the people we love. But the only reason I see to get married is to provide that stability for children. Ned and I don’t need a ceremony or a piece of paper to know that we’re each other’s soul mates. But who can justify having kids these days? The world is crazy—lunatics trying to blow up subway cars filled with innocent people, including children; unstable fanatical governments racing to create nuclear weapons and thumbing their nose at the international community that says they can’t; self-serving and myopic politicians who would rather see us all go down in flames than work together for the common good.”
Lucy had gone on for quite a while, but then she’d clammed up and didn’t want to talk about it. She just lay around the loft reading books, hanging out with her family, going for walks, and avoiding serious conversations. Several times, Marlene had caught her crying, only to have her say again that she didn’t want to discuss the wedding or Ned. “Not now. I need to think.”
However, she’d appeared to be ready to talk again as they sat on the couch waiting for the Sobelmans. But the moment passed with the buzzing from the security gate.
Marlene crossed to the door and looked up at the small security monitor. As expected, an elderly couple stood on the steps leading up from the sidewalk on Crosby Street and was smiling pleasantly at the camera. She pressed a button to unlock the gate and spoke into the intercom. “Moishe, Goldie, welcome! You remember we’re on the fifth floor. We’ll be waiting.”
Butch had joined her at the door by the time the elevator across the hall opened to reveal the Sobelmans. They were a cute couple. Neither was much over five feet tall, though the man had a couple of inches on his wife. He had gray eyes and a full head of kinky gray hair that looked like steel wool with two large ears protruding from it; her curly hair was ginger colored and framed an elfin face with merry blue eyes. Although they were both in their eighties, they were still spry and stepped lightly out of the elevator to hug their hosts.
Moishe was holding a bag from their bakery on the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, Il Buon Pane. “You need me to take that for you,” Butch said, reaching for the bag. But Moishe pulled it away from his reach.
“Not so fast, my friend,” he said. “I want to make sure this arrives in the kitchen safe and unmolested.”
“Then come in, come in,” Marlene said, laughing as her husband chuckled and beamed at their guests.
The Sobelmans entered the living room, where they met Lucy and were soon joined by the twins. As they all greeted one another, Moishe surrendered his jacket to Butch, but Goldie kept hers on. The women were going to a new impressionist exhibit at the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue while “the men” talked.
As the women prepared to leave, Moishe’s hands made the sign language symbols for “I love you” to his wife. Also a concentration camp survivor who had been “experimented on” by Nazi doctors, Goldie had not spoken for more than sixty years, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. She had said her first words in that time only recently, as the assassin Nadya Malovo prepared to shoot Moishe—part of her plan to exact revenge on Butch Karp. “Please, child,” she’d begged Malovo, her voice hardly more than a whisper from the self-imposed silence. “If you must shoot, then I beg you, me first. I cannot stand to see him hurt.”
Although Butch later told Marlene that the last thing he would have expected from Malovo was mercy, the assassin had not shot. In hot pursuit, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers entered the bakery at that moment with her nine-millimeter pointed at Malovo’s head. Although Malovo considered taking out Capers and the Sobelmans in what might have resulted in death to all, she instead gave herself up. Capers, who had lost a partner to Malovo’s treachery, then escorted Malovo to a federal lockup to await trial.
They had all wondered if having spoken once, Goldie would now continue. But she reverted back to silence and communicated through sign language, which was part of the reason Lucy was going on the excursion. A polyglot who spoke more than sixty languages fluently and parts of a couple dozen more, she was also a master of sign language.
I love you, too, Goldie signed back to Moishe. Try to be good.
I’ll do my best, Moishe signed back with a smile as Lucy translated for the others.
* * *
When the door closed behind the women, Karp turned to Moishe. “Why don’t we set up around the kitchen table if that’s okay with you? I think the boys want to record this.”
Moishe nodded and held up the bag. “But first we celebrate life’s pleasures.”
The little
old man winked at Karp, who laughed. He’d already caught the scent of Sobelman’s specialty, cherry cheese coffee cake, which he deemed to be the best in the five boroughs, and that probably meant the rest of the civilized world, too. “I’ll fetch the plates; boys, you get the forks,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “And make it snappy, my stomach is doing handsprings.”
It was a half hour later when the four pushed back from the table with contented sighs and full bellies. With reluctance all around, they turned to the darker issue at hand.
“So, I understand you want me to talk to you about the Sonderkommandos,” Moishe said, looking from one twin to the other. The boys nodded. “I will warn you that this will not be an easy story to tell or to listen to; it may even give you nightmares. But I will tell you the truth because I believe every young Jew should hear it before his bar mitzvah.”
The old man paused. “Tell me first, what is the significance of the bar mitzvah?”
“Isn’t it the rite of passage for Jewish males from childhood?” Giancarlo said.
“And from that point on, we’ll be considered men,” Zak added.
Moishe smiled. “No ceremony creates a man from a boy,” he said. “A man is defined by his actions. But that is the definition most people would give. However, as your rabbi will undoubtedly tell you out at some point, a bar mitzvah marks the time when a Jewish male is morally responsible for his actions. And in a sense, perhaps, your definition is apt, as to be a man, one must be morally responsible.”
Moishe took a sip of coffee. “Myself and my family and friends had just celebrated my bar mitzvah in our little town outside of Amsterdam, where my father was a baker, when our world changed forever. For many generations, we Jews were welcome in the Netherlands; indeed, Christian Dutch welcomed twenty-five thousand German Jews who fled their native land ahead of the coming storm in the late 1930s. We thought we were safe.
“Even when stories began circulating that Jews in Germany were being rounded up and shipped off to ‘relocation camps,’ as the Nazis so euphemistically called them, we still felt safe.”
Moishe paused and pulled out his wallet, from which he took a small old black-and-white photograph. “This is me with my father, Abraham, my mother, Sarah, and my little sister, Rebecca. It was taken in 1943, shortly before the German occupiers announced that all Dutch Jews were to be relocated.”
The photograph was passed around until it came back to Moishe, who looked at it longingly for a moment and then replaced it in his wallet. “And you know what the strangest part of all is? We didn’t resist; we went along like so many sheep to the slaughter. People acted as if we were all going on vacation together. Families packed suitcases and dressed in their best traveling clothes. The vacation would last until the war was over, our parents told each other, and then we would all go home.
“We were sent to a camp near the Polish village and rail station for which it would be named. A quiet place in the country called Sobibor. It was isolated, surrounded by forests and swamps, lightly populated but strategically placed near the large Jewish populations in the Chelm and Lublin districts.
“Construction of the Sobibor camp had begun in March 1942, and it was a model of German efficiency. It existed on a large rectangle of land, four hundred by six hundred meters in size, that was cleared and surrounded by triple lines of barbed wire fence, three meters high and under the watchful shadows of strategically placed guard towers. Tree branches were intertwined in the fences so that the casual passerby wouldn’t know what he or she was looking at.
“The camp itself was divided into three areas, each also surrounded by barbed wire fencing and more guard towers. The first was the administrative area closest to the railroad station, with a platform that could accommodate twenty freight cars at a time. It could have been a train station like any other in Europe,” Sobelman recalled. “We were told it was merely a transit point and that we would be moving on shortly. Only they would not say where we were going.
“This area also included the living quarters for the guards, SS soldiers, and Ukrainians who were forced to work in concentration camps, though in truth, many of them enjoyed their work; after all, their people had a long history of murdering Jews.
“The first area was also where prisoners used as the camp’s labor force were housed, including the Sonderkommandos, whom I’ll return to in a moment,” Moishe said before continuing. “The second area, called Camp Two, was where the new arrivals were marched to be separated from their belongings and each other. The young children went with the women.”
Sobelman spoke quietly as he struggled to form the words. “That was the last time I saw my mother and sister. They and the others were taken to a building where they were forced to undress before going into a special hut to have their heads shaved so that the Germans could make use of their hair.
“Most of those who arrived on the train soon passed from Camp Two to Camp Three through a walkway two or three meters wide and surrounded on both sides by barbed wire. It, too, was covered with branches so that the prisoners could not see out or be seen by those outside. The Tube, as it was called, ran for 150 meters—that would be more than one and a half of your American football fields—toward a group of trees,” the old man recalled.
“Behind the trees was a large, ugly brick building containing three rooms, each about twelve feet by twelve feet. Into these rooms naked, frightened Jews were driven—as many as a hundred and sixty people, sometimes more, at a time, all crammed together and unable to move as they listened to the sound of diesel engines starting outside and then smelled the exhaust being pumped into the rooms.”
Sobelman looked at the boys. “I want you to close your eyes and imagine what I tell you,” he said. “Now, imagine that you are in one of those rooms. You cannot sit down or hide. You cannot smell the carbon monoxide in the fumes, but you know it is there. So you and the others begin to panic. You fight and claw and climb over one another’s naked bodies, looking for an escape. But there is none and you know that you are going to die, and all you can do is scream and pray.”
Moishe closed his eyes. “Ach, I still can hear the voices of the Hasidic women shouting the Shema Yisrael as they were stripped and forced into the killing rooms. Shema Yisrael adonai eloheinu adonai echad!”
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” Giancarlo translated softly.
“Yes, the Lord is our God,” Moishe said with a slight smile. “But for reasons known only to Him, He did not stop the evil done to His people in those years.”
Moishe was quiet again. His eyes remained closed as his voice wavered. “The women did not shout very long … not long at all. In fact, from the time most of us arrived at the rail station to those final moments in the gas chambers, it was only two or three hours. That’s all it took to process and murder four or five hundred people at a time…. Men, women, children, they spared no one.”
Moishe let the image linger before he went on. “For the Jews the guards had kept alive to work, there were many jobs around the camp. In general, these workers were treated better—even allowed to keep and use medicine they found on the poor souls chosen to die—and given more food. After all, they had to maintain their strength.”
The old man cleared his throat. “But the very worst of the jobs was as a Sonderkommando, which means ‘special unit’ in German. And their primary responsibility was to dispose of the corpses from the gas chambers.” The old man paused as he looked at the boys. “For a time, I was a Sonderkommando.”
“How did you become a Sonderkommando?” Zak asked.
“I was with my father when we were forced to strip and then herded toward those gas chambers past the smirking SS guards and Ukrainians who laughed and hit us with sticks to make us keep moving,” Moishe answered. “We had just about reached the building when a German officer, Hans Schultz, reached out and grabbed me by the arm…. I wanted to stay with my father and held on to his hand, but he pulled away and said, ‘Do not
forget.’ And then he was gone into the building, and I never saw him again.”
Moishe paused and dipped his head in sorrow as tears filled his eyes and began to stream down his cheeks. They sat in silence. “I apologize for the emotion,” he said finally, “but it happens sometimes and leaves me unable to speak.”
“Do you want to continue some other time?” Karp suggested.
“No, no, for heaven’s sake, I’m okay now,” the old man replied. “As I said, I never saw my father again. But I was spared not through some kindness, but because the Germans and their Ukrainian dogs did not want to do the dirty work. We worked in teams. Some cleaned out the killing rooms, the bodies so tightly packed that even when they were dead, there was no room to fall down. Rail tracks ran up to the back of the building; bodies were hauled out the rear doors and loaded on trolleys to be taken to pits, where other Sonderkommandos stacked them like cordwood for efficiency, then burned and buried them.”
Sobelman sighed and it took a moment before he could continue. “But there were many jobs for the Sonderkommandos. Some gathered the hair in the shaving hut and sorted it by color and quality—most going to stuff mattresses, though the best was used for wigs. My job was to remove gold fillings from the teeth of the corpses before they were placed on the trolleys for the burial pits.”
Zak scowled. “Why did the Sonderkommandos go along with this?”
“Zak!” Giancarlo snapped. “That’s rude.”
“No, no, it’s a legitimate question,” Moishe responded. He turned to Zak. “The simple answer is that we had no choice. It was do as we were told or be killed, or commit suicide—and there were those who chose either of those last two options as well. However, the urge to survive is very powerful. Some because they fear death. But for others, such as myself, it was with the hope that someday I might exact revenge on my family’s murderers, as well as carry out my father’s wish that I not forget, which is why I think it is important to tell you boys my story. So that you never forget, either.”
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