“It was all about revenge,” shot back Burns, “which happens in every conflict where there’s a clear winner and a clear loser. The fact is …”
“The Jews were the losers,” said Jack.
“What was that Mr. Fisher?” asked Anderson.
“Six million Jews murdered by the Nazis were the losers in that war. Not Germany or Japan. Those countries were rebuilt right after the war and both of them became very prosperous. But the Jews were wiped out. Where are all the Jews in Poland today?”
“They are in America,” said Burns. “And they help write foreign policy.”
There was a lull. It was broken by Professor Hawthrington of Berkeley.
“Ms. Anderson, your guest here has just shown us his true colors. No historian would say a thing like that and it shows where he’s coming from. This is the stuff of conspiracy theories of the worst kind … and anti-Semitism … and that is the seed of this revisionist junk that masquerades as history. Unfortunately, the masses … and it pains me to me say this … but especially the American masses … are ignorant of history. Even their own history. They are susceptible to the garbage peddled by this junk salesman.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Burns.
“You heard me.”
“I didn’t say anything about conspiracy theories.”
“I suppose 9/11 was conceived in Washington by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
“Well,” said Burns, “there are many people around the world who believe that. At the United Nations …”
“Listen,” said Hawthrington, “I can’t think of a more anti-Semitic organization or anti-Israeli organization than the United Nations.”
“I would like to say something about the Nuremberg trials,” said Jack.
“Excuse me?” said Anderson.
“The Nuremberg trials,” repeated Jack.
“Yes? What about Nuremberg?”
“In November 1945 the chief prosecutor … I forget his name … but I know what he said …”
“What did he say?” asked Anderson.
Jack cleared his throat. “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”
At first, no one said a word. Anderson let Jack’s quotation sink in.
“His name was Robert L. Jackson,” said Hawthrington. “This gentleman Mr. Fisher has an excellent memory. The quote is correct.” Hawthrington allowed himself a smile.
“Well,” said Anderson, “we don’t have much time left, I’m afraid, and I see that every one of our callers is still with us. So Mr. Fisher we have several guests on the show today who don’t think your story is true. About the Nazis murdering six million Jews in the last century. They think you’re lying.”
“I never used that term,” said Stracht. “I just think the old man is mistaken and he can be forgiven for that. I mean, he is a hundred years old.”
“I’m not mistaken about anything,” insisted Jack. “I was there. I saw it. When I was in the ghetto at Lodz I saw the SS shoot people right on the street. I saw a man, a Jewish man, walking on the sidewalk and they shot him because he was supposed to walk in the gutter. That was the law for Jews. You had to walk in the gutter. I saw people dying from disease and starvation every day. When I was at Auschwitz I saw them use rifles and machine guns to kill women and children.”
“Children?” said Anderson.
“Yes. They didn’t care. They had no use for them. Not if they were Jews.”
“You’re telling us that they used machine guns on little children?”
“Yes! I saw it with my own eyes!”
Mary Lou was beginning to think Jack had had enough. More than enough.
“Mr. Fisher, you call yourself a Catholic, don’t you?” said Anderson.
“I am Catholic but I was born a Jew and the first five years of my life that’s what I was.”
“So you converted?”
“You might say that but I didn’t have much of a choice. If you were a Jew they were going to kill you one way or another.”
“In ovens and gas chambers?”
“Yes.”
“Now Mr. Fisher, I want to ask you about something else. What’s this about skin made into lampshades?” said Anderson.
“What?”
“Skin … from Jewish corpses … made into lampshades. I’ve heard about this. Did it really happen?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Have you ever heard these stories?”
“Yes but …”
“So you mean it may not be true?” interjected Stracht.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” said Jack. “But I never saw anything like that. I can only tell you what I saw.”
“But you never actually saw someone being placed in a gas chamber, did you?” said Stracht. “Did you see your own parents placed in ovens or gas chambers?”
“No.”
“Did you see their corpses? Their bodies?”
“No.”
“So how do you know that happened?”
“What else happened to them?”
“A lot of things could have happened to them. They could have been sick. They could have had a fatal disease. Maybe one of them got it and it spread. Isn’t that how a lot of Jews died during that time? From disease?”
“A lot of Jews did die from disease but most of them died from machine guns … or rifles … and gas chambers. Millions died in the gas chambers.”
“Trish,” said Stracht, “I’m afraid I have to go but I want to remind you and all your viewers around the world that Austria never had any death camps which harbored and tortured and murdered Jews. Even during a war my country would never do such a thing.”
“There were no such death camps anywhere … not in Europe or anywhere else,” said Burns.
“But didn’t they just close some of those camps a little while ago?” said Anderson. “Wasn’t there one in Holland?”
“Now it’s Holland,” said Stracht. “Listen. Holland closed a few wartime facilities just as several other countries did. In America do they keep those camps open where German Americans and Japanese Americans … U.S. citizens all of them … were incarcerated during the Second World War? Are they open now?”
“No,” said Anderson.
“And weren’t they shut down right after that war? Immediately after?”
“I believe they were.”
“And why did the Americans do that? Maybe so the world wouldn’t be reminded about it? Listen, these places you’re talking about in Europe were kept open for decades after that conflict until there was no purpose in having them. But none of them … and certainly not in Austria … were death camps. That is a fabrication.”
“What about Auschwitz?” said Anderson. “Didn’t they have some kind of museum there that was shut down? And aren’t they now talking about getting rid of the place for good?”
“Auschwitz was a holding facility just like Mauthausen.”
“Okay. Mr. Fisher, our time is up,” said Anderson. “I’d like to go back to you for a final word. The Austrian ambassador to the United Nations doesn’t believe your story about the camps. Neither does the member from the Austrian Parliament and neither does the gentleman from the Institute for Historical Review. And according to one of our guests eighty-two percent of Americans today don’t believe that six million Jews perished at the hands of Nazi Germany in the middle of the twentieth century. Only Professor Esther Dorion from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Professor William Hawthrington from the University of California at Berkeley agree with you on this one.”
“So it’s three against three,” said Burns.
“What I want to know, Mr. Fisher, is what do you say to these men? They don’t believe your story. They think you’re either not telling the truth or maybe your facts are mixed up.”
Mary Lou was squeezing her hands together. She had started to tense up with the first mention of gas chambe
rs.
“I was at Auschwitz,” Jack said. “I saw the most horrible things there. If I had my choice I wouldn’t want to remember these things but living with these awful memories is my life sentence. As for the camps, of course they had camps. I was in a camp myself. An extermination camp. A death camp. Auschwitz. That’s what it was and it wasn’t the only one. There was also Treblinka … Belzec … Chelmno … they were everywhere. All over Europe. And they were there for one reason and one reason only. To kill Jews. And they did. I should know. I was there. I am a witness.”
21
It was two weeks before Christmas and unseasonably hot for New York City. The temperature hovered around sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit – the United States being the only country in the world still using that scale – and city dwellers were peeling off their coats and jackets. Some were even wearing shorts. Hodgson found Jack sitting in the garden behind the Greenwich Village Seniors Center. Alone. In a sweater.
“Mr. Fisher?” Hodgson said.
Jack’s eyes were shut. He looked to be sleeping under the blazing sun.
“Mr. Fisher?”
Jack opened his eyes. “Lieutenant Hodgson. I didn’t know you were coming.”
Hodgson pulled up a chair and sat down. He had a bulging envelope under his arm.
“Is your woman friend with you today?” Jack asked him.
“No,” Hodgson said.
“What have you got there?”
“Some documents I think you’ll find very interesting.” Hodgson opened the envelope, peeled off a few sheets of paper and handed them to Jack, who began fumbling around for his glasses. When he had them on, he started to read.
“Lodz Ghetto … Deportations … and Statistics.” Jack looked up at Hodgson. Even when sitting, Hodgson towered over him. “What is this?” Jack said.
“These are copies of the documents Christine left for you in that package she told you about. The one at the Elora Gorge. You were supposed to go to Kitchener for a family function but you didn’t make it, did you?”
“My blood pressure was acting up and I wasn’t going on that train again.”
“She left this for you and she left it just where you said she would. Behind the first pillar under the bridge that goes over the Irvine River. You were right. We found it, well not us, but the local police up there found it. They scanned everything so I could show you. I didn’t think you’d want a mini kindle so I made hard copies.”
Jack looked at the papers again. Lodz Ghetto Deportations and Statistics. Below the title was a list of tables:
Table A: Liquidation of Jewish Population in the Lodz Ghetto, 1942-1944.
Table B: Number of Deceased in the Lodz Ghetto, 1940-1944.
Table C: Towns in the Warthegau from which Jews were deported to the Lodz Ghetto.
Table D: Jews Deported to the Lodz Ghetto from Western Europe in 1941.
Table E: Timeline of Deaths and Deportations in the Lodz Ghetto.
Jack stared into space. Unblinking.
“Are you all right?” Hodgson said.
Jack didn’t say anything.
“How about we go through this together?” Hodgson said. He moved his chair in closer. The two began poring through the documents one by one, starting with Table A. Hodgson did the reading.
“January 16th to 29th, 1942. Number of victims … 10,003. Place of Deportation slash Extermination … death camp in Chelmno. February 22nd to April 2nd, 1942. Number of victims … 34,073. Place of Deportation …”
He left out the word extermination.
“Death camp in Chelmno.”
He went down the list until he came to the entry for August 9th to 29th, 1944.
“Number of victims … 65,000 to 67,000. Place of Deportation … Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
“I was in that group,” Jack said. “And my parents and my aunt and my two cousins.”
“It says here that 72,000 people were transported to Auschwitz and from that number only 5,000 to 7,000 survived.”
“I survived.”
“Table B. Number of Deceased in the Lodz Ghetto 1940 to 1944. In 1940 there were 160,320 people in the ghetto. A total of 8,475 died and of that number 41 were shot.”
Jack was nodding his head up and down, listening to the numbers.
“In 1941 there were 145,992 people in the ghetto. Some 11,456 died of whom 52 were shot. In 1942 there were 103,034 people in the ghetto and of those 18,046 died. And 43 were shot. The total number of deaths in the ghetto for those five years was approximately 43,000. That’s what it says. Approximately.”
Hodgson went to the next table. Table C. Towns in the Warthegau from which Jews were deported into the Lodz Ghetto. “What is War-thuh-go?” he said.
“Warthegau,” Jack said, speaking like a German. “That was the part of Poland that was incorporated into the Reich in 1939.”
“The what?”
“The Reich.”
Hodgson had a blank look on his face.
“The Reich,” Jack said again.
“Jack, I don’t speak German.”
Hodgson seemed to be apologizing, but Jack didn’t buy it.
“Warthegau is what Germany took over,” Jack said. “Reichsgau Wartheland.”
Hodgson had pressed a button and he knew it, but what hit him just then wasn’t Jack’s frustration at his not knowing about the Reich, but the fact Jack didn’t sound at all like a man whose mother tongue was English.
“There’s a list of towns here,” Hodgson said. “Ka-lees? Is that how you say it?”
Jack looked at the list. “Kalisz. I knew people from Kalisz.” His finger went down the names of the towns. “And Kutno … and Lask … Lodz of course … there were many from there … Poznan.”
Hodgson shuffled through the papers.
“Here,” he said. “Timeline of Deaths and Deportations in the Lodz Ghetto. January 16th, 1942 to May 15th, 1942. It says … large-scale genocide begins. That’s what it says. Genocide. Some 57,064 Jews from the Lodz ghetto are deported to the death camp at Chelmno.”
He stopped.
“It says genocide,” he said.
“That’s what it was.”
Another document had a list of ghetto inhabitants with the Polish names of Jack and his family among them – Samuel Icek Klukowsky, Bela Chana Klukowsky, and Jacob Klukowsky, all of them at 24 Basargasse. In Lodz.
“Well what do you think?” said Hodgson.
“I’m shocked these records exist.”
“Christine got them for you. The sheer number of people killed. It’s mind boggling.” Hodgson looked at the papers again. “Over a period of five months in 1941 more than 57,000 people were sent to the death camp at Chelmno. That’s more people than were killed in the holocaust. In the whole thing I mean.”
“You mean 2029?” said Jack.
Hodgson nodded.
“Let me tell you something,” said Jack. “There is only one holocaust and it wasn’t in 2029. Why, 57,000 was a drop in the bucket. We’re talking about six million people. Six million.”
“Jack, I have to tell you something and I know you’re not going to like this. But I find a number like that hard to fathom.”
“Why?”
“How do you kill six million people? Especially back in those days.”
Jack brushed his hand against the envelope as if swatting a fly. “It’s all right there,” he said, pointing to the papers. “It tells you … 57,000 Jews … they were all Jews … were sent from Lodz to Chelmno. What do you think happened to them when they got there?”
Hodgson was shaking his head.
“And that was only one place. There were more. Many more.”
Jack slipped off his glasses and stared into the sky. “I watched the news last night and a boy was gunned down in the street. They tried to interview his mother but she couldn’t say anything. She just lost her son and the only thing she could do was cry. I didn’t know this woman but I could feel her loss … her pain … from her sobbing.”
/> “I know what you mean.”
“Yes I guess you do but that was only one death. Sometimes you hear about a bomb that goes off and maybe ten people are killed. Just like that. Then they have those big bombs that reach their target and a hundred people are killed. Blown to bits. Now imagine you have this enormous room that can hold a thousand people if you pack them in tight … so tight they can barely move. You lock the door and then you drop poison pellets through openings in the ceiling and in the walls and the pellets release cyanide gas. For some … a little child … it doesn’t take long to die … for an old woman a little longer … and for a young man even longer than that. But soon everyone in that room is dead and when they open the door they find them in a pile. The smallest ones … the children … they were the weakest … and when everyone was trying to escape the gas the stronger ones climbed on top of the weaker ones and that’s how they found them. The bodies of the strong young men are at the top of the pile … the women and the old people are under them … and the little children are at the bottom. That’s how it was at Auschwitz and a thousand people are dead. They could kill twenty thousand a day like that. And they did.”
Hodgson was numb, but Jack wasn’t finished. He sniffed at the air.
“It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “There isn’t a cloud in the sky. And it’s so blue up there. Have you ever seen such a blue sky? When I was at Auschwitz you would never get a day like this even if the weather was perfect. Even if it was a day like today.”
“What do you mean?” said Hodgson.
“Just what I said. The sky was never clear.”
“Why not?”
Jack took another sniff. “There is so much you don’t know,” he said. “But I guess it’s not your fault. It’s our fault. It’s my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s my fault for not telling people. I kept quiet all these years. I didn’t even tell my own grandchildren about it. Not until Christine. I was trying … hoping … to forget.”
“Why wasn’t the sky clear?”
“Because of the smoke.”
“What smoke?”
“From the incinerators. They were burning the bodies. The thousand people, remember? The crematoria. That’s why there was always so much smoke. You could see it and you could smell it. All the time.”
The Last Witness Page 14