“Maybe she lost her balance.”
Hodgson was stymied. He sat back in the chair and it went crunch. “Jack, you have to understand something. We may never find out what happened to Christine at the gorge that day. We may never find out.”
“It was an accident. It had to be. Christine was a lot like me but she wasn’t stupid.”
“What do you mean she was like you?”
“I took risks. My whole life was a risk. But I didn’t always have a choice.”
“Let’s get into that, shall we? The second series of stimuli in the scanner. You remember what we showed you?” Hodgson went into Dr. Jordan’s report again, and then he took out a few photos. “There was this one.”
He showed Jack the black-and-white photo of people stacking furniture on a roadway with a soldier ordering them around. Jack looked at the picture. Then Hodgson took out the photo of German soldiers kicking a man in the street. Jack leaned in closer. Hodgson showed him another photo.
“Is that the hospital in Lodz?” Jack said, squinting. “The building in the back?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack looked confused.
“What is it?” said Hodgson.
“There’s something about that building.”
Hodgson moved on to another photo with a group of children begging, and then to the caricature of the haggard Jew with the big nose. Jack stared at them and said nothing. Then Hodgson showed him the photo of the murder squad with their machine guns.
“Dr. Jordan’s numbers indicate a pretty big increase in neural activity with this one,” he said.
Jack shook his head.
“This one too,” said Hodgson.
It was the photo of naked women standing in a ditch, some of them with little children in their arms. About twenty of them were in the picture, all facing to the left, and at the far right a woman cradling an infant in her arms was rushing in to join them. Behind them strewn about the ground were articles of clothing.
“With that one …”
“Those poor people,” Jack said. “Those poor women and those helpless children. I could have been one of them. I should have been one of them.” And just like that he broke down. The tears came from his eyes in a flood. “All my life all this guilt. Horrible guilt that I shouldn’t be here.” Jack buried his head in his hands and wept.
Hodgson put his arm around him.
“I have no right!” Jack said, sobbing. “Why am I here when so many died? How did I get to be a hundred years old? To suffer so long. Why did this happen to me?”
“It’s all right, Jack,” Hodgson said. “It’s all right. I know how you feel.”
“No you don’t. How could you? How could anyone know? People don’t even think it happened. No one believes me. But it did happen. I was there.”
“I know you were.”
“Do you? Really?”
“Yes.”
“And that monster. Der Todesengel. Mengele. I knew him the bastard. He murdered so many children but nobody believes me. Nobody believes me.”
“I believe you, Jack.”
37
Jack’s ninetieth birthday was a family celebration, but it would be his last one with Eve. It wasn’t long afterward that she had her aneurysm and died. They had been married over sixty years. It meant that Jack was suddenly living alone in his Upper East Side brownstone, and despite daily visits from his son Ralph, not doing very well at it. During this time the Great Holocaust of 2029 took place. Like everyone else Jack followed the news and was horrified with the massacre of Muslim converts to Christianity by fanatical Islamists in southern Turkey. Pretty soon any Christians at all were being slaughtered. It all happened over a period of six weeks. Christians were being targeted by roving gangs who resorted to guns, knives, axes, even hand grenades. The growing army of radicals would toss the grenades right into residential neighborhoods and blow up homes. Most of the Arab world ignored the story or downplayed the extent of carnage, but everywhere else the killing of innocent masses was widely condemned. The Great Holocaust became part of the language.
It was then that a 3D documentary began to generate interest. The documentary wasn’t about the Great Holocaust, but something else. It presented a convincing argument about what had befallen European Jews in the last century. Central to its theme was Auschwitz. The documentary began with a dramatization of Rudolph Hess, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, signing an affidavit on May 14, 1946 in which he stated that two million Jews had been gassed at the camp between 1941 and 1943. The actor who portrayed him – with his long face, heavy eyebrows and square jaw – even resembled the real Hess. As he signed the form, faint music played in the background, and then Hess was taken away. His confession was said to have been obtained under torture. The actual paper with his confession would go on display decades later at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Then the music got louder as the scene shifted to a plaque unveiled at Auschwitz. The year was now 1948. Actual footage from the time was adapted and modified to digital 3D. The words on the plaque said that four million people had been killed at the site between 1940 and 1945, a figure provided from the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in November, 1945.
Then, with the music louder still, it was Auschwitz in 1990, the year when the original plaque was replaced with another plaque. The words on the new plaque said the Nazis had murdered one and a half million people at the site, most of them Jews.
Auschwitz faded away and a huge 3D graphic of a red cross appeared. With the music still building the narrator said that, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, an estimated 135,000 registered prisoners had died at Auschwitz. This figure came from Nazi Germany’s Death Books confiscated by the Red Army immediately after the Second World War. The Death Books had been turned over to the Red Cross by the Soviet Union after the fall of communism in 1989.
Then another dramatization. Richard Glueks, head of Nazi Germany’s Concentration Camp Inspectorate, was busy at work in his Berlin office. The camera showed him from the back and focused on his record books, which opened up to reveal that 103,429 inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau – a little more than half of them Jews – had died of typhus between 1942 and 1944. The image of Glueks slowly dissolved with the voice of the narrator saying that, according to microfilmed records from the Russian Archives, the total number of people executed at Auschwitz was 1,646, most of them Poles. Of this total, only 117 were said to be Jews.
The documentary moved to its closing segment, a tour of present-day Auschwitz. The museum was still open to the public, but the rest of the site had been closed, which meant that few people were visiting anymore. The tour was accompanied by a running commentary, along with footage of what remained from the buildings. But now the music was very different. It began so softly you could barely hear it, and then it became clear. The Blue Danube. The strings playing in perfect unison, Strauss’s celebrated movement swept the viewer away as the voice of the narrator carried the film’s message to its final crescendo.
There was one building where, the narrator said, Zyklon gas was used to disinfect clothes from severe outbreaks of lice. There were the remains of two crematoria where the bodies of those who died of typhus were burnt. There was a building where elaborate theatrical productions were staged to entertain those staying at the camp. There was the excavation of what was once a swimming pool, of all things. The documentary concluded with this statement: ‘The manipulation by media over the course of almost one hundred years about what really happened at Auschwitz is the greatest crime of deception and deceit the world has ever seen.’
Coming on the heels of the Great Holocaust of 2029, the documentary gained traction and before long many people all over the world accepted it as the last word on Auschwitz. It was used to justify a book called The Great Hoax which made a compelling argument about how the Jewish holocaust never really happened. This was the book Christine had tossed into the Elora G
orge. The Upper Grand District School Board would later add a children’s version of it to the reading list for her course An Overview of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.
The Great Hoax inspired a feverish debate in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, about whether or not to close the old camps for good. Many said that the camps were perpetuating a lie. In time, the camps in Germany did close down. One by one. The first was Buchenwald, prompting a protest at the Buchenwald Memorial by a handful of Jews from the nearby town of Weimar, but no one took much notice. That was followed by the closing of Bergen-Belsen, and again, local Jews staged a rally at the Jewish Monument which had been erected at the site in 1946. But the rally created a furor that flew right in the face of those same protesters because words inscribed on the monument referred to ‘thirty thousand Jews’ exterminated in the camp.
“That is a far cry from six million,” said a reporter covering the story. “And it’s twenty thousand less than the number of Christians who were killed in the Great Holocaust.”
Then Ravensbruck closed and Dachau, and both times protests by Jews were met with little fanfare. Then all the other camps in Germany closed. Flossenburg. Neuengamme. Sachsenhausen. Dora-Mittelbau. The movement to close the camps spread to other countries, first to the Ukraine where Janowska was closed, and then Belarus where Koldichevo was closed. Then it was Kaiserwald in Latvia, Sered in Slovakia, Natzweiler in France, Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, and Mauthausen in Austria. Before long, all the camps in Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria closed as well. Then it was the camp in Holland – Westerbork. Some of them were bulldozed right away and others later. Soon the only ones left were in Poland.
The first camps to close in Poland were Stutthof, Majdanek, Plaszow and Gross-Rosen. There were no protests. Not one. They were followed by Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. The camps with their museums and memorials were said to be bad for business. What was once a source of tourism revenue was now met with increasing indifference. The Polish government could no longer make a case for maintaining them since the cost of upkeep was high, the cause unpopular, and donors nowhere to be found. By the time Christmas of 2039 approached, only one camp had not been bulldozed into oblivion.
Auschwitz.
38
The somber procession wound its way along the narrow road that meandered through the small cemetery in Kitchener. It was easy to get lost with all the twists and turns, but the driver of the hearse knew the route. Many people came to Christine’s funeral. The mourners included her Grade 6 students and teachers from Williamsburg Public School, members of the Upper Grand District School Board, close friends, city councillors, a reporter from the only daily newspaper in town, and the entire staff of the community weekly The Reflector where Christine once worked. There were also families who were interviewed by Christine for the obituaries she wrote, and of course, the Fisher family.
Christine’s sister Tiffany, her little girl in her arms, wept by the open grave. Her father Will, his head hung low, was grieving quietly under his breath. Christine’s grandfather Bill, Jack’s older son, kept shaking his head from side to side as if this couldn’t be real. Christine’s mother Emma, a woman who had seen much suffering as a nurse in the trauma ward at the local hospital, would emerge as the strongest. When everyone was gathered around, the priest started to read.
“Turn thou the key upon our thoughts, dear Lord and let us sleep.
Grant us our portion of forgetfulness, silent and deep.
Lay thou thy quiet hand upon our eyes to clear their sight.
Shut out the shining of the moon and stars and candlelight.
Keep back the phantoms and the visions sad. The shades of gray.
The fancies that so haunt the little hours before the day.
Quiet the time-worn questions that are all unanswered yet.
Take from the spent and troubled souls of us their vain regret.
And lead us far into thy silent land that we may go
Like children out across the field of dreams where poppies blow.
So all thy saints and all thy sinners too wilt thou not keep
Since not alone unto thy well-beloved thou givest sleep.”
When the priest finished, Emma with her husband Will at her side, opened a book. Her voice, the voice of a broken mother, was weak but it did not crack.
“I’ll lend you for a little time a child of mine.
For you to love the while she lives and mourn for when she’s dead.
It may be six or seven years, or twenty-two or three,
But will you till I call her back take care of her for me?
She’ll bring her charms to gladden you, and should her stay be brief
You’ll have her lovely memories as solace for your grief.
I cannot promise she will stay, since all from earth return,
But there are lessons taught down there I want this child to learn.
I’ve looked the wide world over in search for teachers true,
And from the throngs that crowd life’s lanes, I have selected you.
Now will you give her all your love, nor think the labor vain,
Nor hate me when I come to call to take her back again?
I fancied that I heard them say, ‘Dear Lord, thy will be done.
For all the joys thy child shall bring, the risk of grief we’ll run’.”
The graveside service was brief, just as Christine would have wished. The priest concluded with a short prayer.
“Eternal rest grant unto them whose earthly lives are past.
Perpetual light shine on them. May they rest in peace at last.
Eternal life grant unto them whose laughter now I’ve lost.
Whose presence and whose smiles I miss but never mind the cost.
Eternal joy grant unto them whose sufferings now are through.
Their pain and illness finally gone, their minds and hearts renew.
Eternal peace grant unto them, my friends and foes together.
Forgive them all their trespasses. May they rest in peace forever.
Amen.”
The Fisher family took a step back, and the casket was lowered into the ground. There were hugs and tears and long, enduring embraces that didn’t want to end, and later at the family’s home an awkward gathering that was almost perverse with the absence of Christine. No one said much of anything, and the next day Jack was back home in New York. Ralph stayed with him in his room the first night, but then Jack told him to leave.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”
But Jack wasn’t all right. He kept asking himself by whose law had his great-granddaughter been taken. Christine was only twenty-five years old, a schoolteacher with her whole life ahead of her. She would have married and had children and some day grandchildren and here was Jack at a hundred. What more could there be for him? Surely he wouldn’t live much longer now, but he was alive and his little Christine was dead. Where was the reasoning in that? But Jack had never seen much reason in his life. Nothing ever really made much sense. Things just happened and you dealt with them.
Not thirty minutes after Ralph was out the door, Jack was sitting alone in his room at the Greenwich Village Seniors Center, staring at that little box Christine got him the previous Christmas. Now Christmas was coming again. It was almost a year to the day. Her gift was some newfangled thing that let you send and receive 3D messages to anyone you wanted. Anywhere in the world. All you needed was their identity code. It would take his blood pressure, heart rate and other things that measured his health, but Jack didn’t care about his health anymore.
He couldn’t explain it, but something was pulling him to that box and maybe it was because she bought it. He got up, flipped open the lid, pressed the receive key and there she was.
“Hi Jack. How are you? You must be getting tired of hearing from me like this but I have something to tell you. I hope you’re sitting down.”
> Jack’s mouth was ajar. He just came from her funeral the day before, and now here was Christine standing in front of him. Talking to him as if all was well with the world. He took her advice and sat on the edge of his bed.
“You remember how you told me about your experiences in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz and then I found those old records the Germans kept? They were meticulous record-keepers and I hope you forgive me for saying this but in a way it’s a good thing because everything they did is there for the world to see. How can anyone deny it? That’s why you’re important, Jack. You are the last living person who can tell the world what happened. You are the last witness. After you there is no one else. You have a duty … an obligation … to tell everything … everything you can remember about what happened to you. Now about what I wanted to tell you. Are you ready? When you were that little boy in the ghetto … Jacob Klukowsky … hidden by your parents Bela and Samuel so the Nazis wouldn’t find you … you had two friends named Josef Karasik and Shimek Goldberg. Remember them? You would sneak over the wall or through the wall and steal apples and pears from the shopkeepers in the market. You stole other things too so your family could eat. Those boys were eight years older than you and Shimek was the one who helped you with the manhole cover so you could get into the sewer. Until you could do it by yourself.”
Christine stopped talking and lowered her head.
“Shimek didn’t survive. He died in the gas chamber with his family. I found all their names in the record books.”
Then she looked up and a smile came to her face.
“But Josef did survive! He survived! Just like you, Jack, and just like you he was the only one from his family who made it. After the war he wound up in a camp … a DP camp they called it … in Austria. It was called Bindermichel and it was in Linz. Then he went to an orphanage. I have the records right here. It was in the mountains near Salzburg. Later he was brought to America by the Jewish Congress. He lived in the Bronx, then got married and moved to Cleveland and he must have learned a lot about food when he was in the ghetto with you because he ran a grocery store with his father-in-law and they did very well. He died in 2017. He was eighty-six.”
The Last Witness Page 22