The Last Witness

by Jerry Amernic

  Christine stopped talking again. She caught her breath and the smile returned.

  “Josef Karasik had children and grandchildren. One of his granddaughters is a woman named Emily Silver. She is fifty years old and lives on the Upper East Side not far from you in one of those brownstones like the one you had with Eve. She knows all about you, Jack. Her grandfather told her the stories and I hope you don’t mind but I gave her your identity code. She wants to meet you but first she’s going to send you a 3DE. What do you think of that? I love you, Jack. Your little Christine.”

  Auschwitz-Birkenau, August 1944

  39

  Jacob had to go to the latrine and he hated going back there. Every time he went he saw the bodies of new children. He didn’t know how they got there or what happened to them. Some of the bodies were so bruised and broken with arms and legs twisted backwards, bones sticking through the skin and in one the head missing its eyes that it didn’t matter what happened to them. It got to the point where Jacob resisted the urge to go – to pee or move his bowels – and he started feeling sick. Jerzy was quick to tell him that he couldn’t get sick because if they found out then he wouldn’t pass the next selection.

  “Come with me,” Jerzy said. “I want to show you something.”

  Jerzy had already told him what was going on here. He told him about the gas chambers where they put hundreds of people at a time, shut the doors and turned on the gas until all of them were dead, the lot of them piled in a heap with the strongest men on top and the smallest children at the bottom. He told him about the ovens where they burned people alive and then disposed of them all. He told him about the barbed-wire fence around the outside of the camp and how it was charged with electricity, so if you made a run for it your life would end right there on the fence. And he told him about Kanada.

  It was a huge yard with watchtowers at the four corners. In the middle were piles – mountains – of the things they collected. Blankets. Thousands and thousands of blankets. Baby carriages. Hundreds and maybe thousands of those, too, but no sign of babies anywhere. Pots and pans and trunks and clothes and even food. Mountains of all these things. The women who worked there weren’t sick, but healthy and well-fed with color in their cheeks. All these things were taken from Jews after they arrived at the camp. The belongings were sorted and the people were sorted and then most of them went straight to the gas chambers. But Kanada was a place of plenty named after a country far away.

  Jerzy wanted to take Jacob to another place, so they could play a game. The game was called Amuzierung zu den leichen bringen, which was German for ‘tickling the corpses’. You had to speak German, of course; any words in Polish and they would beat you and some children were beaten to death for using other languages. Jacob didn’t want to see another corpse, but Jerzy told him this one wasn’t like the bodies at the latrine. This one was at the wall where they shot people with a single bullet to the head. It wasn’t messy, he said, and they weren’t children, but adults and that was better because there was more to tickle.

  The body of a man was in the yard. He had been executed that very morning. A black hole was in the middle of his forehead, but apart from that and the dried blood on the ground everything about him looked intact. Jerzy lifted one of his arms and pretended to tickle him in the armpit and then he laughed. He lifted his other arm and did the same thing. Then he spread his legs apart and tickled him between them. He laughed the loudest at that.

  “Now you do it,” he said.

  Jacob didn’t want to, but Jerzy knew Jacob wasn’t well, that he had diarrhoea from holding it in for so long, and that if it got worse and they found out he wouldn’t make the next selection. Then they would send him to the gas chamber and burn his body in the crematorium. Whatever was left would go up in the smoke that filled the air. It had happened to many children who were there one day and gone the next and Jerzy said it would happen to him, too.

  “You do it,” said Jerzy.

  Jacob was younger and smaller than Jerzy and though Jerzy was just a stick he was still the stronger of the two. Jacob had trouble moving the dead man’s arm. It was too heavy. It made him think of the time he saw the body of Shmuel Zelinsky buried under the newspapers in the lane back in Lodz. He tried to get that coat off by slipping one arm out of the sleeve and then the other. This was like that. Like lifting a rock.

  When he had the arm out to the side, he dropped to his knees and tickled the corpse in the armpit. Jerzy laughed, but Jacob didn’t see anything funny about it. The man was dead. He had a bullet in his head. His brain shattered. He had a wife and children and parents and they would all be crying for him unless they were dead, too. Then Jerzy pointed between his legs.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  Again Jacob didn’t want to, but he did as he was told. He moved the man’s legs apart and tickled him. Down there. Jerzy laughed and Jacob allowed himself a sly smile, but only for Jerzy’s benefit. Jacob didn’t want them to know he was feeling sick.

  “You see,” Jerzy said. “It’s not so bad.”

  Jacob didn’t know how many people were killed at the camp, but it was a lot. Jerzy told him how the trains brought more in every day. Jews from all over Europe. After their arrival they were split into one group that went straight to the gas chambers and another group that went to work, but most went to the gas chambers. That was where the children went, usually with their mothers. That was where the old people went and anyone deemed unfit for work. Jerzy said the people were told they were going to the showers, but it was really a gas chamber. The SS would shut the doors and drop cyanide pellets through holes in the roof.

  Jerzy said they could kill twenty thousand people a day like that. Jacob didn’t know how many people that was. The boxcar that carried him from Lodz to Auschwitz had a hundred people – that was what they said – and was so crowded you couldn’t move. A thousand was more than that and Jerzy was talking twenty thousand. Every day. It was a lot. They were gassed, cremated and disposed of like in a factory assembly line, Jerzy said. After the bodies were burnt, the ashes were used for fertilizer, but Jacob didn’t know what that was. Jerzy said the Sonderkommandos at the crematoria took gold teeth from the corpses and then melted the gold down. The people’s belongings – blankets, baby carriages, trunks, everything else – all got sorted at Kanada.

  Jerzy called Birkenau a Vernichtungslager. An extermination camp. It was too big a word for Jacob, but Jerzy knew what was going on and how to stay alive because he was still there while many others had been killed. And every night in the middle of the night the Kapo came for him and every night when Jerzy got back he went to sleep.

  One day during the morning roll call the doktor who had told Jacob to drop his pants at the selection line came to visit. He was with two SS. He pointed to Jacob and said he wanted him. As soon as Jacob saw him, the shivering began.

  Jacob went with the two SS and the man in the white cloak to another building. They took him to a room, and then the SS shut the door and left them there. Inside the room were two girls, a little older than Jacob but not much, and it was weird because they looked exactly alike. Jacob had never seen such a thing before – two children who could have been looking at each other in a mirror. The man in the white cloak saw Jacob’s reaction and laughed.

  “Meine lieben kinder,” he said to Jacob and the girls.

  He told the three of them to sit and then he gave them candy. He patted Jacob’s hair and ran his hand down the arm of one of the girls. There was a knock at the door.

  “Doktor Mengele ?”

  The man in the white cloak said to come in and three men, all in white cloaks just like his, entered the room. They shut the door and started talking. A few minutes later there was another knock and another man came in, but not in a white cloak. He was wearing the same striped clothes as Jacob. Jacob took one look at him and knew he was a Jew. He was skinny, but not as skinny as Jerzy with bones sticking out everywhere. He had coffee for the three Germans, and as h
e presented each of them with a mug he said in a respectable manner “Doktor.”

  They were all doctors. The men ignored Jacob and the girls while they talked, but Jacob understood much of what they said because they spoke German. Jacob thought it odd that the man called Doktor Mengele addressed the other doctors in the same way that he addressed him and the girls. Meine lieben kinder.

  My dear children.

  They talked about how the war was going. They talked about the Fatherland. They talked about Jews and Gypsies and Slavs, and then the man they called Doktor Mengele motioned to Jacob and in front of the others he said “Der blonde polnische Junge.” The blonde Polish boy. A moment later and he said Versuch. Experiment. Jacob didn’t know this word until Jerzy told him about it. Jerzy told him what Doktor Mengele was doing to the children he was saving from the gas chambers. He told him how, before Jacob’s arrival, there had been an outbreak of a disease called spotted fever and they couldn’t contain it, so Doktor Mengele ordered every person in the whole block of barracks that was infected – seven hundred people – sent to the gas chambers.

  After hearing about the twenty thousand, Jacob didn’t think seven hundred was much, but then he thought of the boxcar and how crowded it was with a hundred people. This was seven times that.

  The man they called Doktor Mengele was kind to the two girls. He kept patting them and smiling at them. At first, Jacob thought he was their father, but he couldn’t have been because they looked exactly alike and nothing at all like him. It was about the Versuch.

  Experiments.

  Jerzy told Jacob that Der Todesengel – that was what he called him – was the most dangerous person at Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.

  When the doctors were finished talking, they took Jacob and the girls to a room with sinks, tables and tools. There were knives, needles and tubes with things sticking out the ends. Jacob didn’t know what they were for, but he remembered what Jerzy had said and he started to tremble again. He couldn’t stop it.

  The man they called Doktor Mengele sat the girls down on two chairs and told them to wait. He turned to Jacob. He said he would give him chocolate if he did as he was told and didn’t create a fuss. He asked him if he liked chocolate and Jacob said he did even though he had never tasted it. Then the man they called Doktor Mengele picked Jacob up under the arms and put him on a table. He made him take off his shirt. He said the chocolate was coming. Then he jabbed a needle into his arm. That was all Jacob remembered.

  When he woke up in his bunk, the pain in his stomach was so bad he thought he would die. It felt like knives with twisted edges tearing his insides apart. For two days, maybe three, he couldn’t eat. Not a thing. It hurt too much. All he had was water and even drinking water hurt. Then he started to eat again, just a little at first, and then some more. Not that they gave him much. The amount of food at the camp was even less than what the Germans had provided in the ghetto, but soon the pain began to subside and then he had to go to the latrine again.

  He went out to the back where bodies of children were all over the floor. It was always like that and there were always new ones. One of the new ones was a girl a little older than him. Maybe she was six. She had thick blonde locks and her hair looked alive, but her body wasn’t alive. There were small, round holes in her chest and splotches of dried, black blood between her legs and long streaks of blood running down her legs. Jacob looked closer and realized it was one of the girls who was in the room with him and the man they called Doktor Mengele. It was her. He didn’t know what happened to the other one.

  40

  “Hello Mr. Klukowsky. My name is Emily Silver and Josef Karasik of Lodz was my grandfather. What a pleasure to meet you!”

  She was portly with heavy jowls and full, round eyes. Her hair was neatly coiffed, she had a touch of makeup on her cheeks, her voice wrapped in deep respect.

  “I must tell you before I go any further that your great-granddaughter Christine is a wonderful person. She really is. She called and I had no idea who she was and then she mentioned your name and I knew immediately this would be one of the most important 3DEs of my life. How she found me I don’t know but she did and I can only guess she’s been doing a lot of digging to get this far. We haven’t really met … not in person anyway … but after that first call we exchanged a few 3DEs and now I feel like she’s a good friend and I look forward to speaking with her again. I feel I’ve known her a long time but then our families go back quite a bit, don’t they? Well I don’t know how to begin. My grandfather spoke a lot about you and your adventures together during the war. I was born in 1989 and I remember as a little girl he would sit me on his lap and tell me about this brave little boy he knew in the ghetto. In Lodz. His name was Jacob Klukowsky and he was four. I was probably about four myself when he first told me about you. He wanted us to know. Oh excuse me but my grandfather … my Zayda … had three children … two sons and a daughter … and his younger son who was the middle one in the family is my father. His name is Howard Karasik and he’s still alive. He’s seventy-eight and thank God in good health. My mother is alive too. Her name is Sheila and she’s seventy-six.”

  Jack was glued to the box. It was as if his life was unfolding before him through this woman he had never met. Josef Karasik’s granddaughter. And did she really call him Mr. Klukowsky?

  “My Zayda told us what it was like in the ghetto. How there was never food and how so many died of disease and how people were taken away for no reason and you never saw them again. Being born when I was and living my whole life in America it’s pretty hard to get a handle on what it must have been like. I mean I’ve always had everything handed to me on a silver platter. Even my name is Silver!”

  She laughed and her jowls shook like they would never stop shaking. But it was a good laugh. A hearty, honest laugh.

  “My Zayda was a hard-working man. I’m sure like you he learned a lot of values in the ghetto and later at the camp where they sent him. He went to Chelmno and lost everyone in his family there. His mother. His father. His brother and his two sisters. All of them. They were all gassed. I’m not even sure how he got out. He always said he was lucky. But you! He talked so much about you! About the little four-year-old boy Jacob Klukowsky and how fast he could run when he knocked over the fruit stalls and how he could make a hole in the wall using a knife and fork. He said you were so brave. That you risked your life to get food for your family and later how my Zayda got beat up by a policeman and you didn’t want to go with him anymore.”

  She laughed again.

  “He called you a pisher. I’m sorry but he did but you were only four years old and he was twelve so that’s what you were to him. But he had a lot of respect for you. For your courage and the way you did things. He said you were a good partner and sometimes he was happy to get out of the Aryan part of the city with one pillowcase filled with fruit … that’s what you used, right? … but you would take two because those rich machers wouldn’t know the difference.”

  The laugh again.

  “Well I keep rambling on but I want you to know what an honor it is to get the chance to speak with that brave little boy who left such an impression on my Zayda when he was in the ghetto. My Zayda died a long time ago. In 2017. Over twenty years now. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I was twenty-eight when he died so I knew him very well and I loved him. He was a wonderful man. My grandmother … my Bubby … is gone now too but she almost got to ninety. She was eighty-nine when she died. But Christine tells me you just turned a hundred! Mazel-tov! How satisfying it must be for someone from the ghetto and the camps to reach a hundred. To have such memories as a little boy and then overcome all that and have such a rich life with children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Christine says you even have a great-great-grandchild. Mazel-tov! I can’t wait to meet you. I live on the Upper East Side and know you’re at the Greenwich Village Seniors Center. I’d love to come by to say hello. Maybe we could have lunch? I know a nice deli in Gree
nwich. Do you like pastrami or corned beef? It doesn’t matter. You could get soup and potato salad but it has to be on me. I insist. I want to tell you about my family and the grandchildren your friend Josef left behind and I want to know what you’ve been up to for the past … what is it … ninety-six years? Maybe we’ll have two lunches! That would be nice. Or you could come and visit us and meet the family. They would all be so honored to meet you. Please send me a 3DE and we’ll talk some more. I’m really looking forward to meeting you. Say hello to Christine for me. I’d love to meet her. Good-bye for now.”

  41

  Brett Krust was really worried about his kids. Both of them. Even little Billy who was only seven. Brett knew it wouldn’t be long before his precocious Stephanie discovered boys. Maybe she already had. Billy, six years younger, looked up to his sister and Brett figured he better set an example with her or he’d have bigger fish to fry with the boy later. Their schooling was always left to their mother, but when Jen came home empty-handed after meeting with Stephanie’s teacher, he figured it was time to act.

  The Cobra made everything so simple. He talked about securing the dignity of the gene pool and Brett liked how he put that. Securing the dignity of the gene pool. If races were supposed to mix, then all of us would have been brown from the beginning, but we weren’t. We were different and there was a reason. The Cobra talked a lot about dilution, and how the traits and characters of one race could dilute that of another. It was all right if you were on the bottom rung – what he called the mongrel among us – but if you were at the top, then all this intermixing could yield only one result.

  Your gene pool was diluted.

  This is exactly what has been going on, and the white race was suffering because of it. All its values were under attack. Democracy was threatened with tribalism. The family unit was under bombardment, and just being a Christian meant that you had to apologize for it. This new philosophy of miscegenation – the mixing of the races – would be our downfall, and soon the mongrels would dominate.