Then Sid said, “We didn’t know what to do. We went to the cops, but the desk sergeant just laughed at us, said the war’s over, forget it.” He turned wondering eyes on Isaac and Saul, “Forget it? I saw that bastard herd women and kids into the gas chambers under Auschwitz.” He hung his head, “I did a little time as a sondercommando there. I couldn’t take it, so they put me on a road crew.” He looked at them again, after gulping his coffee, “I don’t understand why they didn’t gas me too. I should be dead now.” His eyes grew moist, and he wiped them on a sleeve.
Gently, Isaac said, “Tell us about Boettcher. Where does he live? Where does he work?”
“Hah!” cackled Morty. “We can do better than that. We followed him, took pictures.” He rose and brought back a packet with a rubber band around it. He slipped the band around his wrist and laid everything on the table. “His name is Ralph Brandt now. Nice American, no? He works at an eyeglass maker on Lawrence Avenue near Lincoln Square, and lives over a shop on Leavitt Avenue. We watched him for four days. Same routine. Up at seven, walks to work, crosses Western Avenue at 7:45 during the morning rush and opens the shop promptly at 8. The owner comes in about 9. He leaves at 5:15 and goes home. No wife, no roommates. Eats at a small café called the Red Star Inn two or three evenings, and has a beer after at Zum Deutschen Eck, a beirhalle.” He looked up after pushing the photos in front of Isaac and Saul.
“That’s all we’ve got. The addresses are all in there.”
“You’ll take care of him?” asked Sid.
Isaac nodded. “That’s what I do.” He stood and shook both men’s hands, “Thank you.”
They got back in the Ford and Saul headed them east on Pratt Avenue, then south on Western and down to Lincoln Square. “What are we going to do?” asked Saul.
Isaac frowned, “We? Nothing. I will take care of this guy. It is my job. You just drive.” His tone was flat, all business, and Saul kept his silence.
It was afternoon, they parked and found the eyeglass shop. Across the street was a drug store with outdoor tables. They sat and ordered an American drink called a Lime Rickey. It was delightfully refreshing in the warm afternoon sun. Isaac was pleased that each of the roads that Boettcher had to cross was a busy one with lots of traffic. He noted that there were many autobuses and lorries plying the roads also. A plan started to form.
They watched as Boettcher left the shop, locked up and pocketed the key. He walked to the corner and waited with twenty or thirty others for the stoplight to change. When it did, they surged across the street. Isaac noted that Boettcher pushed to the front while waiting, obviously in a hurry to get home or for a beer.
Isaac was satisfied. “Tomorrow,” he told Saul, “you park on the street around the corner there.” He pointed to a woman’s clothing shop that had showroom windows on the corner. “When I get back into the automobile, you take me to the airport. I will make a reservation tonight by telephone.”
They ate supper at the Ashkenaz, a Jewish delicatessen on Cedar Street that served kosher food. Isaac had never had such food. He found the pastrami sandwich huge and delicious. They drank a flavored seltzer with the food and afterwards went for a long walk. Again they spoke of the camps and Isaac told him of his work with Yuri and Abraham. Saul grinned and asked to be remembered to them, and if they ever needed a lawyer in Chicago, they could call him. He said that by 1950, he would be practicing American law.
He seemed so proud, and Isaac was very impressed. After all, what had he done? He had traveled, smuggled, killed and hunted, but, aside from his schooling back in Germany, he had no formal education. Perhaps he would look into some classes in Brussels when he returned. He had heard that a man need not go to school continuously to get his education. Perhaps he could study at home and take some courses as he had time.
Meanwhile, he had work to do and must remain sharp. The next afternoon, he and Saul drove to the corner where they had seen Boettcher cross the street the previous day. Isaac watched from down the street beside a news kiosk. He saw Boettcher pull the shade down and lock the door. Ah, he thought, good German boy, always punctual. As Boettcher started for the corner, Isaac fell into step behind him. They reached the corner and waited for the streetlight to change and traffic to stop. Isaac watched as a large lorry, yes, yes, a truck, as Saul had corrected him, approached, breezing through the light in the curb lane. He was close behind Boettcher now, almost pressed against him, hands in front.
Just before the truck passed, he shoved the taller man, hard. At the same time he cried, “No! What are you doing?” He clenched his hand as if to catch Boettcher’s coat, but not too hard. Boettcher barely had time to turn his head before the truck smashed him into its grille and bumper. The truck’s tires screeched as the driver tried to stop. Several people reached forward, but Boettcher was swept away.
Isaac stayed for a few minutes while some men ran forward and two or three women screamed. There was a smear of blood on the street leading to the spot where the truck had stopped. He reached out and patted a middle-aged woman on the back, muttering, “Awful! Terrible!” Then he walked backward a few steps and, when he was clear of the crowd, turned and strolled toward the corner where Saul waited, the automobile’s engine idling. He kept his head down into a large handkerchief, which obscured most of his face. Saul drove calmly away.
In less than an hour they were at the airport. Saul parked in front and turned to shake Isaac’s hand. “You know, I would have preferred to turn him over to the authorities and have him tried, convicted and be put in a cell for a long, long time.”
Isaac nodded. “So would I, but the police have no interest in prosecuting former Nazis. That is the job I do now.”
“Do you have any problem doing this job, my friend? Do you sleep nights?”
Shrugging, Isaac thought for a long minute. “No, I have no problem sleeping. He deserved what he got. I saw him beat a friend to death. He did it in front of dozens of people. That was before Auschwitz. I heard he was worse there.”
Isaac slept all the way on the flight to New York and strolled around the airport before his Pan Am flight left for London, then Brussels. He was people watching, hoping to recognize an old friend, or another fugitive Nazi.
When he arrived in Brussels, Seymour didn’t bother asking how it had gone.
Chapter 37
Over the next several years, Isaac was sent on many missions. Whenever he returned to Brussels, he squired Hanna LeDuc to nightclubs, dances, and dinners. He also enrolled in an occasional class at Vrije Universiteit, a local Dutch-speaking college. Hanna helped him with the language, and Yuri and Abraham occasionally went to classes with him. Abraham eventually found the language too difficult, and Yuri stopped going, saying he was bored. But Isaac continued with his studies of European history. He was trying to fathom hatred of the Jews by the Europeans and especially the Germans.
After one particularly lengthy and difficult mission to El Salvador, Isaac came home to find Hanna gone. Madame LeDuc said that she had run off with a French screen actor and was now living in Paris. Of course he missed her, but not enough to hunt her down. He told Madame LeDuc that he wished her good luck and hoped that she would be happy. To Isaac, women were not important; he was wedded to his work.
In 1949 he tracked down a former SS corporal who had been in charge of dropping the Zyklon B pellets into the gas chambers at Treblinka. The man was farming in Tunisia. Isaac worked for the man for two weeks as a laborer and then stabbed him to death in his barn when his wife was away visiting relatives.
Later that same year, he found one of his old guards from Buchenwald, Helmut. He never knew his last name. Mrs. Katz had matched Isaac’s drawing to a blurry photo in a newspaper after a minor car accident that took place in Stuttgart. Isaac tracked Helmut Barr to the Daimler factory where he was performing maintenance on the assembly machines. He stopped on the way home each evening at a neighborhood restaurant and bar for a stein of beer before going home to a rented flat in a poor neig
hborhood.
Isaac bought him a beer one night and pretended he was tipsy. They left the bar together after he’d bought Helmut two more beers. They were staggering past an alley when Isaac hit him hard in the kidney. Helmut lurched sideways, and Isaac hit him again with his fist, breaking his nose. Swiftly, he spun behind Helmut and put him in a chokehold, cupping a hand over the broken nose and directing the blood down Helmut’s throat. Helmut struggled briefly, then slipped to his knees.
Isaac dragged him deeper into the alley and dropped him onto his back. Kneeling, Isaac checked his pulse. None. He quickly rifled his pockets, keeping the money and checking his wallet. There was nothing else he wanted so he tossed the wallet into a nearby trashcan. As he started to walk away, Isaac stopped, walked back and kicked the body several times. Then he knelt again and drew out his pocketknife. Carefully he carved a swastika into Helmut’s forehead.
* * *
There were no further connections with the former Nazi guards depicted in Isaac’s drawings until late in 1952 when a woman called one day. She told him she’d recognized the sadistic woman guard, Helga Dressler, whom Isaac had seen once as she was helping drive a crowd of women out of Buchenwald near the end of the war. Miraculously, some of the women had survived. One, a woman named Berta Berger, had seen her in a farmer’s market in a small town outside Munster. Isaac immediately boarded a train and was there the next day. He found Frau Berger, now a plump woman with three children and a short, thin husband, living on a small farm that had belonged to her father.
A light snow had fallen and spotted the ground on the day he knocked at the farmhouse door.
She invited him in, and Isaac sat in the kitchen, sipping a cup of strong tea and talking to Frau Berger while her youngest child crawled around their feet. Her husband was out with the older children digging the last of the potatoes from their garden. Isaac had thought the Bergers were Jews, but she informed him that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious sect that were targets of the Nazis, along with Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, deformed people, mentally retarded folks, and anyone deemed different from the master race.
Frau Berger recounted how she almost bumped into Helga while shopping. Of course, the woman didn’t recognize her, but she followed Helga, staring at her over shelves and around displays until she was sure. She saw Helga again the following market day, and, after seeing a small article in the Munster newspaper about the Nazi hunters and the promise from the new German government to bring all the Nazis they could to justice, she wrote to the newspaper. The editor forwarded it to Seymour Levintall and, again, Mrs. Katz went through the files and found a reference to a Helga Dressler, a female guard at Buchenwald, who had been trained at Ravensbrück, the original woman’s concentration camp. She had been a sixteen-year-old girl just off the farm when Dorothea Binz, the supervising SS training guard at Ravensbrück recruited her in 1942.
Dorothea was a very cruel woman. She found a kindred spirit in Helga and trained her. Helga never had anything resembling power until she came to Ravensbrück. She reveled in it. Eventually she invented even crueler tortures than Dorothea.
On the deadly winter trek, when they’d been ordered to march the women from Buchenwald back into the heart of Germany, more than half of the women had either died or been murdered, many at the hand of Helga Dressler.
Now Dressler was living free in this small town.
With winter approaching, the farmers’ market season would soon end. Frau Berger agreed to meet him on Saturday, the last day of the local market. Once there she pointed out the Dressler. Isaac appraised her, noting that she was probably under thirty, an average looking woman, a little hard around the mouth, with thin lips, and mousy blonde hair. But, he thought, she has a nice figure, strong arms and hands. Today she was wearing a wool dress, worn leather jacket and stockings with high cut boots and leather gloves.
After leaving Frau Berger, Isaac arranged to bump into Dressler. “Oh, excuse me, Fraulein.” He was twenty-nine years old, tall with a full head of dark hair, a wide smile and strong shoulders. He knew he was attractive to women. Isaac gave her his most winning smile and touched her arm. Before she could speak, he asked, “Perhaps you could help me. I am looking for some good bratwurst. Would you know who here has the best?”
She smiled back at him. “Of course I do. Come with me, young man.” As they walked together among the booths, she took his arm and asked, “You are not from this town, are you?”
He looked down at the top of her blonde head. This was a small town, so of course she knew that he wasn’t a local boy. “No, Fraulein, I am here looking for a site for a factory for my family. We make automobile parts. My uncle is trying to diversify, build small factories all over the Fatherland. I am staying in Munster. Do you know the city?”
Helga stopped and looked up at him, “Of course. How long will you be in Munster?”
Isaac shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, a few days perhaps. It depends on how quickly I can complete my business. Or,” he added, looking into her eyes, “if I have another reason to stay.” He knew that this young woman, who had returned to the farm where she was born, was chafing at the seclusion after having had so much power.
“And the bratwurst is for you and your wife?” There was a note of inquiry and hesitation in her voice.
Isaac knew she was hooked. He placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled. “No, Fraulein, I am not married yet. Since the war, I have been much too busy. I promised my uncle that I would bring some back for him.” He raised an eyebrow, “And you? A husband and kinder?”
She shrugged, “Nein, not yet. Perhaps someday.” She stopped and looked at him, one hand on his arm, “What is your name, Mein Herr?”
He laughed. “I am Rolf Brugger. And you, pretty lady?”
She said, “Helga Dresser.” She held out a hand and formally shook his.
As he held her callused hand, he asked, “Would you like to have dinner with me in Munster this evening, Fraulein Dresser?”
She considered for just a moment and nodded. “You have an automobile?”
“Ya. I have rented one from a firm in Munster.” He pointed at an aging BMW. “Do you need to go home before we leave?” The bratwurst was now forgotten.
She thought for a moment, and then shook her head, “If you do not mind being seen with me like this, I need nothing. Do you have a room where I can bathe?”
“Of course. I hope you will select a comfortable eating establishment for us.” He wanted this meal to be a good one. It would be her last.
They drove back to Munster, mostly in silence. She asked about his family and the company’s plans. He had a credible story memorized. He then asked about her past.
“Oh, for most of the war, I stayed with my parents on the farm and worked to provide food for the soldiers and our local neighbors. It is not a large farm.”
“So your father was not in the military?” Isaac had to be careful not to probe too deeply. He knew a lot about her family. Her father was a Waffen SS tank commander, her brother, Horst, a driver for a Gestapo officer.
“No,” she lied. “Just a farmer.”
When they got to his hotel, he helped her out of the car, and she took his arm again. The two walked through the small lobby and up one flight of stairs to his room. He opened the door and reached over her shoulder to twist the knob for the light.
“Danke,” she said and, after looking around, walked to the washroom. Over her shoulder she said, “I will bathe now, Rolf. You may join me if you wish.” She wasn’t being flirty or cute. She seemed more resigned.
“No, I bathed this morning. You go ahead.” Isaac was changing clothes when she came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her. She was hugging it against her breasts, the lower part covering her upper thighs. Isaac turned and quickly slipped his shirt back over his tattooed arm. Then he just stood and looked at her.
She let the towel drop as she realized what she had just seen. It had been years since those days at the c
amps, but part of her knew that one day someone would come for her, that she would be made to pay for what she had done. The realization lay like a nasty little worm of fear coiled in the back of her mind. Now that that day had come, she almost felt relief. Almost. Maybe there was some way she could talk her way out of this. Rolf seemed like such a nice young man.
“Do you want to have sex with me, Rolf?” She sounded almost bored, asking as a matter of fact. She walked to the bed and sat. “I saw your tattoo. Are you here to take me somewhere for trial?”
Isaac went and sat beside her, slipping his shirt off and letting it drop to the floor. He thought he should hate her for the atrocities she had committed, for all the women she had tortured and killed, but as he looked at her naked body, her indifferent face, all he felt was pity and a great sadness.
“No. It all ends here.”
“I understand. I suppose I have been waiting for someone to come for me.” She turned and sighed. “Will you make it quick?”
Isaac nodded, leaned forward and kissed her lips. She didn’t respond at first, then started to move her lips and tongue, probably hoping for a last minute reprieve. He put his hands on the sides of her small head and twisted as hard as he could. He heard the snap. She never opened her eyes.
Isaac gently laid her back on the bed and went into the bathroom to retrieve her clothes. It only took a few minutes to dress her. Sex? He could not even imagine having sex with this woman. Isaac went into the bathroom and showered. Then he sat and read the Tolstoy he’d brought with him, "Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse.” He waited for deep night, for quiet to settle over the small city.
After midnight, Isaac packed his small bag and walked slowly down the stairs, through the lobby and out to his automobile. Around back was an alley between the small hotel and a now closed restaurant. He felt bad that he didn’t give her that last meal. He nodded to Yuri, now sitting in the driver’s seat. Yuri carefully drove the sedan into the alley, and Isaac slipped up the back stairway to his room. He wrapped her body in the bedspread and carried her down the back stairs.
Long Lost Brother Page 24