by Dan Walsh
“That’s why you’re such a good history teacher, Jack. This stuff comes alive to you.”
He leaned over and kissed her and looked down at the album. “Okay, start flicking the pics off the page.”
“No, first you go get your phone and take pics of these pages.”
“Right.” He got up and found his phone. When he came back, they spread the photo album out on the coffee table. She helped him take pics of each page. It only took a couple of minutes. Then they snuggled back on the center of the couch.
After giving up on the next five or six pics, Rachel found one that flicked off easily.
“Bingo,” Jack said, looking at the back. Four lines in German, the same handwriting as before. He turned the pic back over a second to see who was in it and what was happening. Two little boys, one of them the main one; the other considerably younger. Both in bare feet standing on a cobblestone road. Behind them, a cracked, broken sidewalk. Behind that, a bullet-scarred wall. They were looking at whoever was taking the photograph with sad yet hopeful eyes. “Doesn’t it almost look like someone has just promised them something?” he said. “Like maybe some food, if they stood still for the picture?”
“I don’t know,” Rachael said. I just can’t get over how sad they look, in every picture.” She flipped it over and read the words aloud, in German.
Das bin ich und ein kleiner Junge Ich befreundete . Ich weiß seinen Namen nicht mehr erinnern . Er wurde krank und starb am nächsten Winter. Der Fotograf war gerade bot uns ein kleines Stück Schokolade.
“You were right, Jack. The photographer had just offered them some candy. How did you know that?”
“I didn’t. It’s like when I see these old photographs, I put myself there. I just imagine what might be going on.”
“You’re pretty good at it. She read what it said now in English:
This is me and a little boy I befriended. I don’t remember his name now. He got sick and died the next winter. The photo-grapher had just offered us a small piece of chocolate.
“It’s so sad,” she said. “They’re standing there in bare feet. Looks like they haven’t had a bath in weeks. They’re both so skinny. And he can’t even remember his friend’s name…because he died.”
“I wonder when he wrote this note,” Jack said. “It was obviously many years after the picture was taken. Could have been decades. Whenever it was, it looks like the same time as when he wrote on the other pic. Let’s check out some more.”
Rachel turned the page. “I have to admit…this really is fun.”
They continued doing this for the next hour or so, making their way to the fifth page. Rachel was able to safely extract two or three pics on each page. Of those, about half had writing on the back. Both agreed, the writing was all done by the same hand, using the same ink, probably at the same time.
The story of this young orphan boy’s life after the war began to emerge. He definitely had no siblings still alive. He’d said as much on one of the pics. The reason why the backgrounds in the pictures seemed so different was due to how often he’d been moved. Not just to different orphanages but even different towns.
By the seventh page, there was at least some noticeable progress in his situation. He wasn’t skinny anymore, and his clothes didn’t look so shabby.
On the ninth page, the pictures began to change somewhat dramatically. It looked like the young boy—now grown into a teen—had joined some kind of military youth organization. Jack and Rachel had only looked at the back of one picture on that page, and it had no writing. The boy was standing with two friends in front of a large banner with the letters “FDJ,” which sat atop a logo that looked like a sunrise.
“What do you make of that?” Rachel said. “What is FDJ?”
“I have no idea,” Jack said. “My East German history after the war is pretty malnourished.” But he was definitely intrigued. “I can look it up.”
Rachel glanced at her watch. “No, I better go. It’s not that late, but I’ve got some homework I have to do before bed.”
“You really have to go?”
“I really do.” She set the photo album back on the coffee table. They both stood, and he walked her toward the front door.
Once outside, they kissed several times, as they always did saying goodbye.
“So glad you came,” he said. “Hope it wasn’t too weird. Doing that photo album thing at the end.”
“It wasn’t too weird. After reading the first few, I got sucked in, like finding the missing pieces of a puzzle. I wanted to keep finding more of them with writing on the back. But hey, don’t you get too sucked in.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know how you get. This photo thing might be a nice diversion…like, when you need a little break. Don’t let it become an obsession.”
“That’s not gonna happen.”
She gave him that look. They’d only been together a year, but he knew that look. He decided not to argue the point. She waved and smiled again, walked toward her car. “Hey Rach, wait up. I’ll follow you in my car down the dirt driveway, till you get to the main road. It’s pretty dark and then there’s that….”
“Creepy shack?” she said.
“Yeah, that.”
20
After Rachel left, Jack spent the next half hour cleaning up after dinner. While they were eating, Rachel had offered to help, but Jack refused. He knew she had the homework to do and couldn’t stay long. He didn’t want their time together eaten up with chores.
Now that the dinette table was clear, he spread all his Dresden research material out the way it was before. He lifted the lid to his laptop and opened the file he had already created. It took some doing, but he was finally able to break free from the old photo album’s gravitational pull. He had to get back on this research project. The outline wouldn’t write itself.
Within fifteen minutes, he was fully into it again, then spent the next three hours totally immersed in the project, adding five new pages to his outline notes. There were so many more angles to the Dresden bombing than he had ever imagined. A lot more websites, survivor interviews and controversies to explore. The worst part of the controversies were the eyewitness accounts telling of American fighter planes flying down to ground-level to deliberately strafe and kill civilians, who were literally running for their lives. Even Kurt Vonnegut had said this happened.
But there were just as many other accounts—the more official accounts—that denied such a thing ever took place. Was this a case of history being determined by the victors? What was the truth? Jack wasn’t sure how he would handle this part of the story. But he was sure he needed to take a break.
Getting up from the table, he poured himself a glass of iced tea. He walked outside for a breath of fresh air. Stepping off the porch, he glanced up at the half-lit moon and starry sky. They provided just enough light to allow him to trace with his eyes the silhouette of the trees as they wrapped around the lake. It was so peaceful and quiet, so soothing. Hard to imagine anyone experiencing the kinds of things he had just been reading about.
Not only during the World War II years, but even now in various parts of the Middle East. Planes were still bombing targets. People were still dying. Only now, the idea of carpet-bombing civilians was unthinkable. This was the age of smart bombs and drone strikes. Military strategists did everything they could to avoid “collateral damage.”
Jack wondered how the military leaders during World War II would have fought the war if they’d had these hi-tech weapons at their disposal. How would it have changed things? Would it have changed things? The world was such a different place then. He had read recently that since 2003 almost 6,000 American soldiers had died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with this figure, people today were outraged by such losses.
But during World War II, more Americans died than that in the Battle of Iwo Jima alone. More than double had died in the Battle of Okinawa. More than triple had died in the Battle of the Bulge.
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Yes, it was a much different time then.
Jack sighed.
Here he was in this peaceful place with this beautiful scenery, almost overwhelming his senses, and he was thinking about the horrors of war. About battles and statistics. He needed to get his mind on something else, something smaller, more personal. Maybe he should call it a night, pick up the research project in the morning. For light reading, he’d only brought Vonnegut’s book, Slaughterhouse Five. That didn’t seem like the change of pace he needed.
Then he remembered…the old photo album. That might be just the thing.
He was about to head inside when he noticed the oval throw rug still hanging over the wood railing. He’d better bring that in first before it started getting damp. Setting his iced tea down, he shook the rug out a few times, then walked it inside. He needed to move a few things around in the living room to lay it back down properly. One of them was the recliner. As he pulled it back, his eyes zeroed in on that board. The loose floorboard. He could see the whole length of it now. It really was a different shade than the rest. The grain pattern was even different.
It made him wonder…what must have happened to the original floorboard? Did it crack or get destroyed somehow? And why replace it with a new floorboard but not nail the board down? Jack looked at it closely. There weren’t even any nail holes. It had only ever been set in place, as if….
As if someone had wanted it to be an easy thing to pull up and put back. Now he really was curious. He got down on his hands and knees and pulled the board up. All the floorboards were pretty wide, maybe ten inches. Once again, he stared down at a dark hole, probably the crawl space under the cabin. A flashlight. Jack had packed one; it was in his backpack.
He hurried to the bedroom, grabbed the flashlight out of his backpack and headed back to the living room. This was probably all for nothing, but what the heck? It was pretty fun and had definitely gotten his mind off of battles and war statistics. He turned the flashlight on and dropped to his hands and knees.
He could see right off the bat, this wasn’t nothing.
He was looking at a black box, clearly visible through the floorboard opening. He lay on the floor and reached down to feel it. Hard plastic. With his right hand, he felt around the perimeter, trying to get a sense of its size. Maybe eight inches high, a little over a foot wide and a foot deep. He sat up and shone the flashlight on it some more.
Now he knew what it was. A portable safe.
21
Still on his knees, Jack looked at his right hand. It was filthy, just from handling the safe. Clearly, it hadn’t been touched in a while. Possibly for years. He shined the flashlight all around the safe again, trying to get an idea of what he was looking at. How did the owner get the safe down there? It didn’t look like it could fit through the opening. It was too wide. Did he bring it in through the crawl space? But that didn’t make any sense.
Then he figured it out, and felt pretty stupid. The safe was too wide to bring up horizontally, but it was only eight inches high. The opening was at least ten. You could pull it up if you turned it sideways.
So he did.
It came right up through the opening with a little room to spare. He laid it flat on the wood floor. It really was so dusty and dirty. If someone told Jack it had been down there for twenty years, he would’ve believed it. He shined the flashlight back down through the opening, because something had caught his eye as he lifted the safe through. Now he could see some concrete blocks lying on the dirt. That’s what the safe had been sitting on. Which made sense; the blocks would have kept it off the ground in case any moisture or standing water ever gathered there.
Jack was just about to get up and wet some paper towels to clean it off, when he stopped to think about it some more. Was that a good idea? If it was all cleaned up, someone would know somebody else had messed with the safe besides the one who’d put it there. Then Jack realized, he’d already messed up that idea when he felt along the safe’s edges with his hand and lifted it through the opening. It not only looked messed with already, his fingerprints were all over it.
Cleaning it up was actually a necessary step now.
It only took a few minutes and the safe looked good as new. Now, the bigger problem became evident. The safe was locked. It wasn’t any kind of fancy security system, just a simple opening for a key, which of course Jack didn’t have. The crazy thing was, having gotten this far, seeing what was inside the safe had quickly grown from a mild curiosity to something just shy of a quest.
He bent back down and shined the flashlight all around the concrete blocks and the dirt underneath where the safe had been. No key. Nothing even shiny or metallic. He got up and sat on the edge of the recliner. This thought involuntarily ran through his head: If I were the owner, and I wanted to hide a key in this cabin, where would I hide it?
He stood and spent the next thirty minutes going room to room, and spot to spot, trying to answer that question. But no luck. He located one hopeful drawer in a dresser in the loft upstairs. It was filled with odds and ends: spare buttons, old combs, tie tacks, nail clippers, some old coins, and even some keys. All of them, however, too big to fit in the safe opening.
After another fifteen minutes of searching, which included a number of locations on the porch, Jack finally gave up. The key was probably on a keychain somewhere, possibly, probably…in the possession of the Senator, who now owned the cabin and all its contents. But if that was true, it seemed pretty clear the Senator had forgotten all about it. Which also probably meant, whatever its contents, they couldn’t be worth very much.
Which meant that Jack was wasting his time. But really, did that matter? He had all kinds of time at the moment. He wasn’t taking time away from his research. He’d already quit for the day. This was free time.
Speaking of time, what time was it anyway? He glanced at the clock. Almost 1AM. But see, that wasn’t a problem. He could stay up until two if he wanted. Wake up in the morning whenever his body was done sleeping. Jack sat and leaned back in the recliner. It was likely true the key to the safe was on a keychain somewhere. But these store-bought safes came with two keys. He had one sitting in his master bedroom closet at home. These weren’t the kind of keys you kept on the keychain you used every day. Jack didn’t keep either of his safe keys on a keychain. He kept one in a dresser drawer, the other taped to a shelf in the closet. You wanted a key, at least one of them, near the safe. In case you lost the key or forgot where you put it.
It was worth a try.
Jack got back on his hands and knees near the opening and started feeling around the underside of the boards with his hand. About two boards in from the opening, Jack felt a bump. He explored the bump until he was sure he was feeling duct tape, then continued scratching until he found an end. He peeled it back carefully making sure whatever was causing the bump didn’t fall to the ground. He felt something metal, small and metal. After pulling the rest of the tape off, he pulled his arm up through the opening.
“There you are,” he said aloud.
The key was the perfect size. Had to be it. He carried the safe over to the dinette table. He stuck the key in, turned and it opened right up. Okay, what was this? Two notebooks, or journals. Both black, slightly different sizes. He lifted them out and set them aside. That’s it? There was nothing else in the safe? He didn’t know what to expect, but he was hoping for something more than this.
He walked the two notebooks back over to the recliner and sat. Opening the first, he saw it was a journal filled with handwritten pages. They all looked to be in German. Since he didn’t read German, and it would be an impossible task to look all this up in Google Translate, he set it aside. The other one appeared to be a small scrapbook filled with newspaper articles, all cut out and pasted to the pages. He scanned through the articles and didn’t notice anything remarkable other than that they appeared to be obituaries, all written in English. The pictures of some of the deceased were fairly old men. Others showed bla
ck-and-white pictures of much younger men in military uniforms.
Jack quickly picked out the ages of the men from the text. All were in their seventies when they died and all appeared to be military veterans, at least at one time. So what was this, a scrapbook filled with the obituaries of old war buddies? Not very intriguing. He yawned as he set the scrapbook down on top of the journal. This was a total waste of time. There wasn’t anything here. The only question now was, should he put this mess back together now or in the morning?
He yawned again. In the morning then.
He stood and stretched, then a thought popped into his head. Really an image, then a second image. The German handwriting in the journal. The German handwriting on the back of the old photographs. Were they written by the same hand? He stepped over to the bookshelf and pulled out the photo album then sat with both on his lap.
Glancing back and forth between the two, it didn’t take long to see. They were both written by the same person.
The little orphan boy in these photographs had written everything in this journal, which had been tucked away in a safe, hidden under the floorboards of the cabin.
Now, this had possibilities.
22
Jack yawned again.
As interesting as this was, it was still all written in German, which Jack didn’t speak. Rachael wasn’t here and based on her concerns that he’d become obsessed with this, he wasn’t likely to get her back here to read this in the next day or two. Using Google Translate was okay for a few sentences, maybe even a paragraph. But it was way too inaccurate to use for an entire notebook.
He got up with both books and walked back to the dinette table. After setting the notebook back in the safe, he was just about to lay the scrapbook with the obituaries on top of it when an earlier thought percolated upward. When he’d glanced through it the first time and noticed all the dead guys were military vets, he’d dismissed it completely, thinking it was just a scrapbook filled with the obituaries of old war buddies.