by Jana Zinser
He polished and shined Adler’s shoes. He spat on the toe of one shoe with disgust, shining the shoe with a rag in his hand and revenge on his mind.
The ghetto gate opened. Peter watched as two young police officers only a few years older than him marched a pregnant mother, her young son, and a few others at gunpoint through the high grass.
“What did they do?” Peter asked Adler, pointing to the mother and boy.
“They prayed,” Adler explained matter-of-factly. “Jews can’t follow rules. They aren’t civilized.”
The officers lined the group up beside a huge ditch outside the ghetto, just a short distance from the playground behind them. The death ditch was hidden from the rest of Soblin by a grove of trees, but it was within viewing distance of the others inside the ghetto fence. It created fear in the rest of the ghetto residents if they had to watch others die.
Peter saw the boy, about eleven, reach out to hold his pregnant mother’s hand. The boy glanced nervously around. Peter saw his frightened face. He stared as the boy turned around and looked back at the people watching from inside the ghetto fence. It was Charlie, Becca’s friend from school. Peter was sure of it. He would never forget the face of the boy whose father had pulled him out of the train window.
Peter quickly finished shining Adler’s shoes. “No charge,” he said, as he put his shoeshine supplies back in his rucksack. He stood watching the unfolding scene of mass murder, unable to do anything, but unable to look away. Adler, unaffected by the killing, re-entered the ghetto gate, with nicely shined shoes.
In the field outside the ghetto, Evelyn stared down at Charlie’s innocent, brave face and forced a smile. “Charlie,” she said, “I think this is it, my love.”
“Mutti, I’m glad I didn’t go on that train. Then you would have died alone,” Charlie said with the pure love of a child, one who accepted death as easily as he had accepted the unexpected retrieval from the train. “I’m glad we prayed, even if today they will kill us for it. At least God knows we didn’t forget him.”
“I love you, Charlie,” Evelyn said. “You are the pride of Germany.”
The police officers raised their guns.
“Look at me, Charlie,” his mother said. “I want you to see my smile.”
Charlie looked up at her smiling face and said, “I love you!”
“I love you more,” his mother said. “Hold tightly to my hand.”
When the young guard raised his gun to shoot, Peter saw it was Kurt, the boy who ran with the bully Wolfgang at Peter’s school in Berlin.
Kurt paused. The other young guard slapped him on the back, laughing. “What’s the matter, Kurt?” he said. It was Wolfgang, Peter’s school tormentor. Both boys were now twenty-one years old, and hardcore murderers.
“I’m about to shoot a kid and a pregnant woman,” Kurt said.
“He’s not a kid. He’s a Jew. You’re doing him a favor,” Wolfgang said.
Kurt shook his head. “I don’t know. He looks like that kid from our old school.”
“If you can’t handle it, why did you ask for this assignment?” Wolfgang asked.
“I didn’t. You volunteered us,” Kurt said.
Through the fence, Arnold, Charlie’s father, watched the preparation for the assassination of his family. He held his head and yelled in agony. “No!”
Peter watched as their guns mowed down Charlie, Charlie’s pregnant mother, and the rest of those forced to the edge of the ditch. They fell into the ditch, disappearing in the next breath, their lives snatched in a second by swift but sure gunshots.
Wolfgang and Kurt, another chore completed, returned inside the ghetto fence. Arnold turned away from the murder pit, burying his face in his hands.
Peter stared, stunned at the coldness of the killing. “Charlie,” he whispered. “They got Charlie.”
As Peter remembered the moment when Charlie had disappeared from the train window and was pulled back by his father, he saw Charlie’s hands grab the top of the ditch. They hadn’t gotten Charlie. The fall of his mother must have pulled him down, but the bullets, unbelievably, had missed him.
Peter looked around. Wolfgang and Kurt were back inside the gates, the cold-blooded murders they had committed a few seconds ago already forgotten.
Peter ran to the grove of trees and crawled to the ditch, covered in part by the high grass. He grabbed Charlie’s hands and pulled him out of the pile of dead bodies.
On the other side of the electrified fence, Arnold’s mind snapped. He marched over to Wolfgang and Kurt and pointed to himself. “You killed my family!” Arnold shouted, beating his chest. “Kill me, too! I demand it!”
Kurt backed away.
Wolfgang laughed and shook his head at Arnold. “Your turn will come soon enough, and I will be glad to oblige.”
“My sweet Evelyn and Charlie!” Arnold turned to the officers, sobbing. “You’re a filthy, evil killing squad. You murdered my pregnant wife and son, but now you don’t have the guts to kill me?” He waved his hands in the air. “God forgive me, I took him from the train!” He leaned his head back and yelled, “Forgive me, Charlie!”
Charlie turned when his father shouted his name, and watched as his father ran at full speed, throwing himself against the electrified fence. Arnold’s body sizzled at every contact. The sparks flew as his soul sought the end of living in the flesh without his family. He was free to seek a final peace with those he loved—except Charlie was still alive.
Arnold convulsed, then released, and his blistered and partially charred body fell lifeless from the fence.
Wolfgang laughed and clapped. “I love this job!”
Kurt swallowed hard and nodded.
Charlie collapsed on the ground next to the ditch.
Wolfgang and Kurt, distracted by removing Arnold’s electrocuted body from the street, did not see Peter pull Charlie away from the edge of the death-filled ditch. He hefted the unconscious Charlie over his shoulder, like he was a sack of chicken feed on the Coventry farm, and disappeared into the trees toward the playground.
In his death, Arnold had finally given Charlie his freedom. Kurt, meanwhile, had survived another day in the Nazi world by being the aggressor. Even as a teenager, he’d played the bully, because he was afraid if he didn’t, he would be the target. No one knew his deepest secret; that his stepmother, who’d raised him, was Jewish.
Weeks later, Charlie sat in Marla’s London Bloomsbury House office, hungrily eating fish and chips.
Marla smiled at him. “So, you finally made it, Charlie. You are in England now. You are safe.”
“But what will I do?”
“You will stay at the Pellbrooke estate. There are other boys from Germany there.”
“But what will I do?”
“You will go to school.”
“No, I mean what will I do? I have no family left.”
CHAPTER 35
LET THE BOY DRIVE
(August 1942)
On the outskirts of Soblin, Sloan slid into the driver’s side of the truck. Peter stepped up to the window. “Can I drive? I used to drive my father�
��s meat truck—”
“When you were little.” Mica, in the passenger seat, finished the sentence for him with a smile. “We know.” By now, they’d heard Peter’s consistent, but unsubstantiated, meat truck delivery claims many times.
Mica looked at Sloan and shrugged. “Let the boy drive. Let’s see what he can do.”
Sloan looked at Peter and rolled his eyes. “Drive slowly and don’t draw any attention.”
Peter opened the driver’s door, and Sloan the Bear scooted over to make room for the butcher’s son. Peter put the truck in gear. It lurched, and the engine died.
“Your roast is going to be late, ma’am!” Mica joked. Sloan roared with laughter. Peter turned the key, grinding the gears.
“I’m not used to such a poorly maintained vehicle,” Peter said, angrily. The clutch finally grabbed. The truck lurched forward onto the Polish street and headed into Soblin.
Peter pulled the truck onto the road leading past the front gate of the Soblin Ghetto.
Outside the ghetto gates, Wolfgang and Kurt lined up and shot another group of prisoners at the ditch. One man, injured and slumping, but not dead, still stood. Wolfgang shot again, and still the man stood.
Wolfgang and Kurt walked over to the man, and Wolfgang used his old schoolboy trick of hitting his legs out from under him. The man finally fell into the ditch, and Wolfgang shot him again for good measure.
They lingered at the edge. Kurt covered his nose and mouth with his hand against the smell of the decaying bodies still piling up. “That stinks,” he said.
“The ditch is almost full,” Wolfgang said. “The ghetto is running out of room. That’s why they’re shipping them out.”
Smiling, Peter drove the truck down the street. When he saw Wolfgang and Kurt examining their fresh kills at the ditch, his eyes squinted into angry slits. Then he jerked the wheel, turned sharply, and headed on a seldom-used side road toward the death ditch.
“What are you doing?” Sloan demanded.
“I know those boys, and I owe them one,” Peter said.
“No! No! Pull away! Don’t do this!” Sloan shouted.
Mica pressed his hands on the dashboard. “I knew we shouldn’t let him drive.”
“Stop, Peter!” Sloan yelled in his booming voice. “There is no room for emotions. Personal vendettas will only detour our plans.”
Peter couldn’t pull away. His eyes were fixed, his face emotionless. With the power of the truck under his hands, and Wolfgang and Kurt in his sights, Peter pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
As the truck sped closer, Sloan grew quiet. “More to the right and hold her steady.” Accepting the danger of his destiny had always been one of Sloan’s strong suits.
The truck bounced off the road, barely missing the trees, and drove closer, narrowly missing Wolfgang and Kurt. With looks of horror very similar to those on the faces of the people they’d killed, the two Nazi boys dove into the pit of murdered, decaying bodies to avoid Peter’s vengeful onslaught.
The truck’s wheel rode the edge of the pit. The front right tire lost its solid ground, and, for a moment, the truck was headed into the pit, too.
Peter suddenly jerked the wheel away, and the tires finally grabbed.
The truck careened erratically back through the trees and onto the road. It merged into the traffic of the street, with other cars screeching to a stop and honking.
“You are a very bad driver!” Mica shouted.
Sloan gripped the dashboard in front of him. “That was incredibly stupid!” He paused and took a breath. “And one of the greatest rides of my life!”
“Wish I was driving a garbage truck! Would have been more terrifying to them,” Peter said, his transformation into a merciless commando complete.
In the ditch, Wolfgang and Kurt yelled and screamed, clawing over the dead bodies that pulled apart with the boys’ desperate struggles to get out. They emerged, crawling out at the edge of the ditch, slathered with blood and human waste, and covered with maggots.
CHAPTER 36
GOD HAS NOT FORSAKEN US
(October 1942)
The Jewish ghettos and camps were overcrowded, filled with disease and great despondency, but it was only the beginning of suffering. Soon, Jews were being shipped to death camps in crowded train cars like cattle, mostly in Poland, and mass killings became routine.
On a cold October morning, the door to the Vogners’ Dinsdorf apartment swung open and slammed against the wall. Victor stomped in and read from a list held in his outstretched hands. His face had a pompous smirk, as if he enjoyed the job of announcing the latest transports. “Jacob Levy, Nora Levy, Anna Vogner, Greta Vogner, you’ve been selected for resettlement to the east.”
“What does that mean?” Anna asked, wondering why Eddie’s name was not listed.
“Means you’re leaving tomorrow morning,” Victor said.
Anna and Eddie stood rigid and speechless. Nora stepped up. “Greta Vogner won’t be going. She died,” she said.
Anna glared at Victor. “Remember the old woman you threw out on the street like a dead rat?”
Victor shrugged. “There are so many dead rats.” He crossed her name off the list. “Good. Good. That will give us room for one more. Eddie Vogner. Report at six o’clock in the morning.”
“But we didn’t do anything wrong,” Eddie said to Victor.
Victor, with his jowly cheeks and haughty face, looked at Eddie. “You were born a moron, isn’t that enough?”
Bert paced outside the barracks in the Bockenburg Camp. His wife, and Eva, fifteen, walked over to him. Distraught, Eva rushed to Bert and clung to him.
“What’s wrong?” Bert asked anxiously.
Helga waved her hand. “Eva and I are being deported tomorrow morning at six,” she said, as if the shocking news was routinely expected.
Bert collapsed against the wall, all energy gone from his body. “Oh, no. It has come. Then I will go, too.”
“But, Papa, they say these camps are even worse than ours,” Eva said.
“There’s nothing worse than losing you,” Bert said.
Helga clicked her tongue. “I’m so glad William is safe,” she said, pointedly.
Eva’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth pinched into a circle. The years of being second best erupted. “You! You are a horrible mother! To love one child more than another must be wrong before God!”
Helga slapped Eva across the face. “How dare you speak to me of God? He has forsaken us a long time ago. I never wanted to have you in the first place!”
Eva gasped. “You would have done me a favor,” she said, evenly.
Helga raised her arm again to hit Eva, but Bert grabbed her arm. “No! No more. You will no longer torment this child.”
She lowered her hand, and Bert let go. “God has not forsaken us. He is testing us. We must show our faith and believe in Him and the goodness that still lives somewhere inside all people,” he said.
Helga’s rage rose until she could no longer contain it. “Faith? How can you be so stupid? What kind of a man accepts
a child that is not his? Tell her!”
Bert shook his head.
“Then I will tell her!” Helga hissed. She turned to face Eva, gritting her teeth, almost spitting. “A German police officer forced himself on me years ago. Your beloved Bert is not your father!”
Eva’s body jerked, as if she had been hit by a bullet straight to her heart. Bert raised his hand to stop Helga from talking, anger seeping from every pore.
“No more! I said, no more! You have turned against those who love you the most! The Nazis have surely won!” Bert reached out for Eva and hugged her tightly. “Forgive me, my little mouse. I should have spoken up for you a long time ago.”
Eva’s face filled with the horror of a hidden truth revealed. “Is it true, what she said? I am one of . . . them? I am not yours?” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Do not listen to her bitterness. You are my daughter, although you may not be my blood.”
A sob from the depths of the child’s soul erupted with the discovery that what little support and dignity she had was crumbling. Bert pulled her chin up gently until she had to look directly into his eyes, as she still gasped for breath between her cries. “Listen to me, my little mouse, you are something greater than blood. You are my heart and my soul. I was afraid, if you knew, you would not love me back, so I let Helga control me. That will not happen again. I ask your forgiveness.”
“You will always be my sweet Papa,” Eva said. “I don’t want to die.”
“Remember, my child, as long as there is life, there is hope,” Bert said. He kissed her repeatedly. “I will go with you to face whatever the next camp brings.”
Helga glared and turned her back on them both.
Early the next morning, Anna, Nora, and Jacob stood in line on the Dinsdorf street, as Victor checked his official deportation list. A line of transport trucks idled nearby.