by Jana Zinser
“It’s all I had left of who I used to be,” Eva said.
“You’re a bald prisoner, now,” the matron said, as she shuffled them along to the showers. “Welcome to Reinigen. I’m Ramona. You’ll be seeing a lot of me.”
In the showers there was a pause, then a whoosh. Water burst out of the nozzles. That day they would be clean, not dead, but there were no promises beyond that.
The women were given ill-fitting dresses and shoes taken from the suitcases of former prisoners, their last possessions stripped from them with their dignity and freedom in an unrelenting vengeance. Eva looked at her shoes. One was black and two sizes bigger than the other one, which was brown and too small. The men, still separated from the women, wore faded blue and gray-striped pants and jackets.
Another inmate matron grabbed Eva’s small pale arm and twisted her forearm up. Before Eva knew what was happening, the matron pressed down a metal stamp of needles, punching an entire serial number proceeded by an “R” onto her arm.
Eva screamed and bit her lip as soon as the sound escaped. She watched the blood ooze in the unexpectedly violent punctures of the tattoo on her arm. The matron, with a look of disapproval on her face, callously rubbed blue ink into the wound until Eva could see the outline of an “R” followed by her new identification numbers.
Eva stared at the letter and serial numbers with tears streaming down her flushed face. “What does this mean?”
“It means you’re a number now,” the matron said without emotion. “That identifies you when you die.”
The inmates were led to their barracks, long buildings in rows. The women and men were taken to separate buildings. The living quarters had dirt floors, no windows, no insulation from heat or cold, no bathroom, only a bucket or a barrel outside the door. One light bulb hung down near the door.
Thirty-six wooden bunk beds with triple tiers lined the walls and ran down the center. Six people slept on each wooden plank. They had meager covers, no pillows, and no mattresses.
Eva helped her mother into the bunk. “Did you see the railroad tracks? They ended here. There is no leaving this place.”
“There never is,” Helga answered.
Eva gave her mother her ration of bread, and watery soup, made with rotten vegetables and a trace of fatty meat. The one heating stove in the middle of the barracks went out.
Eva lay down in the bunk next to her mother. It would be the last night she was allowed to stay in the women’s barracks. The next day she would be transferred to the kinderlager, the children’s barracks, to help with the children in the overcrowded housing. That night, her first night in hell, she stared at the bottom of the bunk above her. Written in Yiddish graffiti was: “NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE.”
In London, at 16 Poppleton Circle, Becca sat up in her bed, crying. Mrs. Daniels passed her room and heard her sniffling. She slipped into her room.
“What’s the matter, Becca? What’s wrong?”
“My mother and Baby Lilly.”
Mrs. Daniels nodded and sat beside Becca, trying to comfort the poor girl. “You miss them. I know.”
Becca shook her head. “It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?” Mrs. Daniels asked, patting her back.
“I can’t remember their faces anymore,” Becca said, whispering her horrifying confession.
Mrs. Daniels put her big wobbling arms around the sassy little refugee and hugged her tightly. “Not to worry, my little lass. God watches over all of us.”
“I don’t think God can see us anymore.”
Over Becca’s shoulder, the tough lady from Swansea closed her eyes, and a tear squeezed out. “No, no, he sees you for sure.”
CHAPTER 38
THE VIOLIN WOLF
(October 1942)
Peter walked the streets of Berlin until the sunrise lit the horizon. He knew his plan was risky, but doing nothing was certain failure. He would do it. He would do something, and if God was with him, it would work.
Still wearing the stolen and uncomfortable Nazi uniform, he hurried to the back of his father’s old butcher shop. After he made sure no one was looking, he dug in the dirt under the back steps. He uncovered the old dented tin box he’d buried there after the Nazis attacked when he was eleven. He opened the top. The ball and jacks, the yo-yo, and the meat cleaver wrapped in a cloth were still there, waiting for him to return.
He put the ball, jacks, and yo-yo in his pockets. He opened the wrapped meat cleaver and sharpened the blade on a stone, scraping it until it sparked, then wrapped it back up like a package of meat. His plan was in motion.
He walked the two blocks to his favorite parking lot filled with neat rows of red-and-green garbage trucks. He could hear the orchestra of strings in Edelweiss Park warming up as they competed against the hammering of the workers hastily finishing the hanging platform. He had to time his rescue perfectly, or it would be sure death for all of them.
Peter casually made his way to the office with its pegboard of truck keys. He tried to pry open the window like he had when he was younger. It was locked. He looked around, pulled out his meat cleaver still wrapped, and slammed the handle against the window, breaking it. He hated the sound of breaking glass. It reminded him of the night his childhood had died inside the wardrobe. Disobedience was sometimes born of necessity, it had to be done; too much was at risk. He knocked the jagged pieces of glass into the office, then carefully reached in and lifted a key off the hook on the first row of the pegboard.
He opened the door of a truck in the front row with the key and pulled himself up into it. He set the wrapped meat cleaver on the seat next to him, added the jacks, balls, and yo-yo from his pockets, and was ready to drive.
Peter gripped the huge wheel, like he had when he was little. It felt so much smaller in his big hands. He bounced on the seat, and his head hit the ceiling. He grabbed his head and laughed. He took a deep breath and turned the key. The engine sputtered, but didn’t start.
He sat back in the big seat. If God loved the Jews, sometimes things needed to go their way. This was a good time to start. Now was a good time to prove his faith. He gripped the cold key and turned it again. It sputtered and turned over. He was really going to do it. He was going to drive a garbage truck. He wished Eva was there to see him. He moved the gearshift. The truck jerked forward, then shook, until Peter got it in the right gear and it lurched onto the street. It was different to actually drive it. He was a good driver; the truck was just unpredictable.
Peter drove the truck slowly toward Edelweiss Park and waited. When the time came, he pulled the lever and could hear the back opening as he drove into the park.
The two nooses swayed as a crowd of people milled around the makeshift hanging platform, as if it were a celebration. The orchestra waited in their seats on the bandstand at the edge of the park, the same bandstand Peter had often dreamed of playing on as a child.
Officers on horses patrolled the area. Commandant Radley stood beside his horse, whose breath snorted from his huge nostrils.
“Bring out the prisoners!” Radley ordered.
The strings of the orchestra played music, as Sloan and Mica were marched onto the
hanging deck with their hands tied behind their backs. The music was cut short, and the officers placed the nooses around the men’s necks.
Peter drove the garbage truck to the bandstand near the edge of the park and paused. He opened the door and leaned out toward the orchestra, pulling himself up into full arrogant Nazi entitlement. “I need to borrow a violin on behalf of the Third Reich.”
A small mouse of a man held his violin aloft, so used to taking Nazi orders he did not even question the absurdity of the request from an officer driving a garbage truck.
Radley swung up onto the saddle of his powerful horse to give the orders to hang. He raised his arm and pointed dramatically at Sloan and Mica. “They are Jewish rebels and traitors to Germany! They must suffer! They must die!” he shouted to the crowd that had gathered to watch the rebels die. When the clapping and cheering died down, Radley dramatically raised his hand in a Hitler salute, “Heil Hitler!” He was clearly enjoying the moment.
“Heil Hitler!” the crowd responded in unison and with passion.
“Ready?” he shouted.
The officers on the platform nodded. “Yes, Commandant!” they yelled back in unison, poised like point dogs on a hunt, waiting for the order to open the trapdoors in the floor and leave the two rebels swinging by their necks. However, Radley’s dramatic arrogance gave Peter the few crucial moments he needed to implement his rescue plan.
Peter tucked the violin, an old familiar friend, under his chin, and immediately relaxed. He felt the sweet resistance of the strings as he loudly played the violin, like he had at the farm when angry at his swollen farmhand fingers. He purposely and defiantly screeched out a savage wolf song.
When his violin howled, the horses stampeded through the park, bucking off their riders, including Radley, ready to give the brutal command to hang. Chaos erupted.
Peter respectfully handed the violin back to its owner. He quickly nodded a graceful musician’s bow and ducked back into the truck.
He bumped over the curb and onto the park lawn’s expanse, the diesel engine chugging closer to the hanging platform.
Commandant Radley, dazed and unexpectedly dethroned from his horse, limped rapidly toward the offending garbage truck. He looked up and saw Peter driving the renegade truck. “Bruno? Johan Bruno? What are you doing?” he shouted. “Halt!”
Peter did not halt.
“Johan Bruno! Exit the refuse vehicle! Schnell!” The commandant saw the determination in Peter’s defiant gray eyes, and he raised his gun.
Peter grabbed his yo-yo from his pocket and leaned out the window, he flung the yo-yo at the commandant. It wrapped around the commandant’s gun like it was the Vogners’ old porch post.
Radley’s shot went into the air, and Peter pulled the gun back, wrapped tightly in the yo-yo string. Peter smiled. It’s all in the spin and the snap back, he thought.
Radley’s errant gunshot brought the other officers running. Bullets pinged off the huge metal garbage truck like it was a tank. Peter picked up his father’s meat cleaver and gripped it in his hand. It was up to him. If he failed, it would be a crushing blow to the rebel movement. Be bold, he thought. It was time to be his father’s son.
As he approached the hanging platform, Sloan and Mica, with the nooses around their necks, recognized it was Peter heading straight for them in a giant garbage truck. Mica looked at Sloan. “Look! It’s Peter! I’d say that boy’s been worth the trouble.”
“We’ll soon see what the rebel lad is made of,” Sloan said, smiling.
“Ziehen! Ziehen! Pull! Pull!” The commandant’s shouts were muffled amongst the loud chaos.
The confused officers looked at each other. “What did he say?” one officer asked. The delay allowed Peter to drive closer.
The marauding young commando leaned out the window, steering with his foot like he had practiced as a young boy.
Radley screamed, “Pull! Pull!” He gestured wildly to the officers on the hanging platform.
The officers shrugged and pulled the lever. The trapdoors opened just as Peter drove by and slashed the ropes above the heads of Sloan and Mica in one swipe, like it was a beef shoulder. He ducked back inside the safety of the metal garbage tank, breathing heavily.
Sloan and Mica were released from the platform with nooses and rope tails still attached. They fell through the open trapdoors and landed hard on the ground below, stunned but unharmed.
Peter hollered like he had as a make-believe driver and stepped on the brake, pulling the truck to a stop. A bullet hit the hood. Peter motioned to the back as Sloan and Mica looked up.
Limping from the fall, with their hands still tied behind their backs, Sloan and Mica awkwardly threw themselves into the back of the truck’s open trash receptacle.
The crowd in the park scattered as fast as they could, running from the renegade garbage truck, as shots were fired. A bullet hit the back of the open receptacle. Sloan and Mica were lying low, and the bullet ricocheted away. The gawkers in the park who had come to watch a hanging dove for cover.
Peter drove the huge truck out of the park, still dodging bullets from the officers running after them. He pulled onto the road. Radley’s gun, with the yo-yo still wrapped around it, lay on the floor of the truck, out of reach.
A Nazi car squealed around the corner and pulled in behind the truck. In the rear view mirror, Peter saw a hand with a gun extend from the car window. He reached across to the seat, grabbed the jacks, and threw them into the street behind him.
The driver shot a few rounds while trying to avoid the jacks. The car screeched and swerved, until it spun out of control and crashed into a lamppost.
The man with the gun climbed out the car window and ran along the road, but Peter’s garbage truck soon outdistanced him.
He drove the truck a few blocks and slowed to a stop. Sloan and Mica rolled out of the back, and Peter pulled them into the cab. He took the cleaver and cut through the ropes tying their hands.
“Called it a little close, didn’t you, mate?” Sloan asked.
“No, perfectly timed,” Peter responded. “I’m a good driver and a very good butcher.” He made the meat-slicing motion that he’d used to cut the hanging rope.
Peter moved into the lineup of all the trucks beginning their trash pickups and was lost among the parade of garbage trucks. Although the Nazis were right on his trail by then, there were too many red-and-green trucks going in every direction to find him. The getaway garbage truck blended in with the regulated schedule of garbage men and the flowing life of the city. The urban camouflage was complete, and Peter sped away, driving a garbage truck in a daring and dangerous rescue. It wasn’t as fun as he had imagined as a boy, not without Eva.
Before he made his first turn, he glanced back. The hastily built hanging podium was empty. There would be no hanging of Jewish rebels that day. He kissed his fingers and tapped them on the steering wheel.
“So, did you get it?” Mica asked, always focused on the mission.
“Not now,” Peter said. “I’m driving.”
“I know; that’s why I asked. I might not live much longer. Did you get Isha’s location?” Mica insisted. “Please tell me we didn’t do all this f
or nothing.”
Peter stared at the road and slowly shook his head. He couldn’t look at Mica. “I’m sorry, Mica. She was killed at the Bockenburg Camp, trying to escape. I’m so sorry.”
Mica grabbed his head. “I’ll kill every last one of those murderers with my bare hands. I swear I will,” he vowed quietly.
“She was important to you?” Peter asked quietly.
“She was my sister,” Mica choked out.
“Sister?” Peter said. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Mica.”
Sloan put his arm around Mica.
With shaking hands, Peter reached into his shirt. He pulled out Iron Isha’s arrest file, the train invoice, and the grid of numbers and letters, and gave them to Sloan.
Sloan, eager for the distraction from Isha’s death, examined the papers. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, quietly, almost whispering. His hands were shaking.
“What?”
“What is it?” Mica demanded, hearing the excitement in Sloan’s voice.
“You might not have to kill all of them with your bare hands. I think he found the new Berlin communication code,” Sloan said, smiling.
“What does that mean?” Peter asked.
“If we give this to the right people, it could help end the war,” Mica said stoically. “And kill the Nazis that killed my sister.”
“So, I did good? Right, Sloan?”
“You didn’t even know what it was,” Sloan grumped.
“You did good.” Mica managed. “Real good.”
“We will see,” Sloan said. They both slapped Peter on the back, as he drove the truck past his old school. “But I have one question. Who is Johan Bruno?”
CHAPTER 39
DON’T THINK OF THEM AS PEOPLE