Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “What’s he got to do with Hitler?” challenged the irritated intelligence officer. “Hitler’s dead! Don’t you guys care?”

  Cotler finished urinating, started to button his pants. “Piss on Hitler,” he said.

  “Piss on his grave,” agreed Guber cheerfully.

  Then the two of them got into the tank, and the boy moved closer until he stood only inches from the lieutenant. Arbolino took his hand, not knowing quite why.

  “The whole damn war’ll be over in a couple of days!” McInerney exulted.

  “What war is that?” asked Cotler.

  Now Atkins hurried toward the Sherman, carbine in one hand and a small book in the other. He waved the leather-bound volume tentatively, glanced at the child and hesitated a moment before he spoke.

  “He’s Jewish, isn’t he, sir?”

  “I think so.”

  “It’s my Bible, lieutenant. It’s a Christian Bible, and it’s in English. Would he mind…would it be right if I gave it to him?”

  “Sure…Say, you got any cigarettes?”

  “Don’t smoke, sir, but Guber or Stark might have a pack.”

  “I want all of them, every pack we’ve got. They’re for him.”

  The intelligence officer’s frown signaled his bewilderment.

  “Why in hell are you giving cigarettes to a three-year-old?”

  “He can buy things with them,” Arbolino explained. “Food, candy, shoes. You speak German. You tell him.”

  Atkins returned with seven packs of Camels, four Chesterfields.

  “You know that it’s against regulations to give this stuff to German civilians?” the captain asked.

  “You going to stop me?”

  “No, lieutenant.”

  McInerney gave the cigarettes to the child, said something in German and then added a pack of his own.

  “I’m not a louse, you know,” he declared defensively.

  “Never thought you were. Thanks, Mac.”

  The intelligence officer half-smiled, pulled another packet of Old Golds from his pocket. “Smoke too much anyway,” he lied.

  Arbolino patted the child’s head. “Tell him we have to go, Mac. We’re soldiers, and we take orders, and the orders are to move out.”

  The intelligence officer translated, and the child nodded in comprehension.

  “Doesn’t he talk?” McInerney asked.

  “His name is Ernst. That’s practically all he ever told us.”

  The solemn-faced boy put out one hand, and Arbolino shook it in farewell.

  “Keep an eye on him, Mac.”

  “You can bet on it.”

  Arbolino mounted the tank, then remembered as he lowered his legs into the commander’s hatch and tossed the Bible to McInerney. “He can read that when he learns English—if he wants to.”

  Cotler started the engines, and their roar made it difficult for Arbolino to hear the intelligence officer’s reply.

  “What?”

  “He’ll be okay. There’ll be all kinds of relief outfits here in a couple of weeks.”

  The tank began to move.

  “Someone’ll take care of him!” McInerney shouted over the din.

  The other Shermans fell into line, and the armored column clattered out of the concentration camp, heading east. Arbolino was still thinking about the child some thirty-five minutes later, when he heard the sounds, peered up at four flights of P-47 fighter-bombers skimming the horizon. Breaking all precedent, the goddam air support was on time.

  Maybe somebody would take care of the boy after all.

  3

  Somebody did.

  First it was the U.S. Army. That was before it was fashionable to bad-mouth the U.S. Army and everything else American, so everyone agreed that the U.S. forces which liberated the concentration camps did a bang-up job of feeding, clothing and rehabilitating the thousands of survivors—including a three-year-old boy named Ernst. No one felt self-conscious about using words like “liberate” and “rehabilitate” that extraordinary spring. The prevailing emotion in Los Angeles and London, Toronto and Paris, New York and Amsterdam was joy.

  Joy that the war in Europe was done.

  Joy, and astonishment.

  The enormity of the massacres in those camps was hard to believe, and the numbers were almost impossible to comprehend. More than five million Jews and an even greater total of Russians and other Europeans—perhaps seven million—had been exterminated by the Third Reich. Films of the camps were shown around the world, and people blinked and gaped and wondered how a highly civilized people like the Germans could do this.

  Well, according to all reports.

  It had been done systematically and efficiently, and quietly. Many Germans hadn’t known what their government was doing, and many others hadn’t wanted to know. More than a few did know, took an active role in the industrialized inhumanity of the murder factories. That took a while to sink in—on both sides of the Atlantic.

  It finally did.

  Joy and astonishment, and rage.

  The intelligence services of the nations that had joined to fight fascism were already at work. Purposeful professional teams of British, Russians, Americans, French, Poles, Dutch, Canadians, Norwegians, Yugoslavs and others had been in action for months—hunting. That was also before government security agencies and counterespionage organizations were casually despised, exposed and taunted as threats to decent folk. Naïvely confident that they represented right, agents of a score of Allied intelligence units continued to track down the criminals.

  What do the police call them in American TV shows? The perpetrators—that’s it. They hunted the perpetrators of the mass murders committed between 1939 and Hitler’s fiery death in the Berlin bunker—the war criminals. The top Nazi officials were easy. Goering and Goebbels had the good taste to commit suicide, and the other prominent figures proved relatively simple to catch. No, apprehend. Quite a few of the perpetrators were apprehended, including a lot of men and women who insisted that they had merely obeyed orders from the higher-ups. They explained that they had run the murder machine and the death camps only at the command of bigger people, for they themselves were little men and women who never made policy. There were many who said this, and to hear them tell it the Third Reich was largely a nation of dwarfs and trolls.

  The hunt continued.

  Preparations for the war crimes trials began.

  The fighting against the Japanese continued halfway around the world. Obviously unable to cope with U.S. air power, the military leaders in Tokyo effectively dispersed the notion of the superior wisdom of the East by continuing a hopeless struggle. Buoyed by a set of patriotic clichés and schmucky slogans, they proudly refused to end the bloodletting until terrible nuclear weapons charred Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atom bombs back to back top almost anything, they discovered, even the idiocy of fanatical old men with a lot of medals.

  Arbolino and Stark, Guber and Cotler and Jerry Jeff—and their tank—were busy with the “occupation” of a town called Gotteszeil in eastern Bavaria. It was a pleasant community that hadn’t been battered too much by the war, and what made it especially attractive was the fact that there had been only two or three Nazis in the entire population. One was a man named Otto something, who’d died of bleeding piles just before the Americans arrived with all that chocolate and food and other goodies. This might seem hard to believe, but who would doubt the word of a shapely and affectionate young woman lying beside you? Every member of Arbolino’s crew—with the exception of Jerry Jeff—ran into such congenial companions that balmy autumn while they waited for the U.S. Army to confirm that their overseas combat service added up to enough “points” for the trip home. The fine young women of Gotteszeil were sad when the crew left in November.

  The general died in December.

  He never knew that they were going to make a terrific motion picture about his life, with George C. Scott in the title role. He would have felt a lot better about checking out in a dumb-
ass automobile accident if he’d heard about Scott, but back in December of 1945 nobody appreciated what a swell actor George C. Scott would become. The general never doubted that they’d eventually do a picture—a major motion picture, as they say—about his greatness, but he was worried that some pretty boy like Robert Taylor might get the part. Unaware of George C. Scott’s big potential, the general was rooting for John Wayne right up to the moment of that stupid car crash.

  Strange as it may seem, news of his death didn’t really cause that much excitement in the alphabet camp where the little boy waited. Ernst called it the alphabet camp because it was run by an organization named UNRRA—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency—and the thousands of uprooted survivors of the murder factories were known as DPs. Ernst could tell you that DP meant Displaced Person, for he was a bright child with an intelligence superior to that of most boys of his age. He could also tell you his age, and his number. He’d memorized the number they’d put on his arm.

  It was through that number that a social worker connected with some Jewish welfare outfit found out who he was. According to the central registry of concentration-camp prisoner numbers that the efficient Nazis had kept in Berlin, his full name was Ernst Beller and his father had been a chemist. Now someone had to discover whether Ernst Beller had any surviving relatives, any family who would take him.

  Both parents—dead.

  All grandparents—dead.

  Three aunts and eight cousins—dead.

  It looked as if the boy would spend the rest of his childhood in some camp or public institution. Then, in the last week of June—some fourteen months after the tanks had smashed into Dachau—Ernest Beller was notified that he was going to join his Uncle Martin in America.

  4

  Uncle Martin had once met Freud.

  Sigmund Freud, the one with the cigar and the mother number.

  Really.

  It wasn’t that surprising if you knew that Uncle Martin graduated third in the class of 1925 at the U. of Vienna med school and went on to become a full-fledged psychoanalyst. Even his few enemies had to admit that there wasn’t a therapist in his age group who was more fledged than Martin Beller. Now he had a thriving practice in New York City, a large and high-ceilinged apartment on Central Park West, a small potbelly and a fine head of whitening hair that went nicely with his dignity. He also had the open admiration of his wife, Greta, the respect of his colleagues and a good deal of his patients’ cash.

  He was no phony. A stocky man who wore his soft Austrian accent as a badge of honor, Dr. Beller was a dedicated therapist who’d settled comfortably into the Manhattan scene back in ’38 and helped quite a few people since. He never got into bickering with Jungians or analysts of other schools, but he never doubted the classical Freudian theory for a minute. After all, if he’d always wanted to put the blocks to his mom, why wouldn’t everyone else? There is, of course, a great deal more to the theories of the late Sigmund Freud, an undoubted genius. Martin Beller knew the whole bit.

  His wife was no dummy either. What she didn’t know about Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Mahler and postimpressionist art you could tattoo on your big toe, and still have enough room left for Greta Beller’s excellent strudel recipe. She was hip to the stock market and real estate too, handling the family investments. Both of the Bellers were warm and kind, and so was their daughter, Anna. It would be a cliché to say that Anna was a pretty ten-year-old with lovely hair and sparkling eyes. Well, Anna was a pretty ten-year-old with lovely hair and sparkling eyes—and glasses.

  They all welcomed Ernest, gently.

  They all loved him, warmly.

  They all nurtured him, genuinely and compassionately. Despite the analyst’s injunction that they must be careful not to smother the child, both adult Bellers gave the boy a great deal of both physical and emotional affection, and his cousin celebrated him as the brother she’d never had. It was easy to do, for he was a cheery, bright, congenial lad who enjoyed company and learned everything quickly.

  “He’s a Beller all right,” the analyst’s wife said proudly one Friday afternoon in June as they were packing for a weekend at Fire Island.

  “He has a good mind,” her husband agreed warily.

  “Good mind? He’s going to be brilliant, Martin,” she insisted. “He learned English in seven months, and now he has the vocabulary of a ten-year-old. He’s only six, you know.”

  “I know, Greta. Let’s not push him though. He’s been through a lot of trauma.”

  She paused in her packing, tensed. “Is there something wrong, Martin? He seems so—so well adjusted.”

  “He probably is,” Dr. Beller answered reassuringly. “No, I don’t see anything wrong, but there could be problems later. I won’t predict that there will be, but…”

  “There might be,” she finished. “I understand. We’ve got to do everything to help him forget that camp.”

  The therapist nodded, shrugged. “It isn’t that easy, Greta.”

  “He never talks about it.”

  Dr. Beller nodded again. “He may be suppressing it—for now. Let’s see, dear.”

  She resumed the packing, stopped. “What about that number on his arm? Couldn’t it be removed? Every time I see it my stomach knots up.”

  Dr. Beller saw that his wife was close to tears. “Mine too, Greta,” he admitted.

  “Then think of how he must feel!” she groaned.

  He put his arm around her and comforted her before he called in their nephew.

  “Ernest,” he began—using the “more American” version of the boy’s name—“you’re starting school in a few months.”

  “I know, uncle. I’m looking forward to it.”

  He was so direct, appreciative, solid.

  “Aunt Greta and I were talking about the number on your arm.”

  For a second—just a split second—the analyst thought he saw something flicker in that plump happy face. Maybe not.

  “Yes, uncle?”

  “Well, the children will all be Americans and they won’t understand about the number. They might see it in gymnasium, and they might say something.” Martin Beller still said it the way he used to in Vienna—gimm-nah-seum.

  The boy was still smiling. “I guess they might,” he agreed.

  “Ernest—would you want to have the number removed? It wouldn’t be difficult.”

  The child considered, decided. “No, thank you, uncle.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” said his aunt. She was struggling very hard to avoid crying.

  “You wouldn’t have suggested it if it did. I know that, auntie,” he answered pleasantly. “It’s kind of you, but it won’t be necessary.”

  His eyes flickered to the door.

  “Is it the Yankee game?” guessed Beller.

  “I was listening on Anna’s radio.”

  A moment after he left, Greta Beller started to cry quietly.

  In the third week of September 1948, Ernest Beller joined the first grade at one of New York’s finest and most progressive private schools. The Dalton School was located across town on 89th Street between Park and Lexington avenues, and Ernest Beller made the journey each day with his cousin by bus. It was Anna who reported on his first gym class—phys. ed. in her jargon.

  “Terry Gold told his sister,” Anna explained, “and she told me in the cafeteria. A couple of boys asked him what was that on his arm, and he said it was a number. They asked why, and he said he’d been in a camp in Germany.”

  “Oh, my God,” sighed Greta Beller, who hadn’t been in a synagogue for at least thirty years.

  “They asked if it was a concentration camp,” Anna continued, “and he said yes. Then they asked him what it was like, and he told them it was terrible.”

  “What else did he say about it?” Dr. Beller probed gently.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. He said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and then it was time to play basketball. Terry told his sister that Ernie’s prett
y good for a kid who never played basketball before.”

  Ernie Beller did well at the Dalton School during the next nine years. He was always in the top quarter of his class, among the better athletes in basketball and sufficiently popular to be elected vice-president of the eighth grade. His adjustment to the American scene was excellent, and there was no sign of any residual trauma. He did discourage prying questions about the horrors of Dachau, but that was certainly understandable. Greta Beller made a point of encouraging his “cultural interests” via tickets to the best plays and concerts, and found him a first-class piano teacher. Despite all his other activities, Ernie was a good boy who always found time for his hour of practice each afternoon.

  At 3:40 P.M. on the day before his fifteenth birthday, Ernie Beller was on his way home from school when a group of poorly dressed boys stopped him in the street. They were all bigger than he was, and two carried bicycle chains. A third swung a small bat, and he was the one who demanded Ernie’s watch and money. The boy from Dachau didn’t hesitate, not for a moment. He’d heard of friends slashed and beaten by such muggers, and he had no doubt that this gang could be equally vicious.

  He reached into the open garbage pail beside him, jerked out two empty quart bottles and smashed the bottoms off against the apartment house wall.

  The muggers froze.

  “I’ll kill you,” he said in a voice that was cool and factual.

  “Hey, man, you crazy?”

  “I’ll kill you,” he promised.

  He wasn’t joking.

  It was absolutely clear that this neatly dressed prep school kid with the short haircut was ready to cut them to pieces, to gash and gouge with the ferocity of a homicidal street fighter.

  “He’s crazy,” judged the leader of the attackers, and they retreated—very carefully.

  When they were out of sight, Ernie Beller dropped one of the broken beer bottles back into the trash and, taking no chances, carried the other until he was only twenty yards from his own building. As he entered the apartment house, he said hello to the uniformed doorman and predicted that the Yankees would win the evening’s doubleheader against Boston. When he unlocked the door to apartment 12A, his aunt was having coffee—strong Viennese coffee capped with whipped Schlag— with an old friend.