Voices of the Dead hl-1

by Peter Leonard

  Harry sat, blew on his coffee and took a sip.

  “I guess I had you all wrong,” Taggart said. “You don’t strike me as the vigilante type.”

  Harry pictured Sara’s battered face and felt himself getting angry. “Guy killed my daughter, you think I’m going to let that go?”

  “I don’t know but you’re being charged with assault. The bodyguard needed four stitches to close a cut on his face.” Taggart sipped his coffee. “How’d you do that?”

  “Judo.”

  “Judo, huh? You don’t look Oriental. Where’d you learn that?”

  “I took lessons,” Harry said.

  “You a black belt?”

  “Brown.”

  Taggart drank his coffee. “They also got you on destruction of property.” He took out a piece of paper. “Restaurant says you owe them for six Bordeaux glasses, four Limoges plates.” He pronounced the “s.” “Total of two hundred and eighty dollars.”

  Harry sipped his coffee.

  “German consulate says they’ll drop the assault charges if you go home, promise to get counseling.”

  “Counseling?” Harry could feel his bile rise. “They’ve got a lot of nerve.”

  Five

  Dachau, Germany. 1942.

  He watched the SS guard shout angry words in German, spit flying, the mouth working hard, opening and closing in cadence with the harsh guttural command. He saw the scene in hazy gray monochrome. Harry was standing on the muddy yard at Dachau with a group of prisoners, barracks on both sides of them. Guards were beating them with whips and clubs, herding them into the back of a truck that was covered by a tarpaulin. They had been told they were being transferred to a sub-camp, so there was hope because anything was better than where they were.

  “Komm, komm,” the guard said. “You look like you don’t want to work any more. Get on the truck. Schnell.”

  Harry and his father were the last two on, prisoners packed in front of them. The tarp was pulled closed but not all the way. Harry could see through the opening. The truck drove out of the camp, turning right, engine laboring in low gear until it reached the main road, heading toward Munich.

  A few minutes later, Harry saw a stone marker on the other side of the road. Dachau 4 km. They drove a little further and the truck turned right onto a two-track path that wound through the trees, and now there was a feeling of panic among the prisoners. They weren’t being transferred to a sub-camp. Harry tried to convince himself it was a work detail but knew they had been selected.

  Harry looked at the raggedy figures pressed around him, shifting to the sway of the truck. Glanced the other way through an opening in the tarp at the guards following them in two kubelwagens, four men in each. As they wound their way through the trees the guards would disappear from view. Harry’s father told him to jump off the truck.

  “You have to do it,” his father said.

  “I want to stay with you.”

  “In a few minutes there will be nothing left of me, or any of us. Save yourself.”

  Harry hugged his father, waited for the right opportunity, slipped through the tarp and over the rear gate, dropped to the ground and rolled into the trees. He heard the motorcade drive by, got up and ran, following the sounds of the truck engine.

  SS guards with machine guns herded the prisoners through the woods to a clearing. He could see dirt piled up on the other side of a pit that looked long and deep.

  Harry was so afraid he was sick to his stomach, body shaking, could hardly breathe. The prisoners stood side by side at the edge of the pit, twelve to fifteen at a time. When a whistle sounded SS guards walked up behind the Jews and shot them point blank, blowing their heads apart. Harry would jump when he heard a volley of gunfire. Some of the SS guards laughed, making fun of each other for getting blood and brains on their uniforms.

  His father was in the second group. This time a young SS officer in a black uniform walked behind the prisoners and sprayed them with machine-gun fire, the velocity of the rounds blowing them into the pit. The SS man was grinning, enjoying himself.

  “That’s how you kill Jews,” he said.

  A third group was brought into position. He could hear moans and screams coming from a few who were still alive. A rabbi wrapped in a prayer shawl said, “‘Comfort ye, comfort ye‚ my people.’” A guard knocked him unconscious with the butt of his rifle, and dragged him to the mass grave.

  Trucks dropped off groups of Jews and went back for more — fifty people at a time. They were led to the pit and shot. Harry had seen the Nazis do terrible things, beating and humiliating Jews on the streets of Munich, and even murdering them at the camp but nothing like this.

  The young SS officer started passing out bottles of schnapps while the killing continued. When the last transport arrived many of the Nazis were drunk. His mother was with a group from the women’s camp, led to the pit and shot like the others. Harry was numb, couldn’t watch. Closed his eyes and heard the shots. When it was over, the SS guards, twenty killers, stood around talking and laughing, drinking schnapps, smoking. Someone was playing an accordion. Others were taking photographs. It was festive now, lighthearted, a party after murdering almost six hundred innocent people.

  He saw two guards walk past him into the woods, and decided to get out of there as fast as he could. He was moving, crouching behind a tree when a rifle shot blew off a chunk of bark next to his head. Felt it sting his face and stopped. One of the guards had seen him and was coming toward him with his rifle.

  “Look what I found,” the Nazi said, bringing Harry to the pit. “A hiding Jew.”

  The SS officer who’d shot his father whipped Harry across the face with his riding crop. “What should we do with the little kike?”

  “Let him go,” a guard holding a bottle of schnapps said.

  “Are you drunk?” another guard said.

  “If not, I soon will be.” He brought the bottle to his mouth and took a big drink.

  The men standing around the pit laughed. The SS officer placed the barrel of his pistol against Harry’s temple. Harry closed his eyes, expecting the blast. But it didn’t come.

  “Sir, you’ll get Jew blood on your uniform,” a guard said.

  “You have a better idea?”

  The guard standing next to the SS officer stepped over and drove the butt of his rifle into the side of the Harry’s face. Harry staggered and the guard pushed him into the pit. He landed on top of bodies, burrowing between a dead woman and an old man, hearing gunshots above him before he passed out.

  Harry opened his eyes. It was completely dark. He was having trouble breathing. Something was in his nose and throat choking him. It was in his eyes too and all over him, and he now realized he was in the pit, covered with dirt, the weight of it and the corpses, heavy, pressing down on him. He could hear moans and cries from people who were still alive. Pushed his way through bodies, clawed his way through the layer of earth, feeling the cool night air, spitting dirt out of his mouth, wiping it out of his eyes, taking deep breaths.

  Harry climbed out and saw the bodies of others lying on the ground where they’d fallen and died. The scene so surreal, was it a dream? He scanned the woods and saw a girl running, disappearing into the trees. So at least two of them had survived.

  The sky was overcast. No stars or moon. Harry followed tire tracks through the woods to the road. One way went to Dachau and the other to Munich. He walked along the side of the road for a couple kilometers until he heard dogs barking in the distance, and followed the sounds to a farm, fields of crops that had been harvested. Beyond the fields he could see lights on in a house, and next to it the dark shape of a barn.

  Harry waited till the lights went out before crawling three hundred meters across the fields, resting now, leaning against the back wall of the house. He could see windows open on the second-floor rooms above him. The dogs were on the other side of the house, barking occasionally, but they hadn’t seen him or caught his scent. He moved around the hous
e, looked in the kitchen window, saw a loaf of bread on the counter.

  He came to a door, turned the handle, opened it and heard the hinges squeak, slipped into a hallway. He stopped and listened, didn’t hear anything, moved into the kitchen, picked up the bread, tore off a piece and ate it.

  Behind him he heard the twin hammers of a double-barrel shotgun being cocked. “You know what this is?” a man’s voice said in German.

  “I’m starving,” Harry said. “I just need something to eat.”

  “Turn around.”

  He did, and saw a big man holding the gun at his waist, barrel pointed at Harry’s chest.

  “Uli, put down the gun. He is a boy,” a woman said, coming in the room. She was short and wide, blond hair pulled back in a braid.

  The man cradled the barrel over his left arm like a bird hunter. “He is a thief.”

  She turned on the light, looking at Harry in his striped, dirt-caked, bloodstained uniform, shaking her head.

  “Look at him,” the woman said to her husband. “He is from the camp. My God, what did they do to you?”

  Harry was wondering where to begin.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.” He was big for his age, already five foot nine, but skinny after meager rations for six months.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Dead.”

  She came across the room, eyes fixed on him, put her arms around him, pulled his skinny frame against her heavy bosom, holding him. Harry looking over her shoulder at the husband, wondering what he was thinking.

  The woman released him and opened a drawer, took out a towel, wet it under the faucet and touched his face. It was cool and felt good on his swollen cheek. She washed his face, rinsed the towel and washed it again. She took him to the table and sat him in a chair. Served him chicken and dumplings, bread and milk. The husband telling her in hushed tones that helping a Jew could get them killed. The woman, whose name was Margot Schmidt, telling him to go to bed, she was going to look after the boy. She sat with him while he ate. Told him to slow down, there was no hurry, he could have as much as he wanted.

  “Of course we knew what was happening at the camp. We heard the trains arriving. Saw the work details, prisoners in striped uniforms like the one you are wearing. Heard the rumors of medical experiments and firing squads killing political prisoners and Jews. We are farmers. We have nothing against you.”

  When he finished eating she took him to the bathroom, filled the tub and closed the door behind her. Harry dipped his toe in, getting used to the heat, and then lay down in water up to his chin, the water turning brown.

  When he was finished she gave him clothes and shoes that she told him had been her son’s. The son had enlisted and was killed in action during the French invasion. She was angry, bitter, didn’t understand why Germany had gone to war in the first place.

  She took his blood-stained camp uniform downstairs, burned it in the fireplace. Harry slept in a bed for the first time in six months, nervous, getting up every few minutes, looking out the window, expecting to see Nazis.

  He was dreaming of food‚ seeing a plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and potatoes, when he felt someone shaking him and thought he was back in the barracks, block 21. He opened his eyes and saw the woman. She put her hand over his mouth. Told him there were Nazis outside, looking for prisoners that had escaped. They were searching the barn. He could hear the dogs barking.

  The farmer stood in the doorway and said, “If they find him they will kill us too.”

  Harry got out of bed, ducked down and went to the window. He looked out and saw two open military vehicles parked in the yard. Four SS soldiers were walking toward the barn and four more coming toward the house. He recognized the young SS officer from the massacre in the woods.

  “Get away from there. If they see you—” Her words trailed off.

  She took him down to the kitchen, opened a trap door that led to the cellar. He climbed down a ladder into the musty darkness and waited.

  Soon he heard the heavy sound of footsteps above him and voices. Then the trap door was pulled open. Light from the kitchen shone down illuminating the ladder and a section of cellar floor. Harry moved back and bumped sausages hanging on ropes from the ceiling, sent them swinging. Moved back farther and felt glass containers of fruits and vegetables stored on shelves. Harry worried the husband had told them where he was.

  He saw black boots coming down the ladder, and the gray jodhpurs of an SS soldier. Harry moved to the far corner of the cellar, going to his knees behind bins of apples and squash, he touched them, onions and garlic, he smelled them. Harry going down on his chest as the SS soldier’s feet landed on the dirt floor. The soldier moved to the right, training the flashlight over the contents of the cellar, the light lingering and holding on objects and then sweeping across the back wall, coming toward him, light reflecting off the glass containers on the shelves, then tracing a line where the walls met, going from dirt floor to beamed ceiling. Then moving across the sidewall, and over the bins, Harry holding his breath, curling up, making himself smaller.

  He heard a click and the beam disappeared and the soldier was on the ladder climbing back up.

  “Nothing,” the soldier said.

  The trap door was put back into position and it was dark again. He heard the soldiers leave the house. Heard the vehicles start up and drive out of the yard and let out a breath.

  Margot Schmidt, against her better judgment and the protests of her husband, drove Harry to the outskirts of Munich in a rickety old truck that backfired and burned oil. She told him he was crazy. He should stay with them at the farmhouse. They would hide him until the insanity was over, until it was safe. Harry knew the husband didn’t want him. That was obvious, and sooner or later someone would find out he was there and tell the SS.

  She pulled off the road and gave him bread and sausage wrapped in butcher paper tied with string. He put it in the pocket of the coat that had been her son’s. She leaned across the bench seat and hugged him. Harry thanked her and got out of the truck. He pulled the brim of the cap down over his eyes and headed for the towers of Altstadt.

  Twenty minutes later he was across the street from the building his father owned at Sendlinger Strasse 43. The bottom floor had been rented to a pharmacist who appeared to still be in business. Harry and his parents lived in the top two floors. He crossed the street and tried the door. It was locked. He remembered his father kept a spare key on the stone ledge over the rear entrance. Was it still there? Even so, if someone were living in the house they would have changed the locks, wouldn’t they?

  Harry walked around the block behind the building. Stood in front of the door. He jumped up and felt the key and knocked it off the ledge, heard it hit the cobblestone entranceway. He picked it up, slid it in the lock and opened the door.

  Six

  Detroit, Michigan. 1971.

  Harry glanced at the row of black Cadillacs parked on the street, a group of friends and relatives around him at Sara’s casket, waiting for it to be lowered into the ground next to her mother. Rabbi Rosenbaum delivering the Mourner’s Kaddish.

  “May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.”

  “Amen” from the mourners.

  “May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days, and in the lifetimes of the entire family of Israel, swiftly and soon. Now say: Amen. May His great name be blessed forever and ever. Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One.”

  And now everyone said, “Blessed is He.”

  Harry felt like he had slipped out of his body, watching himself in a black suit, white shirt, black tie and black yarmulke, hands clasped together, holding them over his groin, solemn expression, mind flashing snapshots of Sara like frames in a slide show.

  An hour later Harry was sitting in his crowded living room, Aunt Netta, an Orthodox Jew, holding his face in her hands.

 
“Harry, did you shave? You are not supposed to shave or get a haircut. Harry, don’t you know this?”

  “It’s okay,” Harry said.

  “It’s not okay. You should be sitting in a low chair.”

  “I don’t have a low chair,” Harry said.

  She glanced at his shoes, black ankle-high Bally boots with a zipper on the side. “And no leather. You should know better, Harry. It’s rabbinically mandated.”

  Telling him what a mourner should do during shiva. Netta was short and wide like his mother, about five two. She pinned a piece of ribbon, a keriah, on his shirt pocket.

  After the Nazis murdered his parents, Harry doubted the existence of God, and stopped practicing the rituals and traditions of the faith.

  “Harry, I arranged a minyan for tonight’s service,” Netta said. Which meant ten men from Temple would arrive about 7:00 p.m. to recite Kaddish.

  Most of Harry’s family had emigrated from Germany in the late thirties. His father’s side of the family was tall, thin and good-looking. His mother’s side was short and stocky. The men had round faces and thinning hair and wore glasses, black horn rims with lenses so thick you got dizzy if you looked through them.

  Harry’s uncle and former business partner, his dad’s younger brother, sat next to him and grinned. Sam was seventy-one and always had a gleam in his eye.

  “A Polish terrorist was sent to blow up a car,” Sam said. “He burned his mouth on the exhaust pipe.”

  Harry grinned.

  “Two Jews, Saul and Sheldon, were walking past a church. They saw a sign that said: Become Catholic. We pay $100. Sheldon says, “I’m going to do it.” “No,” says Saul. “Yes, I am,” says Sheldon. “You can’t. Your family, your friends, they’re all Jewish. You go to shul for the High Holidays.” “I’m doing it,” says Sheldon walking into the church. Saul paces back and forth until Sheldon walks out with a big smile on his face. “No,” says Saul. “You didn’t.” “Yes, I did,” says Sheldon. “I’m baptized. I’ve become Catholic.” Saul says, “Tell me, did you get the hundred dollars?” Sheldon looks at him and says, “Why is it always the money with you people?” Sam laughed, patted Harry’s cheek. “So how you doing?”