A good haul, he thought, all I need. It looked about the right fit, too. He’d stolen … well, requisitioned … a pair of trousers, three shirts, underpants, a pair of socks, and two handkerchiefs. All he needed now was a jacket, and he’d keep his eyes open for one.
It was already turning hot and the sky was pristine blue. He guessed the time to be close to nine o’clock. The path along the river was pleasant, apart from the glare of walking into the sun. As much as possible he kept in the shade of trees that lined the road. Soon the trees merged into thick bushes that reached the water. I can’t put on my nice clean clothes smelling like this, Jacob thought. Again, he looked around and decided not to hesitate. He was a free man, right? Who knew for how long? Enjoy it.
Without a further thought, hidden by the bushes, Jacob peeled off his odd shoes, his torn trousers and jacket, his sweaty stained shirt, his smelly underpants and socks and, shivering with the fresh breeze on his naked body, stepped carefully into the river. Gasping as the cold reached his crotch, he threw his arms forward and dived. Within moments he was floating on his back, swimming a few strokes, diving, popping up and brushing his hair from his eyes. Free as a fish, he thought, shooting a jet of water through the gap in his front teeth.
Jacob floated on his back, warmed by the sun, a smile on his lips. Even the sudden intrusion of snow, standing naked in the icy winter, blue and trembling so hard his bones ached, even the snap of the whip couldn’t remove his smile. I survived. He drifted for minutes with the river until he turned and swam back, grateful that he remembered how. Stepping through the algae at the water’s edge, with the mud sucking at his heels and squishing between his toes, he picked his way over the sharp roots of the tall rushes and lay down in the grass. He watched a family of startled ducks waddle in a row to the water. The grass was sharp and hard and scratched his back but he didn’t care. He threw open his arms and spread his legs and felt the warmth envelop him and the river breeze dry those private places.
Relief swept through his veins: Yes. It’s really over! He listened to the singing of birds settling in the nearby bush and to the little blue-chested ones that trilled and warbled back. Jacob heard himself shout to them all: I made it! I’m free too!
So what?
He felt a tightness, a band around his lungs, a noose closing. It was the memory of his promise that now he must keep. His stomach clenched at the thought.
As quickly as it came he shrugged it off and jumped up with his arms out to embrace the sun, which brought back the smile. He examined his sinewy arms; and his legs, which seemed to be adding some muscle; his hairy white belly and the shrunken prune below. Hello again, old friend, he thought.
Washed, dried, in clean clothes that were only slightly too large, Jacob set off again along the Neckar, which now looked to him more beautiful than ever, more inviting even than when he had pushed in Karl Wagner on his birthday, an existence ago before Karl donned the swastika.
I could do with some new shoes, too, he thought. Can’t go home in odd shoes.
But a mile on, at the narrowest point where the hills are closest to the river, two massive American tank transporters were parked parallel to each other blocking the road. A growing mass of carts, people, and livestock waited in silence. It had been closed since the day before. Nobody knew why it was closed, or when it would reopen.
There were no river boats here and the bridges had been blown up by the retreating German army. The only way across, an annoyed matron told him, was an American pontoon bridge kilometers ahead by the historic Old Bridge: “And that’s been blown up too.”
Jacob wasn’t going to wait. He was excited at being so close to home, at discovering who was in Heidelberg and what remained of the town. Surely at least the Old City would have been spared, even if the bridge was down.
As soon as he understood the delay could last another day at least, he set off into the hills of the Odenwald, following a trail he remembered that wound around the high ridge and rejoined the river road at the Snake Path almost opposite the Old Bridge. The trail ran through thick woods until it opened onto the last part of the Philosopher’s Way, which had been everyone’s most beloved picnic spot. Philosophers, poets, and painters dedicated their art to the startlingly beautiful view through the trees and across the winding river to the steeples, gables, and red roofs of Old Heidelberg, over which ruled, from its perch on the hill, the ghostly towers of the destroyed renaissance fortress of Prince Elector Otto Heinrich.
As he pushed through the overgrown trail, arms raised to protect himself from the whip of branches, his step became heavier. A cloud descended upon him. He was nearing the most beautiful city in Germany from its most beautiful approach, and all he would see was a sea of rubble, like every other city through which he had passed. He didn’t want to see the medieval towers, the ancient university buildings, even the old castle, humiliated by the bombs, even if he hated everyone who lived in them.
His thoughts became grim. The trees were tall and dark and their branches spread and their foliage pressed in and his childhood fears knocked at his heart. The ogres and demons of the forest and the gnomes and elves of the fables inhabited the minds of all who dwelt in the Odenwald. And even after all he had survived, the howls of the wolves and the shrieks of the dwarves and the fiends of the tales of his childhood still prickled his skin. He hurried forward, sniffing evil spirits in the wind, and wondered with Rotkäppchen: Who is sleeping in my bed? Or did the warplanes huff and puff and blow my house down?
He steeled himself as he broke out of the forest and climbed the final hill from whose peak he would see Heidelberg, for the first time since that loud sharp knock on his door, on October 22, 1940, a date he would never forget, when the Gestapo ordered the family to report within two hours to the train station on Rohrbacher Street. Bring a hundred Reichsmarks and one small bag each with your name, address, and date of birth on a piece of paper inside.
Don’t worry. To a safe place.
The crowd of Christians grew as word spread. They watched in silence: schoolmates, neighbors, their local shopkeepers. When Jacob’s eyes met those of Thomas Holtz, once his bosom friend from kindergarten, Thomas blushed and looked down.
A light rain scattered the onlookers as the first train, with wooden planks nailed over its windows, pulled away from platform 1A at 6:15 in the evening. From inside, fingers poked through the slats, feeling for freedom, a woman’s long black hair billowed through a crack as the wind picked up with the speed. It was the last time he saw his father.
It was just after Yom Kippur and the Jews were taken into occupied France, to Gurs, in the south, where most died of exposure that first freezing winter. The rest met their end in Auschwitz. He and his brother, after watching the first train pull out of the station, were trucked in the opposite direction, to Bergen-Belsen, to the Sternlager. His dead British mother, who he could hardly remember, had saved his life by giving him her nationality. With his last hug, with his last kiss, with his last words to his father, who was strangely calm, as if he had accepted his fate, Jacob had promised: “I will look after Maxie.”
And now he was returning, alone, wearing a stranger’s three shirts, and odd shoes.
Even when Maxie died, Jacob hadn’t cried. His grief was so overwhelmed by his fury and frustration that he had frozen, seized up, and his friends had carried him to the hut, laid him on the bed, and when he had started to rave and yell, they had held him down, sat on him, anything to keep him away from the Rat.
He was twenty when he last saw his father, and now he was twenty-five. In those five years in the hands of the torturers he had never cried.
Maybe it was because he had expected so little that the shock was so great. When he emerged from the trees and looked down from the hill, steeling himself for the worst across the river, only to find the sun glittering on red and black rooftops, lighting rows of medieval homes in the narrow alleys, their white walls gleaming, almond and chestnut trees blossoming white and yellow in
the cobbled squares, and he heard the four o’clock chimes of the Church of the Holy Spirit pealing across the Neckar from the middle of Market Square, and he could even see, counting from the left, the gabled roof of his own home, at Dreikönigstrasse 9, as if nothing had changed, as if a good spirit from the woods had laid a protective hand over Heidelberg and kept the city safe, Jacob couldn’t hold it in anymore.
Alone on the hill, he sobbed with relief: his home still stood; he had come home; so others may return too. And he wept for all he had lost: his youth, his family, everything but his life. And for what he had endured. He howled across the river, and felt better for it.
Finally, trembling, with an unfamiliar relief sweeping through him, he wiped his face, and as he set off down the Snake Path toward the Old Bridge, pushing aside the overgrown bramble, he believed everything would be all right again, after all.
It was a beautiful feeling.
It didn’t last long.
The beauty and the serenity of the ancient town had lulled him. It was picture-perfect down there, but that’s all it was, an image, like a postcard mailed the day before an earthquake. He had been duped by the flowers and the birds and the view.
His back straightened as he walked and it all came back. Why was he here? To find family? He wished, but no chance. Friends? No. Property? No.
No.
His oath to Maxie as he died in his arms.
SEVEN
Twisted around with his arm over the passenger seat, Yonni Tal reversed the darkened jeep into a stand of pine trees. He came to a halt at the edge of a shaft of moonlight, walked to the back, pulled out two long wooden planks, and wedged them beneath the two front wheels, to give them a firmer grip. Heavy rain that afternoon had turned the grass into mud. He didn’t want any surprises; they needed a clean getaway. He leaned the heavy spade against the spare wheel, to grab it quickly just in case they did get stuck.
Ari Levinsky unzipped a kit bag and pulled out two gray German army combat jackets, which he and Omri Shur put on. They adjusted their steel helmets, more for disguise than protection. They didn’t want to be seen at all but if they were, they didn’t want to be recognized later. In one pocket Ari put his jackknife, and in another, two thin steel cords with knotted rubber ends. Just in case, he slipped a seven-inch commando knife into the top of his boot. His stomach turned. He hated the rancid smell from his bag of raw meat and bones.
Omri detached his Colt .45 from the shoulder holster, which he didn’t need, and checked all seven rounds in the magazine. He’d need only one, and hopefully not even that. He’d bought the gun from an American G.I. and liked it for his private work. He snapped the magazine inside the butt, double-checked the thumb safety, and pushed it in his belt. Ari looked around, pointed with his chin at the row of small houses at the end of a country lane. “One, two, three,” he said. “The third house on the left. With the two lights.”
“You don’t say,” Omri said. They’d cruised by six times in two days.
“Ready?” Ari said.
Omri nodded. “If you are.”
Omri, as he always did before a kill, slid his hand under the German jacket and tapped his British army shoulder flash with two fingertips, kissed them, and again tapped the golden Star of David on blue and white stripes.
“Yallah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Omri Shur was a legend in Palestine, at least among the fighters of the Haganah. Born on Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov in the Jordan Valley, at twenty years old he had been a strategist and instructor for the Jews’ endgame, code-named Maoz Haifa. It would be another Masada, the final fight of the Jews in the Holy Land. In 1942, with German Panzer divisions storming across North Africa, led by their greatest general, Erwin Rommel, the Jews in Palestine understood that if his Blitzkrieg crushed the British in Egypt, they would be next, and if the reports from Europe about the Jews were correct, there would be no mercy. They would all be slaughtered. But here it would be a different story. Here, the Jews would fight to the last, and the last redoubt of the last Jews would be in the hundreds of linked caves and thick forests of Mount Carmel—Maoz Haifa, the Haifa Stronghold. On these slopes, Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal. Omri Shur didn’t expect to defeat the Nazis, but he would make sure he would be among the last of the last.
He was trained to kill Nazis at any price.
As for Ari Levinsky, he was born in Hamburg and left for Palestine in 1933 when his prescient parents took Adolf Hitler at his word. He was thirteen years old, newly bar mitzvahed, and thanks to generations of intermarriages with prototypes of Hitler’s racial fantasies, grew into a powerfully built young man with blond hair and blue eyes.
He, too, had been part of the underground Jewish army’s determination to go down fighting. They had formed a secret unit of Jews in Palestine known as the German Platoon: fluent German-speakers who could pass as Wehrmacht soldiers if the Nazis occupied Tel Aviv. They learned to impersonate the enemy: to swagger like them, sing Nazi marching songs, give correct greetings according to rank, until they could get close enough to murder senior SS officers.
In late 1944, two years after General Montgomery’s Eighth Army, the British “Desert Rats,” had turned the tide on Rommel, and the Nazi threat to Palestine had evaporated, the British army formed the Jewish Brigade. Five thousand Jews who would fight for the British against the Germans in Europe.
The Haganah sent Omri Shur and Ari Levinsky, and hundreds more, to join the Brigade and gain experience for the next war they all saw coming: against the Arabs in Palestine. They didn’t get a chance to do much fighting, though. British commanders didn’t trust the Palestinian Jews, and the war ended too soon.
But for a rogue handful of the Jewish Brigade, their own private war was just beginning. A war of revenge.
* * *
Omri and Ari trod in the shadows of trees until the track from the meadow merged with the lane. It was the very last street of Holzkirchen, a small market town in Bavaria, about thirty kilometers from Munich: Hitler country. At ten o’clock at night, most of the worthy burghers were fast asleep. All the houses in the street were dark, except for the third on the left. Upstairs, their man in British Intelligence had told them, at 10:00 p.m. Frau Inge Langenscheidt would be preparing to put out the light. Downstairs, her husband would shuffle around till the small hours of the morning, reading, writing, pacing.
SS-Obersturmbannführer Uwe Langenscheidt, of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division, special liaison with the Croatian Ustasha, murderer, torturer, rapist, had trouble sleeping.
“The fuck he does,” Ari had said when they were given their target, his history, his address, his habits, his wife’s habits, and the names and breeds of the neighborhood dogs. “He’s a big guy, rough, be careful,” the briefer, known to them only as Blue, had told them. Blue was a Jew in British Intelligence, part of a tiny underground within the Allied armed forces that gave the files of identified yet unpunished SS officers to the secret band that called themselves the Avengers. It enabled small units of killers to operate in the British, American, and Russian zones of occupied Germany.
Omri and Ari emerged from the blue-tinged trees into pale moonlight. Now that they were in the open anyway, they no longer crept but walked boldly in the middle of the street as if they had grown up there.
Two men and their shadows, with guns.
At the gate to the house, Ari clicked with his tongue, and clicked again, until Topf, the Langenscheidts’ big mutt, appeared by the garden shed, alert and suspicious. They heard his low growl. Ari clicked again a few times, burrowed in his pocket, and threw a slice of raw meat toward the animal. “Kelev tov,” Ari murmured in Hebrew, good dog. As Topf leaped onto the meat and gulped it down, his tail wagging furiously, wanting more, the two killers quietly unlatched the gate and walked toward the front door, avoiding the two orange pools of light from the windows.
Upstairs, the light went out. After five minutes, without a sound, Ari released the clasp on h
is jackknife, slid it between the lock and the door, and maneuvered and levered until with a pop the bolt slid back into its cylinder. He pushed the door. It still didn’t open. He slid the blade of the knife down to the floor and then upward till he found a second lock. Again, the clasp, pressure, a sudden giving, and the bolt moved backward.
It was just a simple country door.
Omri, pistol in hand, breathed out again. Topf pinned them with his eyes and whined for more. Ari placed a bone in his slobbering mouth.
Omri eased the door open to find himself in a small hallway with a neat row of walking shoes and boots lined up beneath the coatrack. There was a set of stag horns above a mirror. He saw his reflection: coat, helmet, slit eyes, a gun. A shaft of light beneath the door to the left, the only light in the house, showed the way to Langenscheidt. Ari picked up a boot and quietly placed it against the wide-open front door, to keep it from slamming.
He looked into Omri’s eyes and nodded: ready?
Omri’s right hand held his Colt .45 at shoulder height, the safety still on. He didn’t want to shoot. He nodded back.
Ari’s left hand held the doorknob. He squeezed it gently and began to turn. The slightest squeak and he would just throw the door open and barge in. But the more he could open the door undetected, the safer.
The knob turned all the way, both men nodded again, and it was time. Ari opened the door, Omri went in first.
It was a small room. Aiming the gun straight at Langenscheidt’s head, Omri stood before him in three quick strides. The Nazi was sitting in a chair at his desk, his mouth wide in shock, color draining from his face; they saw him turn white. One hand was in the air, as if to push them away, the other on the desk. Omri flicked his gun at the hand and it was in the air too. Langenscheidt was so shocked he didn’t say anything. As he began to collect himself and opened his mouth, Ari put his left index finger to his lips. He whispered in Hamburg dialect: “If you make a sound I will rape your dear wife and kill her.”
Jacob's Oath: A Novel Page 6