Keeper of Secrets (9780062240316)

by Thomas, Julie

  To make room, the killing had taken on a more structured approach with mass executions carried out by firing squad; on some days six thousand Russian prisoners were killed. A year ago construction had been completed on a large brick building over in the northwest corner of the complex and the camp rumor mill was in overdrive as everyone had an opinion on what was going on over the bridge across the creek. No one who was sent there returned to talk about it, and obviously no one was going to venture where they shouldn’t, so the true purpose was anyone’s guess. The most feared place was still the hospital. Stories filtered back, via those on cooking and cleaning detail, of medical experiments that were always fatal. Certainly anyone who was sick enough to need hospitalization was either shot or disappeared without a trace.

  Occasionally they met someone they’d known in their other life, their “free” life. The world where they’d taken the small luxuries of a civilized existence for granted and never given them a moment’s thought, like being clean, sleeping in a bed between sheets, having a change of clothing, getting enough to eat and a change of diet, having some privacy for ablutions, and, most of all, not fearing that their next moment would be their last. Often these people were unrecognizable, invariably now skin and bone and with the slow, listless air so common among the desperate and those without hope.

  One hot June day Benjamin’s quiet, almost internal daily prayers were interrupted by Amos Wiggenstein. He was nearly bald and very wrinkled, but his back was ramrod straight and his cheeks still had color. The two men embraced warmly, and Amos stared at him.

  “How long have you been here, Benjamin?”

  “Nearly twenty months. I know, what a diet! I’ll write a book one day. And you?”

  “Only three. Hannah and I were hidden by my cousin’s husband, a good man, a Gentile. But when my money ran out, we were betrayed by a Jew working for the Nazis, and then they put us on the trains. I don’t know where they took her.”

  They exchanged family information, and Amos told him what he knew of the war. Sadly he knew nothing of Sarah, Elizabeth, or Rachel; and Benjamin took heed to make sure the brief flame of hope didn’t show.

  “They destroyed my shop, you know, in the pogrom, and I never had the chance to go back,” Amos said, and Benjamin could hear the pain in his voice.

  “I know, the boys were out that night, and they went by your shop in the morning. Simon and Levi, they rescued seven of your violins from the back room and took them home. We put them in our attic. One day you can use them to start your collection over. I’m sure the Nazis won’t bother to look in our dusty old attic.”

  Amos was clearly delighted at the news and also to learn that Simon was reasonably well and coping.

  “I am working for them, Benjamin, building things, working with wood. They can see that I am good at carving delicate things. Even with these old hands. And I have started my own project, hidden among the tools and the wood. I am making a violin.”

  “Oh, Amos!” Benjamin felt the tears pricking his eyes. “God bless you for being such a temple of the indomitable human spirit. Wait till I tell my Simon; he’ll be so happy. Just the other day he reminded me what you said to him when he was just a boy: Guarneri himself said the violin sounded like the tears of an angel.”

  Amos frowned and seemed to be searching his memory.

  “I don’t . . . oh yes, I do. He remembers that? It was a piece of fancy, something I made up to excite a young boy’s imagination, something that sounded Italian. You tell him to stretch his hands. When it’s finished, I’ll bring it to him. Then he can be in violin land, you know, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony?”

  The old man’s eyes twinkled with merriment, and Benjamin laughed out loud.

  “ ‘The Red-Headed League,’ Conan Doyle. I haven’t thought about that story for years. Come and see me again, my old friend; you’re so good for my soul.”

  Simon was thrilled by Amos’s news and spent several nights dreaming he had a violin in his hands again. For many months he’d lulled himself to sleep with a sweet dream that saw him playing in public, guesting with the Berlin Philharmonic. Then, bit by bit, it’d slipped away, shattered by the daily horror around him. But after Amos’s visit, the dream returned and with it the haunting, deep strains of his beloved Guarneri. Vivid dreams were his most treasured escape and he often saw himself, as a child, playing his violin; and then he’d see his mother and Levi applauding, as if through his own eyes. Every day he told himself that maybe today Amos would appear, but every day he was disappointed.

  Meanwhile David was a growing concern. He was terribly weak, and at times Simon had to hold him up during roll call and answer for him. A painful cough racked his skeletal body, causing the other men to complain, and at night he sometimes burned with fever, then woke drenched in sweat. Simon gave him what food he could and still eat something himself, and if he feared that David’s quota of polished shells would be down, he tried to do some himself when the guards were distracted. He knew that David missed his twin with a suffering beyond his comprehension. They’d always been two halves of a whole and even fought with a closeness that told others they could criticize each other but would defend their partnership to the death. In the end it hadn’t been enough; he hadn’t been able to keep her safe.

  “Simon?”

  He looked up. It was a man he didn’t recognize, a very short man with a single colored triangle on his jacket, not a Star of David, and a cloth patch over one eye.

  “Maybe,” he answered cautiously.

  “I’m looking for Simon Horowitz.”

  “Why?”

  “I . . . I have something for him.”

  “You can give it to me. I’ll see he gets it.”

  “No, I can’t. My instructions were very specific; give it to Simon Horowitz and no one else.”

  Simon eyed him suspiciously.

  “Instructions? Whose instructions?”

  “From Amos.”

  Simon sprang to his feet. Although he wasn’t tall and was now painfully thin, he towered over the small man.

  “Where’s Amos?”

  “He’s . . . he’s dead. He got very sick, so he couldn’t work anymore and they took him away. But just before, he gave me a package and told me to deliver it to Si—”

  “I’m Simon. You can give it to me.”

  The man hesitated.

  “But where is it?” Simon was puzzled. “How can it be so small?”

  He watched as the man pulled a small cloth bundle from inside his jacket and thrust it into his waiting hands.

  “If they catch me here, they might shoot me. He was good to me, and he took care of me. I wanted to do what he asked.”

  Simon looked at him closely and realized he was no older than David, but his visible eye was blank and his face filthy and lined. Simon spun around and lifted up his silver bowl. Underneath was a half slice of stale bread he’d been saving for his father, but this boy’s need was greater. He cupped it in his hands and transferred it to the boy’s grasp, keeping it covered.

  “Here, eat it now or they’ll take it off you.”

  The young boy’s dark brown eye lit up, and he shoved it greedily into his mouth.

  “Thank you,” he muttered.

  “No, thank you. Amos would be proud of you. How long have you been here?”

  “A year and a little bit.”

  “Do you have any family?”

  “No. All dead. Just me now.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m fifteen, soon.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Philippe.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “All over, we’re Gypsies.”

  There was pride in his voice, and he gazed defiantly at Simon, who smiled back.

  “You have no more reason to be here than we have. I hope
you’re . . . come back and see me again.”

  The boy hesitated and then nodded.

  “I’d like that. Thank you for the bread.”

  He moved like lightning; one moment he was there and the next, he was gone. Simon laid the parcel on his mattress and carefully unwrapped it. The violin was very small and very crude, a wooden body with a bridge, a neck, and tiny pegs in the scroll. The strings were stretched pieces of fuse wire. The bow was not very flexible, a piece of thin tapered wood with some string, which had been frayed like horsehair, stretched from tip to toe. He ran his fingers over the violin and tightened the tiny pegs, then plucked the strings. They made sharp, twanging noises. When he picked up the bow and ran it over the strings, they made a longer twanging noise. Then he wrapped the whole thing back into its cloth cover and hid it inside his shirt. The guards were used to him wandering around and hardly gave him a second glance as he made his way out behind the dog kennels to a patch of ground where he knew he’d be undisturbed. Where he could spend some time getting acquainted with his new possession and find a place to hide it.

  Chapter 24

  Dachau

  September 1941

  Several weeks later Simon stood at his machine, methodically and skillfully raising and lowering the levers. He was very concerned about David; the boy was withdrawn and vacant, not answering questions and hardly eating his food. It was more than the usual apathy, and Simon feared it was the beginning of a glazed semiconsciousness, a state he’d seen in others. In his head he practiced the piece he was trying to master on his secret violin. The wire was tough on his fingers, and the instrument was almost impossible to keep in tune, but he was pleased with the progress he’d made during snatched moments of practice.

  Suddenly his reverie was broken by a loud thump. He looked up to see two guards converging on the table where David stood to polish the shells. Instinct told him to stay where he was as he fought a desperate longing to intervene. Both men were kneeling down; David must have fainted. Then the worst possible thing happened, the SS-obertsturmführer appeared and noticed the disturbance. He briefly inspected whatever it was they were kneeling beside and ordered it to be removed. Simon watched in mute horror as the two men picked up his brother and carried him out of the room. Perhaps once he was outside, where it was cooler, he might be all right. These men knew David well, they guarded him every day; surely they wouldn’t shoot him simply because he fainted?

  The rest of the shift crawled at a cruel pace while he forced his racing mind to focus on the job at hand. If he made mistakes, he’d be punished. Finally the whistle blew, the output was checked, and they were released. He sprinted back to the barracks. His father was sitting with a group of his friends, but David was nowhere in sight.

  “Where’s David?” Benjamin asked cautiously.

  “I don’t know! I thought he’d be back here. I think he fainted, and two guards carried him outside.”

  One of the other men looked up. “When was this?”

  “About five hours ago.”

  “Then he’s gone; they’ve taken him to the hospital,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  The word drifted in the air for a moment, such an innocuous phrase in any other life. Simon could see his own agony reflected in his father’s eyes. The thing he’d dreaded most, worked so hard to avoid, had happened, and the hurt was so intense he could scarcely breathe.

  He turned and ran out of the barracks. He didn’t stop until he came to his special place, behind the dog kennels. He often fed the dogs and they were used to his scent so they didn’t bark when he passed by. He approached an old tree trunk, half decayed and hollow, the perfect hiding place. He’d buried the violin under a pile of sticks and moss. The cover was complete; no one passing would’ve seen anything out of place.

  Bitter tears stung his eyes as he fiddled with the tiny pegs. The four strings were always loose, and he fought a constant battle to keep it even faintly resembling an instrument in tune. He couldn’t tighten the bow and some of the string had worn away, but with a little manipulation and some stolen tape on one end, it did the trick.

  He glanced around one more time. Mozart was David’s favorite and this hardly sounded like the sonata he’d loved the most, but it was enough. Ten bars in, he laid the violin in his lap and began to cry huge sobs that racked his thin body.

  David Isaac Horowitz never returned, and the cause of his death remained a mystery. Simon knew that the guards on the factory floor had taken the boy somewhere. Every day they saw the mute pleading in his eyes, but he was too afraid to ask and they never said a word. Perhaps David was taken to the brick building over the creek and consumed in the dreadful pall of stinking smoke that issued forth from its chimneys. Or perhaps he was taken to the hospital and died in a medical experiment designed to help Luftwaffe pilots survive extremes of temperature. Or perhaps he was just taken somewhere and shot and thrown into a mass grave; there was always one in operation somewhere in the camp.

  However he died, his brother would always remember David as a brave, clever, witty human being with a stubborn streak as wide as the Rhine, the courage to bear pain without complaint, and a fierce loyalty to his family, especially his sister. He also loved his city and his country. He was so proud when his father took him to the Berlin Olympics in August 1936, and it broke his heart that he wasn’t allowed to join the Hitler Youth Movement because he was a Jew.

  In the end, it was Simon’s passion for music that betrayed him. Even this anemic version of the instrument he cherished had come to mean so much to him that he dropped his guard. He was completely absorbed in recalling a passage of Bach and trying to approximate its sound so that his grieving father would recognize it and he didn’t see the faces hiding in the grass, listening. Food was a powerful motivating force, and fights regularly broke out over a scrap of sausage or a piece of potato skin, so it was no wonder that he was betrayed to a second lieutenant for a piece of buttered bread.

  When he eventually stopped and listened to the distant noises of the camp, out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure moving. Before he could hide the violin, the guard had walked into his sight line. The man was tall and well built, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and long legs. His blond hair was cut very short, and he had an angry red scar down one cheek. He wore the insignia of an SS-untersturmführer, a second lieutenant in the SS.

  “Number!” he barked.

  Simon scrambled to his feet, aware that his hat was on the ground beside him.

  “8467291, sir,” he recited quickly, his eyes averted.

  “What is that?”

  The man was almost beside him, holding out one large hand. Reluctantly Simon handed over the violin and bow. The guard examined it carefully.

  “Where did you get it? You may speak.”

  “It was made . . . a worker in the camp, he was a violin maker, sir.”

  “Did you steal it?”

  “No. He . . . made it for me, sir.”

  “You were a musician?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pick up your hat. This way, now!”

  Simon grabbed his hat and ran in the direction the guard was pointing. Somewhere inside him iron fingers of terror had gripped him, but the thought roaring through his head was, Who will look after Papa when I’m dead? The guard marched him to a small square building next to the SS officers’ quarters. He took a key from the pocket of his uniform and unlocked the heavy padlock on the latch.

  “In here!”

  Simon stepped uncertainly inside. It was one single room, lit by a central lightbulb. From floor to ceiling on all four sides were stacks of brown cardboard boxes. The guard shut the door behind them.

  “Search through those boxes, start over there.”

  The guard began to look in the box nearest to him. Simon was frozen by the fear of the consequence of misunderstanding. He couldn’t make himself move.
/>
  “Now, Jew! Are you deaf as well as stupid?” the guard roared.

  “Search for what, sir?”

  The man stopped and looked at him, his expression blank. In all the months he’d been there, Simon had never questioned an order and he knew other guards who would’ve whipped, beaten, or kicked him for such insubordination. In that moment their eyes locked, one pair icy blue and mocking, the other almost black and terrified. The guard wasn’t much older than him, and yet he held Simon’s life in his hand. Prisoners were summarily shot for questioning an order.

  “That’s a very good point. What’s your name?”

  It’d been so long since someone had asked, he’d forgotten what the question meant.

  “8467291, sir.”

  Automatically he averted his eyes and held his hat in his hand.

  “No, not your number, your name.”

  “Simon . . . Simon Horowitz, sir.”

  “And you play the violin?”

  “Yes, sir, and . . . and the piano, sir.”

  “What violin did you play?”

  Simon hesitated; could he share his precious secret with such a man?

  “A Guarneri del Gesú, sir.”

  The man whistled softly. Simon knew there was pride on his face, in spite of his situation, and that was dangerous. The guard closed the box and came closer to him.