Stolen Secrets

by L. B. Schulman

  Most people were too sick to leave the hospital. Medicine was in short supply, and I had grown stingy over the months, hoarding it in my desk. Still, the girl returned with yet another wisp of a child, despite appearing so weak herself that I feared she’d collapse, doubling my load. The story that day was of a chatterbox duck. I hid my smile behind a cupped hand.

  I was mostly by myself in those last weeks of the war. The doctor tended to camp fever in the barracks, and both nurses on my shift fell ill with flu. One day, while delivering a report, I spotted the girl, crouched beside a barrel, scribbling on the back of a can label. Writing was a punishable offense, and I saw the fear flame in her eyes. I strode past her and said only my name. She responded with, “Anne,” and then, a moment later, “Anne Frank.”

  Days later, she came to the hospital with a young boy, a rag doll near death. She recited a poem, though the patient was unable to listen. She herself could barely speak for a dry throat. As I moved past, I dropped a blank sheet of paper onto her lap. She glanced at me with pleasure, but knew better than to show gratitude. I would have taken it away if she had. It was not my job to be kind.

  These exchanges happened a few times—five or six, perhaps—establishing an awkward alliance between prisoner and captor. We were worlds apart in circumstance, though close enough in age. It could never be called a friendship—not during wartime, certainly—but it was a connection in the most unlikely of places.

  I began to slip her something extra whenever I could. A roll, or turnip or two. Once, an orange …

  One wet day, Anne flung open the door, her arms empty. I remember thinking she looked more like a chicken plucked down to its bones than a fifteen-yearold girl. I made certain no one was watching before giving thanks to God for her continued strength. It seemed I had not studied her closely enough. Anne’s rosy cheeks defied the gloomy weather. Even a feisty girl could not win against the disease.

  Oh, how I had looked forward to giving her the three sheets of paper I’d found in Irma’s office the day before. A windfall! But even as I shared the news, the sorrow never left her face. Anne couldn’t mask her feelings. I’d feared that this would bring her trouble from the likes of Irma and Herta. Still, when her emotions ran full throttle, it served as a reminder that we were not, all of us, dead. I, on the other hand, didn’t dare express myself in such free, human ways. Barbed wire surrounded my heart.

  “Something horrible has happened,” Anne began. “My sister is gone! Why? How could it happen? Margot was so good, so perfect. I want to cry, but I can’t! I’ve lost my tears. Why are my eyes dry, Lillian?” She looked as if her own words failed to make sense. Perhaps, under the cloak of her fever, they did not.

  An emotion I hardly recognized cinched my heart. Years later, I would know it as guilt. How many times had I made Anne consume the food I gave her in my presence, despite her pleas about an ill sister? If she’d been caught with extra rations in the barracks, the punishment would have been severe for both of us. I would take the risk for her, but for no other Jew.

  Life was dangerous for all as the war drew to a close. Just the previous week, Anne told me how a page of her journal had blown under Herta’s boot. My handwriting had been on the reverse side—something inconsequential, a note to a doctor, perhaps. Fortunately, Herta had been too busy with roll call to concern herself with a scrap underfoot. It was obvious I could not afford another mistake. Not when guns went off without provocation, aimed in impulsive frustration. I was not naïve; I could die at the hands of the SS almost as easily as Anne could.

  After that day, I insisted she bring her entries to me. I stored them in a locked drawer. They would be safe there, as I was the only one who had the key.

  I will never forget what she said next. “If anything happens to me, you must show these to whoever will look. Words, not people, last forever.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” I told her. “You will live to write many more things.”

  Anne ignored my sentiment. Again she demanded assurance that I would do as she asked. To appease her, I agreed. Soon I had the four entries she’d given me, a separate page for each, filled, I assumed then, with the gibberish musings of a young girl. Words, I have since learned, are the medicine of the soul.

  After a second roll call later that day, Anne appeared again. She spoke of a rumor—a transport leaving Belsen in the immediate future. Of course, I’d heard the same, though my reaction was one of trepidation, not hope. Days earlier, U.S. forces had liberated a camp less than 200 miles south. It was rumored that the train would hold prisoners of value to be traded for German officials, if such bargaining became necessary. The prospect of defeat was overwhelming. I assured myself that we’d heard such things before and nothing had come of it.

  “It’s for the prisoners of Sternlager camp,” I’d said, eyeing the rash on Anne’s neck. “The healthiest among them.” Anyone could tell that a young girl with twiggy limbs and bloody scratches on her lice-bitten arms would make a poor trade for Axis officers.

  “But my father was a businessman in Holland. He had many important connections!”

  I felt certain that Anne would not survive such a journey. Her tired body could barely drag her into the hospital. Her chest quivered with effort. She had to stay here, with me, if she wanted to live. Only I could save her.

  She fell to her knees, crying, “The train is my last hope.”

  I pulled her upright, the effort fatiguing me beyond expectation. My stomach gave a cruel twist. I could not upset myself so. I remember thinking this, even as the floor arched beneath me. Despite my training, I denied the signs. Of course, typhus infects all, regardless of religion or status, but back then, I’d told myself it was a disease of the Jews.

  “Lillian, what’s wrong? You’re burning up!”

  “You’re a fine one to say that … you’re an oven yourself,” I said with a meager smile.

  I grabbed the desk edge and struggled to work the lock. My head throbbed. A thin stream of sweat dripped down my spine. Anne had it far worse. I pressed the last of the pills into her palm. “Take them.”

  She gave them back. “I will be fine. I will get on that train. You can get me on it, can’t you? Please, we’re friends, despite it all. I know you won’t deny it.”

  That word, friend, filled me with unexpected fury. “Shh!” I reprimanded, my eyes sweeping the mostly empty room, save for a comatose boy in the corner. There had been many deaths this morning. The place was near empty.

  “Please. Anywhere would be better than here, even if it’s on a train heading to nowhere.” She looked as if she herself were Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, weighing the future of my soul.

  “I have no say in the matter,” I said in a clipped tone. “Now take this food and eat it, or there will be no prayer for you at all.” I pushed the scant bowl of limp carrots from my lunch across the desk. I could not eat it now, anyway. It would only come up again.

  Anne did not so much as look at it. She turned around and hobbled out of the hospital.

  I did not see her again.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  MAYBE MY GRANDMOTHER WOULDN’T ADMIT THAT they’d been friends, but they had—as much as friendship could bloom in such a desolate place. But why couldn’t Oma have done more to help Anne? Why hadn’t she shared a little food and medicine with Margot? Most of all, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t put Anne on that train.

  I wiped the tears from my eyes and forced myself to keep reading. Oma, crazed with fever on the day of liberation, had ripped off her clothes and wandered onto the field with a crowd of sick and disoriented victims. The soldiers liberating the camp, without the clue of a uniform, mistook her for a prisoner. They set out to save her life.

  Her life, not Anne’s.

  Anne Frank had already died.

  The next chapter was a single paragraph.

  It was years later that I contemplated the true reason for keeping Anne with me. I wanted her to live for s
elfish reasons, as proof of my good heart. If she died, I feared God might inflict on me a horrendous and prolonged death—an end infinitely worse than any punishment man could invent. With Anne on my side, perhaps He would show His mercy. Perhaps I could even forgive myself one day.

  I lay down on the floor, gazing aimlessly at the wall. Disgust and sympathy knotted in my chest. From the article on the final transports out of Belsen, I knew that most of the passengers hadn’t survived the trip. Anne probably wouldn’t have, either. Even so, Oma should have put her on that train. It didn’t matter how much time she had left—weeks, days, hours, minutes—Oma had crushed Anne’s hope.

  Now, all these years later, the only thing left was a different disease that had warped Oma’s memories until she didn’t know who she was, persecutor or persecuted.

  I jumped at a knock on the door. The bruise on my back throbbed, flooding me with the memory of a barrel jammed into my spine. Instinctively, I searched for a hiding place, but when the grandfather clock chimed once, I came to my senses. It was only Officer Nidra, here to finish his report.

  I hid the manuscript behind the poem anthology on the shelf and went to the door. Officer Nidra followed me into my bedroom as I described the stolen laptop. I left him to explore the house on his own. A half hour later, he joined me in the kitchen. I kept my hands in my lap so he couldn’t see them shake.

  “This morning, my partner did what we call a Knock and Talk at the caregiver’s apartment.” He glanced at his notes. “Victoria Gregg.”

  I already knew what he was going to say. I’d looked through Vickie’s glass door this morning. Clothes were scattered on the floor, an open suitcase tossed beside the couch. She was gone.

  “I see in the notes that there was a damaged laptop on the floor,” he said. “Would you be able to tell if it belonged to your grandmother?”

  We headed outside, where I cupped my hands to Vickie’s door and peered through the break in the curtain. Finally I spotted Oma’s laptop in the trail of destruction that my grandmother’s caregiver had left behind.

  “That’s it,” I said, pointing. “Vickie and I were supposed to share it. She wasn’t allowed to take it out of my grandmother’s house.”

  “Did your grandmother make that clear?”

  “It’s in the contract.”

  I told him about the e-mail I’d read from Vickie’s boyfriend that could have bearing on the case. I was relieved when Officer Nidra didn’t ask me how I knew Vickie’s password. He just wrote down the nine-digit number while I summarized what Ryan had said. His eyebrows shot up when I mentioned the trip to Kauai over New Year’s.

  “The password might be a phone number, except it’s missing a digit,” I told him. “It could belong to Ryan. I think the first three digits are an area code from Michigan, which makes sense since Vickie said he lives in the Midwest.”

  “You’re a bit of a detective yourself,” he said with a smile.

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought.

  He eyed the dented top of the laptop. “I expect that the hard drive’s been compromised.” He gestured for me to follow him to the street, where he pointed to the left side of the garage. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  I stared at the graffiti, so small I wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t shown me. Someone had drawn a fist, surrounded by what looked to be half a wreath.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s an Aryan symbol for white power.”

  Seeing the Nazi image made everything feel more real, more terrifying. Suddenly I thought of the newspaper article that Franklin D. had shown me that time he’d brought over Dan’s translation. “Is this related to the swastikas on the synagogues?” I asked.

  “We’re investigating the possibility. We found a similar drawing at Temple Beth Sholom on 14th Avenue,” he said. “Unfortunately, well-intentioned neighbors covered the swastikas at the other locations before we could get there.”

  “Why did they target my grandmother’s home?” I asked, fishing for his theory.

  “We think they’re a fringe neo-Nazi group from the Midwest. They probably ran out of money. Senior citizens are prime targets for theft.”

  A weight slid off my shoulders. He saw this as a robbery, nothing more.

  “When we catch them, they’ll be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said. From the bite in his voice, I could tell he took the case personally.

  He glanced at the silver Honda Accord parked at the corner. A man sat in the driver’s seat, a magazine propped on the steering wheel. “We’ll continue to monitor the home for the next few days,” he told me. “Do you have somewhere to stay during the investigation? We’re going to put lockboxes on both these doors.”

  “Yeah, I live on Fillmore. With my mom, but she’s out of town, so I was taking care of my grandma.” Before he could ask anything I didn’t want to answer, I said, “Can I get my stuff out of the apartment before you lock it up?”

  He took my contact information, then waved me inside. I headed straight for the library and dropped to the floor, rummaging one last time through the scattered bills. This time, I spotted a birth certificate, issued in 1946, with some miscellaneous papers clipped to its back. Figuring it wouldn’t be important to the investigation, I took it with me to look at later. I collected my math book with the original journal pages and the photographs inside, along with Oma’s memoir, and left my grandmother’s house for good.

  The doctors had weaned Oma from the drugs that put her in a medically induced coma to help her brain heal.

  “She’s still unconscious, but her vital signs are stable,” the nurse said to me later that day in the waiting room, an optimistic lilt in her voice. “You can visit her anytime you want.”

  I shook my head.

  After she left, I pulled the memoir out of my bag. I’d reached the part about Oma’s engagement to an American soldier she’d met at the Displaced Persons Camp—my grandfather, Herbert.

  I knew that Bergen-Belsen prisoners, those who arrived via Auschwitz, had identification numbers. I also knew that after the wedding, I could no longer hide my arms behind prudish sleeves. The tattoo declared my love for my husband, while eliminating the blank slate of my flesh. Herbert was a kind and accepting man. He never questioned it. We were both happy to turn our backs on the war and start anew.

  But the happiness hadn’t lasted. My grandparents had an explosive relationship. Oma was a cold and distant mother. She couldn’t make friends. No one ever got to know my grandmother—how could they, when everything she told them was a lie?

  I wanted to stop reading. At the same time, I was hungry for the truth. I forced myself to start again at the beginning, combing through every word this time. It was my only chance to rise above the stranger status my grandmother afforded everyone else.

  From the start, Oma had turned a blind eye to what was happening to the Jews. She had watched dispassionately as a banker was dragged from his place of employment and shot in front of a crowd. The next day, her unemployed father took over the man’s vacant position. The family celebrated as if he’d deserved the new job.

  Then came Kristallnacht, “Night of Broken Glass,” when more than seven thousand Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues were destroyed. We thought the Jews had squeezed us, Oma wrote in the memoir. We wanted them to return the wealth. Oma saw to this by making a feast for her brother and father—potatoes, sauerkraut, and boiled chicken that she’d stolen from the back room of a Jewish market, to which her father said, “You see? They keep all the best things for themselves.”

  Oma never questioned anything, even as she watched her neighbors being carted off in police buses. All she knew was that Hitler promised a better world with the Jews gone. As far as her family was concerned, the proof was immediate and undeniable.

  When Oma’s brother became a fighter pilot, she wanted to make her family proud, too. She wasn’t interested in the traditional role of wife and mother, so she signed up for nurse’s t
raining at a women’s concentration camp in northern Germany.

  My stomach rebelled as I read about the lavish meals my grandmother shared with Nazi officers while the prisoners around her grew more skeletal.

  Later, Oma was transferred to Auschwitz, where she worked as an assistant to Dr. Mengele, a notorious criminal famous for his “medical experiments” on live patients. I skipped through gruesome details of sterilization experiments on women. Yes, it took guts for her to admit to such horrors on paper, but in the end, she’d withdrawn the manuscript.

  When I got to the part where Oma left Auschwitz for Bergen-Belsen, I put the manuscript down. I needed a break. I walked the two miles back to my apartment, hoping the scenery would stamp out Oma’s words. When I reached Fillmore Street, the sun was gone. The apartment was as cold inside as it was outside. I cranked up the heat and burrowed under a blanket on the couch, thinking about the ways Oma and I were similar. We both craved order to feel secure. We both were quick to judge. But Oma had been a Nazi, and that, by itself, made me feel ashamed of every last thing I had in common with her.

  My phone chirped. It was another text from Franklin D. to add to the archive of messages he’d sent in the past six hours. I couldn’t face him yet. I’d give him an update soon, but for now, I flipped my phone facedown.

  The memoir, I urged myself. Don’t stop now or you’ll never go back.

  I had reached the part where Oma connected The Diary of Anne Frank with the girl she’d known at Bergen-Belsen. She became obsessed with every detail of Anne’s short life, attending plays, a movie premiere, even traveling to Ireland to watch the premiere choral performance of Annelies, which I hadn’t known was Anne’s formal birth name.

  Ireland, 2005. Something about that trip tugged at my mind, begging for attention. I strolled mindlessly into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, then wandered back to the couch. Finally it came to me. Oma would have needed a passport to get to Ireland. But before she could get a passport, she’d need a birth certificate.