The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  They bounced along over deep ruts in an unpaved road for almost an hour. Finally the truck came to a stop in front of an unimpressive frame structure behind a patch of weedy brown grass. The only indication that the building was up to anything official was an American flag on a tall pole in the scruffy yard. It whipped and snapped overhead as they filed out of the bus, up a path, and into the lobby, which was small, with a stained linoleum floor, peeling green paint, and several spittoons. A man in a shabby green suit that matched the walls and a battered hat told them to wait until their names were called. There were no benches or chairs in the lobby. A few of the men leaned against the walls or squatted on their haunches, but most of them stood, not at attention but erect. They weren’t that far from their German boyhoods. They knew, or suspected, what was ahead. You didn’t slouch or squat on an occasion like this.

  Only four of them were left when David heard his name called. He went through the door the other men had entered and exited by. A clerk in an Army uniform sat behind a desk piled with papers. Without rising, the man handed David a card and told him to read it. “Loud and clear, soldier. I want to hear every word.”

  David began to read. “I hereby declare under oath … renounce any allegiance…” His voice grew louder. “… to any foreign state … that I will support and defend the Constitution…” And so on to the end.

  The clerk took the card back, stamped a piece of paper on his desk, and handed it to David. “Congratulations, soldier. You are now a citizen of the United States of America.”

  All the way back to camp, as the truck bumped over the rutted road, he tried to figure out what he felt. Relief, certainly. Pride, yes. Maybe a childish gleeful thumbing of his nose at his former country or at least at the people who had taken it over. But some small, ineffable sadness kept tugging at his consciousness. He felt as if a part of him was gone forever. Good riddance, he told himself and whistled an American song under his breath. Nothing patriotic and corny like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which was too hard to whistle anyway, or “America the Beautiful,” just some popular melody the way Artie Shaw and his band played it. The music wouldn’t sound the same anywhere else in the world.

  * * *

  He graduated from the camp with flying colors and then some. He didn’t tell Millie about the then some. He knew she’d never forgive him. He couldn’t even tell her about Camp Ritchie. The top secret designation of the camp was drilled into everyone who passed through it. After the war, he’d learn the only installation that had been more hush-hush was the Manhattan Project.

  In no time at all he managed to forget Captain Krantz, though eighteen months later, when interrogating a prisoner whom he remembered from the days when they were both at Gymnasium—the man, who’d been two years ahead, didn’t recognize David—he thought of Krantz again and just how wrong he’d been. With talk of rugby, offers of cigarettes, and other friendly overtures, he managed to extract some useful information about enemy positions that the prisoner didn’t even realize he was giving.

  * * *

  At Camp Ritchie, David had been trained in intelligence work, schooled in secrecy, and conditioned never to let down his guard. But in one regard, he allowed his wariness to flag. Living among Jews, he’d forgotten what it was like to be a Jew in the outside world. The incident at the ski lodge on his last and only weekend leave before he was to ship out reminded him.

  Millie, who’d graduated from Bryn Mawr the previous June, gone to work as a fact-checker at Russ Bennett’s magazine, and was living in an apartment with two girls from school who’d also gotten jobs in Philadelphia, had assumed she and David would spend his weekend leave at the Bennetts’ house in Ardmore, but Russ Bennett came up with another idea. He suggested a ski lodge in Vermont. He wasn’t being irresponsible, he said. He hadn’t forgotten about gas rationing. But since he had to take a swing through New England on business, and since four in the car didn’t consume more fuel than one, it was almost their patriotic duty to send their soldier off with a bang.

  They were in luck. When they arrived Friday evening, the snow, which had fallen all day, was just tapering off. There would be fresh powder for the weekend.

  David and Millie were out early the next morning. As she followed him down the slope, much as she used to follow her cousin Anna on family holidays in Austria and Switzerland, she was grateful once again to Russ Bennett. At first, she’d thought his suggestion of a ski weekend strange, almost frivolous. Now she realized it was wise. They couldn’t escape the specter of David’s imminent departure, but with the wind stinging their faces, the powdery slopes racing up to meet them, and their minds focused on controlling their bodies, they could outrun the dread for moments at a time.

  The incident occurred as they were heading back to the lodge late in the afternoon. At first neither of them made anything of it. It had taken David a moment even to recognize the boy getting off the lift ahead of them who said hello. Then he remembered he’d been in the form behind him in boarding school. David hadn’t thought much of him one way or another. Boys rarely did of younger boys unless they were pests or admirers. And he’d had enough to worry about with the boys in his own form. He returned the boy’s greeting and kept going.

  He and Millie were slow taking off their skis and boots. They kept groaning about muscles they hadn’t used in years, teasing each other about who’d done better on the slopes, and trying to hang on to the moment they both sensed slipping through their fingers. As they made their way through the lobby, David noticed the boy from school and a man who looked enough like him to suggest a family relationship in a huddle with the manager. A little while later, when they were sitting with the Bennetts in the lounge with the huge stone fireplace, the manager came over, bent close to Russ, and asked if he could speak to him for a moment. Russ followed him out of the lounge. He was back in minutes, his face red, whether from the effects of the sun on the slopes or the warmth of the fire or anger was hard to tell.

  “How soon can everyone be packed?” He was speaking to the three of them but loud enough for his voice to carry. He wanted the other guests to hear, though as he said later, he knew they wouldn’t care. They’d probably be relieved.

  “I blame myself,” Russ said when they were in the car on the way to a hotel where they’d spend the night before heading home the next day. “I should have known the damn place was restricted.”

  “How could you?” Millie asked. “You never had to think about it.”

  “That’s just the point,” Lydia said, her long upper lip growing longer with indignation. “We should have thought about it. Not paying attention is no excuse. Not paying attention just encourages the practice.”

  “You could have stayed,” David said, though they all knew that was the last thing they would have done. “Millie and I could have gone to the hotel and met you tomorrow.”

  “We all could have stayed,” Russ said. “That’s the beautiful irony of it. The bastard, excuse me, ladies, the manager said the lodge did not permit Jewish guests, but since you were with us, and since, get this, you didn’t seem typical, he’d make an exception just this once. Didn’t seem typical! What the hell did he expect, horns?”

  “And a tail,” David said, but he was thinking that in preparing him for new tests, Camp Ritchie had undermined his old vigilance.

  * * *

  The following Monday, Millie went to the 30th Street Station to see David off. She’d known saying goodbye would be agony. She hadn’t expected the other pain, the one that came flooding back. The sunshine streaming through the tall windows was the same heartless light that had poured into the Anhalter Bahnhof that day. The tattoo of her heels on the marble floor as they made their way across the vast art deco waiting room echoed the sound of her mother’s high heels.

  He hadn’t wanted her to come to the station with him. “It’ll be crowded with people saying goodbye,” he warned.

  “Then we’ll be in good company,” she answered.

  “Y
ou have to promise you won’t cry.”

  You have to promise you’ll come back, she wanted to say but managed not to. “No tears,” she swore, “or maybe only a few so you don’t think I’m hard-hearted.”

  A disembodied voice announcing the train and track number boomed out over the waiting room and bounced off the travertine marble walls and red and gold coffered ceiling. He hefted his duffel. She tightened her jaw against the tears she’d promised not to shed. A flood of men in uniform and wives and girlfriends and parents and children began flowing down the steps to the track.

  They stood facing each other on the drafty platform waiting for the train to come in.

  “Take care of yourself, Mil.”

  “I’m supposed to take care of myself? Is that what passes for humor these days?”

  Over his shoulder, she could see the train approaching.

  “I wish to hell you weren’t going.” She hadn’t meant to say it, though she’d known she would.

  “We’ve been through this.”

  They had, again and again and again. He’d told her that it was his fight, and if he didn’t do it, who would. He’d catalogued the insanity and cruelty and injustice that had to be stopped. He’d explained that he was fighting for her too, and for their mother and father and Sarah. The sooner they beat Hitler, the sooner the family would be reunited. There was only one thing he neglected to tell her. It was the then some of his record at Camp Ritchie. He’d done so well, despite Captain Krantz, that they’d asked him to stay on as an instructor. He could have fought Hitler from the safety of a Maryland training camp. There were even those who insisted he’d be more effective there. What was one soldier with an axe to grind against the hundreds he could arm with useful skills? Only he couldn’t have fought Hitler from the safety of a stateside camp. Not really. Not the way he wanted to. But he knew he could never persuade her of that.

  Fourteen

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?” Millie said on her way out of Harry Sutton’s office. She’d been thinking about it since their drink in the officers’ club.

  “I’m an open book.”

  “How did Hans Sutheim end up in the States rather than England? In view of his English mother.”

  “No English family. That’s why she became a nanny. I suppose she would have preferred a Brit Kindertransport, but we couldn’t afford to be choosy.”

  “When was that?”

  “Early. Thirty-four. Right after they murdered my father. There were no official Kindertransports yet, but she saw the bloody writing on the wall. She’d seen it before, but my father had refused to read it. Or maybe he read it and was determined to stay and fight it.”

  She thought of her parents’ discussions that she’d eavesdropped on through the heat register.

  “What happened when you got to the States?” She was thinking of Theo standing all spit and polish in front of his carefully made bed being passed over again and again.

  “You really want to hear the saga of little Hans Sutheim?”

  She crossed his office and sat in one of the chairs on the other side of his desk. “That’s why I asked.”

  He leaned back, put his feet up, and looked at her over them. “The usual for kids who were brought over without their parents by charity groups. I was taken in by a family in New Jersey.”

  So he’d been almost as lucky as she had.

  “Newark, to be exact. They had four daughters and wanted a son, or at least a boy on the premises. Two months after they took me in, the father lost his job. He was a bookkeeper, though I don’t remember where. Funny how much I’ve forgotten. Or repressed. Anyway, there were those four girls to feed, not to mention mom and pop. The money they got for me helped, but not enough, so they had to return me, so to speak. You can’t blame them. I don’t. Even then, I didn’t. Besides, I was lucky. The agency found another family for me right away.”

  She was glad Theo hadn’t heard this story.

  “This time I was the one who got fired—with cause I hasten to add. The father was a rabbi. Orthodox. It wasn’t easy following all the rules—hell, I didn’t even know most of them when I got there—but I learned pretty quickly. Every morning I prayed with the father and the two sons and thanked God for not making me a woman.”

  “What?”

  He grinned. “I see you don’t know the drill, either. That’s the way an observant Jewish man begins his day. ‘Blessed art thou, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, who has not created me a woman.’”

  She shook her head, not in surprise but in recognition. “I suppose the sentiment is common to most faiths, but trust our coreligionists to codify it in daily prayer.”

  “I also went to synagogue with them and sat downstairs with those fortunate men,” he went on. “When I put the bottle of milk back in the refrigerator, it never got near the meat shelf. I was good as bloody gold on their turf, but when I wasn’t on their turf, I figured I could live by my own rules. That was what got me in trouble. One day on the way home from school, I heard the siren call of a White Castle. While I was sitting at the counter enjoying a forbidden cheeseburger, bought, I might add, with the money I earned as a delivery boy for a drugstore, one of the sons I prayed with every morning walked past and, since the place was off-limits to him too, couldn’t resist looking through the window. By the time I got back to the house, my bag was standing outside the front door. They wouldn’t even let me in. Didn’t want me sullying the premises, I imagine. After that I kicked around with another family for almost a year. Then I turned eighteen and got really lucky. I’m not being ironic. The Depression was still around, but somehow I managed to find enough jobs to work my way through City College.”

  “City College? Theo said you went to Harvard.”

  He laughed. “That’s the accent. Wallach tends to jump to conclusions. Witness the beating up of the guard.”

  “He didn’t jump to conclusions. The man had been a camp guard. Anna spotted him.”

  “You’re right. He had been. But a few weeks earlier a bunch of DPs beat the hell out of another man in another black market. That incident turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Wallach was just lucky his wasn’t.”

  He took his feet off the desk and sat up in the swivel chair. “Now get back to work, Captain. If you don’t have enough Fragebogen, I can have Fraulein Schmidt find you some more.”

  She stood, gave him a mock salute, and managed not to smile until she was out of his office. She’d never seen him embarrassed before.

  * * *

  There was another aspect of Harry Sutton’s past she wondered about, but you didn’t go around asking a man how he’d lost a couple of fingers. It wasn’t an arm or a leg, but you still didn’t inquire. Asking nothing was the unwritten rule around men who had seen action. And if someone was foolish or insensitive enough to pry, the men never answered. Like David when she’d questioned him about the two buddies in the snapshot he kept in his mirror. The men might talk among themselves, but never to people who hadn’t gone through it. Never to outsiders. More than once she’d wandered into an office where Theo or Werner or Jack or some of the other officers were talking, and they’d suddenly fallen silent. At first she’d taken it personally. Then she’d realized it had nothing to do with her. Or rather in a way it did. It had to do with their own nightmares, but it had to do also with protecting her and all the others who hadn’t been there. Mary Jo, the nurse she’d met in the PX with whom she occasionally had dinner or went to a movie, had told her about a patient for whom she wrote letters. His hands had been badly burned and he was undergoing skin grafts. His wife had asked in a letter if he’d ever killed a German. “No,” he’d dictated to Mary Jo as she wrote. “I always aimed above their heads.”

  The idea was to keep the innocents innocent. She never would have learned about the two buddies in the snapshot with David if the officer from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps hadn’t come to the apartment to question him. She wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. She�
�d left them alone in the parlor and taken the letters she’d been writing into the dining room to finish. But they hadn’t pulled the doors closed, and she couldn’t help hearing. The JAG officer had a loud voice. Once or twice, when David’s voice dropped to a hush, the officer asked him to repeat his answer.

  “I see from your file,” the JAG officer began, “that you were the man who brought in that I.G. Farben director at gunpoint.”

  “I wasn’t playing cops and robbers. The man seemed to think we were paying a social call. Sat there in his damn library, puffing on a cigar, drinking brandy, and dropping the names of his friends in high places in American business. He even offered us brandy. When I told him we were there to escort him to headquarters, he said he preferred not to go. I said he didn’t have a choice. He insisted he was an old man and couldn’t possibly leave his house at that hour in the rain. My service pistol seemed the only way to persuade him he could.”

  She heard the JAG officer laugh.

  “That’s not what you came here to question me about,” David said.

  “No. I just thought it was a good story.”

  “Or a way to oil the interrogation wheels.”

  “I’m not the enemy, Captain.”

  David didn’t say anything to that.

  “You interrogated a Corporal Heinrich Kropp when he was taken prisoner. Is that correct?”

  “You’ve got the report there,” David said.

  “I’m corroborating it, as I’m sure you understand.”

  “I interrogated Kropp,” David admitted.

  “The first time he was taken prisoner or the second?”

  “The second.”

  “Do you know who interviewed him the first time he was taken prisoner?”

  “Lieutenants Blau and Meyer. We were all lieutenants then.”