Love and Treasure (6 page)

“Louse?” Jack said.

“It’s what she calls the children,” the man with the makeshift canes
said softly, also in German. Jack saw now that he was not elderly at all. He was hardly more than a boy himself. But his face was gray and creased, and he was missing most of his teeth.

“Take them away!” Maria said to Jack.

Jack kept his temper, and turned to the ruined young man. “She called you a
KZler
?”

“Buchenwald.”

Jack asked the young man if it was true, what Maria had said about him and the boys trying to move into the room.

“You are calling me liar?” Maria said, shouting again.

“Silence,” Jack said, his voice soft but clear. Maria folded her arms over her chest and glared, pressing her lips into a thin white line.

The man said, “I lived in this room with six others from Buchenwald, but when I received word, four days ago, that my nephews had been found in Vienna, I went there, to fetch them. When I returned, I found the other men who shared this room gone. These two had taken their place. I have asked for another room. The administrator says there is none to be had. He says that since there are now only these two, the room can also accommodate me and the boys. These gentlemen have other ideas.” The man struggled with his canes, trying to turn around without falling. “In any case, I am fully prepared to deny myself the pleasure of their company.” He turned to Maria. “Find me another place, and we will go.”

Maria smiled. “You go,” she said. “The American will take care of you.” She called something out to the two men at the back.

“Where are you from?” Jack asked Maria.

“Ukraine,” she said.

“And your friends? They’re from the Ukraine, too?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing in Salzburg? How did you end up here?”

Maria’s smile faded. “Forced labor,” she said.

“Liar.” The voice, harsh and angry, came from the doorway, and Jack knew before he turned around who had spoken.

“You are looking for me?” the redheaded woman asked Jack, in English.

“This one!” Maria said. “Take this one away! Put in prison where she belong!”

Jack ignored her. “What’s going on here?” he said to the redhead, in English.

“Maria is
Kapo
of this stairway. While this gentleman was away, she evicted the other Jews from this apartment and turned it over to her friends. People are afraid of her, so they do what she says. For some reason, this gentleman seems less afraid than most.”

“You called her a liar,” Jack said. “Are you saying she wasn’t a forced laborer?”

“Perhaps she was. Perhaps the women here who survived Ravensbrück, and say this lady was a guard there, are mistaken.”

Maria caught the name, and her face fell. “No!” she said in German. “Not Ravensbrück! Forced labor! I am prisoner, too.”

“What is Ravensbrück?” Jack asked.

“A camp in northern Germany,” the redheaded woman said. “For women only.”

By the time the war had ended, it was as though someone had picked up the crazy quilt of Europe by its corner and shaken it, sending people tumbling to all ends of the continent. There were millions of forced and slave laborers conscripted from Poland and Russia, Denmark and Holland, from every corner of the Third Reich’s empire. Joining in these streams of humanity winding through the rubble left from the war were anti-Communist eastern Europeans fleeing the advancing Russian army, hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians forced by Hitler’s armies to evacuate rather than surrender to the advancing enemy, and Volksdeutschen, the ethnic Germans who had celebrated Hitler’s invasion of their countries and eagerly assumed dominion over their neighbors and who now abandoned their homes in fear of reprisal. Former concentration camp prisoners constituted only a very small fraction of the humanity packed into the DP camps, and in and among them hid concentration camp guards like Maria, trying to sneak back home before their crimes came to light.

“If it’s true, why hasn’t she been denounced?” Jack asked.

“She has. More than once. But your military government, they like her. She is disciplined. Efficient. She keeps the others in line.”

He turned to Maria. “Where is your room?”

“Ach! Never mind,” Maria said, her voice saccharin sweet. “No problem. They stay. We go.”

Casually, without menace, Jack shifted his body to block the door.

“She lives on the ground floor,” said the redhead. “Behind the staircase.”

“That’ll do,” he said.

He called the GIs in and ordered them to help the crippled man and the two small boys down the stairs. He took Maria by the arm and frogmarched her down ahead of him. She refused to unlock the door of her apartment, but he saw the key tied to a loop on the webbed military belt that she wore where her waist would have been, had she had one. With a snap of his wrist he yanked the key free and unlocked the door himself. This room, unlike any of the others, still had its hotel furniture. Two large beds made up with actual sheets, even pillows, a dresser missing only one drawer, a cupboard, a table and two chairs, even a scrap of carpet.

By the time the GIs showed up with the crippled man and his nephews, Jack had tossed all of Maria’s belongings—her clothes and her stacks of linens and blankets, her extra boots and her packages of soaps and cans of kerosene, her sacks of potatoes and flour, her side of cured meat, her cooking pots and dishes—out into the hall. He left the beds, complete with their linens, the dresser and the cupboard, the table and the two chairs.

“This is your room now,” he said, handing the key to the young man from Buchenwald. Jack slung the sack of C rations he carried onto the floor, opened it, pulled out half of what he’d brought, and dumped it on the bed. Maria stood in the hallway kneading her skirt in her hands, keening bitterly.

The man hesitated, but the boys ran into the room. The smaller one threw himself onto the bed and rolled on it like it was the first fresh snowfall of the winter.

“They will punish me,” the man said. “As soon as you leave.”

Jack pointed at the GIs. “These men will protect you.” To the soldiers he said, “These three are now your responsibility. Anything happens to them, and you’ll have to answer to me. Got that?”

“Yes, sir,” said the Southerner. He then winked solemnly at the older boy, who tried out a tentative smile.

Out in the hall, Jack picked up the largest of Maria’s bundles.

“Come,” he said to her, but she buried her face in her hands.

“Help me carry her things up to her new room,” he told the GIs. Jack took the steps two at a time. When he reached the fourth floor he saw that the Ukrainians had closed and locked their door. Jack, his arms full, kicked at the door with his heavy boot. When they did not immediately open it, he kicked it again, and it splintered around the lock. He
nudged it open the rest of the way, now with the toe of his boot, and handed Maria’s bundle to one of the startled Ukrainians. On his way back down the stairs, he passed the GIs each with a sack of potatoes over his shoulder.

“Old Maria’s losing her mind down there,” the Southerner said.

The redhead sat one step up from the bottom, chin in hands, watching with cool fascination as Maria muttered dark syllables in her sinuous mother tongue, weeping and furious.

“She says she will go to the senior camp administrator,” the redhead said. “She will report you to the military police.”

“Good,” Jack said. “Tell me. What’s your name?”

“Ilona. Surname Jakab.” Ilona Jakab looked at the bundles of food and clothes piled on the floor around Maria and said, amused but without apparent rancor, “She has done well for herself.”

“If you like,” Jack told Maria, in German, “I will post a guard outside the door to your new room, to protect your possessions until you return with the camp administrator and the military police. At that time, we can discuss in more detail your grievances and in particular your experiences as a forced laborer, which I have no doubt were terribly painful.”

Maria howled something, scooped up a blanket and a basket of apples, and ran up the stairs, her U.S. Army leather and rubber shoepacs thudding on the slick wooden treads.

Ilona glanced after her and nodded, a satisfied smile crossing her face for an instant. Jack flushed, gratified at the implied compliment.

She stood up, brushed the grime of the step from the back of her skirt. She began to walk out the door, and as she passed him Jack reached out a hand, hesitating before he touched her arm. She looked back but did not stop, and he followed her out into the bustling hotel courtyard.

“Wait,” he said. He pushed the sack in her direction. “I brought these for you.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why. Why do you bring me a present?”

“It’s not a present. It’s food.”

“So why do you bring me food?”

“Because you look hungry. Are you?”

“Am I hungry?”

“Yes.”

She considered the question. “I am always hungry.”

“I heard on Rot-Weiss-Rot this morning that the bakeries have started making rolls and croissants again. Would you like to go get some fresh bread?”

She shook her head. “I think we have had enough excitement for today.”

“How about I go get some for you?”

“Another day, perhaps. I am tired now.”

“Of course,” he said. Resilient as she seemed, she must tire easily. She had, after all, only just begun to recover from the hell of her life over the past months or years.

She put out her hand, and he shook it. Her palm was cool and dry, despite the heat of the day, but it felt swollen, the knuckles red, the nail of her right thumb cracked down the middle.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Wait,” he said, keeping hold of her hand. “Is there anything you need? Can I help you with anything?”

She pondered this question for a moment. Then, instead of answering, she said, “You know my name, but I do not know yours.”

“Wiseman Jack,” Jack said.

She laughed. “You answer like a Hungarian.”

“Yes.”

“But you are not Hungarian. Your family, I mean.”

“No. My mother’s parents came from Russia, my father’s great-grandparents from Germany.”

“But Wiseman Jack, you are a Jew, no?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am a Jew.”

“So this is why you helped the Jewish man and his nephews.”

“Yes. I mean, no. Anyone would have helped.”

She laughed darkly. “You are a funny man.”

“No, I’m not.”

She sized him up with a single, raised brow. “Perhaps not. And yet you make jokes.”

“I really don’t.”

“To say anyone would help is a joke. No one helps. No one ever helped.”

“No. I guess not.” He bit his lip. “Please.”

“What?”

“Please. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“What is it you want to do?”

He stared, flummoxed. He had no idea.

She gave him a reprieve. “Thank you, Jack Wiseman. If ever I need anything, I will come to you.”

•
4
•

JACK SHARED HIS BILLET
in an apartment house off the Hoftsallgasse with two other officers, Phillip Hoyle, a lieutenant fresh out of West Point, and another named David Ball, who did something in the OSS about which Jack was careful never to ask. Ball was from Philadelphia, a gawky man with beautiful hands and long, delicate fingers who planned after his service to disappoint his mother’s dreams of his career as a concert pianist and instead go to medical school. Ball’s brief was mysterious and his movements furtive, but part of his duties, Jack knew, included the pursuit and apprehension of former members of the local Nazi Party. One day about two weeks after the incident with Maria, Ball was sent to arrest the former mayor of a small village about twenty miles from Salzburg. The burgomaster’s wife, tipped off to the Americans’ arrival, had hung signs in English throughout her home that read
WIPE YOUR FEET
and
NOT TO TOUCH.

“I wouldn’t even have bothered with a search of the house,” Ball said, “if it weren’t for those damned signs.”

It was beneath a floorboard in the kitchen that Ball’s soldiers found the steel box that now lay on the rickety table in the kitchen of their billet.

“Jesus,” said Hoyle. Neither Ball nor Jack liked Hoyle, though Jack’s loathing was more pronounced, stemming as much from the fact that Hoyle had served in battle not a second longer than it took to earn a dubious Distinguished Service Cross before being pulled back to protect his valuable brass hide, as from the twenty-two-year-old West Pointer’s greedy and craven nature.

“What are you going to do with it all?” Jack said.

It was a record, written in food, of the advance of Hitler’s armies across Europe: tins of potted French foie gras, packets of Dutch chocolate, Spanish sardines canned in oil.

“Eat it, of course, you fucking idiot,” Hoyle said. “Foie gras, Jesus Christ!” He took his knife from his pocket and picked up a can, but Ball lifted a restraining hand.

“No. It’s evidence, Hoyle.”

“Then what’d you bring it here for?”

“It was a moment of weakness. But seeing you salivating over it has brought me to my senses.”

“If you take it back, some corporal in the evidence room is just going to boost it.”

“True enough,” Ball said, looking like he might be on the verge of another moment of weakness.

“I know what to do with it,” Jack said.

“He’s going to take it to that red Jewess of his,” Hoyle said.

“I’ve seen the lady,” Ball said. “She could stand to put a little meat on her bones.”

Jack carried the strongbox down to the Hotel Europa, self-conscious at the value of his burden in a city undergoing ever-increasing food shortages. For weeks now, he had been bringing bread and C rations, cans of Spam, margarine, and other nutrient-dense items to Ilona and to the young man from Buchenwald, whose name was Rudolph Zweig. Jack sweetened his packages with chocolate and hard candies for Zweig’s nephews, Josef and Tomas. Rudolph expressed his gratitude so fervently that he made Jack uncomfortable. His eyes were often wet with tears when he opened the boxes and bags, and once he tried to kiss Jack’s hand. Ilona greeted his deliveries with reluctance and skepticism, even verging at times on an outright irritability (“You again?”) that he found amusing and much easier to tolerate than Rudolph’s damp hand-kissing.