Remembering Dresden (Jack Turner Suspense Series Book 2) (8 page)

Jack had begun learning Muay Thai nine months ago, about three months after Nigel Avery had tried to kill him. It had taken that long for Jack’s gunshot wound to heal up to where he could work out without pain. During that ordeal, Jack realized how helpless and defenseless he truly was. He’d never thought about owning a gun. And he was 100% sure he couldn’t properly defend himself in a fistfight. He’d be knocked out in the first ten seconds.

Neither of those things were true of him now.

In Muay Thai, Jack was still considered a novice, but he felt reasonably sure he already knew enough to adequately defend himself. And with the help of Sergeant Joe Boyd, the police detective who’d saved his life, Jack now owned a 9mm Glock and a concealed weapons permit. The gun made Rachel a little nervous, but considering what they had been through, she completely understood.

Jack finished with his stretches, then moved into his stance and started shadow boxing, working on his footwork then his basic punches. After several minutes, he added in some elbow strikes and knee kicks. It had been awhile since Jack pretended he was whopping on Nigel Avery during his workout. When he’d first started, he imagined beating the crap out of Avery every time. Eventually, the reality that Avery was dead and could never hurt Jack again took hold, and he was able to let it go.

But he knew, he never wanted to feel that helpless again.

After thirty minutes, Jack finished his workout and headed inside for a shower. As he got dressed, he noticed the time. There really wasn’t enough time to dig in and do more research. Not with Rachel coming for dinner. Sizing up the kinds of food he had brought with him, sometime in the next hour or so he really needed to head down to the store and buy a few things. He walked over to the dinette table and began carefully placing everything he’d spread out back into the plastic container. They needed to eat on this table in a couple of hours.

The last thing he picked up was the one fiction book he’d brought along, a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel,
Slaughterhouse Five
. Jack had read it many years ago but thought, in light of his decision to pursue the Dresden bombing for his dissertation, it might be a good idea to read it again. It wasn’t exactly a war novel and not exactly about Dresden. Vonnegut had elected to depict the Dresden bombing, which he experienced firsthand as a POW, in bits and pieces throughout a unique, if not bizarre, sci-fi story about a guy named Billy Pilgrim who gets “unstuck” in time. One of the scenes Pilgrim keeps revisiting is the bombing and aftermath of Dresden.

Jack walked the novel over to the recliner and sat down. It was pretty dog-eared and the pages had yellowed, but it wasn’t falling apart. He started to read the back cover when his eyes glanced above the book toward one of the two bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. People’s bookshelves had always fascinated him. You could tell a lot about a person by the books they kept in their personal bookcases. Of course with his generation and the ones coming up behind him, it was something of a dying art. Nowadays, people could store several bookcases, even entire libraries on their tablets.

Jack set the novel down on the armrest and stood. His head tilted and his eyes began to roam slowly across the top shelves, taking in the titles. Interesting. As he’d noticed before, most of them were hardbacks. Quite a few books about World War II. Some about the aftermath of the war, the creation of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War era with the Soviets. In some of the middle shelves, Jack noticed several books weren’t written in English. Some were in Spanish. Quite a few were in German. Judging by the age of the collection, Jack guessed the books were put here by old man Wagner, not the son.

He was about to pull out a few then paused. The dad had been dead for years, but Jack had no idea what the son was like. The Senator. Was he the kind of guy that would notice if someone had been fiddling with his father’s books? Maybe, maybe not. He had rented the place out to Jack. He knew it was for a month. He had plenty of time to come in and take out anything he considered too personal for rental guests to see.

Jack looked down at the bottom shelves. Wasn’t that his answer? How much could the son care about privacy if he’d left family photo albums on the shelves? Jack wouldn’t even do something like that. And hadn’t Mr. Bass said that The Senator hardly ever came out here anymore?

Jack walked back to the dinette table and picked up his phone. Just to be on the safe side, he decided to take pictures of the books in place first. Then he wouldn’t have to worry one way or the other about getting them back in their proper place.

After finishing that task, he started thinking more about old man Wagner and his son, the Senator. He suddenly didn’t care so much about thumbing through all those first edition hardbacks. Squatting down, he pulled out one of the photo albums. There were just two. Not a matched set. The one he pulled out, judging by its condition, looked to be the oldest.

He straightened up and walked backwards holding it in his hands. Suddenly, his right heel banged into the edge of one of the floorboards. Fortunately, he was shuffling his feet slowly or that could’ve hurt more than it did. He bent down and rubbed his heel, then looked at the cause of his pain. Sure enough, the floorboard was slightly higher than the ones around it. Looking at it more closely, it seemed a slightly different shade than the other boards, too.

He’d have to watch out for that one, at least until he brought the rug back in from airing out.

He stood, stepped over the board and plopped into the recliner. He was just about to open the photo album when he remembered the time. He still needed to run down to the store and get some things for his dinner with Rachel. Pulling out his phone, he checked the time, then smiled.

He had a good thirty minutes before he needed to leave for the store. Knowing how quickly he could get lost once he opened the album, he tapped his alarm app and hit a thirty minute pre-set button he used quite often.

Then he sat back and carefully opened the first page. The pages were made of thin black paper and so brittle. All the pictures on the first page were very small and all were black and white.

The first thing Jack noticed about the pictures was that they were all children. They appeared to be elementary school-age. A few girls but mostly boys. The boys’ haircuts were short and choppy. The girls wore braided pigtails. They were of differing heights but all looked uniformly thin, gaunt even. None of the children smiled in any of the pictures. If anything, they looked worried. The word pensive came to mind.

The next thing he noticed was how dirty and dingy the scenery was. Granted, the pictures were all black and white, but it was more than that. The roads were grimy and dirty. He saw no trees or bushes, certainly no flowers. There appeared to be no sunshine reflecting on anyone’s faces. In every photo gray, cloudless skies.

He wondered when and where they were taken. No obvious clues from the pics themselves. His first guess was the 1940s or 50s. Then again, judging by the apparent poverty, it could be from the 1930s, during the Great Depression.

Carefully turning the page revealed much the same thing on pages two and three. More pictures of children looking poor and disheveled. They weren’t playing with games or toys. If anything, they were standing around or else doing chores. In several pictures, some children pulled and others pushed what looked like a handmade wooden wagon filled with scrap metal. One showed two boys sweeping a concrete floor. Another showed four boys filling up burlap bags with rocks—or were they potatoes—picking them up by hand. The odd thing was, Jack didn’t see any parents or grandparents in any of the pictures.

Whenever he looked at their old family photo albums, they were mostly filled with adults, posing. Relatives from every branch of the family tree. Kids might be in a few of them, but not every one. If they were, they were smiling. Everybody smiled. Even in pics Jack had seen taken in the black-and-white era.

But no one smiled in these. What had they gone through and what were they still going through when these pictures were taken that could take away all of these children’s smiles?

Another thing Jack remembered from his family’s old photo albums was that people often wrote things on the back. The pics were usually glued to the paper, the corners tucked into little tabs. But over the years, some would break loose. He turned another page and saw that one had broken free and was tucked into the center crease. He lifted it out and looked at the front.

Finally, an adult. Two in fact. Both women. They were dishing out watery soup from a tall silvery kettle to a line of anxious children all holding little white bowls. A few children in the foreground sat at a wooden table spooning away. Were these the same children that were in the first three pages? Jack wasn’t sure.

He turned the photograph over and read the words:

Das bin ich, das dritte Kind in der Schlange. Ich vergesse , der das Foto nahm. Vielleicht 6 Monate nach der ich eine Waise. Alle in diesem Foto sind Waisen.

Okay, he didn’t expect that. Looked like German, which likely meant the date in the picture wasn’t during The Depression, after all. It was more likely in Germany after World War II. Rachel had taken German in college, but he wasn’t sure how fluent she was and didn’t want to bother her with this. Then he remembered Google Translate. Rachel had told him it wasn’t always accurate but you could often get the general idea of something using it.

Bringing the photo to his laptop, he opened the program, selected German and typed the words into the left box exactly as they appeared. As he did, these words appeared on the right box in English:

That's me, the third child in line. I forget who took the photo. Maybe 6 months after I become an orphan. All in this photo are orphans.

Jack turned the photo over and focused on the third child in the soup line. It was hard to tell his age. Maybe eight, maybe ten. He had light brown hair, parted to the side. He wasn’t looking into the camera. His eyes focused like lasers on the lady’s hand dishing out the soup.

Although there wasn’t a name on the picture, now it was something real. Not just a smattering of miscellaneous photos, but someone’s collection. Holding the photo in one hand, he browsed through the pages he’d already seen, comparing those pics to the loose photo. The boy wasn’t in every picture but in most of them. Jack started to recognize some of the other children, as well. Perhaps they all lived in the same orphanage. As with the loose photo, the little boy never looked into the camera. And he pretty much had the same look on his face in each one. Serious and sad.

Well, that would make sense now, wouldn’t it? Considering what he’d just read on the back of the photo. The boy had become an orphan six months earlier. His whole world had been shattered. Not just with the loss of his parents but likely his childhood home. He had probably been relocated to a different city. Jack had read about this situation. There were hundreds and thousands of orphans in Germany after the war. In some ways, the effort to rescue them included a desire to rescue their souls.

All of Europe had just suffered through a Second World War foisted upon mankind by the German people. Everyone agreed…everything that could be done must be done to make sure this never happened again.

It was decided, the minds and hearts of these orphaned children had to be redirected toward a brand new way of thinking, on every level. Germany needed a clean slate, a fresh start. These orphans were seen to be part of that solution, but only if they could be raised with a brand-new set of values. Relocating them to different cities helped accomplish that goal. All ties to the past had to be severed. A new day was dawning for Germany. Or so that was the hope. Judging by the looks on these children’s faces, they weren’t buying any of it. Not yet anyway.

Something else Jack had noticed in these pictures confirmed another thing he’d read. These German orphans were all mixed together. Whites of Aryan blood bunked together with surviving children from the concentration camps. Poles, Czechs and other Slavic children were also part of the mix. Leading up to the war, the Nazis had tried to create a master Aryan race, whites only need apply. Jack could clearly see the blending together of all these people-groups in the faces of these orphans. And none of them seemed to struggle with each other in the least. They were all bonded together in the simple struggle for survival.

He was so tempted to pull some of the photos off the pages to see what else he could learn from what was written on the back. They would add so much more to this little boy’s story.

Maybe there was a way.

What if he took a picture of each page? That way, he’d make sure he glued all the photos back in their proper places. He would only pull off those that came away easily, without tearing the page. It could work.

He was just about to try with the pics on the first page when he realized…he didn’t have any glue. Maybe he could pick up some when he went to the store. Just then, the alarm sounded on his phone. He looked at the screen and remembered. Rachel. The store. Dinner.

That’s what he should be doing right now, not playing around with this old photo album. He slipped the loose photo back in the crease of the page, got up and slid the photo album back in its place on the shelf.

As he walked toward the dinette table, intending to write out a list of things he needed, his foot caught the edge of that stupid floorboard again. “O-o-w-w,” he yelled. He sat on the edge of the couch and took a look at his foot. He’d scratched it but it wasn’t bleeding. He wasn’t thinking of bringing the throw rugs in from outside just yet, but maybe he should reconsider.

Then he looked down at the floorboard again. No wonder it had lifted up. It wasn’t nailed down. He couldn’t see if the other end was properly fastened; it was under the recliner. But maybe that’s all it needed, a couple of nails. He had seen a toolbox in the pantry when he’d gone looking for the broom. He could probably fix this in a few minutes. Glancing at the clock, he realized he didn’t have a few minutes. He’d have to do it later.