The Keeper of Secrets (15 page)

Chapter 27

Dachau

April 29, 1945

S
ome photographs are deafening. Years later, the American first lieutenant would study the black-and-white photograph taken the day that he, and his fellow soldiers, liberated Dachau and relive the noise and the stench and the horror of it all and how it mingled with that peculiar sense of indescribable joy. He spoke German so he understood more of what had happened, and more quickly, than the others.

It had snowed the night before, and a dusting of white lay over everything, like fine confectioner’s sugar. The sun shone brightly but it was cold, an early spring day, Sunday, April 29, 1945. He knew that, like all the men of the Forty-Fifth Infantry Division, he was battle hardened. He’d been in combat with a ruthless enemy for over two years, but nothing he’d so far endured or observed could’ve prepared him for the vision of hell that lay behind the electrified barbed-wire fence.

The first thing his division came across was a railway spur off the main line leading into the camp. There were over forty open boxcars sitting motionless, in complete silence, seemingly empty. It wasn’t until they got up close that they saw them, over two thousand emaciated bodies, both men and women, who’d been shipped from camp to camp in the last days of the German stand, with no food or water. Some had been shot in the back of the head with pistols, but most had simply died of starvation, thirst, and cold. Now they lay, mute in their agony, covered by a smattering of pure white snow. Later the soldier described their arms as being broomsticks tipped with claws.

Then they moved on, past the imposing homes of the camp directors and through the large gates decorated with the German imperial eagle. The highest-ranking officers had fled, melted into the general public, but the lower ranks were still armed and in the watchtowers. The first lieutenant watched while a German guard, in full military regalia, a recent arrival from the war on the Russian front, saluted an American officer, barked out a “Heil Hitler,” and handed over his pistol as a mark of surrender of the camp. The officer looked around him at the huge piles of bodies and spat in the German’s face, calling him a “
schweinehund.
” The German was taken away, and some time later the first lieutenant heard a pistol shot.

He remembered chaos more clearly than anything else, chaos and a dawning sense of horror. Slowly the living skeletons started to emerge from the long wooden buildings. Some were waving tattered Allied flags, symbols they’d pieced together from rags and patches of cloth. As word spread among the terrified populace that the Americans were there, the numbers grew quickly; eventually there’d be more than thirty thousand prisoners to account for. The walking dead became a milling, pressing crowd of cheering, groaning, shrieking humanity who were desperate to touch their liberators, climbing over one another to kiss arms and legs and touch the jeeps.

He found the approaches frightening at first, but then he realized that once they’d touched him, kissed him, shook his hand, they moved on to someone else. Those who weren’t able to walk crawled toward the soldiers, and he picked some of them up and carried them to safety so they wouldn’t get trampled on.

Reinforcements from the Forty-Second and Forty-Fifth Infantry Divisions began arriving. They, too, had encountered the boxcars in the railway spur first, and with a roar they ran into the camp on the double, their rage obliterating the usual concern for having adequate cover and concealment.

A full tour of the camp revealed all to the first lieutenant. A room no bigger than his mother’s kitchen housed fifty men dying of typhoid who could do nothing more than smile at him. Kennels were filled with large German shepherds with their throats slashed and their heads crushed. And the dogs weren’t the only ones to feel the vengeance of the imprisoned; guards had been stripped naked to prevent them melting away in civilian clothing. Some lay where they’d been drowned in the moat that ran through the camp; others were torn apart or shot while resisting arrest. Everywhere there were mounds of bodies, stacked up against buildings and spilling out of open doorways, and the stench of decaying flesh permeated his uniform through his skin to his very bones.

Next he came across the evidence he later feared would send him insane, in a brick building across a bridge, separate from the rest. First, he encountered a room full of clothing: shoes, pants, shirts, and coats. Then he came upon an area with tables covered in lines of soap and towels and an entryway into a shower room. And last he found the massive ovens, standing open, their contents spilling out onto the floor, mountains of ash, pieces of bone, bodies waiting to be fed into the yawning abyss.

He stumbled into the weak sunlight and gripped the wall while he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the ground. Everywhere around him his fellow soldiers were reacting the same way, and as they gasped for breath all they could almost taste was the sickly, sweet aroma of burned human beings. Blindly, with rage tearing at his heart, he made his way back to the open parade ground. Part of him wanted to just run and not stop until he was miles away; the rest of him knew he could never leave—it would haunt his dreams until he died.

Some measure of order was being imposed, and finally the message was getting through to the dazed prisoners. They’d have to stay here while they were processed and they couldn’t eat anything until food could be found that they could digest safely: dried bread, crackers, and chocolate soup. Over to his right he saw a tableau of three people frozen in a motionless standoff and within a second had assessed the situation. A tall, well-built man stood holding a white flag. He wore only trousers but was unmistakably an SS officer. There were cuts on his face and arms, and blood ran down to the fingers clenched around the stained flag. Two feet away an American corporal pointed a pistol at the German’s head, and the fury on his face was gut-wrenching. The young man had probably never felt this enraged in his life.

At his feet knelt a small, skeletally thin figure, covered in dirt and wearing rags that barely hid a fraction of his body. Beside him on the ground was an object so incongruous it seemed to shine like a lantern. It was a violin case. The first lieutenant strode toward the group.

“What’s happening here, Corporal?”

All three men looked at him. There were tearstains on the American’s square face.

“I can’t let him live, sir. They’re animals, all of them.”

The small figure on the ground began to plead in German.

“No, please. No, please. Don’t shoot him.”

Gently the lieutenant knelt down beside him.

“What are you saying?” he asked in German. The old man’s face lit up with recognition.

“Please stop him, sir. Don’t let him shoot, please, sir.”

“But it’s over. You don’t have to be frightened of him anymore; it’s time for him to pay for all this.”

“He’s my friend. I’d be dead but for him. He isn’t a bad man, he kept me alive. Please, sir, don’t kill him.”

There was a note of hysteria in his voice. The officer straightened up and stared into the German officer’s face. His eyes were very blue, and he had a bright red scar down one cheek. He returned the gaze calmly; he clearly wasn’t afraid to die.

“Name and rank.”

“SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Walder.”

“Is it true? Are you friends?” he asked skeptically.

“Yes, sir. This prisoner had special privileges, and he played the violin for us. I saw that no harm came to him. Gave him food.”

“What’s his name?”

“Simon Horowitz. He comes from Berlin.”

He looked from the German to the pleading face below him. The eyes were very black in their sunken hollows but clear and bright, and the face was filthy, lined, exhausted, but the emotion was real.

“Very well. Take him away, Corporal.”

The other man hesitated and then holstered his pistol.

“Yes, sir,” he replied with obvious reluctance.

“He’s your prisoner, Corporal. On my orders, see no harm comes to him.”

“Yes, sir.”

The corporal saluted, then stepped away. The SS officer bent down and helped the old man to his feet. They embraced, then the officer was pulled away and marched off across the square. The first lieutenant picked up the violin case and held it out to the old man, who was watching the figure disappear across the parade ground. When he turned back, there were tears in his eyes.

“Thank you, sir. I pray that he survives,” he said softly.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since November 1939, sir. What is the date?”

“Good God! 1945. How did you survive this?”

“I don’t know. I played my violin.”

A sudden thought seemed to occur to him, and he smiled at the American.

“I survived! It’s over and I’m still alive.”

He looked stronger than many, still terribly thin and small but not diseased and with a straighter stance and more fire inside. The officer studied his face again and realized, with a sudden shock, that he wasn’t elderly at all. He was an exhausted, lined, bald, filthy man of no more than twenty-five, clutching a violin case.

Chapter 28

Vermont

August 2008

T
hey expected him to say something. The silence had gone on for some time and hung around the table like a curtain of uncertainty. Rafael gazed at the photo in his hand, the smiling, confident boys holding two large violins. When he looked up, the old men were waiting patiently, their faces impassive, understanding in their eyes.

“It’s an amazing story. Thank you, thank you so very much for sharing it with me.”

It seemed inadequate, but he suspected that anything would. He was looking at Simon, and the small man shrugged his shoulders.

“The most important thing to remember, Maestro, is that surviving the camp doesn’t make you better than all those who died. It just means you were lucky and, perhaps, you had something more to live for. On one level it was about a strange kind of fate, an arbitrary and completely unpredictable sort of . . . karma.”

Rafael nodded his understanding.

“I have some questions, and if I don’t ask them, I will wonder forever. Do you mind?”

“Ask away. I’ll answer them if I can.”

“What happened to Kurt? Did he survive?”

Simon paused before he began his answer.

“I wrote to his father about ten years after the war and I asked him if he could give me Kurt’s address. His father was a doctor in Düsseldorf. For a whole year, I hear nothing. Then one day I get a letter, from his brother, Carl. He said both his parents were dead, of guilt and shame, and that Kurt had not returned from the war. They’d been told he was killed at the very end of the war, perhaps even after the surrender. He was an SS officer, very unpopular job. So I wrote back to him and told him that I had been in Dachau and his brother was a very brave man, a good man, and that I owed him my life more than once. He should honor his brother’s memory. He was very grateful for that and wished his parents had been able to read it. He didn’t say as much, but I have always suspected that his father committed suicide. We keep in touch from time to time.”

Again there was a silence. Rafael put down the photo and picked up the group one: a tall, beautiful woman, a shorter, round, laughing man, and four children, taken well before the dark clouds of war.

“And your mama and Rachel?”

“We know only sketchy details. After a short time in a displaced persons’ camp, I was sent to London, to Levi. We waited a couple of years, and then we went to Berlin to find our old house. It had suffered some damage but was habitable and there was a family living there, a military man of some sort. We asked if we could have a look and they were very nice. They let us take the mezuzah and we have it now, on this house, and I said there might be a box in the attic, could I look for it? They agreed and there they were! Seven violins, the property of Amos Wiggenstein, still wrapped in the sheet music. You know, the ones we’d rescued the morning after the Kristallnacht?”

Rafael was fascinated.

“What did you do with them?” he asked eagerly.

“Brought them with us, to New York. We lived with our uncle Avrum for a while, and I went into banking, followed in my father’s and my uncle’s footsteps, I suppose.”

Levi spoke for the first time.

“And I went into interior design and window dressing. Had my own company.”

Simon took a deep breath.

“When we were in Berlin, we found Maria Weiss. Mama and Rachel had gone to her on that night. What we didn’t know then was that she was a remarkable woman, on the fringes of the Berlin resistance, such as it was. They tried to get us out of Dachau, but the authorities wouldn’t agree; it was too late. And she tried to find Sarah, our aunt, but her house was looted and she was gone. We learned later that Mordecai’s whole family was hidden for ten months by the Grajerks, the Polish family of a teller in our bank, then betrayed and sent with them to Bergen-Belsen.

“But Maria knew people, and those people got false papers for Mama and Rachel. They lived quietly for a while as Catholic Germans, with friends of Maria’s. But these people were also involved in dangerous endeavors, smuggling and hiding Jews and passing German secrets to the Americans and the Russians. Rachel lived with a glamorous young couple, Harro Schulze-Boysen, a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe Ministry, and his French wife, Libertas Schulze-Boysen. They were spies, part of the Red Orchestra network.

“In 1941, Mama tried to go to Switzerland and then on to Levi in London, but her group was stopped at the border and the Gestapo didn’t believe their story, even though they had all the correct papers. Eventually one of them broke, and the Gestapo shipped the whole group off to Auschwitz. Rachel had decided to stay in Berlin. She was madly in love with a resistance fighter, a handsome young lawyer called Hans, according to Maria. When I last saw her, she was fourteen and the idea of my little sister being madly in love with anyone still astounds me. She did important document work for her friends—she was very good at drawing and copying—and I can imagine what sort of work she did.

“In late 1942, the spy ring was infiltrated and they were all arrested. Many of them were tried and executed in prison, guillotined, but when they discovered that Rachel was a Jewess they decided the blade was too good for her and sent her to Auschwitz. By that stage of the war they were killing twenty thousand a day and the average life expectancy of a Jew in Auschwitz was four hours—”

“Oh my God!”

Rafael’s reaction to Simon’s words was instinctual, almost visceral. The old man smiled sadly.

“I know, Maestro, that place was an efficient killing machine. People arrived and lived for as long as it took to process them.”

Rafael shook his head. These men had seen human nature at its worst, such savagery and brutality, and yet they remained above it.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Horowitz. I’d hoped very much for a happier conclusion.”

“I survived, and Levi’s is a happy story. That’s more than many families can say.”

Rafael turned to Levi. “I was going to ask, what happened to you?”

“I don’t talk so much about it. I left home in November 1938 on what we thought was an official exit visa, but I’d been set up and was arrested at the border. You must understand that there was corruption everywhere in those days. One of the border guards tried to shoot me but the gun jammed, then I fought back and escaped. I fled on foot to Switzerland and, eventually, to London. I had the precious things my father had given me and that meant I could pay for my passage to freedom, so he did save me after all. I was in an internment camp for a while, and then I worked on the land, for a farming family in Somerset. They had sons in the air force and they were very good to me. They knew I hated Hitler more than they did.

“After the war, I went back to London and got a job in a soft furnishing store. I designed pieces of furniture and I learned upholstery. When the Red Cross told me Simon was alive, I applied for him to come to London.”

He’d kept his head down and his gaze fixed on the table throughout his short speech, and something told Rafael that he felt uncomfortable talking about himself. Then he looked up.

“Compared to Simon I had a very easy war.”

“He is the master of understatement when it comes to his war, my brother.”

The men exchanged glances, and Rafael could tell it was a subject over which they had made peace long ago.

“So what happened to the violins you brought with you?” Rafael asked in a moving-along-now tone of voice.

“We sold them, all except one.”

Simon got to his feet and went into the hall. He opened a large cupboard and lifted down two violin cases.

“This is the one we kept, a Cremonese violin from around 1810, and this one.”

He opened the case and lifted out a full-sized violin with a lovely honey-gold glaze and one or two obvious tiny cracks. The strings were loose.

“This is the violin both my father and I played in Dachau. I don’t play it, I just keep it. I haven’t played a violin since the last time I played for the guards.”

“May I?”

Rafael held out his hand toward the violin, and the old man handed it over.

“Certainly, sir.”

It felt rough, and the cracks caught under the skin of his fingers. He turned it over and over and studied the beautifully tooled scroll and then handed it back.

“Thank you very much for showing it to me. I have one last question and before you answer, I want you to know that it is not at all my intention to stir up old hurts, not at all. I want to help your grandson to reach a place where he
needs
to play the violin again. It’s now more obvious to me than ever that these violins are a vital part of his family history and Daniel inherits his extraordinary gift partly from you, yes? It would be a tragedy for him, and for us, his public, if he never plays again.”

Both old men nodded their agreement.

“So is there anything more you can tell me about the Guarneri and the Amati violins? Anything at all that might help me to find them?”

“And you do this just for Daniel?” Levi asked.

“Absolutely. They are his legacy. It’s an unbelievably hard thing to do, but if we don’t try, we’ll never succeed, yes? I believe that if we could find even one of them, he would want to play it more than anything else.”

Simon nodded slowly.

“The Amati may be in France. There’s a list of instruments we read about in an old French magazine, oh, it would be ten years ago now, and it mentioned a 1640 with a very light tone and a lovely dark varnish. That sounds like our instrument. It’s in a private collection. I doubt we could get it, because we can’t prove it’s ours.”

“And the Guarneri?”

He felt guilty about pushing them, but they were as open as he was ever going to find them, and sometimes elderly memories need a helping hand.

“It had the most amazing oil vanish; it shone. It was a red-tinted brown and there was a flame in the maple on the back and there was a wolf note—”

“That’s not what he means!” Levi cut across his brother’s description. “He means is there anything to identify it. The answer is no.”

Simon turned him. “It’s for Daniel,” he said firmly.

“We don’t know anything, Simon. That Nazi thug took it away, and we know nothing more.”

“But if he doesn—”

“We promised Papa. We swore a solemn oath and I won’t betray his memory. Besides, that was long before the war. It can’t mean anything now.”

Levi was suddenly agitated, and Rafael could hear the stubborn desperation in his voice. They were hiding something but he had no idea what.

“You can trust me, gentlemen. If something happened to the violin, you know I’ll keep your confidence.”

“We don’t have anything more to tell you, Maestro. I’m sorry if your journey has been wasted,” Levi said with finality. Again there was silence, but this one was more uncomfortable.

“Yes, we do.”

Simon turned to Levi and touched his arm.

“He’s my grandson, Levi, and I
want
him to play. He is the last Horowitz in the line, and there may be no more. His great-grandpapa would
want
him to play again. He would want us to find it, and if the maestro doesn’t know, he’ll never succeed.”

He picked up the violin and gave it back to Rafael.

“Look inside this violin. There is a label; you can just glimpse it. That’s how we would tell our Guarneri, by the date of manufacture.”

Rafael looked into the
f
hole. There was something stuck to the inside back of the instrument, but he couldn’t see what it was.

“I don’t understand.”

Simon gave a deep sigh.

“Years ago, before the war, Papa could see what was happening to us, to the Jews. He was concerned that the Nazis would make an excuse and try to take our possessions. He worried that we owned things the Nazis would say were too precious, too valuable to be owned by a Jew. He couldn’t do anything about most of what he owned and he knew that if they took the house, they would also take the bank, so the vault was not the answer. So he took the Guarneri to Amos Wiggenstein and paid him to make it less valuable. That way the Nazis wouldn’t care so much about it and they might, one day, give it back to him. And he would know it instantly when he found it again.”

The two old men exchanged glances again. Levi was obviously angry but silent.

“So Amos changed the date on the label?” Rafael asked incredulously.

“Yes, sir. Amos was one of the best luthiers in Germany. My grandpapa had come from Frankfurt to bring him violins when he was young, long before we moved to Berlin, so he’d cared for them for many years. He was an old man, but he was very, very skilled.”

“So although it is a 1729, it wouldn’t read 1729, now?”

Simon hesitated, and Levi gave a deep sigh. “No, sir, it
would
read 1729, now.”

“But it isn’t?”

“No, sir.”

Something was beginning to stir in Rafael’s mind, a wondering, an excitement, a feeling of amazement, mixed with a strong sense of dread. His mouth felt suddenly dry.

“Do you know what it
should
read?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Oh, yes, of course. It
should
read 1742, and that’s why the famous last one has never been found. It’s out there somewhere, disguised as something else.”

It was one of those you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop moments, as Rafael reflected and turned the old violin over in his hands. Such a circle of coincidences, but then perhaps it wasn’t coincidence at all; perhaps it was fate, or perhaps it was the strange karma that Simon had spoken of earlier. Roberto di Longi was right, and Rafael was in a bind deeper than he’d ever experienced before.

When he eventually looked up, he could see the relief of a long-held secret, finally shared, on both of the other men’s faces. Rafael felt deeply sorry for them and yet humbled by their resilience and their courage. They’d told the story because he’d asked; they didn’t expect, or want, his pity. How could he ever begin to imagine what they’d gone through? How could he make any of it up to them? Could he restore something so precious, such a link to the past, to those loved ones viciously torn away from them? And, at the same time, could he reestablish a musical dynasty? His gut instinct told him that success in this would be more important than any other part of his legacy.