The Last Witness (25 page)

“Those things were horrific,” the woman said. “I’ve never seen such gruesome things in my life.”

“Jewish holocaust. A hundred years ago.”

“And those are actual photographs? And videos?”

Jack saw Jordan turn his head to the side.

“I think we got what we wanted,” Jordan said.

“Good.”

It was Hodgson.

Jordan looked down at Jack. “You knew that man, didn’t you?”

“Der Todesengel,”
Jack said.

Jordan helped Jack sit up. He still wasn’t steady.

“I’m sure he recognized that man,” Jordan said to Hodgson. “Do you know who he is?”

“Someone Jack wants to forget,” said Hodgson.

They had Jack on his feet now and were holding onto him. He was shaky.

“They called him the Angel of Death,” said Hodgson. “He was a doctor who did experiments on children. Especially twins. I looked him up.”

Jack raised his hand.

“Lieutenant Hodgson?” he said.

“What?”

“It wasn’t just twins.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau, August 1944

34

Konzentrationslager Auschwitz
was a massive camp surrounded by tall trees of white bark, pockmarked with dabs of black. It looked like the work of a paintbrush. In Polish, the birch trees were called
Brzezinka
– the name of a local village – and in German it was
Birkenau
. The nearest town was Oswiecim or
Auschwitz
in German. This place of death would become known to the world as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau was only three kilometers, but it took a long time for the children because they were little and hungry and tired. There were also distractions to slow them down. Along the route they could see slivers of blue sky slipping through the branches, but smoke always got in the way. Off in the distance were long skinny things hanging from trees in a clearing, and when the children got closer they could tell that these things were people with ropes around their necks. But they weren’t the kind of people Jacob saw every day. They weren’t even like the corpses he had seen thrown onto trucks in the ghetto. The heads were all tilted to the side – some one way, some the other – most of them with their tongues sticking out as if they were trying to lick their cheeks. Many had their eyes open. One of the children on the walk, a little girl who was even younger than Jacob, pointed and shrieked when she saw them. The German woman in charge – the
Kapo
– told her to be quiet and slapped the girl with the back of her hand.

At Birkenau they were sent straight to the barracks. Jacob was assigned to his place. The top bunk on the third row. There were two to a bunk and only children were in this building. The
boy who shared his bunk said his name was Jerzy. He was ten years old and from Kalisz. He was taller than Jacob, his body little more than a stick. Jacob had never seen a person like him before with bones protruding from skin as if they wanted to break out but couldn’t.

Jerzy had big round eyes – expressionless eyes – and a head and face so gaunt that Jacob could see every line and bump on his skull. He was shaved, but his hair had started to grow back. Jerzy looked at Jacob’s blonde mane with fascination and stared at his shoes. He said Jacob was in trouble because they would take his shoes. Jacob immediately thought of the
chervonets
in his heel.

“I have an idea,” Jerzy said.

He told Jacob that if they each exchanged one shoe, no one would take anything from them because they didn’t take your shoes if you didn’t have a pair. So Jacob gave him his left shoe, but kept the right one because that was where he had the gold coin. In return, Jerzy gave Jacob his left shoe. It was an old wooden clog that was very uncomfortable and at least two sizes too big. Then Jerzy told Jacob how lucky they were to be in the top bunk. Jacob asked him why.

“Everyone gets diarrhoea but if you’re on the top no one is above you so you don’t have to worry.”

When Jacob heard that, he started feeling sick to his stomach. Jerzy said it wasn’t so bad and put his arm around him. Jacob didn’t like the feel of it.

“Tomorrow I will show you around,” Jerzy said.

That first night the
Kapo
came and it wasn’t the woman who had led them on the walk from Auschwitz, but a burly young German boy. A teenager. He told everyone to go to sleep. Jacob whispered something to Jerzy about food, and Jerzy only smiled and shook his head.

After the
Kapo
left, Jacob tried to sleep, but couldn’t. How do you sleep in a place like this? There was hardly any air and they hadn’t been given a thing to eat. Still, it wasn’t as bad as the boxcar because the musty smell was better than shit and while two to a bunk was cramped it wasn’t like the train from Lodz.

As the night wore on, Jerzy kept putting his arm around Jacob and Jacob kept brushing it off. Jerzy would rest his arm on Jacob’s back or caress his neck with his hand, and no matter how many times Jacob pushed him away, he kept doing it. Then sometime in the middle of the night the
Kapo
returned. He climbed up on their bunk and roused Jerzy, and then the two of them went back down and were gone. Early in the morning, Jerzy came back. He dropped himself beside Jacob and in a few seconds was snoring.

Jacob had to use the latrine, which was out in the back of the building. The latrines were little more than holes side by side in a long wooden slab and this, too, was better than the boxcar where all you got was a single bucket for a hundred people. But it was here where the horrible truth of Birkenau was revealed to Jacob. On the way to the latrine, scattered all around the floor, were bodies of little children. All of them were naked and their bones stuck out like Jerzy’s. Their ribs stuck out, their shoulders had sharp corners with no meat on them, and their skulls looked less than human. Some had their eyes open, staring dead and glazed into space. The smallest one was a little girl who couldn’t have been more than two. Jacob felt the bile rise from his stomach and he vomited all over his feet. All over his right good shoe and all over the left wooden clog he got from Jerzy.

He couldn’t sleep after that. Up in the bunk he put his head on the straw, trying to look away from Jerzy, but he didn’t want to close his eyes because they might come and do to him
what they did to those children. He couldn’t get their faces out of his mind, especially the little girl. She was so small. Soon Jerzy had his arm on him again.

Later all the children in the barracks were summoned for roll call. Jacob didn’t know how much time had elapsed since his visit to the latrine because time was different here, different from anywhere he had ever been before, even different from the ghetto. Time didn’t move at all. As they walked from the building, Jacob asked Jerzy where he went with the
Kapo
during the night.

“You have to do something for them or they will kill you,” Jerzy said in a whisper. “And I’m still alive. What are you going to do, Jacob?”

Outside the building they were told to line up. Yet another line. A man in a white cloak who was standing with the soldiers seemed important because the soldiers listened to everything he said. He approached each child one by one. He looked at a boy and pointed to the right. He looked at a girl and pointed to the right again. Then he came to a girl who was taller and older than the others, but didn’t weigh any more than they did. She was another stick. Her lips parched and dry, her skin peeling away, she had open wounds festering on her arms and chest. The man examined her quickly and pointed to the left. He did this with all the children – some to the left, some to the right – and with each one he was exactly the same. Without emotion. Then he came to Jerzy. One glance and he pointed to the right. Finally, he came to Jacob. The two soldiers beside him had their rifles at the ready. The man asked the soldiers why this boy still had his hair, but before they could answer his hands were running through Jacob’s golden locks. His fingers weaved in and out though the strands of hair and the way he did it made Jacob feel like a piece of merchandise. Then he took Jacob’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, and lifted his head. The man said this boy doesn’t look Jewish.

“Ich bin katholisch,”
Jacob said.

The man told him to lower his pants.

In the ghetto Jacob often saw the young Gestapo officer who patrolled near the wall, but the officer always took him for a Polish boy and never bothered him. Not once. It was that same officer who later hit Father Kasinski. With the German soldier standing beside him, the Gestapo officer, little more than a boy himself, suddenly became very powerful. A figure of authority. He struck Father Kasinski with no hesitation. The Gestapo officer was part of a food chain. The Jews were at the bottom, the Poles were next, and then came the police, the Gestapo, the soldiers and the senior officers. All the Germans had guns and they used them. Jacob saw it happen in the ghetto and he saw it here. A soldier had turned his rifle on a mother and her baby. They wouldn’t think twice about shooting him. But the man in the white cloak was at the very top of the food chain. The soldiers listened to anything he said and followed his every command.

Jacob started to tremble.

The man looked him in the eye and with a snap of his fingers again told him to lower his pants. His hands shaking, Jacob loosened the string belt of his striped pants, but before they fell to his knees he grabbed his bare penis with his fingers and pushed the skin up over the end. The man bent over to inspect him. He still wasn’t satisfied. He snapped his fingers again and ordered one of the soldiers to check Jacob himself, but the soldier didn’t want to touch him. Not down there.

“
Doktor,”
the soldier pleaded, but the man insisted. His voice was firm and impatient.

The soldier handed his rifle to the other soldier. He bent down and brought his face in close. Jacob could feel the breath on his naked skin. He could feel it on his bare stomach. The soldier didn’t want to touch him. Jacob was standing there holding his penis between his fingers,
the skin rolled up over the top, every bone in his body trembling with fear. He couldn’t stop the trembling. The soldier did the inspection and Jacob – four and a half years old – knew his life was hanging in the balance. The soldier kept looking at him and Jacob kept shaking. He had no control over the muscles in his fingers or in his arms and legs, but still he held onto himself. Finally, the soldier looked away and glanced over his shoulder at the man in the white cloak.

“Er wird is nicht beschnitten,”
the soldier said.

He is not circumcised.

The man nodded. He told Jacob to do up his pants and then he pointed to the right. Jacob did as he was told. He was still trembling.

Kitchener, Ontario, November 2039

35

“I’m Stephanie’s mother. Jennifer Krust. Are you the history teacher?”

She was in her thirties, rakishly thin with wild blonde hair and deep blue eyes that wore a tired, pained sadness. Everything about her looked scattered – her clothes, the way her purse bulged as it hung over her shoulder, her unevenly applied lipstick.

“Yes that’s me.”

“Christine Fisher?”

“That’s right. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Krust. Please. Come in and sit down.”

The school had already heard from her husband about the course Christine was teaching.
An Overview of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
. He said he wanted to speak to the principal and when he connected with her he didn’t pull any punches. He told the principal that Christine was brainwashing his thirteen-year-old daughter and not only that, but he accused her of bringing to class doctored photographs showing horrible things which she claimed had happened to Jews during the Second World War.

“He wasn’t very nice,” the principal told Christine. “He was a crude man and he wouldn’t let me get a word in. Then he got really heated and started yelling at me. Cursing the school. Cursing you. Cursing me for letting this happen.”

It was only Christine’s second year of teaching, but she had sat down with enough parents by now to know how to read them and her first impressions were usually right. Five minutes with this Mrs. Krust was all she needed. She was a stay-at-home Mom, not particularly well educated.
Two children. There was Stephanie, who was in Christine’s Grade 8 class, and a younger brother of seven. There was also a husband, a firefighter who wasn’t around much. And one more thing. She was afraid of him.

“What is your husband so angry about?” Christine asked. “And if he’s so concerned about it why didn’t he come and see me himself?”

“Well … he has a bad temper,” she said. “I told him I would go.”

Christine had a responsibility to look out for her pupils, but she was a schoolteacher, not a social worker. There were limits.

“I’d be happy to talk to him,” she said, trying her best to be diplomatic. Always take the high road with parents. “I’m sure he’s a reasonable man who is only interested in your daughter’s welfare.”

The woman turned away, avoiding eye contact. Her tongue skimmed along the edge of her teeth, smudging her lipstick more than it was before. She didn’t look the type who wore lipstick much, and if she wasn’t anorexic, she was dangerously close.

“You don’t understand,” she said and began to fiddle with her purse. “You see …”

“What?” said Christine.

She took a deep breath and played with her purse, opening the zipper, closing it, opening it again.

“What is it?” said Christine.

“Brett … my husband … he has a bad temper and when he gets angry about something there’s no telling what he can do. He can fly off the handle.”

“You mean he’s violent?”

“He can be.”

Christine was thinking. She had to be careful here. Kid gloves treatment. “Has he ever been in trouble with the law?” she asked.

“Well he’s a firefighter. He knows the police and they know him.”

“I see.”

That wasn’t reassuring.

“Listen,” Christine said. “Can I get you a glass of water? Or a cup of coffee?”