Peter Leonard - Voices of the Dead

“Of course we knew what was happening at the camp. We heard the trains arriving. Saw the work details, prisoners in striped uniforms like the one you are wearing. Heard the rumors of medical experiments and firing squads killing political prisoners and Jews. We are farmers. We have nothing against you.”

When he finished eating she took him to the bathroom, filled the tub and closed the door behind her. Harry dipped his toe in, getting used to the heat, and then lay down in water up to his chin, the water turning brown.

When he was finished she gave him clothes and shoes that she told him had been her son’s. The son had enlisted and was killed in action during the French invasion. She was angry, bitter, didn’t understand why Germany had gone to war in the first place.

She took his blood-stained camp uniform downstairs, burned it in the fireplace. Harry slept in a bed for the first time in six months, nervous, getting up every few minutes, looking out the window, expecting to see Nazis.

He was dreaming of food‚ seeing a plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and potatoes, when he felt someone shaking him and thought he was back in the barracks, block 21. He opened his eyes and saw the woman. She put her hand over his mouth. Told him there were Nazis outside, looking for prisoners that had escaped. They were searching the barn. He could hear the dogs barking.

The farmer stood in the doorway and said, “If they find him they will kill us too.”

Harry got out of bed, ducked down and went to the window. He looked out and saw two open military vehicles parked in the yard. Four SS soldiers were walking toward the barn and four more coming toward the house. He recognized the young SS officer from the massacre in the woods.

“Get away from there. If they see you—” Her words trailed off.

She took him down to the kitchen, opened a trap door that led to the cellar. He climbed down a ladder into the musty darkness and waited.

Soon he heard the heavy sound of footsteps above him and voices. Then the trap door was pulled open. Light from the kitchen shone down illuminating the ladder and a section of cellar floor. Harry moved back and bumped sausages hanging on ropes from the ceiling, sent them swinging. Moved back farther and felt glass containers of fruits and vegetables stored on shelves. Harry worried the husband had told them where he was.

He saw black boots coming down the ladder, and the gray jodhpurs of an SS soldier. Harry moved to the far corner of the cellar, going to his knees behind bins of apples and squash, he touched them, onions and garlic, he smelled them. Harry going down on his chest as the SS soldier’s feet landed on the dirt floor. The soldier moved to the right, training the flashlight over the contents of the cellar, the light lingering and holding on objects and then sweeping across the back wall, coming toward him, light reflecting off the glass containers on the shelves, then tracing a line where the walls met, going from dirt floor to beamed ceiling. Then moving across the sidewall, and over the bins, Harry holding his breath, curling up, making himself smaller.

He heard a click and the beam disappeared and the soldier was on the ladder climbing back up.

“Nothing,” the soldier said.

The trap door was put back into position and it was dark again. He heard the soldiers leave the house. Heard the vehicles start up and drive out of the yard and let out a breath.

Margot Schmidt, against her better judgment and the protests of her husband, drove Harry to the outskirts of Munich in a rickety old truck that backfired and burned oil. She told him he was crazy. He should stay with them at the farmhouse. They would hide him until the insanity was over, until it was safe. Harry knew the husband didn’t want him. That was obvious, and sooner or later someone would find out he was there and tell the SS.

She pulled off the road and gave him bread and sausage wrapped in butcher paper tied with string. He put it in the pocket of the coat that had been her son’s. She leaned across the bench seat and hugged him. Harry thanked her and got out of the truck. He pulled the brim of the cap down over his eyes and headed for the towers of Altstadt.

Twenty minutes later he was across the street from the building his father owned at Sendlinger Strasse 43. The bottom floor had been rented to a pharmacist who appeared to still be in business. Harry and his parents lived in the top two floors. He crossed the street and tried the door. It was locked. He remembered his father kept a spare key on the stone ledge over the rear entrance. Was it still there? Even so, if someone were living in the house they would have changed the locks, wouldn’t they?

Harry walked around the block behind the building. Stood in front of the door. He jumped up and felt the key and knocked it off the ledge, heard it hit the cobblestone entranceway. He picked it up, slid it in the lock and opened the door.

Detroit, Michigan. 1971.

Harry glanced at the row of black Cadillacs parked on the street, a group of friends and relatives around him at Sara’s casket, waiting for it to be lowered into the ground next to her mother. Rabbi Rosenbaum delivering the Mourner’s Kaddish.

“May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.”

“Amen” from the mourners.

“May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days, and in the lifetimes of the entire family of Israel, swiftly and soon. Now say: Amen. May His great name be blessed forever and ever. Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One.”

And now everyone said, “Blessed is He.”

Harry felt like he had slipped out of his body, watching himself in a black suit, white shirt, black tie and black yarmulke, hands clasped together, holding them over his groin, solemn expression, mind flashing snapshots of Sara like frames in a slide show.

An hour later Harry was sitting in his crowded living room, Aunt Netta, an Orthodox Jew, holding his face in her hands.

“Harry, did you shave? You are not supposed to shave or get a haircut. Harry, don’t you know this?”

“It’s okay,” Harry said.

“It’s not okay. You should be sitting in a low chair.”

“I don’t have a low chair,” Harry said.

She glanced at his shoes, black ankle-high Bally boots with a zipper on the side. “And no leather. You should know better, Harry. It’s rabbinically mandated.”

Telling him what a mourner should do during shiva. Netta was short and wide like his mother, about five two. She pinned a piece of ribbon, a keriah, on his shirt pocket.

After the Nazis murdered his parents, Harry doubted the existence of God, and stopped practicing the rituals and traditions of the faith.

“Harry, I arranged a minyan for tonight’s service,” Netta said. Which meant ten men from Temple would arrive about 7:00 p.m. to recite Kaddish.

Most of Harry’s family had emigrated from Germany in the late thirties. His father’s side of the family was tall, thin and good-looking. His mother’s side was short and stocky. The men had round faces and thinning hair and wore glasses, black horn rims with lenses so thick you got dizzy if you looked through them.

Harry’s uncle and former business partner, his dad’s younger brother, sat next to him and grinned. Sam was seventy-one and always had a gleam in his eye.

“A Polish terrorist was sent to blow up a car,” Sam said. “He burned his mouth on the exhaust pipe.”

Harry grinned.

“Two Jews, Saul and Sheldon, were walking past a church. They saw a sign that said: Become Catholic. We pay $100. Sheldon says, “I’m going to do it.” “No,” says Saul. “Yes, I am,” says Sheldon. “You can’t. Your family, your friends, they’re all Jewish. You go to shul for the High Holidays.” “I’m doing it,” says Sheldon walking into the church. Saul paces back and forth until Sheldon walks out with a big smile on his face. “No,” says Saul. “You didn’t.” “Yes, I did,” says Sheldon. “I’m baptized. I’ve become Catholic.” Saul says, “Tell me, did you get the hundred dollars?” Sheldon looks at him and says, “Why is it always the money with you people?” Sam laughed, patted Harry’s cheek. “So how you doing?”