Джон Литтл: The Murder of Jesus Christ

I think the nurse was going to tell me something, but she hesitated and then changed her mind. Maybe it would have been, “It won’t be long now,” or “It was good that you could be with her at the end.”

“I love you, Grandma.”

I wanted to lean over and hug her, but she wouldn’t even know I’d done that. I worried about crowding her. It felt like nothing I could do would be the right thing. She looked like death.

Then, with no warning, Grandma’s eyes snapped open, and she smiled. I jumped back and felt my heart pound.

The next thing that happened was impossible. I know it was, but I also know it happened. You can tell me you don’t believe me, and I would totally respect that. Hell, if somebody had told me the same thing, I wouldn’t have believed it, so why should you accept my word?

Grandma smiled more broadly. Then she sat up. That alone would have been a big enough shock, but it was how she sat up that caused the “What the fuck?” moment.

She was weak and her bones brittle and fragile. She had no strength to even hold my hand.

That didn’t stop her. She gave me that big broad smile and then her body swung up from her waist. It was like she had decided to do a sit-up, with the top part of her body swivelling up straight.

Fuck?

When she spoke, her voice was clear and young. She acted and sounded like she was thirty. Her face was still etched with age, but her eyes were bright and her movements graceful.

“David, you must go to my home. Everything is waiting for you on the dining room table.”

For a moment, I couldn’t reply. I wondered if I had fallen asleep and was dreaming, but I knew it was real.

I wanted to talk to her, to shout for joy because she was back to being my surrogate mother again. She laughed a long laugh that made me remember the days when I was a little kid.

I waited too long to say anything, though, and as quickly as she had turned “young,” her eyes fluttered and closed. Her mouth shrunk to a fine old line, and then she fell backward to her bed. She was unconscious again, and I couldn’t help wonder if I’d imagined everything that had happened.

A machine started to whine and beep, and I couldn’t help myself. I stood over her and shook her shoulders, trying to wake her again.

“Grandma! Wake up!”

Two nurses and a doctor rushed into the room and moved me aside while they tried to keep her comfortable.

I wanted to scream at them to help her, but they were only doing what Grandma had told them.

Do Not Resuscitate .

The nurses and doctor exchanged glances and finally the doctor turned to me.

“I’m sorry.”

I crashed down to a chair and started to cry.

Ariela Abelman had one of the happiest days of her life when she turned ten years old. Her mother gave her a necklace that belonged to her mother.

“This belongs to you now, my sweet angel. You must wear it forever.”

The necklace was silver-colored. Although with rare exceptions she wore it for the next eighty-two years, Ariela never had the necklace checked to see if it was actually silver or some other metal. It never mattered to her. She loved it, and she loved that it was handed down for some vague number of generations.

It was the very next day the Nazis invaded Hungary, or at least the small town of Ashue, where she lived with her parents in a tiny basement apartment.

Julianna, her next door neighbor, was sixteen, and knew everything about the war. She was Ariela’s window into the big wide world. That afternoon, Julianna ran over and hugged her.

“Your family must hide!”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“The Germans are here. The Nazis. They’ll take you away and kill you!”

Ariela couldn’t comprehend that somebody would want to kill her. That only happened in fairy tales like Snow White and Goldilocks .

“WHY?”

Julianna looked over her shoulder as if she expected to be hauled to justice for talking to her little next-door neighbor.

“Because you’re Jewish.”

“So?”

“They hate the Jews. You need to tell your family to hide.”

Ariela’s parents were not home. She hid in the corner of her bedroom and spent the afternoon crying in fear.

Her mother arrived home a couple hours later and called out, “Grab a bag and pack whatever you can carry!”

“Are the Nazis coming?”

Ariela didn’t know what a Nazi was, but in her mind they were big and scary monsters, like wild bears.

Her mother stared at Ariela and then ran to hug her.

“Very soon.”

They left and met Ariela’s father at a farmhouse south of town.

“Whose house is this?”

“Don’t ask questions,” snapped her father. “They are friends. That’s all that matters.”

Ariela and her parents climbed down a ladder to the basement. The ladder was accessed from a secret trap door covered by a ratty throw rug.

She didn’t leave the hidden basement for three years, never saw sunshine, never saw another human being except for her parents, and found herself thinking she was just some dirty animal trapped in the wilderness by a gang of hunters waiting for her to show herself.

Sometimes she wanted to come out and let them kill her, but most often, she wanted to fight. She wished they would come to her so she could beat the shit out of them. In her mind, that was very possible.

In reality, when the German soldiers found her family, Ariela was under-nourished, scrawny, a zombie who didn’t even know her age. The soldiers herded her and her parents out, making them walk for hours along with a bunch of other people Ariela didn’t know. They marched and marched until she wanted to drop to the ground and let the others walk over her, but somehow her feet kept moving.

When they finally were allowed to stop, they were at a train station. Her eyes brightened. She’d always liked trains, and if they were going for a ride on one, that would be at least one small pleasure.

She looked for the cars with the windows, thinking of sitting comfortably on one of the cushioned seats, like the trains she’d heard about, but she didn’t see any windows.

Instead, these trains only had cars that were big metal boxes. Her family was pushed along and told to get in one.

The train stank of shit and piss and other horrible things. There were no seats. They had to squat on the floor. When the door closed, it was pitch black, and Ariela’s fear came back.

“Mommy?”

“I’m here.”

“Where are they taking us?”

“I don’t know. Try not to worry about it. Everything will be fine.”

Fine . Ariela swirled the word around in her mind, wanting to believe it, but instead she had a sinking feeling that nothing would ever be fine again.

The train rattled and shook, and eventually they arrived in the Auschwitz camp in Poland, where they were crammed into pens that looked like they should house cattle. There were thousands of other people stuck together in the pens, and armed guards watched over them with rifles.

Ariela saw a man try to escape, but it was hopeless, and he was shot to death in front of her.

There were bad rumors about what the guards would do to them at the prison camp, but nobody knew what was going to happen for sure.

Three days after they arrived in the camp, though, Russian soldiers stormed the area, and as fast as Ariela’s ordeal had begun, it was over. They were liberated, and eventually freed.

The Germans had surrendered.

Ariela and her parents were returned to Hungary, but their lives were never the same.

Eventually, she learned that six million Jews were slaughtered by the Germans under the leadership of Adolph Hitler. That was more than two-thirds of all the Jews alive in Europe. They were families, like her own, and it didn’t matter how old the people were. Women and children were killed first, because they had no value.