Detective Inspector Huss: A Huss Investigation set in Sweden, Vol. 1 (42 page)

They sat down on the sofa and armchairs around the coffee table. Through the glass top the warm-toned Gabbeh rug was visible, and Irene thought it went very well with the framed Miró print on the wall. At Tommy’s request they turned out all the lights and lit all the candles they could find.

The mood was cozy when Tommy began his story.

“This is both an exciting and very sad story. It begins in Berlin in nineteen thirty-two. The National Socialists, under the leadership of the great agitator Adolf Hitler, are about to take over all of Germany. The people are delighted and see Hitler as their great savior, freeing them from unemployment, poverty, and social injustice. Not to mention his skill at playing on their feelings that an unjust peace had been imposed after the First World War. There was a splendid breeding ground for Nazi ideas in Germany in the thirties. From nineteen thirty-three on the National Socialist Party was the only one permitted. Who would call for democracy, when a whole people rose up and marched in step? Books that were viewed as harmful to the national state were burned and authors were banned from writing. Only music approved by the state could be played. Movies and radio programs had to be censored before they could be broadcast. The schools put ideology on their curriculum, and the teachers who didn’t submit were purged. The Jews also had to be purged. The explanation was that they were active in a worldwide conspiracy that threatened everyone. All Jews had to wear a yellow star on their clothes. Gradually, systems were set up to transport them to huge death camps along with gypsies, Danes, homosexuals, Communists, Norwegians, Russians, Poles, Englishmen—”

“There were never any concentration camps! That’s just propaganda!” Jenny’s face was red with rage, visible even in the soft candlelight.

“Is that right? Who is spreading this propaganda, then?”

“It’s the . . . Communists!”

“Who are the Communists of today that are so stubbornly holding on to this lie?”

“It’s the . . . Soviet Union!”

“There isn’t anything called the Soviet Union anymore. No, Jenny, the people who were in these camps can tell you all about it. There aren’t many left alive today, but the ones who are still here can testify that it’s no lie. They speak for millions of people who never got out of the concentration camps alive. But even in their homelands there are groups today who deny what happened. It must be a bitter feeling for the Norwegian and Danish resistance fighters, who today are more than seventy years old, to listen to young neo-Nazis denying their horrendous experiences and the death of their friends.”

Tommy took a gulp of his coffee before he went on.

“But all this flourished at a later stage of Nazi Germany’s development. Back to Berlin in nineteen thirty-two. The National Socialists quickly gained strength. In the late twenties they had founded the Hitler Youth, a movement that aimed to make young people from the age of ten into trusted warriors for the Reich and the party. One dark January night a gang of five Hitler Jugend boys in their late teens was on the way to a meeting. They walked by a school and just as they passed by, a girl came out the gate. She was thirteen years old and her name was Rachel. The boys knew that she was Jewish and that her father was a bookseller. They forced her back into the schoolyard. There they took turns raping her. Four of them held her down while the fifth raped her. They kept on doing it until she started bleeding heavily. Then they got scared and left her lying there. Her father found her a couple of hours later. She lay as the boys had left her. Her eyes were fixed on the black night sky, and she didn’t respond when they said her name. Rachel would never respond again.”

Tommy fell silent and looked at his audience. Irene understood his intentions in telling the story and resisted the impulse to ask him to finish. Katarina looked like she was going to throw up. Jenny sat with a stony expression on her face, but Irene knew her daughter and could see from her nervously plucking fingers that she was extremely moved. Tommy took another deep breath and continued.

“You might think that since Rachel bled so heavily, she wouldn’t have become pregnant. But she did. Her father was in despair. His name was Jacob Uhr. He was widowed at an early age and had come from Poland when Rachel was little, to build a future for himself and his daughter in Berlin. He worked for his unmarried uncle in the bookstore. When the uncle died several years later, he left the bookstore to Jacob. The store wasn’t prosperous, but Jacob could support himself and his daughter comfortably. Until the rape occurred. Doctors came and went. Rachel lay in a coma as a result of shock and had to be cared for like a baby. Finally Jacob could no longer afford to pay the doctor bills and had to nurse Rachel himself as best he could. By then he knew that she was pregnant. A Jewish neighbor woman promised to help with the delivery.”

Katarina was so agitated that her voice broke when she asked, “But why didn’t the father report the boys?”

Tommy’s tone of voice was unchanged. “He did, right after the rape occurred. The police just smirked and winked knowingly at each other. And nothing happened. Nobody was interested in even looking for five purebred Aryans who had raped a lowly Jewish girl. Jacob Uhr should have been grateful that his miserable lineage was infused with a little noble Aryan blood.”

Jenny was pale as a corpse now, and her eyes looked unnaturally large in her hairless skull. She didn’t take her eyes off Tommy.

“Rachel turned fourteen. Two weeks later the labor pains started. For the next three days the thin little girl lay there trying to push out the baby. Jacob had help from the neighbor woman, who was used to assisting at childbirths. She was the one who saw when Rachel died. Jacob refused at first to accept it, but she screamed, ‘Now it’s a matter of seconds!’ She stuck her hands into Rachel’s womb and with the blood streaming down her forearms pulled out the little baby in a torrent of blood. At first Jacob didn’t want to look at the miracle that had cost his only daughter her life. But the midwife was a resolute woman. She bathed the screaming little mite, wrapped her up, and placed the infant in Jacob’s arms. Then she said, ‘Jacob Uhr. This little child is without guilt. Your daughter died that night in the schoolyard, and she never came back to us. But the child is alive and healthy. You have received her as a gift from God, instead of Rachel who was taken from you. The little girl shall be called Sonya, after me!’

“Then Jacob looked down into the baby’s dark sapphire-blue eyes. The little one had stopped crying and looked steadily at her grandfather. And in his heart a light was lit for the little life and he whispered quietly, so that only she could hear: ‘You will live. You will have a better life!’”

“Damn! What a damned shitty story you’re making up!”

Jenny had jumped up from her seat, and her eyes glittered with tears and rage. Tommy looked at her calmly. Without a word he pulled out a thin, worn book with a brown leather cover from the pocket of his jacket. At first Irene thought it looked like an old diary. When Tommy held it up to the light, she could clearly see an elegant monogram in the lower right corner of the cover. The gilt had flaked off, but you could make out the letters J. U. Calmly he said, “You can read it yourself. This is Jacob Uhr’s diary.”

He held it out to Jenny. She instantly put her hands behind her back. She looked at the little book as if it were a cobra ready to strike. Tommy didn’t take his eyes off her as he again spoke. “To make a long story short, with the help of the midwife Sonya, the little Sonya survived. A year later Jacob managed to get out of Germany. He found a job in a bookstore here in Göteborg that was also owned by a Jew. When he married a Swedish woman—Britta, a stubborn fisherman’s widow from the island of Hönö—he fell into disfavor with his employer.”

“Hönö! That’s where your summerhouse is! Is that where you heard this story?” Katarina seemed relieved to begin to divine an explanation for the awful things she had heard this evening.

Tommy smiled and went on, “Part of it. Both Jacob and this woman were more than forty years old when they met. She once had a son, but he drowned in the same shipwreck as his father, during a storm in the North Sea. So little Sonya became like a daughter for Jacob and his wife. But the Jews in Göteborg threw him out of their congregation. Jacob had never been a particularly religious Jew, so he converted to Christianity. Little Sonya was confirmed in the Swedish Lutheran Church. She had blue eyes and wonderfully shiny red hair. She was teased about it, but not because she was Jewish. Nobody knew about that; she didn’t even know herself. She knew nothing about her ancestry, but thought she was Jacob and Britta’s child. Jacob had told her only that he came from Poland, but not that he was a Jew. He never mentioned the time in Germany or what happened there. Britta knew, of course, but she didn’t say anything to Sonya either. She didn’t find out anything until Jacob and Britta died a few months apart, fifteen years ago.”

Irene couldn’t help exclaiming. The pieces had fallen into place and she understood how it all fit together.

Tommy nodded to her and smiled. “You’ve figured it out. But Jenny and Katarina couldn’t know about this, since they weren’t born yet. Sonya is my mother. Jacob and Britta, whom I always called Grandma and Grandpa, turned out to be my great-grandfather and his wife!”

Only Sammie’s faint snoring under the coffee table disturbed the total silence that had descended over the room. Irene couldn’t think of anything to say. Tommy had never told her about this. But really, why should he?

As if he had heard her thoughts he continued, “It was a shock for Mamma. She, who was confirmed and married in the Swedish Lutheran Church, suddenly found out that she was half Jewish and the product of a gang rape!”

Tommy fell silent and looked down at Sammie through the glass tabletop. When he spoke again, his voice was low and utterly serious. “Jenny, if you want you can borrow Jacob’s diary. It’s important that you understand why you and I can no longer be friends.”

Jenny’s eyes were wide with horror; her mouth stood half open, but she couldn’t utter a sound. Irene’s maternal heart writhed in sympathy, but she knew that this was between Jenny and Tommy.

He went on in a neutral tone, “You and Katarina attended the baptism of my children. We have spent vacations and weekends together. But because you have declared that you’re a skinhead, play Nazi music, and advocate what they stand for, you are the enemy of me and my children. Our mortal enemy, literally! When the persecution begins, one drop of Jewish blood in our veins will be enough to have us killed. Even the suspicion that there may be one drop is enough to kill us! And I’m one-quarter Jewish, my children one-eighth. We don’t have a chance. We will be killed.”

Jenny tried to pluck up her courage and screamed, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! We don’t want to kill anybody!”

“Yes you do, Jenny. What is it they sing in the lyrics to the music you like so much? Since you say you love that music, you also have to stand for what the lyrics say. ‘Death to niggers and Jews! Fight for a pure, Aryan Sweden!’ Sound familiar? And to show even more clearly what you stand for, you’ve also shaved off your hair,” he stated coldly.

“That was because of the band! Markus thought it would be cool if I dared to shave off my ha . . . hair!”

The last word came in a long sob. She sprang to her feet, rushed up the stairs, and slammed the door. They could hear her crying loudly. Sammie woke up when she rushed off and looked around bewildered. He sensed that the atmosphere was charged, not at all as cozy as it was when he went to sleep.

Krister leaned forward, put his head in his hands, and groaned, “Good Lord, this has been one of the worst experiences of my life! I almost stood up and yelled at you to stop. But now you’ve put the decision in Jenny’s hands.”

“It’s not Jenny’s fault; it’s the fault of our forgetfulness. We forget what we want to forget, and the consequence is that we lose our history, and then we can’t learn from it. It’s an eternal cycle and everything is repeated,” said Tommy in resignation.

Irene’s mouth was dry when she asked, “Is this story really true?”

“Every single word. Do you want to borrow Jacob’s diary?”

Hesitantly, she reached out and took the little book with the dry leather cover. But she didn’t open it. Uncertainly she said, “My school German isn’t that good anymore. I probably can’t understand what he wrote.”

Tommy gave her a big smile and a shrewd glance. “No, you probably can’t. Because Jacob wrote his diary in his mother tongue. Polish.”

 

JIMMY OLSSON had emergency neurosurgery at two o’clock in the morning. The examination earlier in the day had shown a small hemorrhage between the meninges that had not been visible on the emergency X ray taken the night he was admitted to the hospital. Jimmy’s condition had deteriorated rapidly after he awoke at night with a splitting headache and began to show signs of failing consciousness. His speech had become slurred and his body was going numb.

 

SVEN ANDERSSON looked serious when he told Tommy, Irene, Birgitta, and Jonny about Jimmy. The superintendent said sympathetically, “The poor guy, it’s evident a blood vessel was leaking blood.”

Irene shuddered. Tommy looked angry when he said, “This is what really happens from hard blows to the head. In the movies the hero just shakes his head after a skyscraper falls on him, gets up, and quickly grabs his machine gun to mow down twenty gangsters!”

Jonny snorted, “Why don’t you tell it like it is: This is what happens when you go out on a job with a chick. It’s always the guy who has to take the worst lumps when things get rough!”

Irene was totally speechless, but she didn’t need to get into an argument. Unexpectedly the superintendent came to her defense. “If Irene hadn’t been there, Jimmy Olsson would be dead today.”

“Thanks to her, in that case. She got them into the situation! Nobody asked them to drive out to Billdal. The dames lured poor Jimmy away.”