The Last Witness (27 page)

“I guess she did.”

“But according to Dr. Jordan’s data your neural activity almost went off the chart when you saw the clip of the gorge and Christine was there. When she was little.” Hodgson went into the report again. “Don’t do that. Only birds can do that.”

“What?” said Jack.

“That’s what you said when you were in the scanner. You were talking out loud. We recorded it.”

“I said that?”

“Yes you did.”

Hodgson read from the report.

‘With the presentation of sample no. 8 in the first series the subject exhibited severe stress-related disorder which suggests that insufficient activation of the prefrontal cortex could be the basis for inadequate suppression of unwanted traumatic memories stored in the hippocampus. ’

“Dr. Jordan?” said Jack.

“To put it in English, Jack, this stuff about Christine when she was a little girl wanting to go on the railing obviously left its mark on you. Can you tell me about that?”

“Christine was always a daredevil.”

“How do you mean?”

“She wasn’t like her older sister. Tiffany was careful about things. But not Christine. She was the opposite. When she was little she was all ready to climb up on that railing. She wanted to walk on it.”

“She wanted to walk on it?”

Jack nodded. “And she would have if we let her.”

“Why did she want to do that?”

Jack bit his lip and looked off into space. Hodgson took note. “She wanted to see if she could balance herself,” Jack said.

“You mean on the railing?”

“Yes. That’s why I told her only birds can do that.”

Hodgson took his time with what he wanted to ask next. “So Christine always had this fascination about walking on the railing that overlooked the gorge?”

Jack said she did.

“And they found her there,” said Hodgson. “That’s where they found her.”

With that, Jack’s eyes started to well up.

“Jack, listen to me. There’s a police investigation going on into Christine’s death. From what we know at this point it’s one of two things. Either she fell … or she jumped.”

Jack was staring into space.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

Jack looked straight at Hodgson. “She didn’t jump. She wouldn’t do that.”

“What about this Tay-Sachs disease? She was depressed about that. Anyone would be.”

“She still wouldn’t do it. Not Christine. Oh she was a risk-taker all right. That was her nature. But she wouldn’t go and jump like that.”

“Tell me more about her being a risk-taker.”

“She would go the limit. If someone dared her to do something she would just to make a point. Once when she was nine or ten she climbed up a tree. Some boy said no one could climb it, that it was too high. Well that was all Christine had to hear. She had to show him so she did. She climbed the tree right to the top but then she couldn’t get down. They had to get someone with a ladder to bring her down.”

Jack stopped. He was reminiscing.

“It was a big one too. A birch tree. A tall birch tree.”

Hodgson saw the abrupt change in him, like a switch being turned. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes glassy, as still as death.

“What is it, Jack?”

“Brzezinka.”

His hands started to twitch like those of an old man suffering from Parkinson’s. Jack may have been a hundred years old, but Hodgson didn’t think of him that way. As being old. His eyes weren’t good and his hearing wasn’t sharp, but his mind was clear and more than that, he was keen. There was nothing stale about Jack. But here he was twitching to no end.

“What was that word you said?” Hodgson asked.

“
Brzezinka
is Polish for birch,” said Jack. “In German it’s
birkenau
.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
.”

“Auschwitz?”

Jack blinked and then he came out of the trance that was holding him.

“Lieutenant Hodgson,” he said. “I think that’s the first time you said it right.”

“What does all this have to do with Auschwitz, Jack?”

“The birch trees.
Auschwitz
was full of birch trees. That’s where the name
Birkenau
comes from. In Polish it’s
brzezinka
.”

“So let’s back up a minute and see what we have here. You have a little girl who is fascinated by this gorge. She wants to go up on the railing. She’s a kid who likes to do things and doesn’t worry about the consequences and even when she gets older she’s still fascinated with the gorge. She was alone and figured what the hell? I always wanted to get up on that thing. Here’s my chance. So she did.”

“Maybe but …”

“Either that or she went there with the intention to jump and that’s suicide.”

“No. Not Christine.”

“How can you be so sure? You don’t know exactly how she was dealing with this disease. You said yourself she would get dizzy. She would lose her balance.”

“Maybe she lost her balance.”

Hodgson was stymied. He sat back in the chair and it went
crunch
. “Jack, you have to understand something. We may never find out what happened to Christine at the gorge that day. We may never find out.”

“It was an accident. It had to be. Christine was a lot like me but she wasn’t stupid.”

“What do you mean she was like you?”

“I took risks. My whole life was a risk. But I didn’t always have a choice.”

“Let’s get into that, shall we? The second series of stimuli in the scanner. You remember what we showed you?” Hodgson went into Dr. Jordan’s report again, and then he took out a few photos. “There was this one.”

He showed Jack the black-and-white photo of people stacking furniture on a roadway with a soldier ordering them around. Jack looked at the picture. Then Hodgson took out the photo of German soldiers kicking a man in the street. Jack leaned in closer. Hodgson showed him another photo.

“Is that the hospital in Lodz?” Jack said, squinting. “The building in the back?”

“I don’t know.”

Jack looked confused.

“What is it?” said Hodgson.

“There’s something about that building.”

Hodgson moved on to another photo with a group of children begging, and then to the caricature of the haggard Jew with the big nose. Jack stared at them and said nothing. Then Hodgson showed him the photo of the murder squad with their machine guns.

“Dr. Jordan’s numbers indicate a pretty big increase in neural activity with this one,” he said.

Jack shook his head.

“This one too,” said Hodgson.

It was the photo of naked women standing in a ditch, some of them with little children in their arms. About twenty of them were in the picture, all facing to the left, and at the far right a woman cradling an infant in her arms was rushing in to join them. Behind them strewn about the ground were articles of clothing.

“With that one …”

“Those poor people,” Jack said. “Those poor women and those helpless children. I could have been one of them. I should have been one of them.” And just like that he broke down. The tears came from his eyes in a flood. “All my life all this guilt. Horrible guilt that I shouldn’t be here.” Jack buried his head in his hands and wept.

Hodgson put his arm around him.

“I have no right!” Jack said, sobbing. “Why am I here when so many died? How did I get to be a hundred years old? To suffer so long. Why did this happen to me?”

“It’s all right, Jack,” Hodgson said. “It’s all right. I know how you feel.”

“No you don’t. How could you? How could anyone know? People don’t even think it happened. No one believes me. But it did happen. I was there.”

“I know you were.”

“Do you? Really?”

“Yes.”

“And that monster.
Der Todesengel
. Mengele. I knew him the bastard. He murdered so many children but nobody believes me. Nobody believes me.”

“I believe you, Jack.”

37

Jack’s ninetieth birthday was a family celebration, but it would be his last one with Eve. It wasn’t long afterward that she had her aneurysm and died. They had been married over sixty years. It meant that Jack was suddenly living alone in his Upper East Side brownstone, and despite daily visits from his son Ralph, not doing very well at it. During this time the Great Holocaust of 2029 took place. Like everyone else Jack followed the news and was horrified with the massacre of Muslim converts to Christianity by fanatical Islamists in southern Turkey. Pretty soon any Christians at all were being slaughtered. It all happened over a period of six weeks. Christians were being targeted by roving gangs who resorted to guns, knives, axes, even hand grenades. The growing army of radicals would toss the grenades right into residential neighborhoods and blow up homes. Most of the Arab world ignored the story or downplayed the extent of carnage, but everywhere else the killing of innocent masses was widely condemned.
The Great Holocaust
became part of the language.

It was then that a 3D documentary began to generate interest. The documentary wasn’t about the Great Holocaust, but something else. It presented a convincing argument about what had befallen European Jews in the last century. Central to its theme was Auschwitz. The documentary began with a dramatization of Rudolph Hess, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, signing an affidavit on May 14, 1946 in which he stated that two million Jews had been gassed at the camp between 1941 and 1943. The actor who portrayed him – with his long face, heavy eyebrows and square jaw – even resembled the real Hess. As he signed the form, faint music played in the background, and then Hess was taken away. His confession was said to have been
obtained under torture. The actual paper with his confession would go on display decades later at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Then the music got louder as the scene shifted to a plaque unveiled at Auschwitz. The year was now 1948. Actual footage from the time was adapted and modified to digital 3D. The words on the plaque said that four million people had been killed at the site between 1940 and 1945, a figure provided from the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in November, 1945.

Then, with the music louder still, it was Auschwitz in 1990, the year when the original plaque was replaced with another plaque. The words on the new plaque said the Nazis had murdered one and a half million people at the site, most of them Jews.

Auschwitz faded away and a huge 3D graphic of a red cross appeared. With the music still building the narrator said that, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, an estimated 135,000 registered prisoners had died at Auschwitz. This figure came from Nazi Germany’s Death Books confiscated by the Red Army immediately after the Second World War. The Death Books had been turned over to the Red Cross by the Soviet Union after the fall of communism in 1989.

Then another dramatization. Richard Glueks, head of Nazi Germany’s Concentration Camp Inspectorate, was busy at work in his Berlin office. The camera showed him from the back and focused on his record books, which opened up to reveal that 103,429 inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau – a little more than half of them Jews – had died of typhus between 1942 and 1944. The image of Glueks slowly dissolved with the voice of the narrator saying that, according to microfilmed records from the Russian Archives, the total number of people executed at Auschwitz was 1,646, most of them Poles. Of this total, only 117 were said to be Jews.

The documentary moved to its closing segment, a tour of present-day Auschwitz. The museum was still open to the public, but the rest of the site had been closed, which meant that few people were visiting anymore. The tour was accompanied by a running commentary, along with footage of what remained from the buildings. But now the music was very different. It began so softly you could barely hear it, and then it became clear.
The Blue Danube
. The strings playing in perfect unison, Strauss’s celebrated movement swept the viewer away as the voice of the narrator carried the film’s message to its final crescendo.

There was one building where, the narrator said, Zyklon gas was used to disinfect clothes from severe outbreaks of lice. There were the remains of two crematoria where the bodies of those who died of typhus were burnt. There was a building where elaborate theatrical productions were staged to entertain those staying at the camp. There was the excavation of what was once a swimming pool, of all things. The documentary concluded with this statement: ‘The manipulation by media over the course of almost one hundred years about what really happened at Auschwitz is the greatest crime of deception and deceit the world has ever seen.’

Coming on the heels of the Great Holocaust of 2029, the documentary gained traction and before long many people all over the world accepted it as the last word on Auschwitz. It was used to justify a book called
The Great Hoax
which made a compelling argument about how the Jewish holocaust never really happened. This was the book Christine had tossed into the Elora Gorge. The Upper Grand District School Board would later add a children’s version of it to the reading list for her course
An Overview of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
.

The Great Hoax
inspired a feverish debate in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, about whether or not to close the old camps for good. Many said that the camps were perpetuating a lie. In time, the camps in Germany did close down. One by one. The first was Buchenwald,
prompting a protest at the Buchenwald Memorial by a handful of Jews from the nearby town of Weimar, but no one took much notice. That was followed by the closing of Bergen-Belsen, and again, local Jews staged a rally at the Jewish Monument which had been erected at the site in 1946. But the rally created a furor that flew right in the face of those same protesters because words inscribed on the monument referred to ‘thirty thousand Jews’ exterminated in the camp.

“That is a far cry from six million,” said a reporter covering the story. “And it’s twenty thousand less than the number of Christians who were killed in the Great Holocaust.”