The Last Witness (28 page)

Then Ravensbruck closed and Dachau, and both times protests by Jews were met with little fanfare. Then all the other camps in Germany closed. Flossenburg. Neuengamme. Sachsenhausen. Dora-Mittelbau. The movement to close the camps spread to other countries, first to the Ukraine where Janowska was closed, and then Belarus where Koldichevo was closed. Then it was Kaiserwald in Latvia, Sered in Slovakia, Natzweiler in France, Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, and Mauthausen in Austria. Before long, all the camps in Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria closed as well. Then it was the camp in Holland – Westerbork. Some of them were bulldozed right away and others later. Soon the only ones left were in Poland.

The first camps to close in Poland were Stutthof, Majdanek, Plaszow and Gross-Rosen. There were no protests. Not one. They were followed by Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. The camps with their museums and memorials were said to be bad for business. What was once a source of tourism revenue was now met with increasing indifference. The Polish government could no longer make a case for maintaining them since the cost of upkeep was high, the cause unpopular, and donors nowhere to be found. By the time Christmas of 2039 approached, only one camp had not been bulldozed into oblivion.

Auschwitz.

38

The somber procession wound its way along the narrow road that meandered through the small cemetery in Kitchener. It was easy to get lost with all the twists and turns, but the driver of the hearse knew the route. Many people came to Christine’s funeral. The mourners included her Grade 6 students and teachers from Williamsburg Public School, members of the Upper Grand District School Board, close friends, city councillors, a reporter from the only daily newspaper in town, and the entire staff of the community weekly
The Reflector
where Christine once worked. There were also families who were interviewed by Christine for the obituaries she wrote, and of course, the Fisher family.

Christine’s sister Tiffany, her little girl in her arms, wept by the open grave. Her father Will, his head hung low, was grieving quietly under his breath. Christine’s grandfather Bill, Jack’s older son, kept shaking his head from side to side as if this couldn’t be real. Christine’s mother Emma, a woman who had seen much suffering as a nurse in the trauma ward at the local hospital, would emerge as the strongest. When everyone was gathered around, the priest started to read.

“Turn thou the key upon our thoughts, dear Lord and let us sleep
.

Grant us our portion of forgetfulness, silent and deep
.

Lay thou thy quiet hand upon our eyes to clear their sight
.

Shut out the shining of the moon and stars and candlelight
.

Keep back the phantoms and the visions sad. The shades of gray
.

The fancies that so haunt the little hours before the day
.

Quiet the time-worn questions that are all unanswered yet
.

Take from the spent and troubled souls of us their vain regret
.

And lead us far into thy silent land that we may go

Like children out across the field of dreams where poppies blow
.

So all thy saints and all thy sinners too wilt thou not keep

Since not alone unto thy well-beloved thou givest sleep.”

When the priest finished, Emma with her husband Will at her side, opened a book. Her voice, the voice of a broken mother, was weak but it did not crack.

“I’ll lend you for a little time a child of mine
.

For you to love the while she lives and mourn for when she’s dead
.

It may be six or seven years, or twenty-two or three
,

But will you till I call her back take care of her for me?

She’ll bring her charms to gladden you, and should her stay be brief

You’ll have her lovely memories as solace for your grief
.

I cannot promise she will stay, since all from earth return
,

But there are lessons taught down there I want this child to learn
.

I’ve looked the wide world over in search for teachers true
,

And from the throngs that crowd life’s lanes, I have selected you
.

Now will you give her all your love, nor think the labor vain
,

Nor hate me when I come to call to take her back again?

I fancied that I heard them say, ‘Dear Lord, thy will be done
.

For all the joys thy child shall bring, the risk of grief we’ll run’.”

The graveside service was brief, just as Christine would have wished. The priest concluded with a short prayer.

“Eternal rest grant unto them whose earthly lives are past
.

Perpetual light shine on them. May they rest in peace at last
.

Eternal life grant unto them whose laughter now I’ve lost
.

Whose presence and whose smiles I miss but never mind the cost
.

Eternal joy grant unto them whose sufferings now are through
.

Their pain and illness finally gone, their minds and hearts renew
.

Eternal peace grant unto them, my friends and foes together
.

Forgive them all their trespasses. May they rest in peace forever
.

Amen.”

The Fisher family took a step back, and the casket was lowered into the ground. There were hugs and tears and long, enduring embraces that didn’t want to end, and later at the family’s home an awkward gathering that was almost perverse with the absence of Christine. No one said much of anything, and the next day Jack was back home in New York. Ralph stayed with him in his room the first night, but then Jack told him to leave.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

But Jack wasn’t all right. He kept asking himself by whose law had his great-granddaughter been taken. Christine was only twenty-five years old, a schoolteacher with her whole life ahead of her. She would have married and had children and some day grandchildren and here was Jack at a hundred. What more could there be for him? Surely he wouldn’t live much longer now, but he was alive and his little Christine was dead. Where was the reasoning in that? But Jack had never seen much reason in his life. Nothing ever really made much sense. Things just happened and you dealt with them.

Not thirty minutes after Ralph was out the door, Jack was sitting alone in his room at the Greenwich Village Seniors Center, staring at that little box Christine got him the previous Christmas. Now Christmas was coming again. It was almost a year to the day. Her gift was some newfangled thing that let you send and receive 3D messages to anyone you wanted. Anywhere in the world. All you needed was their identity code. It would take his blood pressure, heart rate and other things that measured his health, but Jack didn’t care about his health anymore.

He couldn’t explain it, but something was pulling him to that box and maybe it was because she bought it. He got up, flipped open the lid, pressed the
receive
key and there she was.

“Hi Jack. How are you? You must be getting tired of hearing from me like this but I have something to tell you. I hope you’re sitting down.”

Jack’s mouth was ajar. He just came from her funeral the day before, and now here was Christine standing in front of him. Talking to him as if all was well with the world. He took her advice and sat on the edge of his bed.

“You remember how you told me about your experiences in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz and then I found those old records the Germans kept? They were meticulous record-keepers and I hope you forgive me for saying this but in a way it’s a good thing because everything they did is there for the world to see. How can anyone deny it? That’s why you’re important, Jack. You are the last living person who can tell the world what happened. You are the last witness. After you there is no one else. You have a duty … an obligation … to tell everything … everything you can remember about what happened to you. Now about what I wanted to tell you. Are you ready? When you were that little boy in the ghetto … Jacob Klukowsky … hidden by your parents Bela and Samuel so the Nazis wouldn’t find you … you had two friends named Josef Karasik and Shimek Goldberg. Remember them? You would sneak over
the wall or through the wall and steal apples and pears from the shopkeepers in the market. You stole other things too so your family could eat. Those boys were eight years older than you and Shimek was the one who helped you with the manhole cover so you could get into the sewer. Until you could do it by yourself.”

Christine stopped talking and lowered her head.

“Shimek didn’t survive. He died in the gas chamber with his family. I found all their names in the record books.”

Then she looked up and a smile came to her face.

“But Josef did survive! He survived! Just like you, Jack, and just like you he was the only one from his family who made it. After the war he wound up in a camp … a DP camp they called it … in Austria. It was called Bindermichel and it was in Linz. Then he went to an orphanage. I have the records right here. It was in the mountains near Salzburg. Later he was brought to America by the Jewish Congress. He lived in the Bronx, then got married and moved to Cleveland and he must have learned a lot about food when he was in the ghetto with you because he ran a grocery store with his father-in-law and they did very well. He died in 2017. He was eighty-six.”

Christine stopped talking again. She caught her breath and the smile returned.

“Josef Karasik had children and grandchildren. One of his granddaughters is a woman named Emily Silver. She is fifty years old and lives on the Upper East Side not far from you in one of those brownstones like the one you had with Eve. She knows all about you, Jack. Her grandfather told her the stories and I hope you don’t mind but I gave her your identity code. She wants to meet you but first she’s going to send you a 3DE. What do you think of that? I love you, Jack. Your little Christine.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau, August 1944

39

Jacob had to go to the latrine and he hated going back there. Every time he went he saw the bodies of new children. He didn’t know how they got there or what happened to them. Some of the bodies were so bruised and broken with arms and legs twisted backwards, bones sticking through the skin and in one the head missing its eyes that it didn’t matter what happened to them. It got to the point where Jacob resisted the urge to go – to pee or move his bowels – and he started feeling sick. Jerzy was quick to tell him that he couldn’t get sick because if they found out then he wouldn’t pass the next selection.

“Come with me,” Jerzy said. “I want to show you something.”

Jerzy had already told him what was going on here. He told him about the gas chambers where they put hundreds of people at a time, shut the doors and turned on the gas until all of them were dead, the lot of them piled in a heap with the strongest men on top and the smallest children at the bottom. He told him about the ovens where they burned people alive and then disposed of them all. He told him about the barbed-wire fence around the outside of the camp and how it was charged with electricity, so if you made a run for it your life would end right there on the fence. And he told him about Kanada.

It was a huge yard with watchtowers at the four corners. In the middle were piles – mountains – of the things they collected. Blankets. Thousands and thousands of blankets. Baby carriages. Hundreds and maybe thousands of those, too, but no sign of babies anywhere. Pots and pans and trunks and clothes and even food. Mountains of all these things. The women who worked there weren’t sick, but healthy and well-fed with color in their cheeks. All these things
were taken from Jews after they arrived at the camp. The belongings were sorted and the people were sorted and then most of them went straight to the gas chambers. But Kanada was a place of plenty named after a country far away.

Jerzy wanted to take Jacob to another place, so they could play a game. The game was called
Amuzierung zu den leichen bringen
, which was German for ‘tickling the corpses’. You had to speak German, of course; any words in Polish and they would beat you and some children were beaten to death for using other languages. Jacob didn’t want to see another corpse, but Jerzy told him this one wasn’t like the bodies at the latrine. This one was at the wall where they shot people with a single bullet to the head. It wasn’t messy, he said, and they weren’t children, but adults and that was better because there was more to tickle.

The body of a man was in the yard. He had been executed that very morning. A black hole was in the middle of his forehead, but apart from that and the dried blood on the ground everything about him looked intact. Jerzy lifted one of his arms and pretended to tickle him in the armpit and then he laughed. He lifted his other arm and did the same thing. Then he spread his legs apart and tickled him between them. He laughed the loudest at that.

“Now you do it,” he said.

Jacob didn’t want to, but Jerzy knew Jacob wasn’t well, that he had diarrhoea from holding it in for so long, and that if it got worse and they found out he wouldn’t make the next selection. Then they would send him to the gas chamber and burn his body in the crematorium. Whatever was left would go up in the smoke that filled the air. It had happened to many children who were there one day and gone the next and Jerzy said it would happen to him, too.

“You do it,” said Jerzy.

Jacob was younger and smaller than Jerzy and though Jerzy was just a stick he was still the stronger of the two. Jacob had trouble moving the dead man’s arm. It was too heavy. It made him think of the time he saw the body of Shmuel Zelinsky buried under the newspapers in the lane back in Lodz. He tried to get that coat off by slipping one arm out of the sleeve and then the other. This was like that. Like lifting a rock.