Love and Treasure (17 page)

On his way out the door, the rabbi shook hands first with Yuval and then with the third man in the room. This man sat on the edge of a cot, his legs crossed elegantly one over the other, smoking a cigarette. Unlike Yuval, who was dressed casually, in a well-worn shirt and a pair of army fatigues, this man wore an impeccably tailored suit, the cuff of his pants breaking cleanly over a pair of canary-yellow socks.

He smiled blandly at Jack, who struggled to get a read on him.

Jack looked from one man to the other and then back at Ilona, who was busy pulling at a loose thread on the apron of her Purim costume. Why had she brought him here?

Yuval said, “In the Yishuv we are not so formal. We use first names. May I call you Jack?”

Jack didn’t reply, instead he looked again at Ilona, who still refused to meet his eye.

Yuval continued, “We have a situation, Jack. You know the conditions in the DP camps, yes?”

Jack looked around the room. It appeared to be the residence of a single person, and though the cot was narrow and there was a paucity of personal belongings, it was a room, not a cubicle. Yuval’s “situation” seemed better than most.

The man continued, “In Germany it is worse even than here. At least here, in Land Salzburg, your command is sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. Your general sends Rabbi Bohnen to help us. But in Germany the military government appoints SS to high positions and lets them abuse the few Jews who survive. Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis. Even now, we haven’t managed to weed them out. They have a saying in Germany, ‘Too bad you weren’t a Nazi, then maybe you’d get somewhere.’ You’ve heard this?”

“No.” But Jack wasn’t surprised. Ball had recently told him that a survey of U.S. troops reported that 59 percent of them believed that Hitler
had done a lot for Germany. Given his experience with the replacements, Jack thought the figure was an understatement.

“The Germans will never stop killing the Jews,” Yuval said. “Even when the Allied victory was inevitable, even as the Wehrmacht prepared to surrender, German civilians murdered the remnant of the camps, those who were led on forced marches through the countryside. I met a man once who told me that he was chased by a gang of boys—boys, Jack—who screamed at him, ‘We’re going hunting, to shoot down the zebras!’ You know why ‘zebras’?”

“No.”

“Because of the striped uniforms.”

At this Ilona moved closer to Jack, slipped her hand in his. He knew she was thinking of Etelka. He almost forgave her for ambushing him with these men.

“What do you want from me?” he asked Yuval, though the question might as easily have been directed at her.

Yuval said, “We understand that you have access to a truck. A U.S. military truck.”

At the thought of the truck and what had happened in the back, Jack flushed.

“There is a truck at the warehouse where I work,” he said.

“A U.S. military truck.”

“Technically it belongs to the Allied civilian authority.”

“It is our hope,” Yuval said, “that you will make it possible for us to, let us say, borrow your truck.”

“Nothing doing.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. Like I said, it belongs to U.S. Forces, Austria.”

“But it is under your command, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So where you command it,” Yuval said, pleased by his own logic, “that’s where it goes.”

Was this what it was about? Was this why Ilona had come to him? Was this why she had made love with him? As incentive? To get him to turn over his truck? He was furious and humiliated and wanted to leave, to run, to escape his anger and shame.

“Sorry,” Jack said, turning to the door. “The truck’s not mine to lend.”

The way Yuval blocked the door was elegant, without apparent force or effort, but as surely as a brick wall. “Okay, so you do not lend it to us. You just park the truck in an unguarded place, leave the key, walk away. And don’t come back for it for a day. That’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all, is it?”

“That’s all.”

“And what, if you don’t mind my asking, do you need a truck for?”

The man in the yellow socks shook another cigarette loose from his pack, affixed a small cardboard holder to it, and lit it with a shiny silver lighter. He blew two thin streams of smoke from his nostrils. He held the cigarette like a woman, between his index and middle fingers. He spoke in a refined and cultivated German accent. “Captain Wiseman,” he said, “you are a Jew.”

It was not a question, so Jack did not bother to answer it.

“I was at Auschwitz,” the man continued. “Not long after liberation. You know of Auschwitz?”

“Yes.”

“As difficult as it is for the Jewish survivors in Germany and here in Austria in the terribly overcrowded DP camps, it is worse in Poland. Those who have tried to reclaim their homes have been threatened. Some of them have been killed. They survive the camps, and find their way home at last, and there they die, on their own doorsteps, killed by their own neighbors. It is a terrible dilemma, don’t you think?”

“What is?”

“What to do with all these Jews. Hitler killed so many of them, but still some remain. Perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps a million. No one is sure. Neither is anyone sure what to do with them. Will your government take them, do you suppose? Will Mr. Harry Truman say,
Please, half-dead Polish Jews, come to New York. Come to Missouri
.”

Jack remembered sitting as a teenager at his maternal grandparents’ kitchen table, watching his normally stoic grandfather weep over the fate of the German Jewish refugee passengers onboard the
St. Louis
, turned away from Cuba, rejected by the United States, and sent back to their grim fates in Hitler’s Europe.

“I doubt it,” he said.

“You doubt it. I, also, doubt it. So then, what will become of them, Captain Wiseman? Their villages are gone. Even their cities. What remains of Jewish Vilna, Jewish Warsaw? Jewish Bucharest or Jewish
Berlin? You know as well as I do. So, then. What will happen to all these Jews?”

“I don’t know.”

“And, like you, your government has no answer.”

“If they do, I’m not privy to whatever it is.”

“Ah, that is where we differ, you and I. You see, I am privy to the answers of at least some in your government. Right now, it is costing your government millions to feed and house the Jews who are pouring into the American Zone. It’s costing, and nobody wants to pay for it. Your president, he wants to spend his money rebuilding Europe, turning Germany and Austria into allies against the Soviet Union. The British are your allies, and thus there can be no official policy that contradicts them, but some in your government agree with me that the Jewish remnant should go far away, as far as Palestine, to settle the land of Israel.”

“I see,” Jack said. “And so you’re planning on driving them there, a hundred thousand Jews, in my truck.”

The man smiled.

“Only a few of them,” Yuval said. “And only to Italy. After that we use a boat.”

Jack had never told a woman to fuck off, and he wasn’t about to begin, but as Ilona chased him through the camp, calling his name and begging for him to stop, to talk to her, he was sorely tempted. Instead he ignored her and would have made his escape had he not run into the crowd of revelers, only just now dispersing, the speeches having finally come to an end.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered, trying to make it through the throng.

“Please, Jack!” Ilona said, catching up to him. She grabbed his arm with both her hands. “Why are you running away from me?”

He shook her off. “I’m not running away.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Tell me, Ilona, did you invite me here today because those men told you to?” He glanced quickly around to be sure that none of the passersby could hear him. He bent his head and hissed in her ear. “Did you sleep with me because they told you to?”

She dropped her hands and glared at him, her face red. “You dare to say this to me? You go. Go now! I never want to see you again.”

He thought of her hand stealing into his at the mention of the murderous German boys and their hunt for the “zebras,” and he hesitated, wondering if his anger was justified.

“Ilona, tell me the truth. What happened today, in your room. In your bed. Did they tell you to do that?”

“I am not a prostitute. And those men are not … I don’t know the word. They are not men who own prostitutes.”

“Pimps.”

She frowned. “That’s not the word.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“ ‘Pimp’?” she said. “That is a ridiculous word. It’s like a joke.”

“Ilona!”

“Jack, I came to you because I missed you. I took you to my room because I was happy.”

“And why did you take me to meet those men?”

“Because your rabbi asked me to. I told him you were coming today, and he told me to bring you to meet the men from Palestine.”

Jack wanted so badly to believe her. And he did. He did believe her but for one worm of doubt that wriggled and gnawed and poisoned what he wanted so desperately to feel. And then another small hand slipped into his, and he jumped. It took him a moment to recognize Tomas Zweig. It had only been a matter of weeks since he had last seen the boy, but in that time Tomas had grown at least a few inches. It was as though his body had hibernated during the long years of the war and was now doing its best to catch up.

“Tomas!” he said. The boy smiled and allowed his hair to be tousled. In German Jack asked, “How are you? How are your brother and your uncle?”

“They are well. Are you well?”

“I am.”

The boy turned to Ilona. “Uncle sent me. He wants you to bring Jack to see him.”

When Jack and Ilona arrived at Rudolph Zweig’s room, they found a convivial group sharing a holiday meal of small green apples and slices of hard yellow cheese.

Rudolph leaped to his feet and said, “I am so glad Ilona has brought you to me! I wanted to tell you when we left the Europa, but it was so sudden.”

“How are you?” Jack asked.

“Very well.” Rudolph looked like a different person. Though his back was not entirely straight, he had discarded one of his canes. His cheeks had filled out. He looked impossibly young.

Tomas’s older brother, Josef, had also shot up and filled out. The boy gave a stiff little bow, a remnant of the punctilious manner instilled by a governess long forgotten. He greeted Jack with a hearty “Shalom!”

Jack raised his eyebrow at their uncle. “He speaks Hebrew?”

Rudolph said, “Both boys are learning. As am I. They have taken Hebrew names.” He gripped the shoulder of the older boy. “Josef is now Yossi, and Tomas calls himself Zvi.”

“Zvi?” Jack said. “And what about you. Have you changed your name, too?”

“Why not?” Rudolph said. “A new name for a new life. Reuven Ben Ari. In honor of my father, Leopold. Yossi and Zvi’s grandfather. We will now be sons of the lion, all of us.”

Ilona said, “Reuven, Yossi, and Zvi are planning on immigrating to Palestine as soon as they are strong enough. They are the only members of their family to survive, and they cannot return to Berlin alone.”

Not long ago, Rudolph told Jack, he had been asked by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to fill out a questionnaire about his immigration goals. He, like 18,700 of the 19,000 other Jewish DPs who filled out the questionnaire, listed “Palestine” as not only his first but also his second choice.

Ilona said, “In the Fürth DP camp near Nürnberg, when a UNRRA worker said they must put a different destination for their second choice, a quarter of the DPs filled in the word ‘crematorium.’ ”

“There is nowhere else for us,” Rudolph told Jack.

Was this true, Jack wondered. Had Hitler proven to the Jews that there were only two places safe for them, the first an ancient and misbegotten spit of land surrounded by enemies and the other no place at all?

Tomas, now Zvi, said, “We are going to walk over the Alps!”

Jack looked doubtfully at Rudolph’s remaining cane.

Ilona said, “In the winter the trip is perilous. Reuven does not like it when I say this, but he isn’t strong enough to make the journey. I tell him he must wait for spring.”

Rudolph said, “They say that as time passes, it will only get harder to cross. The British are putting pressure on the Italians. No one knows how long the route from Salzburg will be open. If we don’t go now, we will lose our chance.”

Jack said, “Who is ‘they’? Yuval? The other guy?”

Rudolph said, “You have met Aba Yuval?” He beamed. “A great man. A hero. The Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, they sent not just Yuval but also Hebrew teachers, scout leaders. To help us prepare. Everyone is trying to get to Palestine.”

Jack turned to Ilona. “And you? Are you trying to get to Palestine?”

“I don’t know where I’m going. Maybe England to my aunt Firenze. Maybe Hungary. Maybe Palestine. Maybe someplace else.”

“Where?” he said.

She shrugged and smiled.

And then, despite all his efforts to the contrary, he felt a tug on the tangled and frayed string in his heart, the one the rabbi had first pulled. He recognized what the rabbi had been telling him. He was a soldier but also a Jew. And now, here, in this place, with this impossibly brave young man and his impossibly brave boys, Jack understood which came first.

•
14
•

JACK AND YUVAL WALKED
along the pathways of the DP camp, dodging groups of children playing in the squares of dirt that might have once been lawns and men gathering in small groups, smoking cigarettes and talking. Everywhere they walked Yuval was greeted with waves and cheers, though as soon as people realized that he and Jack were deep in conversation, they allowed a respectful distance.

“When we are ready, we will send Ilona,” Yuval told Jack. “You’ll give her the keys and show her where you park the truck.”

“No,” Jack said.