White Picket Fences (18 page)

“Yes. And a flat-screen and a minibar.” Eliasz winked and settled into his own chair.

“Comedians. Both of you.” The nurse’s aide turned to the three teenagers. “Okay. Go easy on them. They’ve been nothing but trouble since the last time you guys were here.”

“Hush now,
kochanie.
Go get everything ready for our pedicures.” Josef waved a withered hand and smiled.

The woman tousled his wispy silver hair and walked away.

“So you guys are roommates?” Matt took a seat on a straight-back chair across from the older men. “How’d you get to the same nursing home, anyway? And how’d you both get to San Diego, of all places?”

Eliasz’s unfocused gaze settled on the top of Matt’s head. “You want us to start today backward from San Diego?”

“No.” Chase adjusted the tripod. “We want to go back to where you left off. At the ghetto. You had just saved twenty-five babies.”

“Yeah, but we only have today to shoot the rest of this, so you know…” Matt’s voice trailed off as he looked over at Chase.

“You want us to keep it snappy?” Josef said.

“We want you to keep it authentic.” Chase bent his body to peer into the viewfinder.

“Yes, well,” Josef said. “It will not be hard to keep it authentic. Where did you say we left off?”

“You had just smuggled out twenty-five babies.” Tally sat between Chase and Matt like before. She held the photo of her great-grandfather in her hands.

“Ah, yes.” He looked at Chase. “You are ready? You are recording?”

Chase nodded.

“Yes. Twenty-five infants. We would have saved more, of course, but a man who needed medicine for his sick wife turned us in for a handful of
z
otych.
That happened five months after we started. Late August 1942. The Nazis took me, Eliasz, and his mother and father, along with five others. We didn’t know if the Gestapo knew about Katrine and Sofia, and I prayed that they did not. Sofia told me just before we smuggled out our last two children that we were going to have to choose a new meeting place. So we had—what would you say?—an inkling that something was wrong.

“On our last mission, a young father begged us to take not only his newborn daughter, but also his six-year-old son out of the ghetto. His wife had died giving birth to the infant, and this
father feared for his son’s life as well. There was a rumor that he and his son were to be in the next group being sent to Treblinka. We resisted at first since we could not use our traditional means of smuggling out a sedated baby in my tool bag. A six-year-old boy obviously wouldn’t fit in a tool bag. But Sofia said we should try using the sewers, as other smugglers were doing, and with Katrine’s help, we risked an early-morning rescue.

“We actually thought that because we were doing it a different way, we would lay to rest any suspicions about us. But when we first arrived at Treblinka, we heard that the nurse known only as Sofia had been caught smuggling children out of the ghetto and executed. The rumor was that another woman was with Sofia, but she got away. The people at the camp who told us this didn’t know Katrine’s name, and I was glad they did not. If they did not, perhaps the Gestapo did not. And I was more relieved than I can say that Katrine had escaped. Sofia had all the records of where the children had been placed. I don’t know what happened to those records. I doubt any of the surviving parents were reunited with the children we smuggled out for them.”

“I certainly never found out what became of my baby sister, Marya,” Eliasz said.

“Anyway,” Josef continued, “I was inside the apartment with Eliasz and his parents when the Gestapo came for us. This was less than an hour after they had killed Sofia, but I did not know it at the time. I could barely understand what they said. I don’t speak very good German. But I knew they were accusing us of criminal acts against the
Führer.
They honestly did not care if it was ammunition or food or children that we had smuggled. All
that mattered was that we had defied one of their mandates. And since I was a sympathizer of Jews and had participated in their criminal acts, I was worse than they were. They were not happy with me.”

“Josef was unconscious from a beating when they marched us to the transport to Treblinka,” Eliasz said. “My father and I held him between us. And actually it was a very good thing he needed to be dragged, because I was able to hide my blindness that way. I just walked wherever my father walked and dragged my half of Josef.” Eliasz turned to his old friend. “Have I ever thanked you for having been beaten senseless, Josef?”

Josef smiled. “Can’t recall that you have.”

Eliasz smiled back.
“Dzi
kuj
,
przyjaciel.”

Josef waved a wrinkled hand. “My pleasure.” The man smiled, lowered his hand, and continued. “Now Treblinka was nothing more than a little train station. That’s how we knew it. But in the months leading up to this, while the Jews practically starved in the ghetto, the Nazis used slave labor to build the death camp that would have the same name. It was in a beautiful part of Poland. Many trees and woods. Not a place where you would think atrocities could occur.

“There were two parts to the camp, the part where the Germans and Ukrainians lived, and our part, where the gas chambers were. There were a dozen gas chambers. And no crematorium. I cannot tell you how horrifying it was to be in that place. There are no words for it. Many of the people on our transport were killed the same day we got there—Eliasz’s parents and many others.

“Eliasz and I were young and strong, however, and as long
as we could keep up the ruse that Eliasz could see, we lived. There was a high fence—four meters, I’d say—all around the camp, made of chain link and barbed wire. The Nazis wanted it to be camouflaged with tree boughs woven in the chinks at all times. Eliasz and I did that for months, working around the camp day after day after day, replacing old branches with new ones. Remember how I told you Eliasz made beautiful challah? This was just like that. I told him, ‘Weave the branches like the dough, Eliasz. Braid it like bread.’ And that is how we survived.”

“How did you get out?” Matt said.

“About a year after we arrived at Treblinka, in early August, a handful of brave resisters staged a final revolt. They broke into the munitions warehouse, stole guns, and began to shoot the guards in the watchtowers and set fire to the buildings. They were very brave men. I do not think any of them survived. But their heroism allowed some of us to escape into the woods, including Eliasz and me. The camp was dismantled just a few months later because there was such extensive damage from the fires.”

As the word “fires” fell from Josef’s lips, Chase had the sensation of heat on his arms. He felt himself being mentally pulled away from the nursing home lounge and its odors of age and ammonia. Instead, the faint scent of smoke filled his lungs. He closed his eyes and saw swaths of flame and shapes in the ashen fog. A bed. A crib. Someone was crying.

Smoke.

Flames.

Fear.

“Chase?”

Tally’s voice startled him, and his eyes snapped open.

“What?” The image and its accompanying smells skittered away.

His cousin stared at him. On her other side, Matt seemed not to have noticed the seconds that Chase had mentally checked out. “Wow,” Matt said. “So you guys escaped into the woods. Then what?”

Eliasz laughed. “Then we lived like little rabbits, wandering the countryside. Sleeping in burrows, eating lettuce in gardens that did not belong to us, running at the slightest crack of a twig.”

Josef grinned. “It was rather comical. Finally, though, we met a woman who gave us shelter in her barn until the war was over. We were seventy miles from Treblinka when she found us. Her husband was very ill. I don’t think he even knew we were there.

“When the war ended, we went to Austria because I knew that was where Katrine would have gone to be with her family. This woman helped us get papers to go there. But I never found her. I don’t know where she went after she fled the sewers with Sofia. There was nothing to indicate she had been killed or caught, so I assumed she got away. Everyone did. But I never heard from her again. And I was unable to locate her family in Vienna.

“In 1947 Eliasz and I came to America. First to Chicago, then to Texas, then to California. We opened a bakery in every city we lived in. We had many good years after we left Poland. Many. And I met a lovely woman in Chicago named Helen who patiently waited for me to get over losing Katrine.”

“She was the definition of patience,” Eliasz quipped. “She was a wonder. Helen waited ten years for him to get over Katrine.”

“What can I say? I was in love with my Katrine,” Josef said. “Not knowing where she was, wondering if she had emigrated to the States too, like so many had. I couldn’t just let her go. I couldn’t. I still wonder what happened to her.”

“Lucky for you Helen didn’t let
you
go.” Eliasz turned in the direction of the teenagers. “Helen wasn’t Katrine, but she let me live with them for forty-five years and never complained once about putting up with me. She was a saint. And that’s saying a lot, coming from a Jew.”

Josef laughed. “So we had good years. When I entered this nursing facility a few years ago, Eliasz came with me, even though he did not need to at the time. It has been a good life, considering.”

Matt stretched back in his chair. “Cool. So you guys have been friends your whole life.”

“Yes. We have.”

Chase stopped recording and put the lens cap back on his camera. “That was really great. We have some editing to do and we have to record our own comments, but I’ll come back and show you the DVD when it’s finished, if you want.”

“Yes,” Josef said. “That would be nice.”

“I love to watch a good movie,” Eliasz joked.

Matt laughed and stood up. He looked at his watch. “Hey, we should probably get going.”

“Well, glad to have been of help to you,” Josef said.

Chase began putting away his camera equipment. Matt bent to help him, no doubt to speed things along. Chase, too,
was oddly anxious to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tally lean forward and extend a photo to Josef. The old man bent toward her and reached for it.

“What is this?” He fumbled for a pair of glasses in his pocket.

“This is Chase’s and my great-grandfather. Aron Bachmann. He was a doctor in Warsaw just before the war,” Tally said.

Josef peered at the man in the photo and cocked his head.

“He was Jewish,” Tally continued. “But he married a Catholic woman. He and his wife and son were relocated to the ghetto too. He died at Treblinka. We don’t know what happened to my great-grandmother and grandfather after the ghetto, though. Except that they escaped to England.”

“So this is him. Aron Bachmann.” Josef’s voice was contemplative.

“Aron Bachmann?” Eliasz tipped his head toward the conversation. “What does he look like, Josef?”

Josef held the photo close to his eyes. “Medium build, late thirties, I’d say. Handlebar mustache.”

Eliasz nodded. “The Aron Bachmann I knew had a mustache like that. At least that is how he was described to me. My mother would tease my father that he should grow one so handsome. And yes, he was a doctor.”