Ghostheart (6 page)

April of 1945 found the Allies in Berlin, Americans and Russians meeting at Torgau on the Elbe, troop carriers and tanks rolling onwards in the heart of the Reich. With these events came the liberation of Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and the full realization of what had taken place. The soldiers – victorious, elated – grew subdued, stunned, silent and sickened as they drove through the corridors of bodies, saw a heap of unclothed women prisoners eighty yards in length, thirty yards wide and four feet high. Buchenwald still housed over twenty thousand prisoners, many of them beyond all help – stick-thin, suffering from typhus, starvation and tuberculosis. In the days that followed, despite every effort from the Allies, more than six hundred human beings were buried daily. A wheeled scaffold stood against the skyline, from which hung a dozen beaten and broken bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting corpses, dead of disease and starvation, gassing and slaughter.

Soldiers in their late teens and early twenties liberated Dachau. Soldiers who walked amongst the dead with the eyes of men three times their age. Piles of human ashes, unburned bones, hair shorn from the newly dead, toys taken from children as they were led to the ‘showers’ – the gas
chambers into which men, women and children had been herded in their tens of thousands – and ‘sound machines’ built to mask the horror of screaming. The Allies had discovered the Final Solution, the attempted extinction of a race.

Elena Kruszwica was there to see the soldiers, standing ankle-deep in mud in the small garden behind Wilhelm Kiel’s barrack, there as her now seven-year-old son clung to her leg, asking her who these people were as she fell to her knees, as she heard the screams and shouts of the SS troops being herded into the central square of the camp for surrender to the Americans. Kiel was there, his uniform – and his rank – discarded now, believing he could be filed away with the rest of his men. Elena ran towards him, ran through the American soldiers who tried to hold her back, and lunged for him as he cowered and fell to his knees. With her hands she clawed at his face, tore at his eyes until his features were spattered with blood, gouged and tormented.

The Americans did nothing, watching in horror and disbelief, and when she turned and stared at one of them, holding out her hand, her eyes demanding, her face filthy and grim and resolute, the soldier could do nothing but unclip his gun and hand it to her.

Elena Kruszwica held the gun against Kiel’s face, and Kiel – screaming at her, begging for mercy, pleading for his life until he was hoarse – fell into shocked silence as she spat at him, and then pulled the trigger.

These soldiers, these young men – so valiant, so victorious – were welcomed to Dachau by a woman their own age who looked twenty years their senior, a woman with the word
JUDE
burned into her flesh, into the back of her head, into her breasts.

Elena turned as trucks filed through the gates, as the earth trembled beneath her feet, and then she saw her son, her Haim running towards her, running straight towards her across the path of a jeep. Screaming, she charged out, her feet sliding through the mud, her voice audible over the sound of the
engines, reaching him just in time to catch him and hurl him forward away from the jeep’s wheels. And in this moment she understood: understood that her willingness to die to give him freedom had arrived, for the jeep skidded away from the boy and hit her. Had she been strong and healthy, had she not suffered four years of mental and physical torture at the hands of the Nazis, perhaps she would have survived. But she was not strong, she was emaciated and weak, a broken spirit, a battered body, and the impact of the vehicle killed her within moments. She died with her eyes open, having seen, and then reflecting the sight of a United States Army sergeant picking up her son and holding him close. She died with something resembling a smile on her face, knowing that somehow the boy would see beyond these wires, out into the fields, the woods, the world she remembered before the death of the boy’s father and the rape of her country.

The soldier who held the boy was a Jew himself. His name was Daniel Rosen, and the jeep that had killed the boy’s mother was his own, driven by his aide. Stunned and shocked, he held the boy closer, watching as his fellow soldiers picked up the woman’s body, carried it to the back of a truck and wrapped it in a blanket. Rosen walked with the child, held him carefully, listened to his breathing, understood that nothing could be said to reach this soul, and they stood together at the tailgate of the vehicle. Rosen lifted the corner of the blanket, revealed the almost angelic expression on Elena Kruszwica’s face. The child – wide-eyed and drawn, his cheeks sunken beneath his bones, his forehead high, his hair thin on an almost translucent skull – said nothing; merely reached out and touched his mother’s mud-spattered face. It was said that Daniel Rosen cried for the child, but no-one was sure.

Rosen, commanding an infantry unit, did what he could before medical battalions arrived, before the doctors and nurses stepped from the trucks and administered watered milk, penicillin, sulfa-based immune system fortifiers – whatever
they could to stem the tide of dying that continued for weeks after the liberation.

At the beginning of June Rosen left. He took with him the child; though they had never spoken, Rosen only whispering to the child in Hebrew, the child watching him with that same open, vacant expression, they had found some sense of unity, formed a silent bond that surpassed the need to speak. Perhaps Rosen felt responsible for the death of the child’s mother, perhaps he felt an obligation to salvage one battered soul after having witnessed the atrocities of Dachau, this small German town where thousands upon thousands of human beings had been destroyed.

The unit returned to Berlin, Rosen smuggling the child through the border patrols and checkpoints inside a worn blanket, at one point laying him beneath the seat of a jeep while Russian soldiers searched the vehicle. Germans were escaping into Czechoslovakia, into the Carpathians, into Silesia and the Sudeten Mountains; the Russians were hunting them down and killing them, often torturing them, and some of the German women – knowing this – had gathered around the fences of the camps to plead with the Allies to capture them before the Soviets came. Desperate and distraught, these young women pleaded for their lives, but the Allies could not take them, they were too involved with the vast operation of liberating and saving the lives of the thousands of Jews who remained.

From Berlin Rosen took the child to the US airbase at Potsdam, and from there they flew out, on through Magdeburg, Eisenach, Mannheim, and then across the French border to Strasbourg. From here they drove by night to Paris, to the European victory celebrations, and once there Rosen took a hotel room and stayed for seven weeks, feeding the child, strengthening him, clothing him, walking him back to life through the streets, the boulevards, the parks, sitting in cafés in the sunshine – saying nothing, watching him, eventually sharing some words in a strange mixture of German, Hebrew
and Polish. Haim Kruszwica began to learn English, and the first question he tried to ask Rosen was ‘Where is my father?’ Rosen, thinking that Haim’s father must have been one of the many thousands murdered in the camp, questioned him further, and came to the unwilling and unwanted realization that the child was speaking of a tall, blond uniformed man who had shared his mother’s bed. Rosen had seen the woman kill the soldier, and understood that this man must have been an officer, hiding his rank for fear of the consequences should he be discovered. He told the child that this man was not his father, that he did not know where his father was, and the child asked if Rosen would now be his father.

Rosen, tears in his eyes, said that he would do his best. The child smiled, for the first time in eighteen weeks he smiled, and Rosen cried openly, his face in his hands, there at the street table of a cafe while passers-by stared at him, his uniform, the child with him, and understood that, of all things, war tears the soul apart and reveals pain of such depth it cannot be fathomed.

At the beginning of September, three weeks after Haim Kruszwica’s eighth birthday, he and Sergeant Daniel Rosen set sail from Calais for New York. They arrived in mid-October, among hundreds of returning soldiers, to the celebrations of victory still ringing throughout the free world.

Daniel Rosen, a forty-six-year-old bachelor, took the child to his widowed sister, a devout Jew, generous and worldly-wise, and suffering her protestations to the contrary he calmed her and spoke with her for more than an hour while Haim was bathed and dressed by the housekeeper and taken to the kitchen where he was fed rich chicken broth and homemade bread. Rosen’s sister, Rebecca McCready, having left Palestine in the thirties and married an Irish-American despite her family’s threat of disavowal, stood in the kitchen doorway and silently watched the thin, wraithlike child: his wide almond eyes drinking in the sights, his ears thirsty for the sounds of other voices, for the music that played in the parlor,
his mouselike eating habits as he picked mere crumbs from a heel of bread and chewed them as if they were steak.

‘Yes,’ she eventually said to her brother standing beside her. ‘I will take him.’

Haim Kruszwica became Haim Rosen, Rebecca’s maiden name, and though he was a Pole, though he knew nothing of the Jewish faith, he was taken across the East River into Brooklyn, to the Rosens’ synagogue, and was presented to God as a child of this family.

They possessed a relationship of such quiet and measured stability. Daniel taught the child the alphabet, taught him to read, to write, to spell his own name. He enrolled him in school and would sit for hour after patient hour coaching the child through his assignments. Haim asked questions, Daniel would answer them as best he could, for though he had never had either the will or the inclination for fatherhood it came more easily than he’d believed it would. The child would take his hand as they walked, would hug him when he left for school, would run with him in the park come Saturday, and on Sunday evenings, in the warm sanctuary of the Rosen home, Haim would carry Daniel’s newspapers, his cigarettes, and sit at his feet with his picture books and crayons. Rebecca, watching them, would never cease to be amazed at the resilience and compassion of the human soul. Such a thing could not be measured or fathomed, or ever truly understood. She believed such a thing was a reflection of God, and God alone would know the words with which it could be described.

Daniel Rosen was demobilised from the army in June of the following year. He lived to see Haim in school, one day sitting and watching the child run and laugh through the playground for more than an hour, his heart elated, his eyes filled with tears, and when he walked away he believed that if this act had been his life’s sole purpose then it had been worth it.

In August of 1951 Daniel suffered a stroke, became paralyzed down the left side of his body, and for eight weeks he lay in a bed in his sister’s apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side
district, the child beside him, saying nothing, holding his hand, sometimes reading to the man who had brought him out of hell and back to America. Haim Rosen was fourteen years old, and though he had spoken with Daniel about his mother, though he had described what he had seen in Dachau, it still seemed that he did not understand death. At least not as something that eventually came to everyone.

On 9 November 1951, Daniel Elias Rosen, Sergeant-At-Arms, twice decorated for valor above and beyond the call of duty, passed over. Haim was there when he died; he sat with him for three and a half hours as the body cooled, as the eyes became glassy and reflective, and this was how Rebecca found him. She remembered entering the room, remembered stepping towards the bed, understanding what had happened without speaking or asking anything of Haim, and when he heard her he turned to her, and he smiled – angelically, she recalled, an expression of such peace, such complete serenity – and said in pigeon Hebrew: ‘I understand how bad the world can be, Mama. I see that our lives mean nothing at all to God. I give back my faith, for what use is faith against God? I give back my faith and belief, and I will live my life without Him.’

She remembered saying nothing, remembered hearing the words, only later understanding their import, but by that time Haim Rosen – once Haim Kruszwica, before that Kolzak, son of the errant Rasputin from the Carpathians – had become the product of a disordered mind, amoral and detached.

Haim Rosen, now less a Jew than he had ever been, left Manhattan’s Lower East Side in July of 1952, fifteen years old, and crossed the East River into Queens. Rebecca McCready did not see him again, and when she died in the summer of 1968 the last words on her lips were a blessing for her adopted son. By then, sixteen years after his departure, he had become something she would never have recognized.

And perhaps would not have wished to.

Sullivan turned over the last page and sat back in his chair.
‘Whoa,’ he sighed. ‘Not exactly “Green Eggs And Ham” is it?’

Annie was silent for a time, a little disturbed by the feelings and images the text had evoked in her. She looked towards the window; again the sound of the wind pushing at the glass beyond, and she turned and looked at Sullivan.

‘Perhaps you should come,’ she said. ‘Come to the store Monday night …’

Sullivan nodded. ‘Perhaps I should.’

Annie O’Neill woke on Friday morning, sweating in the cool half light of dawn. At the edges of her thoughts was something she had dreamed, something half remembered. Sullivan’s voice was there, slow and languorous, soothing almost.

‘There were three types of people in Vietnam,’ Sullivan had said. ‘Those who thought a lot about why they didn’t wish to kill anyone, those who killed first and thought later, and lastly there were those who just killed as many as possible and never thought about it at all. They were either frightened kids, Midwestern schoolteachers or homicidal maniacs.’

Even now she could remember the way his face had looked when he’d told her, the face of a man carrying ghosts.