Page 31 of The Little Liar
He glances down the riverbank. He looks up the road. “Listen, boy,” he says. “Do you have any money?”
Nico shakes his head no. The soldier reaches in his pocket and hands over a small wad of bills.
“You tell Herr Graf that Sturmmann Erich Alman helped you. Erich Alman. You hear? Tell him to remember me. Erich Alman.”
Nico takes the money and watches the soldier go. He stays by the tracks until nightfall. Finally, in the dark, he begins to walk back to Salonika. He follows the tracks until they reach the Baron Hirsch station. From there, he finds his way to Kleisouras Street. It is well past midnight when he climbs the steps of his family’s house. He goes to his parents’ bedroom. He looks around. In a drawer, he finds some of his father’s old cigars from the shop. He sniffs them and begins to cry. He crawls into the bed where his mama and papa used to sleep. He curls under the blanket, wishing he could wake up and everything would be a year ago.
Instead, when morning comes, the house seems emptier than ever. Even Herr Graf’s possessions are gone.
Nico walks down the stairs. He sees his beloved crawl space. He pries the door open. Inside, he sees a brown leather bag, sitting by itself. He pulls it out.
The bag belongs to Udo Graf, who had hidden it there for safekeeping. The soldiers, in their haste, had not looked inside the crawl space. Nico unzips his discovery to find inside, among other things, a good deal of Greek and German money, assorted papers and documents, and a small box with several Nazi badges.
Nico stares at them for a long time. He thinks about what he has done. As the clock strikes ten in the morning, he makes a decision. Like many decisions that change a life, it comes silently, without fanfare.
Nico finds a clean shirt and pins one of the badges to his chest. He hides some of the money in his shoes. He gathers as much food as he can fit in the leather bag and walks out the door, heading back to the train station, where he purchases a ticket on the next train going north, the direction of Poland.
When the curious ticket seller asks his name, Nico does not hesitate. He lies with perfect German enunciation.
“My name,” he says, “is Erich Alman.”
A World of Light and Dark
I sometimes think about the angels in heaven, what they are saying about me, and what they make of this hard baked world. If you wonder whether certain periods here on earth make me wish I was still there, the answer is yes.
The months that followed were one such period. It was a time of madmen, Nazis drunk on power and bathing in their own cruelty. Much of the world looked the other way. I could not. Truth was forced to acknowledge every act of torture and humiliation, every prisoner made to crawl in the mud like an animal, every new boxcar of victims arriving at the camps, their hands clawing through the planks, begging for mercy when none was given.
It was a time in human history where the world was cleaved in two, those doing nothing about the horror and those trying to stop it. A world of light and dark.
So yes, there were moments where I wished myself in heaven. But there were other moments as well, moments of tenderness and unexpected warmth:
Fannie, as it happened, was not turned in by the womannear the river, but instead was taken to the woman’s home and given a bowl of soup with pieces of lamb and carrots.
Sebastian did not perish that first night at Auschwitz; he curled up against his father in a filthy bunk, and in the darkness, Lev squeezed an arm around his son to keep the boy from shaking.
Nico rode the trains for several days, learning how to pay for his own meals and how to present his tickets without suspicion. A porter one day noticed his impressive Nazi badge and asked where he was going.
“To see my family,” Nico said.
A world of light and dark. The greatest cruelty, the greatest courage. It was a strange time to be in the truth business. Yet there I was, unable to turn away.
Twelve Months Later
“Hit him!” the guard yelled.
Sebastian flicked the small whip onto the man’s back.
“Harder!”
Sebastian complied. The man did not move. He had collapsed minutes earlier on a work detail and lay on the ground until the guard spotted him. His face was blotchy with dark red spots, and his mouth was open in the mud, as if taking a bite of the earth.
“Are you so weak you can’t wake him up?” the guard said, lighting a cigarette.
Sebastian exhaled. He hated inflicting pain. But if the man did not respond, he would be judged as dead, and his body would be burned in the red brick crematorium. At that point, whether he was still alive wouldn’t matter.
“Stop daydreaming,” the guard growled.
This task, flicking an ox sinew to see if prisoners had expired, was Sebastian’s latest job at the camp known by its German name as Konzentrationslager Auschwitz. In the year since his arrival, Sebastian had endured many assignments, always running from task to task (walking was forbidden),removing his cap and lowering his eyes whenever an SS officer approached. He worked all day and had only a portion of bread and some foul-tasting soup to eat at night. Sometimes the guards would throw a chunk of meat into the crowd of prisoners and watch them fight like dogs to grab it, the winner stuffing it down his gullet, the losers crawling away.
