Page 53 of The Little Liar
He never got the chance. The rescued children were hidden in the basement of a building a few miles from Katalin’s apartment. Meanwhile, word of her daring rescue spread fast. She was arrested again, this time by the Arrow Cross. Nico escaped by hiding on the roof until the soldiers left, then grabbed his bag and forgery tools and ran to the train station.
From there he traveled through Slovakia, renting a room for two weeks from a carpenter, who agreed, for a price, to take Nico via wagon to the Polish border, where he met a Polish Red Cross worker in a café. The man told him the Red Cross was mobilizing to join the Allies in liberating Nazi camps.
“There’s one just outside of Oswiecim,” he said.
“Is it called Auschwitz?” Nico asked.
“I think so.”
Nico took a deep breath. By the end of the night, he had traded a pack of forged food ration cards for the man’s Red Cross arm badge. From there he traveled north through the Tatra Mountains and found sanctuary in a Polish church in the ski resort town of Zakopane, where the priest brought him to the nearest Red Cross team, which was short-staffed and largely women.
One of those women, a young nurse named Petra, took aliking to the good-looking new arrival, and when he told her he was hoping to help Jewish war prisoners, she took him to a house on a dimly lit street and put a finger to her lips as they moved down a stairway. At the bottom, she found a flashlight leaning against the door. She picked it up, entered the room, and turned it on.
There, staring back at them, was a room full of wide-eyed children.
“They are all Jews,” the nurse whispered.
Nico took the flashlight and moved it around the young faces, catching their dull expressions and tired, blinking eyes. He never said he was hoping to see his baby sisters, Elisabet and Anna. Would he even recognize them now?
The flashlight caught some writing on the wall, and as he got closer Nico saw that it was everywhere. In various languages, children who’d been sheltered there had scribbled messages above their names: “I am alive” or “I survived” or “Tell my parents I went to...” with various directions for their loved ones to find them.
Nico felt a choking in his chest. He turned to the nurse.
“How do I get to Auschwitz?”
***
His chance came three days later, after the Nazis who’d been controlling Zakopane abruptly departed. The next day, Nico saw why. Russian soldiers rode through the town in tan leather coats with sheepskin collars. The Polish families cheered them from their porches. When those soldiers stopped to replenish food and supplies, Nico saw his opening.
Dressed in his Red Cross uniform, he helped load medical equipment onto their jeeps, all the while telling anyone who could understand him that he spoke German and could be useful if they took Nazi prisoners.
One Russian captain agreed. It didn’t hurt that Nico offered him a bottle of expensive vodka, which he’d stolen from a guesthouse.
“You can ride with the medics,” the captain said, looking over the bottle. “We leave at sunrise.”
***
So it was that, on Saturday, January 27, 1945, that battalion, targeting Oswiecim, stumbled upon a series of camps a mile away, and Nico’s transport pulled up just in time to witness Soviet soldiers ramming open the Auschwitz gate locks with their rifles. This was the opposite end of the camp from where Sebastian had just taken a bullet from Udo Graf. But Nico could not know this. Instead, he watched dazed survivors in striped uniforms push out of the gate, embracing their liberators or stomping the frozen ground, unsure of what to do with their sudden freedom.
Nico, having come so far, could no longer restrain himself. He leaped from the transport and ran through the entrance, checking every gaunt face in search of his family.Not him. Not her. Not him. Where are they?The Russians advanced in military posture, guns high, anticipating resistance. But they quickly lowered their weapons in shock.
What they saw, what Nico saw, none of them could believe. Amidst the smoldering remains of the camp, starvingprisoners sat motionless in the snow, staring, as if someone had just awakened them from their graves. Hundreds of corpses pocked the frozen ground, unburied, flesh rotting. Behind the destroyed crematorium was a mountain of ash that had once been human beings. The stench of death was everywhere.
Nico felt his legs trembling. He couldn’t find his breath. Until this point, like many soldiers around him, he had believed places like Auschwitz were labor camps. Hard labor, certainly. But not this. Not a killing ground. He had honestly expected to find his family alive, waiting for liberation. But the Wolf’s deceits had fooled even the little liar. It was left to Truth to open his eyes.
I am the harshest of virtues.
“Hello? Does anyone here speak Greek?”
Nico was wedging through what was left of an infirmary, crowded with shivering bodies too sick to go outside. There was no medicine. No pills. No serums. The departing Nazis had stripped the place of even a single aspirin. The patients, bone thin and moaning, occupied every decrepit bunk, every space on the filthy floor.
“Does anyone here speak Greek?” Nico repeated.
From the corner, he heard a grunting noise. He looked over to see an old man raising his hand. He hurried to his side. Only when he was inches away did he recognize the familiar jowls, nose, and mouth.
“Nano?” Nico whispered.
“Who is that? Who is here?”
