Page 80 of The Little Liar
At this point in our story, you’ll notice three of our four characters have landed in America. The fourth would arrive as well, to witness something he thought he would never see again. To explain, I must move our timeline ahead to 1978, ten years after Fannie had discovered Katalin Karády.
Sebastian Krispis had grown into one of the Nazi Hunter’s top staffers. He was working full-time for the agency, which had lost some of its personnel over the years. It was still being funded by a few large contributors, but interest in war criminals was fading. Money was hard to find.
Living by himself in a three-room apartment, Sebastian had thrown himself into the cause. He came in early. He stayed until dark. There were moments, late at night, eating a cheese and mustard sandwich in his office, when he realized the cause was all he had.
He kept a photo of Fannie and Tia near his bed. It tore at his heart that his family was not with him. Still, he sometimes went weeks without speaking to them. He didn’t know what to say. He grew frustrated trying to explain himself, or why justice against these Nazi monsters was, to him, the highestcalling he could think of, and the only one he thought worthwhile. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t feel the same way. Deep down, he was depressed by his obsession with the horrors he’d endured, yet furious with those who had not paid a price for inflicting them.
In the end, he blamed himself for misaligning his life. He shouldn’t have. His mind was not his own. War still takes hostages, long after it is over.
***
What brought Sebastian to America was the stunning news that a new party of Nazis planned to march in a small suburban town in Illinois called Skokie. The town had an unusually large number of Jewish Holocaust survivors, who had come to make a life in America. There were nearly seven thousand in Skokie alone.
Which is why the Nazis had targeted it. During their march, they planned to wear the brown-shirted uniforms, wave the flags, display the swastikas on their armbands, and raise their straight right palms in Nazi salutes.
When Sebastian read about this, he was repulsed. In America? This couldn’t be true! But evil travels like dandelion seeds, blowing over borders and taking root in angry minds.
When the Wolf stirred his followers in the 1930s, it worked not because Germans were inclined to hate Jews, but because all humans are inclined to hate others if they believe they are the cause of their unhappiness. The trick is to convince them.
It isn’t hard. Just find a group that feels aggrieved and pointat another group as the source of their woes. The original Nazis did that with the Jews. And while the new Nazis that were springing up did not carry the Wolf’s fervent allegiance to Germany, they sang his same song of racial purity, and the need to purge the impure before they ruined life for the deserving. Hate is an ancient melody. Blame is even older.
Sebastian convinced the Nazi Hunter that this event in Illinois might be an opportunity to weed out former SS officers. Perhaps some would attend? Watch from afar? Photos could be taken. Information could be gathered.
The Hunter agreed. And soon Sebastian was on his way to the United States, planning publicly to observe the rise of a hate group, and privately to seek clues about Udo Graf and Nico Krispis.
Only when he boarded the plane did he admit to himself he was hoping to see Fannie, too.
Udo had taken notice of the march.
Living outside Washington, D.C., he was well aware of the green shoots of rising Nazism. It made him proud. And hopeful.
It had been more than three decades since he’d followed that ratline from Italy to Argentina then America. His cover remained secure. Thanks to various unseemly tasks he handled for the senator, Udo had risen to the post of “special adviser.” He had his own office, and drew a large salary. Meanwhile, unofficially, he continued to work with the American spy agency, which, in its fervid war against communism, hadelevated his status. He listened to tapped phones. He translated stolen documents. They even sent him to Europe once, to pursue his supposed intelligence connections.
Udo had hoped to visit his homeland on that trip but was told it was too dangerous. Someone might remember him. It vexed him to be that close, yet unable to set foot in his beloved Deutschland, even if it had been cleft in two, the East and the West, and his childhood city of Berlin was divided by a massive wall. Still, it pleased him to learn of a growing resistance by certain Germans to keep apologizing for the war. Some even objected to the Holocaust memorials being built in their cities.
“Enough,” they said. “Time to move on.”
This is how it begins,Udo told himself.Time passes. People forget. Then we rise again.
***
Udo was now in his early sixties, but he kept himself fit with a regimen of morning exercise that he never missed: two hours, every day, rising before sunrise, pushing himself through sit-ups, pull-ups, weights, and running. He refused to eat junk food—even though his American wife, Pamela, stocked the cabinets with it. He took care of his teeth. He stayed out of the sun. He dyed his hair brown to fight the gray. Thus, when he looked in the mirror, he saw not an aging man but the nostalgic form of a soldier, ready to resume his duties when called. In his mind, he remained a warrior, hiding in the bush.
The Illinois march was too risky for Udo to attend. Asmall town. Lots of Jews. No doubt some of them had been at Auschwitz. There was always a chance one might remember him. He had heard of a fellow Nazi hiding in Baltimore who had been shopping in a supermarket when a survivor spotted him and began yelling in Yiddish,“Der Katsef! Der Katsef!”(“The Butcher! The Butcher!”). She made such a scene that police arrested the man, and eventually, thanks to paperwork from that old Jew in Vienna, his past was exposed. He was extradited to Germany and found guilty by a court.
Udo wanted none of that. He wrote in his notebook the mistakes other SS officers had made and how to avoid them. But when the small-town march in Skokie was canceled in favor of a rally in Chicago, he reconsidered. A big city like that? He could hide in the crowd. Blend in with the onlookers. See how ripe this country might be for a Nazi resurgence. He so missed belonging to something he believed in. The temptation was hard to resist.
He arranged the trip to Chicago on the premise that he was visiting Pamela’s family. A small lie, in the scheme of things, and, in Udo’s mind, well justified. On the plane ride there, he imagined witnessing an impressive military scene, young, strong Nazi men, hundreds if not thousands of them, marching in step, neat and disciplined, demonstrating the power of a superior race, sending a message to the world.
***
What he saw on the day was quite different. When he arrived at the park that Sunday morning, it was already rimmedwith anti-Nazi groups shouting slogans, and young Black militants carrying signs. Hundreds of police officers milled about, wielding clubs, wearing helmets. Long-haired teenagers bunched in circles, smoking, looking for amusement. By Udo’s estimate, there were at least several thousand people, and none of them were Nazis.
Finally, two vans pulled into the park, one black, one white, and a group of men, maybe two dozen, spilled out. They dressed in Nazi uniforms but were hardly what Udo would call fit, disciplined, or even organized. They struggled to climb atop their vans as people screamed, “Nazis, go home!” Much of what the men tried to say was drowned out. Onlookers hurled things. Police began shoving protesters back. Some were arrested and put in handcuffs. Udo saw people laughing, others smoking, drifting in and out of the chaos.
The whole scene disgusted him. This was no call to action. It was a circus. A handful of men disgracing his nation’s uniform, yelling more about Blacks moving into white neighborhoods than about the Wolf’s principles of a master race.Look at these slobs, Udo thought. The leader screamed, “I believe there was no Holocaust!” As he did, a protester yelled, “Go to hell, Martin!”
A man next to Udo leaned over and pointed. “Did you know his father is Jewish?”
