Page 37 of The Little Liar
“Sometimes it is better to leave this world by your own hand than theirs.”
She pushed the pouch into Fannie’s palm, then rose and left the room.
For the next five months, as summer came then faded away, they continued their routine, sewing, washing, eating, sleeping. Fannie stayed in the coop, and even got used to the ammonia-like scent of chicken droppings. She all but forgot about the screaming gray-haired woman.
But just because you forget about a lie does not mean it forgets about you.
***
I have mentioned this is a story of great truths and deceptions. You will find the big ones and the small ones interconnect.
When Hungary’s leader, Miklós Horthy, made his alliance with the Wolf, he lied about his ongoing conversations withthe Wolf’s enemies. And when the Wolf found out, he lied, too, inviting Horthy to a phony meeting to lure him out of his country while the Nazis invaded it.
When Horthy learned of how he’d been duped, he was furious. Before meeting with the Wolf, he hid a pistol in his clothing, planning to execute the Nazi leader in cold blood. But he put the gun back just before he left his room, later claiming it was not up to him to take a life. Perhaps, if he had gone through with it, the war might have ended sooner, and what happened next to Nico, Fannie, Sebastian, and Udo might never have come to pass.
But that is fantasy. And I do not traffic in fantasy.
Here is the reality: Horthy was promptly replaced, a puppet government was installed, and the Nazi forces, sensing the war was slipping away, swept through Hungary with the fierceness of a bleeding animal. The Wolf put his top people in charge of expelling all Hungarian Jews to the death camps. In this task, they had eager help from the Arrow Cross, a hateful Hungarian political movement that, in mirroring the warped view of the Wolf, believed Hungarians also had a racial purity that needed protecting.
The Arrow Cross was as vicious as any Nazi outfit, and its soldiers swept through the countryside, rounding up all those they viewed as undesirable. They raided schools, synagogues, bakeries, lumberyards, shops, apartments, houses.
And one October morning, before the sun came up, they swarmed through a hillside village and followed a tip from a gray-haired woman in a green coat who told them, “The ladyin that house is hiding a Jew.” They kicked in the front door and discovered a seamstress and a teenager eating oatcakes.
“Who is this girl?” one of them yelled.
“This is my daughter!” Gizella answered. “Leave us alone!”
A soldier whacked her with a club and told her it was a good thing she loved Jews so much, because now she would get to die with them. Fannie screamed as the Arrow Cross took her away, dragging her past the gray-haired woman, who nodded approvingly, her arms folded across her chest. Fannie could only stare in disbelief.
The little lie had caught up to her.
In war, there is no limit to repeated horrors.
Fourteen months after being shoved inside a cattle car, Fannie Nahmias was shoved inside another one, this time heading to Budapest, where bombs were falling and buildings were in ruins. Later she was herded into her second ghetto, and forced to sleep in a lightless room with nine other people whose names she never learned.
Then, in November of 1944, Fannie and dozens of other Jews were marched at gunpoint through the streets of the city. It was dark, nearly midnight. Snow blew through the air. The prisoners were dragged up a long bridge, then led down steps to the banks of the Danube River. There, shivering in the cold, they were forced to remove their shoes. Their bodies were tied together with rope, three or four in a group. Fannie caught the eye of a young Arrow Cross soldier, staringat her pretty face. “It won’t hurt,” he mumbled, and looked away.
The prisoners were turned toward the dark water, which was moving rapidly. Fannie tried to see how long this lineup went. It was at least seventy or eighty people, many of them children, the snow landing on their heads and naked feet. For a few minutes, the soldiers huddled and pointed here and there. Finally, at the far end of the line, an Arrow Cross guard stepped forward, lifted his gun, and fired at one Jewish man’s head, watching him and the bodies tied to him fall into the freezing river, the swift current whisking them away.
He moved to the next group and fired again.
Fannie squeezed her eyes shut. Her heart was pounding like a fist on a door. She thought of Gizella and wondered if she were still alive. She thought of her father, knowing he was dead, and her neighbors from Salonika, who were probably dead as well. She thought of the bearded man on the train, who whispered to her, “Be a good person. Tell the world what happened here.” She realized she would never do that now. She was trembling uncontrollably, her knees, her hands, her jaw. Amid the sobbing of her fellow prisoners, she told herself this would all be over in a minute, she could die and be with her loved ones in heaven. There was nothing to miss about this world anymore.
She heard sudden yelling and commotion. As a frigid wind blew across her face, for some reason, she thought of Nico. She saw him so clearly in her mind that she actually thought she heard him calling her name.
“Fannie?”
She stopped breathing.
“Fannie? Is that you?”
She opened her eyes to see a taller version of the only boy she’d ever kissed, draped in a Nazi officer’s coat. At the sight of him, she promptly fainted, pulling the two people tied to her wrists down to the ground and nearly falling into the blood-stained river.
Nico, from Lie to Lie
Now I must tell you about Nico’s journey. For me, this is painful, like a mother speaking about her son’s time in prison.
The boy who never lied shed his honest skin on those Salonika railroad tracks in 1943. By the time he appeared on the banks of the Danube, now nearly fourteen years old, he was barely recognizable—to me, or to those like Fannie who knew him in his earthly form.
