Page 48 of The Little Liar
His grandfather, hunched over, was mumbling the blessing in Hebrew. Sebastian burned with an anger that singed his soul. He swore at that moment he would never pray again. There was no God here. There was no God anywhere.
“Get back to work!” the Nazi officer yelled.
A horn sounded. The prisoners hurried to their tasks. Thick clouds swallowed the morning sky.
Twenty minutes later, Lev Krispis was gone from this earth, a single bullet to the head having separated his soulfrom his body, which was tossed into a muddy trench, dug the day before by a dozen haggard prisoners, including Sebastian.
A son should never have to dig his father’s grave. I’d like to think this was part of the truth that the Lord judged when Lev arrived at heaven’s door.
But then, I am down here with you. So how would I know?
Four Days of Snow
Only the dead see the end of war. But individual wars do reach their conclusions, and the Second World War would end with the Nazis defeated. That defeat, however, did not arrive at the same time everywhere. Instead, the curtain dropped for months, with some celebrating liberation while others suffered final, brutal consequences.
Allow me to present a single day, Saturday, January 27, 1945, experienced from four different perspectives, to illustrate how the war ended differently for Fannie, Sebastian, Udo, and Nico.
All four involved snow.
Fannie was walking in a long line of prisoners.
She didn’t know what day it was. She didn’t know what month it was. Only that it was terribly cold, and that she and the others had to sleep on the frozen ground every night, without as much as a sheet to keep them warm.
The Nazis, in their final desperate acts, were marching captured Jews back to the motherland, to keep them from tellingliberators of the atrocities they had suffered, and to use what was left of their labor before murdering them.
It is hard to conceive that, even as the concentration camps were burned and abandoned, those who had survived them were not done with their torture. Instead, they were rounded up, ghostly and emaciated, and forced to walk hundreds of miles without food or water. Those who fell, stopped to rest, or even squatted to defecate were quickly shot, their bodies left unburied by the side of the road.
You might ask why the Wolf, in the waning days of his attempted world domination, would care so much about killing helpless Jews when there were military battles to be waged. But questioning a madman is like interrogating a spider. They both go on spinning their webs until someone squashes them out of existence.
Fannie and the other children hidden by Katalin Karády were discovered one night after a neighbor informed the Arrow Cross about unusually large food deliveries coming to the building. Soldiers burst into the basement and started screaming orders and waving rifles. The youngest children were taken away. Teenagers like Fannie were herded to a detention barracks at Teleki Square, where they waited with crowds of starving adults, clueless about their fate.
Then, one morning, they were forced out into the winter cold, joining a thousand other Jews in a thick line that filled the street. That line was flanked by Nazi guards, who shouted a single direction.
“Marsch!”
They were walking to the Austrian border.
The journey would later be labeled a “death march” for all the shootings and fatal collapses of its victims. Fannie found the only way to survive was to step into the muddy shoeprints of those in front of her and stare straight ahead, never stop, never look back, not when an old woman next to her dropped into the snow, not when a skinny man gasping for breath stopped to urinate and was pushed to the ground by an SS soldier. Fannie squeezed her eyes closed, knowing a bullet was coming. Bang! She shuddered and marched on.
The war’s constant grip had sapped the adrenaline from the poor girl’s bloodstream. Her body was rake-thin, her cheeks hollow. There was so little left of her emotionally that she found herself fingering the small pouch of red rosary beads given to her by Gizella, as a voice inside her whispered,“Enough. We are a wisp. Swallow a bead. Get it over with.”
She might have surrendered to that voice, if not for a memory that played endlessly in her head: the crowded train car from Salonika, and those final words from a bearded stranger:
“Be a good person. Tell the world what happened here.”
The only way to do that was to survive. It was her last shred of purpose. So she lifted one foot, then the other, and she kept herself awake by slapping snow against her face, and hydrated by shoving it into her mouth when the guards weren’t looking.
On her fifth day of marching, she found herself beside a young boy, maybe seven years old, who was struggling to stay upright with a pack on his back.
“Take your pack off,” Fannie whispered. “Leave it.”
“I can’t,” the boy said. “I have cheese in there. I will need to eat when we arrive.”
Fannie wondered how he had managed to get cheese, or to have a pack at all, since most of the others were denied even the smallest satchel. But it wasn’t helping. He kept stumbling, and crying, and he fell in the snow several times. Fannie yanked him up before the guards noticed.
“Give me the pack, I’ll hold it.”
“No. It’s mine.”
