Page 52 of The Little Liar
“Stop him! Stop that man! He kills! He’s in charge!”
The boy’s words were damning—but they were in Ladino, a language the Russians did not comprehend. Udo kept walking, feeling the sweat bead under his cap.Ignore him. They don’t speak his language. You are a farmer. You have no reason to look back.
“Stop him!” Sebastian screeched. “Somebody stop him!”
A fifth jeep passed by. Not much farther now, Udo thought. He would turn at the intersection and disappear into town.
And then, from the other side of that barbed wire, came a single screamed word, a word that in any language meant the same thing.
“NAZI!”
Udo shivered.Keep walking. Don’t react.
“NAZI! NAZI! NAZI!”
Suddenly, a second voice shouted Udo’s way.
“You! Stop!”
Udo clenched his jaw.
“Yo! Hey! You! Stop!”
A Russian soldier was yelling from a transport.
Damn that Jew boy. I should have killed him on the train.
Had Udo merely halted and addressed the soldier, presented his Polish papers, shrugged at the screaming teenager, he might have slipped away. But Sebastian’s incessant yelling bored its way into Udo’s brain.NAZI! NAZI!This filthyJude, yelling at him with such disdain. How dare he? Yes, Udo was a Nazi, and intensely proud of it. This Jewish scum was screaming the word like a curse!
Udo would not have it. In a split second that changed everything, he spun toward the barbed wire fence, pulled out his luger, and fired at Sebastian, who twisted grotesquely with the bullet’s impact and went down like a dropped marionette.
That was the last thing Udo saw before taking a bullet of his own, just above his knee, dropping him to the ground as two Russians pounced on his back, pushing him into the frozen earth.
Back at the fence, the other survivors scattered, leaving alone the body of a teenager who’d been shot at the very moment of his liberation, his blood now turning the white snow red.
And that is how the war ended for Udo and Sebastian.
Half a mile away, Nico heard two gunshots.
The soldiers beside him ducked their heads. Their jeep continued in a line of Russian transports, following railroad tracksuntil they reached an entrance. Nico saw iron letters arched over the gate. Three words in German:
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
Auschwitz.
Nico shivered. Seventeen months after chasing the train that stole his family, seventeen months of changing identities, switching papers, speaking different languages, doing anything and everything to get to this place, finally, he had reached it. He was still just a teen, but there was little youthful about Nico Krispis anymore, not in his appearance, and not in his soul. War had shown him cruelty, brutality, and indifference. But above all, it had shown him survival through lying. Nothing—least of all the Truth—could get in the way.
Nico’s newest name, according to his “official” papers, was Filip Gorka, a Polish Red Cross worker. Before that, he had been a Czech carpentry apprentice named Jaroslav Svoboda. Before that, Kristof Puskas, a Hungarian art student.
How he managed to get onto this Soviet transport, on the very day that Auschwitz was liberated, is an unlikely story rife with deceptions.
Here, briefly, is the path Nico took.
***
You remember, in Hungary, Nico told the actress Katalin Karády that “not everything” had been taken by the Nazis. A day before they raided her apartment, Nico had broken in and hidden her jewelry and furs in two garbage cans in a nearbyalley. Weeks later, those items enabled Katalin to barter for the lives of Jewish children about to be executed on the Danube River, including Fannie, whom Nico recognized and convinced Katalin to include in the trade.
Did Nico ever speak to Fannie?
