Thick grey cigarette smoke hung in the air. The pub must have been the last spot in the city where smoking hadn't been banned. Sitting at a small table in the back corner and sipping at a rye and ginger, Bill Oliver noticed that there was almost a blue hue to it. Everyone there seemed to be puffing besides him. His grandfather had died of lung cancer when he was in his teens. It had been a horrible death. It pained Bill to stay here, but this was his first time in Boston and he was at the pub to meet an old colleague that he hadn't seen in years.
Since he'd arrived he had been stuck in the hotel. Between the mindless pay-per-view movies in his small cramped room and the endless presentations, his brain was reeling. Bill had always wanted to come here—sit behind the Green Monster, visit Harvard—and this was his first academic conference in eight years. He had felt a certain amount of pride when his department, at the University of Toronto, offered him a sizeable grant to attend. Out of the ninety delegates that had been invited, a few of the bigwigs in the field were there: Breitman, Galletly. His close friends had been glad to see him leave. He needed time away from his problems. But now, three days in, he was frustrated and tired. Several trips through the city had amounted to little besides spending five hours lost and running around in circles on the subway. Even his short paper on the development of the gas van had been cancelled at the last minute due to time constraints. There had only been a few dozen reserved seats, and the general public was forced to stand against the wall and listen. The auditorium was small and it had quickly gotten stuffy with stale air. The coffee had been terrible, too. It didn't help that the seats were made of hard plastic, the kind that high schools stored under the gymnasium stage for plays, and were uncomfortable. The whole thing seemed to be one big let down after another.
That was when he had called Mark Yates. Both of them had gone to graduate school together at the University of Toronto. Although they'd kept in semi-regular contact with one another through e-mail, over the last few years Bill had heard less and less from him.
He wasn't surprised when Mark agreed to meet him for a drink. They would meet around nine at the White Lion Pub. It was only a few minutes from the hotel. In the hours before he left his room, Bill had sat at the small desk in his hotel room and read his paper and skimmed a few books he had packed in with his clothes. Mark would have questions about his research —he always did—and Bill wanted to be able to answer them with a certain degree of detail. Theory he could do, but dates and places were another story all together. Mark was like the student that every one of his classes seemed to have. They'd always sit at the front and spout off obscure facts and pass them off as common knowledge. At times he couldn't respond. It made him feel inadequate as a university teacher. Standing at the podium by his desk and staring back at them, Bill would visualize them sitting at home and memorizing, thinking themselves smarter for it. He just wanted to kick a desk over when one of them had that look on their face like they'd just put one over on him.
Through the crowd of people standing at the front drinking and laughing, he could see Mark inch his way past. He was smiling and his eyes were wide.
"It's great to see you again," Mark said, as they sat down. "It must be three years since we've had a drink."
"It's been quite a while. I lost your e-mail last year, that's why I haven't written." He told everyone that. Truth was that he had no desire to tell his old friends about his failed marriage.
Bill held his breath for a moment and hoped that the persistent questions that always accompanied small talk since the divorce would be avoided here. He knew they'd come.
"How's Annette?" The words were like nails down a chalkboard.
His eyes lowered for a second. "We divorced a while back. It was best for both of us. She wanted a family and I just couldn't afford the time." He hated to lie. It made him feel ashamed of himself, but it was better than feeling pathetic. He hated that the most. Truth be known, he hadn't done much of anything since the divorce.
"Do you two still talk?"
"We spoke last December, but we don't keep in touch on a regular basis. The whole thing was rather messy."
She had wanted it. That was the truth. He'd never mention that she thought that he was too poor for her and would never amount to much. At times like this, talking about her and his work, Bill always remembered a poster that had been stuck to his supervisor's door. Pictured on it was an older disheveled man with long hair and dusty clothes. Surrounded by books that were piled high the caption beneath him read, "If you want to get rich, don't do history!" That was him, mired in debt and working contract for what seemed like eternity.
"How is the research going these days?"
"Slow." He took a long sip from his glass. Seven years out of graduate school and he had little to show for it besides two reviews and a minor article in Military History Magazine. He knew that his work was pitiful. Even the senior students within the department joked about him behind his back with the other professors. It wasn't his fault. Holocaust Studies was a beat dog in the world of academia. It didn't help either that his German was poor. Never had the chance to use it; all the large research grants went to Canadian subjects. He always said that he was born 20 years too late. The 1970s had been the golden age of scholarship for German historians. "I've got a few articles in the works, but I've been really concentrating on teaching these days." Another lie. To most of his colleagues, teaching was a necessary evil. To him, it was survival. It paid the bills. But even in the classroom he felt awkward and always uneasy, stumbling through his lectures.
"I never did enjoy teaching. It always felt like babysitting to me. Luckily, I'm only obligated to teach five courses a year, but during the winter semester they pile it on. Writing is where I'm most comfortable."
"Why, what's on your plate these days?" Bill asked. "Still the colonial era?"
"Actually, Barbara and I are working on a project together. You'd love her. Very fiery woman. Brilliant, too. Got her PhD from Georgetown. We're collecting oral histories of nineteenth century Polish immigrants. I don't speak the language myself. She's fluent. She translates and I do the quantitative stuff here. Hopefully, we can put something together for press by early next year."
"I picked up your latest book," Bill informed him. "There was some great stuff in the introduction and conclusion. Couldn't get to the rest. You know me and numbers." It had been on the eating habits of slaves in Missouri and was full of graphs and charts that he couldn't get his head around. He'd barely gotten through the thirty pages he actually did read.
"To be quite honest, I wish that I'd had more time to work in another chapter. The publisher was insistent that I make the deadline."
"I can understand that. I'm never satisfied with my own stuff." He stirred the last of his drink with his finger, downed it and called to the waitress for another. Mark ordered a mineral water. He would, Bill thought.
"You mentioned you're here for the Holocaust Studies conference, right?" he asked. "Barbara was in a small town in Poland a few months back—actually, she was on the boarder between Germany and Poland—conducting interviews, and she happened to come across a small archive that you might be interested in. It's right up your ally, I'd bet."
"My language skills aren't what they used to be," Bill said. In the last six months he'd found it progressively harder to get through the historical abstracts index. Most of the citations were in German. "I really need to practice."
The waitress was back with their drinks. Bill's was a double.
"The name of the town is Legniclaw. It's about a two-hour drive from the border. Very small place. No more than a few dozen people now. Apparently, during the occupation the Nazis liquidated the whole place of Jews. Most were sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Barbara was speaking with the lady that manages the site now. Her name is Sala Rubinowicz. I can give you her contact information to get in touch with her."
"Sounds promising, but most of the best primary material was carted of to Moscow after the war. You know that. I'd need half a fortune for bribes to get my hands on some of that stuff. What's left isn't worth the trouble." He took a long drink from the glass. Whiskey burned at the back of his throat. It felt good.
"That was my initial reaction," he said. "But most of the stuff hasn't been touched since the war."
It was three days before he bothered calling the archive in Poland. He hadn't even seriously considered looking into going until he had come home from teaching his weekly night class—three hours with a twenty-minute break in between—and checked his telephone messages. Annette had called. It would happen every few months: her new boyfriend would leave her or she'd just feel sentimental and lonely. This time is was the latter. Bill had become accustomed to it by now, but it still reminded him of his disappointments. She was his crowning achievement of failure.
Listening to her cry on the other end of the answering machine, he stared at the luggage still parked by the door. Red customs tags were tied to the handles. The trip to Boston had been a bust. For a few of his colleagues he'd concocted a story that his paper had gotten a nice round of applause and a half dozen questions from the audience. It was believable and didn't sound too contrived.
It was morning in Poland and Sala Rubinowicz had picked up on the second ring. Her voice was warm and her accent thick. He was lucky to catch her, she told him. She was only in for a few hours. The line had some static and Bill found himself asking her to repeat herself more than once. What she told him got him excited. Since it had opened in early 1999 only a handful of lawyers from the Jewish Claims Conference had looked through the files. They'd all been stored at the back of someone's attic for 60 years. There was some water damage, but really nothing major. Now all of them were at the back of her office. She really couldn't say what was in them other than train transport records of deportations. Bill felt a little trepidation fiddle with his stomach. Numbers weren't his thing. Quantitative stuff was for the obsessed, and deportation usually meant Auschwitz, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Those were the big names that were left to the big boys who had the money and the contacts to go running around eastern Poland. Those were the talking heads that you saw on television. It was an exclusive club, one that he certainly didn't belong. But to have the opportunity to go dig through a relatively unknown archive, his poor German and all, was something he just couldn't pass up. He told her to expect him soon.
He stayed up reading long past midnight. It was something he hadn't done in years. Legniclaw. He'd never heard the name before. It didn't surprise him. The Nazis had sent millions of Jews east from hundreds of unknown towns and villages. But any fourth-year undergraduate knew how the place might have fit into the broader anti-Semitic program being implemented in late 1944. The Russian Red Army had destroyed Army Group Centre in the late summer and was pushing towards Berlin.
Confident that the end of the war was near, the Polish Home Army had risen up in Warsaw. Against this backdrop, the Nazis were pushing to finalize their genocidal program. The few Jews left were being shipped east to the camps. Gas was pumping faster and crematoriums were stoking their fires hotter than ever. Farthest east the Nazis were digging up their dead Jews, trying to burn away what evidence was left of their horrible crimes.
There was no telling what he could expect to find in Legniclaw. Most places like it were in ruin now or had nothing left to remind them of the past beside their memories. To some, the past was best forgotten. Those sites that were still standing and could afford to hire an archivist were the lucky ones and received grants from governments or donations from survivors' organizations. He guessed that there might be a guard post, some train rails, or a searchlight left. Nothing more. Even Auschwitz had been left to fall into the ground. But there would be something revealing—raw and emotional—about standing at the junction where Jews were unloaded from cattle carts 60 years ago or made to kneel in the woods before an open pit. This was the opportunity that he needed to get himself out of this rut and away from his ex-wife. He could start fresh. It could breathe new life into his work and things could be like they were back when he'd first discovered history back in high school.
It was surprisingly easy to get things into order. Plane tickets were cheap and he could leave in a few days. One of the graduate students was willing to fill in for him. Bill would kick him back a few bucks and the department wouldn't know the difference. Something new had to be left on the message manager. He'd mention going to Europe and about the archive. Annette might call. It would be his way of rubbing it in her face.
When he finally got to bed he didn't get much sleep. He was too anxious. It would be like that until he was in Poland. But when he did he dreamed of freezing. Men with dark black hair slicked back, their skin milk white, were dipping him in a vat of frozen water and counting the seconds with a stop-watch as they held him down. They were grinning too—their teeth yellow and nicotine stained—as they put him in it naked up to his neck. The lights were bright. He could feel the water burn like fire. When he woke he was crying. It was the first time he had cried since the divorce.
There was a two-hour flight delay between London and Gorzów. In Gorzów, he sat in the rear of a cab, his back ached from the 14-hour flight. It was an old blue Moskvich 412, and the springs were coming up through the seats. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke and bad breath. Loud rough voices squawked out of the radio. Reception was bad, and there was constant static. He guessed it was a call-in talk show. Out the window he could see the trees lined up along the road. Most of the leaves had fallen off and the branches were just about bare. It left them looking like long narrow skeleton fingers.
"Two hours," the driver had said when he'd first gotten into the cab. His English was good. The man appeared to be in his mid-sixties. His sports-jacket was loud blue—a hold over from the 1970s. He had a large square head and his shoulders were broad and thick. Bill's uncle had been a carpenter—a big man. He figured the driver had done something along the same lines.
Out over the horizon Bill could see a cluster of buildings appear. Rain was falling in heavy, wind driven lines. After a few seconds the buildings were in full view. Five six story large gray hulks of concrete stood against the cloudy sky. Solid gray, the windows were black and none of them had doors. Bill knew what they were; he'd seen them in a PBS documentary once. The Soviets had built them in the 1950s as public housing. Most of the former Eastern block countries had them scattered outside their cities and towns. Moscow thought they'd last decades. Concrete doesn't rust or rot. But they had lacked proper indoor plumping and the tenants were quick to abandon them. They were eyesores now. Gypsy squatters were a major problem, he remembered. Whole slum towns were springing up around them. These, however, were empty.
"It's a lonely place," the cab driver said.
"What was that?" Bill asked. He found it hard to hear the man over the blare of the radio.
"The buildings—it's a lonely place," he repeated, as he stared out the window. The windshield wipers swooshed back and forth hypnotically. "I was a soldier when they were built. We were doing exercises a few miles from here and the army or the government saw fit to put us to work. We never finished them." As he pointed out towards the empty buildings there seemed to be something dark and brooding like a shadow hiding behind his old face.
"Was there a reason?"
"No money, no interest in Warsaw—who can say?"
"Do you know the town?"
He gripped the wheel tightly and chewed his lower lip. Bill could see that his knuckles had gone white. "A little. My unit stayed there while construction was underway. Do you mind if I ask why you are coming to Legniclaw?"
"Research. I'm a historian."
"American?"
"Canadian. I'm interested in what went on there during the war."
"The Germans sent their Jews east, you know. My mother is Jewish. Didn't bother me what happened here either way, though. It was common during the war. I was baptized - you know. My father wouldn't have it any other way."
Legniclaw was hidden behind the buildings and down over a steep crest. It was surrounded by a long marshy field. The grass was dead and frost had set in. a thick forest of evergreens faced it like a wall from the north and ran an endless sea of pine for miles over the hills beyond. The small town was made up of a small cluster of houses and buildings that formed a circle. Two roads led out from the east and the west. In the center there was a clearing. As they approached Bill could see that the place was an ancient town. Large hedgerows grew up just outside in patches and there was a shallow gully running around it. A bridge—the taxi had a few feet to maneuver on either side but that was about it - led onto cobblestone. The streets were narrow and unmarked. People were out despite the rain. An old woman was walking with a young man. She was carrying a cloth bag. Her eyes were old and weary. Small red brick houses lined the roads, and only a few cars were parked along the sidewalk. With the rain and the clouds, the roads were dreary and dark. As they drove farther into the town the buildings became larger but the architecture was the same drab style. Bill assumed that it was the business district. There were signs posted over the doors of some. It didn't matter though. It had been fifteen years since he'd been able to read a word of Polish.
They pulled up to the curb. "We're here," the driver informed him. Bill read the meter and put a handful of cash in the man's thick calloused hands. As he hauled himself out of the cramped backseat the driver unrolled the passenger window and stuck his head out. "This town has a lot of history and the people are all from the older generation. They'd rather not relive the past." The old man's eyes had gone dim and his lips were slack.
Bill nodded.
There was nothing unusual about the house, and there was no way to distinguish it from the rest of the buildings and houses lining the roads. If there had ever been a sign over the door it had been taken down. A bell rang pleasantly as he opened the door. Inside it was warm and comfortable. The ceilings were high, and he suspected the rooms up above would be cramped. Thick white plaster covered the walls. A narrow staircase led upwards.
Bill put his bags down and decided to wait. A frail old woman came down the stairs holding the railing. Her hair was white and pulled back tightly into a bun. She wore a light gray dress that hung just past her knees. Her skin was loose and her arms and hands were covered in dark liver spots. It was obvious that she had been born long before the war. But Bill could see that she had been beautiful once. He always measured time by historical events. His profession dictated it.
"Can I help you?" she asked. She was smiling and her eyes were kind. Her voice was soft. She wasn't Polish, he could tell from her accent. German—he was sure of it. The town was close to the border. There'd be a lot of ethnic Germans here. During the war the Nazis had called them Volkdeutsche and thousands had been resettled across Eastern Europe to help prepare the way for Hitler's Garden of Eden. "Are you looking for a room?"
"My name is Bill Oliver. Someone from the travel agency was speaking with you early last week."
"Of course. I'm Barbara Rollman." She extended her hand. It was cool like a leather glove. "You're the historian from Canada. It's rather exciting to have someone like yourself here. What exactly do you study?"
"German history. The Holocaust to be more specific," he informed her. "I'm here to see what's in that archive of yours. I hope something interesting." He hated to explain to people what he did. It made him feel uncomfortable. It was like telling them he looked up young girls skirts for a living. He saw the looks on their faces. Most thought that it was all a little disturbing, writing about how people were gassed and shot. He didn't see the same register on her face.
"That sounds very interesting. I was born in Dresden, you know. My family lived there throughout most of the war. But you must know all about what happened there."
"I'd love to talk to you about it before I leave. That's if you don't mind. I'm sure you have some amazing stories to tell."
"That would be nice," she said. Bill could see that her hands were gnarled and arthritic, but her nails were long and painted glossy brown. She had her eyebrows penciled in too, like his grandmother used to do. "Let me show you to your room. Breakfast is at nine and dinner is at six. Please let me know whether you will be here. It pains me to see good food go to waste. All my generation is like it."
Up along the staircase pictures were hung down the length of the walls. Most were black and whites. There was a man in German military uniform in a few. One showed him standing by a tank and another of him standing at the door of an old log cabin. There was snow on the ground and he had a large trout on a stick. Bill assumed they were of her father.
She led him down the hallway to his room. The air felt cold inside. There was a small writing desk in the corner and a closet to hang his things. The bed was hard. Bill didn't mind. He was still used to his old mattress that he'd had since he was a graduate student. The ceiling was low as he'd expected. There was only a foot between it and the top of his head.
Before she left Bill turned and asked, "How do I get to the archive? There are no street markers."
The woman held her breath for a moment. "Follow this road and take two rights. It isn't hard to find. There is a sign on the front door. At least I remember there being one. The young lady who runs it is a nice girl. She's not from here. Warsaw, I think."
"Actually, I'm from Lódz. Mrs. Rollmann was mistaken. I visited Warsaw for several months while I was doing some archival work. But I never lived there." Sala Rubinowicz was a tall and pleasant young woman. Her clothes were plain and she wore little makeup. Bill found her attractive. "I suppose your itching to see the files. Follow me."
It was an old and dusty place. The front office consisted of a bulky steel desk and filing cabinets that were lined up against one wall and continued on down the hallway. A dirty old photocopier was parked in the far left-hand corner. The walls had been white once but had taken on a dirty yellow appearance. Gray patches had been scuffed into the hardwood floor and the boards creaked with each step. There were large framed maps hanging from the walls. Behind the glass Bill could see that some were dated from the eighteenth century. Two doors led off from the hallway. One was open and dark inside. There were old chairs piled up haphazardly between busted computer monitors and keyboards.
The other door was closed. Plastic blinds had been pulled down over the window. Sala opened it and turned on the light. The place smelled musty. Piles of paper were heaped around the room. Most had gone brown with age. A dozen sagging cardboard boxes were stacked in one corner. A children's school desk sat in the middle. An ancient microfiche machine had been placed on top of it.
"They are in one of the boxes in the corner there," she informed him. "As I said on the phone, there really is no order to them. So you'll just have to dig. I'm sorry about the clutter, but I'm only here one week out of every other month."
"I understand," Bill replied. "Is the photocopier out there working?"
"It's in order, but she's a contrary old bitch. Just be patient with her. If you need anything, just call. My number is on the desk."
It was obvious that no one had touched the boxes in months, maybe years. They were sunk down into one another from their own weight and the cardboard was thin and worn. Tape held a few together at the corners. Numbers and letters were scrawled in thick black marker on the sides of each box. Bill figured that someone had once intended to put them in some system of classification. Apparently, money and time had dictated otherwise. The bottoms were soft, and he took them down carefully. They were heavy and filled with paper. A thick layer of dust covered the top and he brushed it off with his hand.
The third from the top had been marked with 45-01. There was something written in Polish beneath that. Inside it was filled with hundreds of sheets of browned and yellowed paper. There was no order to the documents. Some were neatly stapled and put in manila envelops while others were half crumpled and shoved down into the box. Bill started to take them out and quickly leaf through them. There was nothing special about their appearance. All of them had the same black German typeface. Bill knew that there was no way that he could read them all in the next few days. He'd have to leaf through them and simply photocopy what he though what was important. It was really a hit or miss operation.
Bill began to stack boxes into three separate piles. There were more than enough documents for each day. The first few dozen were nothing special: military correspondences between low ranking officers about logistics and transportation. One briefly mentioned insurgent attacks by the local populations. They were dated May 1940. One had been forwarded from Herman Backe's office and was held together by a rusted paper clip. Figures and tables were printed down the page. During the early years of the war Backe had been the German Food Controller and had been in partnership with Göring's Office of the Four Year Plan. The document looked promising and Bill put it aside. For the next several hours he sat on the floor thumbing through the rest. His German held up surprisingly well. By the time he had gotten two thirds of the way through the dirty heap he checked his watch. Three hours had passed. It was getting close to ten. Jet lag had finally caught up to him and his head was throbbing after starring at endless pages. There were only a few sheets left and he decided to finish up and leave.
Before he reached the bottom his heart began to pick up speed. At the top of one of the documents was printed "CHIEF OF THE SECURITY POLICE AND SECURITY SERVICE." By that time it was Kaltenbrunner; Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague, had long since been dead. It was addressed to Berlin. Bill's hands had gone clammy with sweat. He wiped them on his pants. Centered halfway down the page and written in bold black was "OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT NO. 203." The right hand margin indicated that fifty copies had been distributed. This was the thirty-sixth. Two small holes had been put through the top left hand corner. Pages were missing.
Bill found it hard to breathe. He'd been writing and teaching history for over ten years, but he'd only seen these documents reprinted and edited as collections in libraries. Originals were rare and like gold in his world. Any archive lucky enough to have them had them locked up in temperature controlled vaults where air moisture was monitored on an hourly basis. The U.S. Army had first found them at the Gestapo archives just after the war, and now the U.S. National Archives, Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum were the only ones that belonged to that exclusive club that had originals. There had only been a few hundred reports written. They detailed the progress of the Einsatzgruppen—mobile killing units of the SD, the security service of the SS—in the Eastern Territories and had been sent back to Berlin to report on anti-Semitic operations. Bureaucrats had written them and the language that they had used was dry. Specifics were never mentioned in them. Their operations had been a state secret and their transmissions were all in code. Euphemisms like "evacuation" were common. Victims were also given "special treatment," "rendered harmless" or "resettled."
Bill was out in the front room at the photocopier, pressing the large blue button on the front console. The thing was old and had collected dirt and grime over the years. A light went on under the cover and scanned the document. From inside the machine he could hear the tray of paper shift. Then there was another sound of paper rustling and a red light flashed. It was jammed. Bill rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, took a deep breath and opened the front panel. He was sweating freely now. It all appeared fine. He really had no idea what he was looking for and gave up. There was no way he could sit here anymore to keep on reading. It was late and he hadn't eaten since London. His body was breaking down with exhaustion. The excitement hadn't helped either. The document had been sitting around for long enough now that he figured Sala wouldn't mind if he just took it and returned it in the morning.
Mrs. Rollmann had left his supper in the oven. The pork chops were fine but the soup was made of red beets and was cold. Bill washed it down the sink. After that he sat in bed for an hour, reading the faded document over and over. It was typical of SD reports: insurgent attacks and the subsequent deportation of the local Jewish population.
He wondered what exactly had happened to them. Some Jews had heard of what was happening and had escaped to the forests to join the partisans. Many had returned later only to be caught up in the web. That was a likely explanation of what had happened.
After making some notes, he fell asleep.
Bill woke to the sound of boots storming up the stairs and down the hallway. There must have been at least a half dozen of them. He could feel the bed rattle as they crashed against the floorboards. He bolted up and threw the covers off. The room was bitter cold and he could see his breath. As his bare feet touched the floor he reeled back. It was like ice. The hair on his arms was standing on end and his skin had turned to goose flesh. Frost covered the window. Bill wrapped himself in the bed sheets and got up. The footsteps stopped just outside. Shafts of light shifted in the space between the floor and the door as they moved. Fists pounded hard. The wood heaved inwards and rattled in the frame.
"Öffne die Tür, Gestapo!" a rough voice screamed from the hallway.
Bill went stiff and his tongue dropped down into his throat. A cold sweat had broken out all over his body. His knees were weak.
Everything went silent for a moment. He could hear them whispering to one another. There was a loud crack as one of them put a boot to the door. The wood splintered at the knob and the frame split in the middle. As the door swung inwards, Bill fell back. For a second he saw polished black riding boots and gray pants standing in the doorway.
Bill crawled towards the bed, pushing himself with the heels of his feet. In the second that he had taken his eyes off the door the hallway had gone dark again. The doorframe was intact and the frost had gone from the window. Lying there with the sheets tangled around him, he was confused and disoriented. Had he thrown himself from bed in the middle of a nightmare? The day had worked him over good. That was it. His mind was playing games. It was his mind punishing him for the trip and for sitting in that cramped little musty room with the bright lighting for too long. Should have listened to my head, Bill thought. He got up and looked around the room. Outside it had been raining. Puddles had gathered on the cobblestone and were frozen. The street was empty. Heat was still coming out of the old radiator by the bed. Bill made his way across the room and poked his head outside. The silence was pervasive and he thought for a second he could hear the dust move around in the air. Down the hall men in uniform were smiling on the pictures that hung from the wall.
Bill went back to bed. Before he got in he locked the door behind him.
The dinning room table was long and narrow. It was solid oak and thick. Bill sat at one end eating the bacon and eggs Mrs. Rollman had made. She was there sipping coffee next to him. They chatted. Bill could see her eyes looking out over the rim of the cup. To him there was something dark lying behind her mask of makeup. The woman seemed mechanical now, as if she'd stood in the mirror for an hour rehearsing how to act. He hadn't seen it yesterday.
"You didn't hear me up last night, I hope?" he asked. In the morning Bill had woken with a terrible migraine pounding inside his head. It was half an hour before it had dissipated to a dull throb and he could manage to get out of bed. "I had to use the washroom and it took me a minute to get my bearing."
"I'm a sound sleeper. Don't worry yourself."
"Did you feel a draft last night?" he asked. He could remember little from the night besides the cold. He hated the cold. It reminded him of sick grandmothers with arthritic hips and children with running noses. It had crept in through the window and swept around the room. His feet still felt like blocks of ice.
"No. There's a fireplace in my bedroom and I have it going throughout the night," she informed him. "I'll have the carpenter who looks after the house seal the windows properly. I'd have done it earlier but my hands aren't good for much now."
"No rush."
"Did you find what you were looking for yesterday?" she asked.
Bill starred at his plate as he cut his food. "There were some interesting things. But I haven't had the time to scour the files properly yet. With a full nights sleep, today should be much more productive."
"Is this your first trip to Poland?" she asked.
"Yes. I spent a few weeks in Western Europe as a student, but that was years ago." Bill felt embarrassed telling his dirty little secret. What kind of professor of Holocaust Studies had never gone to Poland? It just sounded ridiculous. He'd usually remark on the fact when talking to his colleagues. It was better that way. He could always slip it in somewhere and coat it with prevarications. It made his inexperience seem less trivial then. "When I first arrived you mentioned that you were born in Dresden."
"My family history dates back there into the mid-fifteenth century. It's a lovely city. We came here after my father was shot on the Eastern Front," she said. Her German was still thick after seventy years. "He was transferred here as military police and sent for my mother and I to get away from the cities. It was very dangerous after 1944."
"The Allies were bombing everything," Bill said.
"We weren't lucky enough to escape them. I can remember sitting out on the front step. The sky suddenly went black and I looked up and saw a wave of planes stretch back for miles. Then there were the long whistles of bombs falling down upon us. There had been a munitions dump outside of town, but they had missed by miles. I ran inside and hid under the table. When they hit there was a deafening clap and the floor shook. My mother didn't come home after that. I can remember the horrible screaming and seeing the blackened men and women and babies walking dazed through the fire with their skin falling off. People were sucked into buildings right off the streets. It was so hot that you couldn't breathe. My house had been spared but there was nothing left to the rest. The week after, emergency crews were collecting bodies and loading them on carts. They had them piled up everywhere. There was just too many dead for them to deal with."
"My father sent for me then," she said and put the cup down. She rubbed at her arthritic wrists with her long bony fingers. Her eyes looked forward as if she were watching the events unfold on a television. "It wasn't too long after that the Russians came. We had heard the stories from the soldiers retreating through town that the Red Army was raping all the women as they advanced. I was spared that horror and sent to a displaced persons camp. The mayor had been an acquaintance of my father and his family took me in. I have not left since."
For a moment Bill was silent. "War is horror," he told her. "Too many people have forgotten the horror of it all. More need to hear stories like yours."
"Times have certainly changed from when I was a young woman." She got up from the table and went into the kitchen. He could hear the water running as she talked. "History is a precious thing, Mr. Oliver," she called back. "Then we knew who we were. That seems to be lost now"
Bill went to the concrete buildings overlooking the town after breakfast. He'd seen them from the street looming down like idols. They looked dangerous—he figured that the inside they were falling down upon themselves—and the child in him that begged for adventure couldn't resist.
Back behind the houses the ground was hard. Frost had frozen the bent and folded grass. Black pools spotted the field. The wind was cold and bitter against his face. The hill was a gradual incline that ascended for fifty feet. It wasn't steep. There were a few small pine trees pocking out of the ground, and Bill grabbed hold of the branches to haul himself up. His shoes weren't meant for climbing and he almost fell back twice on the brittle gravel that led up to the place.
He wandered through a few of the apartment complexes. They were cold inside like tombs. Bill had forgotten gloves and stuffed his hands deep inside his pockets. He could see his breath and the crunch of his steps echoed loudly. The long empty hallways had little light. Sweating, Bill found himself running through the patches of darkness. They led off into small two bedroom flats. Some were covered with a foot of dark rainwater that had leaked down through cracks in the ceilings. Most had only one window. There was a rank smell of cat urine, too. Gaping square holes were cut into the ceilings at the back of each building where the stairwells should have been.
Bill stared out through one of the windows cut into the wall of an apartment and thought of the documentary that he'd seen late one night. There'd been an old gaunt woman facing a slow death in her tiny room. Breathing heavily, it took her minutes to leave her bed and open the door to visitors. At some point she'd said, "You can't stay healthy living here." The narrator explained that at least two other ground-floor residents were said to have died over the past year. Neighbors suspected that it was tuberculosis.
Looking down at the town, Bill wondered where the Germans had brought the Jews to die. In his mind he could see them taking a few out deep into the forest to dig a long and narrow trench. It would be their graves. Then the Nazis would bring the rest, have them strip and put their valuables in a neat little pile. There would have been screams of terror as they saw what was about to happen. Maybe there'd been a "packer" at either end to lay them face down in the dirt or one upon the other. All that had to be done then was to pass by and fire a shot at the back of their skulls. There hadn't been many of them. It would have been done quickly.
Sitting in the back room of the archive, Bill's headache had returned. It was a low, dull throb. He'd had one like it before when Annette had first left him. It made his stomach uneasy. Rubbing at his temples he found it hard to read. The florescent lighting was bright and didn't help much. He'd gone outside several times to get away from the stale air. It had grown cold and started to snow intermittingly. Sala had left a note on the front desk. She had been called back to Warsaw on urgent business. That was fine with him; there was less distraction that way.
Much of what was in the second box of documents had been spoiled by water damage. Mold had crept in from the top and up through the bottom. The paper on the inside was hard and crusty. Purple circles of ink had spread out leaving it unreadable. The paper clips holding them together were rusty and had eaten through inches of reports. At the middle of the bundle a few had been saved. They were in a neat chronological order and dated as far back as 1943. Lines of single and triple digit numbers ran up the side. They were ration quotas. It wasn't listed whether they were Jews or POWs. Bill was familiar with what they'd been fed. He'd invited a Holocaust survivor to one of his classes a few semesters back. The man had been young—barely in his teens - when he had been taken to Dachau. It had been 1940. The Americans hadn't liberated the camp until April 1945. A few of the students had cried when he'd held up his sleeve and showed them his forearm. Tattooed in thick dark green was his identification number. "All they feed us was rotten turnips," he'd said. "I haven't eaten one since. I just can't bring myself to it." The old man had laughed.
There was a gap of a few months in the dates on the files. Bill rifled through the spoiled papers. Nothing fit. At the bottom of the small pile sitting on his lap he found the reports that had followed yesterday's discovery. His eyes grew large. The document was yellow and slightly torn. As he read the short neatly typed paragraph, Bill could feel his heart pound against his chest.
It was all common enough for what the Einsatzgruppen had sent back to Berlin. Some reports were more detailed than others but none truly relayed the graphic nature of what had gone on. It was all numbers and procedure. Bill found it strange that the Jews set to work hadn't been killed. The Germans were still pushing ahead with genocide even then, and Hungary had been forced to give up its Jews. From Poland death marches were leaving trails of pain and sorrow back to Germany.
There was another document there that was stuffed in a small manila envelope. It was only a few sentences.
The copier was still broken. Bill put the documents in a plastic clipboard and stuffed them in his briefcase. He couldn't risk leaving them here for the mold and rust to continue to eat at. They were too important to the town and to him. These were a gold-mine for a historian. He'd have to turn them over to an archive eventually, he knew that. The National Archive in Ottawa was a good a destination as any. But now the reports were his. Annette would hear about his discovery, too. That he knew. One of their mutual friends would call her up like they always did and tell her about the new book that he was writing or what an exciting time it must be for Bill now, traveling across Europe and all.
The trip to Legniclaw reminded him of graduate school when history was worth something to him, when he had called it his "passion." That was a lifetime ago. This was his chance at some success, finally. Money and fame had never mattered much to him. Respect from his peers was more important. That was better than fame. There'd be an article in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to start. A book might follow. Maybe he could offer something to the discipline along the way. Thoughts like that had seemed like childish fantasies before, but now they were real possibilities.
Bill got up and flicked off the light. The hum of the florescent lighting and been murder on his brain. The headache he'd been suffering since getting off of the plane was back, pounding in regular intervals.
It was night now and still snowing. A thin blanket of it covered the cobblestone. Bill turned his collar up and stepped out, locking the door behind him. It smelled terrible outside. He figured it was a burst sewer pipe somewhere down the road. The street was dark and quiet. His heels clicked nosily. Rubbing at his temples, Bill noticed something dark on his fingers. He saw that the snow was gray. He held out his hands and solid flakes landed there. It was ash. Bill looked up. Past the tops of the houses something darker than the night rose up into the sky. He could see a thick plume of smoke floating back over town. With his briefcase over his head he jogged towards the house.
Turning the corner his heart fell down into his stomach. Bill stood in the middle of the street if he had been flashed frozen. His jaw went slack. His briefcase hit the cobblestone with a loud crash that echoed off the houses. Paper spilled out across the street.
Bodies were hung from the streetlamps. Their necks were snapped and twisted to the side horribly. They were dressed in ragged and soiled clothes. Painted signs were tied around them. Bill could make them out. They were in German: "THE JEWS OF LEGNICLAW ARE NO MORE!" One hung a few feet from him. Beneath the sodium glow of the streetlight he could see a dead man's eyes bulging from his head. His tongue was protruding fat and purple from his mouth. A yellow star had been sewn over the breast. "JÜDE" was stitched in the middle.
Ash was falling heavily now like a storm. Bill began to run down the road with his arms flailing out. His lungs ached and it was hard for him to breath. As he came up to the door he saw that the sidewalk had changed. The concrete was gone and large bits of stones were lying flat in place. Names and dates were scattered around. They were headstones. Broken Yiddish prayers were carved into a few. For a moment Bill thought of the road that led through the Plaszów labor camp just outside of Krakow. It had been paved with headstones torn up from Jewish cemeteries. Amon Goeth, the camp commandant, had forced the Jews to build it, knowing all too well that they too would soon be erased. Bill now knew that they had done the same here in this town during the war.
Bill wrenched the door open and fell inside on his knees. Barbara was sitting in the living room reading. She turned and he went to her. "What went on here?" Bill screamed into her old face. "What happened to the Jews?"
She had washed off all of her makeup and she looked like a snake. Her penciled in eyebrows were gone, too. Her mouth was a fine razor slit. "I don't know what you are talking about," she said in a hiss. "Now let me go, Mr. Oliver! You're hurting me."
"I'm not stupid, old woman. Who's the man in the pictures, really?"
"Some things are best forgotten, Mr. Oliver."
"Tell me before I break you." Bill's face had drained of all color and he looked like he'd been dead a week. His eyes were huge, his mouth gaping. A silver chord of saliva hung from his bottom lip and spit flew out from his mouth towards her. What he had seen had driven him mad.
"It was a different time then. No one understands that now."
"Tell me!" he screamed.
Her eyes had grown dark and went half closed. "It is my father. He was stationed on the Eastern Front and he was shot, like I told you before. He was SS. My mother didn't know about what was happening. But I knew. I was in university and heard rumors on the buses and at the cafes. I told her nothing. He was transferred here towards the end of the war. They were short on men, and my father had experience in difficult matters. Jews came through from Western Europe and were sent east. Some came back from the forests later on. They were starved and in rags. Towards the end, things started to go bad. There were shootings and hangings - things that I've tried to forget. He would tell me that it was special work for our Fuehrer. You cannot forget them, though, no matter how hard you try. The memories are always with you."
Bill stood there watching her. His body felt empty, as if it had been drained of life. He'd felt it once before when Annette had come back to the apartment to collect her things. He'd been drinking for two days straight. On the first night he'd taken a bottle of prescription painkillers down from the medicine cabinet. Nothing had happened because he had passed out. He'd been lucky. The next day she piled boxes up into the elevator while he sat on the sofa watching television. He hadn't said a word to her. That had been the end of them. His body had felt empty then, too. "So those were all lies that you told me before?" he asked the old woman as his chest heaved in and out. He was weeping. "They strung them up in the streets for everyone to see!"
"We all watched them bring them out to the fields to dig up the old ones and them get shot themselves. We all watched them burn and did nothing. But I read the papers. Hess and Frank, all of their children have been hounded by the press. Why would I be any different? Why would our town be any different? It was best for me to stay here and not go back to Germany."
"Where were they buried?" he demanded. Bill had his hands in his hair and was clutching at his face. Sweat was running down his forehead freely.
"They brought them up on the hill to an anti-tank ditch that had been dug. You could hear the gunshots everywhere. I can still hear them now."
"Why have you kept all of this hidden?" he demanded. Bill grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. As he touched her images ran through his mind like a scene from a movie on fast forward. A dozen people were outside her house on the sidewalk. Some of the buildings were charred black and had been gutted by fire. Deep bomb craters littered the cobblestone and were cordoned off with wooden horses that were painted red. Jews—their knees were scrapped and dirty, they were weary looking and clung to one another in desperation and fear—were being marched down the street by two German soldiers, as they were hit with rifle butts. The spectators flung small rocks and rotten tomatoes as they passed. "Goodbye, Jews!" they screamed in German. A young attractive woman broke from the crowd and ran to the Jews. Her fists were in tight balls at her sides. She struck an old man and he fell to the ground. As he lay there, she spit in his face and kicked him. She turned and her eyes were wide and blearing and full of hate. It was Barbara Rollman. Then the images were gone as quickly as they had begun.
Bill slapped her hard across the face. The chair tipped back and she hit the floor. There was a soft snap. The old woman let out a deep, guttural moan as her last breath escaped her lungs. Then she was still. For a moment he stood there looking down and watching her. His chest heaved in and out. A dark blue circle had formed on her left check. Bill knelt beside her and put his ear against her breast. There was nothing. Her heart was silent and her chest unmoving. He had killed her. Bill opened the door a crack and peered out. The road was dark and quite. Parked at the curb was an old gray wooden farm cart. It was empty. As the grey ash fell down like snow, Bill stared at it. For a moment he thought he saw it loaded down with the bodies of dead men and women. They were riddled with bullet holes and blood dripped down onto the cobblestone. The man heaped on top—his body stretched out and half hanging from the back—had been beaten badly. His face was ruined. One eye was hidden behind his mashed cheek but the other stared out towards Bill. Then the bodies were gone. There were loud voices yelling and laughing in the distance, too. Faint. From behind the houses, there was a series of loud pops as someone fired off a pistol. They were calling for him.
Bill dragged the old woman out the door by her ankles. She was light like a small child. Outside the bodies of dead Jews glowed under the sodium glare of the streetlamps and ash continued to fall. He put her up on the cart.
Bill made his way across the open field. The cart was cumbersome on the frozen grass and the wheels crunched on the frost. He looked back at the old woman. A death shroud of ash had covered her body. Halfway across, he could see that up on the hill a huge bonfire had been set in between the concrete buildings. Bodies were piled twenty feet in the air. Flames licked out like forked tongues and lit the buildings up. The wind brought the smell of burnt flesh and kerosene. Thick black plumes of smoke rose up and drifted back over the roofs of the houses.
As he reached the bottom of the gravel hill he took the old woman over his shoulder. It was easier getting up this time. He knew his way. As he approached he saw that a half-dozen men stood around the fire with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. They were all drinking and passed a metal flask around to one another as they laughed and talked. They were the ghosts of dead. They'd come back to haunt Bill and to remind him that the past couldn't be forgotten. They were in grey uniforms and wore coal-scuttled helmets. Their jackboots were caked in dirt and their jackets were unbuttoned and the shirt-tails were hanging out. One of them was an officer. Unlike the others his uniform was clean and trim. He wore a long leather trench-coat that went down past his knees. There was a skull and cross bones on his hat and it shone in the moonlight. His hands were in his pockets and Bill could see that a series of medals decorated his right breast. Somewhere in the recesses of his brain Bill knew that it was the old woman's father. One of the soldiers—he was young and blonde—danced wildly around the fire pissing into it and laughing. He held a Lugar and fired it into the mass of bodies.
"Another for the fire, Herr Oliver?" one of them in a green uniform turned and asked. He smiled as he spoke. The few teeth he had left were rotten through. Bill could see that his eyes were black like onyx. "These Jews are like cockroaches: you kill one and two more appear."
"That's the last of them," Bill said. He tossed the old woman in. Red embers flew up and danced around in the air like fireflies. The fire was a tangled mess. Carbonized arms and legs poked out and some faces were still visible. Eyes were bulging from blackened faces. A young woman had been heaped on top. She was clutching at a small bundle. She had been screaming and her lips were burnt back to expose pearl white teeth. Flames quickly reached up around the rug. Bill watched as the old woman's thin blonde hair sizzled and burned down to her scalp. Really, she just lay on the ground and stared up with blank, lifeless eyes. There was no fire, no Germans. But for Bill they were as real as he was.
"The Russians will be here in a few days," the officer said. He offered Bill a drink. "There is a lot of work still to be done before we leave."
He sipped from the flask. It was brandy and burned the back of his throat. Watching the fire he asked, "What will happen to me?"
The men were all drunk and laughed at what Bill had said. "The war isn't over yet and that old Jew bitch had to die," he said. "You're always worrying, Herr Oliver. Have another drink. You'll be in Berlin in a week. After a few nice German girls you'll forget all of this."
"The past eventually catches up on you," Bill whispered. He took another drink and passed the flask to one of the soldiers.