The Storyteller Read online

  "No."

  "Then maybe Josef is different," Sage says.

  "Did he come to you because he wants to make himself feel better? Or because he wants to make his victims feel better?"

  "Obviously that's not possible," she replies.

  "And that makes you feel badly for him?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  I focus my attention on the road. "The German people have paid billions of dollars of reparations. To individuals. To Israel. But you know what? It's been nearly seventy years and they've never held a public forum to apologize to Jews for the crimes of the Holocaust. It's happened elsewhere--South Africa, for example. But the Germans? They had to be dragged by the Allies into the Nuremberg Trials. Officials who had helped build the Third Reich stayed on in government after the war, just by denying they were ever Nazis, and the German people accepted it. Young people today in Germany who are taught about the Holocaust brush it off, saying it's ancient history. So, no, I don't think you can forgive Josef Weber. I don't think you can forgive anyone who was involved. I think you can only hold them accountable, and try to look their children and grandchildren in the eye without blaming them for what their ancestors did."

  Sage shakes her head. "Surely there were some Germans who were better than others, some who didn't want to go along with what Hitler said. If you can't see them as individuals--if you can't forgive the ones who ask for it--doesn't that make you just as bad as any Nazi?"

  "No," I admit. "It makes me human."

  *

  Minka Singer is a tiny woman with the same snapping blue eyes as her granddaughter. She lives in a small assisted-living condo and has a part-time caretaker who moves like a shadow around her employer, handing her reading glasses and her cane and a sweater before she can seemingly even think to ask for them. Contrary to what Sage indicated, she is absolutely thrilled to be introduced to me.

  "So tell me again," she says, as we settle on the couch in her living room. "Where did you meet my granddaughter?"

  "Through work," I answer carefully.

  "Then you know how she bakes, yes? A person could get used to that kind of food all the time."

  "You'd have to have a lifetime deal with Jenny Craig," I reply, and then I realize why Minka has been so happy to meet me. She wants me to date her granddaughter.

  I'm not gonna lie: the thought of that makes me feel like I've been zapped by a bolt of electricity.

  "Grandma," Sage interrupts. "Leo didn't come all this way to talk about my bread."

  "You know what my father used to say? True love is like bread. It needs the right ingredients, a little heat, and some magic to rise."

  Sage turns beet red. I cough into my hand. "Ms. Singer, I've come here today because I'm hoping you'll tell me your story."

  "Ach, Sage, that was meant for your eyes only! The silly fairy tale of a young girl, that's all."

  I have no idea what she's talking about.

  "I work for the United States government, ma'am. I track down perpetrators of war crimes."

  The light goes out of Minka Singer's eyes. "I have nothing to say. Daisy?" she calls out. "Daisy, I'm very tired. I'd like to lie down--"

  "I told you so," Sage murmurs.

  From the corner of my eye, I see the caretaker approaching.

  "Sage is lucky," I say. "My grandparents aren't alive anymore. My grandpa, he came here from Austria. Every year he held a big backyard party on July twenty-second. He'd have beer for the grown-ups and an inflatable pool for us kids, and the biggest cake my grandmother could make. I always assumed it was his birthday. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I learned he had been born in December. July twenty-second, that was the day he became a U.S. citizen."

  By now Daisy has reached Minka's side and has her hand beneath the woman's frail arm to help her stand. Minka rises and takes two shuffling steps away from me.

  "My grandfather fought in World War Two," I continue, getting to my feet. "Like you, he never talked about anything he'd seen. But when I graduated from high school, he took me to Europe as a graduation gift. We visited the Colosseum in Rome, and the Louvre in Paris, and we hiked in the Swiss Alps. The last country we visited was Germany. He took me to Dachau. We saw the barracks, and the crematoria, where the bodies of prisoners who had died were burned. I remember a wall with a ditch below it, angled away, to catch the blood of prisoners who were shot. My grandfather told me that immediately after visiting the concentration camp, we would be leaving the country. Because I was going to want to kill the first German I saw."

  Minka Singer looks back over her shoulder. There are tears in her eyes. "My father promised me I would die with a bullet to the heart."

  Sage gasps, stricken.

  Her grandmother's eyes flicker toward her. "There were dead people everywhere. You had to walk on them, sometimes, to get away. So we saw things. A bullet in the head, there were always brains coming out, and it scared me. But a bullet in the heart, that didn't seem so bad by comparison. So that was the deal my father made me."

  I realize in that instant the reason Minka has never spoken of her experience during the war is not that she has forgotten the details. It's because she remembers every last one, and wants to make sure that her children and grandchildren do not have to suffer the same curse.

  She sits back down on the couch. "I don't know what you want me to say."

  I lean forward and take her hand. It is cool and dry, like tissue paper. "Tell me more about your father," I suggest.

  PART II

  When I reach the age of Twenty

  I will explore this world of plenty

  In a motorized bird myself I will sit

  And soar into space oh! so brightly lit

  I will float, I will fly to the world so lovely, so far I will float, I will fly above rivers and sea The cloud is my sister, the wind a brother to me.

  --from "A Dream," written by Avraham (Abramek) Koplowicz, b. 1930. He was a child in the Lod ghetto. He was taken from the ghetto on the final transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and was murdered there at age fourteen. This poem has been translated from the original Polish by Ida Meretyk-Spinka, 2012.

  What they had told me of the upior could not be true. The whip wielded by Damian had lashed open Aleks's back, so that his skin hung in ribbons, and he was bleeding. How could a monster with no blood of his own do that?

  Not that it mattered. The crowd had turned out to watch the punishment, to revel in the pain of the creature that had caused them so much misery. In the moonlight, sweat gleamed on Aleks's body, twisting in agony as he strained against his bonds. The villagers threw water in his face, vinegar and salt in his wounds. A light snow fell, blanketing the square--a bucolic picture postcard, except for the brutality at its center.

  "Please," I begged, breaking free from the soldiers who were restraining the onlookers, so that I could grab Damian's arm. "You have to stop."

  "Why? He wouldn't have. Thirteen people have died. Thirteen." He jerked his head at a soldier, who caught me around the waist and held me back. Damian lifted the whip again and sent it whizzing through the air, cracking against Aleks's flesh.

  It did not matter, I realized, if Aleks was even to blame. Damian knew the village simply needed a scapegoat.

  The cat's-eye tail had opened a gash along Aleks's cheek. His face was unrecognizable. His shirt hung in shreds at his waist as he sagged to his knees. "Ania," he gasped. "Go . . . away . . ."

  "You bastard!" Damian shouted. He hit Aleks so hard in the face that blood sprayed like a fountain from his nose, that his head snapped back on the stalk of his neck. "You could have hurt her!"

  "Stop!" I shrieked. I stomped as hard as I could on the foot of the soldier who was restraining me, and threw myself on top of Aleks. "You'll kill him," I sobbed.

  Aleks was limp in my arms. A muscle jumped along Damian's jaw as he watched me try to bear the weight. "You can't kill something," he said coldly, "that's already dead."

  Suddenly a soldier bur