Once We Were Brothers (49 page)

Elzbieta sat speechless.

“Can you give us precise information about his wealth, his bank accounts and the property he confiscated?”

She nodded. “Can you assure me that I won’t be deported or prosecuted?”

“Will you testify about his role in the persecution of Zamość and its citizens?”

“I want it all in writing. I get to stay in the country.”

Richard nodded. “You’ll have immunity.”

“And I want protection for Jennifer and myself.”

Richard nodded.

The interview lasted three hours. A nine-page statement was prepared and Elzbieta Krzyzecki Rosenzweig, having received a written grant of derivative use immunity, signed her name before a witness. The statement contained a detailed narrative and disclosed,
inter alia,
the true identity of Elliot Rosenzweig, the number and location of Swiss bank accounts established sixty years ago in the name of Otto Piatek and subsequently transferred by her into the name of Elliot Rosenzweig, and enough factual data to firmly establish Elliot as Hauptscharfuhrer Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamość. A warrant for the arrest of Otto Piatek, n/k/a Elliot Rosenzweig, 455 Sheridan road, Winnetka, Illinois, was issued and handed to the United States Marshall’s office. There would be no bond.

* * *

Catherine and Liam taxied directly to the hospital from the Federal Building. Adele was sitting by Ben’s bedside. A wall-full of machines was blinking and beeping – oxygen tubes, intravenous tubes and electrocardiograph wires came out of Ben like spaghetti. Ben lay still, his eyes closed, his skin pale.

“Has Doctor Chou been in?” Catherine said.

“Several times. He’s totally non-committal. He just keeps saying, ‘Let’s wait and see.’”

“I have such good news for Ben. Otto is being arrested. With the testimony of Elzbieta and the subpoenaed bank records, he’ll be deported and sent overseas to be tried as a war criminal. He’ll finally pay his debt to all the innocent people he tortured or sent to die and Ben will have avenged the murder of Hannah and his family.”

Adele stepped away from the bed. She put her arm around Catherine’s shoulders. “There are some things I’d like to tell you,” she said to Catherine. “This is Friday and I have a promise to keep. I’d like you to come with me.” She turned to Liam and Mort. “Call us if anything changes, please.”

Catherine and Adele drove out of the downtown area and onto the Kennedy Expressway. “How far did Ben get in his story?” she asked Catherine.

“To the end of the war. He got to the part where the Russian army had liberated the Majdanek camp.”

“That’s as far as he went?”

Catherine took a deep breath. “That day, when he told me what had happened, I’m afraid I broke down. I was overwhelmed. Otto had ordered the execution of Ben’s father and Father Janofski. Hannah, Ben’s mother, Lucyna and the sisters of St. Mary’s were sent to die at Auschwitz. I was so upset that I stopped him and spent the rest of the night curled up in the chair.”

Adele nodded and patted Catherine on the leg. “Well, there’s more.”

“Really? Please, Adele, tell me.”

“Ben and the other Majdanek prisoners were not actually liberated in the sense that they were free to go anywhere. Stalin was a distrustful anti-Semite and didn’t want to release the Jews behind his lines, so the Russian army sent the survivors to a detention camp in Siberia. They were interned there for several months. Those who didn’t perish from the cold or their weakened condition were finally released. It was late in the spring of 1945.

“Ben had no family and nowhere to go. He was a DP, a displaced person, one of thousands who wandered Europe after the war. Although invited to join those who would emigrate to Israel and help set up the new state, Ben declined. He was sick at heart and felt a need to reconnect with his memories.

“He decided to return to Poland, but Zamość had changed. All the people he knew were gone. The Jewish ghetto had been razed and Ben’s old neighborhood was full of strangers. He was unwelcome. He was an outcast in his own town.

“He left Zamość and started walking south along the country roads, drawn to Uncle Joseph’s cabin because intuitively he knew that’s where he should go, if for no other reason than to spend his time with the memories of Hannah and Beka.”

Adele exited the expressway and turned her car onto Old Orchard road. “The return was painful for Ben. The mountain tranquility, the peace he craved, eluded him and the wilderness gave him no comfort. The valleys around the cabin were abandoned, even Krzysztof was gone, but in truth, Ben had no desire for companionship. A recluse, he fished the streams. He hunted in the forest. He talked to the memories of Hannah and Beka. Weeks went by and the mountains blossomed into summer.

“Then one night in early July, an American army jeep pulled up to the cabin. Ben watched it from his front porch. An African-American corporal got out of the driver’s seat and walked a few steps toward the cabin.

“‘Mr. Solomon?’ he called.

“Ben nodded.

“The corporal walked around the car and held out his hand to assist his passenger. Ben stood. He knew even before he saw her legs slide out of the passenger seat.”

“Hannah!” Catherine whispered.

Adele smiled. “Yes, dear. It was Hannah. And no moment was ever sweeter.”

Catherine wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “No matter where he ended up, she promised she’d be there.”

“That’s right.” Adele pulled her car into the parking lot of Henderson’s Florist. “We’ll stop here for the flowers.”

The bouquet, a standing order of red and white carnations, was wrapped and ready. Adele took the bouquet and drove across the street into Memorial Park Cemetery. Together they walked down the pathway till they came to a rose-colored granite marker. Adele set the flowers gently into the holder on the stone above the inscription:

Hannah Solomon

Dance Through All Eternity

1921-2001

Catherine stared at the stone in silence, feeling strangely connected. “You knew Hannah?” she asked Adele, after a few moments.

“Oh my, yes. She was my best friend.”

“Wasn’t she sent to Auschwitz?”

“Indeed she was, just as Ben described, on that terrible afternoon in 1944 when the women were loaded onto the truck in the courtyard of St. Mary’s and driven from Krasnik to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Leah Solomon and the sisters of St. Mary’s were separated from Hannah and were never seen again. Hannah and Lucyna, young and strong, were assigned to work in a nearby armaments factory. Hannah’s beautiful auburn hair was shaven and she was issued a striped uniform.

“Every day they were marched out of the Birkenau camp with the other women laborers in columns of five, four miles to the factory. At the end of a twelve-hour work day, they marched back. In a drafty wooden stable, meant to hold forty-eight horses, Hannah and eight hundred other poor souls slept on bare wooden platforms, three compartments high. No blankets, no pillows. There were holes in the floor for human waste. There was no heat or running water. As the weeks went by, many succumbed to the ordeal. Malnutrition, disease, madness, or the sheer exhaustion of the daily labors claimed those that the gas chambers did not consume.

“In October 1944, they began to hear the distant guns of the Russian Army. To Hannah and Lucyna the artillery blasts were the drums of freedom. As they grew louder, they knew they would be freed if they could only hang on a little while longer.

“But Lucyna was failing. Although a tough little woman, she was losing her mental and physical stamina. Hannah urged her on, found extra food and water for her, and encouraged her to keep going. ‘We’re survivors,’ she told her. ‘When this is over, we’ll all be together again.’

“Just as the prisoners anticipated the advance of the Red Army, so did the Germans. In October and November they dismantled and destroyed the crematoriums. Gassings stopped. The SS did whatever they could to cover up the evidence of mass executions. Finally, on the morning of January 18, 1945, the women were roused by the Kapos and told to gather in the yard. It was the final roll call.

“Snow blew over the frozen ground, yet Hannah, Lucyna and the women stood outside in their thread-bare clothes. They were each given a piece of bread, a slab of margarine and were marched out of the gate. Fifty-eight thousand prisoners, in columns of five, began what was to be known as the Auschwitz Death March. You see, Catherine, even in the face of defeat, the Nazis continued to pursue their Final Solution.

“The prisoners were marched during the day and slept in barns or open fields at night. This was the dark of the Polish winter, the rivers were frozen and the snow drifts were at times as high as their knees. If a prisoner fell, became ill, complained, or was unable to walk, she was shot and her body left in the snow.

“Lucyna’s strength was all but gone, but Hannah commanded her to keep walking. Leaning on each other, and on Hannah’s indomitable will to live, they reached the railroad station in the town of Wodzislaw.

“There the women were stuffed into unheated railroad boxcars for transportation to other concentration camps deep in Germany. They were so tightly crammed that there was little or no room to sit and the train moved with agonizing slowness, often sitting on a side rail to allow the military trains to pass.

“Once each day the train would stop. The women would be given a pail of water and a ladle, although the water was insufficient to serve everyone, even with minimal portions. It was during this ghastly transport that Lucyna gave up the fight. Dehydrated and weakened, she slipped away in Hannah’s arms.

“Eventually the doors slid open and the women, blinded by the bright sunshine, were prodded down the ramps and into the Buchenwald concentration camp. There they found conditions just as bad, if not worse, than at Auschwitz.

“Hannah was assigned to the Dora-Mittlebau subcamp where women labored, some of them in caves, assembling munitions. The work was so strenuous and the conditions so foul that many women did not survive, but for Hannah, she had made a promise and she intended to keep it.

“On April 11, 1945, in the midst of her ordeal, weak and barely able to endure another day, she awoke to a chaotic scrambling in the camp. The guns that she heard were those of the U.S. Army 104th Infantry, the Timberwolf Division, which had landed in France and advanced eastward through the Rhineland. Some of the Dora SS had fled. Some guards had taken prisoners and marched them north. The other guards were left behind to execute the remaining inmates but they were foiled when the American troops overran the camp.

“Hannah, weighing less than eighty pounds, was helped to a stretcher, carried out and driven to an American field hospital. She was in the hospital when Hitler took his life on April 30th and when Germany unconditionally surrendered to General Eisenhower on May 7th.

“There was a medic at the hospital, a corporal who cared for Hannah every day. He was a sweet man named William Porter, from a small town in Mississippi, and he patiently nursed her back to health. Through broken English and over many days, Hannah told him her story. Bit by bit. The story of Zamość and of her family. The story of Ben Solomon.

“Through it all, she never lost faith and hung tight to the vows she and Ben had made. She always knew she’d find him and she came to believe it would be at the cabin. ‘He’ll be there,’ she said to Corporal Porter one day. ‘He’s waiting for me, I’m sure of it. I promised I would come to him.’ And Corporal Porter gave her his word, he’d help her get there when she regained her strength.

“In July, almost a year to the day she was sent to die, a year since she’d seen Ben, Corporal Porter borrowed a jeep and drove her south to the mountains.”

Catherine kneeled on the frozen grass and gently touched the headstone. She whispered a prayer and stood up. “What is it, Adele? Why do I feel so close to her? Why do I feel like I know her?”

Adele smiled.

“Remarkable people,” Catherine said. “Such determination. How did they get to Chicago?”

“Cousin Ziggy. After the war, there were thousands of displaced people: survivors of the camps, war refugees. But there were strict immigration quotas in the United States. It was possible for U.S. citizens to obtain visas for displaced European relatives, providing the citizens signed a document agreeing to be financially responsible. After a tangle of red tape, Ben and Hannah came to Chicago in 1949.”

Adele’s cell phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her coat pocket and held it to her ear. “It’s Liam. Ben’s condition is unchanged.”

Catherine stared at the flowers. “They’re already frozen.”

Adele smiled. “Of course. But they’re here. It’s an unbroken link. A promise kept.”

“Tell me about their life in Chicago,” Catherine said on the ride downtown.

“Just plain old Chicago folks, I guess. They lived in an apartment on Cornelia street for many years. Hannah took a job at a hospital and enrolled in DePaul’s School of Nursing. When she got her degree, she worked at Children’s Memorial until her retirement. Ziggy got Ben the job with the Chicago Park District where he worked at the golf course until 1996. He was a voracious reader and never stopped educating himself. He pursued a degree through the evening program at Northwestern and later accepted an adjunct position teaching evening courses in European history.”