Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (2 page)

In short, these ten people all have embraced the gift of a second life that not everyone received on one tragic day. It is a treasure to them, misbegotten but secured by blood.

This book is about the capacity of the human spirit to triumph over monsters. Distilling it into words and putting it between the covers of a book seems somehow inadequate. I’m not sure these chapters can tell the complete story of what happened to these people, or what is happening still, or can explain what it feels to owe a debt to the dead.

Yet they are a beginning.

THE PAST IS GONE ON RIVER ROAD
,
as if maybe it never happened. Today, where it passes through the Cramer Hill neighborhood, River Road is just another street in the bleak city of Camden, New Jersey. On one side of the narrow, uneven pavement, the old café was long ago boarded up, and nobody even bothers to paint over the gang graffiti anymore. The apartment house is now a shabby Chinese takeout place. Its rolling doors, like little garages, are padlocked shut, and it’s no longer possible to see shadows through the windows. A bit of tattered crime scene tape flutters in the gutter outside what was once the American Stores grocery, now a market where Spanish-language signs in the window push disposable cell phones that can call Latin America, and promise to accept welfare vouchers.

Back then, this was an intimate little stage, a short block with only five buildings on one side and three one-story stores on the other—hardly the scene for the momentous tragedy that was played out here.

And now, sixty-plus years on, some of the most feeble buildings built before the First World War have been yanked out like rotten teeth, leaving seedy gaps. The haunted barbershop was one of those buildings. A few years ago, on the empty lot where it had sat, three kids accidentally locked themselves in the trunk of an abandoned car and suffocated. It was big news, but even the local paper failed to mention the horror that had happened on that same spot fifty-six years before. Memories are short.

Almost nobody here remembers what happened back in ’49—certainly not the toothless junkie panhandling for his next fix on the corner at Thirty-Second. He doesn’t give a shit that he is standing on the exact spot where a man died on an autumn morning. The fact that nobody remembers …well, it’s as if he never existed at all. It’s all just a figment of the fractured memory of Cramer Hill.

The gray, stuccoed hulk on the corner behind the junkie is the old drugstore. For a long time, you could still see the bullet pockmarks in the plaster walls, but no more. Now it’s a cheap
zapatería
—a shoe shop—where the Latina clerk speaks only broken English. She rents the place, but the landlord has locked the doors leading to the second floor, hiding its secrets. Nobody is allowed up there.

Ah, but the clerk’s son knows, even though he can’t possibly remember. The kid, maybe a second grader, points to the bolted door and says one word:
fantasmas
.

Ghosts.

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1949, TWELVE-YEAR-OLD CHARLES COHEN WAS EAGERLY AWAITING THE START OF JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, WHERE HE HOPED TO PLAY IN THE BAND. BUT THE MORNING BEFORE SCHOOL WAS TO START, HIS WORLD WAS SHATTERED.
Courtesy of the Cohen Family

“HE’S GOT A GUN!”

The last day of summer vacation dawned warm under a pallid sky, but no twelve-year-old boy could have been sunnier than Charles Cohen. His trumpet was polished, his trousers pressed, his shoes shined. Tomorrow, he would begin seventh grade at Camden’s stately Veterans Memorial Middle School, and he could hardly wait. Next to his upcoming bar mitzvah, seventh grade felt to him like the next natural step to becoming a man.

Charles lived with his parents and grandmother in a three-bedroom apartment over his father’s River Road drugstore. After breakfast, his father, Maurice, and mother, Rose, opened the shop, as always, at nine o’clock sharp, while Charles got ready for the twenty-minute bus ride to Philadelphia with his grandmother Minnie, who’d promised to buy him new school clothes for his first day, maybe a new suit for the High Holy Days.

Maurice Cohen, the son of Polish and Russian immigrants, was just forty. He had worked for a chain of drugstores after he graduated from Temple University’s pharmacy school, but he dreamed of being his own boss. His father, a Russian immigrant who wasn’t rich, invested in his son’s dream in 1936 at the height of the Great Depression. Now, thirteen years later, Maurice wasn’t just a successful druggist, but an essential part of Cramer Hill. If anybody needed a prescription in the middle of the night, he knew “Doc” would roll out of bed and compound it for him.

THE CHILDREN OF RUSSIAN AND POLISH ÉMIGRÉS, A YOUNG MAURICE AND ROSE COHEN EMBRACE IN THIS FAMILY PHOTO. THEY TOOK EVERY THURSDAY OFF FROM THEIR CRAMER HILL DRUGSTORE JUST TO SPEND TIME TOGETHER, OFTEN RELAXING AN HOUR AWAY IN ATLANTIC CITY WITH THEIR SON CHARLES AND DREAMING OF SOMEDAY RETIRING THERE.
Courtesy of the Cohen Family

Rose was his unofficial nurse. The couple had met right after pharmacy school in Philly and married after a whirlwind courtship. Also the daughter of Russian émigrés, she helped around the shop, handing over penny candy and scooping ice cream at the store’s six-chair soda fountain. Now they’d been married twenty years, partners in every way.

This Tuesday morning, the day after the Labor Day holiday, was already bustling. Most Tuesdays, Maurice’s widowed mother, Minnie, spent the morning with her sister Rose, but today she was taking Charles to the city. She watched the clock so they wouldn’t miss the next bus across the Delaware River.

The Cohens had no car, but not because Maurice was old-fashioned. Oh, they had one of those newfangled television sets—Charles especially loved
Howdy Doody
and the
Kraft Television Theatre
—and the drugstore had pay phones that everybody in the neighborhood used because not everyone could afford a phone in 1949. Sure, the druggist had refused to put pinball machines or jukeboxes in the store, but only because he felt a drugstore was no place for gambling or wasting lunch money. No, it was just that Maurice, a kindly sort, feared he might hurt somebody in an automobile.

Besides, cars were always breaking down—a source of endless entertainment for kids on River Road. Invariably, some salesman’s Ford would stall on the street, and he’d get out in a blue cloud of marvelous profanity, throw open the hood, and tinker in the greasy guts until it started again.

So that morning, when Charles heard backfires on the street, he ran to his grandmother’s bedroom window overlooking the intersection of River Road and Thirty-Second, where the only stoplight for blocks usually confounded even the best drivers.

While Minnie made her bed, Charles pushed the screen out and looked down. Odd, he thought, there were no cars in the intersection.

All he saw was Junior, the odd fellow who lived next door, walking in front of the store. Since coming home from the war, Junior had lived with his mother and didn’t work. He always walked around in a jacket, tie, and combat boots, carrying a Bible and blurting out gospel passages to anybody whom he passed, but people had stopped taking him seriously. Today, looking tidy as always in a light brown suit, white shirt, and a striped bow tie, he seemed to have more purpose in his step. His thin lips were tight, his face intent. And he wasn’t carrying his Bible.

He had a gun.

As Charles watched, Junior walked right up to Mr. Hutton, his father’s insurance man, who’d just emerged from the drugstore’s front door. They spoke a few words that Charles couldn’t hear, then Junior raised his lanky arm and fired his gun into Mr. Hutton. Then again …and again.

The insurance man crumpled on the sidewalk as Junior then calmly walked through the front door of the Cohens’ drugstore.

“Junior’s got a gun!” Charles yelled. He heard his mother scream.

Minnie was stunned until she heard Rose running up the stairs from the store.

“Hide, Charles, hide!” Rose screamed. “Mama, run away, run away!”

As Charles scampered to his little room at the back of the house, Rose shoved him in his closet.

“Don’t make a sound!” she ordered him before she hid in her own closet down the hall. But he could still hear his grandmother frantically dialing the police on the phone next to her bed.

Howard Unruh didn’t just hold grudges.
For twenty-nine years, he nourished and
cultivated them like black orchids.

“He’s got a gun!” she shrieked into the receiver. “He’s got a gun!”

Charles covered his ears, but he heard a few rapid gunshots outside, then the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. His grandmother was still screaming into the phone, her fingers clattering the cradle as if the line were dead, trying desperately to connect to someone, anyone …

Then a shot. And silence.

Charles sucked in his breath and closed his eyes. He tried to make himself invisible in the dark at the back of his suffocating little closet as he heard the heavy footsteps coming down the hall.

Three more shots rang out, then after a few seconds, a fourth.

Before he could hear the footsteps fading away down the stairs, Charles fell into a terrified unconsciousness.

When he awoke minutes later, his whole world had changed.

AVENGING GRIEVANCES

Howard Unruh didn’t just hold grudges. For twenty-nine years, he nourished and cultivated them like black orchids. He was a collector of wounds.

Since he had come home from the war, he’d heard his neighbors talking about him. Sometimes behind his back, sometimes to his face. At the bus stop. In the dinette. On the street. He was a mama’s boy, they said. He was a
queer, they said. He was a gangster because he carried a gun, they said. “See that guy?” they’d say when he walked past. “You can get him to stay all night with you.”

The lying tailor told somebody that he saw Unruh going down on some guy in an alley. The shoemaker threw his trash in the Unruh yard. The barber dug his new cellar and purposely piled the dirt so that the rain flooded his poor mother’s basement.

That kid who sold the Christmas trees—Sorg was his name—plugged his lights into an outlet in the basement and stole Unruh’s electricity. Sure, he offered to pay for it, but he never came around with money. He was a thief.

And the druggist, Cohen, was the worst. Cohen and his whole family. They talked about Howard in their house. He could hear them through the walls. The Jew and his wife shortchanged people and kept the money. His son played that damn trumpet and the radio too loud and then made it louder if anybody complained. And Cohen’s wife. She bawled out Unruh in public for leaving her damn gate open because stray dogs got in the yard they shared and scattered the trash around. She said she could see by his eyes he wasn’t right. That’s why he built the new gate in the back—so they couldn’t embarrass him anymore by scolding him where everyone could hear.

They were wrong about him. All of them. Unruh didn’t smoke, curse, drink, or run with loose women. He loved the sad, somber music of Brahms and Wagner—which they ridiculed, so he played it loud. He believed in God and loved his mother, and they hated him for it.