Interest (18 page)

33

Len’s grandfather, Jerzy Savitz, was only twenty years old in 1939. At the time, he was still living at home while apprenticing as a watchmaker at a small jewelry store in Krakow. Jerzy had a rare mechanical genius, an ability to fix anything and a vision for seeing how things could fit together. Things weren’t good in Poland at the time; the depression had hit his city especially hard. Despite that, Jerzy was beginning to feel like everything in his life was starting to snap into place. Not only did he have a job, but it was one he liked. He and his fiancée, Katarzyna, were planning to get married in the coming year. Jerzy and Katarzyna had been high school sweethearts. Katarzyna was nineteen, a shy, artistic kid with an ethereal glow about her.

The situation in Jerzy’s hometown had become tense, hysterical, and superpartisan over the last few years. His once-peaceful country was being squeezed like an apple in a vice: Nazis on one side, Soviets on the other, both looking to carve Poland up like a Christmas ham. Jerzy remembered people getting into fistfights and arguments in Market Square over whether the country should try to placate the Nazis or stand and fight. Jerzy and his family weren’t political, but that was no longer an option under the threat of invasion.

Overpopulated Germany wanted new territory.
Lebensraum
, they called it: space to spread their legs and let their balls hang out onto their neighbors’ foreheads. Jerzy didn’t know what the Russian word was. He didn’t speak Russian, but he figured those knuckle draggers hadn’t really bothered to come up with a pretense anyway. All he knew was that he had to get out of Poland. Jerzy had cousins in a faraway city called Pittsburgh, and they had promised to get him a high-paying job at one of the local steel mills should he come to live with them. Jerzy didn’t know much about Pittsburgh or the United States. All he knew was that anything was safer than staying in Krakow.

Jerzy had spent a lot of time reading about the Nazis, and he tried to educate his family on the danger they’d face if they stayed.

“First you want to marry a Gentile, now you want to run away!” Jerzy’s father shouted at him one night, red-faced from vodka. “I was born in this house! So were you! This is home. Where would we go? Where is your head, Jerzy?”

Jerzy didn’t want to leave his folks behind, but with the head of the family being so unreasonable, he was worried that he and his fiancée would have to go it alone. The problem was that international travel was quite expensive at the time, and Jerzy wasn’t making much as a jeweler’s assistant. Getting Katarzyna and himself to Pittsburgh would cost a fortune, and he couldn’t do it without his dad’s help.

Once September rolled around, it was too late to go anywhere. The Germans cut through the Polish resistance like it was cream cheese. Then, sixteen days later, the Soviets came from the east and pulverized anything that the Germans hadn’t. A million Poles died in a month. It only went downhill from there.

There was a knock on the door one night. Jerzy’s father, half asleep, opened the door to about ten German soldiers in black uniforms. The men took one look at the Mezuzah on the door and barged in. Jerzy had been sleeping upstairs in a room he shared with his brothers when he heard his mother screaming downstairs. Jerzy ran to see what the trouble was but was immediately knocked to the floor by one of the Schutzstaffel, the rest of whom pointed their guns at him.

“Please don’t kill him!” his mother pleaded, as one of the Germans held her arms behind her back.

The Nazis pulled everyone out of their beds and forced them outside in the cold night air. The Savitz family wasn’t alone out in the street. Their mostly Jewish neighbors also shivered and stared blankly as armed German teenagers looted their houses and stole everything they and their ancestors had ever worked for. Jerzy watched helplessly as the Germans carried away heirloom jewelry and furniture.

In a matter of days, the Nazis had walled off the streets connecting the Savitz family’s neighborhood with the rest of the city, and shot anyone they found trying to escape. They severed the telephone lines and confiscated radios. Travel in or out of the neighborhood became impossible. Food became scarce. Jerzy was no longer able to see Katarzyna, whose family lived on the other side of the wall. The Savitz family’s neighborhood was now an urban prison.

“I should have listened to you, Jerzy,” his father wept at the kitchen table.
Yeah, no shit
, Jerzy thought to himself. Seeing his once-proud father, the face of authority over his short twenty years, have an emotional breakdown gave him the resolve he needed to do something crazy.

“Ma, can you sew uniforms like the Germans wear?”

“Jerzy,” his mother said, elongating his name hesitantly, “what are you planning?”

“The neighbor kid got shot trying to climb over the wall, right? Then Mr. Weider was caught when his tunnel collapsed. To hell with being sneaky. Let’s just walk right out of the ghetto.”

“Jerzy, we need to stay out of trouble or they’ll kill us.”

“Ma, they’ll kill us either way! We need to get out.”

Jerzy’s mother, an expert seamstress, found a bolt of black fabric in the attic and reluctantly set to work with her old pedal-powered sewing machine. In a week, she had made some very good uniforms, complete with insignias and hats.

Jerzy studied the Germans’ movements from the attic window at night; he noticed that they were nothing if not routine. Every night at ten, an Opel truck with about eight soldiers in the back would park on the street out front. The soldiers would get out, and while they were patrolling the streets to enforce the curfew, they left the truck unattended.

One night, Jerzy waited until the Germans had gone to the next street over and then got out to take a look at the truck. Feeling around in the dark, he found the ignition under the instrument panel. The Germans had taken the key with them. He felt three wires going into the tumbler. Jerzy was a city kid who never drove and didn’t know much about automobiles, but he did understand locks and electric current due to his incessant tinkering. Creeping back into his house, he watched the truck nervously from the windows. At midnight, as always, the Germans drove off. They didn’t seem to have suspected anything.

The family waited until the timing was perfect: a night with a full moon and fog. One Monday evening at exactly 10:30 p.m., Jerzy and his entire family, dressed as Schutzstaffel, opened their front door and ran across the street to the truck. Jerzy’s older brother had driven a diesel for a trucking company for a while, so he sat in the driver’s seat. Jerzy ripped the wires out of the ignition and, sweating and shaking, stripped the insulation off and tried touching them all together. Poof, just like that, the truck started. Jerzy twisted the wires together using needle-nose pliers and off they went. They slowed down to wave at the checkpoint guards, who waved back like everything was OK, and they kept on going into the night.

Jerzy’s father knew of an abandoned hunting cabin in the mountains outside the city, and long before starting out, they’d correctly calculated that they could reach it before the Germans even noticed the truck was missing. The cabin was a mess and didn’t even have firewood for winter, which was fast approaching. There was a hole in the roof and no beds. There was no fog in the mountains, so under the moonlight, Jerzy and his brother hid the truck in a ravine, covering it with pine tree limbs.

Over the next four years, the Savitz family hid out in the Tatra Mountains, looting nearby abandoned cabins for essentials, hunting deer, foraging berries, and only using the fireplace at night so no one would see the smoke.

Despite missing Katarzyna, Jerzy found mountain living to be glorious. It was an awakening, even. It disabused him of the many feeble notions that urban living put into one’s head: that one needed money to survive, that one needed the authorities for protection, or that one must hire professionals to do things for the sake of convenience. Humans had survived just fine before life became so convenient, he reasoned, and it was that very convenience that caused modern people such terrible existential angst.

The Savitz family’s luck ran out in the fall of 1943. The Germans, desperate to root out a fierce and unrelenting Polish resistance army hiding in the hills and forests, checked every single cabin in the area. The soldier who knocked on the door immediately recognized Jerzy’s brother from pictures that had been circulated after their escape. The entire family was taken into custody, loaded onto a train, and taken to Auschwitz.

Jerzy and his two brothers were young and strong, so they were put to work at the facility. His parents were sent somewhere else and were never heard from again. It wasn’t until years later that Jerzy figured out what had happened to them.

What Jerzy found unusual about the prison camp was that not everyone there was Jewish. There were political dissidents, intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists. It was almost as if the Nazis were just as concerned with ridding the world of free thought as they were with ridding it of Jews.

Jerzy’s older brother died of pneumonia during the first winter. The prison guards unceremoniously threw his body onto a cart with the bodies of others who had died and then dumped them all into a hole. Two decades of childhood together—catching frogs, playing soccer, and reading dirty stories in the attic. His blood, his best friend. The fucking Germans just threw him away like trash. Lives and agony meant nothing to those monsters.

Some of the Germans clearly delighted in the misery and murder, almost in a sexual way. Others seemed to have no moral sense of their own and instead deferred completely to authority: “Just doing my job.” “Just following orders.” During the long days in Auschwitz, Jerzy often wondered how the Nazis could staff an entire prison camp with thousands of people, none of whom apparently had the ability to question if they were doing the right thing.

In January of 1945, the Nazis ordered the camp to be evacuated due to the advancing Russians. Jerzy and his remaining brother, Heniek, were forced to make the horrific death march back across the border in the middle of the winter. Heniek was emaciated and too weak to keep walking. A German soldier, annoyed at Heniek’s inability to keep up, simply shot him in the back of the head. Heniek’s body dropped into the ditch along the side of the road. Jerzy wanted to run to him, to explode in rage and grief. Instead he just stood there, silently depleted and shivering from exhaustion and malnourishment. A soldier kicked Jerzy in the back and told him to keep moving.

As if God were spiting him, Jerzy survived. The Krauts relocated him to the Bergen-Belsen camp deep inside Nazi territory, and a few months later, Germany surrendered. Two days after the Germans deserted their posts, horrified British commandos liberated the camp.

Jerzy had lost the will to live. He had nothing left to live for. Now he was free.

34

After rolling all night, the train pulled into Kansas City the next morning. Except it didn’t stop at the station. Instead the train switched onto a short line and kept moving way out into the prairie. By that point, a few of Len’s fellow passengers had had to defecate during the trip. They’d done their best to use only one corner of the car, but it was starting to smell terrible. He tried to see where the train was going, but with so many people pressed up to the sides of the car to avoid the smell, he wasn’t having a whole lot of luck. After two more hours of travel, the train began slowing down. It came to an abrupt halt that caused several people to fall into each other.

Dranthyx jackboots threw open the cattle car doors. As if he’d been waiting for the opportunity, a man in a bright yellow shirt jumped out of the car and tried to make a run for it. One of the Dranthyx raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired. A bolt of electricity, like the kind one might see arcing out of a Van de Graaf generator, connected with the escapee’s back. Instantaneously the man’s entire torso exploded open from steam pressure, like a burrito that someone had left in a microwave too long. Superheated blood and flesh splattered some of Len’s fellow prisoners nearby, causing them to scream in pain. Everyone got the message. No one else stepped out of line that day.

Exiting the train car, Len saw that they were in an vast area fenced in by miles and miles of barbed wire with guard towers every hundred yards or so. Despite the land being so flat, Len couldn’t see the end of the fence. The place was so big that the entire train fit inside of it.

“Len!”

Len turned and nearly cried when he saw Octavia and Natalia behind him. They’d arrived in one of the other cars on the train.

“Oh, thank God!” Len hugged them both.

“Daddy, we rode on a train! Look at this! The octopus man put this mark on my arm. Isn’t it neat? It’s like the dinosaur stamp at the library. It says X but it should say O, for Octavia. Natalia has one, too. Oh look, so do you! That’s great! Now we’re all secret buddies. Daddy, what is this place?”

“It’s a concentration camp.”

“Camp? Oh boy! That sounds like fun! Will we sing songs and cook marshmallows on the fire?”

Len wondered how anyone, ingenuous child or not, could be so indomitably sunny in a situation like the one they were in.

“OK, let’s go!” one of the Dranthyx shouted while shoving people to get them moving. Several Dranthyx marched everyone who had disembarked from the train through the camp, which took two hours due to the sheer size of it. Len saw that the whole facility was broken into hundreds of subfacilities, each the size of a small town. There were great numbers of tent barracks in each, filled with cots stacked to the roof.

“How on earth did you build something this big with no one noticing?” Len asked one of the Dranthyx soldiers.

Len wasn’t expecting an answer, but the animal laughed and obliged. “See, that’s what befuddles me about you simians. If someone tries to be secretive, you go out of your way to discover what they’re hiding. However, if something enormous happens in plain sight, you figure it must be legitimate and pay it no mind. We appropriated billions of dollars out of the Pentagon budget each year for construction costs, and no one even cared where the money went. We moved half a million migrant workers here to build this place, which took over a decade, and no one even thought it was unusual. No one even asked what we were doing.”

“How big is this place?”

“A million acres, give or take. The facility is designed to hold fifty million chimps at a time. We had to buy five of the largest cattle ranches in Kansas in order to have enough space. This is just the North American facility. This is nothing. You should see the one we built in Asia!”

“Fifty million? I’d think there were more Xreths than that.”

The creature smirked at Len’s poor pronunciation of the word. “There are actually about three times that many on this continent. We’re still rounding them up. Many are hiding, but don’t worry, we’ll find them. To put it more colloquially, this ain’t our first rodeo.”

“At what point do you decide to cull?”

The Dranthyx looked Len over, probably wondering how he knew so much and debating whether to keep answering questions. Len could almost see the creature thinking to itself,
To hell with it, he’s going to die anyway, I might as well tell him what’s up.

“We have found that things run best at about 10 percent Xreths, 4 percent Tchogol, and the rest Saskel,” the Dranthyx answered gamely. “That’s optimal. However, Xreths have reached 25 percent of the global population. That’s why there’s so much turmoil these days. Governments cannot collect revenue properly when Xreths are always opposing them, which is bad for business.”

“Why has the number of Xreths increased?”

“Long ago, Xreths didn’t have many options when it was time to settle down and make babies. You either married your small-town Saskel neighbor or you died childless. That all changed when higher education became commonplace. Xreths left ancestral homelands and became highly concentrated in cities and universities. Naturally, they chose other Xreths with whom to reproduce. That was bad enough, but then the Internet came along and the assortative mating really exploded out of control. So here we are, trying to restore balance before the situation becomes any more unmanageable. If you ask me, I think the Directorate let it go too long. But what do I know?” The Dranthyx was suddenly sardonic. “I’m just a lowly grunt with an IQ of 153. They won’t let a dummy like me in on the decision-making.”

Rising from what Len presumed was the center of the camp was an enormous concrete cube. It was five hundred feet tall and equally wide, and its roof bristled with nine smokestacks that each rose a thousand feet off the ground.

“What’s that?” Len asked.

“The nerve center of this operation. It’s not online just yet. We didn’t anticipate having to use it so soon, but it should be running in a week or two.”

“Is that when you’ll start killing us?”

“That’s enough questions for now,” said a different, less-sociable Dranthyx tersely while pointing his gun at Len.

Len, Octavia, and Natalia were assigned to Sector FG, Subcamp 3402, which held approximately five hundred people, almost all of whom were on Len’s train. The sectors and subcamps were separated by barbed-wire fences and paved streets, some narrow like alleys, others wide like boulevards. The streets even had billboards on them, except they were entirely black, with no advertisements. Len figured they broke the population down like this because it was easier to manage smaller groups of people.

Having seen the famous footage of the German camps of WWII, Len was amazed that this facility had toilets, showers, cots, and tents. He wondered if maybe the Dranthyx had learned from previous experience that isolating subcamps and giving prisoners the necessities of sanitation kept diseases from spreading. For efficiency’s sake, the Dranthyx probably wanted to confine all the dying to the reactor rather than having to collect bodies from all over the enormous camp.

The Dranthyx troopers ushered everyone into the subcamp without incident, but the sight of the Dranthyx closing the big gate behind them was enough to make some of his fellow captives start crying. They were trapped behind a ten-foot cyclone fence and huge rolls of electrified concertina wire.

While everyone lost their shit, Len, Natalia, and Octavia claimed some cots in the corner of one of the tents.

“Daddy, why are they crying?”

“Maybe they don’t like camping.” Len didn’t know what else to say.

“Don’t worry! I’ll make some s’mores for them, then they’ll feel better,” Octavia said cheerfully.

Len looked into Octavia’s eyes. Before becoming a parent, Len thought children were born as blank slates, and that parents molded a child’s mind. That notion turned out to be an arrogance of youthful inexperience. No way. Turns out, kids came out of the womb with their own personalities—fully formed individuals with their own agendas—and the best a parent could do was to teach them by example to be good people. Octavia happened to have been born with a heart of gold. She had the most beautiful soul Len had ever seen. Her ability to light up the room with optimism and selfless empathy always reminded Len what a jaded, angry, pessimistic curmudgeon he’d become. He stroked her cheek.

“I didn’t think it would end like this. I wanted to die fighting,” Natalia said grimly. She didn’t look so good.

“We don’t have to give up fighting,” Len said.

Natalia gave him a defeated, bitter look. “You see chimneys?” she asked irritably, motioning to the distant smokestacks beyond the razor wire. “You know what those are for?”