Of Flesh and Blood (46 page)

She offered a faint laugh. “Make it two hours. I need a bit more sleep before that kind of excitement.”

Tyler closed the door behind him but stood outside and listened with his ear to it. If he had heard her throw up, or even rush back into the bathroom, he would have dragged her to the hospital kicking and screaming if necessary. But Jill was quiet on the other side for the five minutes that he waited by the door. Finally, he turned and headed for the stairs.

With no traffic on the road, Tyler reached Liesbeth’s seniors’ complex in less than ten minutes. The lobby was laid out like that of a hotel, except the Asian woman behind the desk wore a white nursing uniform. She buzzed upstairs for permission and then directed Tyler to the bank of elevators.

He was surprised when his sister answered the door. “Hi, Tyler,” she said, and turned quickly from him.

In the brief glimpse, he recognized that her eyes were red from crying. “Erin?” he said, as he followed her into the living room.

Liesbeth was sitting on the rust leather couch in front of a coffee table, where two snifters of brandy rested on coasters. In front of her, a weathered photo album lay closed. Liesbeth straightened her skirt with gnarled fingers and rose to greet Tyler. She held a few tissues in her knobby hand, and it was obvious that she had been crying, too.

He bent forward and hugged her lightly. The peppermint scent of her favorite mints drifted to him. “Hello, Liesbeth.”

“Thank you for coming, Tyler.”

Tyler glanced from his grandmother to his sister. “What’s going on, you two?”

The women shared a quick look, and then Erin said, “I was telling Liesbeth about Africa.”

Tyler nodded, relieved to hear his sister had shared her hellish experience with others. And he could think of few better people than Liesbeth to open up to. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Erin seesawed her head from side to side. “Remember that young mother who had the heart transplant?”

He nodded.

“She didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry, Erin.”

She shrugged. “Otherwise, I’m a little better. No panic attacks recently. I finally told Steve what really happened in Nakuru. I don’t know why I ever kept it from him. So stupid. Trying to stick my head in the sand and pretend it never happened.” She sighed heavily. “I’ve booked an appointment with Dr. Genest.”

“Sounds like you’re on the right track,” he said.

“How about you?” She tilted her head down and looked at him as though peering over reading glasses. “How’s it going with that . . . you know . . . reporter?”

“No article today,” he said. “Hopefully my fifteen minutes of fame are up.”

“And Jill? Any word on her study?”

“Day by day.” Tyler was tempted to let Erin and Liesbeth in on the news of his wife’s pregnancy, but he bit his tongue. It was too early to tell anyone. Besides, he knew the announcement needed to come from both of them. His concern for Jill stirred again, and he pulled out his cell phone and double-checked that he had not missed a call. Nothing.

While the two siblings caught up with each other, Liesbeth headed over to the small bar trolley in the corner of the room and poured a third snifter of brandy. She walked back to Tyler and, without asking, passed him the glass.

Erin sat beside Liesbeth on the couch, while Tyler took the chair on the other side of his grandmother.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why this old woman was in such a hurry to see you both,” Liesbeth said with a soft laugh.

Erin rubbed her grandmother’s arm. “It is a little unlike you, Liesbeth.”

“To put your mind at ease, I’m not dying, as far as I know.” She smiled. “And, even better, I haven’t changed my will.”

Both grandchildren chuckled politely.

Her smile vanished. “I wanted to tell you something about your grandfather.”

Tyler glanced at his sister. Erin turned to her grandmother. “What about Opa?” she asked.

Liesbeth looked from Erin to Tyler and then reached for the photo album in front of her and pulled it closer. Using the side of her disfigured
forefinger, she awkwardly opened the front cover and flipped through the first few pages before she stopped on a page.

In the yellowing color photograph, a young man in a swimsuit smiled widely. The backdrop of a beach with the corner of a cabin visible looked vaguely familiar to Tyler but he couldn’t place the location.

“Ha!” Erin laughed. “Opa looked just like you back then, Pip. Only skinnier.”

Tyler saw the strong resemblance to himself in Maarten’s wavy brown hair, strong jaw, and slightly crooked grin, but Erin wasn’t exaggerating about the gauntness. Even in the faded old photograph, Maarten’s ribs were completely visible and his legs looked like sticks.

Erin tapped a finger on Maarten’s turned-out forearm where a blockish black tattoo ran. “Opa covered up the numbers the Nazis tattooed on him, right?”

Liesbeth nodded. She ran her swollen finger along the edge of the photograph. “Maarten and I met this same summer, 1946. More than a year after he had been liberated from the camps.”

Erin shook her head. “I can’t imagine what he must have looked like then.”

Instead of answering, Liesbeth flipped the book over so that it rested on its front cover. She opened the back cover and, with obvious difficulty, dug her swollen fingers inside the attached small pouch, withdrawing a wallet-size black-and-white photograph.

“Oh my God,” Erin said as soon as she saw it.

In the photo, Maarten wore a striped prisoner’s shirt. Unsmiling, his face was wasted to the point of skeletal. His neck wasn’t much thicker than a drainage pipe.

“The American troops took this the day he was freed,” Liesbeth said. “By then he had spent over a year in Auschwitz and seven more months in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.”

“How did he survive like that?” Tyler muttered, unable to tear his eyes off the disturbing snapshot.

“He didn’t,” Liesbeth said. “Not completely, anyway.”

Confused, both grandchildren turned to Liesbeth for an explanation.

“What you are both going through now . . . Erin, that terrible senseless attack in Africa. And Tyler, the shame you feel about the poor little boy’s
outcome . . .” Liesbeth looked tenderly from one grandchild to the other. “I’m so pleased that both of you are speaking about your experiences. Maarten never would.”

“Never?” Erin said.

“We were married for three years before he let me know he was ever in Auschwitz. I had known all along, of course. You saw the photographs. One look in those kind eyes of his told you immediately that he had survived something unimaginable. But Maarten never wanted anyone to know. And it was many years before he told me what he really went through.”

Liesbeth appeared on the verge of tears again. A painful silence fell over the room. Erin and Tyler looked to one another, both at a loss for words.

“Maarten wanted to take it all to his grave with him.” Liesbeth cleared her throat. “But I think these terrible secrets drove him to his grave. The poor man couldn’t sleep afterwards.” She shook her head adamantly. Her eyes were burning when they locked onto Tyler. “And I will not take his secrets to
my
grave. You are family. You need to know. I only wish I had told you sooner.”

“Told us what?” Erin demanded.

“Yeah, Liesbeth,” Tyler agreed. “Why the secrecy? It wasn’t Opa’s fault that the Nazis committed genocide. Millions of Jews were sent to the concentration camps. I thought a number of the young men like him, who were strong enough to work as slave laborers, did survive.”

“Not exactly like him,” Liesbeth said in a hushed tone, as she looked down and slowly stroked the inside cover of the album. “You asked earlier how Maarten survived . . .” She steadied her voice. “You see, your grandfather was forced to work for Josef Mengele.”

“
Mengele?
” Tyler felt as though he had been punched. “The Angel of Death?”

Erin’s face fell. “That doctor who used to do all those horrific human experiments? Opa worked for
him?
”

“He had no choice.” Liesbeth sighed. “Mengele or one of his cronies met every new prisoner as the transport trains arrived at the station. He would walk down the lineup assessing each new arrival on sight, and divide them into a line to his left or right. Those on the right would go to the slave labor camp, where many were worked to death anyway. And those on the left—the
elderly, the infirm, and the younger children
along
with their mothers—were immediately murdered in the gas chambers.”

Tyler had already learned this from a documentary he had seen on Auschwitz, but he had grown up unaware of his Jewish ancestry and had never heard any direct eyewitness accounts of the atrocities. It was so much more viscerally chilling to hear the crimes described by his own grandmother.

“Maarten had dust allergies and asthma,” Liesbeth went on. “He would not have survived a week in the labor camp. So when Mengele asked the group of new Dutch arrivals if there were any doctors with experience in surgery or pathology, his older brother, Fritz, shoved him forward.” She shook her head. “Poor Fritz died of cholera only days before the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz.”

“Did Opa have any experience in surgery or pathology?” Tyler asked, confused.

“Nonsense,” Liesbeth said. “He was only twenty-eight. He had barely finished medical school in Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded. He was never allowed to work as a doctor. He had to pretend.” She sighed again. “I think some of the other Jewish doctors helped him. Maarten once told me that Mengele recognized his inexperience. But apparently the monster took a bit of a shine to him and gave him a little more leeway than most. In other words, he didn’t murder Maarten.”

“Poor, poor Opa,” Erin muttered.

“Maarten assumed he was going to work as a doctor for his fellow inmates,” Liesbeth said. “And at first, he did.”

Tyler remembered from the documentary how Mengele had forced Jewish doctors to help in his ghastly research on human guinea pigs. “Did Opa have to work on Mengele’s experiments?”

Liesbeth tucked the concentration camp shot of her husband back into the pouch and gently shut the album. She looked over at Tyler, and her eyes clouded with tears. “You remember I said all the children in Auschwitz were gassed on arrival? That wasn’t quite true. Mengele selected out the identical twins. He saved them to experiment on.”

“Oh, God, I remember when I first told him I was having twins.” Erin brought her fingers to her lips. “He cried when I told him . . .,” she croaked. “I thought he was overjoyed. I had no idea.”

“How could you know?” Liesbeth said. “I’m so sorry he never lived to meet Martin and Simon. He would have loved those boys so much.”

“And Opa . . .,” Erin gasped.

Liesbeth nodded. “Those savages forced Maarten and another Jewish doctor—a Czech—to perform many of the autopsies after their ghastly experiments. No! That’s not the right word! It was not experimentation. It was sadism and torture. Absolutely inhuman. Evil.” She squeezed her gnarled hand into a ball. “Maarten worked and slept in Block Ten. So he saw the poor little darlings before, during . . . and after. He once told me that Mengele could be quite charming when he wanted. He sometimes gave the children candy. Many of them even called him Uncle. But the things he did to those children. You wouldn’t do them to an insect . . .”

Erin leaned forward and buried her head in Liesbeth’s shoulder. The smaller woman wrapped an arm around her granddaughter. The sight of his robust sister being comforted by his frail grandmother moved Tyler beyond words. He had an involuntary memory of the Mengele documentary that described how the sadistic doctor had once tried to re-create Siamese twins by sewing two young twins together, back to back. Tyler winced at the thought.

“Maarten did nothing wrong,” Liesbeth murmured. “He was as much a victim as the children themselves. He came close to suicide, but he never could do it. Do you know why?”

Erin and Tyler shared a blank stare.

“He was desperate to help those children. And he risked his life to do just that.” She stopped to get her voice to cooperate. “He helped them the only way he could.”

“What do you mean, Liesbeth?” Erin asked.

“Many of those children went through such hell before they died,” Liesbeth said. “Often, when one twin died during an ‘experiment,’ Mengele killed the other immediately. Just so he could do the autopsies at the same time.” She looked down at her knees. “Maarten used to steal extra doses of morphine, potassium, and any other drugs he could get his hands on.” She paused. “He could not bear to watch the children suffer to death. When no one was watching him, he helped to end the agony sooner for the ones who were already dying.”

Erin sat up straighter and looked at her grandmother. “Oh my God . . .,” she whispered.

“What he did was noble!” Liesbeth said in a stronger voice, and folded her arms across her chest. “He risked his life to ease their pain.”

Erin reached out and ran her hand over her grandmother’s wrinkled cheek. “That sounds like Opa.”

Numb, Tyler shook his head. “And later, after he came to America? Opa’s work with the children with cancer . . .”

Liesbeth nodded. “He dedicated his life to those children. He would have done anything for them. He could never stomach the thought of a child suffering needlessly. Nothing in the world was more important to him.”

Suddenly, it all made horrible sense to Tyler. A tide of pity rose inside him for his grandfather and the awful things he must have seen and had to live with. His feelings of guilt must have been immeasurable.

“He was such an amazing man, your grandfather,” Liesbeth went on. “He worked himself beyond exhaustion. Giving everything for those poor cancer-stricken children. Until his heart broke a hundred times over. And he still had enough love to be a wonderful husband, father, and opa.” She uttered a shaky sigh. “But he could never sleep. The poor man tried everything and every pill. It never worked. In our fifty-two years together, he never once slept a whole night through. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I would find him tossing and turning in bed beside me or pacing at the window.” She laughed sadly. “It’s funny, you know. Maarten once told me that before the war he slept like a lamb. His mother used to have to shake him awake in the morning for school.”