The Book of Ghosts (3 page)

“—near Oswiecem,” Max finished his lover's sentence.

“How could you possibly know that?”

“When I was back home after the war, my parents schlepped me to some cockamamie lecture at my old temple from a guy who was an Auschwitz survivor. He told some wild tale about his friend and how they murdered an SS lieutenant and smuggled a book out of Birkenau in a cart of victims' ashes that the local farmers used as fertilizer. To my amazement, it was a pretty fascinating story, but I thought it was just a load of horseshit. You know, a lot of survivors have this terrible guilt and they feel like people, other Jews especially, blame them for being too sheep-like, as if these poor people marched happily into the ghettos and then the showers. So I figured this guy dreamed up this story to relieve his own guilt and to defend the people he watched die at the hands of the Nazis. I guess I was wrong.”

“It would appear so. Shall we open it?”

Max clutched his hand around Daniel's. “No. Let me check a few things out about its potential value and historical significance. We don't want to do anything that might damage it. We'll store it here for safekeeping,” Max said, taking the package. “Plus, when you get home, try and find anything in Bronka's papers that connect her to her family and farm in that area. Provenance is critical.”

Daniel was so thrilled at the idea of being a part of history, as opposed to flitting around at its edges, that he dispensed with proper mourning etiquette and dropped to his knees.

Wantagh, Long Island, NY, 1952

Ava had taken David to visit his grandparents in Scarsdale and Jacob Weisen had just settled in to read the paper after returning from his Sunday morning fishing excursion to Twin Lakes when the bell rang. There wasn't anything particularly ominous in the sound of the bell or the hour or the time of year and Jacob was always invigorated by fishing, so he was almost jaunty as he got up to answer the bell. That all changed when the short, rotund figure in an ill-fitting suit and a squashed down fedora on the other side of the storm door announced he was Karl Olson from the
Herald Tribune.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Olson?”

“You got me wrong, Mr. Weisen, or is it Mr. Wise?”

“Weisen.”

“Like I say, you got me wrong. It's what I, or rather, my paper, can do for you.”

“You're not making sense to me, Olson.”

Olson had been a journalist long enough to spot the signs of withdrawal and he couldn't afford to lose Weisen, so he went to plan B. He opened a thin folder he carried in his left hand, removed an 8” x 12” photograph, and held it up to the screen on the storm door.

“Do you recognize the item in the photograph, Mr. Weisen?”

He didn't have to say a word, for Olson had his answer as Weisen's eyes grew big and shock flashed across his face like sheet lightning. And for the first time since he fainted during his second shift removing bodies from the gas chamber, Jacob Weisen nearly swooned.

Then, quickly recovering, Jacob said, “I was in shock there for a second. Excuse me.”

“So, you think it's—”

“Isaac's book,
The Book of Ghosts
? I know that's the answer you want, but I cannot say for certain,” he lied. “It's been eight years. Eight years I have spent fighting a war with myself between remembering and forgetting. Besides, anyone, any unscrupulous person who has heard me talk of the book, would know just how to make such a thing seem real. Look, Olson, even now I'm sure there are hundreds, thousands of those dreadful striped pajamas around. In my talk, I always discuss just how I wrapped the book in black rubber sheeting I got from this bastard guard named Heilmann. I then wrapped that in a layer of fabric,” Weisen gestured with his hands as if neatly folding invisible fabric. “The fabric came from the pajamas of a poor barracks mate who had died in his sleep that same night. I used a long strip of sleeve fabric to hold the bundle tight together and tied a strong knot.” He made the motions of tying a knot, even wincing, as he tugged at the ends of the invisible strip. “So, you see, anyone could have made a fake.”

In spite if his equivocation, there was no doubt in Jacob's mind that this was the book, for he had, in fact, wrapped it exactly as he had just described before giving it to the Gypsy to smuggle out of the camp in the ash wagon. The one detail he had always left out—the silhouette of the six-pointed star—was clearly visible in the photograph. Seeing it brought all the horror back to him. He swore he could smell the stink of the ovens on the package in the picture.

“You'll have to excuse me, Olson. You can understand how even seeing a photograph of such a thing is disturbing to a man who went through what I went through.”

The survivor doth protest too much, thought the reporter, but decided not to directly confront Weisen. Instead, he asked, “Why would someone want to do that, make a fake, I mean?”

Jacob shrugged. “Why does anyone make a hoax? For a sick joke maybe. To profit somehow? To discredit? I wouldn't know. Where is the thing, anyway?”

“In West Berlin.”

“Curious. And how did it get to be there?”

Olson said, “I don't know all the particulars, but apparently a woman brought it with her when she fled Poland several years ago.”

“A woman?”

“Yeah, she grew up on a farm outside Auschwitz.”

There was that sheet lightning again. “And who has the package?” Jacob asked, his voice brittle.

“I'm afraid I can't divulge that information to you, Mr. Weisen. I just need you to conform to me that this might actually be
The Book of Ghosts.
”

Once again, Jacob was caught in his own web of lies. He needed to stall, to have a moment to think. “And what, you're gonna write a story about it?”

“Not yet,” Olson said. “At the moment I'm only fact checking. For now, I just need to know it's not an obvious fake. My guess is that sooner or later, you'll be asked to authenticate it.”

“Sooner or later?”

This guy's playing for time, Olson thought, which only cemented the opinion he'd reached seeing Weisen's reaction to the photograph. Still, he was a reporter and his opinions and impressions counted for only so much. He needed to hear Weisen say the words, so he prodded, “I'm sorry, Mr. Weisen. You haven't answered my question. Is it an obvious fake?”

“No,” Jacob heard himself say, “not an obvious one. But I'm not saying it's the—”

“Thank you, sir,” Olson cut him off, already turning his back on Weisen. “I've got all I need for now.”

West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany, 1952

JW confirms package probably authentic
—
Olson

The person manning the teletype machine in the
Herald Tribune
office the day Olson's cryptic message to Max Baumgarten arrived was a man named Ernst Flesch, the same man who had sent Max's original inquiry note to the New York bureau. Flesch had a small burn scar on the underside of his left arm near his armpit. The burn hadn't occurred during the war, but immediately in its wake. Many men in both the Federal Republic of Germany—West Germany—and the German Democratic Republic—East Germany—bore such scars. In retrospect, it was foolish of them to burn themselves in this manner as the resulting scar marked them as certainly as the thing they were so desperate to obliterate: their Waffen-SS blood group tattoo.

That a former member of the Waffen-SS was manning the teletype that day might not have been so terrible a thing had Max Baumgarten been a little more like his lover Daniel. The reserved and cautious Daniel would never give such a note to the teletype operator to send. He would have done it himself, but Max, in spite of his work in army intelligence, often did careless things. Even still, few, maybe no other former SS man, would have understood the implications of the messages sent between Max Baumgarten and Karl Olson.

It was Max's misfortune, however, that Corporal Ernst Flesch had served for a short time at Birkenau under a certain Oberleutnant Kleinmann, an officer who had treated him well. It was Flesch who, in the wake of Kleinmann's murder, had driven the railroad spikes into the cross through the wrists and ankles of Isaac Becker. Flesch ripped the message out of the machine, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash.

The rest was almost as easy as that: Getting Baumgarten's address, gaining entrance by saying he had an important message from New York, garroting the Jew with a length of piano wire held tightly between his gloved hands. Only when another man stepped out of the lavatory, wet from a shower, did things get a little complicated, but not so much that Flesch couldn't handle it. The man almost seemed more embarrassed by his nudity in front of a stranger than shocked by Baumgarten's lifeless body on the floor before him. By the time the nude man regained his wits, it was too late. Flesch slammed the heel of his gloved right palm into the base of the nude man's nose, breaking it. Daniel reeled blindly, falling to the floor. Flesch grabbed his old Walther, put a pillow around the pistol, held the pillow to the man's face, and squeezed the trigger. Flesch held his breath, waiting to see if any of the neighbors would react. None did. There were no shouts to call the police, no shrieks, no running feet in the hallway, no banging at the flat door. Ernst Flesch exhaled and calmly set about tossing the apartment, even checking the undersides of all the drawers and emptying out all the food canisters. He repeated this same process later that evening at Daniel Epstein's flat, but neither search produced the package.

Wantagh, Long Island, New York, 1952

As is often the case, an action taken with one purpose in mind leads to its exact opposite. And so it was with Ernst Flesch's handiwork. The double homicide got big headlines in the West Berlin papers, even bigger ones and more play in the London and New York papers. Of course, the nature of the relationship between Max Baumgarten and Daniel Epstein was only alluded to and then obliquely, but it didn't take a genius to read between the lines. Yet the story had legs—long, powerful legs thanks to Karl Olson and the mood of the times. His story about the possible connection between
The Book of Ghosts
and the double homicide in West Berlin got picked up by every newspaper from New York to Yorkshire, from Pekin, Illinois, to Peking, China. Anyone who hadn't heard of Isaac Becker, Jacob Weisen, and the book knew about it now.

After his time in Birkenau, this period of Weisen's life was by far the worst. Even after the initial flurry of activity in the wake of Karl Olson's story, Jacob had no peace. With the Cold War in bloom, the Rosenberg executions pending, and Red paranoia spreading like the common cold, the story of
The Book of Ghosts
took a bizarre twist. Seemingly overnight, the legend went from something heroic and life affirming to something vaguely evil and suspect. There were all sorts of theories about how Isaac Becker was really a Soviet spy and that the book was full of coded secrets. That when they liberated all the Auschwitz camps, the Russians had enlisted Weisen as a spy. That the book was a lie perpetrated by the Russians to make Americans doubt the sincerity of their new allies, the West Germans. None of it made a lick of sense or held up under any kind of scrutiny, but what did that matter in 1952?

The worst part for Weisen was when the investigator from the House Un-American Activities Committee showed up at his house to interview him and his wife. It was bad enough that this preppy asshole came into his home, asking questions not so different than a Gestapo or KGB interrogator might have asked, but what really infuriated Jacob was that this prig hounded Ava as well.

“Levinsky, that's your maiden name, is it not, Mrs. Weisen?” He didn't wait for an answer. “You're the daughter of Saul Levinsky, the lawyer who represents the grocery workers union. Is that correct?

“Yes and yes.”

“Were you aware that the head of the union is alleged to of have ties to the New York Socialist Workers Committee?”

“No.”

“Do you think your father is aware of these allegations?”

Ava was cool. “You'd have to ask my father, I suppose.”

And so it went. Jacob kept his answers short and nearly bit through his tongue in frustration because, in spite of his anger, the investigator's unfounded insinuations and thinly veiled anti-Semitism, Jacob knew he had been the one to bring this down on their heads. He, and he alone, was responsible. Nothing ever came of the allegations, but rumors and whispers were enough to ruin people in those days, especially Jews who spoke with foreign accents. After all, who needs the truth when you've got demagoguery on a grand scale?

Jacob and Ava Weisen were luckier than most in that they weren't ruined. In fact, Olson's story did far more damage than HUAC ever could. Now that the legend of
The Book of Ghosts
was out there for the world to know and the pictures Max Baumgarten had snapped of the tattered package were in wide circulation, Jacob had very little peace. Jewish groups raised funds to hire investigators to look for it. The Federal Republic of Germany, as an act of atonement and as a gesture to the people of Israel, had agents on its trail. It was rumored that the Israeli government had assigned some Mossad agents from the Nazi hunter squads to search for the book. For a moment there, it seemed that every adventurer, freelance reporter, and foreign government on the planet was out searching for the damned thing. And of course, they all wanted to interview Jacob Weisen. Worse still were the constant rumors of the book's whereabouts.
The Book of Ghosts
had been transformed from a lie into a combination of the Holy Grail and the Maltese Falcon. With every report, every rumor, came a knock on Weisen's front door or a ring of his phone.

Yes, there were whole months, years sometimes, when the activity would slow to a trickle and Jacob and Ava could enjoy their children and, eventually, their grandchildren. The damned book, however, was never completely out of their lives and each time an escaped Nazi was captured—the year Eichmann went on trial was hell—or a Holocaust-related movie like
The Pawnbroker, Schindler's List, Shoah, Marathon Man, The Odessa File, The Boys From Brazil
or even
The Producers
was released, Jacob was forced back into the hell of his own making. The Internet only made things worse. By then, at least, he had retired and they'd moved down to Boynton Beach. After Ava passed in 2002, Jacob Weisen had a brief period where he was practically Zen about the whole affair. He could not undo things. What was done was done, but it wasn't done, not by a long shot.