The Book of Ghosts Read online

  “Listen, Jackie, your wife told me already the story about the book and I told it to my rabbi and you shouldn’t know from his reaction. He was on shpilkes, on pins and needles,” old Beckerman said in his heavily accented English. “He’s a wise man, Jackie, my Rabbi Greenspan. He says you must share the story of your friend and the book. He says no matter how much pain it brings you to talk about it, to not share it with your people is a scandal, a shanda. The rabbi asked me to talk sense to you. He has called a special meeting of the temple brotherhood for a week from Sunday and he wants you to speak to us to tell us the story.”

  Jack didn’t bother protesting. He had known this day would come sooner or later and there was a practical part of his decision. Mr. Beckerman put a roof over his head and food on his table. If surviving the camps taught him anything at all, it was never to be cavalier about shelter and food. To disappoint his boss would also be professional suicide. Besides, he loved the old man. So he went and he spoke but, to his relief, it pretty much stopped there. Over the course of the next year, he had the occasional request from this Jewish group or that to repeat the myth and he did. It wasn’t until the Forward got hold of the story that the legend of the heroic storyteller Isaac Becker, his boyhood friend Jacob Weisen, and The Book of Ghosts spread. It didn’t take long for the New York tabloids and the Times to run with it.

  What could Jack Wise do? He couldn’t unscramble the eggs of his lies. And having once been caught in the momentum of history, he understood there was no swimming against its tide. So, he figured, if everyone else was going to swim with the tide, he would swim with it too, as far as it would take him, which, as it happened, was very far. Playing it for all it was worth, he went back to using the name Jacob Weisen and accepted every paying speaking engagement he could land, including ones in Argentina and the newly established state of Israel. The money helped because Ava was pregnant with their first child and they were saving to buy a house on Long Island. Even Mr. Beckerman cooperated, giving Jacob all the time off he needed. But by 1952, with no witnesses to corroborate or challenge his story and with no book unearthed, his life settled back into a happy and largely uneventful routine. Ava was again pregnant. David, their three-year-old, was a terror. They had their ranch house in Wantagh and Jacob rode the Long Island Railroad to work five days a week instead of the subway.

  Oswiecem (Auschwitz), Poland, 1946

  Bronka Kaczmarek had nothing to lose and everything to gain in trying to get the hell away from the family farm outside Oswiecim. The Nazis, as kind of a farewell to the neighborhood, had murdered her parents and older brother while she lay hidden in the hayloft, listening to the pop, pop, pop of the Walther. Not a week later, a squad of Red Army soldiers had filled the void left by the fleeing Germans and announced their arrival by stealing Bronka’s last cow—a pathetic-looking animal—and by raping her more or less continuously for two days running. If their treatment of her was any indication, it seemed to Bronka that the Russians hated the Poles almost as much as they hated the Germans. In any case, she had had enough of them both. One monster, she thought, but for tailoring, was much like another.

  Over the course of the last eight months, she had sold everything that wasn’t nailed down to neighboring farmers or on the black market. She had taken her time so as not to arouse suspicion. It was probably an unnecessary precaution because now that Poland had been swallowed up by the Bolsheviks and private property was deemed a capitalist folly perpetrated by the masses, everyone was scrambling to survive. Desperation, not wheat, was the biggest cash crop in Poland after the war. The only thing Bronka hadn’t sold was the thing she wished she had never seen: the little package wrapped in the tatters of striped pajamas, a Jew’s striped pajamas. How did she know? Because although the yellow star was missing, its six-pointed silhouette remained. She didn’t much like Jews nor did her father, but her father was a superstitious man. He had pulled her aside one day shortly after the ash cart had come from the camp and shown her the package.

  “What is it, Papa?”

  “It is one of their secret things,” he whispered as if the animals were listening.

  “Maybe it’s money or some of their diamonds. Let me have it. I will untie the knot and look.”

  He pulled it to his chest. “No, Bronka, never!” He crossed himself and spit on the ground. “Now that I have taken it, we will be cursed if we do not protect it. Yes, they killed Christ, but they are God’s Chosen. They have powers.”

  She laughed at her father. “Powers! Power to what, to make blue smoke out of the sky? Chosen for what, to be slaughtered like cattle?”

  Her father slapped her so hard across the face that the imprint of his thick fingers marked her left cheek for days. She hated that the slap was now her most enduring memory of her Papa, but because the package meant so much to him, it had become her only way to hold onto her father. Since she possessed neither the inclination toward deep thought nor the time to ponder the universe, Bronka Kaczmarek sewed the package into the lining of her coat and left Oswiecem forever under cover of darkness in the rear of a potato truck.

  As it wasn’t in Bronka’s nature to let irony take purchase in her thoughts, she didn’t waste time worrying about the fact that she found herself, two years later, in West Berlin, married to a British man named Daniel Epstein. Daniel, a wiry, handsome man who worked for the BBC World Service, was nominally Jewish and didn’t ask Bronka to convert. In fact, he didn’t ask much of her at all. She was more a housekeeper than a wife to him—a kiss farewell in the morning and one when he arrived home in the evening—and that suited her well enough. After those two days with the Russians, the thought of a man—handsome and well-mannered or not—inside her made her break out in a cold sweat. And so it went for three years until the morning Bronka was crushed beneath the wheels of a potato truck outside the local market. Wherever her eternal soul might be, even Bronka must have appreciated the irony in her deliverance.

  When Daniel was going through his wife’s things, he found the coat Bronka had worn the night she left Oswiecem buried in the back of a closet. If he hadn’t patted down the pockets to see if she had left anything of value in them, the remainder of Jacob Weisen’s life might have been spent in relative peace. But Daniel Epstein did pat down the pockets and he did find the tatter-wrapped package sewn into the lining of the threadbare coat. Although he had no idea of what to make of it, he knew someone who might. Yes, he knew him quite well.

  After several years back in the States, Max Baumgarten, an army intelligence officer during the war—translating captured documents, mostly—had been assigned to Berlin as a correspondent for the Herald Tribune. He loved everything about the job, including his ability to scratch a particular kind of itch out of the sight of prying eyes. Unlike Daniel, Max felt no need to take on a bride for cover, but the British had that peculiar need to keep up appearances. Hell, Daniel even played the dutiful husband in the aftermath of Bronka’s death, refusing to “see” Max until a proper and respectful period of mourning had been observed. So it was a surprise, a happy surprise, when the week after the Polish peasant was buried, Max picked up the phone and Daniel was on the other end.

  They set a time to meet at “their” flat. They kept this place for their trysts, renting it under a false name and paying monthly in cash. Even seven years after the war, pounds or dollars talked loud and kept questions to a minimum. They had the place until the end of the month. After that, Max didn’t see the need to keep it any longer, not now that Daniel’s Polish peasant was dead. Max arrived early: setting up candles, icing down a bottle of pre-war vintage Veuve Cliquot, and setting out an iced tin of pearl black caviar, sour cream, and thinly sliced and toasted pieces of baguette. When Daniel showed up carrying a package wrapped in pajama tatters, Max’s lustful intentions evaporated. Max could barely contain himself. “Holy shit! It’s The Book of Ghosts.”

  Daniel crooked his head like a confused puppy. “What?”

  “Did Bronka tell you wher
e she was from in Poland?” Max answered the question with his own.

  “Well, at first, no. I suppose even she was embarrassed. But one night after one too many vodkas, she confessed to me that she grew up on a farm—”

  “—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 Ma
x 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.