Voices of the dead

“I guess I had you all wrong,” Taggart said. “You don’t strike me as the vigilante type.”

Harry pictured Sara’s battered face and felt himself getting angry. “Guy killed my daughter, you think I’m going to let that go?”

“I don’t know but you’re being charged with assault. The bodyguard needed four stitches to close a cut on his face.” Taggart sipped his coffee. “How’d you do that?”

“Judo.”

“Judo, huh? You don’t look Oriental. Where’d you learn that?”

“I took lessons,” Harry said.

“You a black belt?”

“Brown.”

Taggart drank his coffee. “They also got you on destruction of property.” He took out a piece of paper. “Restaurant says you owe them for six Bordeaux glasses, four Limoges plates.” He pronounced the “s.” “Total of two hundred and eighty dollars.”

Harry sipped his coffee.

“German consulate says they’ll drop the assault charges if you go home, promise to get counseling.”

“Counseling?” Harry could feel his bile rise. “They’ve got a lot of nerve.”

5

Dachau, Germany. 1942.

He watched the SS guard shout angry words in German, spit flying, the mouth working hard, opening and closing in cadence with the harsh guttural command. He saw the scene in hazy gray monochrome. Harry was standing on the muddy yard at Dachau with a group of prisoners, barracks on both sides of them. Guards were beating them with whips and clubs, herding them into the back of a truck that was covered by a tarpaulin. They had been told they were being transferred to a sub-camp, so there was hope because anything was better than where they were.

“Komm, komm,” the guard said. “You look like you don’t want to work any more. Get on the truck. Schnell.”

Harry and his father were the last two on, prisoners packed in front of them. The tarp was pulled closed but not all the way. Harry could see through the opening. The truck drove out of the camp, turning right, engine laboring in low gear until it reached the main road, heading toward Munich.

A few minutes later, Harry saw a stone marker on the other side of the road. Dachau 4 km. They drove a little further and the truck turned right onto a two-track path that wound through the trees, and now there was a feeling of panic among the prisoners. They weren’t being transferred to a sub-camp. Harry tried to convince himself it was a work detail but knew they had been selected.

Harry looked at the raggedy figures pressed around him, shifting to the sway of the truck. Glanced the other way through an opening in the tarp at the guards following them in two kubelwagens, four men in each. As they wound their way through the trees the guards would disappear from view. Harry’s father told him to jump off the truck.

“You have to do it,” his father said.

“I want to stay with you.”

“In a few minutes there will be nothing left of me, or any of us. Save yourself.”

Harry hugged his father, waited for the right opportunity, slipped through the tarp and over the rear gate, dropped to the ground and rolled into the trees. He heard the motorcade drive by, got up and ran, following the sounds of the truck engine.

SS guards with machine guns herded the prisoners through the woods to a clearing. He could see dirt piled up on the other side of a pit that looked long and deep.

Harry was so afraid he was sick to his stomach, body shaking, could hardly breathe. The prisoners stood side by side at the edge of the pit, twelve to fifteen at a time. When a whistle sounded SS guards walked up behind the Jews and shot them point blank, blowing their heads apart. Harry would jump when he heard a volley of gunfire. Some of the SS guards laughed, making fun of each other for getting blood and brains on their uniforms.

His father was in the second group. This time a young SS officer in a black uniform walked behind the prisoners and sprayed them with machine-gun fire, the velocity of the rounds blowing them into the pit. The SS man was grinning, enjoying himself.

“That’s how you kill Jews,” he said.

A third group was brought into position. He could hear moans and screams coming from a few who were still alive. A rabbi wrapped in a prayer shawl said, “‘Comfort ye, comfort ye‚ my people.’” A guard knocked him unconscious with the butt of his rifle, and dragged him to the mass grave.

Trucks dropped off groups of Jews and went back for more-fifty people at a time. They were led to the pit and shot. Harry had seen the Nazis do terrible things, beating and humiliating Jews on the streets of Munich, and even murdering them at the camp but nothing like this.