When he’d finally arrived in Fraustadt, he saw the town was remarkably preserved, and he was reminded of his childhood with a ferocity he forced himself to suppress. As he’d walked the street, looking for familiar faces, no one seemed to want to meet his eye. The house where he’d been born, where his father had been kicked to death, and where he’d been spirited away in the gray dawn like a thief, had stood abandoned and empty.
When he’d knocked on neighbors’ doors and explained who he was, they shook their heads, gazes skating away, a look of fear on their faces. Perhaps it was his uniform.
“We don’t know anything,” one woman, he couldn’t remember her name, had said piteously. “Your mother left years ago… before…”
Before. Such a terrible word. Before the Jews were rounded up like cattle, before they were herded onto trains, before they were sent to their deaths in ways it was nearly impossible to comprehend.
Already, just days after the war, details of the death camps had begun to filter through military channels. Matthew had heard about Auschwitz, and Majdanek, and Treblinka, about Dachau and Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, among others. So many others.
He’d read matter-of-fact reports, and heard low, horror-struck voices describe scenes like those he’d seen at Wobbelin, and even worse.
He’d heard how prisoners were told they were merely on a transit stop, to rest and wash, before they went on to a labor camp. How they were made to strip and taken into a chamber that looked like a shower but in
fact became a tomb. He’d heard it all, and he had accepted it and understood it even as he refused to let it affect him. He couldn’t.
All he learned in Fraustadt was that his mother had left with his brothers and sister before the worst, maybe in 1941. No one could quite remember, or perhaps they didn’t want to.
It gave him not quite hope, but the approximation of it, to know that they hadn’t been deported, at least not then. His mother was smart, he reminded himself; she’d got him out, after all, and he knew she’d been squirreling away valuables for years. Before he’d left, before he’d run away like a child, she’d promised him they would all get out.
“Don’t worry, mausi,” she’d said, using an endearment he hadn’t heard since he’d been a little boy. “I’ll keep them safe. I know what to do.”
He’d believed her. He’d believed her for her sake, and for Franz’s and Arno’s, as well as for dear little Gertie’s, but most of all he’d believed it for his, because he could never have gone as he had if he hadn’t taken his mother at her word, if he hadn’t looked into her brown eyes and seen the sincerity, accepted the firmness of her tone, her smile. We’ll be all right. I promise.
In mid-May, when Matthew finally left Fraustadt, and any answers, behind him, he wondered if he should have taken his mother at her word, or if she’d simply been saying what she’d known he’d needed to hear.
“Sergeant Lawson.” Captain Betts, the officer in charge of this small military governance in Boizenburg, was a kindly man who had come over on D-Day, unlike the new recruits who had plenty of military intelligence training but no combat action, and had just been shipped in after V-E Day for the cleanup job.
Matthew had little time for any of them, although he tried to hide his visceral disdain for their know-it-all attitudes, their buoyant sense of confidence without any experience, like children on a holiday. They talked more of going to Paris than what the Nazis had done. He liked Captain Betts well enough, at least.
“Sir.” His tone was neutral as he saluted.
Betts looked at him unhappily. “Sergeant, I’m afraid I’ve discovered something I believe you should see.”
Matthew kept his face expressionless. “Sir?”
“I took the liberty, after you returned from Fraustadt, to ask some higher-ups about your family.”
Matthew tensed, a stillness stealing through his body that left him unable even to breathe.
“Weiss,” Betts said, as if asking a question, and Matthew forced a nod. “The Nazis destroyed many of their records, and looking for a name is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I don’t think we’ll ever know everyone who…” He paused to clear his throat. “But I found this.” He pushed a piece of paper towards Matthew; it was a mimeograph of a typed list of names.
When Matthew took a step closer, he saw it was a deportation list, and the names of his mother, brothers, and sister were all on it. It was dated October 1942.
“From Dresden,” Betts said quietly. “To Treblinka.”
Matthew’s head jerked up as he looked at his senior officer, his rapid blinking the only sign that he understood what the man was telling him. Treblinka… one of the extermination camps that had been destroyed by the Nazis, a desperate cover-up of their unbearable evil. A place utterly without hope.
“I’m sorry,” Betts said.
“You know what happened?”
“Your mother and sister died upon arrival. Cause of death was noted as heart failure.”
“They were gassed.” He spoke flatly, unemotionally. “And my brothers?”
“They were transferred to Auschwitz, after the uprising at Treblinka. They died in August 1944, the same way.”
Matthew nodded slowly, saying nothing. He felt as if nothing in him was working properly—muscles, lungs, heart. It was all mechanical, a series of contractions and jerks that only just kept him alive.