And After the Fire Read online

  Dedication

  For Michael

  Epigraph

  To hear footsteps in the evening—and see no one.

  —from “Unwritten Elegy for Krakow’s Jews”

  by Adam Zagajewski (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Historical Note and Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Lauren Belfer

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  AMERICAN-OCCUPIED GERMANY

  May 1945

  He never meant to kill her.

  The afternoon had started out nice enough, for war-ravaged Germany right after the surrender. As Corporal Henry Sachs reclined on the parapet of a ruined castle and enjoyed a smoke in the sunshine, he reflected that life was going fine. A cooling breeze whipped around him. The view across the valley spread for miles. Hawks soared. Church steeples marked the towns. A half-dozen castles perched on the distant hills.

  The war was over. He was alive. You couldn’t ask for more than that, and he didn’t. He was twenty-one years old and full of beans, if he did say so himself. At five feet nine (okay, in his boots), with dark hair, brown eyes, and a suave, devil-may-care edge, he reminded himself of Humphrey Bogart. He’d signed up in ’42, the day after he graduated from high school, and he prided himself on making the military work for him instead of the other way around.

  Like today. Soon the Third Army would be pulling out and the Soviets would take over this part of Germany. Before the Americans said auf Wiedersehen, Henry had a hankering to do some sightseeing. He’d recruited his best buddy, Pete Galinsky—right now pacing around to take in the view—to join him. They’d borrowed, so to speak, a military jeep, and they’d gone on a drive. They’d visited medieval towns and toured old churches. In exchange for chocolate and cigarettes, the currency of the day, they’d bought lunch at a prosperous-looking farmhouse where they teased the kids and Henry noticed that there wasn’t a man in sight.

  He checked his watch. The time was going on 16:00 hours, 4:00 p.m. “Let’s start heading back,” Henry said. Back meant Weimar, the city where they were based.

  “Sounds good,” Pete said.

  Henry tossed his cigarette butt over the parapet. They returned to the jeep, and Henry took the wheel. Pete navigated, examining the map and checking the compass balanced on his knee. Pete was twenty going on fifty, and his long, thin face matched his long, thin body. He was from Buffalo, New York, where he’d progressed from high school into working at his family’s clothing store. The army in its wisdom had decided he should be a mechanic and trained him to repair trucks.

  Soon they were on the main road. They curved around a hillside, and the landscape opened onto a wide vista, meadows stretching into an endless distance. Henry pressed down hard on the gas pedal, and he was free. The wind hitting his face smelled rich and fertile. He inhaled, filling his lungs. The war in Europe was over. The good guys won. He felt elated. Triumphant. Invincible.

  “It’s a straight shot from here,” Pete said. “We’ll have time to visit Tiefurt Palace along the way.”

  Visiting hours at the palace (if there were any) didn’t apply to them, not with Henry speaking German like a native and carrying an ample supply of chocolate and cigarettes in his rucksack to smooth over any hard feelings. Henry had been born in Brooklyn, where his family owned a shoe store, but his father was from East Prussia and his mother was from the Sudetenland. They spoke German at home, and Henry had learned the niceties of German grammar in high school. He’d spent the war translating for an intelligence unit.

  “‘The chateau and park of Tiefurt, once the summer residence of Duchess Anna Amalia . . . ,’” Pete read aloud from the Baedeker guide, a gift from Henry’s father on the day he shipped out.

  When she came to America, Henry’s mother had left a big family behind in the Sudetenland, in the town of Eger. She exchanged letters and photographs with them frequently. Henry had never met any of these relatives, but he knew them from their photos: gorgeous cousin Shoshanna, with her hair pulled back; Aunt Chana, with her round face and a body to match, wearing fur in winter and in summer, at least for photographs; Uncle Max, who stood proudly in front of the family’s dry goods shop; cousin Jakob, Henry’s age, wearing thick glasses and reading a book; youngest cousin Franz, with his bright blond hair and Tyrolean jacket. Franz gripped old Grandpa Abraham’s hand and seemed afraid of the camera. Abraham smiled down at the boy with a mixture of love and indulgence that almost made Henry jealous. Abraham was Henry’s grandpa, too.

  After the war started, Henry’s mother didn’t receive any more letters or photographs from the family.

  Henry glanced at Pete. Did Pete have family living in Europe when the war broke out? He couldn’t ask. Sure, he and Pete joked about their hometowns and their baseball teams (Henry, the Brooklyn Dodgers; Pete, the New York Yankees, because Pete’s hometown didn’t have a major league team).

  But prying into stuff that actually mattered? No.

  Henry and Pete took some ribbing from the other guys about being Jewish, but no more than, say, the Irish guys took for being Irish. Anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, that was America for you, and nobody, usually, was getting murdered over it, at least if your skin was white. Before he signed up, Henry had heard taunts on the street about Jew draft dodgers, but once Henry wore the uniform, he’d put a stop to that. The high-class officers Henry translated for made cracks about dirty Jews, cheap Jews, President Rosenfeld and his Jew Deal, the usual garbage. Henry kept his rage to himself, because being a translator on the back lines was a whole lot better than being cannon fodder on the front lines.

  “The road to Tiefurt Palace is going to be on the left when we get near town,” Pete was saying.

  When Henry first signed up, things were tough, sure. During basic, a bunch of guys showed up from a small town (was there any other kind?) in Arkansas. They’d never seen a Jew and asked Henry if he had horns and a tail, the age-old slur. Why, you boys want to see? Henry had replied in his best Brooklyn street-fighter tone. Surprise, surprise: they didn’t.

  “The turnoff
should be coming up,” Pete said.

  They’d reached the outskirts of Weimar, and everything was starting to look confused. This must have been an industrial area before the Allied bombing and the battle for the town. Potholes the size of tanks pocked the roads. Downed electrical wires crossed ponds of muck. The tower of Schloss Weimar, the town’s palace, rose in the distance, but getting there would be tricky.

  “Let’s call it a day,” Henry said.

  “Don’t worry,” Pete said. “It’s not far. Tiefurt Palace—when will we ever be here again?”

  They were approaching the town center. Municipal buildings were on their right, a steep hill on their left.

  And then a road, leading up the hill. Henry made the turn, just like that, because Pete was right: When would they ever be here again? He shifted into first to get the jeep up the incline. At the top of the hill, a church loomed before him. He made a sharp left, the only option.

  “Holy shit,” Pete said.

  Henry seconded that remark.

  A peaceful residential neighborhood opened before them, a broad street of stone houses, green lawns, and tall trees. The houses were four stories tall, with columns, carved doorways, and wrought-iron gates. They were mansions.

  Henry drove slowly along the street. For all their size, the houses sat on small lots. One mansion after another, like stone giants squeezed close. Henry felt a strange unease. The neighborhood hadn’t been bombed, but the houses looked deserted. The shutters were closed, and the windows that didn’t have shutters were sealed with wooden boards nailed from the inside. The lawns were uncut, the gardens overgrown. Henry had spent enough time in this misbegotten country to know that Germans liked to keep their lawns trimmed and their gardens pruned.

  “You see how the houses don’t have much land?” Pete said. “That shows how valuable the property is, when you build one mansion right next to another.”

  “How come you know a thing like that?”

  “Some guy came into the store, wanted to buy a tuxedo. Worked in real estate. Thought he was a big shot. He talked, I listened.”

  Was this Pete’s future, selling clothes in Buffalo, making his customers happy because he was willing to listen while they talked? Henry wanted more out of life than this, although he didn’t know what.

  “Street looks evacuated,” Pete said. “The rich people getting out before the Russians arrive. Or maybe the Nazi bigwigs lived here, and they’re hiding in the attics.”

  “Sounds about right.” Henry parked at the side of the road, as if they were stopping to visit friends. “Let’s take a look around.” He got out of the jeep and picked up his rucksack.

  “The jeep’s not safe,” Pete said.

  “Come on, Grandma. It’s safe enough,” Henry said, even though he knew it wasn’t, especially not the spare tire and the jerry cans of gasoline. “We’ll be gone for five minutes at most.”

  Pete shrugged, but he followed along. With helmets on and rifles at the ready, they made their way down the deserted street. Peering between the mansions, Henry saw that the houses on the left were built along a ridge with a view of a green valley. On the other side of the valley, the land rose steeply, dense with trees. The entire scene was basking in the orange light of late afternoon.

  When they came to a house without a fence, Henry crossed the lawn to take a better look at the view. The brilliant, raking light, combined with huge gray clouds against a pure blue sky, gave off an and-then-God-created-the-universe feel. Henry wasn’t religious, and his parents weren’t religious, but he had made his bar mitzvah when he was thirteen just in case, as his mother had put it. Seeing the light fill the valley, Henry felt a spiritual pull that he’d never before experienced.

  Henry wondered: Was the Buchenwald concentration camp over there, somewhere on the opposite ridge? Buchenwald meant “beech forest,” but it wasn’t a place you’d want to go for a hike in the woods. The camp was built on a hilltop clearing four miles outside of Weimar. Because Henry spoke German and worked in intelligence, he’d been assigned to lead the defeated locals on tours of the camp and eavesdrop on their conversations. For these visits, the good citizens of Weimar dressed in their Sunday best. The ladies wore sturdy high heels and felt hats, and gripped their leather handbags. The men (all past military age) wore suits and ties, or tweed jackets with sweater vests and ties, and they wore hats, too. In the trucks going to the camp, most of the people joked and laughed, as if they were on a festive holiday outing.

  When they arrived at the camp, they were greeted by the vacant stares of the survivors, skeletons that inched along. They saw the stacks of bodies, arms and legs sticking out at broken angles. Looking at the piles of naked dead men, the teenage girls hid anxious giggles behind their hands. The women covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs to keep away the stench. Henry wanted to pull the handkerchiefs away and push those fat faces into the rotting corpses.

  The stench of the camp—it assaulted him all over again, making him queasy.

  Henry must have played Buchenwald tour guide for five hundred people. Sometimes understanding German was a curse. To hell with the lie the Germans told the GIs, that they didn’t know about the camp. Some of them were employed at the camp, for God’s sake. Local grocers supplied food to the administrators and their families, and to the guards. The residents of Weimar shared their suburban rail line with prisoners going to the camp. Henry’s tourists even talked among themselves about the wind of ashes that blew upon the city, leaving a grayish white dusting upon their windowsills and front steps. The citizens knew very well where the ashes came from: the Buchenwald crematorium.

  Henry’s concentration-camp tourists probably thought his German wasn’t good enough to understand what they were saying. But Henry understood. Every word. He learned that Weimar’s Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, was a transit point for civilian captives going east. When you went to the station, you saw old women, little kids, mothers and fathers from across Europe changing trains. Thousands upon thousands of civilians, pushed onto cattle cars and heading east, where things were really bad. Or so the rumors said. Henry happened to know that the rumors were true. Buchenwald was mainly a slave-labor camp, not a murder factory like places he’d learned about in the east. In the east, people were exterminated by poison gas and then cremated. Buchenwald didn’t have gas chambers for killing people. Even so, when you were working people to death, not giving them enough food, basically doing nothing to heal the sick, and hanging and shooting men for offenses real and imagined, you ended up with a lot of dead bodies, more than the ovens of the camp’s crematorium could deal with.

  As Henry stood at the ridge and gazed out at the view, a question kept pushing into his mind: If God created the entire universe, as Henry had been taught, did that mean God had created Buchenwald, too?

  No. No. Forget all that, he ordered himself. The war was over. He’d made it through alive. Today he was sightseeing, like a normal guy visiting a foreign country. With luck, he’d be going home soon. He imagined a day at Coney Island, the sand beneath his feet, the salty tang of the ocean in the air. He’d run into the water and let the awful memories wash off him.

  He saw himself sitting at the dinner table with his parents and his little sister, Evelyn. She was seven now and reading nonstop, according to a letter from Henry’s mother. Cute, too. He kept a photo of her in his wallet. Once he was settled, he’d call up a few girls he’d known in high school. Find out how the years had treated them. He’d be a veteran, with his college paid for by the GI bill and a great future ahead of him. The girls would be all over him.

  He saw himself signing up at Brooklyn College. To study what? He had no idea. Inside him, a knot was tightening at the prospect of returning to civilian life.

  “Come on,” Pete said, “let’s get moving.”

  “Good idea.” Henry turned away from the valley and faced the back of the house. This side wasn’t boarded up. A terrace led to wide doors which were open to the after
noon breezes. Wrought-iron chairs and a glass-and-wrought-iron table were positioned on the terrace to take advantage of the view. Henry imagined SS officers relaxing after work, enjoying drinks and a smoke before dinner.

  He walked closer. A cup and saucer were on the table, and a book. He had a feeling that a second ago somebody had gotten up and gone into the house for a sweater. That person would return in a moment.

  Henry walked up the steps onto the terrace. Behind him, Pete was cautioning, but Henry ignored him. He went through the open door. Pete followed.

  They entered a room that was oval-shaped and bright. Henry looked up. A domed skylight. Delicate furniture filled the room, the kind Henry recognized as antiques . . . wooden chairs with spindly legs that would collapse under his weight; a small round table that looked like it was standing on tiptoe. The fireplace’s marble mantelpiece was carved into intricate feather shapes. One wall had a picture painted right onto it: the view across the valley. A grand piano filled the other side of the room. Its lid was down, its keyboard closed.

  “Look,” Pete said. “A cooking pot. Hanging in the fireplace.”

  The electricity was off. Probably the gas, too. Somebody was making do, trying to survive.

  “They’re burning books for fuel,” Pete said.

  Sure enough, books were piled on one side. Taking a closer look at the debris in the fireplace, Henry saw the remains of printed pages, curled and blackened.

  Pete was examining the stack of books. “Get a load of this: gold lettering on the front.” He held up a book for Henry to see, then leafed through it. “Published in 1811.” Pete picked up another. “This one says 1793. Look at this leather binding.”

  Some of the books were fancy, Henry could see that.

  “I’m going to take a few of these books as souvenirs,” Pete said. “They’ll be burnt up tonight anyway, so what the hell.”

  Taking souvenirs was against the rules, but everybody was doing it. Henry had buddies who’d sent home packages stuffed with German swords, cameras, silver, china, paintings.

  Henry hadn’t taken any souvenirs yet. Nothing had turned up that really grabbed him.