Finding Rebecca: A Novel of Love and the Holocaust (20 page)

“Christopher, you are the best thing
in my life, the only thing I’ve ever had that was truly worth living for. There
is no life for me without you. Don’t you see? This isn’t the end for us.” She
leaned down to kiss him and they made love, under the covers, safe against the
cold of the morning all around them in the room. They lay there in silence for
a few minutes afterwards, holding each other, her thin, frail body against his.

“I want to go out,” she said jutting
her head upwards. “I want to go out walking along the cliffs. I want to see the
island and the sea. What are the Germans going to do to me if they catch us?
Deport me?”

Half an hour later they were on the
street, she on the crossbar of his bike as they cycled past columns of German
soldiers and out of the town into the countryside towards Christopher’s
father’s house in St. Martin. It was cold and Christopher felt the scythe of
wind cut through him. They arrived at Christopher’s father’s house and Rebecca
stumbled slightly as she got off the crossbar of the bike. She pitched forward,
almost falling onto the road and Christopher threw the bike down, tried to
catch her, but she righted herself and smiled up at him, taking his hand as
they walked to the door. Stefan was there, and took her into his arms, holding
her under his chin, kissing her on the top of the head. He looked every one of
his forty-eight years.

There was no small talk. Stefan
prepared the tea in silence. It was watery, weak, the tea leaves almost
completely drained of flavor.

“I’m here to say goodbye. It’s tomorrow
that I leave and…”

“I know that Rebecca, I know why
you’re here. I’m just so sorry we couldn’t do anything to prevent this.” Stefan
said as he sat down.

“It’s my fault,” Christopher said.
“If I had told Casper that Rebecca was a Jew, if I had told him…”

“If you had betrayed Rebecca, you
mean?” his father replied. “Christopher, this is no one’s fault but the Nazis
themselves. Rebecca, you have to be brave. You were always such a brave girl.
The strongest person I ever knew.”

Rebecca drew her head up and looked
at him. She reached forward to Stefan and hugged him. Christopher sat back and
watched them embrace. His father was silently crying.

They stayed for lunch, a thin turnip
soup that Stefan had managed to concoct. They talked about the future and how the
Seelers themselves were likely to be deported to Germany at any time. They
talked about the possibility, or the seeming impossibility of escape or finding
places to hide on the tiny island, and food to sustain them while they hid
there. The conversation fell silent until Rebecca began to smile again.

“I see the old tree house is still
hanging on,” she said. The wooden structure, built over a morning by Uli almost
twenty years before was clinging to the tree he had nailed it to. It was
completely weather-beaten by that time, the original paint all but faded to the
wooden grey underneath, but it was still there, despite the wind and the rain
sweeping in. It still stood. They talked about the times they had there and the
golden sun of their youth for an hour or more and then left to walk the beach
together, promising to come back to say goodbye to Christopher’s father later.

Their clothes were faded and old,
hardly able to keep the cold out and they huddled together as they walked down
to the beach. Rebecca looked at her father’s house at the end of the road, held
the look, turning her head as they walked past. “Wait here,” she said.
Christopher went to protest but stopped himself and kissed her on the cheek
instead. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” she said, and slipped out of his grasp.

Christopher walked down to the end of
the road to where barbed wire writhed around fence posts hammered into the
ground. It had been a while since they had been here, more than a year, not
since the barbed wire was put in place and the mines laid down along the beach.
Somehow Christopher found it hard to imagine a full-blown amphibian invasion of
Jersey on the beach by his father’s house in St Martin, but the Germans had.
Christopher stood there for ten minutes, staring out at the sea until Rebecca
emerged once more. Her face was grim determination, no sign of sadness.

“What happened?” Christopher asked.

“He’s on the same ship as I am
tomorrow. We’re being deported together.”

They walked along the line of barbed
wire as it snaked along the coastline. They followed it for several miles, just
walking. It was enough just being there and together. On their way back they
were able to make it down through a gap in the wire to the Angry Horse, but the
sea was too rough and the beaches they played on as children were strewn with
mines. They made their way back as the evening drew in and the grey of the
clouds turned black over the sea. The rain came down, swept in on the cold wind
and they shivered together as they tramped back up the road towards
Christopher’s father’s house.

Tom and Alexandra were there as they
arrived and they embraced Rebecca with tears in their eyes. Christopher’s
father asked them to stay, but Rebecca refused. They spent another hour there
with Stefan, Tom, and Alexandra, but it was so hard to find the joy that they
had all shared for so long. It seemed only a matter of time before Tom would be
the only one of them left on the island and somehow Christopher felt worse for
him to be left behind. Though Alexandra cried for most of the time and there
were few smiles on their faces, Christopher felt bathed in love.

They made their way back into town
before curfew, set at 8 pm at that time. They passed by some troops on the way
back. The only thing they could take away from him, the only thing he really
cared about was those last few hours with Rebecca, so Christopher made sure to
look as casual as he could as he passed and not hurl the hatred at them that
was burning a hole inside of him.

They arrived back at the apartment
and locked up the bikes outside. They made their way upstairs and tried to act
as normally as they could. Rebecca prepared dinner of some carrots, a potato
and some thin soup cooked in some seawater for extra flavor as the salt had
long since run out. He held her as she cooked, his face buried in the back of
her neck. They ate the meal and sat together under a blanket on the couch, as
they did many nights, but this was very different. Neither spoke and their grip
was that much tighter than it ever had been before.

Christopher fell asleep at around
four, the heavy yoke of tiredness overcoming him, robbing him of his final
hours with her and the final sunrise they could have had together. They woke up
at around noon. Rebecca packed her bag. Christopher couldn’t watch her. It was
too much. He walked her down to the Savoy where her father and the other Jews
were waiting, herded together by enough German troops to guard hundreds. The soldiers
stood back wordlessly, glaring at the Jews as they arrived. There were thirteen
altogether. Rebecca was the thirteenth. Christopher nodded to Cassin and
motioned for him to come over. Cassin edged his way out to Christopher. He
looked like a very old man. He was drunk.

“Look after Rebecca. She is still your
daughter. This is your chance to make up for the past.” Christopher held out
his hand. Cassin didn’t answer him, but nodded his head, shook Christopher’s
hand. Christopher turned to Rebecca, the same frightened girl he had found by
the beach almost twenty years before. He took her in his arms but the German
officer came over. It was Voss. He glanced at Christopher, but didn’t
acknowledge him.

“All right,” he said. “We need to get
moving now.“ He pulled Rebecca back and away from Christopher but Rebecca
motioned for him to come back. Christopher leaned in to her.

“Next time, I see you, we’re getting
married. The next time…” A German soldier cut her off, forcing her onwards. But
she said it again. “You hear me, Christopher? The next time we meet.”
Christopher nodded, barely able to see through the tears burning down his face.

The thirteen were marched down to the
harbor. Christopher walked alongside them. He wanted to be strong for her, but
it was more than he could bear. They marched straight out and onto the ship.
Rebecca turned to Christopher, standing alone on the jetty. She was on the
gangplank and shouted something back to him, but it was lost in the wind. He
saw her red face, saw her tears one last time before she disappeared inside.
Christopher put his hands up to his face, his entire body on fire. He stood up
to watch the ship as it left. There was no one else there. He stood on the
jetty completely alone, watching the ship as it moved away until it disappeared
into the grey of the horizon.

It was all over in a few minutes. There
was no more noise from the crematorium. The screams had faded into silence. Christopher
was moving side to side and then pacing back and forth in some kind of attempt
to control the shaking infesting his body. The yard was empty now. Christopher
steeled himself, trying to extricate the horror of what he had just witnessed.
There had been no way of knowing that this was what went on here, or that this
is what he would find. He heard Muller’s voice directing the Sonderkommandos
and saw him looking over. He breathed deeply in through his nose, trying to
slow down his heart, blackened and damaged by what he had just seen.
Christopher felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around immediately and saw
Friedrich. “It takes a bit of getting used to, Herr Seeler,” Friedrich said.
“These ways are so much more humane than they used to be.”

“More humane for the prisoners?”
Christopher blurted.

Friedrich looked back at him,
squinting his eyes as if not able to comprehend what Christopher had just said,
before a slow smile spread across his face. “No, no, that is an irrelevance.
More humane for the SS men, tasked with this important duty. There were too
many affected in the early days, before we streamlined the process. You will
get used to this, Herr Seeler. There is strength in you that I can see, that
all who meet you can sense. Use it and you will be doing the Reich a great
service here.”

“Yes, Herr Rapportführer.”

“Excellent, now get to work. You are
needed inside the changing room. Make sure all valuables collected are put into
the appropriate boxes and piles, and, above all, make sure that they all find
their way back to the Reich, and not into the filthy hands of the prisoners
themselves.”

Christopher nodded, saluted, and
found the strength to walk back into the crematorium, following the path that
the people had taken just minutes before. Muller and Breitner were already
inside, directing the Sonderkommandos as they sorted through the piles of
clothing. Flick arrived with several prisoners, each carrying a separate box.
Breitner did the talking, reminding the Sonderkommandos to go through all
pockets to check the lining in each coat, to turn out every suitcase, and to
place the currency in one box, gold and jewelry in another, watches into
another. Christopher walked among them, watching each as he went by, trying to
look officious and fearsome. Coats were taken down off the hooks where their
former owners had left them and neatly folded clothes were flung into piles.
Christopher picked up a child’s doll, ragged and worn with one eye missing, its
blonde hair streaked with dirt, and placed it back down on the little girl’s
clothes who had left it. The SS men walked up and down, shouting at the
prisoners sorting through the goods, urging them to go faster, faster, and
watching them to see that they didn’t pocket any of the valuables for
themselves. It was all done with speed and efficiency. Boxes of shoes, coats,
underwear, wallets, eyeglasses, gold and jewelry, bottles, medicines, food and,
of course, cash, were placed on trolleys, ready for transportation back to the
warehouses that Christopher was to oversee. The SS officers were pleased at
what obviously had been a good morning’s work. Christopher made his way past the
guards and prisoners and through the now cleaned out dressing room, and saw the
box full of dolls by the door, collected and sorted along with everything else,
waiting to be ‘redistributed back to the Reich.’ Nothing was not worth
stealing.

Christopher walked out into the yard
as more SS men moved in. The Sonderkommandos made their way into the gas
chambers to transport the bodies, the ‘stiffs’, as the guards referred to them,
upstairs to be burnt. Christopher thought of the thousand or so corpses, freshly
murdered, and had no intention of waiting around to see what happened next. He
hurried each of the prisoners along as they jogged towards the warehouses, the
carts packed with the boxes they had sorted themselves. He watched them as they
pushed the carts, perhaps twenty of them, towards the warehouses. A voice came
from behind him. “You know what they call the section where we sort through the
goods? The section you’re now in charge of?” Breitner said.

Christopher looked at him, wondered
about the tone in his voice before replying. “No, I don’t.”

“They call it Canada, the land of
untold riches,” Breitner sneered, revealing brown, chipped teeth. “You probably
didn’t know that.”

“Thank you, Herr Breitner,”
Christopher replied and began to walk back towards Canada, following the last
cart as it departed from the crematorium.