Finding Rebecca: A Novel of Love and the Holocaust (45 page)

“What did he tell you about me?”

“He said that you were SS. He said
that he had always been right about you. I didn’t believe him at first, not
until I saw the lists of names. And even then….” Her voice faded and then
strengthened again. “It took me a long time to accept it.” Christopher raised
his hands to his face, his elbows on the table. “He never told me what you did
for the prisoners or even if you did anything for him,” Rebecca continued. Her
eyes locked onto his. “Did you help him?”

“I had him transferred to the camp by
mistake. I asked for a Cassin and they sent him. Some joke, eh?” But Rebecca
didn’t smile. “Yes, I helped him, as much as I could anyway. I gave him extra
food and organized a job for him where he could stay alive.” They were both
silent for seconds which dragged into minutes as they both looked at the menus
laid on the table in front of them. The waiter came back just as Christopher
was about to speak. He was young, perhaps 22 and very tall, well over six foot.
He smiled as he took their order.

It was only after the waiter left
that Rebecca began again. “We stayed in the displaced persons camp for weeks.
The authorities had no idea what to do with us and I didn’t know what to do
with myself. Without you I had nothing left to live for.” Christopher felt the
words cut through him and looked down at the table, his hands, but she
continued. “I went to the British authorities in the camp to offer my services
as a go-between for them and the rest of the refugees there. I met with some of
the officers charged with collecting testimonies on war crimes and I began to
help them. I wrote a list of all the SS officers I had ever encountered and
began to quiz the others in the camp about what they remembered. Somehow I
gained strength from that. I shrugged off everything else. It wasn’t revenge.
It was never about that. It was justice, only that.”

Christopher let the words sink in
before he asked his next question. “Did you speak to many prisoners from
Auschwitz?”

“No, I never did. I just dealt with
the camps that I knew, that I was in. I suppose our lives would have been quite
different if I had.”

“I suppose they would have been,”
Christopher said, his voice dull and distant.

Rebecca took a breath and continued.
“I collected lists and testimonies and handed them over to the authorities. But
that still wasn’t enough. I got in touch with some other former prisoners I
still knew. I moved to Vienna to continue my work.”

“Why Vienna?” Christopher thought of
the city and imagined himself meeting her there at some random place in a city
he’d never been to. But the image faded as Rebecca spoke.

“That was where Ari was from. He was
a survivor too. I met him through some of the other former prisoners.” The
waiter came to the table and to see if they needed anything. He immediately
seemed to regret it and began to back away. Christopher thanked him before
bidding Rebecca to continue. “We had successes, and we met Simon Wiesenthal and
soon started working with him. Do you know who he is?”

“The Nazi hunter?” Christopher
smiled. “As a former member of the SS, it pays to know people like Mr.
Wiesenthal. They might still come for me one day.”

Rebecca smiled, but it faded quickly.
“We joined with him for a while before we moved to Israel.”

“And you were married there?”
Christopher tried to keep his voice level, tried not to betray the torment of
saying these words. His acting was good. She seemed not to notice.

“Yes.”

“You never seem to want to talk about
him.” Christopher was trying to picture him. He almost asked her for a
photograph.

“Ari?”

“Yes, your husband. Every time I ask
about him you deflect the question.”

“Do you really want to hear about
him?” Rebecca was staring across the table at him, her hand on the stem of her
wine glass on the table. She raised it to her mouth. Christopher didn’t answer
but folded his arms, leaning forward to place his elbows on the table. A
pianist began and the sounds of the music drifted through the restaurant like
confetti on the wind. Rebecca looked around and then back at Christopher. She
looked as if she was going to say something else, but then began again.
“Earlier on you spoke about not wanting to fake it and realize that you were
married to the wrong person,” she took a sip of wine and Christopher felt his
heart jump and was ashamed of himself. “The fact that Ari and I are married is…not
as important as it once might have been.” Again, Christopher felt the shame of
his heart as it jumped.
 
“Ari is an
excellent person, very good at his job and very effective in what he does for
his country. But I feel like we’re business partners more than a married
couple.” Her eyes were stone as she spoke. “He’s dedicated and kind...” Her
voice trailed off. “He had a difficult act to follow, you know?”

She smiled but there was no joy there
and it quickly faded. “I think now that it was a reaction to you. Maybe I
didn’t have the strength to be alone and Ari and I had the same determination,
the same mission. Marriage seemed the logical step, but you never left me. Even
if I didn’t think about you during the day I’d have these dreams where you’d
come to me and we would be on the beach in Jersey and I’d reach out to touch you
but you’d disappear, and Ari would ask me why I’d wake up sweating.”
Christopher just looked back at her, had nothing to say.

Rebecca ran a hand through her hair
and let her head drift back to look at the ceiling. She brought her head back
down and locked eyes with Christopher once again. “But the dedication I feel to
my country and my people is more important than anything else to me. I have to
be where I am right now. There is still so much work to do, still so much
healing to go through, for so many of us. I couldn’t walk out on my country
now, not when it needs me most, and being married to Ari is a way of serving my
country and my people.” She was looking at him again now. “It seems to me that
you have the perfect life now. You have your daughter, your father and Uli’s
son. Alexandra and Tom are right there with their children and you have this
network of love around the world in the people you saved.”

Christopher shook his head and
laughed. “Perfect? That’s a big word, Rebecca.” Christopher sat back in his
chair. “It’s true what you say. I’ve been very lucky that my father and sister
survived the war and little Stefan is a joy, but sometimes I feel sorry for
Hannah. She has so much responsibility for someone her age. I thought that the
nights where she would have to come in and sleep with me would become less as
time went on, but they haven’t. I woke up last night in my hotel room, on the
floor, screaming. I was begging that she would be there but she wasn’t, so I
just got back into bed and shivered alone until the alarm call came this
morning.” Christopher looked around at the other tables, aware of each person,
but they were not looking at him. He looked back at Rebecca. “I have dreams
where I’m shooting the prisoners, where it’s me feeding the crematoria, it’s me
conducting the experiments and making the selections.”

Rebecca shook her head. “No,
Christopher, that wasn’t you. You didn’t do any of those monstrous things. You
are the only reason that hundreds of people are alive today.” She pointed her
finger at him across the table as she spoke. The words felt good but only as a
spattering of water on a massive fire.

“That’s what everyone tells me.” He
was staring into nothing as he spoke. “I still see Anka all the time. She was
the first little girl I tried to save in the camp and I saw her shot in front
of me. I still see her body collapse in the snow. And she comes to me, as the
teenager, as the young woman she should have been today, and I couldn’t save
her, I tried to, but I couldn’t…” Christopher tried to hold back the tears,
didn’t want to be crying here, with her, but it was too much. Rebecca stood up
walked around the table and held his head against her.

“Oh Christopher, you did so, so much.
You couldn’t save everyone, you just couldn’t.”

Christopher put his arms around her
waist and then suddenly became conscious of where they were and stood up. He
was in front of her. He reached down and kissed her on the cheek and walked
towards the bathroom. Several people in the dining room were looking at him as
he weaved through the chairs and tables. He thought of Hannah and his family in
Jersey and felt the calm spread back through him, his heart rate falling as he
reached the bathroom. The water from the faucet splashed down and he cooled his
hands under it and brought them up to wipe his face. He thought of what Rebecca
had said about Ari. He looked at his reflection in the mirror and judged
himself fit to return to the table. The food was on the table as he arrived.

“Are you feeling better, Christopher?”
she asked, and he looked at her. “I just want to let you know that your actions
have been recognized, not just by the people who brought you here, but in
Israel too. You have no reason for guilt or shame. You should be as proud of
yourself as I am of you.” She reached across the table and put her hand on his.
It should have felt wonderful.

Christopher took a deep breath and
then opened his mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come, the thoughts in his
head stopping him. Christopher felt his face tighten. He stared at her for a
few seconds before he spoke and, when he did, the words flowed out of him like
water. “What are you really doing in New York, Rebecca? Why are you all the way
over here alone, without your husband?” The words were infused with the anger
growing inside him, and her eyes were wide open now, her jaw dropping until she
caught herself.

“I told you already, I’m over here on
business.”

“You’re in marketing, is that right?
When did you stop hunting Nazis? How would you know what the Israelis are
thinking about me?”

Rebecca looked back across the table
at him with a tenderness in her eyes. “Christopher, what are you talking
about?” she whispered.

“Is it me? Did you come here to
investigate me? How long have you known about me, about what I really did?”
Confusion swam through him and he felt very hot. His head was light on his
shoulders and his breathing was quickened.

“I don’t know what you’re talking
about, Christopher, but I’d really appreciate it if you stopped now.”

“What did Israeli intelligence tell
you about me? Why didn’t you contact me if you knew?” He felt his voice shudder
in his throat. “You don’t work in marketing, do you?”

Rebecca moved her head to the side,
facing away from him. He was still staring at her and eventually she began
again. “It’s not like that, Christopher, it’s not. I only found out about you a
few days ago. I wanted to come here, to see you.” She reached across the table
to take his hand. “I’m not here…in that capacity.” She reached across with her
other hand, but Christopher was sitting back and her hand slipped from his.
“Christopher, it’s me. I’m here because I want to be….” But she stopped
talking. Christopher was staring at her. She took a deep breath. “The
Israelis…”

“The Mossad,” Christopher corrected
her.

“I’m not here as an agent of the
Mossad. I’m here as me, for you. I’ve wanted to see you, wanted to talk to you
for as long as I can remember. There hardly seems a time in my life now when I
wasn’t pining for you and what seems like a dream that we had together.”

Christopher ran a hand through his
hair. “What could the Mossad want with me?”

“There is nothing the Mossad wants
with you, perhaps for you to give them some information you might have, but
probably not even that. I wasn’t here just for you. You were an afterthought,
an addendum to the mission, the result of a secretary being thorough. They
thought I might be able to get information from you, that there might be
something you could help us with. But when I found out you would be here, that’s
when I volunteered for the job. I found out about you a week ago in Tel Aviv.
Ari handed me the file on you because he found out you were from Jersey.”

“You never told him about me?”

“Tell Ari that the love of my life
was an SS guard in Auschwitz? No, I never told him.” Her voice was dry as she
spoke, and she looked away to the side.

“How could you have not known about
me? You were investigating Nazi war criminals. How did my name never come up?
More than twenty people testified on my behalf at my trial.”

She shrugged. “I only dealt with the
camps I was in. I never gathered or shared information about anyone from
Auschwitz. We have other operatives who were there. I’d never heard of you
until last week. There are thousands of SS men, and thousands of files. I never
saw yours. I wish I had. I wish I had heard about you and I’m sure this would
all be different.” She reached towards him but he pulled away.

The words warmed and hacked at
Christopher’s heart equally and he was dizzy. He leant forward and put his head
into his hands and when he uncovered his eyes again Rebecca was no longer
looking at him but around the room, sipping the red wine from the glass in her
hand. She stood up and excused herself and Christopher watched her walk towards
the bathroom. He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared and the
thought that she was calling her husband, or even her commanding officer, crept
into his mind. What was the point in this and who knew if anything she said was
the truth now? But what would the Mossad have to gain from him? He knew nothing
and the files they must have had on him would show the testimonies of the
people who spoke on his behalf at his trial. There couldn’t be any other reason
that she would be here, in the Plaza hotel in New York, with him. He had to
trust her. This would probably be the last time he would ever see her.
Christopher picked up the knife and fork, forced himself to eat. He thought of
Hannah, and little Stefan, and his father, and he thought of Rebecca, and
wondered if the person in front of him was that same girl he’d met on the beach
in Jersey.