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After they clinked glasses, Abby felt the flush in her cheeks slowly fade, replaced by numbness. She tried for a smile but failed, her facial muscles seemingly frozen into a frown. As they ate, she studied her grandfather in silence. She watched the way he brought his fork to his mouth, the way he chewed and interjected occasionally in her parents’ conversation but mostly keeping to himself. She watched for signs he was the man she had grown to love and not the man from his past. She watched for signs that he wasn’t. She watched him blow out the single birthday candle on his cake and wondered what he wished for.
To start over? Absolution? For Abby’s silence?
By the time her mother cleared the dinner dishes, Abby excused herself to do her homework, but instead of mounting the stairs, she continued down the hall to the guest room, where she waited for her grandfather.
Several minutes later, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him, his expression placid, and she wondered if he had known this had been where she’d really come all along.
She said nothing as he made his way to the wingback chair in the corner of the room, across from her position on the edge of the large four-poster bed.
“I figured the other night was probably not the last you’d want to discuss this. How did you find out?” he asked.
Abby’s eyes widened. She had prepared herself to ask the questions, not the other way around. Unsure of how much she wanted to give away, Abby surprised herself by telling him a half-truth. “Grandma. After she died, she left me her jewelry box, and inside was a letter where she told me everything.”
He nodded, saying nothing.
“Based on your lack of reaction, I take it you knew she had found out?” Abby asked.
“I suspected as much. She found the journal and started asking me about it. I got so upset, eventually, she let it go.”
Sighing, Abby could imagine he did more than get upset. She was willing to bet he put on such a display, he practically forced her to drop it.
She ran a hand over her face. Despite having some answers, she needed more. If the other night was about denial and confirming the truth, tonight was about understanding. Who was the guy watching her at the coffee shop? Who was responsible for Lawson and McBride’s murders? Was that him, too? She needed to know everything, her grandfather’s whole story. Because if she was being honest with herself, a part of her hoped and prayed there was an explanation for this that made it somehow better, despite knowing there could be no such thing.
“How...” Abby paused, pressing her palms to her eyes. “I can’t even believe I’m about to ask this.” She dropped her hands and continued. “I need to know everything. From the beginning. How did you get on the wrong side of the war? How did you become, not just a Nazi officer but a renowned one? You were coined...” She couldn’t say it. The words stuck in her throat and on her tongue, but she ground her teeth and pushed through. “...The Butcher of Auschwitz.” She nearly gagged saying it out loud.
“I was seventeen when my parents were killed by a drunk driver. The driver of the car was a Jewish shop owner in town. I was left to provide for my three sisters by myself. Me. No one else. By the time Hitler came into power, several years later, I was thirsty for someone to blame for the life I’d been unfairly dealt. I was thirsty for a role model because mine were taken from me so early. I felt...lost, until he took me under his wing. I don’t know why. At the time, I felt special, I guess. He had chosen me, among several others, to align himself with, to confide in, to lean on.”
Her grandfather pointed at himself, wincing with the words. “He made me feel special, and so when he started his propaganda on the Jews—his war against them, s
preading stories of their destruction and started proclaiming how they’d ruin us—I believed it. He argued that they stabbed us in the back and were the reason for the defeat of the German Empire. It was a slow, but powerful, grooming of his men that made us believe Jews were a lesser race. He convinced us they would ultimately ruin Germany if given the chance.”
He blinked and continued, rubbing his hands on his pants as he spoke. “I was still very angry about my parents and so I drank this in, soaked it up. I believed every word because I was mad. It wasn’t hard to convince me to follow him. He believed in me, and all I saw was a man who wanted to control the people who killed my parents.”
Abby swallowed, unsure of what to make of what he said.
“Even if I believe that, when you started working in the camps, when you saw the people being killed—women and children brutally murdered—how could you continue to follow? No matter how much you hurt, I can’t rationalize killing innocent people. Why did you go along with that? Why did you kill people by your own hand? I don’t think I can ever make sense of that, no matter what happened in your past.”
She waited for an answer, but his gaze shifted from her to the floor. A vein pulsed in his forehead, as he stared at a spot on the rug in silence.
“Grandpa?”
“What do you want me to say?” he growled. “That I’m sorry?” He glanced up at her with eyes of steel. “I told you the other night when you asked me about it that I was sorry. I told you I regretted all of it. I’d trade places with them if I could, but you and I both know life doesn’t work that way!” He shook his head, his lips trembling.
When he spoke again, his voice cracked, thick with tears. “After the war, I ran like many of the other officers. A church took me in, providing me sanctuary since we were being persecuted. In my time away, I reflected and began to realize the horrors of what I had done. Away from my men, the lies, the pressure and commands of my superiors, I fully realized the monster I had been. I repented, and when I was presented with the chance to escape, to form a new life, I took it. I tattooed my arm, not only as a means of escape, but as a reminder—to never forget my past mistakes, my vow to change. I took Yoel’s name because it was by reading his journal that I came to realize the depth of my sins.”
Abby swallowed. “Did you kill him?”
“Who?”
“Yoel Gutman. The boy who penned the journal. Was he one of the Jews you killed? Is that how you came to possess the journal?”
For no sensical reason, this question was imperative. He had killed many, maybe thousands, but this one murder mattered most.
He nodded, using no words to confirm this iniquity.
Abby folded in half, resting her hands on her knees, unable to breathe. Only a very sick man could take the name of one of his victims as his own. She knew this, yet the denial in her heart still ebbed and flowed like a river, holding on to love.
“How could you live with yourself? How could you just lie and pretend it never happened?” Straightening, she asked, “How could you go on to live a lifetime knowing so many didn’t live because of you?”
