1945

Debbie had an open invitation to work in the furniture store and help Mr. Ginsberg with his bookkeeping. She did so during the fall whenever she had the time or needed the money. Thus, she didn't really particularly notice when no one called out to her and said hello as she entered the building that Saturday morning. She wasn't expected and Mr. G. and his sales staff of two were probably having a meeting, which, on a slow Saturday, frequently meant analyzing the weekend's football games. With soldiers returning to athletics, no one knew who had good teams or bad, but the consensus was that the collegiate reign of West Point and the Naval Academy was just about over.

She entered the back offices and hung up her coat. Then she heard a strange sound coming from Mr. G.'s personal office. The door was closed, which was unusual. Mr. G. had a thing about keeping it open so he could see what was happening. Curious, she tapped lightly before opening it. Mr. G. was seated behind his desk. He was slumped over and held his head in his hands. The normal disarray she teased him about was all over the floor, as if it had been swept there from his desk, which, for once, was almost bare.

Mr. G. looked up and she could see that he had been crying. For once she wished she had called before coming in. "Mr. G.? Are you okay?" God, what a dumb thing to say, she thought; of course he wasn't okay.

He looked at her for a moment. His eyes were pools of deepest sadness and, to her surprise, seemed to be tinged with rage. "Nothing is okay. Tell me, were the others afraid to enter, or were you not aware?"

Debbie took a seat in the wooden chair across from him. Aware of what? she wondered. "I just came in to do a little work. There was no one outside so I just walked in."

Ginsberg nodded. To her he looked as if he had aged a decade since she had last seen him only a few days earlier. "My faithful staff is doubtless across the street drinking coffee and waiting for me to calm down. A few minutes ago I was quite emotional. Do you wish to know why?"

"Yes," Debbie said timidly.

Mr. G. held a batch of papers in his hand. "I finally got these this morning. They came from a friend of mine in the International Red Cross in France. He's been trying to track down the family my wife and I had in Europe. You will notice, dear Debbie, that I used the past tense."

Debbie cringed. "I heard you."

"Twenty-one of our relatives were alive in Germany and Poland as of a few years ago. Some on the German side, my side, were imprisoned before the war, while those on my wife's side, in Poland, we had hoped were refugees who maybe had fled to Russia. Do you know how many are left?"

"No, sir."

"Four," he said in a rasping voice. "Four out of twenty-one. The ones who went to Buchenwald died a long time ago, only we were never informed. Notifying next of kin of dead Jews was not a Nazi priority. As near as my friend can tell, the people in camps like Buchenwald were worked very hard, fed very little, and finally died of malnutrition or any of the hundreds of diseases that will strike down a weakened body. If they were unable to work for their keep, they were beaten, sometimes beaten to death.

"My wife's people who lived in Poland were swept up by the Germans after the invasion and taken to a place in Poland the Germans called Auschwitz. Do you know what went on there?"

Debbie could only repeat herself. "No, sir."

She'd heard the stories, but, like most people, she'd found them too terrible to be true.

"My friend referred to it as a death factory that may have swallowed millions of victims, mainly Jews, and spat out only their ashes. When the inmates first entered the camp, the healthy were separated from the weak- like the proverbial wheat from the chaff- by some Nazi who had appointed himself God. The weak were stripped of their clothing and valuables and sent into what they were told were showers. When they were all together, they were gassed from the showers and died. Do you know what the healthy Jews had to do?"

Debbie shook her head.

"They had to get rid of the bodies. But first they plundered them for eyeglasses, gold fillings, nice hair, and anything else that might help Hitler. The clothing the dead left behind, even though much was just rags, was sent to German families who had lost possessions because of the bombing."

The thought of it sickened her. Paul had written to her of some of it. He'd seen a couple of the smaller camps and had told of emaciated Jewish refugees wandering Europe. She'd read other accounts in Time and elsewhere, but they were as if she were reading fiction. It couldn't happen to her or to someone she knew. Now she knew she'd been horribly wrong.

"But," Mr. Ginsberg sighed, "six survived."

"I thought you said four?"