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After a cursory glance at incoming emails and my own to-do list, I knuckled down to make a plan. What did I know, and what did I want to know?
First on my list was the mysterious person Joel Goldberg had been emailing with, NotwhoIthinkIam. Who indeed?
I started surfing through a list of genealogy websites, hoping that Notwho had used the same handle in various sites. I found that he’d posted on several threads. The most interesting concerned people who had changed their names after the Holocaust.
Some had changed for pragmatic reasons – difficulty in spelling, or a desire not to wear their Jewish name in a world that had proved hostile to their people. Others had patriotic reasons – film producer Menahem Golan had changed his surname from Globus in honor of the Golan Heights. Others had changed as a way to start over again in a new place, leaving their old identity behind.
NotWho had asked Joel if he knew anything about someone named Karl Kurtz, and Joel hadn’t been able to find anything. But I had a few more tricks up my sleeve than Joel did. My fingers tingled with the thrill of hacking as flexed them, then hunted through my hard drive for a program that could break into a poorly-guarded database.
I was doing exactly what had sent me to prison in the first place—breaking into places I didn’t belong in service of what I believed was a greater good. I hoped that I’d learned a few things since then—how to hide my tracks better, for example. And this time I was determined that I would take down this killer before anyone else died.
Once I had the program initiated, I entered the addresses for several databases and told the program to search for both Kurtz and Feinberg, then pop up a message with the results.
While that worked in the background, I went to one of the forums where NotWho had participated. With a couple of keystrokes, I was able to view the information the user had provided when setting up the ID. I was stunned to find that the email address used belonged to Saul Benesch.
Was that what Benesch was hiding? That he wasn’t who he thought he was? And what did that mean, anyway?
I needed to talk to Benesch again, but I didn’t know him well enough to call him or drop in on him. I didn’t even have the connection that I had with Henry Namias, who had known my mother. I’d have to wait until the Talmud study group on Wednesday.
Suddenly my laptop pinged with an incoming alert from the website where I’d left the query about Kurtz earlier. The name Karl Kurtz had been found in a database for a displaced persons camp called Feldafing, near Munich, in what was in those immediate post-war years the American zone of occupation.
The record was skimpy. Kurtz said that he was a Jew aged twenty-two, a native of Berlin, and that he had been living underground under an assumed name. He wanted to emigrate to the United States.
That was it. No record of whatever happened to him.
When I looked up, Rochester was on the floor with the translation between his paws. “That does not belong to you,” I said, pulling it away from him. Fortunately he hadn’t chewed it, though there was a big drop of drool on the page, nearly covering the name Kalman Feinberg.
Why did that name resonate with me? I read through the document carefully. Aaron Feinberg had died at Auschwitz soon after he, his brother and Hafetz had been locked up there, but Kalman and Hafetz had been put to work.
My brain finally made the connection. Aaron Feinberg was the president of Shomrei Torah. Was he descended from Aaron and Kalman Feinberg?
But he couldn’t be. According to Hafetz, Kalman had died at Auschwitz about six months before the camp was liberated. I remembered the photo I’d found that included my mother, the one from a speech by a Holocaust survivor named Kalman Feinberg.
Had to be a different man. Feinberg was a common Jewish name, as was Aaron. Kalman was less familiar to me, but perhaps it had been popular in Berlin at the time. I had certainly seen certain names recurring in my classes at Eastern – Jessica, Kyle, Justin and so on.
The Feldafing database was still open on my laptop, and on a whim I typed in the name Kalman Feinberg. I was stunned to see a result, a form filled out when someone left the camp.
Kalman Feinberg, a Jew aged twenty-three and native of Berlin, had been granted a visa to emigrate to the United States. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had found a place for him to live and a job.
In Trenton, New Jersey.
My brain buzzed with connections. This was the man, then, who had spoken to the youth group my mother belonged to about his experience during the Holocaust. The father of Aaron Feinberg, president of Shomrei Torah. He had been in Feldafing at the same time as this mysterious Karl Kurtz. Did they know each other? They were the same age, both Jews from Berlin.
Could Myer Hafetz have been mistaken, and Aaron Feinberg survived? Perhaps he’d simply been transferred to another camp, and Hafetz had lost track of him.
I went back through the database looking for an entry form for Feinberg, but couldn’t find one.
I looked at Rochester. “Kurtz went into the camp but never left. Feinberg never entered the camp, but left it.”
He looked up at me, then rolled back on his side. “Don’t you see it, puppy? Maybe Kurtz and Feinberg are the same person. And Kurtz was German, not Jewish.”
He yawned.
Was his disinterest because I was on the wrong track? Or just that he wanted to take a nap?
When he entered the camp, Kurtz admitted that he had been living under a different name in hiding. Perhaps during his stay he had merely reappropriated his own name? Or like many others, he’d chosen a new name to go with his new life. Nothing illegal or immoral about that.
I had too many ideas buzzing in my brain and I needed to talk to Rick. How was I going to tell him that I’d gotten this information? Should I be honest? After all, he’d asked me to work my online mojo. He knew that meant hacking, didn’t he? Or was he so certain that I was following a straight and narrow path that he hadn’t warned me to be honest?
I left Friar Lake early and headed to Rick’s house. “I’m fine,” he protested, as he opened the door. “Tam was here for a few hours. She cleaned up and made me dinner to heat up later.”
Rochester romped past me to play with Rascal, and I followed Rick into the living room. “I’m glad you’re better because I need to talk to you,” I said.
By then I had decided I’d tell Rick how I had searched the databases, without mentioning that I’d had to break in. If he asked, I’d be honest. But I didn’t want us to get sidetracked in a discussion of my problems if I didn’t have to.
I laid out the situation between Kurtz and Feinberg. “One man comes into the camp, another goes out,” I said.
“Wasn’t one of them the guy in that document you had translated?” he asked.
I pulled it out of my messenger bag. The spot of drool Rochester had left on Kalman Feinberg’s name was dry but still discolored. I handed the paper to Rick.
“See here?” he said, after he’d read for a moment. “This guy Hafetz says that Kalman Feinberg died at Auschwitz. So how did he end up at this Feldafing place?”
I looked at the paper with him.
“Hold on,” I said after a minute. “Suppose Kurtz was lying about being Jewish when he entered the camp. I read about it, and it was the first all-Jewish displaced persons camp set up. Once you got in there, you had a golden ticket to go to Israel or the United States.”
“So Kurtz pretended to be Jewish to get in,” Rick said. “But isn’t there a basic problem with pretending something like that?”
“What do you mean?”
He pointed to the place in Hafetz’s testimony where the police had forced him to drop his pants. “Wouldn’t they check that in the camp?”
“You mean to see if he was circumcised?” I turned to my laptop. “Hold on a minute.”
I did a quick search, then turned the screen so Rick could read. “This says that some German Jews didn’t circumcise their sons because they wanted to be modern. He could have said that.”
“OK. So this Kurtz, a German, not Jewish, shows up at the camp and convinces them to let him in so that he can take advantage of the immigration options.”
“And he changes his name to someone he knew back in Berlin who died. Maybe to honor his memory or hide his background. Maybe just because it was easier.”
“And he comes to Trenton as Kalman Feinberg. Then what?” Rick asked.
“He gets a job, he gets married. And then Myer Hafetz shows up.”
“Who was also from Berlin, and knew that the real Kalman Feinberg died at Auschwitz.” Rick nodded. “But why does that matter to Kurtz-slash-Feinberg?”
“Because he lied,” I said. “He married a Jewish woman. He named his son after the dead man’s brother. In the two years before Hafetz arrived, he had become a big shot at Shomrei Torah.”
“It’s a big step from that to killing someone – to killing two people,” Rick said. “And right now this is all just conjecture. We could be totally on the wrong track.”
“I need to talk to Saul Benesch,” I said. “He might have the key here. Why was he looking for Karl Kurtz now?” I told Rick about my plan to speak with Benesch at the Talmud study group on Wednesday morning.
“Be careful what you say,” Rick said. “You don’t want to be the next one in this killer’s crosshairs.”
