Chapter 58

The soldiers took the abstract things first: name, date of birth, country of origin. Then the concrete possessions: money, jewelry, family photographs, the pretty hair clip clasped onto the ponytail of a doe-eyed six-year-old, the children themselves.

After that, the prisoners were ordered to strip out of their clothing. With every stitch discarded, scraps of dignity followed. Later, the hair clippers would relieve them of their vanity.

In the bathhouses, doused in dark disinfectant that reeked and stung like battery acid, they washed themselves under the pounding spray of cold water. After that, physicians poked, prodded, and plunged gloved fingers into all of their orifices—promptly ridding them of any remaining pride they might have secreted away.

Between the medical bunker and the uniform bunker, the soldiers used fists, curses, batons, and boot heels to break their will.

Dressed in blue-and-white-striped prison uniforms, the captives trotted into a massive open-air space known as Roll Call Square. They were made to stand with their arms crossed behind their heads as they listened to the commandant recite the rules, regulations, and penalties associated with life in Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

Later, they ate a meal of stale bread, potato soup, and coffee. It was the worst food they’d ever tasted, the saddest feast they’d ever been unlucky enough to attend.

* * *

Lizard was assigned to a barracks that housed fifty-three men. Within months, the occupants would swell to two hundred. For now, though, Lizard had his pick of beds.

He chose a lower bunk, opposite the window, sat down on the lumpy straw mattress, and gazed out at the star-freckled sky. Hushed conversation hummed all around him. Soon, however, the talk died as people drifted off to sleep or retreated into the chaos of their worried minds.

Lizard remained awake long into the night, contemplating the choices he’d made, the lies he’d told, and the roads he’d wandered that had now delivered him back to the very place his parents had fled so many years earlier.

He supposed it had all begun with his birth, an innocent enough event that was no different from anyone else’s. He was the youngest of three, the last child to be born to Moise and Rachel Rubenstein—Jews who had fled Weimar after Germany was defeated in the Great War.

“You think we wanted to leave our home?” Lizard’s father often lamented. “We had to go because the Germans put their defeat squarely on the shoulders of Jews.”

“And the Communists,” Rachel always reminded him.

“Yes, the Communists. They accused us of working for foreign interests. They called us traitors, treated us like criminals. This,” Moise blared, pounding his fist on the dinner table, “after Jews fought loyally in the war!”

They’d arrived at Ellis Island in September of 1920 and were met by a cousin who had been as close as a brother to Moise. The family traveled by train to St. Louis, where for over twenty years the cousin had lived, worked, and built a life for himself.

“And now you will do the same,” he told Moise.

The first years were lean. The family of five shared one bedroom at the back of the cousin’s small home. Leo (he’d not yet christened himself Lizard) and his sisters shared a double bed and their parents slept on the floor.

Moise, a gifted tailor, took any and all menial jobs that came his way to supplement the scant income from his stock and trade.

In time, though, his business grew and prospered, and within three years the family moved into a two-bedroom cold-water flat. Four years after that, Moise was solvent enough to purchase a modest three-bedroom home.

“Here in America,” Moise reminded his children daily, “you can become anything you want to be.”

Lizard would take his father’s words to lengths he would have never imagined.