“He was beaten by the SS and said that he had promised himself he would avenge the death of his relatives and his own sufferings. . . . He knew where one German lived by himself. He stealthily approached him and beat him with his fists, but he still felt unavenged. He found a nearby axe and described in detail how he killed the man with the axe in cold blood with his own hands. He said after he saw the lacerated corpse he felt better and went home. . . . At no time [since] has his behavior indicated any of the murderous traits indicated.”
—A psychiatric report from
Camp Fohrenwald, Team 106
I WAS BACK IN DR. GABOR’S OFFICE. This time there was no reason. I had not lost my voice. My vision was twenty-twenty. My only symptom was an outburst of honesty. Truth-telling landed me in a psychiatrist’s office. I know that is what patients always say, but in this case it was accurate.
When Madeleine had come to get me after the incident in the courtroom, the police told her I had disrupted the proceedings by insisting I was Peter van Pels. She got huffy then, my good little wife.
“What’s wrong with that? He is Peter van Pels.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s got to yell about it in a New York State courtroom, ma’am.”
In the car on the way home, she said I had to go back to Dr. Gabor. Gabor or someone like him.
“Ah, but there’s no one quite like our Dr. Gabor,” I said. I wanted to show her I had not lost my sense of humor.
She started to cry. “If you refuse to get help, Peter, I’ll take the children and leave. I swear to God, this time I mean it.”
I believed her. The memory of the boy she’d mistaken me for had atrophied. The expectations she’d had of me had withered. I told her I would make an appointment the first thing in the morning. I did not even argue that it was a waste of perfectly good money. There was nothing wrong with me anymore. It was Otto, and that crazy writer who thought he spoke in Anne’s voice, and the rest of the world that was sick. But I was too exhausted to argue. My muscles ached. That was from the skirmish with the court guards. My nerves twitched. My mind was sore. It would be so easy to give up. I felt the words rising in my chest. There’s something I have to tell you . . . about the years in Amsterdam . . . about Auschwitz . . . about my circumcised penis. The innocence would drain from the eyes she was determined not to close. A cataract of fear would cloud her vision. I remembered the shame I had seen on Abigail’s face when I caught her staring at my number. I clamped my mouth shut. I had acted irresponsibly in court, but I had not lost all sense of decency.
UNLIKE MY red-haired friend, Gabor needed to refresh his memory about who I was. He sat studying a folder full of papers while I waited across the desk from him. It was still cluttered with the tools of his trade, and primitive symbols, and those sad martyrs from Calais. Nothing in the office had changed, except the doctor. He looked more prosperous than ever, but that might have been the deep polished-mahogany tinge to his face and hands.
“Been south?” I asked while he browsed through the notes he had written about me years before.
“Mmm,” was all he answered.
He closed the folder, leaned back in his chair, fixed me across the desk with that inane owl’s stare, and asked what brought me back.
I had made up my mind. This time I would tell him the truth. He was not someone I had to protect. I would tell him everything, or almost everything. There was one matter I could not afford to confess. I was an American citizen, a pillar of the community, but that did not mean I could not be deported or extradited.
I began with the boy in the diary.
“You believe me?” I asked when he had written it all down.
“Why not?”
“Otto Frank didn’t. At least he pretended not to.” I told him about my letter to Otto and the answer from his attorneys.
“Maybe he’s not pretending. After the war, when your name wasn’t on the list of survivors, he concluded you were dead. He’s been living with that sorrow for a long time. It might be too painful for him to entertain hope.”
“If he’s so heartbroken, why did he denigrate my father’s memory? He’s afraid to believe I’m alive.”
“Are you so clear about how and when everything happened?”
I thought of my mother’s blond hair and my father’s mustache. “I remember the important things.”
He looked down at the file he had left open on his desk. “Your father died in Auschwitz, correct?”
“We’ve been through this.”
“In the selection, that first night on the train platform?”
I nodded.
He rifled through the pages in the folder. They were covered with scrawls. His handwriting was as muddled as his office.
“Unless he died a few months later, when you watched him being marched off with a group of other men, then saw the clothes in the truck when it came back.”
I could not recall telling him either account, though I remembered both of them.
“I’m not trying to catch you out, Mr. van Pels. Both deaths are real in your head.”
In my head. I could have murdered him for that.
“My father’s dead, and you tell me it doesn’t matter how I killed him.”
“How you killed him?”
“How they killed him.”
He stared across the desk at me with that idiotic gaze.
“I am not a murderer.”
“I never suggested you were.”
“That night in the barn was an aberration.”
He waited.
“It was right after the war. We were still hungry, for Christ’s sake. That’s how soon after the war it was.”
He went on staring at me.
“We just wanted to have some fun. And get a little of our own back.”
“Your own?”
“Revenge. Hell, we deserved it, after what we’d been through. He deserved what he got too. The war’s over, and all of a sudden he’s just an innocent farmer. Like he never heard of the SS Like he didn’t have the fucking tattoo to prove it. The tattoo and those mean little eyes and that pig’s snout of a nose.”
“You had some sort of run-in with an SS man?”
“The bastard only got what was coming to him.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
I had thought he would never ask.
The others had had enough. Come on, they said. We’ve had our fun. We hurt some Germans. We made some money. But I could not stop. The hunger still gnawed. I had beaten up a few men. I had broken some windows, taken a pair of boots and a bottle of schnapps, stolen some money. Penny-ante stuff. Crumbs of revenge. I craved a banquet. And I knew where to find it. Everyone knew about the farmer, what he had done during the war, what he was just waiting to start doing again.
The unpainted wood glinted in moonlight thin as water. The door to the barn was open. The son-of-a-bitch was a lousy farmer, on top of everything else.
The stench of animals and manure and sweat and piss and alcohol made me gasp. The only stink missing was fear. The farmer was unconscious. I was fearless.
Rats scuttled in the darkness. I took another step inside. An animal snorted. Something pawed the ground. Snores sawed the sickening air. Shapes began to take form in the darkness. I made out a haunch, a snout, a heap of filthy clothing, an axe. The clothing went up and down in rhythm with the snoring. The shaft of the axe fit my hand as if it had been made for it.
I used both hands to lift the axe, but it fell of its own weight. Blood spurted into the watery moonlight. I raise the axe again, and it falls a second time, a third, until I stop counting. Blood makes a black puddle on the hard dirt floor. Moonlight flickers in the pool like a flame. I drop the axe on top of the heap of stinking clothing. My stolen boots skid through the blood as I begin to run.
When I finished the story, I took out my handkerchief and mopped my face. The sweat was pouring out of me as if I were still hacking away with that axe. Gabor was lolling back in his chair, cool as a cucumber.
“So you went to the barn and you killed the SS bastard with an axe. Good for you. If you really did.”
“What do you mean, if I really did? I just told you I did. I never told anyone else in my life.”
“You never told anyone? Not the others you were with that night?”
“I told you, they had had enough. They left.”
“What about in the DP camp? Perhaps you mentioned it during the psychological evaluation?”
“Are you crazy? You think I would have got into this country if I had told them that?”
“So no one could have stolen your story?”
“What do you mean, stolen my story?”
He straightened his chair, stood, and went to a filing cabinet in the corner. Keeping his back to me, he pulled out a drawer and began searching. The man really was a son-of-a-bitch. I confess something I never told a soul. I admit I am a murderer. And he decides to look for something in his files.
When he came back to his desk, he was carrying a manila folder. He opened it, rifled through sheets of paper, and handed me one.
“What’s that?”
“Why don’t you read it?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor, but I did not come here to read about other people’s problems.”
“I think this will interest you.”
I took the piece of paper from him and began to read. I did not have to go beyond the first few paragraphs. “How did you do this?”
“How did I do what?”
“Get my story down in my exact words while I was talking.” I knew that was not what he had done, but I needed time.
“It’s not your story, Mr. van Pels, or rather it is, but you’re not the one who killed the man in the barn.”
I was still holding the piece of paper. I dropped it on his desk.
“Why do you think you were referred to me that first time, when you lost your voice?”
“The medical doctors couldn’t find anything. They said a psychiatrist was my only hope.”
“Yes, but there are many psychiatrists. Why me?”
“I didn’t want to drive to New York.”
“I’m not the only psychiatrist in New Jersey.”
This time I did not answer.
“Didn’t they tell you anything else about me?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So you didn’t know I work with survivors of the camps?”
“I have nothing in common with those people. They’re frightened. They live in the past. I have put it behind me.”
“You have this story in common. That paper you just read is a record of an interview in a DP camp.”
“Okay, so I’m not the only guy who hacked up some Nazi bastard in a barn.”
“You’re probably right there. More of that sort of thing went on than we like to admit. Maybe you’re one of the killers, but I don’t think so. Don’t ask me why. It’s just a hunch.”
“I didn’t think psychiatrists were supposed to have hunches.”
“Hunches are all we have, Mr. van Pels. But what I’m really curious about is why you’re so determined to believe you’re one of the murderers.”
“That’s the way I remember it. I even dream about it.”
I waited for him to rifle through that damn folder again, and remind me that I told him I do not dream. If he did that, I was going to get up and walk out of his office. I should have already. I confess the most serious crime I ever committed, and he tells me I’m not guilty of it.
“You remember killing the German because you wanted to kill him. You and a lot of others. And when one of you did, all of you did.”
“A minyan of revenge.”
He tilted his head to one side quizzically, as if I had surprised him.
“You said you were not knowledgeable about your religion.”
“You can’t help picking things up, here and there.”
I KNEW as I locked the car door that I was asking for trouble. On these potholed streets, lined with crumbling buildings defaced by rage, a Cadillac was an invitation to theft.
The men were already folding their prayer shawls and unwinding their phylacteries when I arrived. I was not sorry to have missed the prayers.
The redhead came up the aisle to meet me. “Years go by, you don’t come near the place. Now all of a sudden, you’re a regular. You’re thinking of converting back to us, maybe? It’s not such a bad idea. Six million we got to replace.”
“I have three children.”
“Mazel tov. You’re raising them Jewish?”
I shook my head no.
“I didn’t think so.” He slid into one of the pews and, grabbing the back of the seat in front, lowered himself to a sitting position. His jaw tightened with the effort. Chasing me up the aisle, he was fast on his feet, but bending his back was a slow exercise in agony. That was another reason I avoided people like him. I did not like to be reminded of the pain. I did not want to know what had caused it. Nonetheless, I sat beside him.
“Your wife, I bet she’s not Jewish.”
“She is.”
He turned to me. The pale, almost invisible eyebrows arched. “This I don’t get. You move heaven and earth to be a goy, then you marry a Jewish girl? You couldn’t find yourself a nice shiksa?”
“I fell in love with my wife.”
He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “A romantic I got on my hands.” He lowered his eyes to me. “She’s the love of your life? No one else you ever looked at twice?”
“I almost married her sister.” I had no idea why I was telling him this. I never thought about it anymore.
“You think this is a coincidence? All the girls give you a hard-on—you should excuse my language in shul—they just happen to be Jewish? So what happened with the sister?”
“She said she couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t Jewish.”
“I wasn’t hearing this with my own ears, I wouldn’t believe it. Divine retribution, I’d say, if I believed in God, which I don’t, just like you.”
“You don’t believe in God?”
“After what happened?”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I already told you. Someone got to come.”
“Why?”
“How many times I got to explain it to you? Cain. The minyan. The same reason you keep coming.”
“I came because—” I stopped. I had no idea why I was here.
“Yes?”
I told him about the night in the barn, and what I had been believing all these years, and Gabor. His face was impassive as he listened.
“So?” he asked when I finished.
“You’re not surprised?”
“What’s to surprise?”
“But it’s so vivid. Even in dreams.”
“Dreams.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Somebody invents a way to get rid of dreams the way they can get rid of these”—he tapped the number on his arm—“they’d make a fortune. That’s what made you go to a headshrinker, you got bad dreams?”
“A little more than that.” I told him about standing up at the trial, and shouting about the truth, and telling people who I was. “Nobody believed me.”
“All these years you’re pretending to be someone else, now nobody believes you’re you, and you got your feelings hurt.”
“I don’t care if they believe me. But I could kill them for what they did to my father.”
“Now you’re a killer again.”
“They’ve made my own wife think my father stole bread out of my mouth.”
“Maybe you didn’t lie so much to your wife, she wouldn’t have so much trouble telling what’s true from what’s not.”
“What makes you think I lie to my wife?”
He shot me that yellow smile. “She know you come here?”
I shook my head no.
“She know you’re Jewish?”
I did not answer.
“You tell her what you told me just now, and the headshrinker, and that court full of strangers?”
“I have to protect her. Her and my children.”
“With that, I wouldn’t argue. I bet you make a good life for them.”
“I try.”
“Nice house.”
“Nice enough.”
“Wall-to-wall carpeting. All the latest appliances. A deep freezer stuffed with food, I bet.”
I did not answer.
“Tell me, you got a lot of mirrors in that fancy house of yours?”
So that was where he was going. “You mean how can I look myself in the mirror when I lie about being a Jew?”
“Again with the Jews. If half the people who say they are spent half as much time worrying about it as you, who say you’re not, this place would be full every morning. I’m not talking about running around with a Star of David on your arm. We got enough of that from the Nazis. I’m talking about being a mensch. You know what a mensch is?”
“A man.”
“A little more than that. Decent. Dependable. A stand-up guy.”
“So?”
“So, I was you, I was so worried about my father’s memory, I’d forget Otto Frank and go home and look in one of those mirrors in that fancy house you built to keep everyone safe.”