Bess said, “Remarkable how resilient we are. I never would have thought I’d be this calm. The one I’m worried about is Julian.
“There’s a strange thing about marriage, Sylvia. Even after all these years there are moments that cannot be shared. I suppose they belong between man and his God.” Bess looked at Sylvia’s concerned face and added, “My dear, you will never know how grateful I am to you for being here at this moment. You are such a comfort.”
“This is where I want to be, where I’m happiest. If you don’t mind, I’ve decided I’m going to be your houseguest for a while.”
“Mind? Oh, my dearest girl, I’m overjoyed. But as close as your mother and I are, I wouldn’t want your mother to feel that I was alienating you.”
Sylvia smiled.
“She already knows that and she won’t feel jealous.”
That night Sylvia sat down at the desk and wrote Martin a letter. Not a love letter, really, but one of nostalgia in the hope that memories of their happy childhood would give him something to hold on to, to support him during the terrible weeks and months ahead.
Chapter Eight
Long before Martin received the letter he was on ship bound for Italy.
Nothing in his life had prepared him for the horrors of years to come.
Nothing would ever erase the sounds and sights of the brutality and carnage. He saw the unburied dead rotting by the roadside, old people and
children starving, girls barely in their teens who knew just enough English to say, “Okay, GI Joe. You give me chocolate, I give you good time.”
In a back street of Palermo, after the Italian army had retreated, Martin watched as a drunken paratrooper and an emaciated thirteen-year-old girl climbed the rickety stairs to her bedroom while her little brothers fought each other for scraps of food in the garbage cans outside.
But nothing he saw in defeated Italy equalled Germany after WE Day.
Hitler had told the world exactly what he intended to do when he’d written Mein Kampf, but no one had believed he would carry out his final solution. Even the first stories that filtered back after the destruction of the Third Reich seemed too terrible to be true.
For centuries European governments had stood by while Jews were persecuted, but never had the civilized world been faced by murder on such a scale. Six million Jews. Six million innocent lives. The Allies rushed in to cover the shame of the denial. And no one felt more outrage than Martin Roth. Captain Martin Roth, assigned to locate and reunite survivors of Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen names that would make their instigators pariahs until the end of time.
Sitting in his makeshift office amidst the bomb craters of Berlin, trying to pair off names and sort the legacy of the dead, Martin thought at moments that he would die of grief and shame. How could he not have known as early as 1940? Every Jew in the world should have made it his or her business to have realized what was going on. Every family smugly writing checks to Zionist groups, to their local temple, should have raised a cry to heaven. But they had sat back and allowed genocide to be perpetrated on a scale never before seen.
Never again would Martin take his Judaism for granted. The lessons he had learned were bitter, but at last he knew who he was, what he was.
And for the first time in his entire life he felt like a Jew.
When he was finally ordered back to the States, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go. His work was not finished and he tried to extend his tour to help the refugees. But his commanding officer took one look at Martin’s ravaged face and sent him home. As his troop ship pulled into New York harbour, he took out his mother’s last letter.
“Thank God you’re whole and will be coming home to us soon … But that wasn’t quite what was going to happen. Martin wasn’t going home right away. And although it might not have shown, he wasn’t exactly whole. If there were lines on his face, they were a
“There’s a strange thing about marriage, Sylvia. Even after all these years there are moments that cannot be shared. I suppose they belong between man and his God.” Bess looked at Sylvia’s concerned face and added, “My dear, you will never know how grateful I am to you for being here at this moment. You are such a comfort.”
“This is where I want to be, where I’m happiest. If you don’t mind, I’ve decided I’m going to be your houseguest for a while.”
“Mind? Oh, my dearest girl, I’m overjoyed. But as close as your mother and I are, I wouldn’t want your mother to feel that I was alienating you.”
Sylvia smiled.
“She already knows that and she won’t feel jealous.”
That night Sylvia sat down at the desk and wrote Martin a letter. Not a love letter, really, but one of nostalgia in the hope that memories of their happy childhood would give him something to hold on to, to support him during the terrible weeks and months ahead.
Chapter Eight
Long before Martin received the letter he was on ship bound for Italy.
Nothing in his life had prepared him for the horrors of years to come.
Nothing would ever erase the sounds and sights of the brutality and carnage. He saw the unburied dead rotting by the roadside, old people and
children starving, girls barely in their teens who knew just enough English to say, “Okay, GI Joe. You give me chocolate, I give you good time.”
In a back street of Palermo, after the Italian army had retreated, Martin watched as a drunken paratrooper and an emaciated thirteen-year-old girl climbed the rickety stairs to her bedroom while her little brothers fought each other for scraps of food in the garbage cans outside.
But nothing he saw in defeated Italy equalled Germany after WE Day.
Hitler had told the world exactly what he intended to do when he’d written Mein Kampf, but no one had believed he would carry out his final solution. Even the first stories that filtered back after the destruction of the Third Reich seemed too terrible to be true.
For centuries European governments had stood by while Jews were persecuted, but never had the civilized world been faced by murder on such a scale. Six million Jews. Six million innocent lives. The Allies rushed in to cover the shame of the denial. And no one felt more outrage than Martin Roth. Captain Martin Roth, assigned to locate and reunite survivors of Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen names that would make their instigators pariahs until the end of time.
Sitting in his makeshift office amidst the bomb craters of Berlin, trying to pair off names and sort the legacy of the dead, Martin thought at moments that he would die of grief and shame. How could he not have known as early as 1940? Every Jew in the world should have made it his or her business to have realized what was going on. Every family smugly writing checks to Zionist groups, to their local temple, should have raised a cry to heaven. But they had sat back and allowed genocide to be perpetrated on a scale never before seen.
Never again would Martin take his Judaism for granted. The lessons he had learned were bitter, but at last he knew who he was, what he was.
And for the first time in his entire life he felt like a Jew.
When he was finally ordered back to the States, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go. His work was not finished and he tried to extend his tour to help the refugees. But his commanding officer took one look at Martin’s ravaged face and sent him home. As his troop ship pulled into New York harbour, he took out his mother’s last letter.
“Thank God you’re whole and will be coming home to us soon … But that wasn’t quite what was going to happen. Martin wasn’t going home right away. And although it might not have shown, he wasn’t exactly whole. If there were lines on his face, they were a
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