Ghost of the Past
It started on a cold day sometime in April. It must have been a Sunday because I was told to spend the day cleaning the house, which usually only happened after church. I usually went up the attic at times like these, so that I could “clean” while spending most of the day searching through old trunks and looking at family heirlooms. You would think my grandmother would notice that I always reorganized the attic when she ordered cleaning days, but if she had, she never spoke up about it.
I lived with my grandparents ever since my mother died when I was a baby. My father disappeared shortly after. He couldn’t handle raising a child alone, I suppose. All I know about my parents is the stories my grandparents told. Well, they would talk about my mother, anyway, their daughter, especially since any relative at a family gathering would say:
“Look at you, all grown up! You look exactly like your mother. Especially your eyes.”
But whenever I look at photographs of her, I never see myself. Yes, I see the same silver blond hair, the same blue eyes, but my face doesn’t look like hers. I’m not sure if its wisdom, love, or a sense of life’s hardship that shadows her face, but I can’t seem to find a likeness. Perhaps because she will always be to me a lifeless photograph with rose-colored memories and not very human at all. No one seemed to remember her mistakes or know her secrets and, to me, that’s what makes a person human. That’s what makes you able to love them-the chance to overlook their faults, even though you know they are there. To me, my mother is perfection and utterly cold.
My father I have never seen, photograph or otherwise. I think I look for his photograph when I visit the attic just to find the other part of me. This potential for discovery is probably why I enjoy the attic so much. The space itself is not very inviting: dusty floorboards lie underneath dirty, peeling leather trunks and sagging cardboard boxes littered with insect corpses while spiders linger in the corner, their webs gently swaying in the drafts of my movement. There are two windows on either end of the house and a single, naked light bulb in the center of the ceiling. Every time I go into the attic I am both surprised by the amount of dust and mesmerized by the mystery of silent, static boxes.
I noticed that there were a few other boxes thrown upstairs, most likely brought into the attic after my grandmother had finished packing them the last cleaning day and ordered my grandfather to bring them here. They were labeled in German, which I barely understood, and probably mislabeled as well, so I opened them and glanced at the old clothes and papers strewn inside. Somewhere in the attic was a trunk where I compiled all of my grandmother’s old clothes, so I set off to find it.
I knew the trunk was buried underneath boxes, I just wasn’t sure which ones. It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the pile and opened up the rusted locks that I realized I had found the wrong one. I didn’t recognize it, either, which intrigued me even more. I found it odd that something I had never seen was the first one I opened; I would have thought a trunk I handled often would be in the front.
The top layer was mostly papers strewn haphazardly and they had shifted to reveal a carefully folded tan uniform. I pulled it out, curious, and my heart skipped a small beat as the Swastika-decorated arm swung into my view. Surprise turned to anger; it didn’t belong in the house, the attic, to my grandparents or friends, and certainly not in my life.
I folded the shirt up quickly and flung it into the trunk. The papers made a crackling sound underneath, reminding me of my initial task of organization, so I quickly swept up them to one pile. In my haste, however, I uncovered more and more documents until a black and white photograph came into view. Two men in uniform stood smiling and posing in front of a pile of chaotic large, long, white, floppy objects. Until I caught a distinct face of a short-haired woman near the bottom of the pile, I didn’t know they were humans. Suddenly, the limbs, hands, feet, and heads of thousands of corpses in the pile were so apparent I felt like I would be sick. They were so emaciated, it looked as if they had partially decomposed already and even worse was the tractor in the corner of the photograph shoveling more bodies into the pile.
My gaze moved slowly to the two men.
I didn’t recognize one; he looked like a healthy brown-haired, boisterous young man that in a different photograph I might have been attracted to. The other…the other man I recognized almost instantly. The photograph was not as clear as the other family portraits I had seen of my grandfather, but there was no denying that the second smiling man in the picture had to be him.
I threw the papers down to the ground and ran towards the door, feeling everything in my stomach rise to the surface. It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the stairs and stood panting in the middle of the hall on the second floor that I felt like I could breathe again. Thankfully, I was alone and for a few moments, I stood there staring at the family photographs on the adjacent wall as they stared disapprovingly back at me. Every single photograph looked like a murderer, looked Aryan, looked like me.
“Christel, are you ok?” my grandmother called from downstairs. “I heard the attic door slam.”
“I’m fine.”
I went back up to the attic, seeing the room in a completely different way. It was no longer mysterious. It was frightening. I picked up the letters from where they fell after I threw them and gathered them into a pile once more. The trunk didn’t have much else in it besides the uniform and photo. There was one other photograph of my grandfather in his uniform, but there was nothing left in me to react. I turned to the letters, but I didn’t know German. I knew it was in my blood, but my grandparents never spoke the language. I felt angry at this and I resolved to learn it myself. I needed to know what secrets these words were hiding and I felt that there was nothing else that could be more shocking than the photograph. I closed the trunk and replaced the boxes on top of it, marking the place where I put it carefully in my head. Then I snuck the letters into my bedroom on the second floor before returning to the attic for a third time and resuming my reorganization of the new boxes.
***
A few weeks passed and my German was only slightly better than it had been before. But I was determined and I managed to translate most of the letters into English with the help of the German teacher at school. They told a narrative that I was too angry to identify with: my grandfather decided to leave his home, with the blessings of his parents, to become a soldier for Hitler’s army. He became an SS officer assigned to Auschwitz. I wasn’t too interested in any more details; his long praises of Hitler made me feel sicker and angrier and the nonchalant tone he adopted to talk about the camps was horrifying.
I knew that most of my disgust was because of Rachel. She was Jewish and my best friend; we met in elementary school and had never been apart since. I went to church every Sunday and holiday mass, but some people thought I was just as Jewish as she because I knew when and what all the Jewish holidays were as we always celebrated with her family. It particularly hurt to imagine people like Rachel being tortured and killed like animals.
The current letter I was translating, though, was different. It was a later letter to my grandmother describing one particular boy. My grandfather went to great lengths to find out the boy’s name; he claims he was obsessed with this child-no more than ten years old by my grandfather’s estimate. But, orders being orders, as my grandfather wrote, the boy was sent to the gas chamber with his younger sister and mother.
“Christel, are you ready to go?” my grandmother called to me. “We’re going to be late if we don’t leave soon.”
We were supposed to go to my Rachel’s house that evening for Passover. I had completely forgotten, I was so engrossed in the letters. I frantically gathered them and stuffed them under my bed. So far, no one had found them there.
“I’m coming!”
I picked up the translation, however and ran to stuff it into my desk before catching near the end of the letter that my grandfather had found out the boy’s name. I barely glanced at the page, afraid that my grandmother would come into the room to see what was taking me so long, before running out of the room and bounding down the stairs. My grandfather was already in the car outside while my grandmother gently escorted me to it.
The ride felt longer than usual. Maybe it was my mind focusing on the letters I had just translated or maybe it was the tension of confrontation that I felt with my family. I tried to remember the boy’s name. Benjamin Scheinberg, that’s what it was. But something about it didn’t feel right, like it was familiar. The name fit together much too easily for comfort.
“You’re awfully quiet, Chris. What’s wrong?” my grandfather asked from the driver’s seat. I couldn’t see his face and I was grateful.
“Nothing.”
I caught my grandmother glance at her husband with a worried look, but she stayed silent.
“Did you get a lot of work done on your homework today?” he asked.
“Some.”
“What are you working on?”
“I’ve got a couple of papers due. Some reading.”
He glanced back at me in the rear view mirror. “Are you sure you’re ok?”
“Yeah. Just tired.”
He looked back at the road, though I could tell my grandmother did not buy that answer.
“What papers do you have to do?” she asked.
“Nothing much, Oma, just something for the Industrial Revolution and another one for English.”
“What’s your English paper about?” she asked.
“Nothing important.”
The irritation in my voice was not intentional, but it was enough for her to stop asking questions. My grandfather opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it.
We arrived at Rachel’s house early and I followed my grandparents at a short distance while they walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. The interior was strangely warm and friendly compared to my mood. Her family was already bustling around the house, most of them trying to get into the kitchen to help her mother. Her father was in a heated discussion in the living room about baseball with her uncle and some cousins. Rachel herself managed to escape the kitchen and skipped over to me when we arrived. My grandparents, used to us going off when we arrived, were not bothered when the two of us set off for her room. I, for one, wanted to get away from my grandfather as soon as I could. For the moment, being with Rachel was a welcome diversion.
But it wasn’t long before I felt like leaving her, too. The cold fear came back when I realized that Rachel’s last name was Scheinburg. My next thought was whether I looked transparently afraid of what I knew. I tried to talk myself down. There were probably hundreds of Scheinbergs living in Germany and it felt like an odd coincidence that the person my grandfather vividly remembered from the camps would be related to my best friend. But the name sounded too familiar and I had a bad feeling that they were the same. The air felt frigid going into my lungs, but I tried to calm down by reminding myself of the probable facts.
“Oh,” Rachel said plopping down on her bed with a fatigued sigh, “I love my relatives, but man, I’m glad to get away from them. That kitchen was crowded.”
“Did you make anything for tonight?”
“I always make the matzo balls and my mom actually let me make her kugel. We’ll see how it turns out,” she said with a wink.
I mustered up a small smile.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Yeah, right,” she said, snorting ever so slightly. “Come on, Chris. I can tell if something’s bothering you.”
“I’m just tired.”
“Well, all right. If you don’t want to talk about it.” Rachel lay down on her bed and stared at me, smiling. “Did you clean out the attic recently?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you find anything interesting? Any cool vintage clothes we could use as costumes?”
I paused. “Do you have any connections with the Holocaust?”
Rachel stiffened ever so slightly; anyone else who knew her less would have never caught it. She paused before saying, “Yeah, I had family who died. Why?”
“Do you know who?”
It was Rachel’s turn to pause. “My grandmother, my uncle and my aunt. Why are you asking me? What did you find in the attic?”
Nausea filled me. I thought I was going to be sick. “Do you know your uncle’s serial number by any chance?”
“What did you find in your attic, Christel?” she asked sitting up.
“Nothing,” I said, the sickness getting stronger.
“Like hell, it was nothing. What did you find about my family?”
“A trunk. My grandfather had hidden away some papers and photographs from his youth.”
Rachel looked at me critically. “I think you should just tell me. Get it out.”
“I-I don’t want to find out that it really was…” I had to stop. The excuse weren’t working and she was right. I had to say it, even if it wasn’t to her. Even if it was just to the room in general; I had to get it out in the air.
I took a deep breath. “I found a trunk with my grandfather’s old things from his time in the SS. He wrote several letters and I’ve been staying after school with Herr Andres to translate them. My grandfather mentioned a boy-Benjamin Scheinberg. I was just afraid…that he was…”
Rachel remained silent. She was looking at the floor in front of her, perfectly still. Then she looked up at the ceiling and started walking around her room. The silence was much too heavy and I started crying. It was so simple a reaction that it felt like a rain after thunder and yet, I wanted to be able to stop and I couldn’t.
I looked up briefly to see Rachel giving me a Kleenex, but her gaze was still past me. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet.
“I had an uncle named Benjamin who died in Auschwitz but that doesn’t mean your grandfather knew him.”
This statement didn’t bring any comfort to either of us. She sat back down on the bed and looked me in the eyes. Her eyes were red and glossy, but her stare was more intense than a bullet and it cut through me like paper. “Most of my family suffered in Auschwitz. My father worked in Auschwitz. He was thirteen when they were taken to the camp. He told me that was why he never had a Bar Mitzvah. That’s all I know about it, except that I shouldn’t ask anything else. I’ve read a lot, Chris. A lot about what life was like in the camps and I cannot connect my father to that place. And yet…the connection is there.” She stopped to grab a Kleenex for herself. “And now you’re telling me that the man who is practically a father to my best friend and who acted like the grandfather I never had growing up is responsible for the death of, not only my family, but hundreds, maybe thousands of other Jews? Other people, for God’s sake!”
She let out a short half laugh smoldering with anger. “God damn.”
Her mother called Rachel’s name sharply from the dining room making both of us slightly jump. Rachel looked at me a little panicked.
“Do I look like I’ve been crying?” she asked.
I had to laugh a bit at the sudden normality of the question. “A bit. How do I look?”
“Awful,” she said, smiling. “Hopefully no one will ask any questions.” She paused at her bedroom door and turned to me. “I’m not mad at you, Chris. I know you’re pretty broken up about it, too. It’s just…really hard to take in. So…help me and I’ll help you, ok?”
I reached out and hugged her hard. “Of course.”
Rachel’s mom opened the door just as we were about to leave.
“What is taking you so long?” she said, sharply. “We’re about to-Rachel, are you ok? Chris, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, mom,” Rachel said. “Let’s go.”
If I knew Rachel’s mom, she didn’t take that as much of an answer, but she didn’t press us with the rest of the family waiting for our arrival. My grandparents gave us a bit of a puzzled look when we arrived to the table, but Rachel’s father started with the service before they could ask us any questions.
The Seder went exactly like it was supposed to even through dinner. My grandparents were sitting on the other end of the table so it was easy to avoid them and I noticed Rachel being very careful to avoid contact with my grandfather. I only caught my grandfather’s eyes once and even though he smiled at me, still oblivious, I felt just as sick and fearful, especially of the possibility that I might have to confront him in front of Rachel’s entire family, some who had gone through Auschwitz and would not react nearly as quietly as Rachel had. I felt like what I knew was completely transparent and also that there was a possibility Rachel might let slip what she knew. It felt like I was stranded on thin ice.
After dinner, while the adults continued to talk in the living room, Rachel pulled me aside and back into her room.
“I think you should tell him what you found,” she said. “He needs to know what’s bothering you.”
“What about your family?”
“Well, you won’t tell him here, silly. My family shouldn’t know. They don’t need those horrible memories coming back and they don’t need a living reminder of the horrors they experienced. I’ll eventually forgive but you need to reconcile with him. At least I have an excuse to be mad after what he helped do with my family. You just have a horrible feeling on principal.”
“Rach, it wasn’t right and even though he’s my dad, I can’t forgive him for killing people.”
“If you love him, he has a right to know what’s got you so mad. You should let him explain and then decide whether you’ll forgive him or not.”
“What about you?”
Rachel shrugged. “I don’t live with him. Besides, he can confront me one day if he wants. Otherwise, I’ll work it out on my own.”
My grandmother arrived just then and told me they were planning on leaving. I gave Rachel a final hug and she thanked my grandmother for coming. She stayed in her room while we left, probably to avoid my grandfather, while I left with my grandparents.