ONE
MILIA GOTTSTEIN-LASKER SWEPT into her office, as always, as if the ground outside were on fire and she was seeking shelter. Running her fingers through her thick, shiny mahogany hair—crying out for the cut and blow-dry she couldn’t waste time on—she slammed her huge black purse onto her desk, turning to her long-suffering secretary, Shoshana, with her usual greeting: “Where are we up to?”
Unlike other enterprises, which had a beginning, a middle, and an end, or at least a way of measuring progress, hunting for Nazi war criminals who had escaped justice was a never-ending process of effort and almost constant disappointment. There was no problem finding them; they were all over the place, even now, seventy years later, having escaped via the infamous routes dubbed “ratlines”: There was the Nordic route, through Finland and Sweden to Argentina. The Iberian route through Spain via Rome or Genoa. And then there was the Vatican route—provided by friendly churches and clergymen and sympathizers worldwide, the Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganović, and the Bishop of Austria, Alois Hudal. It was the one Adolf Eichmann had used, Milia discovered, and he was apparently so grateful that he said he considered himself “an honorary Catholic.” Which, Milia was sure, must have been just lovely for the Pope.
Others, she’d found, had been equally helpful: the International Committee of the Red Cross had provided false identity papers, and the Americans, via the CIC, or Counter Intelligence Corps, the precursor to the CIA, were only too delighted to generously host Nazi war criminals who were willing to turn informants, like the infamous Klaus Barbie, who happily chatted away about Communist activities. Through their Military Intelligence Service, the Americans had gone so far as to actually set up a secret camp within the United States where Nazi scientists who had spent the war years diligently working on missiles to annihilate the West were allowed to sunbathe by a pool and play tennis—that is, when they were not being feted with trips to Jewish department stores where they could buy their wives and mistresses expensive lingerie for Christmas—all the while being pampered by American GIs (almost exclusively Jewish refugees who spoke perfect German) obscenely forced by direct military orders to “make them comfortable.” The US rocket program had been grateful.
Judging by the sheer number of Nazi octogenarians and nonagenarians spread across the world, the fugitives had taken very good care of themselves. Money, after all, had not been a problem; their victims had seen to that. But then, even when you found them and produced live witnesses to testify against them (miraculous in itself—the survivors, alas, had emerged penniless and ill), governments still declined to extradite or prosecute, claiming the murderers were unfit to stand trial, or that their identity had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
And when, finally, they’d been forced to put them on trial, they suspended their sentences, or allowed them to appeal until they conveniently died peacefully in their beds at ninety-eight. Even worse were the ones actually sentenced to terms more appropriate to shoplifting eye shadow than smashing babies’ heads against rocks. More than once, Milia had come to view her work as a Sisyphean task, in which the only people actually getting punished were the pursuers themselves, people like herself, her father, and her grandfather.
Despite everything, her grandfather, Marius Gottstein, founder of the Survivors’ Campaign, had refused to give up. His experiences as a Palestinian Jew fighting alongside the British against the Nazis in the Jewish Brigade; his shock as he entered concentration camps at war’s end; and the shattering discovery of the fate of the family he had left behind had given him a vision. In it, he saw the petty clerks, the failed small businessmen, the untalented lawyers and doctors, the low-level civil servants, the career criminals—who had been proud of their shiny boots and spiffy Nazi insignia and willing to commit mass murder if they got a tablecloth and some earrings out of it—finally exposed to their neighbors and family and the world for what they were and what they’d done. It was not about revenge, but about educating young minds to inoculate them against such poison that, once ingested, turned ordinary people into heartless, soulless monsters.
That was enough for him. He’d never expected to achieve anything as grandiose as “justice.” For what would be a just punishment for such unprecedented and unthinkable crimes?
She remembered visiting her grandfather in his office—small, crowded rooms full of file cabinets and windows that faced walls. Her memories of him were the opposite of what most people imagined him to be. With her, he was always jolly and generous, a large-faced man with a quick smile. Sitting on his welcoming lap was like being enthroned in a private kingdom where sweets and toys flowed up out of bottomless pockets. He was of such formidable girth—testifying to a very low resistance to sweets, especially Austrian cream cakes—that she had found it impossible to imagine him as the lean, muscular soldier he had been at war’s end.
But once, watching him on a television news program interrogating a suspected Nazi collaborator—now the mayor of a small German township—she’d caught a glimpse of another side of him. She’d watched, mesmerized, as his blue-green eyes (the ones she’d inherited) darkened to a muddy gray, flashing with lethal threat, his stance as still as a leopard ready to pounce.
Unlike his famous counterpart, Simon Wiesenthal, and despite a relentless work ethic, he’d only been modestly successful, accomplishing the arrest of mostly minor Nazi officials: SS concentration camp guards, Gestapo interrogators, Hungarian police officers involved in roundups and deportations, and a handful of Einsatzgruppen shooters. His biggest fish was Aribert Heim, called Dr. Death for his “work” at Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Sachsenhausen, where he was credited with particularly gruesome methods of medical torture. Following numerous dead ends, Marius had managed to track down Heim in 1962, living under everyone’s nose right back in Germany. Heartbreakingly, Heim managed to flee to Egypt hours before arrest, tipped off by one of his many local friends. While the Egyptians were more than happy to host people of that ilk, under pressure they eventually produced a death certificate for Heim. Her grandfather hadn’t been convinced.
The Heim case had broken him. She remembered her grandfather bedridden, his smile gone, in deep discussion with her father, his arms swinging with deliberate, even dangerous, abandon to underscore a point. He had died soon after.
No one could fault her father for the dedication he’d brought to the role he’d inherited. Yet his connection to the Survivors’ Campaign was never the same as his father’s. For he had, as the French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut wrote in The Imaginary Jew, “inherited a suffering to which [he] had not been subjected.”
It was an irony that oppressed him.
Unlike his father, who had experienced so much evil firsthand, Moshe Gottstein had grown up in Israel among free, proud Jews who knew not only how to protect themselves, but also how to exact revenge from their enemies. By the time he was a young man, the Israelis had put Eichmann in a cage. Moshe had watched Eichmann on television, grimacing and twitching as he crookedly pressed his stingy lips together when forced to listen through headphones to eyewitness testimonies of the unimaginable human suffering his work had put into motion. A normal human being who knew he was guilty of such crimes would have grabbed the gun from his guard and put a bullet through his own head, her father once told her. But not Eichmann. He wanted to live and was not too proud to grovel, fantastically claiming that he “was only following orders.” Considering the boastful recordings he’d left behind in Argentina crediting himself with being the chief architect and supervisor of the Final Solution, this must have cost him.
In the end, he might just as well have admitted the truth. The Israelis weren’t fooled, nor had they been squeamish about putting a noose around his lying throat, then turning him into ashes, which they cast far out at sea so as not to pollute their land. This, her father often said, was the only just punishment for Nazis and their collaborators. Unfortunately, except for the Jews, no one else in the world seemed to agree. “Let’s face it,” he told her, “most countries have zero to gain from show trials, which expose their own complicity and bad national character, let alone the spectacle of evil old men gasping their last at the end of a rope.”
He had more than ample reason for this conviction. After her grandfather’s death, her father had flung himself against the locked doors of ministries, government agencies, and justice systems all over the world, desperately battering away, consumed by his passion to see some kind of justice, however token. It was a quest that in the end separated him from his family, carrying him to the ends of the earth for months at a time.
Her mother, Judith, also a child of survivors, had been sympathetic at first, even proud, first of her father-in-law’s and then her husband’s tireless efforts. But eventually she lost patience. There were no screaming matches, just a swift, almost silent uncoupling as her parents’ marriage calved off, floating away into the unknown. Soon after, her mother remarried. Both her parents lived only blocks from each other in the same leafy Tel Aviv neighborhood, walking distance to the beach. Her stepfather, an orthodontist, was a blank to Milia, defined by his punctuality, demand for neatness, and love of soup. But she had to admit, even in her resentment, that her mother seemed not only content with his predictability, but positively enamored of it: “When he comes home, at least you know what you’re getting,” she’d say. “With your father, you could never tell. His days were one long horror story.”
With such memories, taking up the torch after her father’s sudden death had never been a clear-cut choice for Milia. By then a doctoral candidate in English literature, wife of Julius Lasker, a busy surgeon, and the mother of three active children, she’d struggled to decide which of her obligations made the morally superior demand upon her time and dedication. Julius had not been happy, to put it mildly, demanding to know how they would manage with two such formidable jobs. He wasn’t wrong. It had been exhausting, a life of constant compromises, which she had had no choice but to shoulder alone. He, after all, was saving the living, while she was representing the already dead.
In her mind, the pendulum often swung up and back, sometimes going so far as to embrace her mother’s view that the only thing her father’s work in the Campaign had accomplished was to destroy yet another Jewish family: his own. But whenever that idea overwhelmed her, she remembered how her father had answered her when she’d confronted him with such a bitter assessment. Wordlessly, he’d handed her a brown manila envelope. “Read it” was all he’d said. She had. And it had changed everything.
TWO
AS ALWAYS, BEFORE sitting down behind her desk and turning on her computer, Milia went to the window and looked out into the quiet street. The unchanging familiarity of the old pines and towering eucalyptus trees swaying gently in the barest wind always calmed her mind.
Shoshana, a religious woman nearing sixty, adjusted the short, constantly too-tight brown wig that piously covered her graying hair, her expression one of slight dread as she waited patiently for a sign that Milia was ready to start the day.
“Well?” Milia asked with characteristic impatience, suddenly turning back and sitting behind her desk.
“There is an invitation. From Lithuania.”
Milia took off her sunglasses, releasing a puff of exasperated air between her teeth that lifted the sweat-moistened bangs from her forehead. She hadn’t slept well. Black-and-white images of mass graves from a case she was working on kept sneaking into her dreams. Why couldn’t the invitation be from Denmark? she thought. Or Sweden? Instead of a country whose mere mention was like prying open the rusty doors to a house of horrors?
How often had she heard the stories about her Lithuanian relatives—the three sisters and four brothers, their children, their in-laws, and all the cousins? The obscure, strange-sounding names of their villages were burned into her memory until she sometimes forgot she hadn’t actually been there, too, inside those neat wooden houses near the big lake, joining in the enormous, rollicking Friday night meals; milking the cows; watching the timber carted in from the deep black forests.
Shoshana cocked her head sympathetically. “So, do you want me to politely decline?”
Of course she wanted to decline! But then she thought better of it. Lithuania had been her grandfather’s and father’s obsession. And as much as she wished it weren’t so, ever since opening that manila envelope, had become hers as well.
“No. Wait.”
Dear Dr. Gottstein-Lasker,
I am writing to you on behalf of the European Commission, which, as you know, on 29 November 2018, acquired a Permanent International Partnership with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The participation of the EU in this international body allows for closer cooperation on combating Holocaust denial and preventing racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism.
As part of this year’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day in Europe, we are organizing a special program to involve young people throughout Lithuania in remembering Lithuania’s Jewish communities, titled Our Neighbors, Our Friends. As chairman of Lithuania’s Holocaust Remembrance initiative for the coming year, and initiator of this event, I would be honored if you would consider accepting our invitation to be our keynote speaker. Your important work as head of the Survivors’ Campaign has given you a particular prominence in our country, which would be extremely valuable in drawing interest and participation in this year’s activities.
Of course, all expenses would be paid as well as a modest honorarium. Please let us know if you would consider this proposal.
We are hopeful for a positive response.
Sincerely,
Dr. Darius Vidas, Chairman, Algirdas University
Milia sat up straight in her chair, as if someone had appeared at her door with a shotgun. Keynote speaker! In Lithuania! A particular prominence! And then the strange fear suddenly left her, replaced by a sudden uncontrollable desire to laugh. She felt it climbing up the back of her throat almost choking her before she finally gave in to it. And once she started, she found it almost impossible to stop. She laughed deeply, helplessly, until her throat ached and she was blinded by tears.
“Everything all right?” Shoshana asked, her eyes wide. Milia, unable to speak, shooed her away almost rudely, as she valiantly attempted to control herself.
“Honored,” she whispered to herself, in between hiccups. And the title!! Our Neighbors, Our Friends!! Since Lithuanians had murdered all their Jewish neighbors and friends seventy years ago … She wiped her eyes, studying the signature at the bottom of the page. Vidas. Dr. Darius. She considered whether it was someone she or her father had come across over the years. But it didn’t ring any bells. He’s probably new and someone is playing a trick on him, suggesting my name. It’s a practical joke, she thought, feeling a tiny spark of reluctant sympathy for the hapless Dr. Vidas.
For years she had been considered persona non grata in that Baltic backwater. Someone had once even called her Lithuanian public enemy number one! Even though she knew that wasn’t true (Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center in Israel deserved that crown), she’d considered it a badge of honor to be placed alongside Dr. Zuroff and Dr. Dovid Katz, whose Defending History blog was a daily thorn in Lithuania’s side, shining a relentless light on the continuing, infuriating moves of the Lithuanian government and its institutions to distort its history of joyful collaboration with Hitler to achieve the Final Solution.
And then there was Grant Gochin, who was in a category all his own. Born in South Africa, the descendant of a large Lithuanian Jewish family mercilessly butchered, he had taken it upon himself to sue all those in the Lithuanian government attempting to turn “partisans” with Jewish blood on their hands into national heroes. Despite constant setbacks, and the fury of the establishment, he was relentlessly pursuing his agenda through Lithuanian courts like a Jewish Don Quixote.
But perhaps bravest of all were the rare non-Jewish Lithuanians fighting against their country’s distortion of history. Silvia Foti, granddaughter of Jonas Noreika—widely honored by Lithuanians as a partisan martyr and hero—had bravely published an eye-opening memoir outing him as a notorious antisemite, Nazi collaborator, and mass murderer. And bestselling Lithuanian author Rūta Vanagaitė had collaborated on a remarkable book with Dr. Efraim Zuroff titled Our People, underscoring with deadly accuracy the long-buried secrets of Lithuanian-Nazi collaboration. Silvia had been accused of disloyalty, while Rūta had seen her successful career implode; her publishing house not only dropped her, but also removed all her bestselling books from the shelves, intending to pulp them.
Milia was proud to be counted among such people. If you were a Nazi hunter and no one hated you, you weren’t doing your job.
But it wasn’t easy.
She remembered sitting beside her father twenty years ago in his roomy, almost too-modern private suite in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, when everyone was still running around getting recommendations for physiotherapists, convinced he was on his way to recovery. “Please, Milly, get out of the Shoah business,” he suddenly implored her, taking her hand with surprising firmness. “It’s thankless work, better left in God’s hands.”
She was stunned. “Sha, Aba. Don’t strain yourself.”
He sat up straighter, shaking his head. “This is not coming from weakness, from being sick. It’s coming from the idea that life is short, and I shouldn’t have dragged you into this mess, the way my father dragged me.”
Copyright © 2023 by Naomi Ragen