Read Online Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman - Free Book Online

shrimp had cleaned their clocks. Jack had never run from a fight, but he did not consider truculence to be a sustainable philosophical approach to life, and so he had chosen to survive officer training by keeping his mouth shut and his head down. He made no friends, but neither did he, unlike Finkelman, lose any teeth.
    “And it’s okay, life for a Jew in your army?” Ilona asked.
    “It’s fine,” he told her, and indeed things had improved once he joined the Rainbow Division and found himself in the company of a fair number of Jewish enlisted men and even a couple of other Jewish officers.Despite the ease with which many of his men and fellow officers tossed around words like “kike” and “sheeny,” he would not have described them as anti-Semites. True, the running joke about “Abie and Sadie,” who managed, despite rationing, to get tires for their car and sugar for their tea, depressed him, as did the fact that when conditions got particularly bad he frequently heard GIs complaining that the only reason they were being forced to endure the misery was because they were fighting Hitler for the sake of the Jews. But the men’s antagonism was born of ignorance—Jack and the others in the division were the first Jews many of them had ever met. So he was generous with his forgiveness of them and stingy in his praise of the Jewish enlisted men. He was harder on the Jews in his command than on the Gentiles, holding them to a higher standard of comportment and conduct in a way that was, he supposed, a kind of secret favoritism, as though he believed in his heart that more could be expected of a Jew than of his Gentile brother-in-arms.
    Ilona said, “Both my great-grandfather and my grandfather were officers in the Hungarian Honvédség; you know what this is?”
    “No.”
    “The Hungarian unit of the Austro-Hungarian Army. They fought for the emperor. They both had the rank of ezredes . In German, Oberst .”
    “ ‘Colonel.’ ”
    “Yes. My grandfather would be higher, even, than ezredes , but he died in the Great War. His regiment, the Twentieth Nagyvárad, was very brave. Many were killed. My mother said we must be glad he was dead because if he had lived to see his men turn on him, it would have broken his heart.”
    Jack considered posing the question that had been on his mind for so long, the question he both wanted and dreaded to ask.
    Perhaps sensing the reason for his silence, perhaps following the unknowable trend of her own thoughts, Ilona said, “My mother is dead. Also my father.”
    “I’m sorry,” Jack said.
    “Why are you sorry? You didn’t kill them.”
    “It wasn’t an apology,” he said. “Sometimes when you say you’re sorry, it just means that you are sad.”
    She said, “Ah. Sad. Not sorry. It is my English. I didn’t understand. So now I am sorry. But not sad. What’s the word? Apologistic.”
    “Apologetic.”
    “Yes. Apologetic. I am apologetic.”
    “You don’t need to be. Ilona … what … Will you tell me what happened to your parents? To your family?”
    She shrugged. “The usual. Ghetto, train, Auschwitz, selection.”
    Her large extended family had remained together as long as they could, she told him, all the way to the ramp at Auschwitz, but only she and her older sister, Etelka, had been directed to step to the right. By the time the two girls had been processed into the camp, the rest of her family, her parents, her aunts and uncles, a passel of cousins, her grandmother, every last Jakab of Nagyvárad, had been transformed into the grease and smoke that coated the inside of Ilona’s and Etelka’s nostrils and settled in a dingy film on their skin.
    The girls were sent from Auschwitz first to Dachau and then to one of the Kaufering satellite camps in Landsberg. They had clung to each other until only a few weeks before the war’s end, when Etelka had been taken from the morning count without warning. It was only days later that Ilona found out that