Read Online Measure of a Man by Martin Greenfield, Wynton Hall - Free Book Online Page B

exchanged pleasantries. He then shared the news that changed the trajectory of my life.
    “What are you doing here?” asked Mendel.
    “Oh, I thought I would check the name lists and photo bulletins,” I said. “I do that everywhere I go. Look, look, look! That’s all I do it seems,” I smiled to mask the hurt.
    “I don’t understand what you mean,” he said. The confused look on his face made me uncomfortable.
    “My father—I haven’t found him yet. If he’s alive I want to know where he is,” I insisted. Mendel’s apparent obtuseness made me angry. Surely I wasn’t the first survivor he’d spoken to who was looking for a loved one. Mendel’s face grew serious and somber.
    “You can stop looking,” he said. “I was there the day the Germans shot him.”
    “What?!”
    “I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you this. I was there. You can stop looking,” he said. He could see that I was about to faint. “Sit down,” he said.
    I sat down.
    “Your father was a special man. He loved you very much,” said Mendel.
    I wept.
    “Joseph was in charge of directing a building project. It was a small bridge. I was there on the worksite. We didn’t finish construction on deadline. So the Nazis shot him. I saw it happen,” he said.
    I put my face in my hands and cried. My heart hurt—physically hurt . Mendel put his hand on my shoulder and tried to console me.
    “Maxi, I’m so very sorry,” he said. “But crying isn’t going to bring him back. You have to do what he would have wanted you to do. You have to be a man, make your own way now.”
    “What camp were you two in?” I asked Mendel.
    “Buchenwald.”
    “ Buchenwald? I was in Buchenwald!” I said frantically. “When did they shoot my father?” Mendel looked away as if he wished I hadn’t asked that question. “I have to know,” I urged. “Please. When?”
    “About one week before the liberation,” he said softly.
    I buried my face in my hands again. I shut my eyes tight and tears streamed down my forearms. I drew inside myself, consumed by a wave of despair that left me dizzy. At that moment I would have relived the horror of the Death March and the beatings ahundred times to have five minutes with my father, to tell him how much I loved him. Mendel was still speaking, offering words of counsel, but I had stopped listening. I think I always knew this day would come—that one day I would have to hold my father’s funeral in my heart. But I was unprepared to hear it this way. Knowing the timing made the ache all the deeper.
    One week from liberation! I thought. He came so close. He almost made it!
    I don’t remember much about my parting with Mendel or where I went afterward. Just that my first fears were confirmed—I was all alone in the world. The father I loved, the man who gave me everything I needed and taught me honor and integrity, murdered and gone.
    Death from illness or an act of nature I could have handled. Not willful murder based on blood and belief. Not a slaying over lineage and faith. The execution’s moral grotesqueness and the loss of my hero ripped a hole in my heart that remains to this day. Sometimes at night when I dream, he comes to me, strong and smiling. He tells me he’s proud of me and loves me. Would that I could live inside those dreams forever.
    In a daze, I headed back to Prague, where I could be around survivors who spoke Yiddish and had endured similar horrors. Their presence made me feel a little less broken. My father and mother and siblings would have insisted that I stay strong, so I thought of ways that I could honor their memories and move forward. My time there started to ease the pain—though of course that would never go away—and stoked my entrepreneurial fires. I talked to the other boys and men about their future plans and past businesses. I liked the idea of starting from scratch. I wanted tobuild something myself that could produce pride and a profit. An older man at the camp