This story is not about my mother, who had the misfortune of being a Jew in Europe during the Second World War. And it is not about my mother’s sister, Zeta, who in 1942 was shot dead by the Germans in the little Russian town of Botek. Nor is this story about Zeta’s best friend, Sarah, who died with Zeta one day before her father arrived to save her. Thirty-five years later, in the summer of 1977, I met Sarah’s father at the Frankfurt Airport. I was an American college student, who had just spent a summer studying in Israel. He was an old man in his eighties, who used to be a Nazi general.
*
I did not expect to call. My layover in Frankfurt was only two hours. Bad weather and the chaos of end-of-summer travel combined to extend the two-hour delay to seven. As I walked my third bored lap around the international terminal I saw the phone book dangling from a chain inches above the ground. Aware of the German reputation for order, I picked up the book and placed it neatly in the slot beneath the phone. And then I remembered the Nazi general and the story my mother had told me.
I wasn’t sure if he lived in Frankfurt or even if he was alive. But I looked up his name and it was there and I dialed the number and someone answered. He was the general’s grandson, a young man my age....
Subscribe now to keep reading
Please enter your email to log in or create a new account.