Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 86 of a new online serial novel, Nine A.M., by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
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Visiting hours for the public at the shivah house:
Morning between 6:00 and 7:00 am
Afternoon between 2:00 and 3:00 pm
Evening between 8:00 and 8:45 pm
It was only 6:30 in the evening, but Naomi ignored the sign on the door and knocked. It was the first time she’d ever knocked at this door—or had even approached it. It was the first time she was seeing the unusual door handle—an elongated tube made of gold-colored metal that was cool and smooth to the touch—which was very different from the round wooden knobs that the rest of them had on the doors of their little houses.
Did it make the Sherer family happy that this knob adorned the door of their home, or was the point just to indicate that their status was different from that of the other residents of this place? Naomi didn’t have time to think about that, because just then the door opened, and Eva stood there, staring at her. After a moment she said, “Yes?”
“Eva…” Naomi said. “I will come later in the evening to be menachem avel. But right now, I need to speak urgently with Suzy. Is that possible?”
“Yes,” Eva said and walked back into the house.
A moment later, Suzy came to the door. She blinked when she saw Naomi but then recovered quickly. “Is Dror okay?” she asked.
“As okay as he can be on a day like this…” Naomi replied. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Some time ago, my grandmother gave me advice on how to cushion difficult information for children. I will work with him in class, but do you want to hear some ideas that you can implement at home?”
“Okay…” Suzy’s eyes were cold and distant, as always. “Do you want to come in?”
“I prefer not to. I’m a bit uncomfortable.”
Suzy stepped outside and closed the door behind her. She glanced back for a moment to the closed window, and then scanned the path ahead of them. “What do you want?” she asked in a whisper.
“The telephone…”
“Did it stop working? Did the battery finish?”
“No…I don’t know, actually.”
“I hope that you turned it off between each call. The battery is supposed to last a long time if you do.”
“You turn it off with the same round button that you turn it on with, right? So yes, we turned it off. I hope my brother did too, after his last call. What I wanted to ask is where the telephone is now. I know it’s in the forest, but…”
“Wait here,” Suzy said. Then she went back into the house. Naomi waited for a minute near the door that had been slammed in her face, hoping that nothing was being plotted and schemed behind the wall, and that it would not be Sol who would step out of the door to confront her.
But it was Suzy who came out again a few moments later. “A bit later, my husband will come and pick up Dror from school,” she said. “And from there, he’ll go with him to the forest. Let’s say that this is one of the pieces of advice you gave me: to take Dror to a pastoral and distant place and let him talk about everything that is hurting him. Try to follow them discreetly. The phone is buried in the ground, at the foot of one of the trees. That’s where your brother put it. And just to be safe, my husband will hang an old piece of clothing on that tree, and he’ll stick a branch into the ground at the place where the phone is buried.”
“But…what will Dror say?” Naomi asked, practical as always.
“David won’t do it in front of him.” Her eyes suddenly grew wide, and she took a step closer to Naomi until she was just inches away, and grasped her shoulder. “But if you’re caught, we are not involved, do you hear? David has gotten into enough trouble with your brother’s phone call!” She didn’t wait for a response; she just opened the door and disappeared back into the house.
Naomi turned around and continued on her way, wondering with a dour smile what an observer of this scene could be thinking to himself. They certainly did not look like a devoted preschool teacher and a mother listening attentively to her advice. Suzy wasn’t a great actress.
She went back to the preschool. The children in the classroom area were copying the last few lines from the board into their notebooks, and the younger children were wiping down the tables with rags. The first mothers returning from work had come to pick up their children; David Elkovitz was the only father who came along with them. He stood in the yard and waited until Dror came out to him, walking with slow, heavy steps. Naomi smiled briefly at the mothers, and waved to them and their children. Then she got ready to follow the Elkovitzes.
“Do you want to take a walk, Dror?” she heard his father suggest.
“No, I want to go home, to Mama.”
“But I want to speak to you first, in a quiet place.”
“Is it an important conversation?” the precocious child asked.
“Yes. It’s about our grandfather, and about how you feel.”
Naomi couldn’t hear the answer anymore, because the pair had moved too far away. She straightened the collar of one of her students, patted the cheek of another, and set out. The camp was still relatively empty; there was almost another hour until work officially ended. She didn’t follow the exact same path as Dror and his father; instead, she turned in the opposite direction. If she’d be asked where she was going, she could always say she was heading to the store.
But the minute Naomi reached the store, she bypassed it and disappeared among the trees behind it, and then ran in the direction that the Elkovitzes had taken. The woods grew thicker here, and she needed to move branches and brush from her path so that she could continue walking. Her ears were on the alert for every sound, and for good reason. She suddenly heard a low murmur, and quickly retreated behind three tree stumps that were standing so close to one another that they almost appeared connected. Elkovitz was talking, and his tone was high—unlike the tone he had used to speak to Dror just before.
“Me? I’m going to speak to my son a little bit, Sol.”
“And the forest is the only place you could find to do that?” Yes, that was Sol Sherer.
“As you see.”
When all was said and done, Elkovitz had a clear status, and it was evident from Sol’s voice that he knew it. “Okay, okay, speak wherever you want…” Based on the last word that sounded like it was fading out, and the crackling of leaves and branches, Naomi realized that the man was walking away, and heading toward the left.
She waited another few seconds behind the trees, crouched down, and then slowly stood up. “Sit here a minute, Dror,” she heard his father say. “I’m walking ahead a bit. I want to check if we can see Grandpa’s gravesite from there.”
Naomi tried to peek through the thicket of the leaves. There was Dror, standing in a small clearing and looking around him. Then he sat down. A moment later, his father was back. That meant that the place where the phone was hidden wasn’t far. “We’ve gone a bit too far. Come, we’ll go over there to speak,” David said with a sigh. They walked back and passed very close to where Naomi was standing.
A moment later, she came out and walked to the place where Dror’s father had disappeared to before.
There was a rag, hanging on a protrusion from the trunk.
And here was a short branch lodged into the ground.
***
“Is…am I speaking to Hanter?” Ten hours later, behind the locked door, Naomi gripped the telephone until her knuckles were white.
“Yes.”
“I…this is Schvirtz.”
“Oh, we were waiting for your call. We came in early just for that.”
“I think we need help urgently.” She could hardly breathe, and Aryeh placed a cup of water next to her. “They found out about my brother, and he has gone into hiding. I don’t know how much time he can hold out until they catch him.”
“But don’t turn to the Austrian police,” Aryeh mouthed to her.
“Right, please don’t call the Austrian police,” Naomi said hastily. “If you could get here with some backup…something else, from your own people… Also, you should know that there are people here who don’t believe us.”
“Jews?”
“Yes. Maybe they’ll think that you are…some type of bait from the outside, or an ambush meant to expose us.”
“I hear,” said Moshe, Bentzy’s father. “We’ll find a plan of action, b’ezras Hashem. Try to hold on. Can you give us some details about the place? We’ll figure out a way to get there, with Hashem’s help, but any information about what’s going on inside would be helpful.”
“It’s a mountainous area, and some of it is very heavily forested. There’s a wall surrounding everything. At the upper part, on the east, there’s a forest, and at the foot is the factory and office structures. In the middle, there’s a flatter area, where the living quarters are.” Naomi felt like she wasn’t being so clear, perhaps because of the pressure to finish the conversation quickly, but she was doing the best she could.
“On the western slope are the animal kennels and our cemetery, which is a bit further south. And in the north of the camp is the Nazi estate, with the manor house, which is separated from our camp with a low gate. They are five people right now—the most dangerous are the father, Hauptman Josef Wangel, and his son Bernard. Besides them are Hauptmann Katarina, Wangel’s wife, who you also have to be careful about, and two daughters. But maybe by the time you get here, they will bring backup…I don’t know. Maybe more people have come already, because we’ve had visits from other Nazis in the past.”
“And weapons?” He was writing everything down.
“They have rifles,” she said hesitantly. “That’s what we know. They haven’t come out of the manor house for two days already, but that could change at any—”
Beep-beep-beep. Had they intercepted her? No. The phone had turned off, and she couldn’t get it to turn on again.
***
Until about four in the morning, Binyamin lay on the roof, almost adjacent to the rectangular hole, and prayed. Throughout that time, he heard voices from the estate, both inside and outside the house. Someone on the floor beneath him was apparently unable to sleep. Only when the skies began to pale, turning a bit reddish, did absolute quiet set in.
Hearing the silence, Binyamin tied his rope to a pipe that stuck out from the edge of the roof. Then he sent the other end of it into the opening in the roof. He grasped the rope and slowly let himself down on it.
His feet soon touched solid ground. He found himself in an old, blackened, wood-burning fireplace; all around him were remnants of wood that the last fire had apparently not burned. The fireplace was surrounded by three stone walls, and in front of him was the low fireplace opening, surrounded by low, red metal bars. Binyamin bent all the way down, skipped over the little railing, and stepped out.
He was in a large room that took up the entire third floor of the manor house. In the past it must have been used as a living room for the nobleman who had lived here more than a hundred years ago. The decorated floor, the scratched mahogany table, and the yellowing lace curtains all bore traces of the long-ago grandeur, but it was obvious that the Wangel family hardly used this area.
The fireplace was in the center of the room, and behind it was an open door. Binyamin tiptoed toward it and peeked out; there was only silence. In another corner, almost hidden behind the table and chairs, was a closet with three doors.
The Wehrmacht uniforms that filled it did not surprise Binyamin. Some of them were very old, nearly crumbling, and some were very new. He didn’t give the uniforms more than a cursory glance. But at the bottom of the closet were two large, heavy boxes, and Binyamin knew that this was what he was looking for.
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