In memory of Hanna

Word Count: 2,984

In Memory of Hanna

It had been three months since the surprise party. Jakub was stunned when Hanna walked him into the room filled with dozens of friends wearing party hats and broad smiles. A pianist and a bona fide chanteuse with a Marlene Dietrich accent led the singing of Happy Birthday. A pair of waitresses served fancy appetizers and flutes of champagne. Hanging across the back wall behind the makeshift bar a banner read HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAKE EDELMAN – 73 YEARS YOUNG. Surrounded by his family, old friends, colleagues and neighbors, it was one of the happiest days of Jakub’s life.

One week later, Hanna was dead.   As usual she had awakened shortly before seven to prepare breakfast. Lingering for a few minutes before getting out of bed, she complained of a slight pain in her chest, assuring her concerned husband “it was nothing.” Jakub went to the bathroom to get her an Alka Seltzer for the heartburn he had diagnosed. When he returned, his beloved was gone. They had been together for more than sixty years. Now he was alone.

In the weeks since sitting Shiva, Jakub literally seemed to shrink in size. A gregarious, cheerful man, Jake, as he was known to his friends, had become non-communicative and isolated. He seldom returned telephone calls and consistently refused the outpouring of invitations to dinner, the movies, even the Bulls games at the United Center where for years his firm had owned season tickets. When his friends eventually stopped calling, either out of understanding for his position or hurt feelings at being ignored, he barely noticed the silent phone and empty mailbox. Reluctantly he accepted the meals his daughter insisted on bringing over on Tuesdays and Fridays; otherwise he remained unapproachable. He spent his time intent on a project that occupied all his waking hours, sorting out on the dining room table hundreds of photographs dating back to the faded sepia toned images of his first Kodak Box Camera.  When he finished, a thick album had emerged from the disarray, each photograph annotated and adding to the biography of the one and only woman in his life. On the cover he pasted the front page of the memorial booklet handed out to the funeral guests: HANNA PRINSTEIN EDELMAN – NOVEMBER 4, 1933 – NOVEMBER 29, 2005. 

As if it was yesterday Jakub remembered the first time he and Hanna met. It was 1941 and the Edelmans and Prinsteins were among the thousands of piteous, dislocated Polish families herded into the hellish abattoir of Majdanek labor camp. “Może Ja jest wasz przyjaciel? Can I be your friend?” she had asked, smiling despite the cold wind sweeping across the bleak, fenced in field where the wary children waited out the long hours until the work gangs of tired mothers returned to the drafty barracks. Jakub was nine years old, small for his age and too puny for the road construction crews cashiered from the early morning roll call of shivering prisoners. Hanna was a year younger, painfully thin, and barely sustained by the tin cup of watery soup and crust of moldy bread that was the daily ration. Three years later when the Russians liberated Majdanek they limped to the gate, barely alive, parents dead, and began a journey that didn’t end until their arrival at the vestry door of the Chicago Sinai temple on 47th Street and Grand Boulevard, having infiltrated from Eastern Europe into the American zone of occupation, propelled from there by a flip of a coin (Heads, Israel, Tails, America) to the ‘sea-washed, sunset gates’ of the land of the free. Jakub looked watery eyed at the washed out snapshot the rabbi had taken of the two of them, hand in hand, standing stiffly on the steps of the shul. “Uśmiech, Jakie,” Hanna had instructed, “Smile, we are home at last.” 

Jakub put his tribute to Hanna on the marble topped cocktail table in front of the living room couch. For every photo saved there were ten untaken, the images existing only in memory.  Hanna had been his witness. Her testimony proved they were alive surviving in the shadows when the world abandoned them as dead. And still there were those who would eradicate their very existence by denying the horror that took place. He sat quietly for a few moments longer. Then he rose to his feet, shrugging his shoulders as if shedding a comforter that was no longer needed. Purposefully he walked over to the sprawling pile of newspapers stacked in disarray on the antique Queen Anne style desk Hanna had bought when they moved out of the small apartment on the south side. Arranging the papers by date he set aside the news and metro sections and discarded the sports, business and other parts. Shrugging his weariness and melancholia aside he plunged into the back issues of the Chicago Tribune. 

He read avidly, pausing only to brew a pot of black coffee, renewing his longstanding habit of scrutinizing the headline stories and op/ed features as he sipped from his favorite ceramic mug. Initially he turned the pages quickly but as the news became more current his reading slowed. One recurring story seized his attention. On several occasions he underlined key phrases with a red pencil, cutting out the articles and carefully organizing them in a manila folder. As he worked, there was a noticeable shift in his posture, the slump in his shoulders that carried the sadness of previous months giving way to a swelling chest; Jakub literally pumping resolve into his body, readying himself for combat. It was well past midnight when he filed the last article in the now bulging dossier. 

Although exhausted, he refused his body’s cry to stretch out on his bed. Instead, he inserted a favorite Miles Davis CD into his rebuilt Sony SCD-1 player (Jakub smiled to himself recalling Hanna’s gasp of dismay when she learned how much he had paid for the stereophile’s dream machine).  The heavily improvised music of the jazz legend would help him stay awake. Opening his desktop computer, Jakub felt his eyelids scraping the conjunctiva of his tired eyes, but he was determined not to give in to his fatigue. He cupped his head in his hands, closing his eyes to clear his mind, visualizing how he would organize his thoughts for the email he was determined to send.

Professor Lukas Huber opened his email with a scowl of indignation. As was typical on a Monday, he already had received several caustic messages including one signed by the members of his department calling for his resignation.  He had expected nothing less from a faculty overrun with Jews and Leftists. He was about to trash the mail, unopened, when a subject caught his eye, For a patriot. The return address read hanna@aol. Curiosity aroused - AOL was a dated server - he opened the email.

My dear Professor Lukas,

I represent a group of business and professional patriots who believe in  your heroic efforts to deny the fraudulent existence of the Holohoax.

We back up our beliefs with a fund dedicated to providing cash support to the heroes of our noble cause who often suffer financial losses as a consequence of their public opposition to the spurious cant of the Jewish-controlled media and Zionist propagandists. The payment is given anonymously, and no questions are asked. I have been authorized to convey $10,000 to you personally, to be used as you wish. 

I have your office number and will call you to arrange the discreet delivery of your honorarium.

                                                          Paul Haas

                                                          For the German-American Alliance

“Chicago is not a hot bed of the radical right,” Lukas reflected, puzzled, but intrigued. “Who is this Paul Haas person?” he mumbled audibly. The possibility of a well-endowed, secret organization operating under the radar was not altogether far fetched to the Professor. On many occasions after a speech or demonstration a well dressed, perfectly mainstream burgomaster would come up to him and reveal himself, albeit surreptitiously, as another of the growing number of Holocaust deniers. He Googled German American alliance but the notations were outdated, referencing the Nazi Bund that was popular before the war.

The pages of the album fluttered open to the photograph of Jakub and Hanna under the wedding huppah. In a shiver of light, Hanna’s spirit materialized and reached out to Jakub, kissing him, caressing him, guiding his hands to the telephone connected to the Sony SCD-1 Electronics speech synthesis player. He cleared his throat, picked up the phone and dialed the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago. “Lukas Huber, please." The eastern European accent he had never been able to get rid of, was gone. In its place a crisp Teutonic voice commanded to be heard. “Tell him it is Paul Haas.” 

The conversation was remarkably sanguine. Initially Huber attempted to pry as much information as possible from his mysterious caller… “Do you have an address where you can be reached, a phone number… something to attest to your legitimacy…” His questions were acknowledged with appreciation, understanding, empathy… assuaging the anxiety that prompted them, yet leaving them unanswered (a fact that Huber realized with a mixture of consternation and grudging admiration after he had hung up). 

 “Herr Professor, I understand your concern, but my mission is not complicated. I have been authorized to deliver an envelope to you on behalf of people who believe in the cause you are championing; nothing more. On the side of discretion I am asking you to meet me downtown where the paths of two very ordinary people will cross…and part.”

Dr. Lukas Huber was not a wealthy man. His path to the office he occupied at one of America’s most prestigious universities was both circuitous and rancorous. Starting from college days to his most recent well-publicized rants, his dismissal of all assertions that the Holocaust took place as conscious fabrications and psychotic delusions was a lightning rod for controversy and public scorn. It was not a path to riches. He could use the money. “Where shall I meet you and how will I recognize you?” he asked abruptly.

Jakub took the gun from its hiding place under the neatly folded, lace tablecloth that Hanna kept for the Seder dinner. He glimpsed himself in the hallway mirror and smiled at the incongruous reflection, Jake Edelman, the mild mannered, bald headed accountant was nowhere to be seen. Charles Brunson, crime fighter, doer of justice, Death Wish superstar, stared back. It had been easy to buy the gun. He had simply downloaded an on-line application form for a Firearms Owners Identification Card, answered the questions – over 21, yes; patient in a mental hospital, no; convicted within the past 5 years of domestic battery, no – and mailed the form with $5.00 to the Illinois State Police in Springfield. Two weeks later he took his newly acquired FOID to Bell’s Gun Shop on Mannheim Road in Franklin Park and purchased a .357 caliber Glock that he picked up three days later, no questions asked. 

Promptly at 2pm Jake Edelman spun his way through the revolving door at 400 N. Randolph Street, making a point to exchange his usual cheerful banalities with Eddie, the building’s longtime doorman. “Taking a walk in the park, Eddie, see you in about an hour.” Crossing the street, he entered Millennium Park by way of the walkway that ran between the McDonald’s bicycle rental and the Harris Theater, then took the steps that led to the restrooms located under the billowing stainless steel sails of the music pavilion designed by Frank Gehry. Several teenaged boys, part of a high school field trip, were milling about talking loudly; otherwise the Men’s Room was empty. Unobserved, Jakub entered a vacant stall. 

When he emerged a few minutes later, he was unrecognizable, a well-trimmed moustache and goatee prominent below steel rimmed spectacles and a felt Bavarian Hat. Foreign Diplomat was the character he had selected from the on-line catalog advertised over the internet at Buy Costumes dot com, his qualms about the theatricality of the disguise eased by the catalog’s assurance that instant recognition of the role being played was essential to the audience. Jakub had spent several hours practicing in front of the hallway mirror, “Guten tag, professor, ich bin Paul Haas.”  He was remarkably calm as he rehearsed. Confident his deception would work, he laughingly decided the Kommandant’s click of the heels was overdoing it.

At ten minutes to three, Jakub aka Charles Bronson aka Paul Haas settled into the settee located next to the curving marble staircase that wound its way to the second floor of the Chicago Cultural Center. A few retirees from the Senior Citizen meeting rooms were scattered among the tables provided by the center but as he had anticipated the overstuffed divans and wingback chairs in the alcoves that book-ended the stairway allowed for inconspicuous privacy. From time to time he fingered the overstuffed envelope tucked into the breast pocket of his trench coat but even the most zealous of observers would have detected no sign of nervousness from the quaintly foreign man who sat quietly at one end of the couch.

From his hiding place across the street, Lukas Huber kept a close watch on the ornate entrance to the Cultural Center. At precisely three o’clock he pulled up the collar of his topcoat and entered the building. The stairway to the upper floors was directly ahead of him and instantly he registered the seated man with the idiosyncratic moustache and beard. The man was small and slight compared with Huber’s own considerable heft, a physical disparity that dissolved the professor’s indecision. An amateur boxer in his college days, Huber still possessed the menacing, raw strength of a younger man despite the widening girth of middle age. Satisfied by his appraisal, he left the safety of the entrance foyer and walked toward his mysterious benefactor. 

Jakub felt the wetness in the crease of his palms but betrayed no outward emotion. He had not realized that Lukas Haas was such a big man. “If things went wrong” … Jakub quickly dispelled his disquietude. He got to his feet, signaled his presence with a nod and waited for the curtain to rise on the melodrama he had created. Pulling up his collar, he turned on the portable larynx he had sewn into his jacket lapel. The artificial vocal cords that he had transposed from the SDC-1 worked perfectly. “Guten tag, professor, ich bin Paul Haas.”  

 Huber looked directly into the little man’s eyes. It was a habit of his to take the measure of those who challenged him, his gaze never showing signs of emotion, doubt, or confusion, forcing his opponents to avert their eyes, to symbolically submit to his will and the superiority of his argument. Jakub was prepared for the stare-down. The blue contact lenses he had inserted into eyes were featureless, bland, and oblivious of Huber’s steely look. Huber was only partially assured… was there a glint behind the opaqueness? Finally he asked, ““You’re giving me ten thousand dollars…”

Jakub cut Huber off with a finger raised in caution. “You are getting what you deserve, my friend, nothing less.” Jakub opened the liner of his trench coat and tapped the envelope that protruded from the deep, inside pocket of his trench coat. “Come,” he said, nodding toward the elevator that descended to the pedway underneath the Cultural Center.

Huber had arrived with many questions to be asked but really, what more was there to know? The covert group this little man Haas represented wanted to compensate him for the years of contempt and vituperation he had endured. Finally, he would be rewarded for telling the world the truth.

           The alcove was deserted when the elevator arrived. Jakub entered the empty car first, punching DOWN as he turned to face Huber who had followed him instinctively. The heavy bronze doors closed silently. Jakub smiled reassuringly. He opened his coat and reached into the deep, bulging pocket of his coat. It was not the envelope he groped for, his fingers instead curling around the ergonomic handle of the Glock. As the elevator jolted into motion, Jakub pulled the pistol from its hiding place, his forefinger cradling the trigger. To fire, all he had to do was squeeze; five point five pounds of pressure would disengage the pistol’s three mechanical safeties; less pressure than holding Hanna’s hand as they lay side by side on their wedding bed.

           “Here is your payment,” Jakub whispered coldly. 

Huber recoiled, struggling for breath, his expression registering a distorted sequence of confusion, disbelief and rage.  He reached for Jakub, his body slamming the smaller man into the wall as a second bullet tore into his belly. Slowly he slid to the floor, a widening stream of blood oozing from his abdomen.  The elevator lurched to a stop at the pedestrian passageway that tunneled under the Chicago Loop. Jakub had counted on the network of tunnels being lightly used mid-afternoon of a workday and he exited from the elevator unobserved. He waited for the doors to close, then walked unhurriedly down the corridor leading to the Millennium Park Metra Station. 

At the retail mall adjoining the passengers’ waiting room he turned abruptly into the public restroom, taking quick notice of the two men using the porcelain urinals, then slipping unobtrusively into an unoccupied stall. Lingering until the men washed their hands and departed, he emerged moments later wearing the Cubs baseball cap he had on when he left his apartment. Following the pedway under the Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street intersection he took the stairs and exited to the street. 

“I’m back, Eddie.” Jakub signaled his return with a friendly wave. 

“Glad you had a nice walk, Mr. Edelman,” the doorman called out as Jakub pushed through the revolving doors.