Seconds Away

CHAPTER 17

Ema was waiting in the back corner of the student parking lot when I arrived. These spaces were coveted, and I guess there was a time when students started throwing punches over them. Now the school wisely raised money by selling them. If you wanted a prime space for the school year, it cost a grand. What was most amazing to me was not only did the spots sell out in record time, but there was a waiting list.

I was carrying a gym bag with my basketball stuff in it. Today was the first day of tryouts. Despite all the other things that were going on in my life, I still had butterflies in my stomach over that.

I walked to school. So, I guessed, did Ema. I mean, I had never seen a parent drop her off. She usually just came out of the woods behind the field. As I approached, I couldn’t help but notice that Ema looked somehow… different. I couldn’t put my finger on it. She was still dressed in all black without a hint of color. The skin was still pallid, her lipstick choice today a slightly more venomous shade of red.

“What?” Ema said.

I shrugged. “You look different.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Different how?”

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was definitely something-something maybe about the tattoo on her arm… Whatever. Now was not the time. “Doesn’t matter. You said you learned something about the Butcher of Lodz?”

Ema suddenly looked wary.

“What?” I said.

“You have to promise you won’t ask about my sources.”

I frowned. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Yeah, right, because what joke could be funnier than that?” She bit down on her lower lip. “You have to promise me. You won’t ask.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Just promise, okay?”

“I don’t even understand what I’m promising,” I said, “but okay, I won’t ask about your sources or whatever.”

Ema hesitated, studying my face to make sure that my promise was legit. Then she said, “I did some Photoshopping with your picture of the Butcher. If I sent someone a picture of a guy in a Nazi uniform and asked if he worked as a paramedic, they’d think I was nuts.”

I nodded. That made sense.

“So I used Photoshop to change his clothes into something more current. I also sent one photograph that was in the original black and white, and one that I colorized.”

“Who did you send them to?”

Ema gave me a hard look.

“Oh, wait,” I said. “Is that the source you’re talking about? The one I’m not supposed to ask about?”

“Not really,” Ema said. Again she hesitated. All around us, cliques were gathering. They were chatting or laughing or, like us, having serious talks. I wondered how many of them were talking about old Nazis from World War II. I doubted many were.

I sent the pictures to the director of Emergency Medical Services for San Diego,” Ema said. “My source is the one who got me in touch with him. But that’s not important.”

“Okay,” I said. “And what did the director tell you?”

“Hello, colleagues!”

I turned. It was Spoon. Ema did not look pleased.

Spoon pushed the glasses up his nose. “Am I late?”

“We just got started,” I said.

We both turned back toward Ema. She looked even less pleased. “Wait.”

“What?”

She pointed at Spoon. “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s part of this, Ema.”

She looked at Spoon. Spoon wiggled his eyebrows and spread his arms.

“Like what you see?” Spoon asked.

Ema frowned. “Are you really wearing a pocket protector?”

“What, you want the pen to ruin my shirt?”

“That shirt? Yes.”

“But green plaid is back.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping between them. “Can we get back to this?”

Ema’s eyes locked on to mine.

“He’s part of this,” I said again.

She dropped her gaze. “Fine, whatever, it’s your Nazi.”

“Please continue,” Spoon said.

Ema ignored him. “Anyway, I sent the pictures to the EMS office in San Diego. They would have been the ones to respond to any car accident in that area. I also gave them the date of your accident.”

“One question,” Spoon began, rubbing his chin. “Who’s your source?”

Ema shot daggers at him with her eyes.

“Spoon,” I said.

He looked at me. I shook my head for him to keep silent.

“So the photographs were sent down to human resources. They checked through their files. They showed the photograph to every employee they could find. Then, just to make sure, they sent me a link to a website with headshots of every licensed paramedic who has worked for the county for the past three years.”

She swallowed, but I knew what she was about to say next.

“There is no record of him. No one recognizes him. According to the San Diego EMS office, this guy never worked for them.”

Silence.

Then I said, “There are private ambulance companies, right? Maybe one of them…”

“It’s possible,” Ema said, “but they wouldn’t be called to an accident scene on an interstate. That’s the county’s jurisdiction.”

I tried to sort through what she was telling me… But what had I expected her to find? That a ninety-year-old Nazi who looked about thirty had been working for the San Diego Emergency Medical Services? Still, at the very least, the sandy-blond paramedic looked like the Butcher of Lodz. Someone should have been able to find the guy, right? If they showed the picture around or looked through their records, wouldn’t someone have come back and said, “Hey, this guy looks like…” well, whatever his name was?

I looked toward Ema. “So it’s a dead end?”

She looked at me with those caring eyes of hers.

“I mean, who was the sandy-blond guy with the green eyes I saw that day? Who took my dad from the scene?”

Spoon stayed silent. Ema took a step toward me. She put her hand on my arm. “We just started investigating. This is just the first step.”

Spoon nodded in agreement.

“There has to be an accident report,” Spoon added. “The names of everyone involved would be on it. We should get a copy.”

“Good idea, Spoon,” Ema said.

He puffed out his chest. “I’m not just eye candy, you know.”

We. They kept saying we. It felt ridiculous-we were just a bunch of dumb kids-and yet it also felt ridiculously comforting to have these two on my side.

Ema turned back to me. “I’ll get my source on it.”

“The source I shouldn’t ask about?” I said.

“Right.”

The bell rang. Students started to stream into the school. We said our good-byes and headed inside. My first three periods went by slowly and uneventfully. No boredom compares to school boredom. You stare at that clock and try to use any kind of mind-meld trick just to make the hands move faster. They never do.

I had Mrs. Friedman for period four today, my final class before lunch. I may have mentioned this before, but Mrs. Friedman was my favorite teacher. She had been teaching a long time-Uncle Myron was one of her former students-but she had not lost an iota of enthusiasm. I loved that about her because that enthusiasm was contagious. Nothing seemed to bore her. No question was unworthy of an answer. No moment was unworthy of study.

Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.

But today even Mrs. Friedman seemed a little off her game. The smile was there, but it was nowhere near its normal wattage. Of course, I knew why. So, I assumed, did the rest of the class. Mrs. Friedman’s eyes kept finding their way back to that empty desk.

Rachel’s desk.

Rachel had first introduced herself to me here. Yep, that’s right. The hottest girl in the school had smiled at me and struck up a conversation with yours truly in this very classroom. I had been both dumbstruck and rather pleased with myself. I had only been a student here a few short weeks, and I, a lowly new kid and sophomore, had already drawn the attention of that girl.

I must have been super cool and incredibly charming, right?

Nope. I soon learned that Rachel had ulterior motives for flirting with me.

In all that had happened, I had almost forgotten about that. Rachel had been deceptive at first. She may have had her reasons. But now that I thought about it, did I really, fully trust her-like I trusted Ema and Spoon? She had been part of our group that had taken down some very nasty bad guys. She had been brave and resourceful and put herself on the line.

But still, Rachel had first come to us from a dishonest place.

Could I just let that go? And what was with all that mysterious talk in her hospital room? What was with the Abeona butterfly on her door?

Was she still keeping secrets?

“For tomorrow,” Mrs. Friedman said, toward the end of class, “please read chapter seventeen in your textbooks.”

I opened mine up, checking to see how long chapter 17 was, and as I started thumbing through the pages, I spotted the header for chapter 36, something we wouldn’t cover until the final quarter of the school year:

World War II and the Holocaust

The bell rang. I sat there for a second. Mrs. Friedman was an expert in World War II and the Holocaust. Maybe if I showed her that old black-and-white photograph… well, no. That might be too much. And what would be the point? But maybe if I asked her about the Butcher of Lodz, maybe she could cast some light on all this.

I couldn’t imagine how, but what would be the harm?

Mrs. Friedman was at the blackboard, working the eraser. She was the only teacher I knew who still used a blackboard and chalk. She was old-school in every way, and I loved her for it.

“Mrs. Friedman?”

She turned and smiled at me. “Hello, Mr. Bolitar.”

Mrs. Friedman always addresses us as “Mister” or “Miss.” Again, with some teachers this would produce groans and eye rolls. Not with Mrs. Friedman.

I wasn’t sure how to start, so I just dived in. “I wanted to ask you a history question.”

She stood there, waiting. When I stayed silent a beat too long, she said, “Well, go on. I didn’t think you’d want to ask me a math question.”

“Right, of course.”

“So what is it, Mr. Bolitar?”

I swallowed and said, “Do you know anything about the Butcher of Lodz?”

Mrs. Friedman’s eyes popped open a bit wider. “Hans Zeidner? The Butcher of Lodz from World War Two?”

“Yes.”

She seemed almost shaken just by his name. “I don’t understand. Is this for another class?”

“No.”

“What then?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. Mrs. Friedman was much shorter than I was, but I felt myself shrinking under her gaze. I stood there, trying to come up with something plausible. A second or two more passed and then Mrs. Friedman held up her hand as if she understood and I didn’t need to go on.

“Lodz is in Poland,” she explained. “There was a Jewish ghetto there in the 1940s. Hans Zeidner served as a Nazi officer there. He was Waffen-SS-they were the worst of the worst. Responsible for the brutal murder of millions. But the Butcher is probably better known for his time in Auschwitz.”

Auschwitz. Just the word hushed the room.

“Do you know about Auschwitz?” Mrs. Friedman asked me.

“Yes.”

She took off her reading glasses. “Tell me what you know,” she said.

“Auschwitz was a notorious Nazi concentration camp,” I said.

She nodded. “Most use that term. ‘Concentration’ camp. I prefer the more accurate one-extermination camp. Well over a million people were murdered there, ninety percent of whom were Jewish.” She stopped. “The camp was run by Rudolph Hess, but the Butcher of Lodz was one of his more ruthless henchmen. Do you know the legend of Lizzy Sobek?”

Again, I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I went with something vague. “She was a little girl in the Holocaust, right?”

Mrs. Friedman nodded. “Lizzy Sobek was a thirteen-year-old girl from Lodz.”

“Lodz. As in the Butcher?”

“Exactly.”

“Did she live in that ghetto?”

“For a while,” Mrs. Friedman said. She looked off, lost for a moment, and I wondered where her mind was taking her. “Much of Lizzy Sobek’s story, well, the documentation is sketchy. We don’t know what exactly is true and what is legend.”

I swallowed hard.

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Friedman asked.

“Fine.”

“You look pale.”

“This is tough stuff, that’s all. But I want to hear it.”

Mrs. Friedman studied my face. I don’t know what exactly she was looking for-maybe why I was interested in something so grim, maybe why I seemed to have a personal connection to these people. “By all accounts, the Sobeks were a close-knit family. The father and mother were Samuel and Esther. The children were Emmanuel, age sixteen, and of course Lizzy, who was thirteen. They were Jewish and hid in the Lodz ghetto until the Butcher’s men found them and transported them to Auschwitz. Her mother and brother were immediately killed in the gas chambers. Her father was put into a labor camp.”

“And Lizzy?”

Mrs. Friedman shrugged. “Let me go on with what we do know first, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Somehow Samuel Sobek escaped Auschwitz with about a dozen other prisoners. They tried to hide in the woods, but the Waffen-SS, led by the Butcher, eventually tracked them down. They didn’t bother to return the prisoners to camp. They lined them up, gunned them down, and threw them in a hole in the ground. Just like that. Lizzy Sobek’s father was one of those executed and dumped in a mass grave.”

A chill filled the room. There was suddenly no sound, not anywhere. If my fellow classmates were still in the building, they were somewhere far away now.

“What about Lizzy?” I asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Friedman said, walking toward the bookshelf, “that’s the part that’s harder to document. We have records of Lizzy Sobek entering Auschwitz with her family in September of 1942, but we have no records of what happened to her after that-only the legends.”

“So,” I said slowly, “what are the legends?”

“That Lizzy Sobek escaped Auschwitz too. That she somehow evaded capture and joined the resistance. That even as a young girl, she actually fought the Nazis. But the most renowned tale of Lizzy Sobek involves a rescue mission she supposedly led in southern Poland.”

“What sort of rescue?”

Mrs. Friedman pulled a book off the shelf. “Somehow a group of resistance fighters were able to stop a train transporting Jews to Auschwitz. Not for long. Just for a few brief moments. They put downed tree trunks on the track. The guards had to jump down to remove them. But you see, on this train, there was one particular car that was carrying the children.”

I froze when I heard that. Children. Lizzy Sobek had been trying to rescue children.

“Someone broke open the cargo door, and the children managed to escape into the woods. Over fifty of them. And they claim that the person who broke the door open-the person who led the raid-was a young girl.”

“Lizzy Sobek,” I said.

Mrs. Friedman nodded. She opened the book in her hand. I could only see part of the title-something about illustrations from the Holocaust-but she started paging through it quickly.

“Do you believe the legend?” I asked.

“There is evidence backing up the story,” she said a little too carefully, like she was reading from a script she didn’t fully believe. “We do know that the children were indeed rescued. We know that most claimed that the leader was a young girl matching Lizzy’s description. But on the other hand, none of the children actually met or spoke to Lizzy Sobek. If the story is to be believed, she rescued them, led them up the hill, and then went on her way.”

“Still,” I said, “with so many witnesses…”

“Yes, there’s that,” Mrs. Friedman said. “But there are other issues that cast doubt on the story.”

“Like?”

She was still leafing through the illustrations. “Like the witnesses were all children. They were young. They were scared. They were hungry. It was dark out.”

“So it might not have been Lizzy Sobek that they saw.”

Mrs. Friedman nodded, but I could see a shadow cross her face. “But there was something more.”

“What?” I asked.

“It was February. In Poland. There was snow on the ground.”

“So it was cold.”

“Freezing.”

“And you think that, what, affected their judgment?”

Mrs. Friedman stopped on a page. She took off her reading glasses and I could see tears in her eyes. “This,” she said, pointing to the page, “was drawn by one of the children rescued that day.”

She lifted the book and showed me the drawing. When I saw it, my heart stopped.

There were children running up a hillside in the night. They were running away from a train and into the woods. The central figure in the drawing was a lone girl standing on a hill, waiting for them. And surrounding the lone girl were dozens and dozens of…

“Butterflies,” I said out loud.