Comfort to the Enemy (2010) by Elmore - Carl Webster 03 Leonard Read Free Book Online Page A

Jewish.
    And he's got relatives over in Poland who've disappeared. He hears from a cousin named Zigmund he calls Ziggy. Ziggy used to smuggle food into the Warsaw ghetto. All the Jews were kept inside the walls ten to twenty feet high. Ziggy said the Germans'd go inside the ghetto and do what ever they want. One time they brought out sixty prominent Jews everyone knew and respected and shot them in the street. Pretty soon, they're bringing out five or six thousand at a time and sending them to a concentration camp only forty miles away, called Treblinka. They arrive, some are put to work and the rest are sent to a gas chamber. In a few minutes they're dead and the bodies are burned in a crematorium.
    Louly said, a crematorium? She got around sideways between Carl's legs in the bubblebath to stare at his face. You believe that?
    Ziggy told Teddy it's been going on for a few years. Some are put to work digging pits, long ones like ditches, only much deeper. Men, women and children are brought out and machine-gunned. They fall in the pit and the bodies are covered with lime.
    Louly was facing Carl now, sitting back on her hands holding on to the sides of the tub.
    Thousands of people are murdered and we don't hear anything about it?
    Ziggy told Teddy almost all the Jews who were living in Poland have disappeared.
    They're dead?
    Shot or gassed, those that haven't starved to death.
    Ziggy saw it happen?
    Or heard about it from people who did.
    Louly was shaking her head. I don't believe it.
    Jurgen admits it. He says the POWs that hear about it don't want to believe it either. They can't see soldiers like themselves killing woman and children. Jurgen said it's the SS doing it, not soldiers. The boss, Bob McMahon said they know about it in Washington, the Nazis bent on exterminating an entire people. That's the word Washington uses, exterminate. You can read about Nazi atrocities in the paper, but they aren't played up because they're too hard to believe. So the papers focus on how we're beating up on of the Japanese.
    How about the one that shot you, Louly said, who wasn't supposed to be there?
    I told you, I was hit right here, Carl said , turning in the bubblebath to pinch the slight bulg e a bove his left hip, and in the leg. Broke the bone. What happened to the guy?
    The Nip? There were two of them. Listen, I'm going to make us highballs, order up some mixed nuts. You want anything?
    You won't talk about it, Louly said. Why?
    Are you kidding? I tell everybody, Carl said. Come on, let's have a drink.
    You don't want to admit some guy got the drop on you.
    Honey, this is different, it's a war story. Get dry and I'll tell you what happened.
    Chapter Six
    Gary Marion, Ex-Bull Rider
    Carl and Jurgen were discussing what the Nazis have been doing to Jews. Then Carl goes to pick up Louly, who is home for a war-bond rally, an d t hey spend a night in a hotel room, with Carl recounting what he's heard from Jurgen.
    Carl was shaving in his white undershorts in the bathroom, the door open, his highball on the counter; he'd come out to the bedroom to stand over Louly at the vanity in a peach teddy brushing snags out of her red hair, Carl stooping to shave in the vanity mirror while he told Louly his war story: How they lived in Quonset huts on Momote Plantation among rows of coconut palms, the 5,000- foot airstrip cutting a wide swath of packed coral through the trees. He told her fighter planes took off every day -- Australians in Hurricanes and Spitfires, the Navy sending F4U's and Hellcats -- to drop bombs o n b ypassed Japanese bases like Rabaul, keeping a good 100,000 Nips out of the war.
    ''Did you eat much coconut?''
    ''Hardly any.''
    ''Why not?''
    ''Too much trouble, and the milk gives you the runs. We hung mosquito netting over our bunks and took Atabrine tablets every day. It could turn your skin yellow.''
    ''So you didn't take any.''
    ''Once in a while I did.''
    ''How was the chow?'' The marine soundin interested.
    ''Poor to