Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory Read Free Book Online Page A

uniform – and his rank – discarded now, believing he could be filed away with the rest of his men. Elena ran towards him, ran through the American soldiers who tried to hold her back, and lunged for him as he cowered and fell to his knees. With her hands she clawed at his face, tore at his eyes until his features were spattered with blood, gouged and tormented.
    The Americans did nothing, watching in horror and disbelief, and when she turned and stared at one of them, holding out her hand, her eyes demanding, her face filthy and grim and resolute, the soldier could do nothing but unclip his gun and hand it to her.
    Elena Kruszwica held the gun against Kiel’s face, and Kiel – screaming at her, begging for mercy, pleading for his life until he was hoarse – fell into shocked silence as she spat at him, and then pulled the trigger.
    These soldiers, these young men – so valiant, so victorious – were welcomed to Dachau by a woman their own age who looked twenty years their senior, a woman with the word
JUDE
burned into her flesh, into the back of her head, into her breasts.
    Elena turned as trucks filed through the gates, as the earth trembled beneath her feet, and then she saw her son, her Haim running towards her, running straight towards her across the path of a jeep. Screaming, she charged out, her feet sliding through the mud, her voice audible over the sound of theengines, reaching him just in time to catch him and hurl him forward away from the jeep’s wheels. And in this moment she understood: understood that her willingness to die to give him freedom had arrived, for the jeep skidded away from the boy and hit her. Had she been strong and healthy, had she not suffered four years of mental and physical torture at the hands of the Nazis, perhaps she would have survived. But she was not strong, she was emaciated and weak, a broken spirit, a battered body, and the impact of the vehicle killed her within moments. She died with her eyes open, having seen, and then reflecting the sight of a United States Army sergeant picking up her son and holding him close. She died with something resembling a smile on her face, knowing that somehow the boy would see beyond these wires, out into the fields, the woods, the world she remembered before the death of the boy’s father and the rape of her country.
    The soldier who held the boy was a Jew himself. His name was Daniel Rosen, and the jeep that had killed the boy’s mother was his own, driven by his aide. Stunned and shocked, he held the boy closer, watching as his fellow soldiers picked up the woman’s body, carried it to the back of a truck and wrapped it in a blanket. Rosen walked with the child, held him carefully, listened to his breathing, understood that nothing could be said to reach this soul, and they stood together at the tailgate of the vehicle. Rosen lifted the corner of the blanket, revealed the almost angelic expression on Elena Kruszwica’s face. The child – wide-eyed and drawn, his cheeks sunken beneath his bones, his forehead high, his hair thin on an almost translucent skull – said nothing; merely reached out and touched his mother’s mud-spattered face. It was said that Daniel Rosen cried for the child, but no-one was sure.
    Rosen, commanding an infantry unit, did what he could before medical battalions arrived, before the doctors and nurses stepped from the trucks and administered watered milk, penicillin, sulfa-based immune system fortifiers – whateverthey could to stem the tide of dying that continued for weeks after the liberation.
    At the beginning of June Rosen left. He took with him the child; though they had never spoken, Rosen only whispering to the child in Hebrew, the child watching him with that same open, vacant expression, they had found some sense of unity, formed a silent bond that surpassed the need to speak. Perhaps Rosen felt responsible for the death of the child’s mother, perhaps he felt an obligation to salvage one