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

battered soul after having witnessed the atrocities of Dachau, this small German town where thousands upon thousands of human beings had been destroyed.
    The unit returned to Berlin, Rosen smuggling the child through the border patrols and checkpoints inside a worn blanket, at one point laying him beneath the seat of a jeep while Russian soldiers searched the vehicle. Germans were escaping into Czechoslovakia, into the Carpathians, into Silesia and the Sudeten Mountains; the Russians were hunting them down and killing them, often torturing them, and some of the German women – knowing this – had gathered around the fences of the camps to plead with the Allies to capture them before the Soviets came. Desperate and distraught, these young women pleaded for their lives, but the Allies could not take them, they were too involved with the vast operation of liberating and saving the lives of the thousands of Jews who remained.
    From Berlin Rosen took the child to the US airbase at Potsdam, and from there they flew out, on through Magdeburg, Eisenach, Mannheim, and then across the French border to Strasbourg. From here they drove by night to Paris, to the European victory celebrations, and once there Rosen took a hotel room and stayed for seven weeks, feeding the child, strengthening him, clothing him, walking him back to life through the streets, the boulevards, the parks, sitting in cafés in the sunshine – saying nothing, watching him, eventually sharing some words in a strange mixture of German, Hebrewand Polish. Haim Kruszwica began to learn English, and the first question he tried to ask Rosen was ‘Where is my father?’ Rosen, thinking that Haim’s father must have been one of the many thousands murdered in the camp, questioned him further, and came to the unwilling and unwanted realization that the child was speaking of a tall, blond uniformed man who had shared his mother’s bed. Rosen had seen the woman kill the soldier, and understood that this man must have been an officer, hiding his rank for fear of the consequences should he be discovered. He told the child that this man was not his father, that he did not know where his father was, and the child asked if Rosen would now be his father.
    Rosen, tears in his eyes, said that he would do his best. The child smiled, for the first time in eighteen weeks he smiled, and Rosen cried openly, his face in his hands, there at the street table of a cafe while passers-by stared at him, his uniform, the child with him, and understood that, of all things, war tears the soul apart and reveals pain of such depth it cannot be fathomed.
    At the beginning of September, three weeks after Haim Kruszwica’s eighth birthday, he and Sergeant Daniel Rosen set sail from Calais for New York. They arrived in mid-October, among hundreds of returning soldiers, to the celebrations of victory still ringing throughout the free world.
    Daniel Rosen, a forty-six-year-old bachelor, took the child to his widowed sister, a devout Jew, generous and worldly-wise, and suffering her protestations to the contrary he calmed her and spoke with her for more than an hour while Haim was bathed and dressed by the housekeeper and taken to the kitchen where he was fed rich chicken broth and homemade bread. Rosen’s sister, Rebecca McCready, having left Palestine in the thirties and married an Irish-American despite her family’s threat of disavowal, stood in the kitchen doorway and silently watched the thin, wraithlike child: his wide almond eyes drinking in the sights, his ears thirsty for the sounds of other voices, for the music that played in the parlor,his mouselike eating habits as he picked mere crumbs from a heel of bread and chewed them as if they were steak.
    ‘Yes,’ she eventually said to her brother standing beside her. ‘I will take him.’
    Haim Kruszwica became Haim Rosen, Rebecca’s maiden name, and though he was a Pole, though he knew nothing of the Jewish faith, he was taken across the