The Light at Midnight: A Historical Thriller Set During the Holocaust Read online

  Also by Tom Reppert

  The Far Journey

  The Captured Girl

  Assassin 13

  The Light at Midnight

  The Light at Midnight

  Tom Reppert

  Helen’s Sons Publishing

  ©2020 by Tom Reppert

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  PART ONE: NASHOK

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  PART TWO: CHILDREN AT WAR

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  PART THREE: BROOKLYN

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE LIGHT AT MIDNIGHT

  PART ONE: NASHOK

  Chapter One

  An unusually cold winter hung on in Nashok like a wolf with its teeth deep in a deer’s leg. Even in March, temperatures still plunged below zero. The Neman River that cut our town in half was frozen, and snow covered the countryside. Those early months of 1941 were uneasy ones. Herr Hitler’s angry speeches railing against Jews could be heard almost daily, blaring from radios in neighborhood homes, and many people, including Papa, worried about the Germans on the Polish border ninety kilometers away, but I took no notice of it.

  On that first Sunday in March, bundling in our warmest clothes, my friends in the Young Guardians and I joined townspeople on the ice and skated down the river, racing past the trees on the banks, ducking under the small bridge. Tall for a fourteen-year-old girl, I felt clumsy in my stork-like body and spent much of my time fearful boys would gawk at me. But on this day, I imagined myself as clever as Sonja Henie, leaping into the air with a spin—that was till I fell. Some people skating by laughed. Sharply waving off Peretz Frischer’s concern, I gathered myself up and chased after the Guardians.

  Then, glancing back at him, I grinned. “Catch me.”

  He laughed and gave pursuit, but I reached our friends first.

  Peretz was sixteen and thought of me as a little sister. In my secret dreaming of castles and fantasy worlds, I thought of him as my prince. And Nashok as our fairy kingdom. Here, I had my family, friends, school, the Young Guardians, and Peretz. Our kingdom of Jews had been on the Neman River for eight hundred years, a town of stone buildings, wooden houses, and synagogues. These days, more than four thousand of us tried to live in harmony with several hundred Poles and Lithuanians who numbered among our neighbors. Some of them liked us; many did not. It wasn’t all beautiful sunsets and good neighbors in the kingdom.

  But I loved Nashok anyway. I loved the winters, but summers were a special time. With the windows open to fight the heat, you could hear music throughout the day and much of the night. Someone was always playing a violin, and we had two pianos in town. I loved to hear the klezmer band play. Late at night, I would sneak up to the cupola on our roof and listen to them performing at a wedding somewhere in town. Even if they were on the far side of Nashok, I could hear the faint melodies drifting on the air. I imagined myself hand in hand with Peretz dancing at our wedding.

  Summer meant the best market days. On Wednesdays, I ran down to the square early to watch the gypsies arrive in their covered wagons and prepare their stalls and performance areas. By eight o’clock, farmers from the region and merchants from Belorussia had set up their wagon stalls with produce and a variety of goods. The town shopkeepers moved their wares outside while Jews and Christians crowded into the square to bargain noisily. Often, I saw two merchants arguing over a single customer, each pulling on his jacket. With horses, pigs, chickens, and a few cows, you had to watch where you stepped.

  As long as the gypsies were in town, parents kept their children close and clutched their purses to their bodies. Everyone knew gypsies kidnapped children and, being master thieves, stole whatever they could. Yet, we all found ourselves spellbound by their talents. Amazingly, they swallowed fire, walked across the rope strung from the row shops to the firehouse, sang such beautiful songs that people wept, and told fortunes with mystery and wonder.

  This world changed for us in 1939 when the Russians came the first time. They were replaced by the Lithuanians for a bit, then they came back again just seven months ago on market day when their tanks and truckloads of soldiers rolled into Nashok. They drove down Vilna Street into the square. It was late afternoon, and already many merchants and farmers had left for home. The rest dispersed quickly, none quicker than the gypsies. I ran home to tell Mama.

  She was kneading bread dough in the kitchen alongside Janina, our Christian housekeeper, and only shrugged. “Did you get the kerosene?”

  “But, Mama, the Russians are back.”

  “If the electricity goes out, Rivka, how are we to light the lamps without kerosene?” Sighing, she stopped kneading the dough and looked at me. “Before these Russians, we had the Lithuanians. Before them we had the communists the first time, then before them we had the Poles, and before them the Germans from the war. Always somebody wants to tell us what to do. What do you think I can do about it?” She wiped her brow with a flour-dusted hand, leaving a white slash, and began working the dough again. “Rivka, we must live our own lives. When our new masters are gone, we will still be here.”

  Yet, Mama sent Janina back for the kerosene, not me.

  An hour later, as I was ironing one of Papa’s shirts, the door flew open and my older sister Hanna rushed in, her long, black hair tumbling out when she pulled her black beret off.

  “Mama, the Russians are back,” she announced.

  “She knows,
” I said.

  Hanna frowned at me, then said to Mama, “Well, I should go tell Papa.”

  Our mother was taking bread from the oven. She set the pan on the counter, glancing at Hanna. “I’m sure he already knows. He has his patients. Don’t bother him.”

  “I’m supposed to help at the clinic anyway.”

  Mama shrugged as if Hanna could make her own choices. My sister rushed out the front door as fast as she’d come in.

  Chagrined, I frowned because while I did the ironing, my sister ran off to the clinic to help Papa. But then, to be fair, she wanted to be a doctor and I didn’t.

  After that, the Russian takeover moved swiftly. They appointed several local Jewish communists to a Revolutionary Council to govern Nashok and placed Malka Henske, one of our own neighbors, in charge. Having grown up with her, Papa knew her well. A real communist, her first order of business was to seize the great Polish estates in the region and parcel them out to Polish and Lithuanian peasants. Papa’s five hectares of land outside town where our family had kept cows and apple trees for untold generations fell into Malka’s hands.

  I wondered what Mama thought about the Russians now.

  On that first Sunday in March when Peretz walked me home after skating, I sat in the living room with my family. Papa, Mama, and Baba, our grandmother, talked about Malka’s latest outrage, especially Baba, who hated her and the Russians, while Hanna and I worked on our studies. She had a biology book in her lap while I read one of my German books, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. I loved this story about a young girl’s Christmas gift, the Nutcracker, coming alive and fighting evil in the form of a seven-headed Mouse King. When the Nutcracker defeats the Mouse King, he takes the girl away to a magical kingdom made up of dolls.

  Pulling my sleeve, Hanna interrupted me and leaned in close. She whispered something she’d heard that day about a farmer who’d received land from Malka but was not so grateful. Drunk in a Nashok bar, he shouted for all to hear, “That bitch Jew has no right to take Polish land.”

  I giggled at the swear word.

  Upset we were not paying attention to her tales of outrage, Baba asked, “What’s so funny, girls?”

  I shrugged. But when Papa asked, I told him about the man, dropping the word bitch.

  He’d heard the story too. “Leopold Sadoski. I don’t think he is a happy man.”

  I asked Papa why a man just given land by Malka Henske would say that about her. “I’ve never seen her at temple once,” I added.

  “Doesn’t matter, Tsigele. You know the answer as well as I do.” He still called me Little Goat, even though I was hardly little anymore. He was trying to read the local paper, now an underground publication. He shrugged as if to say isn’t it obvious? “They hate us.”

  Then he went back to his newspaper.

  His answer frustrated me. Of course they hated us, but why? For a Jew, even in Nashok, this hatred was our life as much as rain and snow. Each time I witnessed it, each time it was directed at me and I saw faces contorted with fury, I could not understand from what dark abyss such a thing arose. Only that it did.

  One man in particular frightened me, Radek Karnowski. The Karnowski brothers Radek and Lucek owned a grocery shop in the market square and belonged to the Polish Endecja party, an anti-Semitic gang calling for Poland to be free of Jews.

  At one time, the brothers had pictures of Jesus and Mary in their store window with a sign that said, No Jews in this store. Now, they had pictures of Stalin and Lenin. The sign forbidding Jews stayed.

  Radek was the worst of the two. He was a broad man with a long, dark beard that made him appear like Rabbi Herskowitz. A heavy drinker and brawler, he frequented Nashok bars with ten or twelve of his mates, then came out looking for Jews. They carried cudgels and knives and sent many men to Papa’s clinic.

  On market day the next Wednesday, I encountered him while he and his bully boys were on a rampage. Winters didn’t stop people from bartering and selling. Bitterly cold, women vendors hung braziers inside their dresses to warm themselves. After school, my best friend Mila Frischer and I, bundled in our wool caps and thick coats, hurried hand in hand to the square, making straight for Luba Hadash’s pastry shop. She baked the most delicious lemon cakes and for us would throw in warm tea, then let us sit in her kitchen to eat them.

  Mila was what people called cute. Her dark hair was slightly lighter than her cousin Peretz’s, whose shaggy, black locks gleamed in any light. She and I had been talking about lemon cakes for the last hour. I had a few coins I’d saved from my work translating German, Russian, and English documents into Yiddish and Hebrew, mostly for one of the Rabbis or even Papa. I was good with languages. Actually, I was very good.

  This afternoon, the sun floated above without heat. The square was crowded with farmers and merchants. The air smelled fetid from all the pig piss and the horse and cow droppings, all the slop. But not as bad as summers since it froze immediately.

  Under the communist, market days were much smaller affairs. The Belarusian merchants no longer attended because the Russians had closed the border, and most shop owners feared being labeled bourgeoisie and shipped off to Siberia if they appeared to be doing too well. So instead, they sold their goods on the black market.

  And the gypsies no longer came.

  Now, Malka Henske had her minions hammer posters onto the telephone and electric wire poles and passed out leaflets praising the merits of communism. Some of her lieutenants stood on boxes and made speeches everyone was too cold to listen to. Not exactly as riveting as gypsies eating fire. These days, people came in the hundreds, not the thousands. But they had to eat so they came.

  As we turned the corner to Luba’s shop, Mila and I pulled up short. Passing a bottle of vodka back and forth between them, Radek and ten of his mates blocked the door. At first, refusing to be turned away, men and women just pushed past them into the store. Drunk, slurring his words, he spit and cursed at them, “Dirty Jews, there is no place for you in Poland.”

  He seemed to forget that, at the moment, we were part of the Soviet Union.

  For a few seconds, Mila and I watched from fifteen meters away. I noticed Avigdor Koppel, a young man who worked at the furriers, start up the path to the shop with two of his friends. His father repaired bicycles out of his house on Starka Street and exchanged repair work with Papa for getting his arthritis treated. Radek and several of his buddies stepped in front of Avigdor. I knew this would be trouble. The yelling got louder and the shoving more violent.

  Mila said softly, “Maybe we should go to Mr. Gelman’s. He has nice bagels.”

  Fear getting the better of me, I said, “Maybe we should.”

  We turned to go when Radek yelled, “You.” He and another man strode straight for me, ignoring Mila. I would have run, but fear locked my legs in place.

  He stopped a foot away, a menacing presence in work clothes and heavy boots. Spittle dripped down his beard. His eyes burned with madness and hatred, and I could not fathom why. My heart wracked my chest with its furious pounding. Even though Radek had been a patient of Papa’s for years for something about chronic tendonitis in his feet, my father never charged him a single coin, yet here he was threatening me.

  The other man who hung a step back I didn’t know. He was thin with a pockmarked face, grinning like this was a puppet show.

  Radek shouted at me as if I were on the other side of the square, “You’re that Jew doctor’s daughter, aren’t you? The noble Dr. Resnik. Living in that big house like a king. Treats the rest of us like shit. Thinks he’s better than anyone else.”

  His yellow teeth looked like fangs. His foul breath shot out in white gusts. Frozen in panic, I couldn’t answer.

  “Jew brat, you and your bastard father don’t belong in Poland. Take all your dirty Jew family and get the hell out!” He shook his fist at me. “I should knock your teeth in.” r />
  His screaming eyes told me he would do it. That I was a girl smaller than him didn’t matter a grain of wheat. I stood my ground though, but from absolute terror. I couldn’t move. Yet, from somewhere within, anger welled up. It formed in my chest and grew massive. I was not any less frightened, but I felt the same exploding rage that came to me at rare moments. A bit insolently, I said, “If my father leaves, who will treat your flat feet?”

  The pockmarked man sniggered. Radek’s eyes flashed with fanatical rage. He drew back his fist and would have hit me. That was when Avigdor punched him in the face. A small man, he did little damage except to enrage Radek even more. The Endecja leader turned on him savagely and began pummeling him. Several of his cronies joined in. A wild brawl erupted when Avigdor’s friends came to his rescue and several men from the market flew into the fight.

  Mila grabbed my hand and we ran.

  “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen,” Mila said as we raced from the square. “You are amazing.”

  I wasn’t amazing; I wasn’t brave. I was a coward. What bothered me was that Mila believed I’d stood up to the monster. It seemed Avigdor thought the same thing. Afterward, he told people that Dr. Resnik’s daughter Rivka was as brave as Yosef Trumpeldor himself. But when I told everyone I’d actually been too scared to move, they thought me just modest. In fact, I was shaken for days after the incident. The look in Radek’s eyes plagued my dreams and made the night frightening. I’d seen madness and hatred in his eyes before to be sure, but there had been something else this time, something I could only describe as dark and evil.

  At the same time, another thing began to fascinate me even more. That anger that arose out of me. I could not control it any more than I could control my fear. It took shape, something ferocious, a companion that was on my side. It had visited me once before when I was ten. At that age, the woods were forbidden to me because they could be dangerous, but I wandered their paths, not straying too far from home.

  One day I ran into Stannis Karnowski, Radek’s oldest boy. A wolf cub had been caught in one of his traps, and he was poking it with a sharp stick. The cub was two, maybe three months old and snarling at Stannis. The moment I saw this, the rage surged through me, fearless and monstrous. Screaming at him, I picked up sticks and rocks and began throwing them. Miraculously, he backed away, not afraid of me, but at a loss as to how to deal with this screaming, wild girl. The wolf cub bit me in the forearm when I released it.