Beyond the Shadow of Night(101)

“It’s true,” Asher continued. “I wouldn’t want to see you locked up, and . . . I’d miss you.”

Mykhail exhaled long and hard. “Thank you,” he said. “So . . . I guess I owe you an explanation.”

“Mykhail, you owe the world an explanation.”

“Well, let me tell you—tell you the whole story. The complete truth.”

“I’d be forever grateful. I only want to understand, nothing more.”

Mykhail drew breath. “Everything I’ve told you up until I became incarcerated in the POW camp in Kiev is the truth. Now I’ll tell you what really happened there, how I got out.”

“That’s all I want—everything you can remember.”

“Remember?” He shook his head. “Believe me, Asher, it’s a door I’ve kept firmly locked all these years. Keeping it locked has been harder than you could ever imagine, but I’ve always known what’s lurking behind it, those awful memories scratching at the other side like a rabid dog.” He covered his face for a few seconds with his hands, then sighed and said, “All right. This is what happened. The truth.”

He swallowed half his apple juice in one gulp, took a few seconds to prepare himself, then started speaking again.

“I was offered a deal. I had no idea what it was, except that it would get me out of that wretched camp.”

“A deal?”

“I only found out much later what the deal was. Does the word “Trawniki” mean anything to you?”

Asher nodded slowly. “Go on.”

“I had very little choice, believe me. I was shunted around and told what to do. And I ended up at Treblinka.”

“Treblinka. I see. And . . . what did you do there?”

“I . . . I looked after one of the engines.”

“Engines?”

“The engines that produced the fumes.”

Asher slowly slid both of his hands over his head. “Dear God,” he breathed.

“You have to understand—”

“SHUT UP!”

Neither man said anything for some time. Eventually, Mykhail spoke slowly and quietly, as if his words could injure.

“I’m sure you know what that job entailed. And afterward, when they closed the place down and disbanded the Trawnikis, the men were largely free to wander the streets and make their own way as they saw fit. I walked for miles and hitched lifts, got casual labor in Berlin. I knew the story. I couldn’t go back to Ukraine. Trawnikis were classified as traitors, and either executed or sent to the gulags. So I bought myself a new life here. I had no idea what had happened to my parents, and as horrible as it sounds, I tried my best to forget about them. Registering as Michael Peterson when I disembarked at New York helped with that.”

Mykhail glanced at Asher once or twice, but couldn’t look for long.

Asher cleared his throat. “Excuse me if I haven’t fully listened to the rest of your lies.”

“That was the truth,” Mykhail said. “On my daughter’s life.”

“So, the truth is,” Asher said, “that you collaborated with the Nazis.”

“I collaborated against the Russians.”

“But that means you collaborated against the Jews too, surely?”

“Look. I would have died in that POW camp if I hadn’t become a Trawniki, and I would have been shot if I’d refused to do as the other Trawnikis. You know it and I know it. It was the lesser of two evils. I thought it might lead to the overthrowing of the Russians—to Ukrainian independence.”

“That’s your defense?”

“Have you forgotten the Holodomor? What the Russians did?”

“That’s hardly an excuse. And it’s—”

“Do you know how many Ukrainians died in the Holodomor? Have you read up on it? It was easily a million or more. A million or more—systematically starved to death by Stalin in the early thirties.” He prodded a crooked finger toward Asher and then to himself. “Our parents protected us, but it could so easily have been us, Asher—you and me and our families dying in the early thirties, long before Hitler did his worst.”

“Like you say, that all happened a long time before Treblinka.”

“It’s still important, Asher. It’s part of who I am, what motivated me. And . . . and there’s something else you don’t know.”

“More lies?” Asher said, frowning. The frown softened. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Soon after you left Dyovsta, when I was about fourteen, I asked Mama why I was an only child. She said she couldn’t have any more children.”

“And?”

“Years later, Papa told me the real reason. He spoke with tears in his eyes. After I was born, Mama put off having more children because of the hostilities with the Russians. She waited for as long as she could, then tried in the early thirties. She miscarried due to malnutrition—the Holodomor . . . that Russian abomination. So she tried again the next year, with the same results, and she was too traumatized to ever try again. The Russians made me an only child, Asher. It was as if they killed my unborn siblings. Think how that made me feel when I was a young man.”

Asher scowled. “Okay, that’s sad and horrible, but you think it excuses you siding with the Nazis?”