Maurice hadn’t been much of a Jew growing up. His family ate bacon and pork chops and never fasted on the Day of Atonement, and though they gave money to UJA, they admitted that the Zionists were a little crazy. There were some Sephardic families who lived in the same building, all from the same shtetl in the Ukraine, and Maurice and his brothers used to make fun of the separate sets of dishes for meat and dairy, and the sidelocks and the heavy coats and big fur hats and the Yiddish. The Sephardic kids viewed the Pikars with contempt, and sometimes made nasty comments so Maurice had to sock them, and then there was trouble between the parents. None of this made Maurice feel very interested in being a Jew. The only times Maurice actually felt Jewish was when the kids from the Catholic school called him a Christ-killer, and then he’d have to sock them, too. When he joined the army he was worried that if he was captured, the “J” on his dog tags might motivate the Nazis to do something special to him, but that didn’t make him a Jew, it made him a highly motivated combat infantryman. What made him a Jew was Buchenwald. You could smell Buchenwald before you saw it. The smell of thousands of unburied corpses floated on the wind through the lovely German forests and valleys, mixed with the smell of shit and the smell of disease. Buchenwald was a slave labor camp. There were 30,000 prisoners, all sentenced to Vernichtung durch Arbeit, Extermination through Labor. The German Communists lived in barracks at the top of the camp, the Jews and Gypsies were piled in barns in an annex called the Little Camp. When Combat Team 9 burst in, there had been no food shipments for weeks. In addition to starvation, there was typhus and typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis. The only latrine was a concrete-lined ditch, but many prisoners were too sick to reach the ditch and fouled themselves where they lay. Many of those who could move couldn’t stand upright but only creep on the ground like spiders. On bunks or lice-ridden straw mattresses or the ground, the living slept with the dead. Maurice remembered jumping off the truck and standing in amazement looking at all this. A grizzled prisoner in a striped uniform came up and spoke to the captain in English and offered to take him on a tour. The prisoner took the stunned GIs through the camp, pointing out this and that feature. The soldiers gave the prisoners every ration they had, and every cigarette, and every piece of scrip. The guide smoked a Camel and ate some chocolate. Then—before anyone could intervene—a Polish prisoner walked up and smashed the guide’s head in with a piece of lumber. The guide had been one of the Nazi guards disguised in a prisoner’s uniform. Unlike the Jews in the camp, Maurice had been given weapons by his government. Not just the rifle and the bayonet, but mobility and power and access. Nobody was going to mess with an armed GI, not in Occupied Germany. So Maurice began messing with the Nazis. The officers didn’t care. The officers cared about fencing their loot and getting themselves shipped home and collecting medals now that it was safe. The enlisted cared about getting drunk and getting laid. The civilians only cared about their own survival. Maurice cared about killing Nazis. The Death’s Head SS, who guarded the camps, and the General-SS, and the Waffen-SS, and the SD and the Gestapo. The SA, the Leadership Corps, the Orpo, the Gauleiters, the Kreisleiters, the Hoheitstraiger. The NS, the RHSA, the RAD, the FKNS, the DAF, the NSKK. The Auxiliary-SS, whose particular task was to eliminate any evidence that the camps had ever existed. The Germanic-SS, traitors from foreign countries who had their own military formations. The SS Medical Corps, who performed the freakish experiments in the camps. Maurice became an expert on all of these. And he became an expert on revenge. He’d just track them down and shoot them. No one stopped him. No one cared. No one ever told him he’d gone over the line. He felt more and more Jewish all the time.
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