The Little Liar by Mitch Albom

Author:Mitch Albom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

1946

Truth is universal. You often hear that expression.

Nonsense.

Were I truly universal, there would be no disagreement over right and wrong, who deserves what, or what happiness means.

But there are certain truths that are experienced universally, and one of them is loss. The hollow in your heart as you stand by a grave. The lump in your throat as you stare at your destroyed home. Loss. Yes. Loss is universal. Everyone in their lifetime will know it.

Salonika, by 1946, was a monument to loss. A city of ghosts. Less than two thousand Jews remained, the “lucky” ones, who had hidden like hunted animals in the nearby mountains, and the less fortunate who dragged home from the camps, dead yet somehow alive, searching for something but uncertain what for, having lost everyone they loved and everything they knew.

Sebastian Krispis, now fully grown but bone thin, stood in front of No. 3 Kleisouras Street on a chilly February morning and banged on the door. He wore a coat provided by the Red Cross, pants and shirt from a relief agency, and boots he was given by an empathetic Polish shoe merchant. His shoulder still ached from the bullet he had taken a year ago.

A middle-aged man with heavy stubble answered in an undershirt. Sebastian stood up straight.

“Hello, sir,” he said in Ladino. “My name is Sebastian Krispis, son of Lev and Tanna Krispis. This is my house.”

“Ti?” the man replied.

“This is my house,” Sebastian repeated, switching to Greek.

“What are you talking about?” the man said. “It’s mine. I bought it.”

“From who?”

“A German.”

“That German never owned it. He took it.”

“Well, however he got it, he sold it to me. I paid the money. So it’s mine.”

He tilted his head, studying Sebastian’s clothes. “How old are you anyway? You look like a teenager. Go back to your family.”

Sebastian felt his jaw tighten. Go back to your family? He’d had headaches for almost a year, ever since waking up in a Kraków hospital with that bullet beneath his shoulder. The doctors could not remove it, they said, because it was too close to a major artery. A cyst had formed above the wound, a permanent reminder of Udo Graf’s terror.

Go back to your family? Sebastian spent weeks in that hospital bed, then months in a displaced persons camp, where survivors passed around newspapers, desperately searching for lost relatives. He asked repeatedly for any news of his grandfather, but when a Greek survivor arrived and claimed that Lazarre had died in the infirmary, Sebastian was denied permission to leave and search for the body. Even here, the Jews were treated like inmates. At times, they were actually forced to share quarters with captured Nazis.

Go back to your family? As months passed, some well-meaning Jewish groups tried to create a cultural life for the refugees, inviting schoolteachers and staging sporting events. Sebastian was asked if he wanted to take part in a musical. A musical? All around were the Wolf’s withered victims, so haunted by trauma they could barely drag themselves through the day.

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