Zophias Revenge

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Wayne Jessop 

"Take full vengeance for the sons of Israel on the Midianites; afterward you will be gathered to your people." Num 31:2

I stood leaning on the back of my desk, staring out at the ocean glistening blackly in the pale moonlight. I was in one of those moods that my long suffering wife recognised. A deep brooding isolation. She just glanced at me, left me alone and quietly got on with her sewing.
 
I disappeared into the cubbyhole of a room that was my office. Having spent a desultory fifteen minutes pushing around the fish Sarah had served for dinner, not really hungry, but going through the motions to please her.
She never entered that room. Found it much too depressing. Besides I kept it locked up, safe from the prying eyes of relatives that dropped in now and then. All those pictures of horror camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz on the walls. Photos taken from camps liberated by the Russians. Photos of Jewish children, women, old folk, all sent to the gas chambers, then on to fill the gaping maws of the insatiable gas ovens of the crematoriums.
 
There were other photos on the walls too. Photos of elderly men and women mostly taken with the aid of both telephoto lens and cellphones. These were modern pictures, all dated with a small number on the bottom left corner.
Sarah asked me about them a long time ago, when she walked in bringing coffee and cognac after a late night meeting with a youngster from Mossad. All I could think of replying was “Death, that's who they are, death”.
 
She looked at me with a frown upsetting her beautiful face, changed it to a fleeting smile and quickly departed. She now understands my “other life” and covers for me when necessary.
 
The desk was littered with books, fishing tackle, papers in Hebrew. A Rabbi with the patience of a saint spent five years teaching me the language long after I had finished my Bar Mitzvah instruction,along with a few trips to my beloved Israel to hone my skills.
On the desk,directly in line with where I sat, was a photo frame. Behind the glass was a torn piece of dirty brown material frayed at the edges. Roughly sewn on with thread was a yellow star on which was printed in Gothic font, the word Jude.
It had been torn off the jacket my father's brother wore in Auschwitz. My uncle Chania had a good friend in the camp. There was a promise made. Fortune would have it that the friend survived and had torn the Star off the rotting jacket, along with little hidden treasures of my uncles to give to his relatives as promised, if he could find them.

I ran arthritic fingers through my thinning grey hair, looked at the photo of Frau Doktor Ilse Ostermann staring over the shoulder of the photographer, all the world like someones dear old granny.

Her hobby in Treblinka was to watch her pet dogs tear Jewish children apart after forcing them to run across a courtyard.
She was found near retirement as a practise nurse in Greymouth. Apparently her death wasn't the quickest there has been.
My approach for recruitment into the Zophia Foundation was actually in Israel at a lecture given by Simon Weisanthal, Israeli Nazi hunter, who had the backing of the State of Israel, specially Prime Minister Golda Meyer.
Classical approach really. An invite back to the home of a young Jewish couple for a cup of coffee several days after they had chatted me up over a communal dinner at a local settlement. I was picked up by the young man Samuel from my hotel and driven through a maze of narrow alleys and streets in Jerusalem's Old Quarter. We actually ended up behind a fruit shop and climbed rickety stairs to a small flat on the first floor. Strange way to get to have a coffee I thought but shrugged it off as normal Israeli paranoia, living in a potential war zone.

Waiting for us in the kitchen was an old Jewish man, introduced simply as Benjamin. Samuel shrugged, after seeing Benjamin jerked his head - towards the door, smiled apologetically at me then left.

Benjamin invited me to sit on an old straight-back chair next the window and I watched the crowds flow by as he made coffee for us.
We made small talk for a while. He asked about life in New Zealand. If I had contact with other Jews in my homeland. He shared with me a little of his family history in Germany. How they ended up betrayed by neighbours who were considered friends. The Gestapo kicked down their door very early one morning, bundled them as they were into the back of a truck then sent to one of the local labour camps and on to Treblinka.

He survived by being at a Christian friends house when the Gestapo came. The parents, at great risk to themselves and their family had hid the the Jewish child when they heard about the arrests. Then came the ten thousand dollar question. Benjamin pulled his chair a little closer to mine, rested his forearms on his knees, leaned towards me while looking intently at my face, asked his questions. “What do you think of when I tell you that there are, in your beautiful country, in New Zealand your homeland, living with immunity, men and women that did terrible things and have not been punished?”

“What if I was to tell you that we believe at least fifteen SS Ncos and Officers are enjoying life in your country, hmm? Prison guards, interrogators, executioners. All living in what you call a South Sea paradise.”

  “I can see the disbelief on your face my young friend. How could this be, you are thinking? How did they manage to worm their way into my country, perhaps, yes?”

  “Money my friend, hmm? Jewish gold, objet d'art, cash and lots of it, to buy passage on a steamer from Europe via South America, or even travelling from the USA. “You look surprised at that”, He said smiling sadly.

Some had turned and spied for the Allies against East Germany and the Russians of course, but usually they didn't last too long and were killed or fled elsewhere, but most escaped, which is where New Zealand comes in.”

 But that was years ago. I had co-signed the death warrants on four men and one woman living here in New Zealand. I had also managed to have six more ShutzStaffel animals sent to Germany and Israel for sentencing. Spandau Prison became the lifelong home of some, and the others, well lets just say that justice comes swiftly in Israel.

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Gregory Zender, Dutch immigrant, also known previously as Gregori Aloysha Doletskaya, ex-TruppFuhrer Waffen SS, Officer in Charge of Guards at Bergen Belsen concentration camp, was sitting comfortably in his lazy-boy chair, the one that was given to him as a retirement gift from the wholesalers he had worked in since arriving in Tauranga from Australia.
New Zealands border guards were some of the slackest in the world when it came to keeping an eye out for a criminal, specially a war criminal. The war had ended, lets just get on with life, pretend that places like Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka never existed. That the men and women who guarded, tortured and slaughtered six million jews were only obeying the orders of a madman. What would they want here in New Zealand anyways?

But Gregory Zender was worried. Here in Godzone, his dear friends and comrades with whom he had made contact with over the years, who met secretly once a year on Hitlers birthday to drink to old times, to tell stories about the power they had. The ridding the world of those accursed Jews. The world should be thanking them not hunting them down. Now yet another of his friends has died suddenly.

Five in the last three years, only one had a heart condition, Otto Schaarmens, his car somehow went off the road and over the cliff of the western side of the Kaimai Ranges.

Gregory Zender shivered as he thought about it. He could feel the icey fingers of death slide across his heart. Images of those he had killed personally haunted his dreams. Like a boar he had cornered years ago, he could sense his death, but could only tremble in fear. His blood pressure soared and he wondered how was going to get him first. A fatal heart attack or the verdamnt Jews.
He wasn't stupid. He had read about the gangs of Jewish thugs travelling the world hunting old women and men like himself who were loyal to der Fuhrer. Having them deported back to Germany to stand trial, or if they were problems to assassinate them there and then. Oh no! He wasn't stupid. He had heard that his late friend Frau Ilse had been burnt to death in a suspicious fire, apparently trapped in her bedroom when the curtains caught fire. The small two bar heater was too close to the nets and poof! She was gone. Funny thing is that he had never seen a heater in her bedroom. She never really felt the cold.

He put the book he was reading onto the nightstand by his bed, took his medication, said goodnight to the photo of his beloved long dead wife, Emeline.

After his usual moving about to try and get comfortable, at least as much as his aches and pains would let him, he drifted off to sleep.  

As is usual with the elderly they become light sleepers and Gregori Doletskaya was not exception, so he heard when the front door hinges creaked a little as it was slowly opened. At the same time a foul smelling gray mist started to fill the room. It slithered around the room , a shadow filling shadows, the smell a harsh reminder of the smoke and the ash.

Gregori Doletskaya was petrified. His breathing quickened and became a phlegm choked rattle, his heart felt like it wanted to tear itself out of his sunken chest. He watched petrified as this ghostly apparition slowly metamorphosed into a man and a woman side by side, skeletal, she in rags, he in the striped shirt and pants of Hitlers final solution. She was holding the half rotted body of a baby and standing between them was a boy-child, naked, covered in sores and maggots.. They just stood there staring at him, the woman offering him her baby, just like they did in Treblinka, hoping that some-one might take pity on a jewish child.

The group watched silently as a young Israeli woman dressed in black entered the room silently and move swiftly to the bed. Placing one gloved hand over the old mans mouth and leaning on his body she plunged a long very fine needle through his ear and into his brain. He died instantly, unlike his victims. The moment he died the family vaporised, returning to the bosom of Abraham.
Of course his death was attributed to a heart attack. 

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