"But, Michael," Kari blurted, "what if they killed my father while they were trying to find my grandfather? I was mad at Dad. I hadn't spoken to him in years because of the way he acted about what his father did; because he lied about it and covered it up. But that doesn't give these men the right to kill him. That makes them just as bad as my grandfather was."
Voices were rising. Other people in the restaurant were beginning to stare. "Wait a minute," I said. "You're telling us that someone came looking for your Nazi war-criminal grandfather, and you think they're the ones who killed your father?"
Kari nodded. "I'm sure of it," she said.
I looked around the room. There weren't that many people around, but some of the customers seated at other nearby tables seemed entirely too interested in what was going on at ours.
"I'm sorry," I said. "This isn't something we should be discussing in such a public place. I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to come down to the department after all. At least there we'll have some privacy."
This time there was no objection from either Michael Morris or Kari Gebhardt.
18
Breaking up an interview at a crucial juncture like that is always a tough call, but Seattle's still a small enough town when it comes to discussing something that volatile. I opted for privacy over continuity.
I considered the privacy issue so important, in fact, that I was even willing to risk moving the interview to one of the interrogation rooms at the Public Safety Building, if need be. Interrogation rooms can be pretty scary places for someone who's never seen one before. Out of deference to Kari and Michael, Sue Danielson radioed ahead in search of a more suitable alternative.
We lucked out. The conference room next to the chief's office-the same one in which I'd spoken to June Miller hours earlier-was free for the remainder of the afternoon. We went there, but even in reasonably comfortable surroundings, it wasn't easy to restart the interview.
"Maybe we'd better go all the way back to the beginning," I suggested.
"Back to Sobibor?" Kari Gebhardt asked, blinking uncertainly.
"That would probably be best," I answered.
Kari took a deep, steadying breath. "There was an uprising at Sobibor in October of 1943. According to the records, my grandfather was still a guard there at the time. The mass escape from Sobibor was the only successful one out of all the Nazi camps. That day five hundred fifty prisoners scrambled through and over the barbed-wire fences and ran from the compound. Of the three hundred who actually made it to the woods outside the prison, only forty-seven were still alive by the end of the war. In the course of the uprising, approximately twenty-seven Ukrainian guards disappeared. Eight German guards also disappeared and were presumed dead."
"Hans Gebhardt was one of those?"
Kari nodded. "After I came back from Germany, I confronted my father about Sobibor, about my grandfather's role there, and about Hans Gebhardt's status as a deserter. Father denied every bit of it. Said it never happened. He claimed I was making the whole thing up. After that, I never had anything more to do with him." Her voice diminished to the merest of whispers. "Until three days ago, that is," she added.
"What happened three days ago?"
"That's when the people Michael told you about came to our apartment in Bellingham. They asked all kinds of questions about my father-where he worked, what he did. I felt like I had to warn him, and I did-even though Michael begged me not to."
I turned my attention full on Michael Morris. "Why?" I demanded.
"Because I didn't want that slime to get away."
"Kari's father?"
"No, her grandfather. I never thought Gunter would be in danger as well. That didn't occur to me. But I wanted them to catch the old man."
"They who?"
"Simon Wiesenthal's people. They were sure they were on the right track, and I didn't want them to lose him."
Michael's knowledge about the noted Wiesenthal Nazi hunters, his single-minded determination that Hans Gebhardt not escape capture, and the defiant way in which his eyes met mine suddenly switched on a lightbulb in my head.
"Michael," I asked, "are you Jewish?"
He nodded. "Half. My dad's Irish." His answer went a long way toward explaining his attitude.
"And you, Kari?"
"Lutheran," she answered, "so far."
"And how, exactly, did you two meet?"
"At school," Kari replied. "Toward the end of our freshman year, a Holocaust survivor came to the university to speak as a guest lecturer. Michael and I didn't know each other then, but we both went to hear the talk."
Michael nodded and took up the story. "I saw her at the lecture, and I knew what was said affected her. It affected all of us. After the lecture was over, a group of us went out for coffee. Somehow, Kari and I started talking. Long after everybody else had gone home, we were still there and still talking."
"What about?" Sue asked.
This time it was Michael's turn to draw a deep breath. "About the Holocaust. We talked all night. I told her about my family, and she told me about hers. My mother lost most of her aunts and uncles in concentration camps. She's still bitter about it, even now. And yet, here was Kari-the granddaughter of one of the very monsters my mother had warned me about-and she didn't seem like a monster at all. She was my age. Just listening to her talk, I knew she was every bit as horrified about what the Nazis had done as I was."
Once the dam was breached, Michael Morris couldn't seem to stop talking. "That's almost two going on three years ago now," he hurried on. "We've been together ever since. We've talked about getting married, but my mother's dead set against it. Like it was okay for her to marry my father, but it's not okay for me to do the same thing. Mother doesn't say so straight out, but she'd really like Kari and me to break up so I can marry some nice Jewish girl.
"And even though her family died in the Holocaust, she doesn't approve of what we're doing-tracking down the various escaped survivors, writing to them or to their descendants or relatives, trying to learn exactly what happened to them during and after the war. Mother says Sobibor has become an obsession for both Kari and me. She says it's not a healthy foundation for a relationship."
It crossed my mind that Michael's mother might be right about that, but I didn't mention it to either Kari or Michael. In the meantime, Sue went back to the death-camp story. "What did happen to those death-camp escapees?" she asked.
Sue Danielson had been sucked into wondering about the desperate and virtually hopeless fates of those survivors in exactly the same way Michael and Kari had become caught up in their compelling stories. Part of it is the hope that a sliver of good could somehow emerge from such appalling evil. And once you heard about such terrible, inhuman suffering, it seemed unthinkable and disrespectful to turn away.
Michael shrugged. "Fewer than twenty of the escapees are still alive. A few of the German officers were tracked down and tried at Nuremberg. Some of them got as little as three years for their part in killing all those people. One of them, the commander at the time of the uprising, was sentenced to sixteen years. We read an interview with him after he was released from prison. His comment about the war was that ‘…it was a very bad time for the Germans.'"
Shaking his head in apparent disbelief, Michael repeated the phrase. "‘For the Germans'! I can't believe the man's hypocrisy! How could he even think such a thing, much less say it?"
With that, Michael lapsed into a brooding silence. I waited a moment before I pressed on. "Tell us what happened to the guards."