For once Judy was at a loss for words. She was touched by Karl’s simple, unaffected words. To think that she had complained of being lonely! Her mother and father led busy lives, but she knew she was never far from their thoughts. They filled the house with gayety. Yes, they worked, her mother and father.
“What about your father, Karl? Doesn’t he....”
“I thought you understood,” Karl interrupted her sharply. “He’s been dead for eight years. He died four months after he was liberated from a concentration camp.”
“Oh!” was all Judy could say.
The floodgates of memory were loosened.
“He was a great violinist.” The boy’s face was transfigured by a passionate devotion. “He had made a great name for himself. My mother told me of his triumphs. And he could have escaped in time as he advised others to do, but he refused to leave until he succeeded in getting my mother and me out of Austria. Then it was too late. He was picked up with others and sent to the Polish border—”
“But you say he was freed, taken from that—that camp—”
“Yes, for three, perhaps it was four wonderful months we were together. But he was a shadow, thin, emaciated, sick. But his spirit was exalted. Something I couldn’t understand, being the child I was. But I felt his excitement, that poured itself out in his love for me. I could feel his eyes bore into me as he talked. His faith was something unbelievable. In spite of all he had gone through, he believed in the goodness of people, the mercy of God. While he was in there, in daily expectation of—you know—he wrote a piece of music—for himself and for the others waiting to die. He sang that piece to me. He played it over and over. ‘Some day,’ he said, ‘it will be the theme of a larger work for the land of our hope—Israel!’ He was only thirty-five when he died.”
“I didn’t mean to bring back all those terrible memories. I’m sorry, Karl,” Judy’s voice trembled.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about any more. What happened to my father was the fate of six million others! Just because they were Jews and other brave ones who dared to risk their own lives to help them!”