Black Cross

Leibovitz’s face hardened. “A place called Totenhausen, on the Recknitz River in northern Germany. As to when Mac was there, if you turn over the cross it will tell you.”

I turned the cross over. Engraved on its back were the words:

Mark Cameron McConnell, M.D.

15 February 1944

“That’s the date that the act of valor took place,” Leibovitz murmured. “Fifty years ago, your grandfather did something so strategically important, so singularly heroic that he was awarded an honor only one other non-British subject has ever received. That other recipient was also an American.”

“Who was it?”

The rabbi straightened up with difficulty, his spine stiff as a ramrod. “The Unknown Soldier.”

I felt a lump in my throat. “I can’t believe this,” I said hoarsely. “This is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard. Or seen,” I added, holding up the ribbon and cross. It seemed somehow heavier in my hands.

“You’re about to see something still more extraordinary,” Leibovitz said. “Something unique.”

I swallowed in anticipation.

“Look under the padding in the box. It should still be there.”

I handed the cross to Rabbi Leibovitz, then gingerly lifted the linen cloth that lined the bottom of the pine box. Beneath it I found a frayed swatch of woolen cloth, a Scottish tartan pattern. I looked up questioningly.

“Keep going,” Leibovitz said.

Beneath the tartan I found a photograph. It was black-and-white, with contrasts so stark it looked like one of the old Dust Bowl photographs from Life magazine. It showed a young woman from the waist up. She wore a simple cotton dress, her slender body posed rather formally against a background of dark wooden planks. Her shoulder-length hair was blond and straight, and seemed to glow against the unfinished wood. Her face, though worn by care lines around the mouth, was set off by eyes as dark as the wood behind her. I guessed her age at thirty.

“Who is this?” I asked. “She’s . . . I don’t know. Not beautiful exactly, but . . . alive. Is it my grandmother? When she was younger, I mean?”

Rabbi Leibovitz waved his hand impatiently. “All in good time. Look beneath the photograph.”

I did. A meticulously folded piece of notepaper lay there, wrinkled and yellowed with age. I lifted it out and started to unfold it.

“Careful,” he warned.

“Is this the citation for the award?” I asked, working delicately at the paper.

“Something else altogether.”

I had it open now. The handwritten blue letters had almost completely faded, as if the note had been put through a washing machine by mistake, but the few words were still legible. I read them with a strange sense of puzzlement.

On my head be these deaths.

W

“I can barely read it. What does it mean? Who is ‘W’?”

“You can barely read the writing, Mark, because it was nearly washed away by the freezing waters of the Recknitz River in 1944. What the note means can only be explained by telling you a rather involved and shocking story. And ‘W’ — as the author of that note so cryptically described himself — was Winston Churchill.”

“Churchill!”

“Yes.” The old rabbi smiled mischievously. “And thereby hangs a tale.”

“My God,” I said.

“Would you have any brandy about?” asked Leibovitz.

I went to fetch a bottle.

“I lay it all at Churchill’s door.”

The old rabbi had ensconced himself in a leather wing chair with a crocheted comforter around his knees and the brandy glass in his hand. “You know, of course, that Mac first went to England as a Rhodes scholar. That was 1930, the year after the Crash. He stayed two years, then was asked to stay a third and matriculate. Quite an honor. When he graduated and returned to the U.S., I’m sure he thought his ‘English period’ was finished. But it wasn’t.

“He graduated medical school in thirty-eight, somehow squeezing in a masters in chemical engineering during his internship. By then it was 1940. He entered general practice with a friend of his father’s, but he’d hardly settled in when a phone call came from Oxford. His old tutor told him that one of Churchill’s scientific advisors had been impressed by some monographs he’d done on chemical warfare in World War One. They wanted him to join a British team working on poison gases. America wasn’t in the war yet, but Mac understood what was at stake. England was hanging by a thread.”

“I do remember that much,” I said. “He agreed to go on the condition that he would only work in a defensive capacity. Right?”

“Yes. Rather naively, if I may say so. Anyway, he took your grandmother with him to England, just in time for the Battle of Britain. It took some doing, but he talked Susan into going back to the States. Hitler never did invade England, but by then it was too late. They were separated for the duration.

“Fifty years,” Leibovitz said softly. He paused as though he had lost his train of thought. “I suppose that seems an age to you, but try to picture the time. Dead of winter, January, 1944. The whole world — including the Germans — knew the Allies would invade Europe in the spring. The only question was where the blow would fall. Eisenhower had just been named Supreme Commander of OVERLORD. Churchill—”

“Excuse me, Rabbi,” I interrupted. “No disrespect intended, but I get the feeling you’re giving me the long version of this story.”

He smiled with a forbearance learned at the sides of impatient children. “You have somewhere to go?”

“No. But I’m curious about my grandfather, not Churchill and Eisenhower.”

“Mark, if I simply told you the end of this story, you would not believe me. I mean that. You cannot absorb what I am going to say unless you know what led to it. Do you understand?”

I nodded, trying to mask my impatience.

“No,” Leibovitz said forcefully. “You don’t. The worst thing you have ever seen in your life, all the worst things put together — child abuse, rape, even murder — these are as nothing compared to what I am about to tell you. It is a tale of cruelty beyond imagining, of men and women whose heroism has never been equaled.” He raised a crooked finger and his voice went very low. “After hearing this story, your life will never be the same.”

“That’s a lot of buildup, Rabbi.”

He took a gulp of brandy. “I have no children, Doctor. Do you know why?”

“Well . . . I assume you never wanted any. Or that you or your wife were sterile.”

“I am sterile,” Leibovitz confirmed. “When I was sixteen, I was invited by some German doctors to sit in a booth and fill out a form that would take fifteen minutes to complete. During those fifteen minutes, high-intensity X-rays were passed through my testicles from three sides. Two weeks later, a Jewish surgeon and his wife saved my life by castrating me in their kitchen.”

My hands felt suddenly cold. “Were you . . . in the camps?”

“No. I escaped to Sweden, along with the surgeon and his wife. But you see, I left my unborn children behind.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever told that to a Christian,” Leibovitz said.

“I’m not a Christian, Rabbi.”