Excerpt of The Last Way Station by Jon Reisfeld

Chapter One

The last thing he remembered was the simultaneous
crunch of glass between his teeth and the deathly
roar of his service pistol at his right temple ... along
with
the brief realization that it was over. But was it?
The banging grew louder. It came from
everywhere, reaching his consciousness through the
darkness and the cold. The cold was terrible. Far worse,
he was sure, than the bitter nights at Stalingrad where
the doomed men of his encircled sixth army had fought
on – at his command – to the last bullet. 'At least they
had my gun muzzles to keep them warm,' he mused. But
he lacked even that small comfort now. The aching,
gnawing sensation consumed him. He could not move.
He could not breathe. He felt frozen solid. 'The Jews!
The Jews!' the thought suddenly flashed into his mind.
'Somehow, they are behind this. A handful must have
survived and reached the bunker. And now they are
making me suffer.'

‘The Jews?’ he thought, catching himself. Blaming the
Jews had become such an involuntary reflex he could
not stop it, even now. Far beyond second nature, it had
become as natural, and essential, to him as breathing.
His self-induced brainwashing was a far more
impressive, and complete, triumph than any his statefunded
propaganda machine could claim. He was
indisputably the greatest anti-Semite who had ever lived.
And in this regard, he truly was a self-made man.
Of course, he did not care for Jews. Who did? But
he had had no particular axe to grind. They were just
such a convenient and vulnerable target that they
became indispensable to him. He owed them everything,
for he literally had taken everything they had.
All his life, he had felt the Jews’ contaminating
presence. When he was just a boy in the village of
Braunau, in western Austria, he had heard the whispers
behind his back, that his own father had a streak of "Jew
blood" running through his veins.

"Alois' mother, Maria" he had once overheard a
gossip saying in a local cafe, "then a modest woman in
her forties, worked as a cook for the Jew, Frankenberger,
and his family. She had no dowry, you see, and
she had never married. Then, one day as she later
described it, she 'succumbed'" he chuckled, "to the
uninvited advances of Frankenberger's teenaged son. And
wouldn't you know it," he said rather matter-of-factly,
"that circumcised stallion left her with child. It was all
supposed to be very hush-hush," the gossip said. "Maria
confronted the Jew and threatened to tell the
Burgermeister she had been raped. Worse still, she told
him she was more than willing to let her own kin deal
with the boy. She rattled Frankenberger, who quickly
made her a nice settlement. He put her on a pension,
and she retired. Scullery woman and cook one day;
'baroness' the next – with enough of a dowry to make a
decent home for herself and Herr Hiedler, with whom
she had maintained a long-standing 'arrangement' ."
"So the lad did have his way with her, then, eh?" the
other asked.

"What difference does that make," the gossip replied
indignantly. "She, a fine German woman, said he did.
Isn't that enough? It was more than enough for
Frankenberger. He did not want to place his precious
son's fate in the hands of the village, or worse. The Jew’s
hush money allowed Herr Hiedler, a man of good
German stock, but humble means, to make an ‘honest’
woman of Fraulein Schicklgruber.”

"How fortunate for the fraulein," the other man said,
with just the slightest hint of irony.

"Yes," the gossip replied. "The payment clearly
'proved' she had been wronged. After all, would you pay
20 Gulden a month, for fifteen years, to someone making
false accusations against your son?"

"No, of course not," the other man said, "but then
I'm not a –"

"Precisely," the gossip interrupted, and they both
shared a quiet laugh together.
Hitler, seated alone, in a nearby booth, with his back
to them, thought about confronting the man. He
imagined slapping him hard in the face, rebuking him
loudly and publicly and then throwing steaming hot
coffee in his eyes. The idea that he could even be part
Jew infuriated him. And the altogether outrageous
inference that his grandmother had been a willing party
to her own “rape” – or a cunning blackmailer – left him
barely able to restrain himself. But then, he thought,
‘Suppose, their slander was true? Then what?’ A deathly
chill swept over him. Infuriated, he wished he could
confront his grandmother and put the matter to rest. But
she had died long before he was born, and the truth now
slept with her in the grave. Or so he had thought.