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.