As Elena Strauss began to fall, second and third shots rang out in the bizarrely lit hallway. Three more shots were fired.
Then it was unnaturally quiet upstairs in the Strauss house.
CHAPTER 11
“Outside! … Everyone outside. Move quickly there. Move! Move, I say!”
Downstairs, the Strauss family was being marched single file out onto the dark side lawns.
The confusion was surreal. Terrible memories began to come back for some of the family members.
David Strauss was being helped to his feet. Holding his broken, bleeding nose, he was being led forward with the others.
Suddenly, the two other Nazi intruders appeared from another side of the house. “Let’s go,” the Soldier called out. “This way! Now!”
The four Nazis ran north into the thickest estate woods. Dogs began to bark at all the neighboring houses. Police sirens could be heard howling in the direction of the village of Scarsdale.
Amazingly, everyone outside seemed to be unharmed. The attack appeared to be over.
The Strauss family members began to weep, to hug and kiss one another. The wrow, wrow, wrow of the sirens got closer. Wide-eyed neighbors were running across North Avenue in housecoats and pajamas.
Suddenly, David’s Aunt Shirley was pointing back toward the gardens.
Everything became deadly quiet. Everyone just stared.
David turned and stared, too. In front of Grandpa Sam’s pear and boxwood trees. Right in front of an old gazebo brought down from the Cherrywoods Hotel.
“Rotten, pathetic, filthy bastards!” David Strauss spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Oh you rotten sons of bitches.”
They had burned a five-foot-square swastika on the estate lawns.
CHAPTER 12
Later that night, a sixty-eight-year-old man, former SS Colonel Hermann Rinemann, sat in his old world décor New York City apartment. He tried, unsuccessfully, to be reasonably calm.
Colonel Rinemann watched the ABC television replays of the Academy Awards slayings, then the Scarsdale attack.
Rinemann then tried to watch a movie until the next news report at two-thirty.
At two-thirty, he watched the last news on Channel 9.
At three-thirty, he watched the final news on ABC.
At four-thirty, he walked his dog on the empty, steaming streets of upper East Side Manhattan.
When he returned from his walk, he fixed himself toast and tea with lemon—but he found he was too excited to eat once he had prepared the food.
Something called Not For Women Only was on TV. At 7:00 A.M., CBS began its morning news with more clips from the previous night.
Finally at eight, New York time, Hermann Rinemann made a long-distance phone call.
To La Paz, Bolivia.
A manservant answered the phone.
Rinemann inquired if Senor Eliazer was up at his usual hour. If Senor Eliazer was available to come to the telephone.
Yes, it was very, very important. Yes, he would wait.
The next voice Colonel Rinemann heard was that of Senor Eliazer. Senor Eliazer—who had once been known by another, much more famous and powerful-sounding name.
In a hushed voice, Hermann Rinemann began to describe in great detail what he was watching on the Today show’s eight-o’clock news.
The raids.
The warning.
Dachau Zwei.
Part 2
CHAPTER 13
Henri Bendel’s, New York City.
Her thick black hair blazing like the mane of a Thoroughbred, Alix Rothschild struck a New York Vogue pose beneath the rich brown-and-cream canopy of Henri Bendel’s on West Fifty-seventh Street.
Behind Alix, in Bendel’s glossy window, the arms and legs of several mannequins were strewn on top of broken lightbulbs and colorful bazaar streamers. In a second window, there was a much-tastier display from Bailey-Heubner, one of the boutiques on the ground floor inside the building.
When Alix had been ten, she remembered, her Uncle Benny had bought her a white beaver topper from this very same, wonderfully screwy, department store.
Now Alix was shivering in a summery Halston gown. She was also falsely representing a cloying new women’s fragrance called Tricot—(the French word for knitted sweater, she hoped someone at the Madison Avenue perfume factory realized).
For three magazine ads and two television commercials, Alix Rothschild would receive $250,000 to promote Tricot, a scent very much like Rive Gauche, Charlie, Wind Song, Cachet, Babe. A touch less alcohol; a smidgen more jasmine. And Alix Rothschild!
All around the dark-haired actress there were flashing Mylar reflectors on aluminum tripods.
No more than an arm’s length away was an expensive troupe of makeup, fashion, and hairstylists. Dabbing, blotting, curling. Crimping, glossing, spraying, powdering.
Making certain that Alix Rothschild looked perfect.
Which Alix did.
An art director, photographer, assistant director, and account executive told her so. The crowd gathered around Alix showed it with their approving smiles and wide eyes. Even Bendel’s ancient doorman, Buster, looked mildly animated, or at least, amused.
“Gorgeous, darling.” “Perf, Alix.” “Sexy kitten now.” Alix heard the shop talk among the reflectors. “Varushka got herself preggers in New Hampshire. Yes, she did, too. I heard it from Kimberly over at Elite.”
Alix’s mind, meanwhile, was drifting.
Whenever the crowds and bright klieg lights suggested to Alix that she was someone special—her own tremendous guilt, her terrible visions, came rushing in to countermand the pleasant experience.
This time it was worse than it had ever been, Alix realized.
Instead of chic, expensive perfumes, she could smell putrefying corpses.
Instead of the wealthy Fifth Avenue crowd, she saw a line of stick-limbed, bent-over prisoners in striped prison garb, with big yellow stars branded on their backs and chests.
Thirty-five years before, Alix Rothschild’s mother had died horribly on one of those terrifying lines. At Dachau Konzentrationslager. Her father had died in Buchenwald. Alix was one of nearly a million concentration camp survivors in the United States.
Lately, she’d become obsessed.
Ever since the Nazi raid in Westchester. Ever since the threat of some kind of uprising by the Reich, Alix had been able to think of nothing else.
On May 7, 1945, church bells, fire alarms, and air-raid sirens had tolled and pealed all through ravaged Western Europe, inside Russia, all the way to America.
The terrible war in Europe was finally over.
Winston Churchill had said: “This moment is a signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.”
What Alix Rothschild remembered was a long, grim line of German civilians. The American Army had forced them to come and visit Dachau after the liberation.
Their heads hanging low, protesting their innocence, the Germans were led through the rotting barracks filled with dying men, women, and children.
The Germans were shown the rows of gallows, where men, women, and children had been hanged; the torture racks and laboratories; the crematoriums still packed with human ashes, the last attempts to exterminate a few more.
It was UNRRA that eventually found shelter for some two hundred Dachau children at the Kloster-Indersdorf monastery, due north of the death camp.
Among the children survivors was three-year-old Alix Rothman.
The monastery experience was a sad and unreal one, too.
Little bald children, their stomachs swollen from malnutrition, followed the UNRRA people around constantly—telling their personal stories over and over. Though there was sufficient food at Kloster-Indersdorf, the children continued to steal.
The Dachau children said they couldn’t help it. A few of them who broke the habit early would leave the dining refectory proudly showing the nurses that they had empty hands and pockets.
In bizarre con
trast to the actual DP camps, a photo essay appeared in Life magazine in 1945. In eighteen photographs, two pretty little “Heidi-types” were shown having a “typical” camp experience. The girls were then followed across Europe as they bravely hitchhiked (with their Life photographer, of course) back to their homes. The pretty blond girls were shown “making friends with an American doughboy”; having a medical exam—“their hair is washed and well brushed”; being given an “extra hot chocolate” before they began their cross-country jaunt.
No wonder that so many Americans came to believe that the death camp and DP camp horror stories had to be bizarre exaggerations.
When Alix was three and a half, her aunt and uncle finally came to Kloster-Indersdorf to claim her. They took the little girl to America, the land of Life magazine. Where Alix was told “to blend into the melting pot”; where she was told “to forget all those terrible things that happened”; where she became Rothschild instead of Rothman.
“I just can’t do this anymore,” Alix muttered to herself, standing in front of Bendel’s. Then, suddenly, she announced it to the large commercial crew.
“Do what, love?” The director started to walk toward her.
“I can’t sell any more perfumes. Or wash-your-hair-once-an-hour shampoos. Or automobiles. Or anything. I’m sorry.”
Alix began to push her way out through the film crew.
“Please excuse me. Please. Please don’t touch me.”
With that, the actress hurried away down Fifty-seventh. She turned onto Fifth Avenue in her Halston gown.
A spring wind was coming up the street. Alix was feeling a little better now, able to breathe at least. She tried to forget about Dachau and Buchenwald.
As she walked, Alix looked down at her feet—size 10-B—and she wondered why she had ever thought they looked good in white “rowboats” from Charles Jourdan.
Alix Rothschild also wondered why people thought she was at all pretty.
CHAPTER 14
Nestled midway between Albany and New York City, ten miles northwest of beautiful Mohonk and Minnewaska, the famous Strauss Family Hotel was set high in the Shawangunk Mountains. The multiwinged and turreted hotel was somebody’s fantastic idea for an American-style castle.
With more than 550 rooms, Cherrywoods Mountain House was actually two great, sprawling hotels, one building on either side of three-hundred-foot-high shale cliffs separated by a shimmering black lake.
Because they were originally constructed in stages over sixty years’ time, the “Houses” combined several conflicting styles of European and American architecture. In fact, approaching the Mountain House from the main gravel road, the near wing and livery stable looked not so much like one style, but rather like ten or twelve different styles, and the buildings were in different colors.
Most awesome and beautiful, however, were the grounds of the resort hotel.
More than two thousand acres of gardens, grape arbors, barber-cut lawns, and virgin woods, which hotel guests were encouraged to tour on foot, or even in a horse-drawn buck-board.
From most rooms there was a breathtaking view over the evergreens and apple farms that stretched nearly to Newburgh, some thirty miles distant on a thin blue ribbon that turned out to be the Hudson River.
Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, and Kennedys had had the wind knocked out of their sails by the Cherrywoods Mountain House view. “The finest view on the Atlantic Coast,” travel editors raved.
“Someone really ought to make a scary movie here,” Nick Strauss had always said, and once had shamelessly suggested to hotel guest Roman Rosemary’s Baby Polanski.
Maybe someone would make a horror film there, Dr. David Strauss thought as he surveyed the land one overcast and particularly graphic afternoon.
For it was at Cherrywoods Mountain House where the members of the Strauss family were sequestered under specially arranged-for FBI protection, and where they waited in safety, hoping that their lives would soon return to normal.
CHAPTER 15
In the beginning of David’s stay—the three weeks before the hotel reopened for regular guests (just a trickle of Cherrywoods’s normal spring business, though)—he rarely went out of his suite of rooms on the fifth floor of West House.
David Strauss was obsessed with his grandmother’s, his brother’s, and his wife’s murders. David was particularly obsessed with memories of his and Heather’s life together before the evening of April 25 in Scarsdale.
Once he began to go out on the hotel grounds, David tried to lose himself in a flurry of physical activity.
Mornings at dawn, he rowed a modified scull around and around Lake Arrow. He went for long solitary swims and long jogs through the pine forests.
In the afternoons, David offered a free medical clinic for hotel workers and their families. He tacked up a very unofficial-looking sign in one of the long hallways on the ground floor.
Dr. David Strauss. Hours: 3 P.M. until I’m finished.
More and more, though, David found himself being drawn to the subject of modern-day Nazis. He pored over Nazi books and stared at old Nazi movies, with unhealthy attention. Almost daily he tried to reach an old friend of his grandmother’s, the famous Nazi-hunter Michael Ben-Iban. Ben-Iban, however, never seemed to be at his home in Frankfurt. “I’m sorry, Ben-Iban is away in Israel”; “Ben-Iban is on business in England,” David heard from the old man’s secretary.
David had always overintellectualized the Nazis, he decided midway through his reading and research.
So who exactly were these Nazis? he now asked himself over and over like a monotonous broken record.
In May of 1980, who were they?
Who was it that had attacked his family on Upper North Avenue?
Who had murdered Heather?
Why?
In a suite of hotel rooms, David stockpiled some three hundred Nazi books and pamphlets, many of them supplied by the Ulster County Lending Library Association. Among the Nazi books were Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler; Thomas Mann’s Order of the Day; hefty tomes by Walter Langer, Michael Bar-Zohar, Shirer, Speer, Toland; The Final Solution; Hitler’s Twelve Apostles.
There was also the swastika-covered and quite stupefying Hate Book; pornographic Nazi paperbacks imported from a drugstore in nearby Poughkeepsie—Gestapo Prison Brothel and Bitch of Buchenwald; and The National Socialist White People’s Party Songbook (To the tune of “Jingle Bells”: “Riding through the Reich/In a big Mercedes-Benz/Killing lots of kikes/Making lots of friends”).
There was also the Holocaust volume of The Jewish Encyclopedia, the complete Lucy Rabinowitz, Samson the Nazarite, and Jabotinsky.
Almost daily now, too, a man named Harry Callaghan from the FBI brought David new information: data on the known Nazi organizations still flourishing anywhere.
From all of this information, Strauss began to compile his own composite box score on the Nazis. They certainly knew who he was. Now David wanted to know all about them.
Literally everything about the Nazis.
The American Nazi Party. Now calls itself the National Socialist White People’s Party, David wrote in a foolscap notepad. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, FBI guesstimates 800 to 2,000 active members.
The National States Rights Party. Out of Marietta, Georgia. Hate sheet called Thunderbolt distributed to 15,000 members every month. Members included Fred Cowan, New Rochelle furniture mover who went berserk in 1976, killing five people in Westchester.
American Nazi splinter groups:
The National Socialist Party of America. Based in Chicago. Attempted Nazi march through Skokie, Illinois, on July 4, 1977.
The National Socialist Women’s Organization. Chicago.
The National Socialist League (Gay Nazis). Los Angeles.
A small group in Pennsylvania called Stormtroopers, but considered “harmless” by FBI.
International Nazi groups and movements:
Die Spinne. “The Spider.” Leaves no mailing
address. Not considered “harmless.” The same goes for Die Schleuse, L’Araignée, and ODESSA.
Day after day David Strauss rummaged through, or just stared at, the hateful stacks of Nazi papers and Nazi books.
He wondered exactly which page had killed his brother, his grandmother, his wife.
Every night when David closed his eyes, he saw after-images of the funerals.
Heather’s funeral had been disturbingly peaceful. An Episcopal cemetery called Evergreen. Blue skies overhead. Tall, full-boughed trees like those in Van Gogh’s final paintings at Arles.
Nicholas, Elena, and Beri’s service had been at Temple Emmanuel on Fifth Avenue. The funeral was held the day after the shootings, according to Jewish law.
As David lay in his bed at Cherrywoods, he could see himself riding to the funeral in a somber, tomblike limousine. The trees along Fifth Avenue were silently flashing by the limousine’s windows. His own face was reflected on the windows: dark, dreamlike, severe.
There were nearly four thousand people at the temple.
Gray police barricades had been set up for three blocks in either direction on Fifth. Two pale blue police buses sat at Sixty-seventh Street, which happened to be the site of the Soviet Embassy.
David held the arms of his two great-aunts as he slowly walked down the roped-off entranceway to the temple.
Inside the temple, David’s gaze fell down the long center aisle. At the sight of the three plain pine caskets his eyes filled. A cantor with a basso profundo voice began to sing. A swirling wave made up of sadness and immeasurable loss turned David’s stomach inside out. He felt lightheaded.
You never know how much you’re going to miss people. At that moment, David was certain he couldn’t go on without them.
Dear, dear Heather and Elena. And Nick and Beri.
Not only family, his four best friends in the world. His flesh. A physical and spiritual part of David gone without warning.
CHAPTER 16
Dr. David Strauss ran to punish his body, it seemed—for what sin or sin of omission he wasn’t exactly sure.