Free Jacob's Oath by Martin Fletcher

the howls of the
     wolves and the shrieks of the dwarves and the fiends of the tales of his childhood
     still prickled his skin. He hurried forward, sniffing evil spirits in the wind, and
     wondered with Rotkäppchen: Who is sleeping in my bed? Or did the warplanes huff and
     puff and blow my house down?
    He steeled himself as he broke out of the forest and climbed the final hill from whose
     peak he would see Heidelberg, for the first time since that loud sharp knock on his
     door, on October 22, 1940, a date he would never forget, when the Gestapo ordered
     the family to report within two hours to the train station on Rohrbacher Street. Bring
     a hundred Reichsmarks and one small bag each with your name, address, and date of
     birth on a piece of paper inside.
    Don’t worry. To a safe place.
    The crowd of Christians grew as word spread. They watched in silence: schoolmates,
     neighbors, their local shopkeepers. When Jacob’s eyes met those of Thomas Holtz, once
     his bosom friend from kindergarten, Thomas blushed and looked down.
    A light rain scattered the onlookers as the first train, with wooden planks nailed
     over its windows, pulled away from platform 1A at 6:15 in the evening. From inside,
     fingers poked through the slats, feeling for freedom, a woman’s long black hair billowed
     through a crack as the wind picked up with the speed. It was the last time he saw
     his father.
    It was just after Yom Kippur and the Jews were taken into occupied France, to Gurs,
     in the south, where most died of exposure that first freezing winter. The rest met
     their end in Auschwitz. He and his brother, after watching the first train pull out
     of the station, were trucked in the opposite direction, to Bergen-Belsen, to the Sternlager.
     His dead British mother, who he could hardly remember, had saved his life by giving
     him her nationality. With his last hug, with his last kiss, with his last words to
     his father, who was strangely calm, as if he had accepted his fate, Jacob had promised:
     “I will look after Maxie.”
    And now he was returning, alone, wearing a stranger’s three shirts, and odd shoes.
    Even when Maxie died, Jacob hadn’t cried. His grief was so overwhelmed by his fury
     and frustration that he had frozen, seized up, and his friends had carried him to
     the hut, laid him on the bed, and when he had started to rave and yell, they had held
     him down, sat on him, anything to keep him away from the Rat.
    He was twenty when he last saw his father, and now he was twenty-five. In those five
     years in the hands of the torturers he had never cried.
    Maybe it was because he had expected so little that the shock was so great. When he
     emerged from the trees and looked down from the hill, steeling himself for the worst
     across the river, only to find the sun glittering on red and black rooftops, lighting
     rows of medieval homes in the narrow alleys, their white walls gleaming, almond and
     chestnut trees blossoming white and yellow in the cobbled squares, and he heard the
     four o’clock chimes of the Church of the Holy Spirit pealing across the Neckar from
     the middle of Market Square, and he could even see, counting from the left, the gabled
     roof of his own home, at Dreikönigstrasse 9, as if nothing had changed, as if a good
     spirit from the woods had laid a protective hand over Heidelberg and kept the city
     safe, Jacob couldn’t hold it in anymore.
    Alone on the hill, he sobbed with relief: his home still stood; he had come home;
     so others may return too. And he wept for all he had lost: his youth, his family,
     everything but his life. And for what he had endured. He howled across the river,
     and felt better for it.
    Finally, trembling, with an unfamiliar relief sweeping through him, he wiped his face,
     and as he set off down the Snake Path toward the Old Bridge, pushing aside the overgrown
     bramble, he believed everything would be all right again, after all.
    It was a beautiful feeling.
    It