Free Edited for Death by Michele Drier

crimes against the peace of the world imposes a great responsibility. The four great nations flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law.
    "The crimes which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated," Jackson wrote.
    Henry copied down the words and kept them with him as he searched the German records. Finally, after close to two years in Nuremberg, Henry wangled a month of leave. He still had what money he’d earned with Rabbi Morgenthal and he’d saved much of his Army pay, using it to buy cartons of American cigarettes. He hitched a ride on a convoy headed north and reached Berlin just before the Russians sealed it off from the rest of the West.
    With his language skills, his knowledge of German documentation and bureaucratic structure, the last letter from his mother and his supply of American dollars and cigarettes, Henry hit the black and gray markets of Berlin. He talked to whomever he could find who knew about records.
    When he was down to four days on his pass, he met a German woman who worked in a lawyer’s office during the war, typing up transportation orders and lists. She took him to what was left of a basement under the lawyer’s building, and let him spend a few hours. He dug through the files until he found his parents’ names on a list of people titled “Shipped East.” When he demanded what that meant, the woman shrugged and said she didn’t know. No one told her what she was typing or why, and she didn’t ask.
    When he got back to his unit, Henry shared his information with some of the senior officers and they agreed that it wasn’t good news. They would put the word out to the troops who were still working with survivors of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and other death camps, but if his parents hadn’t turned up by now the chances were almost nil that they were alive.
    If he couldn’t find his parents, Henry resolved to find his home and possessions. He particularly wanted to find his father’s favorite piece of art, a small sketch of horses by da Vinci. When his hitch in the Army was up, he stayed on in Germany through the 1950s, using his contacts to find some of the art, jewelry and other precious objects that his family had collected over the centuries. He realized that he’d been somewhat lucky. Because his family’s home was large and sumptuous, the Nazis used it for the headquarters of a unit that was packing up and stealing. They stole vast quantities of rare and expensive objects and paintings—anything that was valuable and portable—and moved them by the boxcar load into abandoned salt tunnels in the heart of Bavaria and Austria.
    By recovering and judiciously selling selected pieces of his family’s possessions, Henry was able to stay on in Europe and dedicate his life to quietly making sure that the crimes would never be forgotten so that they could never be repeated.

 
     
    CHAPTER FIFTEEN
     
    Clarice looks at me.
    I look back.
    World War II? A lot happened in World War II.
    “What happened?” I ask. “Did the Army use the hotel for troops? Did you get shut down?”
    “No, no. What happened didn’t affect the hotel, it affected my grandfather—and his brother,” Royce says.
    “I know your grandfather was a war hero,” Clarice says, glancing around as though looking for ghosts. “I can’t see what this had to do with you buying the hotel.”
    “It’s what happened after the Senator and my uncle got home.”
    It seems funny to hear him talk about his grandfather in the third person, but I’ve never had a relative with a title.
    “He’s not really my uncle,” Royce continues, “he was my grand-uncle. It’s a small family. My great-grandparents only had two children, William and Robert. They were both in the war. William