The Heritage Paper

Chapter 7



Zach Chester was still smiling from his brief encounter with Veronica Peterson. They had gotten to know each other through their kids—TJ and Maggie had no other friends, so their parenting paths had crossed on numerous occasions—and she never failed to make him smile. The part he couldn’t understand was why he felt guilty about it. Sara was the one who did the cheating. And sadly, that was the least of their problems.

It all started when Zach got his dream job at Newsbreaker Magazine and they moved to New York. All was right with the world; at least until Sara began acting erratically and forgetting to pick up TJ at school. There were times when she seemed like a completely different person, but he wrote it off as the stress of trying to adjust to a new life in a new city. But she sure didn’t appear to be stressed-out on the surveillance tapes—the ones taken by the cameras they’d installed in their brownstone for security purposes, including their bedroom, where she seemed to be doing a good job of making new friends. The thing that struck him was how brazen she was. She knew the cameras were there—it was like she didn’t care.

Zach moved out, so he wasn’t present weeks later when Sara was arrested for running a crystal-meth ring out of their basement. And she was so hooked on the stuff she no longer recognized their son. The news helped explain her dramatic behavioral shift, but it sure wasn’t easy to explain to TJ. And being a supposed award-winning journalist, he couldn’t believe that he never picked up on the signs. It still haunted him.

He remained married, but no longer had a wife. And for all intents and purposes, he was now a single parent. He’d moved to Pleasantville so TJ could be close to the Bedford Hills Women’s Prison where his mother now resided. He was forced to leave his job at Newsbreaker, and now wrote for the Hudson Valley Times, a small local paper.

The students and assorted relatives were led into a classroom. Desks were set up in a semi-circle, facing a podium where the Heritage Paper presentations would be made.

Many of the children had brought a grandparent to accompany them with their presentation, so the room had the feel of Bingo Night at the local senior center. Zach was fairly new to town, so he didn’t recognize many, but two of them he did, and was surprised by their presence.

He knew the elderly men from a story he did for Newsbreaker on the sixty-year anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. Aligor Sterling, head of the Sterling Center, was the most recognizable because of his political activism, including being presidential candidate Jim Kingston’s biggest contributor.

Ben Youkelstein wasn’t a household name like Sterling, but he was well known in the underground world of Nazi hunting. The two of them had relentlessly tracked Nazi war criminals across the globe the last half-century, attempting to bring justice to an unjustifiable event. Zach wasn’t sure why they were here, but his best guess was that they had grandchildren in Pleasantville. He figured that some kid was going to have an interesting presentation.

After welcoming everyone, their teacher Mrs. Foss explained why they were packed like sardines into a sixth grade classroom. The mission of the Heritage Paper was to trace one branch of the family tree, using a living relative as the chief source, to see it through their eyes, and then present it together. Mrs. Foss had the kids pick an order out of a hat. TJ would be second to last, which meant Zach would have to stick around for the whole thing.

The first two presentations went by fairly quickly, as the nervous students talked a mile a minute. They were bland and generic, which made him feel better about TJ’s presentation, which would be purposely vague.

Maggie Peterson was now up. Zach checked for Veronica, but it didn’t look like she would make it. Instead of a relative, Maggie brought a television on a cart. Mrs. Foss announced that Maggie’s great-grandmother, Ellen Peterson, was too frail to attend, so they had made a video. Zach remembered TJ helping out with the recording, or something along those lines.

Maggie read off index cards, explaining that her great-grandmother had come to America following World War II and lived in New York until she moved to Sunshine Village in Chappaqua, a couple of years back. And without further ado, Ellen Peterson appeared on the screen. She eerily reminded Zach of the old lady in the Titanic movie.

“My name is Ellen Peterson, but my maiden name was Ellen Sarowitz. I was born in Munich, Germany in 1918. Before I get into the events of my life, I have a confession to make. This project is about family and heritage, and I have not been truthful about my past with my own family.”

This got Zach’s attention. A little scandal might not be a bad thing, he thought, perhaps livening up the tedious school project. He looked at TJ, searching for a hint of inside information. TJ just shrugged. Zach wasn’t sure what it meant, mainly because TJ responded to most things these days with a shrug.

Ellen continued, “I came to America as part of the underground railroad that helped deliver persecuted European Jews to the safety of the West. But I came under the false pretenses of being a survivor of the Terezin concentration camp.”

Zach noticed a tear on Ellen’s overly blushed cheek. He glanced again at Youkelstein and Sterling; now wondering if their presence might be connected to this confession.

“My mother, Etta, had been a prostitute, so my formative years were surrounded by drug abuse and my mother’s loose morals. Strange men would gravitate to our apartment and would often beat and rape my mother. They would also try the same on me, so I had to learn how to defend myself at a young age.”

Mrs. Foss looked shell-shocked—rape, drugs, and prostitution probably wasn’t what she had in mind when she concocted this project. That’s what you get for opening up the scary can of worms called family, Zach mused.

“I came to think of our ghetto as hell on earth, and the Jews who lived there were the devil’s children, even if I carried the same blood as them. When I was around Maggie’s age, my mother began to show the symptoms of a deadly form of syphilis. At the end, she couldn’t get out of bed and I became her caretaker.

“It was the fall of 1932 when a young man running for German Chancellor came through our neighborhood on the campaign trail. He stopped by our home to see my sick mother to help promote his plan for national health insurance, building on the system that began with Prince Otto von Bismarck, after Germany united in the nineteenth century. The candidate was so taken by our plight that he openly wept and promised my mother he’d care for me when she died. And unlike most political candidates, he lived up to his campaign promise.

“That man’s name was Adolf Hitler.”