Love and Treasure Read Online Free PDF

the suitcase were bundlesof currency in a rainbow of colors. Hungarian pengő, U.S. dollars, British pounds sterling, Swiss francs, reichsmarks. Even a small banded-together stack of green-and-yellow bills: Palestinian pounds. Jack had never seen those before. Avar opened a small sachet and poured a handful of colored gemstones and pearls into his palm.
    “That’s what we’ve been looking for,” Rigsdale said. Avar put the gems back in the sachet, tied it closed, and tucked it into the suitcase. Then he buckled the suitcase and, with great solemnity, handed it to the American officer.
    On Captain Rigsdale’s orders, Avar’s men turned over their ammunition. Rigsdale sent a GI to the station to bring back the stationmaster and a few railroad workers to uncouple the passenger cars. Arrangements were made to escort Avar and the rest of the Hungarian civilians to a DP camp. Rigsdale ordered the now-unarmed guards to accompany the train to Salzburg, under the guard of a few GIs. Then he turned to Jack.
    “You. With me.”
    Jack followed Rigsdale to the jeep. Rigsdale, though he’d ridden beside the driver on the way to Werfen, swung himself into the backseat. Jack began to climb into the front when the captain barked, “With me.”
    Rigsdale didn’t speak for the first part of the journey back to Salzburg, and Jack remained silent beside him, waiting for the inevitable reprimand and busying himself with trying to clean a smear of dirt from the knee of his trouser. Though he loathed all things military, Jack was punctilious about his uniform. Whenever possible, he kept it clean and tidy, his collar and cuffs crisp, his shirttails tucked tightly into his webbed belt. Unlike many of the other U.S. Army officers and certainly the men, he refused to slip into slovenliness, even when covered with battle filth. He tried to shave every day, had done so even during the long weeks of battle, when the possibility of bathing was as remote as the idea of going home. The more furious he became at the perverse machinery of the military, the more his belt buckle gleamed, as if to prove that it wasn’t he who was unfit for the service but the service that was unfit for him.
    When they reached the outskirts of Salzburg, Rigsdale said, “That was quite a performance, Lieutenant.”
    No reply seemed called for, so Jack provided none.
    “You need to remember something, soldier. This is a war, not a crusade, and you’re an American soldier, not a rabbi.”
    “Yes, sir,” he said, the only evidence of his furious embarrassment the flutter of muscle in his clenched jaw.

• 2 •
    FOR JACK ’ S SINS RIGSDALE gave him a deuce-and-a-half M35 truck and put him in charge of unloading the train. Twenty-five Hungarian POWs, a half-dozen GIs to guard against looters and black marketeers, and one truck to unload 1,500 cases of watches, jewelry, and silver, 5,250 carpets, thousands of coats and stoles and muffs of mink, fox, and ermine, crates of microscopes and cameras, porcelain and glassware, furniture, books and manuscripts and tapestries, gold coins and bullion, the few remaining precious gems, the liturgical objects, the stamp collections and silver-backed hairbrushes; all the items, valuable and less so, that constituted the wealth of the Jews of Hungary, 437,402 of whom had been deported to Auschwitz over the course of just 56 days almost exactly a year before.
    One of the GIs offered to organize more transport, but Jack had seen too much of what passed for organization among his fellow soldiers. In his unit’s first days in Austria, his men had “organized” everything from alcohol to bedding, from guns to eggs to radios. Once, two corporals had even organized a Volkswagen and gone joyriding. It took them an hour to realize that the strange sound they had been ignoring in the backseat was the mewling of a baby in its basket. Jack had tracked down the frantic mother and returned the baby. His CO had kept the car.
    “Come!” Jack