I signed in as Alan Kessler because a soldier named Kessler on the wrong list would've been a dead soldier. My father's real surname would've made a German records clerk raise an eyebrow, and that eyebrow could've gotten me shot before I ever set foot past the tide line. So on the manifest at Fort Dix, I wrote down a name that didn't exist yet. It stuck. I carried it through Normandy, through the Ardennes, all the way to a gate in Bavaria where the smell told you everything before your eyes caught up.
I was born in Newark in the fall of 1922, but I grew up in Baltimore, in a rowhouse on Eutaw Place that my father bought with money he made distributing newsreels up and down the East Coast. He ran two small companies — Kessler Pictures and a distribution outfit he called Liberty Reels — and by the time I was ten he'd traded the rowhouse for a brick colonial out past Roland Park, the kind with a circular driveway and a housekeeper who answered the phone. My father was not a man who got down on the floor to play with you. He ran the house the way he ran the office — memos, schedules, a locked door after eight at night. I really got to know him after the war, not before.
We had a governess named Miss Odell who took my twin sister Ruth and me to the Eastern Shore in the summers, and once, when I was twelve, to Havana for two weeks because my father had a distribution deal to close there and didn't want to leave us behind with just the housekeeper. I swam competitively for the JCC team downtown — breaststroke, mostly, and I was fast enough that my father actually came to two meets, which for him counted as devotion. We kept the High Holidays and not much else. My father talked, sometimes, about Palestine — about a Jewish state, about whether we'd see it in his lifetime — but it was dinner-table talk, not action, until Germany started swallowing its neighbors and the dinner-table talk turned into passports and steamship schedules.
By late 1938 my father could read a newspaper the way other men read a ledger. He started making calls. My older sister and my mother's brother left for New York in the spring of '39, ahead of the rest of us, because visas came one family member at a time if you were lucky and connected, which we were, barely. Ruth and I stayed behind with our mother into that summer, waiting on paperwork that kept getting stamped and re-stamped by clerks who seemed to enjoy making you wait. We finally got out in August, six weeks before the invasion of Poland, on a train that stopped for what felt like hours at a border crossing while my mother held both our hands so hard the marks lasted into the next station.
We didn't get a boat out of Southampton the easy way. The first passage we booked got canceled, then rebooked through Lisbon, and the freighter we finally boarded — an old Portuguese line that smelled permanently of diesel and salt cod — caught fire in its engine room two days out. I remember my mother's face when the crew started shouting, not scared exactly, more like a woman doing arithmetic. We got taken off by a fishing trawler and put up in a rooming house in Lisbon for eleven days before a second, sturdier ship carried us the rest of the way across, into New York harbor on a gray morning in September, my mother clutching a hatbox that held, it turned out, every document our family owned.
We settled with my father and sister in a two-bedroom apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx — the Roland Park house was long sold, the money mostly gone into getting the rest of us out. My father started over distributing shorts and B-pictures out of a rented office on 46th Street. I finished high school two years behind where I should've been, my English still catching up, and I turned eighteen four months before Pearl Harbor.
I enlisted in the spring of '42. Basic training was at Fort Benning, then more training in England through the winter and spring of '44, waiting on weather and orders nobody below the rank of colonel understood. I went in on Omaha Beach in the second wave, June 6th, out of a landing craft that dropped its ramp into water up to my chest. The man to my left, a kid from Scranton named Dombrowski, didn't make it past the sandbar. I did. I've never fully worked out why, and I stopped trying to work it out sometime around 1960.
From Normandy we fought our way through the hedgerows of France, then east through Belgium and into Germany itself, taking towns whose names I could still recite in my sleep — Aachen, then the long cold stall at the Rhine, then finally across, pushing toward the Elbe in April of '45. Somewhere in that last push, a battalion I was attached to as an interpreter — my German, learned at my mother's insistence back in Baltimore, suddenly worth more than my marksmanship — got orders to help clear a camp outside Munich.
Dachau. I walked through that gate on April 29th, 1945, twenty-two years old, and I understood in about four minutes that nothing I'd trained for had prepared me for what a human being looks like after being systematically starved and worked and beaten for years. There were boxcars still on the siding, packed with bodies that had been dead for days before anyone got there. There were men — I use the word loosely, because what I saw were mostly skeletons wearing striped fabric — who tried to stand up for us, tried to salute, and collapsed doing it. I have never, in eighty-one years since, found language that does that scene justice, and I've stopped trying. A week later I was at Buchenwald with a different unit, doing intake interviews, writing down names of people who sometimes couldn't remember their own.
I came home in December of 1945 to that same Bronx apartment, and I didn't talk about the camps for almost thirty years. Not to my mother, not to Ruth, not to the woman I married in 1949. What I did instead was go back to the only trade I really knew, which was my father's trade. I got a job as a junior story editor at a small distribution house in Manhattan, then moved into production, then into acquisitions for a company that, by the mid-1950s, was quietly buying up rights to British properties nobody in America had heard of yet. I sat in a screening room on West 44th Street in 1961 and watched sixteen minutes of test footage for a spy picture based on some paperback novels a producer named Broccoli kept pushing, and I told my board we should put money behind it. Later in that decade I did the same thing for a slapstick French-inspired comedy about a bumbling inspector and a stolen diamond — everyone in the room thought it was a B-picture, and I said no, that's a franchise, put the marketing budget behind it. I was right both times, which in this business buys you about five years of people listening to you before they stop again.
None of that is really the point, though. The point, if there's one thing eighty years has taught me to say plainly, is what I saw at that gate in Bavaria at twenty-two, and what it did to the rest of my life, including the part where I made movies.
My mother died in 1971 without ever asking me a single question about the war. I understood why. She had her own losses — cousins in Prague, an aunt, a family friend named Klein who ran a print shop three doors from ours before we left, who never made it out. I didn't push her to talk, and she didn't push me. Ruth married a dentist from Riverdale and raised three kids who grew up thinking their Uncle Alan worked in "the movies," which was true and also the smallest possible version of true.
I started talking, finally, in 1978, when a local synagogue in Riverdale asked veterans to speak for a Yom HaShoah program. I said yes almost by accident, thinking I'd get up, say a few sentences, and sit back down. I stood at that podium for forty minutes. A woman in the third row, maybe seventy years old, came up to me afterward holding a photograph of a boy in a striped uniform, and she asked if I remembered him. I didn't. I told her I was sorry, that there were thousands of faces and I couldn't hold them all, and she nodded and folded the photograph back into her purse and thanked me anyway, like the not-remembering was its own kind of gift, because it meant I'd seen so many that this particular boy had blurred into all of them, which meant I'd truly been there.
I still have the intake ledger from Buchenwald — a cheap spiral notebook, half of it in my handwriting, water-stained along the bottom edge from a rainstorm that caught our unit without cover somewhere near Weimar. I keep it in a fireproof lockbox in my study in the house I still live in, on a quiet street in Riverdale, four blocks from the synagogue where I gave that first talk forty-eight years ago. My grandson Ethan, who's twenty-six now and works in finance downtown, asked me last spring if he could have it when I'm gone. I told him yes, on one condition: that he read it out loud, once, to his own kids when they're old enough, the way nobody ever made me do for thirty years, and that he write his own name on the inside cover under mine, not to replace it, just so the ledger keeps moving instead of sitting in a box waiting for someone to open it.
He asked me what name to sign. Not Auerbach — that name never made it onto anything official in my life after 1942. Just Kessler, the name I invented on a troop ship because a dead man's papers couldn't afford the truth. I told him: sign your own. The ledger already has mine.
