Never Forget: A Jacob Mitzak Thriller, #0

By Jordan Vezina

Before Jacob Mitzak was the legendary Nazi hunter known as The Hammer Of Israel, he was just a scared boy living in a nightmare. 

His mentors would go on to become spymasters and politicians, but first they must all survive the ambitions of a mad Austrian. 

Staying alive from one day to the next in the prison camp is challenging enough, but now one of their own has begun murdering guards in the night. 

The killer leaves the dead wrapped in the wire of the fences with their eyes torn out. This would be a cause for celebration, were it not for the reprisals of Commandant Hoss, who has not taken kindly to his guards being executed.

One prisoner knows the identity of the killer, but with one catch. This witness loses his memory every five minutes. 

Never Forget is the prequel to The Hammer Of Israel and the beginning of the Jericho Black Universe. A vividly realized historical thriller, this book mixes rigorously researched history with a spine chilling mix of horror and edge of your seat action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jordan Vezina
• Release date: Mar 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393036012

Book preview

Chapter One

Aleks Rosen was a survivor.

He entered Auschwitz early in the war and remained there for the duration. Aleks was proud to say that he was a survivor, because the concept carries with it the connotation of having endured, of having held steadfast through tumultuous events. This description is not untrue, but, along with these attributes, a survivor has also had to fight, to not only hold fast but to push forward through the storm, as layers of flesh are stripped away by the driving rain to lay bare the true nature of a man’s or woman’s spirit.

Aleks was such a man.

Despite all this, he was one of the lucky ones. Aleks had always been an introvert, preferring solitude, to be alone. The box car which had brought him to Auschwitz rolled into the camp rail yard on his nineteenth birthday. He had no family, no wife. That is why I say Aleks was one of the lucky ones.

One could say Aleks was the luckiest of the unlucky.

Aleks was assigned to Auschwitz I. You may not know this, but Auschwitz itself was not one single camp; instead it was formed from a network of three different camps, each with a different purpose. Auschwitz I and II were primarily work and extermination camps, while Auschwitz III supplied labor to IG Farben, a German chemical and pharmaceutical company. Besides these, there were forty-five other satellite camps. A constellation of horrors.

I illustrate the scope of Auschwitz in such detail to help you to understand how easy it would be for one man to hide in such an ocean of suffering. One man paddling through the waves in his little boat with such skill and such cunning that, within the confines of his dingy, he could manufacture his own world of horrors.

Aleks could recall the day it first happened. The dead were nothing new; they were the currency upon which the camps sustained themselves. This death, however, was different. There was no absence of savagery in the camps, but it was never anything like this. Especially not visited upon an officer of the Waffen SS. Aleks did not know what to feel as he watched the prisoners gathering the man up in a canvas bag, the inside of his throat exposed to the chill morning air, his eyes removed and his teeth smashed in. Aleks knew he felt happy, happy that one of them had met so viscous an end, but he also felt a creeping terror overtaking him, knowing that no guard had done this. That left only one pool of suspects.

The prisoners. The prisoners were the suspects.

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Where are your spectacles? Aleks asked Irving, as the man stood, absent-minded, in front of him.

I do not wear spectacles, Irving Baumer replied.

How many fingers am I holding up? Aleks asked as he raised two fingers, with a certain exhaustion in his voice.

Irving stared for a moment and then nodded.

It would appear that I wear spectacles.

Reaching down, Aleks patted Irving’s shirt pocket and found the glasses. Retrieving the glasses from his pocket, Irving perched them upon his nose and smiled at the newfound clarity of the world in which he lived.

You are a good friend, Aleks. He smiled. I am glad I do not forget you.

No one ever understood why Irving Baumer remembered what he did. The man’s condition was such that he forgot everything he saw or heard within five minutes, almost to the second. However, there were exceptions to this that fell into a few different categories. The first was basic life functions. He understood how to eat food, how to use the bathroom, and such like. He knew where he was and what was happening in the grand scheme of things. They theorized that he was missing only his short-term memory, perhaps as the result of a strike to the head during the beginning of all the trouble in Poland. He also remembered three specific things. He remembered where he had put his shoes, the name of the guard who manned the yard outside his bunkhouse at night, and the names of those he saw most. Besides this, he also seemed to remember specific conversations. Later, Irving upped the count of things he remembered to four, but he could never remember what the fourth was. This was assumed to be a symptom of his progressive decline.

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The prisoners stood in the rain, as they often did, lined up in pretty rows, waiting for Commandant Hoss to address them. This was unusual, as the Camp Commandant never addressed the prisoners, and certainly not in this type of mass gathering. Something dark was coming.

Away from the main group stood a line of twenty men and women arranged in their own orderly row, although awaiting what, none present could