Sokal's Story (Part I)

He was born in Krakow, exactly in the same month, day and year as Ella Fitzgerald, 25 April 1917. Always with pride he underlined this. 

His father was a dentist, a Jewish dentist. Sokal was a child advanced for his age, and learning went so easily for him that at the age of sixteen, of course thanks to different small cheatings of his mother and several changes of middle schools, he aced his high school examinations. 

He was to study dentistry in Krakow, but because of different complications tied to their son’s age and religion, his parents decided that he would study instead in Vienna, where after all his father also studied once and where his Aunt Ute, his mother’s much younger sister, lived. 

Knowing Yiddish, in the summer he learned German and in the early fall of the year 1933 he started his university studies in Vienna. Busily studying dentistry, the entire time he lived with his aunt on Fleischmarkt Street in the First Bezirk, meaning in the very center of the Austrian capital. 

Tante Ute was still young, attractive, and a prematurely widowed lady. Because she did not have children, all her repressed feelings of motherhood she poured on him. She was very wealthy, she even had a Citreon which she drove herself. 

Often, when the weather was nice, they took trips to Rust, located in Burgenland on Neusiedlersee, and the winter to the not so distant Alps. Several times his aunt took him by car to Italy, where he saw Turin, Milan, Trieste and Venice, a few times they were also in Budapest. To Germany, from which came still bleaker and more foreboding word, they never went. 

Around his aunt, in serious and not so serious aims, circled always some men, but nothing ever came of this because Tante Ute suspected that each was only interested in getting at her money. 

During his studies, Sokal almost never visited his family home in Krakow. Always when he went there and returned, some horrible and unnecessary troubles tied with crossing the Polish border greeted him. So more often his family, and mainly his mother, visited him in Vienna, and twice they met in Slovakian Smokovec. 

When in March of the year 1938 came the Anschluss, Sokal was three months from graduating. He was twenty one years old. 

He knew well that he would not end his studies there. His parents pushed for him at any cost to escape to America, his aunt also from a certain time had thought about this, but it was not so simple. 

On the fifth day after the Germans’ incursion some very long ago cast aside suitor arrived at his aunt’s door. He had on him the uniform of an SS officer. 

Even though the doors to the parlor room in which he talked to her were slightly open, he had no idea that someone else was in this large house. 

Sokal, who kept quiet, heard still louder sounds of discussion, and more of argument. He wormed his way to the study of his aunt’s dead husband, in which she had gathered all of his things. 

Because the deceased hunted, there were also several specimens of different kinds of sporting weapons, with which in great secrecy, when his aunt was not there, completely like a child, Sokal loved to play. 

The loud discussion continued, when suddenly to Sokal’s ear came the yell, “du judische hure!” accompanied by the sound of the discharge of a pistol. 

Feeling that something was not right, he grabbed from within arm’s reach a Belgian drylinger, quickly and with great experience loaded it and very quietly moved in the direction of the parlor, where a moment ago his aunt had still been carrying on a conversation with her guest. 

Through the ajar doors he saw her lying on the floor in a very unnatural position, with a hole in the middle of her forehead, and the back of the SS-man, who was just calmly putting on his black leather coat. 

His hands were lightly tied up by the coat. He had only the chance to make a confused expression, when from four meters from the buckshot barrel of the Belgian drylinger twelve caliber came the first shot, which precisely destroyed the crotch of Tante Ute’s murderer, taking him down like a log on a divan. 

Sokal ran up to his aunt, but could only confirm then that she was not alive. Simultaneously he saw that the injured SS officer was slowly trying to pull out his pistol. He came up to him and from the second buckshot barrel of the twelve caliber, from a distance of a meter, he shot and tore apart into their first elements the right wrist and lower arm of the murderer. 

Anew he loaded the buckshot barrel and did the same to the left hand, still knotted in the cuffs of the coat. Next he placed the barrel to the bone of the SS-man’s left leg and calmly looking into the half-conscious man’s eyes, pulled the trigger again. 

He observed at this that after the given fire the shining new high boots of his victim immediately became as if tarnished, after which they stretched, and after a while through many nearly invisible holes his blood began to drip.