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Chapter 1

There are

I don’t s like, say, what cereal turns out to be your favorite or whether you get into any AP classes or what girl you fall in love with or where you wind up living for the next twenty years I , the next—snap!—it is cos you accepted about reality, are turned around

Like, up becoht

Death becomes life

I stared at the photograph, realizing that we are always just seconds away fro with my oo eyes ain—as if I expected the ie It didn’t

The picture was an old black-and-white Doing a little quick math in my head, I realized that it had to have been taken nearly seventy years ago

“This can’t be,” I said

I wasn’t talking to myself, just in case you think I’ to the Bat Lady She stood a few feet away froray hair looked as though it werestill Her skin rinkled and crinkly, like old paper someone had folded and unfolded too many times

Even if you don’t know this Bat Lady, you know a Bat Lady She’s the creepy old lady who lives in the creepy old house down the block Every town has one You hear tales in the school yard about all the horrible things she’ll do to you if she ever catches you As a little kid, you stay far away As a bigger kid—in h school—well, you still stay far away because, even though you know it’s nonsense and you’re too old for that kind of thing, the house still scares you just enough

Yet here I was, in her inner lair, staring at a photograph that I knew couldn’t be what I thought it was

“Who is this guy?” I asked her

Her voice creaked like the old floorboards beneath our feet “The Butcher of Lodz,” she whispered

The man in the picture wore a Waffen-SS uniform from World War II He was, in short, a sadistic Nazi who, according to the Bat Lady,her own father

“And this picture was taken when?” I asked

The Bat Lady seemed puzzled by the question “I’m not sure Probably around 1942 or 1943”

I looked at theround myself in what I knew for certain: My name, I kneas Mickey Bolitar Good start I’m the son of Brad (deceased) and Kitty (in rehab) Bolitar, and now I’o to Kasselton High School, the new kid trying to fit in, and based on this photograph, I am either delusional or completely insane

“What’s wrong, Mickey?” Bat Lady asked me

“What’s wrong?” I repeated “You’re kidding, right?”

“I don’t understand”

“This”—I pointed to the photograph—“is the Butcher of Lodz?”

“Yes”

“And you think he died at the end of World War Two?”

“That’s what I was told,” she said “Mickey? Do you know so?”

I flashed back to the first ti to my new school when she suddenly appeared in the doorway of this decrepit house I alhostly hand toward me and said five words that struck me in the chest like a body blow:

Mickey—I had no idea how she knew my name—your father isn’t dead