The Little Liar

by Mitch Albom

But here is the funny thing about truth: the less real something seems, the more people want to believe it.

Many today are unaware that the Nazis, in their efforts to conquer the continent, invaded Greece and claimed that hot country as their own. Or that Salonika, prior to the war, was the only city in Europe with a Jewish majority population—which made it a ripe target for the Nazis and their Schutzstaffel, or SS, troops.

But just as ignoring proper food will ultimately decay your body, so will handpicking the Truth eventually rot your soul.

So he did not say a word. And with that silence, he changed his brother’s life forever. Sometimes, it is the truths we don’t speak that echo the loudest.

By the time you share what a loved one longs to hear, they often no longer need it.

In this venture, they had ample help from Catholic priests in Italy and Spain. You might ask why men of the cloth, supposedly true to God, would be willing to help those responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people. But clergymen can distort me as easily as anyone else. “The war was unjust.” “His crimes were exaggerated.” “Better free to repent than to rot in a prison cell.”

The Soviet Union was the next major threat. And nobody knew, hated, or fought harder against the Russians than the Nazis. So when the war ended, and the ratlines allowed thousands of SS members to escape, many of them were secretly invited to come work for the United States government, which would provide new names, new jobs, new homes, and new protection, so long as they helped take down their old Russian nemesis. Such recruitment was never shared with the American public, nor would it be for many decades. This should not surprise you. When it comes to lies, governments can outlast anyone.

This is how it begins, Udo told himself. Time passes. People forget. Then we rise again.

Sebastian had continuously lamented the lack of attention given to the Greek victims of the Wolf’s war. While stories from Poland and Germany were commonplace—books written, movies made—many people seemed unaware that the Nazis had even invaded Greece, or that Salonika, once home to more than fifty thousand Jews, had seen less than two thousand survive.

yards up the tracks, an original wooden cattle car, the kind the Nazis had

“Atoning,” Nico rasped. He forced a smile, but his breathing was labored. Sebastian tried to muster a righteous rage, but it was failing. At that moment, he could only hear his father’s final request. Find your brother one day. Tell him he is forgiven. “You can stop atoning now,” Sebastian finally whispered. For a moment, they just stared at each other, until the age wrinkles and graying whiskers seemed to melt away. They were back to being two young brothers, resting atop one another, as if they’d just finished wrestling in the bedroom.