by Conrad Burnham
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Lawrence stood perhaps just over five feet tall. From a distance you could see that he was grimy. His age was hard to tell but I would guess that, at the time I knew him, he was in his mid-sixties. His silver hair was matted in a hard combover, his weak chin perpetually stubbled and his mouth was almost always open in a small o, showing a row of little gray mole teeth. His eyes were of the same Talpidae lineage, and he wore thick, greasy, brown-framed glasses of a style popular in the eighties. I’d seen him several times before in the store, mostly talking to Rolf, an older coworker, though occasionally he’d snare some other employee closer to my age, usually with a searching look of desperation or one of resigned despondency. Soon enough I would understand these expressions.
It should be mentioned that this was the “old days” of the Strand, before they changed to a branded merchandise hawking tourist destination. The basement was a gathering place for a few woolly septuagenarians, one for instance was a former rocket scientist with NASA, though I don’t know if others were as distinguished. I would hear them discussing theater, restaurants, books of course, politics, the opera, but all of them would be lurking around, waiting for a manager to fill a box of proofs to send back to the little room in the corner of the basement. Once the box was full there was a sort of feigned politeness, and you watched the geriatric’s eyes grow beady with need and they would follow the employee to the corner room while carrying on their conversations. The poor employee, sometimes me, would have strict boundaries with the proof room: nobody crosses into it until the books are shelved. Most of the time you would barely get out, having to squeeze past the small horde that came in like hungry dogs after scraps. These ashen intellectuals would scratch and claw at each other, drawing blood and tearing hair over prized advanced reader proofs that they would sell for a profit on eBay. Lawrence wasn’t a proofie, as we called them, but a type of gray man, in faded winter coats and loose sweaters that reached to his knees like a lot of them were and so blended in with this portion of the clientele from that era.
I worked in the basement of the Strand, a section called Review, where all the recently reviewed books from critics and publishing’s lower rungs would bring freebies of their newest books to sell. Sometimes I would help the managers at the desk of the Review section unboxing and stacking books so they could look them over and give the seller their chit. Lawrence would come down and the managers would mumble something that I usually missed but caught enough to know was a comment on this little man that showed up several times a week. They’d watch him weave his way into the maze of books with a look on his face that said he was searching for someone.
His one friend there, the one person he could rely on to chat with him at length was Rolf, who sorted books behind the stairs next to the foreign language section. Rolf was an immigrant from Germany. As a teenager he worked at a country club in Vermont and after that he moved to New York City only to become homeless for a while before getting a job at the Strand and moving into a tenement building. Rolf came across as harmless, though maybe a little crackpot, perhaps slightly deranged. He stood seven feet tall with a light brown skullet that brushed his shoulders. He always wore a white t-shirt, tucked into light blue jeans. One eye bugged out further than the other. His age was indeterminate, though I would say he was in his mid-fifties. Once, when I was shelving in the stacks, I heard him from somewhere deep in the basement wrestling phlegm from his throat with what sounded like all the might it would take to lift a wrecked car off an old woman’s crushed leg. It was both amazing and repulsive, he was yelling so loud. A few quick asides to give you a better glimpse. I often came across him in the break room saying, ‘interesting’, while stroking his chin and thumbing through large books with titles like Iowa Class Battleships: Their Design, Weapons and Equipment or Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines. He had designs for large scale weapons of his own, he’d told me. Rolf was somewhat of an enigma. Once he interrupted a conversation I was having because a fond memory of the oft-canceled McRib sandwich hit him and he wondered aloud to me and my coworker, why they canceled that one. Another thing he told me, unprompted, with about as much glee as I imagine he had on the day that he himself heard the news, was that his terrible boss at the country club where he worked as a teenager had asphyxiated to death, along with his mistress, while they humped in the big man’s car that was parked and running in the garage. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rolf laugh so hard. The story must have been thirty years old or more but still struck him like fresh news. Slightly deranged right? Over the holidays he snuck boozy eggnog in a paper bag, which he attempted to share with anyone of us he thought worthy. His life goal, he’d mentioned many times, was to be the landlord of an apartment building in Arizona, and so one year he departed the Big Apple in pursuit of his American Dream. However, not too long after, less than a year in fact, I heard through the grapevine that his attempt had failed and he had come back to NYC, broken, winding up homeless again, only to be taken care of by old Strand employees until he was somewhat back on his feet. This was Lawrence’s friend. I saw them speaking often. After getting to know both a little more, I could see why they would gravitate toward one another. At least that’s what I thought at first. I realized later that maybe Rolf couldn’t get away because of having to be stationed where he was for work.
Little by little, I would hear tell of Lawrence from other coworkers or managers. Lawrence was Jewish and was pen pals with several SS officers from the Second World War, somebody had told me. I asked him about it and he showed me letters and pictures to prove it. This of course shocked me, but then perhaps you would be fascinated or obsessed to the point of wanting to hear it directly from the people responsible of such unspeakable horrors against your not-too-distant relatives.
He brought a small stack of letters for me to look over along with some pictures that the officers had sent him. I held up a small black and white portrait of a young officer, Karl Preuß, his features smoothed by the age of the film, his uniform crisp, hair blond. Lawrence showed me another picture, this one in color, the same man, but much older, white-haired and wrinkled, with his little wife standing on a bridge, looking like two German citizens, someone’s grandparents. Karl integrated back into society after the war and found himself working on the reconstruction of Germany. He met his wife, part of the Trümmerfrauen, helping clear the ruins in Munich, after the war. Karl claimed to have not even witnessed atrocities, only hearing of things when meeting other officers. He rose through the ranks, he said, because of his cunning, not his cruelty. For a while he was stationed on the Czechoslovakian border checking passports. A conversation with an officer who was passing through led to a change in position to Berlin where he was to command a small unit for a specialized operation for the foreseeable future. The unit rounded up known counterfeiters that were to make fake currency intended to collapse the British economy. After the war, his brother-in-law, a prisoner of war at Langwasser, had suffered poisoning by the Nakam, when they tainted the loaves of black bread the prisoners were given to eat. His brother-in-law didn’t die, Karl said, but was writhing in a hospital bed for days and so, Karl lived for a long time in fear of having some revenge enacted upon him. But nothing ever happened. After the reconstruction Karl found employment in an automobile factory and his wife as a teacher of kindergarten. They had three children, now all grown with children of their own. Lawrence found and reached out to Karl on a whim, asking him about his life, his involvement in the war, his experiences. To his surprise, Karl responded within a few months. The tone of his letter was full of an anxious urgency, all too glad to tell his story as he saw it. He talked about Germans living in the ruins of bombed-out buildings, some in caves immediately after the war. He mentioned in every one of the five letters he sent to Lawrence his guilt and in every letter he asked Lawrence for forgiveness.
Another letter from a man named Eberhard Saalmeier detailed the accounts of being a young officer with the Kriminalpolizei who worked mostly on fraud cases. The Kripo was absorbed into the SS in the thirties, but his functions never changed. The most exciting thing he claimed to have worked on in the war were blackout burglaries, and that that was mostly done in paperwork at his desk. His colleagues in the department worked on the more serious crimes of sexual assault and murder that was capitalized on during the blackouts. He talked about growing up in Bayerischzell where his parents ran an inn. He would help them clean the rooms and prepare meals for the guests. People would come from all over just to breathe the air there. Because of his size, his uncle and cousin encouraged him to move to Berlin and join them in the Kripo. He joked that his size never came into play, at least not to anyone’s expectations. Every Christmas he would travel south to visit his parents. Some of these nights he would see old friends, some of whom would tell him, over a few pilsners, that a friend of a friend or a friend of a cousin who worked at SS-Berghaus Sudelfeld overheard an assistant on holiday saying to someone else that at Dachau he had witnessed people subjected to standing naked outdoors in freezing weather for hours and then being thrown into vats of boiling water to see if it would warm them properly. This was the extent, Eberhard explained, of the horrors witnessed by him. After the war he was considered essential and was rehired as a detective where he worked for another ten years before going back to Bayerischzell to help his aging parents. He and his wife, a secretary with the department, enjoyed a quiet, childless life, breathing their clean air and marveling at the scenery. In another letter Eberhard mentions getting lost in the Teutoberg forest as a teenager on a hike with the same cousin who convinced him to become a Kripo. They left in the morning with a couple of slices of Schwarzbot and käse in a satchel and a flask of tea. The scenery was immaculate, the trees, oak, ash, beech, more green than he’d ever seen, he said, patches of blue sky and the sun peeking between the boughs, but then he started to feel like he was seeing some of the same trees, the same rocks, to which his cousin said that he was mistaken. Hours went by as did many branches, trunks and leaves. Weariness began to set in. They went up for a long time as the sun began to go down. He said that near dark, not finding their way out of the forest, that they came upon castle ruins that at first look could almost pass as plain rock except that from another angle, its structure emerged. Inside they sat on the precipice and ate their food. His cousin talked about his dream of becoming a Kripo, like his father, then he talked about the girl he would eventually marry, a fact that nobody but his cousin was sure of. When the sun was gone, they slept in a corner, out of the wind, pressed against one another. On waking they saw that the interior cascaded deep into darkness away from the entrance near where they slept. Something crashed deep inside, sending a wave of echoes from the black and they ran down the hill where they came upon a group of schoolgirls and their teachers on a nature hike who, giggling, pointed the way back to the main road.
I wondered at Lawrence’s end of these correspondences. He knew that no matter the story they were complicit. What exactly was he after and what did he disclose about himself? Would he embellish the truth? Would he have gotten a response if they knew the hygienic state of the writer of these descendant’s questions, questions he had a right to ask and ought to likewise get an honest answer for?
There came a point where I didn’t care how obnoxious the man was, I wanted to hear about his strange life. He’d piqued my curiosity. Gaining his trust as someone who would listen to his life’s lonely tale, he told me of his adolescence as a troublemaker. It was hard to imagine this aged and bookish homunculus as anything but someone who shied away from much of the public, let alone someone who was once an adolescent and at that, a delinquent. One shift shelving in foreign language taught me that Lawrence used to like to go behind buildings in Manhattan when he was a teenager and snip undergarments left out to dry. Bras, negligées, lingerie, holsters, girdles, all fell prey to Lawrence and his red handled scissors as did sheets, towels, quilts and duvets. Just for the sheer delight of destroying someone else’s things. I could almost see a teenaged Lawrence jumping from a fire escape and dashing down an alley. With this tale he regaled this to me with something of a devilishness in his smile, a delight, it seemed, he most likely recalled often.
He had troublesome friends, he told me, who, like misery, sought out company too. But perhaps it was really that loneliness means more acceptance for some. One friend of Lawrence’s was a cab driver who schemed to screw some homeowners out of a lot of money by suing them. The plan was to dig a hole in the unsuspecting’s backyard and lie inside of it as though he’d fallen in and have Lawrence snap some pictures. Preposterous as it may seem, this was a real, hatched-out idea with an intended victim, for whom the plot against them also served as an act of revenge for some slight the cab driver perceived from this particular fare. Lawrence probably lucked out when the plans never came to fruition.
Another of his friends was someone I surmised to be on the run from the mob. Lawrence all but said this to me. The picture of the guy was painted clearly enough. This was also someone who knew that Lawrence was loaded. Apparently, Lawrence’s parents had millions of dollars from the stock market and rentals that he’d inherited after they’d died. When Lawrence was in his twenties this guy, a teenager a decade younger than Lawrence, never gave Lawrence the time of day until Lawrence let it slip that his parents were wealthy. Suddenly this guy’s obsessed with Lawrence and butters him up all the time. Now they’re hanging out on the streets of the Bronx, laughing together. Lawrence finally had someone who would enthusiastically say hello when seeing him walking down the street, perhaps for the first time in his life. Lawrence considered him his friend. Not only that, he considered him his best friend.
They would scheme together on petty criminal activities, stealing from bodegas, breaking into their neighbor’s apartments or stealing cash from Lawrence’s parents, but mostly it was Lawrence listening to this guy he was likely infatuated with, talking about his exploits. Until one day he disappeared. Lawrence looked for his friend for a long time; years went by, decades. He felt confused at first, that it must be he who repelled his one friend, sending himself back into his solitary ways, until one day a letter showed up at his parent’s apartment.
Lawrence was in his sixties, still living at home, when his parents died. They were landlords, and they seemingly never spent a dime their whole lives. He came off as an unlikely millionaire, but maybe he thought that holding onto it with a clenched fist was better than spending any of it ever on say, going to the dentist. His teeth were disgusting little cubes of yellow-gray plaque, and he never wore anything that didn’t look like it hadn’t been in heavy use since the 1980s, likely hand-me-downs from his father. Lawrence looked like he slept on the streets but that was definitely not the case. He would buy hundreds of dollars of books on art and history on his stops at the Strand, spending hours there and leaving only when he’d exhausted all the people who’d put up with him.
The letter couldn’t have come at a better time, Lawrence told me. He wanted a vacation, needed to get away from New York City. He told me the only place he ever visited was Washington D.C., and he only went there to go to the Smithsonian. The letter urged Lawrence to come for a visit in rural Tennessee. When Lawrence arrived, he and his old best friend sat on the front porch, drank whiskey and talked about old times, looking at the scenic yet secluded vista surrounding his friend’s farm. At some point, when Lawrence was asleep, his friend got ahold of Lawrence’s credit card and racked up a couple of buys; a jet ski and an espresso maker. His friend laughingly brushed off Lawrence’s look of consternation, slapping his shoulder as if not hearing him say, That wasn’t very nice!, while looking at his bill. But then Lawrence didn’t do anything more than that. So I guess the guy got a jet ski. I couldn’t believe it. I would have been furious, I told him, just for starters. Lawrence smiled at me. A smile that I could not read. He went on that at some point during the trip, his friend thought it would be funny to lock him in a barn with a young colt. Lawrence pounded the door and wailed to be let out while his friend stood on the other side laughing, keeping the barn shut for a long time until Lawrence exhausted himself. It was just a joke, his friend said, when he let the dripping Lawrence free of the barn. To this day though, I believe Lawrence was meant to be executed by that pony. He told me his friend kept pestering him on long distance calls leading up to the visit about giving him power of attorney over Lawrence. Why go down there Lawrence? This guy obviously wants to kill you so he can take all of your money, and he’s come up with some crazy ways to do it. But obviously it didn’t go through, after all, he lived to tell me the tale. At least to that point.
My wife and I moved away from Brooklyn to Los Angeles years ago and sometimes Lawrence crosses my mind. I wonder sometimes if he’s alive. If he’s reignited his passion for snipping underwear behind buildings or if he’s in prison because he helped one friend carry out a hair-brained scheme, or maybe dead and buried on a farm in rural Tennessee because he helped another. All his SS contacts must surely be dead, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he pesters their children.
I wrote my friend Natty Faze, an ex-coworker who knew about Lawrence, and asked if he thought Lawrence might be dead by now. He said, Oh the eccentric Strand customer who was fixated on you and may have been a Nazi? I replied, He was Jewish…or so he claimed. But was definitely pen pals with SS officers, he showed me photos and letters, but yeah, that guy. Probably dead right? He responded, Probably so.
It never crossed my mind that Lawrence may have been a Nazi. I took him at his word that he was Jewish, though I suppose I don’t know anything. His language towards others was awful though. I never responded to these types of comments, I’ll add, when he’d often trap me somewhere in the basement where I was shelving and would just start in, he knew I didn’t think that way at all, but he didn’t care. He would flash that same devilish smile at my disgust and carry on. Sometimes, because of curiosity, you voluntarily get too close for comfort and then you’re in someone’s web and you realize, you’re also a part of their feast. Lawrence was a racist bigot and said atrocious things. This I thought ironic, coming from a man who said he was a descendant of a people who were murdered because of who they were. I doubt he was a Nazi, but I also don’t think he was practicing Judaism. Hateful for sure. Eager for a dose of something slimy. His fascination with SS officers, to me, was probably like anyone who attended an execution at the gallows, or is a watcher of true crime shows now, fascinated by man’s capacity for cruelty and its assertion of a right to choose capital punishment.
The first part of what Natty said also struck me. He was fixated on me. After a while I would hide from him many times and overheard him asking for me by name. Over the years working there I’d outgrown my curiosity and now wanted nothing to do with this abhorrent person. His inner being reeked of something like decay, a portable, bubbling origin point of hate who wore his feelings in layers of crud that he traversed the city in. Some of my coworkers would help me evade him by pointing in the opposite direction I’d gone, while others, with an evil glint in their own eyes, delighted in seeing me stuck and having to squirm my way free.
My wife thinks Lawrence was in love with me. She thought he might try to kill her to get to me, or maybe it’d be he and I that died strangely, mysteriously and passionately. He came to one of my music performances at a bar in Brooklyn and stood in the corner leering the whole night, not talking to anyone but giving everyone the creeps, chewing on his tongue, his glasses illuminated but showing no eyes. I was terrified.
December 2025
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Conrad Burnham is a writer, editor and musician. He lives in Los Angeles.