Mitzvah (T)

Disclaimer: I own none of the characters; CBS/Alliance/Bruckheimer does.

This one-shot is a response to the recent episode, Yahrzeit: It contains spoilers.

It is also in memory of a dear, dear friend who passed away recently.

With thanks to Tinks, who I can honestly say is a total inspiration.

This story was originally posted as a stand-alone one-shot and was nominated for Best One Shot in the CSI:NY Awards (didn't win though!), but as I'm reposting and in the interests of less complication, it is reposted under New York Nightseven though it occurs strictly during daylight hours LOL!

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She barely made it to the street before the contents of her stomach made their unwanted appearance. She felt the vomit burn her mouth, her nose, bringing tears to her eyes.

Wobbling, the straightened up and shakily made her way back to the side of the apartment building, where she collapsed, leaning against the wall.

It was all real, she thought, all those things she had been told, all of it. Real.

A shadow fell over her, she looked up to see the concerned look in the blue-eyed detective's eyes.

The young officer opened the collar of her uniform to give herself some air and placed the back of her hand across her forehead. She closed her eyes.

Don Flack Jr had seen the young uniform go white, as she'd approached the secret room, before she'd run from the room as though being chased by something truly terrible. The other uniforms hadn't seemed surprised. The kid was a rookie, they'd said, although they'd been surprised that a load of WW2 memorabilia had set her off. Normally it was a bad murder scene. Now, as he stood over her, the small Star of David pendant on a silver chain spilling from under her uniform, he understood.

"I don't think I ever really understood the scale of it," she whispered.

He looked down. He glanced at the concerned CSI who had come to see what the issue was, a frown in her golden brown eyes, waving her away. He brought himself down to the young uniform's level. She was turning out her pockets looking for something. He handed her his handkerchief. She accepted it with a small smile, wiping the remains of her episode off her face.

"What was in that room," he agreed, "It was sick. Really sick."

"Do you know what makes it worse?" she asked. He shook his head.

"It's that it was all in a secret room. All those things. Those menorahs, the tallits, they were all in a secret room."

Much like how her people had hid, or tried to hide, from the Nazis, the SS, the people who hated the Jews. In secret rooms.

"They tell us all about it you know," she continued, "We remember the dead on Yom Kippur, on Yom Ha-Shoah – the day of remembrance for the Holocaust. I've been to the Shoah Foundation, we all had classes as kids in the Synagogue. I've even been to Yad Vashem, the memorial museum in Israel. When I spent a year on a Kibbutz, before I joined the academy."

He nodded.

"They hammer it into us that this was done to us, to our families, to our people. I lost great-grandparents in the Shoah. My grandmother was a replacement for children that were gassed in Auschwitz. I've seen pictures of what those bastards did. Hell, when my family went to Europe one year, I even went to Dachau, one of the concentration camps, the one where they did all the experiments on inmates."

Flack didn't know that. He sort of knew about Mengele and Auschwitz, but not about the other places.

She leant her head back against the wall, closing her eyes again.

"How can people today keep that sort of thing? How can people still be like that? I just don't understand."

Flack really didn't want to explain about Elgers just yet. Would she be able to handle a man who tattooed himself with the kinds of symbols some governments banned by law?

Suddenly she looked queasy again.

"That man," she said, "That man kept gold teeth, teeth they ripped out of mouths with pliers, before they burnt them, in a Kiddush cup. Do you know what a Kiddush cup is?"

Flack shook his head.

"It's a ceremonial cup. We use it on Shabbat, the Sabbath, when we break bread and drink wine to celebrate its coming again."

The girl went green and was violently sick again. Flack rubbed her back until she stopped heaving.

"Kid," he said, "What's your name?"

"Rebecca Green," she replied.

"OK, Officer Green, this is what I want you to do. I want you to go back to the Precinct and tell your sergeant that you need to go home. That you ate a bad prawn or something, OK?"

She opened her mouth to protest. Flack held his hand up.

"No buts kid," he said firmly, "That shit made me sick to my stomach and I don't have half the reason you do. Go home. Talk to your family. Talk to your Rabbi. Pray, if that's what you need to do. But I'll square it with your captain if it comes to that.

The girl smiled gratefully. Flack helped her to her feet. A concerned uniform was standing by a squad car; her partner, Flack guessed.

"Make sure she gets back to your squad room OK," he said. The uniform nodded, before putting his arm around his young partner's officer and guiding her to the squad car. They drove off.

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Flack heard later that Officer Green had witnessed the subsequent interviews with Elgers and Klein. Braun, Flack corrected. When she's heard Braun say they should have killed them all, she'd had to be bodily removed from the vicinity of the interrogation room by two other uniforms. They'd not reported her though. Everyone had felt the same. Without Green's excuse.

Flack hoped she didn't know about the trade in holocaust victims' possessions. He really hoped she didn't.

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That year, on Yom Ha-Shoah, when Rebecca Green lit candles with her family for the dead, for the victims, for the first time she truly understood why they did.

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And that's it folks. Review if you want to, but it's just a little something that was kicking around my head after the episode.