As the owner of a small hotel frequented by lost souls who had a little bit of money and a police record or two, my father sat behind the front desk of the Seacrest Hotel in Atlantic City in the early 1970s. It had been over 25 years since Hitler shot his prized shepherd and Ava drank some poison and Russian boots stomped over Berlin.

For my father, Atlantic City was not a desired or direct route from Miory, Poland. It began for him in 1942 as his ghetto was being liquidated. Told by the Nazis to go outside and be “counted” yet again, the 220 ghetto-dwellers were herded out to an open field. They were ordered to undress, line up — schnell. My father survived because of the word “God.” When the future of these naked humiliated souls became clear to him, my father cried out, “Mine Gott.” His prayer was immediately answered with a rifle butt to the left side of his head and one of Hitler Youth’s finest yelling, “You have no God, he’s ours.” My father fell to the ground as the bullets began — old, young, good, and even bad souls went up to the heaven en mass.

My father lay unconscious until nightfall. When he awoke, nothing was moving. Even the blood stopped flowing and covered the dead in a layer of blackened red crust. He staggered into the dark woods near the mass grave where he never before imagined himself spending a night. His entire family, part of the exodus direct to heaven that afternoon, left him alive and behind. He spent the rest of the war in those woods with a band of partisans imagining the voice of his eight-year-old son calling him Tateh.

After the war, my father remarried and immigrated to America and then when I was 11, he became the owner and proprietor of the Seacrest Hotel, a small bordering on sleazy hotel in the middle of Atlantic City. From the corner of St. James Place and the Boardwalk, you could see the neon sign advertising the Seacrest Hotel with the “L” flashing and hissing throughout the night. For me, the location could not get any better – Boardwalk arcades clanging with the sounds of pinball machines and Skeeball, the Italian ice vendor pawning his wares on Million Dollar Pier, penny auctions with a shill planted in the third row, Kohr’s custard swirled in chocolate/vanilla braids, miniature golf courses, the Belgium Waffle man, Mr. Peanut giving away plastic bank replicas of himself, and fortune tellers who couldn’t read a word in a newspaper, but were scholarly with a palm if it held a $5 bill.

My father sat behind the front desk always ready to check in a customer. Hundreds of people would pass by his desk every summer. Some arrived with enthusiasm, but would leave with disappointment — a child that would not get off the streets and come home, an alcoholic that could not give up his bottle, a husband and wife who gave up trying to make their marriage work. Others were down so low when they checked-in, the Seacrest became their haven. Yvonne was one of those souls selling herself every night on Pacific Avenue so she could supply her needle with sweet liquid to soothe her veins. Smitty was her pimp.

One day she decided to stop. I remember that morning waking up to a woman screaming and trying to figure out if it was a dream or was it happening in the hotel. It was too bright out to be night and still too dark to be morning. It was the time when Yvonne handed over her earnings to Smitty. After a crashing noise, there was the sound of a hand slapping against a face, and then another scream. The sounds were coming from the lobby. I knew my father was out there, so I jolted out of bed and ran towards the screaming.

The green ceramic lamp with the flower cutout lampshade was shattered on the floor. Yvonne’s belongings were strewn out of her pocketbook by the front desk. “Stop it, you’re hurting her.” My mother was already there and pleading with Smitty to stop strangling Yvonne. My father kept yelling out Smitty’s name trying to jog some kind of humanity within him. But Yvonne’s pink plastic earrings, like Christmas balls, swung back and forth with each squeeze of her neck and banged against Smitty’s pinkie ring, a large gold “S” within a circle of diamonds. His strong hands, muscles tensed with a mission, were wrapped around Yvonne’s neck as she gasped for air. Like a Tango dip, her body was bent backwards in a slight curve. If it weren’t for the fact that Smitty was killing Yvonne, the pose seemed choreographed.

I remembered the first time I saw Smitty and Yvonne. They checked into room 29 as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, rarely speaking a word to each other. After checking in, Yvonne sat on the couch in the lobby eating crème-filled Tastykakes while watching cartoons on television. She was a dark-skinned black woman, very thin and wore lots of makeup. Smitty went to make a call in the spray-painted gold phone booth in the lobby. He slowly walked towards the phone with a gait that came from life on the streets. He carefully closed the folding door in the booth. Even though the sound was muffled, I could hear every word he said. I was reading a magazine in the lounge chair next to the phone booth. Most of the conversation consisted of “a-ha,” “nah,” and an occasional grunt. The only full sentence I heard him say was, “Look, I killed before and I ain’t got no problem killin’ again.” I wasn’t exactly surprised. He looked the part of a B-movie pimp and I knew to keep my life out of his. It came with the territory at the hotel — live and let live.

Smitty punctually paid his weekly rent in cash with money that Yvonne earned for him. He’d ask my father how business was going, my father would reciprocate and ask about his, and a word or two about the weather. It wasn’t that my father approved of Smitty’s work, but for some reason they understood each other. They both learned that life can throw people together and keep them together because of unusual reasons — whether it’s in an alley, on a bus, or in a marriage; anywhere. “Hitler was a strange matchmaker,” my father would always comment about the new life and world he was thrust into.

Yvonne’s face was streaked with a tears-and-mascara blend. My father kept shouting Smitty’s name. A short stocky man, my father looked dwarfed next to Smitty’s long, angry body. Here we go again, my father must have thought. Tears and screaming and monsters killing in front of me again. I thought this was 1972; the Nazis were destroyed. But, here I am with demons before me. Again, my father yelled Smitty’s name and pleaded, “Smitty, it’s not nice to do this in a lobby. Go to your room and do this.”

It was a surreal moment. Was my father joking? This was not a time for humor. Was he concerned that a strangled woman in the lobby would be bad for business? This was not a time to think of business. It seemed to take hours for that sentence to translate into all of our minds. You could almost see Smitty digesting the words as he ever-so-slowly turned and looked at my father with a completely puzzled look on his sweaty face. In that split second, Yvonne broke away and my mother whisked her behind the front desk. My father pushed Smitty outside, and it was all over. He saved someone from being killed; something my father could not do years before even for his own family. Perhaps he was due a win. Perhaps it was more of a lucky day for Yvonne than a win for my father. Later that day, a man who looked like he could have been Yvonne’s father took her away.

Smitty lived at the Seacrest until the end of the summer. A year later we saw him again. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when God seals our fate in the book of life for another year. Who shall live and who shall die? It was a long day and we were eager to get home and break the fast. As we exited the massive doors of Rodef Shalom synagogue on Pacific Avenue, Smitty happened to walk by. He ran over and shook hands with my father.

“How’s business?” my father asked him.

They chatted for a few minutes. An Atlantic City policeman, directing traffic, stared at them trying to figure out how these two men could have ever known each other. Smitty patted my father on the back and wished him well. My family went back to the hotel as Smitty walked down the street and turned into a bar. My father was right, “Hitler was a strange matchmaker.”