The One Man (32 page)

“
Her?
She's as good as dead anyway.” The German grunted. “Don't waste your pity. For her, this is quicker anyway.”

Terrified, the girl, who didn't speak German but clearly understood what was being said, reached out and grabbed onto Blum's leg. “Please, don't leave me. Don't leave me!” she blurted in Polish.

He had the cash. He could barter for her life too. Any life is as worthy as another, the Midrash said. But that money was needed to bribe the guards tomorrow night. Without it, he had no way to get Mendl out. And that's why he was here. Even now, he knew he had only seconds to get away without anyone seeing what was going on.

“I'm sorry.” Blum looked down at her.

“No, don't go!
Please…”
She lunged for him in desperation, her wide eyes filled with terror.

“Get away from here now,” the German said. “Or you both die.”

Blum pulled out of her grasp and started to run, hugging shadows of the long, dark building, taking one last glance behind.

He heard a shot. The woman's sobbing pleas went silent. Then he heard a second one.

The one Fuerst pretended was meant for him.

“Filthy, fucking Jews,” the guard grunted loud enough to be heard back in the line, wiping his hands on his uniform.

Blum hurried off in the darkness and turned at the far side of the building. Block 12 was just across the yard.
If I were you,
Fuerst warned him,
I'd get into the first block I see.

Blum ran across the yard and twisted open the outside door. People were huddled at the one window. “Who are you? What's going on?”

“I need a bunk,” Blum said. His heart almost clawed out of his chest. “I was in Twenty. We were being taken to the gas. I was able to bribe a guard…” He looked through the window and saw the end of the line of his block mates disappear toward the front gate.

“You can sleep there.” Someone pointed to an empty spot.

Blum nodded, blowing out a blast of air from his cheeks. “Thank you.”

“Twenty…”
someone whispered. “Levy was in twenty, wasn't he? He always wore a tweed cap.”

“Yes.” Blum nodded. “He was.”

“Too bad. He was a good man. He lasted a long time.”

Blum climbed onto the bunk, encased in a layer of cold sweat, a part of him holding back the urge to retch, another part on the edge of tears, knowing how lucky he was to be alive.

“Stop shaking,” the person next to him said.

“I'm sorry. I can't.”

The young woman he had just seen killed came into his mind. He heard her begging him in her last breaths to save her; saw her young and pretty face.
For her, this is quicker.
He'd basically purchased his life with hers, though, truth was, she would have been dead in minutes anyway. Strauss was right: There were things a whole lot worse than a dead cat lying ahead of him.

He lay on his back, eyes wide open, his heart unable to stay still. Both joyful and ashamed.

Shamed that he had bought his life with another's. And that she was now dead.

Joyful that, by doing so, the mission was still alive.

 

FORTY-SEVEN

EARLY THURSDAY MORNING
NEWMARKET AIR BASE, ENGLAND

Though it was well past mightnight, Peter Strauss was unable to sleep. Just as he hadn't slept more than an hour or two the two previous nights.

Instead, he wrote letters to his wife and kids and then just lay in his bunk, anticipation coursing through him. He took comfort in the early morning drone of the squadron of Wellingtons returning from their nightly runs over Germany. He would count the planes one by one as they went off—thirty of them tonight—rising into the sky at twenty-second intervals and disappearing into the night, pounding the coast of Brittany and the “impregnable” German homeland into rubble and dust. Then, hours later, still awake, he would count them on their return. Imagining, almost like a private wager with himself, that the last one back carried Blum and Mendl, as he prayed that the Mosquito that would leave tomorrow night to pick them up would. Strauss was a thorough man, but these last two nights, he'd given himself over to games.

What else was there, except to drive himself crazy? Each hour crept like an eternity. Imagining details they may have overlooked, things that could go wrong. Each night, an ocean of time for him to navigate until light, and each day, pretending to go about his work, but his mind thinking of nothing else. But what else had his work been for the past year except to plan this one mission? He knew Blum's schedule inside the camp. What would he be doing now? Waking? Having his meal? Finding his way onto a work detail? Did he have access to the others in the camp?
It was one in a million.
Had Vrba's number held up? Had Blum been killed on the whim of some guard, and they would never know?

Was Mendl even still alive?

Their contact, Katja, had radioed back that Blum had landed successfully and then, a day later, that he had entered the camp. So far it all seemed to be going as planned. But they could only plan out so much. Now it was up to Blum. Strauss could do nothing more, but wait. And play these games.

And pray.

Yes, he'd even prayed. For the first time in years. He read over the lines in the
Sanhedrin
that Blum had shown him about any who saves a life is as if he saved the entire world. His father, the cantor, would be proud of him. What would he have called Blum? “A real
Kiddush Hashem,
” he would say. A man who acts honorably. Who deserves our admiration.

Strauss smiled. It was true. As much as any man he knew.

But the phrase also carried a second meaning, one far more tragic. It referred to those who had died as martyrs for the faith. They too were
Kiddush Hashem.
And it made Strauss think. What if all the doubters were right? What if Blum didn't make it back? What if it was a suicide mission he had sent him on? Could Strauss live with that? Sending a man off to his death on such an improbable task? Would he one day look at his own son and say, “I never killed a man with my hands, but I sent one, a good one, on a wild chase, and never heard from him again”?

Yet from the moment Blum had turned at the door in Donovan's office that first meeting and asked how they would get him out, Strauss knew he had picked the right man.

Outside, Strauss heard the faraway drone of the first bomber to make it back that night. Zero two thirty hours. He got up from his bunk and stepped out. To the west, he saw the first lights from the Wellington coming in, wings steady, descending smoothly, then touching the tarmac and quickly pulling off the runway as another appeared, not far behind.

And then another.

He'd counted thirty leaving that night, and one by one he felt lifted by their safe return. Soon it was eight, then ten, fifteen, twenty. They kept on coming in.

At last twenty-eight, then twenty-nine …

He looked at the sky and waited.

One more.

Ambulances and maintenance workers rushed up to the ones that had landed. Two or three airmen who had been hit were carried off in gurneys. Pilots jumped down from their cockpits.

C'mon,
he said to himself, his eyes peeled to the moonlit sky.
Where are you? Make it.

In his mind, it was the one that carried Blum and Mendl back to England.

One more.

Finally he heard a buzzing. He looked to the west. He saw a wing light that seemed to be wavering, dipping and then rising in the night.

The last of the big, old flying fortresses limping home. It had been hit. It descended lower and lower, dark smoke coming from its left engine.
Make it, you bastard.
Watching while holding his breath, Strauss balled his fists.

Make it.

Finally the bomber touched down. Strauss let out a sigh of relief. A good omen. All back safe and sound. He didn't know who he'd been telling to make it, Blum or the plane.

Tomorrow it would be he running out and embracing Blum and Mendl as they climbed out of the fuselage.

A
Kiddush Hashem.

Whatever happened, Strauss knew he had picked the right man.

 

FORTY-EIGHT

THURSDAY.

At first light, the
kapo
came into the block where Blum had spent the night. He banged on the boards. “Everyone outside. Roll call. No delay! Outside, now! On the double!”

Everyone leaped out of their bunks and hustled out, running to take a quick piss or shit, wiping the sleep out of their eyes. The Blockführers were all outside. “Everyone line up by blocks,” they ordered. They were told to form rows of four in the main yard. Thousands of prisoners were milling around. The entire camp. No one had any idea what was up.

Blum had a bad feeling inside.
What the hell was going on?

“Something must be up,” the person next to Blum said as they organized themselves into a line. “You rarely see it this way.”

A shiver of unease ran down Blum's spine. He'd already cheated death once. He'd found Mendl. All he had to do was hide out in the numbers and make it to tonight, then they'd be out of here. But lining up, seeing the vast array of guards hustling everyone together,
“Schnell! Schnell!”
searching the barracks after they had been emptied, it was clear to him that there was a reason for this kind of attention. No one was being fed or readied for the work groups. Blocks were being counted. Every man. One by one.

If work was being delayed, something
had
to be up. It was almost as if they knew something.

The prisoners all stood there, thirty, forty minutes, until the entire camp was lined up in the vast staging area. Then a dark-featured major in full uniform and boots came up in front of them, clearly the man in charge.

The camp commandant, Blum suspected.

“What the hell is Ackermann doing here?” the man next to Blum wondered out loud. The man was short, with heavy eyebrows and large ears, and spoke in Czech, which Blum knew a smattering of. “And who's that with him? We've got a visitor of some kind.”

“I don't know.” Blum craned his neck to see.

An important-looking colonel, his gray uniform jacket buttoned to the top, war eagle wings on his chest, walked aside the commandant.

“Intelligence.” The word spread down the line like wildfire. It traveled from block to block. “From Warsaw. Some big shot.”

“Intelligence…?”
Blum's neighbor grunted. “What the hell is an intelligence colonel doing here? Looking for something…”

Blum's heart began to pick up. Any deviation from the normal routine was a worry, but this lineup, the entire camp, some Abwehr bigwig … Today, of all days. Going block to block, stopping in front of each man, the Rapportführer recording the names. Each barrack going through every prisoner both by name and by number.

This wasn't for show. They were clearly looking for someone.

Blum inched up his sleeve and stared at the number burned into his wrist. A22327. Vrba's number, but once it was matched up against whom it rightfully belonged to, the game would be up. They'd be able to trace it back to the block Blum was in now. And the false identity they'd created for him, Mirek from Gizycko, didn't match up against any prisoner in the camp. He listened to the names and numbers being called out, craning, having lost sight of the two officers walking row to row.

“Berger. A33546.”

“Pecsher. T11345.”

“A transfer. From Theresienstadt,” the Czech muttered. “Like me.”

Blum's heart began to pulse with worry. Strauss had warned him, this was as big a risk as any he would face inside. There was no way they were able to provide him a valid name and number. The numbers in the documents Vrba and Wetzler had smuggled back with him all belonged to people who were dead now.

The roll call grew closer.

What Blum needed was a name. A name that would match up against someone here and buy him some time.

Each block took about fifteen minutes to go through, the camp commander and his distinguished visitor weaving amid the rows as the names were called out. Time passed—forty minutes, an hour. Then two. Everyone was weary and going back and forth on the balls of their feet. They were on Block Nine now, only three until his. Blum looked around warily.

Occasionally, someone dropped in his tracks from exhaustion.

Suddenly the man next to him leaned over and asked under his breath, “You're the one who came in last night, aren't you?”

Blum's heart stopped cold. He looked straight ahead and didn't answer.

“From Twenty? You're the one who bought himself out?”

Blum hesitated again, nervously watching the role draw closer.

“Abramowitz. A447745.”

“Aschkov. T31450.”

“Don't worry, you've got nothing to fear from me,” the man next to him whispered under his breath.

Blum looked at his wrist again. It would give him away. Mirek wouldn't match up.
What the hell, he'd be caught anyway.
Blum glanced at the Czech and nodded. “Yes.”

Had he just signed his own death warrant?

“Well, you're ahead of the game,” the man said. “Look over there, Twenty's spot is vacant this morning.” Blum craned around. Indeed, all the people he knew whom he had stayed with two nights back were missing. Their space was empty. “Must have been something very special you gave up to get you off the list?”

Blum picked up the intelligence colonel again as he strode, arms behind his back, his gaze focused and narrowed, as they stopped in front of each man in line. They listened to the name and the number.

“Weisz.”

“Ferber.”

The Rapportführer checking them off on his board, one by one. Staring impassively into each prisoner's face. As if he were looking for someone. For one man. Amid the thousands here. One man who he would know the moment his eyes set on him.