Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  “You will have your specimens, Herr Doktor. I’m afraid that even in 1944, Jews are something we still have a surplus of.”

  Himmler raised an arm and took in Sergeant Sturm’s assembled SS troops. “Kameraden!” he shouted, his breath steaming in the cold. “I know that your work here is difficult. Yes! It takes a strong constitution to witness what I have just seen and yet remain good and decent men. You men are our finest flower, the seeds of the Reich’s future. You alone have the strength to do what must be done. That is why we will win this war. The Englishman — and, yes, the American too — merely does his best in all contests. The German does what is necessary! Kameraden, Sieg heil! Heil Hitler!”

  During the answering salvo of Sieg heils, the shoemaker lay prone in the narrow space between the truck and the hospital wall with the snow soaking through his burlap clothes. He saw Brandt escort Himmler back to the waiting vehicles and join him in his field car. As they sped away, joined soon after by the troop truck, Major Schörner signaled to two SS men standing behind the E-Block. Within seconds, scalding jets of high-pressure steam and detergent chemicals blasted into the chamber to flush the corpses, walls, ceiling, and floor clean of nerve gas. The remaining mixture of air and toxic liquid was sucked out by powerful vacuum pumps. Finally, two small steel vents were opened in the roof, and scorching dry air treated with decontaminants removed all traces of Soman from the chamber.

  Major Schörner looked around expectantly. Ariel Weitz scurried up to him like an obedient terrier.

  “The usual, Weitz.”

  “Jawohl, Sturmbannführer!”

  Schörner seemed entranced by the sight of the little Jew hurrying down the steps that no other man would tread without a stutter in his heartbeat. When Weitz disappeared, the major hastened back toward the front of the camp.

  The alley was empty.

  The shoemaker listened to the fading engines. Impelled by morbid curiosity, he darted across the alley to the far side of the E-Block, crouched in the snow, and pressed his face to an observation porthole.

  The sterility of the scene stunned him. There was no blood or feces, not even a speck of dirt. The steam had taken care of that. But the position of the dead revealed the madness of what had gone before. The twenty-eight Jewish men who died tonight had been packed inside the E-Block like tinned herrings. Most had died standing up. Their corpses were tangled in a general riot of limbs, their dead skin blistered pink by the high-pressure steam, their open eyes glazed and protruding horribly. One man’s head was jammed against the window from which Himmler had watched.

  The shoemaker almost screamed when the corpses near the door began to move. Then he saw Ariel Weitz pushing his way in among the dead like a grave robber. The man was not even wearing a gas mask! Perhaps his guilty conscience had spawned a death wish. Weitz turned up his nose and sniffed the air like a Hausfrau checking her bathroom. Apparently satisfied, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a pair of precision pliers. Then he leaned over one of the fallen corpses. The shoemaker saw the face clearly, its pink mouth frozen in a rictus of pain and horror. It was the young Dutch lawyer, Jansen.

  Weitz pulled a small torch from his back pocket and shined it into the oral cavity. His grisly effort was rewarded by the glint of gold. Carefully, he inserted the pliers into the corpse’s mouth, fitted the tongs around the tooth and yanked it free of the bone. Weitz brushed away skin that had sloughed onto his hand, then pocketed his prize and put the pliers back into the lawyer’s mouth.

  The shoemaker felt his hands shaking. What kind of monster could plunder the corpses of his own tribe for its exterminators? He stared with murder in his eyes as Weitz fitted his pliers around yet another gold-crowned tooth. Then, as if suddenly aware that he was being watched, Ariel Weitz looked up — straight at the window from which the shoemaker watched.

  The shoemaker froze. He met Weitz’s startled gaze for a few seconds, peered into the twin abysses of his eyes. Then he ran across the empty alley and along the wall of the hospital.

  He forced himself to slow down as he neared the inmate showers. Running could draw gunfire from the watchtowers at any time. As he passed the Appellplatz, an image of the old Dutchman’s diamonds flashed into his brain. Was it worth the risk? The value of gems had been low throughout the war, in the camps at least. A treasured brooch might fetch four potatoes in a black market trade. But times were changing. As the Red Army offensive gained momentum, some SS had shown an interest in goods that would help them buy their way westward in the event of a Russian breakthrough.

  He made five quick passes over the well-trodden snow where he and the Jansens had stood during the selection. Just as he decided that Sturm had defied Major Schörner and returned for the diamonds, he saw a flash on the ground to his right. He bent down, scooped up a handful of snow, then moved quickly toward the inmate blocks, sifting the snow as he walked. He counted four loose diamonds in his palm. Slipping the stones into his pocket, he silently scaled the wire fence and dropped to the other side.

  “Bitte! Please do not shoot!”

  The shoemaker clutched his chest in shock. Only when he recognized Rachel Jansen, the wife of the Dutch lawyer, did he begin to calm down. She was standing in the shadow of the Christian Women’s Block with her tiny boy and girl clinging to her legs. “What are you doing out here?” he asked furiously.

  The Dutchwoman hesitated too long. “My children needed the toilet. They have loose bowels.”

  “Don’t lie to me! You came to look for the diamonds, didn’t you?” He saw by her expression that he was right. Rachel Jansen either had courage or she was a fool. “The SS took the stones already,” he said in a gentler tone. “You must go back.”

  She nodded hesitantly. “Can you tell me anything of my husband? The truth.”

  The shoemaker felt a sudden and surprising rush of emotion. Against his better instincts, he took the young woman’s soft face between his hands. Very quietly, so that the children would not hear, he said, “You must be strong, Rachel. Your husband was a fine man, but he is dead. They are all dead.”

  He expected a hysterical response, but after an initial shudder, a quick blinking of the eyelids, Rachel Jansen pulled away from him. Her right hand went to her forehead, then covered her eyes. “Oh dear God,” she whispered. “We are alone.”

  The shoemaker caught up a child in each arm and began walking to the Jewish Women’s Block. Rachel followed. At the door he set the children down.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You are de schoenmaker, yes? I’ve only just arrived, but . . . already I’ve heard of you. Some people . . . they say bad things.”

  The shoemaker shrugged. He was thinking about Ariel Weitz.

  “They say you collaborate with the Germans.”

  He glanced anxiously toward the Jewish Men’s Block. He had no time for questions, but something about this young woman had struck him. Perhaps it was her children, or the brave husband she had lost, or her ability to sustain the blow of losing him and not shatter, as so many had. He reached into his pocket and closed his hand over the four diamonds. He started to pull out a single stone, then brought out two. He placed them carefully in her hand.

  “That’s all I could find,” he told her. “Use them well.”

  Before she could respond, he turned and hurried toward the Jewish Men’s Block.

  As he passed under the faded yellow star over the door, the musty stew of caked sweat and mold and naphtha hit him, the smell of home. He lay on his hard bunk, stunned to find himself not sharing a blanket for the first time in many months. No shortage of bunks tonight. None of the eleven survivors of his block asked where he had been.

  He wanted to sleep, but he could not get Ariel Weitz out of his mind. In the darkness above him hovered the image of the Jewish traitor, the golem, startled in the midst of his ghoulish work. What had shocked the shoemaker — what made him run — was not the fear of getting caught. It was the tears. As the little ferret looked up from the corpse, huge wet te
ars had been streaming down his face. That sight had shaken him to his core. Because if Ariel Weitz still possessed some secret well of compassion, some vestige of identity from the world of light, then could not the shoemaker as well?

  He let his mind reel back through time, to his life before Hitler. The pungent stench of the block gave way to the warm colors and smells of his home. Bread cooking in the oven, good matzo, his wife working over the kitchen stove. And in the back of the apartment, his shop. There, shaping leather at the last, his son, only fourteen yet nearly as tall as his father. So quickly becoming a man. He heard his wife calling, “Avram? Avram! Come! There are men in the street! Brown Shirts!”

  The shoemaker hugged himself and shivered in his bunk. That Nazi rally had marked the beginning of the end for him, the end of the time when he would be known by his given name. Soon after his wife and son fled Germany, Hilter’s thugs began rounding up Jewish combat veterans along with all the rest, just as his son had predicted. Avram was arrested with a truckload of other Jews from Rostock and taken to a distant camp. There he had become prisoner 6065, a number of prestige now in the hellish universe of the camps, where a low number indicated either survival skills or luck — both treasured commodities.

  When all his comrades died, he was transferred north to help build another prison in the land of numbers — Totenhausen Camp, not fifty kilometers from Rostock, his home city. There — here — he had carved out a small place for himself, existing in darkness, moving through life in single steps, with each step hoping to avoid the god of the camps, which was Death. So far he had been lucky, if survival was luck. Some believed the dead were the lucky ones. Sometimes he believed that too. But tonight, in some nameless slice of time between seeing the tears staining Weitz’s ratlike face and giving the two diamonds to Rachel Jansen, the shoemaker had become Avram Stern again. And that terrified him.

  Because once again he had something to lose.

  One hour after the shoemaker found sleep, Anna Kaas was standing beneath a tree in a dark clearing five miles northeast of Totenhausen. A giant of a black-bearded Pole stood beside her, ravenously chewing the salted ham she had stolen from the camp stores. Kneeling on the ground at her feet was the gaunt young man with wild hair and violinist’s fingers. He bent over an opened suitcase and began tapping out coded number groups on a Morse key. The numbers had been encoded to conceal the words on the sheet of paper in Anna’s hand. While the young Pole tapped and his older brother wolfed down the ham, Anna reread her message.

  Himmler personally observed Special Action tonight. Field test of Soman Four to be held at Raubhammer Proving Ground in fourteen days. The Führer will be present.

  She took a match from her purse and set fire to the paper. It burned quickly. With her eyes she followed the dark antenna wire from the suitcase to the tree branch high above them.

  She wondered exactly where the dots and dashes were going.

  Six hundred miles away, in Bletchley Park, England, young Clapham received the message, transcribed and decoded it. Then he lifted the telephone and placed a call to SOE Headquarters in Baker Street.

  Brigadier Duff Smith was awakened from sound sleep on an office cot to take the call. When he heard the word SCARLETT, followed by the contents of the message, he thanked Clapham, hung up, reached into a nearby tumbler and splashed water on his face. Then he calmly walked to the next office up the hall and said: “Barry, where’s Winston tonight?”

  13

  Rachel Jansen spent her first morning as a widow trying desperately not to fall asleep. She had not rested for many hours, but until she was certain that her children were relatively safe, she would not sleep. She sat stiffly on the floor, her back pressed against the narrow bunk she had been assigned, one of three stacked like bookshelves against the front wall of the Jewish Women’s Block. Her father-in-law stood unsteadily beside her. Her two children — Jan, three, and Hannah, two — sat on either side of her, their heads pillowed upon her shrinking breasts.

  With stinging eyes Rachel looked warily around the barracks. For the last hour, women of every size and condition had been staring at her. She could not understand it. During her short time here, she had taken great care to offend no one. The women she had mentally christened the “new widows” — those who had arrived with her and also lost their husbands last night — were not staring. They seemed to be suffering various degrees of shock. But the others were. The only characteristic the staring women shared was their hair. Most of them had several inches of it.

  It’s the old-timers, she thought uneasily. The camp veterans are staring at us. Rachel pressed her thighs tightly together and thought of the two diamonds the shoemaker had given her. It was a bit of an indignity to hide them in so intimate a place, but she had seen female veterans of the camp hiding coins, rolled photographs, and other small treasures there in the showers, and she had quickly followed their example. It proved a wise decision. Since then she had witnessed two surprise searches.

  Why do they stare so? she thought anxiously.

  “My son,” Benjamin Jansen whimpered for the hundredth time. “My home and my business weren’t enough? They had to take my only son?”

  “Quiet,” Rachel whispered, pointing to the snoring children. “Sleep is their only refuge.”

  The old man shook his head hopelessly. “There is no refuge from this place. Except through the back gate.”

  Rachel’s young face hardened. “Stop whining. If it hadn’t been for that shoemaker knocking you down, you’d already be out the back gate.”

  The old man closed his eyes.

  Though exhausted, Rachel stared defiantly back at the toughest looking of the women — a thickset Slav with ash-colored hair — and blocked out the old man’s fatalism. It was not easy. The thought of the “back gate” was enough to paralyze anyone. Already she had learned that the irregular tattoo of muffled bangs echoing in the trees behind the camp — which she had thought were gunshots — were actually explosions of gas through the swollen skins of decomposing bodies, buried in shallow pits behind the camp. Her husband’s resting place. . .

  “Hey!” barked a gravelly voice. “Don’t you know why everyone is staring at you?”

  Rachel lashed out blindly with her right hand and blinked her eyelids. She had fallen asleep just long enough for the big Slav to cross to her bunk. “Leave us alone!” she snarled.

  The coarse-featured woman towering above her did not back away. She squatted down and jabbed a stubby finger at Benjamin Jansen. She wore leather-soled shoes, Rachel noticed, the only pair in the barracks.

  “They’re staring because of him,” the woman said in a thick Polish accent. “This is the Jewish Women’s Block. He can’t stay here. The SS tolerate a certain amount of movement between the women’s and the children’s blocks. Helps to keep mischief down. But no men are allowed in the women’s block. The old goat can listen to what I have to say, then he has to go.”

  Rachel looked at her father-in-law to make sure he understood.

  “You’ve never been in a camp before, have you?” the woman asked. “None of you.”

  “We passed through Auschwitz,” Rachel answered, “but only for an hour. I’m afraid this is all quite new to us.”

  “It shows.”

  “How, exactly?”

  The woman wrinkled her wide, flat-boned face in scorn. “A hundred ways. But that doesn’t matter. Now that your rich husband has gone through the back gate, maybe you’re not too good to socialize with us, eh? Or maybe you want to be transferred to the Prominents’ Block?”

  “No, no. We want no special treatment.”

  “Good. Because there is no Prominents’ Block here. That’s Buchenwald. In Totenhausen everyone is equal.”

  The woman seemed to take great satisfaction from this statement. Rachel extended her hand. “I am Rachel Jansen. I am honored to meet you.”

  Rachel’s formal manners brought a sneer to the woman’s face. “I’m Frau Hagan,” she announced. �
�I am Block Leader. I am also a Pole and a Communist.” Frau Hagan said this as if it were a challenge to the devil. “I am kapo of Jewish women prisoners. Because I understand Yiddish, of course. Not everyone in this camp is Jewish, you know. There are Christian Poles, Russians, Latvians, Estonians, Gypsies, Ukrainians . . . even Germans. More Communists, too. A whole world behind an electric fence.”

  Frau Hagan frowned again at Benjamin Jansen. “I came over to tell you the facts of life — camp life — before your ignorance gets you and others killed.”

  Rachel nodded quickly. “We appreciate your kindness.”

  Frau Hagan snorted. “The first thing I tell you is this: whatever you were outside, forget it. The sooner the better. The higher up the ladder you were, the harder it will be for you to get used to the camp. What were you? What did your husband do?”

  “He was a lawyer. A very good one.”

  Frau Hagan turned up her heavy hands in mock despair. “You see? That’s terrible. Another spoiled princess.”

  “My father was a carpenter,” Rachel added quickly.

  “That’s a little better. I was a washerwoman on the outside. A maid to a German businessman’s family. Yet here I am Block Leader.”

  “That’s very impressive,” Rachel said carefully.

  Frau Hagan stared at Rachel, trying to see if she was being made fun of. She decided she wasn’t. “Now, the badges. Your children are wearing the plain yellow star. Jood. That means Jew in Dutch, eh? Some language. Well, a Jew is a Jew, no matter what the letters. Yellow triangles mark them all. But there are other colors, you’ll see. People here have been brought from many camps, but in general the badges are based on the Auschwitz system. Knowing the badge colors can mean life or death for you here.”