The Tenth Witness

by Leonard Rosen

  So despite the writer’s too generous use of visionary and bold, the Kraus biography had something to say about the mood of those years and the reconstruction of a devastated continent. Yet as I skimmed the book, nowhere did I find an honest accounting of Otto’s direct involvement in the war, nothing to suggest he’d gotten his hands dirty making steel for the Führer. Even so, I would read it through and find something good to say.

  Dora arrived with the coffee and juice on a tray, with toasted muffins and jam set on fine china. “How are your studies going?” Liesel said.

  “Very well, Ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Henri, I’m paying Dora’s college tuition. Her parents worked for my family for years. Way back when, sometimes we played together, didn’t we?”

  Dora was, perhaps, twenty. She smoothed her apron as Liesel spoke.

  “Dear, please clean the toilet in my bedroom before you leave.”

  I watched the young woman step into the bedroom and through the open door saw her picking up my boxer shorts and pants. I cringed as she folded them over a chair. At last she left, and Liesel and I fell into each other’s arms again, ransacking the freshly made bed. I drifted in and out of sleep, wondering if, and how much, Liesel knew about the breaking yard in Hong Kong. I said nothing because I wouldn’t dare risk ruining our day.

  As it turned out, a phone call did that for us.

  It was late afternoon by that point, the shadows creeping across the Englischer Garden. As Liesel listened, I watched her expression slide into something hard and focused. She reached for a pencil and paper. She said yes several times, I understand. Of course. She hung up.

  “One of our iron mines in Uganda. An explosion and cave-in, with thirty men trapped. Anselm wants me to go out there to meet with government ministers.”

  “You were just there. Did you have any idea?”

  “That’s my brother’s end of the business. He does mines and blast furnaces. I do schools and clinics.”

  “And you . . . you’ll be the pretty face.”

  She paused. “He uses me like that sometimes.”

  I could see, in fact, that she felt used; but she wouldn’t take me into her confidence just yet because I hadn’t earned that. Her eyes flashed as she packed her bags. Night fell, the streetlamps blinked on. Neither of us was happy when the driver arrived.

  “Stay,” she said, heading out the door. “You’ll get the apartment in Dachau set up tomorrow. But stay tonight. It would make me happy.”

  She gave me a key and left.

  sixteen

  The next day I met with the senior management of Steinholz Precision Auto Parts in Stuttgart, an hour’s train ride west and north of Munich. The Hong Kong contract needed some fleshing out, so after moving to the apartment in Dachau and inspecting the warehouse space that would become my lab, I took a ten o’clock train.

  The trip to Stuttgart proved doubly useful because I’d be visiting the chemical supply house Anselm had recommended, not a ten minute walk from the Steinholz headquarters. It had been a while since I stood over a lab bench. Notwithstanding my concerns about how Anselm would ultimately put my work to use, I was actually excited to begin. New projects always get my attention. Anselm had already delivered eight personal computers, all new, to the warehouse. These were to be the patients on which I would perform a caustic surgery.

  Even without conducting research into the chemical extraction of precious metals, I knew the process involved dissolving the metals into a solution with acids and then crashing them out of the solution with salts. I’d be working with a pantry full of nasty materials, and I made sure to put protective gloves and goggles on my shopping list.

  As the Munich-Stuttgart train rumbled along, I continued to read the biography of Otto von Kraus, written by A. Bieler, an historian at Hanover. The von in Otto’s name was an old-world salute to nobility that Liesel and Anselm had dropped. There were von Habsburgs and von Rothschilds; apparently Otto was one of them, which I didn’t quite understand, given his humble origins. But I supposed great men have a habit of surprising.

  My opinion of the biography didn’t change for reading more of it. Still, I enjoyed a middle section of glossy photos, especially the image of Liesel flanked by her brother and Otto at the lighthouse on Terschelling. The caption read 1960. They each held shovels for the groundbreaking of Löwenherz. Liesel, twelve or thirteen, all arms and legs with short wavy hair, wore fisherman’s boots that reached to her knobby knees.

  From the photographs I could see that Otto Kraus was a pugnacious man. With his beefy hands and thick forearms, he had the look of a dockworker one would do well to avoid in a bar. Yet by the time this photo was taken, Kraus had moved well beyond fighting with his hands. By that point, he could pay lawyers.

  Good for him, I supposed. He had waltzed into the lucrative business of steel fabrication after the war, anointed by the German, Flemish, and Dutch governments to be their provider of choice. How he had managed that was anyone’s guess. But the more contracts he won, the more furnaces he built, the cheaper his steel became, the more demand he created. All he had to do was deliver a reliable product, which by all accounts he did.

  I saw in these photos the supreme self-confidence of a man who understood his advantage and would yield it to no one. Anselm had more refined edges, a university education that gave him a high-caste vocabulary and manners. But whatever toughness Anselm possessed, and I guessed it was plenty, he had learned from Papa. And Papa had learned on the farms and in the foundries of Lower Saxony. I read this:

  Otto von Kraus was born in 1902 in the village of Beddingen, which after the municipal consolidation of 1942 became the town of Salzgitter. His parents farmed, but with iron ore deposits in the district, he worked autumns and winters at the local mills. These were the crucial years in which von Kraus developed his passion for steel.

  Kraus’s rise had been meteoric. Prior to the four-year run-up to the war, the Reich depended heavily on iron ore shipped from suppliers beyond Germany’s borders, which Herman Göring regarded as a strategic weakness. A solution lay close at hand. Known since the 1300s for its low quality but plentiful iron ore, the mines of Salzgitter could provide for all of the Fatherland’s needs if a new method could be found to work that ore into usable steel. Kraus devised such a method, and Göring chose him to lead the new Reichswerke. Berlin invested millions, and Otto Kraus, the local man who knew the district and the mines, prospered.

  Not without a cost, however. Kraus took what his biographer called “the necessary but unpleasant step” of joining the Nazi Party. He contracted with the SS for labor: Jews from the east and Slavs from the north—all from conquered territories—and express-shipped in cattle cars to the newly constructed Drütte concentration camp. In a triumph of efficiency, the SS built the camp inside the gates of the sprawling steel mill. Bieler noted that Otto was sickened at the necessity of working men like animals.

  I had had enough. Between Bieler’s wretched mythmaking and the rhythmic shaking of the train, I was nodding off as I thumbed through the final section of the biography, devoted to the postwar triumphs of Kraus Steel. It was titled “Ten Witnesses and a Clean Slate.”

  Many who directed the factories that supplied the Reich with war materiel faced prosecution for their use of slave labor. Of those, dozens escaped justice by passing as refugees and escaping the country. But Otto von Kraus, a principled man confident of his innocence, did not run. As would be expected, the Americans arrested him on a charge of war crimes. Yet one month into his captivity, and prior to his scheduled trial, military prosecutors received an extraordinary affidavit stating that von Kraus had acted honorably during the war. Within the areas of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring that he controlled, von Kraus treated workers with humane consideration. Indeed, he opened an infirmary on the factory grounds where the sick and the most seriously injured could recover.

  Von Kraus could not change the deplorable conditions at the Drütte concentration camp; but eve
n there he demanded that the SS increase food rations in order to give his laborers the strength needed to make steel for the Reich. The sad fact remains that many perished at Drütte, a loss that von Kraus mourned deeply the rest of his life.

  When news spread that Allied forces had arrested Kraus, ten survivors of the camp approached a military judge and swore to the following:

  1. Otto von Kraus resisted Nazi barbarism.

  2. He treated workers the best he could in terrible circumstances.

  3. He saved lives.

  4. We know him to be a good and honorable man caught up in evil times.

  As sworn to and attested by the undersigned in the presence of Col. Richard Starr, military judge.

  I scanned the names and sat bolt upright as I read the last one: Jacob Zeligman.

  “Stuttgart,” called the conductor. “Stuttgart is next.”

  I didn’t walk far along the station platform before finding a pay phone and calling Freda Kahane. The phone rang. Pick it up, I muttered. I reached into my pocket and held Isaac’s medallion.

  “Henri! Are you upstairs? Come, visit.”

  I asked the unlikely and heard the improbable. She was crossing the kitchen; in the background a tea kettle whistled. “We buried Isaac two weeks ago, and here I am leaving to sit shiva with Jacob’s wife? God isn’t kind.”

  She had plenty of evidence for that.

  “It’s true, Jacob survived Drütte. He and Tosha talked about it all the time. But Isaac? You know he wasn’t a talker. When I asked Jacob to tell me how he knew him, he said ‘Ask Isaac.’ Some kind of agreement they had, that he wouldn’t say. It was that way for thirty years, Henri. I would go to Isaac and say, ‘Tell me about the war, what you saw.’ And he would say, ‘Why, so we can compare whose horror was more horrible?’ He wouldn’t do it. I could never get him to talk, aside from the fact that I was his second wife and that he had children once. Sons.”

  She waited. “Visit, Henri.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Give me a few weeks. Tosha wasn’t a well woman even when Jacob was alive. I may need to stay.”

  PIGEONS ROOSTED in the rafters of the station and pecked at trash in the train beds. Businessmen folded papers beneath their arms, waiting for the first-class coaches to open, and suddenly I felt both alone and scared. The years collapsed and I saw these same men and women in winter, yellow stars sewn onto their coats. I heard orders and harsh, guttural shouts. Truncheons fell. Old men dropped. Soldiers pushed and clubbed hundreds into trains meant for cattle.

  Someone tapped my shoulder. “Are you done? The phone?”

  The possibility that Isaac had worked alongside Jacob Zeligman at Drütte, making steel for Otto von Kraus, struck me dumb. Had they occupied the same square of German soil at the same moment? I found myself wishing that Kraus was the hero his biographer made him out to be. Never mind that his steel was turned into Hitler’s tanks and bombers. Von Kraus was part of the Nazi apparatus, but he could also have been one of the righteous who saved Jews at great peril to themselves. These people existed, and I desperately wanted Liesel’s father to be one of them.

  Zeligman could no longer help establish that; nor could he tell me Isaac’s story. But others from Drütte, the witnesses who signed the affidavit, could. I decided to find them.

  seventeen

  The noble metals do not degrade in the presence of air and water. A chemist would explain by saying they don’t oxidize easily. That’s why jewelers prefer gold, silver, and platinum over steel, which rusts, and copper, which turns green. Find a gold necklace in a 3,000-year-old crypt or salvage a saltwater-soaked guinea from the Lutine, and the gold will shine sun-yellow. Or spray a thin layer of gold or platinum to connect circuits on a computer’s motherboard and the circuits will transmit electrons faithfully for years until some other part of the board fails.

  I understood the risks Anselm’s assignment posed the moment I accepted it. My strategy would be to use great care in pursuing two extraction techniques: a chemical approach using acids and salts and, more promising for production at larger scales, electrolysis— running a current through a chemical bath to release metal ions.

  The chemical supply house delivered my order the day after my visit to Stuttgart, and I spent the remainder of that week assembling shelves and directing the small army of plumbers, electricians, and carpenters that Anselm had made available to me.

  I had claimed one corner of an otherwise enormous, vacant warehouse located in the suburb of Dachau, by a train yard. Kraus Steel owned ten of these warehouses and had converted one to furnished apartments for employees cycling through the Munich headquarters from the far-flung corners of the empire. My situation was ideal, with a comfortable apartment and a four-minute walk to the lab. I took a long-term rental on a car and settled in for work.

  With Liesel in Uganda for at least two weeks, I had no obligations other than building the lab. At the end of the first week, given all the assistance I received, the only missing piece was a proper ventilation hood. This would arrive the following Thursday and, in its place, I bought two box fans that I set in the windows to draw fumes from the workspace.

  I was proud of my effort and took photos with my trusty Minolta as proof I had built a serviceable lab. In neatly labeled trays were my pipettes, graduated cylinders, stir plates, and beakers. I had purchased carboys for hazardous waste. I set up a desk with a lamp and a phone. I read everything I could about the extraction of gold from mixed materials, a process that turned out to be relatively straightforward, though by all accounts dangerous.

  When I had nothing left to read and no shelves to build, I prepared for my trip to Buenos Aires. I copied our designs for the dive platform and made notes for likely alterations. The Argentine wreck, the Preciado, sat at the bottom of a river, unlike ours at the bottom of the sea. They would need a barge with a shallower draft, which affected both the size and capacity of the crane they would use, as well as the number of sheds that could be built. I re-spec’d the barge and prepared a presentation.

  By the following Monday, I had nothing to do but wait for the vent hood. All that was required was that I be patient. I could have devoted my days to walks in a park or reading a novel or technical journals. But I’ve never been one for sitting idly. So I set to creating a supply of aqua regia, one part nitric acid to three parts hydrochloric acid. The “king’s water” is a solution strong enough to dissolve most noble metals.

  I knew full well what a mistake in mixing these acids would mean, and I believed in safety protocols. If I checked my lists another dozen times I couldn’t have been more prepared. I slipped on my goggles, my flame-retardant lab coat, my rubberized apron, and my nitrile gloves. I turned on the box fans for exhaust.

  I did everything according to plan, except wear a gas mask. The man at the supply house had forgotten to mention I might need one, in addition to the ventilation hood, or I had forgotten to ask. Either way, my sworn enemy couldn’t have planned a more potent attack if he’d shot a canister of chlorine gas into my lab from an opposing trench. In my haste to begin work, I inadvertently produced a weapon of mass destruction.

  All by myself.

  I mixed the acids too quickly or overlooked a drop of water in one of the beakers. Whatever the cause, when I poured the nitric into the hydrochloric, the mixture fumed. The first whiff knocked me backwards, the chlorine blistering my throat and lungs. I collapsed in a fit of coughing, but not before dropping the beakers into the steel tub, which had enough residual water to create a billowing, yellowish-green cloud.

  I clawed my way across the warehouse floor. I reached the wall and flung open a window. Breathing seared my lungs. I hacked into the sleeve of my lab coat and saw phlegm and blood. My eyes burned. Had I not worn goggles, the gas would have blinded me.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. I sucked down ragged breaths and stared across the tracks to a stand of trees, grateful that I could see them. Stupid.

  WITHIN THE hour, still spittin
g blood into a handkerchief, I fashioned a makeshift mask, wrapping wet towels around my mouth and cinching them in place with my belt. Protected, barely, I vented the chlorine and neutralized the acids. Within an hour, I could feel my lungs clearing and decided against a trip to the hospital. I staggered, instead, to my apartment and took a hot shower.

  As I gulped down the cleansing steam, I could imagine no likely scenario in which Anselm’s salvage of circuit boards would leave his laborers unharmed. I’d had protection, and look what happened. They would have none, and they would be maimed or killed. Unless, that is, I reported faithfully on the dangers and convinced Anselm to take precautions. I made a conscious choice to continue my work and deliver the report he’d asked for, but with a detailed appendix titled “Safety.”

  Still, I imagined the worst. The men who’d work at an electronics salvage yard in the People’s Republic of China would be desperate to feed their families. They would sign whatever document Kraus Steel waved in front of them for the privilege of navigating a landscape of chemical filth. Anselm was going to create a dead zone more toxic than his ship-breaking facility in Hong Kong.

  I showered until the water ran cold. I damn near cried from exhaustion and from anger at my stupidity, both for having injured myself and for having accepted the job. The physical symptoms would clear in a few days. Weighing more heavily was the question of what to do with what I’d learned.

  Alec would have told me to shrug my shoulders and get over it, that business requires the occasional bending of one’s finer instincts. My father would have lectured me on the dangers of doing business with Germans, even thirty years after the war. I couldn’t confide in Liesel because I had spent no more than a handful of hours, albeit intimate hours, with her. What would I have said, in any event? That I suspected her brother of a crime he had not yet committed?

  I fell asleep spitting blood and phlegm into a handkerchief.