The Far Side of the Sky

by Daniel Kalla

  Grodenzki looked from Simon to Franz. “My family is from Lódz. You have heard of it?”

  Franz nodded. “In central Poland?”

  “Poland’s third-largest city, or it used to be, anyway.” Grodenzki grunted. “After Lódz fell, in September of ‘39, the Nazis herded us into a walled ghetto with hundreds of thousands of other Jews. The conditions …” he exhaled.

  “I’ve heard,” Franz said.

  Grodenzki shot him a look that suggested Franz had no inkling of how awful it was. “Two and a half years, we manage to survive in this ghetto. But just after New Year’s Day, the SS begins to round up the Jews. Whole families—old people, children, babies—doesn’t matter to them. They tell us only they are taking us to ‘relocation camps’ in Germany.”

  A chill ran up Franz’s spine as he remembered Max using the same term regarding his daughter’s family.

  “They take us to a little town, seventy kilometres away, called Chelmno.” Still clutching his cup, Grodenzki stopped for another sip of coffee. “My family’s turn came on the twentieth of January. My older brother, my little sister and my parents.” And then, as though speaking to himself, he added, “Standing in that stinking, frozen cattle car. We are—hundreds of us—jammed in too tight to sit. Even the old and sick have to stand for the entire trip. Hour after hour. At the train station, they unload us into the backs of big transport trucks and drive us into the town. Chelmno. To a big, old manor house.” He grunted. “It is quite pretty, actually. But none of us are so stupid as to believe the Nazis might let us stay in a castle.”

  Franz glanced over to Simon, whose eyes were glued to the table.

  “But there they are—the SS brutes—leading a long line of Jews into the castle,” Grodenzki continued. “We know there has to be trouble because they aren’t shrieking or beating us like usual. Right before we get to the doors, two Nazi guards pull my brother and me out of the lineup, along with a few other young men. We watch my parents, and my little sister, Perla, disappear inside.” He paused a moment. “The Nazis drive us men—many are boys, actually—out to Waldlager. The forest camp.” Grodenzki stared out past the others and fell silent.

  “Forest camp?” Franz asked with a shake of his head.

  “Sonderkommando labour detachment.” Grodenzki laughed bitterly. “That’s what they call us slaves who work at the forest camp. Our job is to empty the trucks.” Grodenzki pointed to Franz with the nubs of his left hand. “You see, inside the castle, the new arrivals—little children with their dolls, old men with canes, women carrying babies—all of them—are led down a grand hallway. Beautiful paintings hang on the wall. Soft carpets. Heated, even. At the end of the hallway, they stop in front of a desk. A Polish man tells them they need to change for a doctor’s medical examination and that they have to check all their valuables in at the desk. The man even writes a receipt for their possessions.” He snorted with disgust. “From there, the Jews are led through a doorway, along a dark passageway and into an empty room with plywood for walls and metal grates on the floor. When the room is full—more crowded than the cattle cars leaving Lódz—the door is slammed shut. Only when the engine turns over do people realize that they have been packed into the back of a truck.”

  “Oh, mein Gott,” Franz murmured.

  “God is nowhere near Chelmno, Herr Doktor, trust me,” Grodenzki said. “One of the SS men connects the truck’s exhaust pipe to the only vent inside the back of the truck. And the driver runs the engine until the screams stop.” He glanced from Simon to Franz. “Then the guard unhooks the exhaust pipe, and the driver heads off with his load of fresh corpses out to the forest camp. To us waiting Sonderkommandos. We carry the bodies to mass graves—pits, not graves. And we dig others while we wait for more trucks. There are SS guards at the forest camp too. They don’t help unload the bodies, of course, but if anyone from the truck is still moving, they put a bullet in the back of his or her head.” He shook his head. “Then the guards … they always laugh.”

  Grodenzki took one more slow sip of his coffee. “Day and night, the trucks make the four-kilometre trip between the forest camp and the castle, leaving empty and always returning full. Perhaps a thousand Jews are murdered every day. Maybe more.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Franz brought a hand to his mouth. “And you, Aaron. How did you escape?”

  “One day, my brother, Szmul, and I are sent with a bunch of others into the forest to cut trees. The Nazis are running out of space to stuff all the victims.” Grodenzki rubbed his forehead with his palm. “Szmul knows we have little time left. Every two or three months the Nazis replace the Sonderkommandos with new recruits. They retire the previous ones with machine guns.” He put his shortened forefinger to his temple. “So we work extra hard, sawing down as many trees as we can and moving deeper into the forest. At dusk, right before the SS come to round us up, we run. The guards don’t notice us missing right away. By the time they release the dogs, it’s dark and we’re hiding high in a tree. The Nazis don’t worry much about us. They assume the Polish winter will save them the bullets. And the cold almost did finish us off.” Grodenzki held up his hands with the eight missing fingers. “Frostbite.”

  “Awful,” Franz muttered.

  “No, doctor.” He grunted. “Frostbite saved my life!”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Szmul and I would have died quickly if we did not stumble across a group of partisan guerrillas. Polish Resistance fighters.” Grodenzki wiggled his stubs again. “The leader takes pity on us. He feeds us and lets us sleep in their camp. He shows us maps and the best route eastward. Takes us three months, but Szmul and I reach Soviet territory. As soon as we do, Szmul is recruited—at gunpoint—into the Red Army. But me?” Grodenzki raised his hands again. “What good am I as a soldier?

  “I tell everyone who will listen about Chelmno. But they don’t believe me or they don’t care.” He nodded to himself. “I realize that I have to tell them in America. But how? Then I remember Shanghai, where my aunt and uncle live. The travel through China was even harder than behind enemy lines in Poland, but somehow I arrive here.”

  Simon gaped at Franz. “It’s even worse than the wildest rumours, isn’t it?”

  Franz was too shocked to speak. He didn’t doubt a word of Grodenzki’s story, but despite all he had seen and heard in the past few years, he still could not digest the idea of a human slaughterhouse.

  Simon’s expression hardened and he tapped the tabletop with his finger. “We can’t ignore this, Franz. The world needs to hear what the hell the Nazis are up to in Chelmno!”

  CHAPTER 44

  Franz had hardly spoken since returning home two hours earlier. Sunny had never seen him as preoccupied or as shaken. As soon as Hannah left to visit a friend, Sunny sat him down on the sofa. “Franz, tell me what happened this morning.”

  He rubbed his temples. “I do not want to discuss it. Not today, Sunny.”

  “I thought we shared everything now. Good and bad.”

  “Not this, Sunny.” His voice faltered. “I wish to God I had never heard a word of it.”

  Sunny leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him. She tilted her face up and kissed him tenderly on the lips. “I can wait until you are ready to talk.”

  “Chelmno,” he croaked.

  Sunny pulled free of the embrace. “What is Chelmno?”

  “A village in Poland. Or it used to be. Now it’s an extermination factory.” He swallowed. “I met a Polish Jew this morning. He only had two fingers …”

  By the time Franz finished recounting Grodenzki’s tale of the asphyxiation trucks, tears rolled down Sunny’s cheeks. “Gassing whole families?” she sputtered. “Can this really be true?”

  “The local Jewish leaders are skeptical, but I know he is telling the truth.” Franz nodded to himself. “It was not his words or even his missing fingers. His eyes. They held the look of a cancer patient near the very end. His eyes were dead, Sunny.”

 
; Sunny wrapped her arms around him again. “Thank God you, Hannah and Essie are here in Shanghai. So far away from them.”

  “I hope we are far enough.”

  Sunny insisted on accompanying Franz to the hospital. Hand in hand, they walked the sidewalk in the blistering July heat.

  “Simon wants me to help him find a radio transmitter,” Franz said. “So Aaron can tell Jewish leaders in America and Palestine about Chelmno.”

  Sunny’s chest tightened with dread. “You know how the Japanese treat spies! If they caught you with a transmitter …”

  “I can still see them dragging Heng away.” Though no one had heard what had become of his neighbour, he, like everyone else, assumed the worst. “But this is worth the risk. Someone has to tell the rest of the world.”

  “The world is already at war with Germany. What more can be done?”

  “The war is not going well for the Allies,” he said. “What if they negotiate a ceasefire or a peace treaty with the Nazis?”

  Sunny racked her brain for some way to talk Franz out of such high-risk espionage. “Would Churchill or Roosevelt really agree to peace with Hitler?”

  “They can be replaced by leaders who might,” Franz said. “Besides, think of all the countries from France to Belarus already overrun by the Nazis. Imagine how many Jews are caught in their clutches? Millions of women, children, old people …”

  “It hurts to even think about it, Franz. But how will risking your life on a transmitter possibly help them?”

  “If the Nazis see that the world knows about Chelmno, perhaps they would stop killing people. Or if the Jews themselves know what awaits them in such camps, maybe they would resist more?” He looked at her helplessly. “Sunny, I have to do something. You understand?”

  She did. “I want to help too, Franz.”

  Franz broke into the first smile she had seen since his visit with Grodenzki. “I love you so much, Sunny Adler. Your support is all that I need.”

  At the refugee hospital, Max beckoned to them from inside his lab. “I went to a meeting last night,” he said in lieu of a greeting. “We met a man. A Polish Jew—”

  “Aaron Grodenzki,” Franz said. “I spoke to him this morning.”

  “Grodenzki’s story. The trucks and the carbon monoxide …” Max wrung his hands together. “You don’t believe him, do you, Franz?”

  Franz looked down and shrugged.

  “Those Nazis are as uncivilized as they come,” Max continued. “Capable of cruelty beyond belief. But a camp built for no purpose other than murder?”

  “I agree that it makes no sense, Max,” Franz said, choosing his words carefully.

  Sunny saw how hard Max was struggling to convince himself that his daughter and her family would not meet the same fate as the Jews at Chelmno. “No doubt there are camps,” Max said. “Terrible ones like Buchenwald and Dachau. But I think Grodenzki exaggerated his story in order to play upon our sympathy. We can’t allow him to spread such irresponsible stories. To panic people with these rumours. If my wife heard this …”

  Franz laid a hand on his friend’s arm. “I believe him, Max.”

  Max’s face fell and his shoulders slumped.

  “Listen, my friend,” Franz hurried to add. “The Nazis have always held a particular hatred for the Polish Jews. Remember Herschel Grynszpan? It does not mean they will treat German Jews the same way. Not at all.”

  Max shrugged off Franz’s hand. “I don’t believe him.”

  “But if it were true, would you not agree that silence might only encourage the Nazis?”

  “I won’t believe it!” Max’s voice cracked as he groped for the handkerchief in his pocket. “I won’t. I can’t.” Without another word, he jumped to his feet and rushed out of the lab.

  From the grim faces of the staff and patients on the ward, Sunny recognized that the word of Chelmno had already spread. To distract herself, she set to work.

  She was checking the temperature of a patient, a woman recovering from malaria, when she heard a commotion in the hallway. She looked up and saw Berta waving frantically to her from the doorway. Abandoning the thermometer in the patient’s mouth, Sunny hurried over to her. Franz arrived from the opposite direction.

  “The Japanese!” Berta whispered urgently. “They’re here!”

  Franz squinted. “Here? Why?”

  “They have brought wounded soldiers,” Berta said.

  Franz dashed for the entrance, and Sunny followed. Two uniformed Japanese medics sporting Red Cross armbands marched down the pathway toward the door. The medics slung a wooden stretcher between them that held a sailor in a bloodied white uniform.

  The medic at the rear of the stretcher called in English, “A bomb exploded at the wharf! Chinese sabotage. We have four injured sailors. Get us beds!”

  “How serious are the injuries?” Franz asked.

  “You are doctor?” the medic demanded.

  “A surgeon, yes.”

  “Two are bad,” the medic snapped. “You have operating room here, yes?”

  They cleared four beds in a row for the wounded sailors. Sunny and Franz stood at the foot of the beds beside the English-speaking medic and assessed the casualties. Blood and debris covered the men. They reeked of burnt clothing and sulphur. Three of the four sailors had their heads bandaged. Sunny could see that the patients in the first two beds suffered far more serious injuries than the other two.

  The sailor in the second bed lay still with his head and half of his face draped in heavy bandages. His blood-soaked pants were shredded over his left leg. A towel covered his leg, but from the thigh down, the limb twisted unnaturally and the foot pointed at a right angle to the rest of the leg. The medic nodded at him. “Shattered femur from a falling wall. Many cuts to his head and face.”

  The medic swung his finger to the first bed, where a wide-eyed sailor, as pale as the wall behind him, stared silently back. His tunic had been sliced open, exposing his chest and abdomen. He clutched a blood-soaked towel to his belly. “He has lost much blood,” the medic grunted.

  Franz leaned closer to the sailor. “May I?” he asked, pantomiming the act of removing the towel.

  The sailor nodded warily. Franz gently peeled it back. Blood caked the man’s abdomen, and more oozed out from a central hole the size of a fist. A greyish-pink loop of bowel poked out of the wound. A long shard of glass glinted under the skin. Franz lowered the towel back over the abdomen and rested the sailor’s hand on top of it. He turned to the nearest nurse. “Berta, prepare the operating room.”

  “Certainly, Dr. Adler,” she replied.

  Franz motioned to Sunny as he spoke to the medic. “Mrs. Adler is an able surgeon. She will be in charge of the others while I operate on this man. All right?”

  The medic glanced at her skeptically before turning to Franz with a single nod.

  Franz pointed to the patient with the shattered leg. “Sunny, you might need to reset his femur while I’m in surgery.” “I will,” Sunny said. “Go.”

  As soon as Franz left, Sunny turned to the plump nurse near her. “Irma, I will need catgut and several needles. Also, can you bring a fresh supply of bandages and plaster?”

  Irma hurried off in search of the supplies.

  Sunny looked at the grey-haired nurse who stood against the far wall motionless with fear. “Miriam, can you please draw me up three full syringes of morphine?”

  Sunny assessed the man in the fourth bed. He was moaning the loudest. He had an obvious wrist fracture, broken ribs and a deep laceration over his head that required multiple sutures, but his repairs would have to wait. She turned to the sailor in the third bed. Aside from cuts and nicks to his head, he had a probable pelvic fracture and multiple fragments of wood and debris embedded under the skin of his chest and back. His care would not be a priority either.

  Sunny turned to the man with the misshapen leg. As she reached for the blood-stiffened towel covering his wound, she noticed that his non-bandaged left eye had open
ed. He stared at her groggily. As she gently pulled back the towel from his leg, she suppressed a gasp. A ragged crater the size of a soup bowl cut into his thigh. Inside the wound, Sunny saw tattered flesh, torn muscle and fragments of bone and metal. Only the belt-tourniquet cinched above the wound stemmed the bleeding, but the leg had turned blue and mottled from lack of blood.

  Sunny saw that resetting the leg would be futile. Only an amputation could save his life. As she laid the towel back down, he shifted. A grimace formed on what she could see of his lips.

  “Miriam, where is that morphine?” Sunny called.

  “Coming, Sunny,” Miriam replied shakily.

  Sunny examined the sailor’s head wounds. She peeled back the bandages from his scalp to reveal three or four deep lacerations and began to remove the dressings over his face. He lay still as she worked, but she saw that his exposed eye had come into focus and was watching her more intently.

  Suddenly, there was a horrible familiarity to his face. Nausea swept over her. Her hands began to tremble as she pulled off the rest of the dressing to reveal the jagged scar running between the man’s upper lip and nose.

  Holding the bandage limply in her hand, she gaped at the man who had murdered her father and tried to rape her. She had to resist the impulse to grab his neck and squeeze with all her might.

  The sailor’s right eye was swollen shut from the bruising, but his left eye stared back at her with a glint of fear.

  “Sunny. Sunny!” Miriam prompted with a light shake of her shoulder.

  “Yes?” Sunny said without taking her eyes off the sailor.

  “Your morphine.”

  Sunny grabbed the three full syringes out of the nurse’s hand. Each one held at least three standard doses of painkiller; enough morphine to reliably kill a patient with a narcotic overdose.

  The sailor tried to lift his head off the bed, but it fell right back. Spittle flew from his lips as he muttered something unintelligible.

  “What is the wait?” the medic barked. “Are you going to give him medicine or not?”

  “Yes, I will,” she said evenly. “He is in a great deal of pain. He will require extra doses of painkiller.”