by Andrew Gross
“Nathan, don’t tease me. Anyway, I have something for you. Wait here.” She crawled inside and came back out a minute or two later with a piece of sheet music. It was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major. One of her favorites. What she played at the conservatory’s recitals last year. She took the opening page and tore it from the binder.
“Leisa, don’t!”
Then she folded it in half, lengthwise, and neatly split the page in two.
“See…” She folded up one side into a small square. “You’ll keep this half and I’ll keep mine. When we see each other again, we’ll put them back together. Like this.” She unfolded hers and joined them again, the bars and passages once more fitting perfectly together. “That’s our pact, okay? It’s like a ticket. You won’t lose it, will you?”
“They’ll have to kill me to take it off me.” He grinned.
“Well, I prefer you don’t let that happen.” His sister looked at him, her dark eyes wide and bruised with an unknown foreboding. “But the same for me.” She threw her arms around his neck. “I’m going to miss you, Nathan.”
“I’ll miss you too, Doleczki.”
She wouldn’t let him go.
“Whatever you do, Leisa, you continue to play. That’s who you are. Never let them take that from you.”
“I won’t,” she said, her body trembling with fear.
“And remember, when the shit hits the fan…”
“Yes, Chaim.” She nodded, her head buried against him. “If you say I must.”
Outside the barracks, Blum opened the folded sheet music he had kept with him these past three years. “Wolfgang Ama—” his side read at the top. “Concerto ein—”
Then the opening bars.
He closed his eyes and imagined that Leisa was clutching hers when the bullets came. At least, he knew in her heart she was.
A couple of enlisted men hurried past and he stood up. The two saluted. “Sir.”
Blum saluted them back.
I’m sure that reassignment you put in to the Ritchie boys will be coming through at any time, Donovan had said, if that’s how you’d like it to go.
He remembered at his bar mitzvah in Krakow, he had spoken of aliyah. Like all Jews, he had made a promise to go to the Holy Land one day. A promise most would never keep. So maybe in a way this would be his aliyah. To honor his parents and their deaths. His heritage. Not to Jerusalem, to the Holy Land, but to a camp in the woods of southern Poland where terrible things took place.
His promised land.
To find this one man.
With no return ticket.
He folded Leisa’s music sheet back into a square and placed it inside his wallet, next to the small photo of her he kept there. Crushing his cigarette out, he picked up his cap and went to go in. He stopped a second. Thinking of her, which he tried not to do much these days, had brought a tear.
Months after he’d found out her fate, he’d also gotten word: Chaim Weissman had died in a fall off a rooftop onto Limanowa Street while fleeing the Germans the very morning Blum’s family was murdered.
When that troop truck pulled up in front of their building, the Germans ordering everyone to get outside, “Schnell!” she probably waited, just like Blum had made her promise. Hid in the stairwell, hoping. Maybe until the moment they barged in and dragged her, screaming, down the stairs.
He’ll be here, he’ll be here, she probably told herself. Nathan promised.
Even as they were lined up against the wall and the bullets came.
FOURTEEN
Before his work shift the following morning, Blum went back to the Main Hall and asked for Captain Strauss’s office, which turned out to be a small, poorly lit cubby on the third floor at the end of a long hallway. He stood in front of it for a few seconds, put his cap in his hand, and then knocked on the door.
The captain looked up from maps and reports and seemed pleased to see him. “Lieutenant.”
Strauss’s office was a world away from his boss’s. The only light was a bright lamp on the metal desk, other than what came through a shuttered window. One wall of shelves was stacked with heavy books and binders. A map of Poland and another of Europe were tacked to the other wall. On the desk, Blum saw two framed pictures. A pretty dark-haired woman, likely the captain’s wife, and two young kids, and another of an older couple, the man dressed in a dark suit with a short beard, his wife in a white dress and hat.
Strauss pushed back from the desk, waiting.
All Blum said was, “So when do I have to leave?”
The captain edged into a smile. He stood up and put out his hand. “Day after tomorrow. At least, for Britain. The actual mission date is set for the end of May. That gives us two weeks there to prepare. Familiarization with the local terrain and the camp. What you can expect inside. You’ll need to lose a few more pounds. Shouldn’t be so hard, on what they feed us these days.”
Blum grinned.
“The Boss will be pleased. Damn pleased.” Strauss sat on the edge of his desk. “He’ll want to congratulate you himself, of course. He’s up on the Hill today. Do you mind, can you let me see your wrists.”
“My wrists…?” Blum held them out.
Strauss nodded, turning the left one over. “You don’t happen to have a problem with needles, do you?”
“Needles…” Nathan shook his head. “No. Why?”
“Not to worry. We’ll explain it all later. I know this is all coming at you pretty quickly. Anyone here who ought to know?”
“Here…? You mean in the States? Just a friend, perhaps. No one special. Maybe my cousin and his wife back in Chicago. They brought me over.”
“Let’s just be sure we keep the real reason behind your trip to ourselves. How about we just simply tell them that you’re being deployed? Everyone’s being shipped over there these days. No need to mention anything more.”
“I understand.”
“Oh, and then there’s this…” Strauss reached across his desk and opened a file. He took out a photograph. “I suppose, no reason not to show you this now.”
It was of a man, middle aged, in his fifties maybe. A heavy but pleasant face, sagging cheeks, wire glasses, graying hair, combed over from the side.
“Here’s your man,” the captain said. “Though he may not look exactly the same now.”
Blum ran his eyes over the photograph.
“Don’t worry, before we’re done you’ll have every wrinkle on his face committed to memory.”
“What’s his name?” Blum asked. He looked kindly yet, at the same time, the eyes were serious, wise. There was a mole on the side of his nose. Who was he, Blum wondered, and what did he know, to make him, above all others, worth Blum risking his life to save?
“His name is Mendl. One ‘e.’ Alfred. He’s a professor. From Lvov. I’m afraid that’s about all I can tell you now.”
“Mendl…” Blum muttered out loud. “What is his area of specialty?”
“Electromagnetic physics. Something very heady like that. Know much about it?”
“I know an apple falls to the earth if you drop it.”
Strauss grinned. “That’s about my limit too. But a lot of very smart people here who do, say that what Mendl knows is indispensable. And that it’s worth whatever we can do to bring him here. I think you should know, Nathan—I hope it’s all right that I call you that, we’re pretty much going to be tied at the hip for the next two weeks—that this mission, long as the odds might seem, goes all the way up to the top. And not just in this building, if you know what I mean. All I can say is, what you’ve agreed to do, you’re doing your country a great service.”
Blum nodded, feeling a surge of pride. “Thank you, sir.”
“What you asked me yesterday…” Strauss sat back down and looked at him. “If I was a Jew. Actually, my father is a cantor.” He turned around the photo on his desk of the man in the dark suit with his wife. “His congregation is in Brooklyn. Temple Beth Shalom. Everyone always asks him why
…? Why are we not doing more to help? So many horrible things coming out about what’s happening over in Europe. I tell him that we are, but I know, in my heart, that’s no answer. Shortening the damn war best we can, driving the Nazis from power, that’s the only answer. And this … what you’re helping us do, if we’re successful, though I can’t fully explain the details of what’s at stake, will help more than anything either of us will ever do. Do you mind…?” Strauss reached across the desk and took back the photo of Mendl with kind of a rueful smile. “It’s my only one right now. Don’t worry, you’ll know every pore on that face by the time you go. So I’ll inform your superior officer. I assume there’s someone there who can step in for you?”
“Mojowitsky,” Blum offered. “He’s in EU-4. He’s quite strong.”
“Good, then…” The OSS captain nodded and then stood up.
Blum stood up too.
“If you don’t mind,” the captain took off his glasses, “I’m curious about something…?”
“What is that?”
“I guess we’ve both thought out the risks of what you’re doing. I can only imagine, Colonel Donovan and I, we weren’t that good of salesmen…”
“You want to know why I would agree to go?”
“Yes. Keeping in mind, of course, I’d sign up myself in an instant if I was what they were looking for.”
Blum gave him a thin smile. His eyes lifted to the metal shelves on the wall. Amid the files and thick binders, he saw a couple of leatherbound books in Hebrew. Strauss was the son of a cantor. “I see a Talmud. Do you happen to have a Mishnah up there as well?”
The Mishnah Sanhedrin was the earliest written credos of Jewish law from the Torah, something a cantor’s son might have been read from in his very first lessons.
“Somewhere.” The captain shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“Chapter four, verse five.” Blum stood up. “I don’t have any better way to explain it.”
“Chapter four, verse five … I’ll see if I can find one then. Anything else?”
“No, sir.” Strauss saluted him; Blum returned it. “Actually, there is one last thing…” Blum said, turning in the doorway. “I do have a fear of something.”
“I hope it’s not small spaces,” the captain said. “Things are liable to get pretty tight in there once we drop you in.”
“No.” Blum shook his head and smiled. “Heights.”
* * *
After the lieutenant left, Strauss sat as his desk a long while. He felt buoyant. Catfish was back in the game! He picked up the phone to get word to Donovan—the Boss would be ecstatic too—but then he thought better of it and put the receiver back down. He stood up and checked the shelves for what Blum had mentioned. It was at the bottom of a stack. He didn’t even know why he had it. Certainly not because of any religious feeling on his part these days. He’d been to temple only on Yom Kippur for the past three years. To please his father, perhaps, who had given the holy books to Strauss before he left for duty and who was disappointed that his son, after law school and in the service, had pulled away from the faith.
One day you’ll come back, he told him. You will.
The Mishnah Sanhedrin.
Strauss pulled the book out and sat back down, paging through the blue, leatherbound copy until he found it: chapter four, verse five.
It was on the story of Adam. Some nameless scholar, Strauss had no idea whom, had written his commentary of the text, highlighted in red.
Then, starting to read the passage Blum mentioned, he let himself smile.
He knew exactly what came next; it was one of the first things ever drummed into him in religious school. He thought of Blum, the family he had left behind. All dead now. But whom he felt responsible for. It was a brave thing he was doing. But not so brave, when you’d lost everything. Everything but this one thing. All that he had left. And all that mattered.
God’s speed, Strauss muttered to himself. To all of us.
Then he read the next passage, though he already knew the words by heart:
It was for this reason that man was first created as one person, to teach you that anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and any who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.
PART TWO
FIFTEEN
APRIL
In Block Thirty-Six, the barracks he shared two to a bed with 250 others, Alfred marked that he had been in the camp three months now. The biting Polish winter had finally given way to a late, muddy thaw.
They’d taken his books, his papers, everything, on his first day of arrival. They probably had all ended up in smoke like ordinary kitchen trash. If they only had some idea … Still, it gave him the slightest measure of satisfaction that it was a far better result than if these monsters had been able to use his work for their own ends.
Word was, even while he was in Vittel, that the Germans were making advances toward creating a fissionable isotope. He knew that work on this was taking place at a laboratory in Haigerloch on the Eyach River, using heavy water from Norway. But enriching uranium was only the first step of a long process. Then they needed to extract plutonium from the uranium and then separate the fissionable isotope, known as U-235, from its heavier cousin, U-238, which he’d heard that Fermi had successfully isolated at his cyclotron in Chicago. And to do this there were several untested methods. You could bombard the isotopes with electromagnetic waves. Lawrence had shown that an electrically charged atom traveling through a magnetic field moves in a circle whose radius is determined by its mass. Lighter U-235 atoms would follow a narrower arc than the heavier U-238s. But to separate the quantities needed, it could take years.
Then there was thermal diffusion, circulating uranium hexafluoride between cool water jackets and high-pressurized steam.
But the best path Alfred’s research had shown was through gaseous diffusion, which meant they could separate the needed isotopes by pumping uranium gas against a porous barrier, with the lighter molecules passing through more rapidly than the heavier ones. The rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its nuclear mass. Sooner or later they would all run into the problem. The Germans, the Americans, and the Brits. Though he had gotten word that after his escape to London from occupied Denmark Bohr was now in the United States, so maybe the Allies had combined their efforts. And there were only two men in the world who had been working on this kind of research. The other, Bergstrom, he’d heard, was with the Nazis now. For Bergstrom, it had always been about the work—no matter who funded it. And staying alive. Alfred had also heard the Americans were making progress too.
He knew now, as he jotted down some formulas in what remained of the thinning light, that he should have gotten out long ago. Everyone had pushed him to. “Make your way to Copenhagen,” Bohr had urged. “You can work with me. It will be safer for Marte and Lucy.” But Lvov was their home; Marte had family there. They had built their life there. For two years it had been safe, protected by the Russians under the nonaggression pact. But once the Russians fled, travel across Europe became impossible. One day, men in brown shirts and swastikas, boys really, barged into his office and told him he was no longer a professor. Just a Bolshevik yid. They ripped his books down from the shelves and trashed his papers—thank God he always kept his truly important work at home—and hurled him down the stairs. Right in front of Mrs. Zelworwicz, who had worked in the lab with him for eleven years. Alfred was lucky. Many of his colleagues were dragged out into the square and shot. Soon all Jews were forced to move into the ghetto. Rumors were everywhere about mass deportations to camps.
Then, two months later, an emissary from the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw managed to find him and explained in a café on Varianska Street, We have a way.
He had thought of making a new life for himself in America with Marte and Lucy. Maybe taking a teaching position. At the University of Chicago with Fermi, or in California, reuniting with Bethe and Lawrence.
Maybe even Bohr. All Nobel winners. As a scientist, he had never been on their scale, of course, when it came to the theoretical side. But as a researcher, his work had value too. Now look … Alfred stared gloomily around the barracks. People dragging themselves back to their bunks, exhausted, like soulless ghosts. The one or two who had something to barter for cigarettes were greedily inhaling them. Two had died today alone on his work detail. One from a club to the head, dropped where he stood; the other, simply from exhaustion, just gave up, and was shot.
Yes, he had waited too long.
Marte was dead. He knew that in his heart, as sure as he could bring her beautiful image to his eyes. She’d grown ill while at Vittel, and it had only worsened on the train. These animals didn’t even waste soup on sick ones like that. The only reason he had been directed to the left and permitted to remain alive was that he spoke German as well as a Volksherren, a prized commodity in here.
And Lucy … his beautiful, gentle Lucy. She was likely gone as well. He’d married late in life, and his daughter was an unexpected treasure to him, like uncovering the atomic theory and the principle of origin at one time. Early on, he’d gotten word through a barrack mate’s wife that she’d contracted typhus, which was as good as a death sentence in here. Alfred’s own strength had started to wane as well. And why not? What purpose was there to staying strong and remaining alive? Every day hundreds went missing. Entire barracks. The guards said they’d just been transferred to some other work facility. The nearby work camp at Monowitz. “They’re happy there,” they would say. But everyone knew. The stench emanating from the flat-topped building near the gate was damning enough, and the dark plume of smoke that came from neighboring Birkenau, just to the west, and hung over the camp was an everyday reminder. Himmelstrasse. “The road to heaven,” it was called. And each of them would walk it soon enough.
The road to death, it was better named.
A month or two ago, Alfred had begun to put together parts of his work by jotting them down on whatever scraps of paper he could find. He went through the hundreds of progressions again in his head, ten years of research, starting with the basic assumptions: The rate at which gases diffuse is inversely proportional to the square root of their densities—Graham’s Law; the various methods to separate the needed isotope U-235 from its much more abundant cousin, U-238. All jotted on the backs of food labels stolen from the kitchen or roll call lists crumpled and left in the snow. Rewriting the endless progressions of formulas and equations. He scribbled out rough sketches of the isotope as it passed through its various radioactive stages; his vision for the kind of membranes they would need to pass through; even his own thoughts on the triggering possibilities for the actual “device,” which was what they called it, in its most theoretical form: a device that would theoretically harness the gargantuan explosive energy created by the chain reactions from the separation of the isotope. He had first discussed this possibility with Szilard at a conference in Manchester in ’35. He rewrote much of his own early research in his head. Speeches to the Academic Scientifica; classes he’d given. His work with Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Ten years of research, whatever he could recall, all kept in the coffers of his brain. At the least, it kept him sane. He wrote it down and stuffed the papers in a coffee tin that he hid in the flooring underneath his bunk, covering it when either SS guards or their malevolent Ukrainian kapo, Vacek, came inside.