by Andrew Gross
“And…?” Alfred urged him to finish.
The Frenchman shrugged. “The kid recited back every one correctly. Every damn one. Someone got mad and accused him and his cousin of setting the whole thing up, so he went one better. One by one, he recited the town where each of us said he was from. Remarkable, huh…?”
“Yes, but I’ve known a lot of young men and women with minds like that. The secret is to put their skill to some kind of practical use.”
“And what do you do then, if you don’t mind me asking?” the prisoner inquired. “Teach, I suppose?”
“Currently I’m in transportation, sadly.” Alfred showed him the bicycle tire.
“Yes, we’ve all found new occupations here, haven’t we?” The Frenchman laughed. “I was mayor of my town.”
“So what’s his name?” Alfred asked, removing his glasses and wiping the afternoon sun off his brow.
“Wolciek, I believe,” the Frenchman replied, heading inside his barrack. “Leo. Watch him again if it all works out.”
They both knew precisely what “all works out” meant.
“Just watch your money. It could cost you fifty zloty.”
SEVENTEEN
A week later, Alfred happened upon the boy playing again, this time against an opponent named Markov, an Estonian, whom everyone said had been a local champion there. Leo used the King’s Indian Defense and, to the delight of the crowd, dispatched the more experienced man in just twenty moves.
Even Markov applauded the boy’s ability.
Alfred also noticed the attractive blond woman there again, leaning against a railing on the steps of the infirmary, quite absorbed in the game. But as soon as it was over, to the polite bows of the German guards, she went back into the infirmary. She must be a nurse. Or even a new doctor there.
As the crowd split up, Alfred made his way over to the winner, whose pockets were stuffed full of well-earned treats and cigarettes. “May I have a word with you, Pan Wolciek?”*
“With me? Do I know you, sir?” the boy questioned. It was natural to be suspicious here. Everyone, even those in a striped uniform, would either want something from someone they thought could protect them a bit longer or could possibly even be a spy.
“Well, I was called Herr Doktor Mendl while at the universities of Gottingen and Lvov,” Alfred introduced himself. “But in here, I suppose, simply Alfred would be fine.”
“And I was simply Leo while back in Lodz.” The boy grinned. “But in here I’ve become King Leo.”
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you by any name, young man.” He was clean-faced, tow-headed with blue, sparkling eyes. “Word is, you have quite the memory skills. You certainly know your chess.”
“I’m pleased if it keeps me around here an extra day … Back in Lodz, I was junior champion before we were forced inside the ghetto and then most of the competition dried up. Chess just didn’t seem so important then. What about you, Professor, do you play?”
“Not since my university days,” Alfred admitted. “And as you can see, that’s been quite a while.”
“Well, in here we are all pretty much the same age,” Leo smiled philosophically, “since you never know when any day may be your last. Anyway, it’s been a pleasure, Herr Doktor, but if you don’t mind, I’m afraid I have to—”
“Are you as good at math and science as you are this game?” Alfred confronted him. “We used to say, brains without application is like beauty without kindness. It’s all a waste.”
The boy shrugged. “I’m afraid much of my formal education was put aside when we were forced to move inside the ghetto. Still,” he grinned, slyly, “I suppose I could give you a quick demonstration, if you’re so curious.”
“I’d be honored.”
The boy had light features, blond hair if it was allowed to grow out, a narrow face with alert eyes, and clearly a wit as sharp as his chess with a kind of cocksureness to match. “Can you provide me the date of your birth, Herr Professor?”
“As I’ve said, I’m an old man. Maybe too old to play this game with you. But it’s October 7, if you must know. Fourteen years before the turn of the century.”
“That’s 1886, correct?” Leo replied quickly. He made a flourish with his arms and bowed. “See?”
“My, that is quite amazing,” Alfred said with mock praise.
“Oh, you expected more? All right, then … So October 7, 1886. That is what you said, correct…?”
“Sadly.” Alfred agreed.
“Then let me see…” The boy closed his eyes, put two fingers to his forehead, silently moving his lips as if in the midst of calculating. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Congratulations, Professor, you are a very special man to have been born on the Sabbath.”
Alfred’s eyes went wide.
“I can also calculate that it is only one in seven who can make that claim.” Leo grinned teasingly.
“The first trick was quite good enough,” Alfred said, undeniably impressed.
The boy was right! Alfred’s mother always joked that it was a wonder he hadn’t decided to become a rabbi and not a scientist, since he was virtually born at schul. For the lad to have gone through that many years and iterations, over five decades, and then having to factor in leap years as well … “That is quite amazing. If you don’t mind me asking, how did you manage it? And, without a pencil and paper, so quickly?”
“I devised a formula. It involves numerical properties for each day of the week as well as for each century. In any given year, the dates 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 tend to fall on the same day. Then you have to factor in leap years, of course. In your case, fourteen of them. So I can compute any day in my head. So how is that for ‘application,’ Professor?” the boy asked, gloating a bit.
“I would say it’s quite strong,” Alfred nodded grudgingly, “if you aspire to be a calendar.”
“And what is it you aspire to, old man? In the time you have left here.”
“How about try this…?” There was an exercise Alfred assigned to only his very top students as a means to calculate numerical primality. “I’ll give you a number. Memorize it.”
Leo stared at him and shrugged, seemingly ripe for the challenge. “Should be no problem.”
“It’s long: 9,007,199,254,740,991. Now repeat it back to me.”
“That’s it?” Leo shrugged. He gave the numbers back to Alfred in rapid order. “What’s the trick to that?”
“Now express that same number as a power of two,” Alfred instructed him.
“Hmmm … as a power of two…” Leo bunched his lips in thought. “That isn’t easy.” He took in a breath, as if accepting the challenge, his brow wrinkling and his gaze tunneling. He put a hand to his chin. “How much time do I have…?”
“A lad like you…” Alfred smiled. “I don’t know, two, three minutes … How much do you need?”
“Two or three minutes should be fine…” The boy started in, appearing to go through many abstract calculations in his head, muttering numbers to himself, shifting his index finger back and forth, like a musical metronome. Time passed. “Of two, you say,” he asked again, looking a bit frustrated. Ultimately he just looked back at Alfred, shaking his head, and shrugged. “I told you my formal education was interrupted by the war. It’s not that I can’t figure what you asked, it’s just … I would need maybe some paper and a little more time. I’m quite sure I could get it though.”
“I’m sure you could.” Alfred patted him on the shoulder. “No matter, it’s not so easy.” The guards were now ordering everyone to get back to their jobs. “Can we talk again, perhaps? I have some things I’d like to discuss with you.”
“You need me to teach you some chess, Professor? You said it’s been years. That might take a while.”
“Maybe it’s I who would like to teach you something,” Alfred responded.
“And that would be…?”
“Electromagnetic physics.”
“Electromagnetic physics…”
Leo rolled his eyes. “Oh, that is useful indeed, Professor. That, and a note from Reichsführer Himmler himself might just keep you alive in here another day.”
“Don’t be so smug. Its applications are vital. So can we speak again? How about tomorrow?” Alfred pressed. He could see the guards had lost their good humor. The sticks had come out and they started prodding everyone along.
“I’m afraid that the chess takes up most of whatever time that is free here,” Leo said with an apologetic shrug. He started to back away. “But I enjoyed talking with you, Professor. And oh, just to be clear … On that other matter…” He raised his index finger in the air as if a thought had just come back to him. “I believe the answer you’re looking for is two to the fifty-third. Isn’t that right?”
“Excuse me?” Alfred muttered, taken by surprise.
“Your number, Professor. It’s two to the fifty-third power, is it not?” Leo grinned coyly. “That is what you wanted to know, right?”
Alfred’s jaw parted, as if a weight was attached to it. He had given the boy only two or three minutes … Even his most advanced students would have needed at least an hour and a notebook full of paper to calculate that out. “Yes, that is correct.” His mouth was as dry as cotton. “Well, almost, that is…”
“Yes, you’re right!” Leo agreed. “Stupid of me. It’s actually two to the fifty-third minus one,” he corrected himself with a victorious gleam in his eye.
Alfred blinked. “Yes, minus one.” He cleared his throat and nodded back, knowing the color had drained from his face.
“So yes, let’s talk again, Professor, by all means.” Leo backed away and waved, grinning.
Alfred just stood there, between shock and astonishment. A small smile crept onto his face. “And what is your birth date?” he called after him. “If you don’t mind.”
“Mine?” Leo said. “Why, January 22, Herr Professor. And to be clear, that would be twenty-eight years after the century.”
“Yes, after, of course…” Alfred followed him as the boy melded into the crowd. Over the years, he had encountered many great young minds. Some had gone on to have brilliant careers. Others just faded into the professions of the law, business, or civil service. But this one … Yes, the Frenchman was right. Astonishing. No other word for it.
And he was just sixteen.
EIGHTEEN
A few days later, a corporal named Langer entered Leo’s block as Leo rested after his twelve-hour work detail. Despite his age, Leo was assigned to the motor transport team because his first night off the train he had said that his cousin had been a mechanic back in Lodz, which was true, so they threw him on it, and he’d had to learn on the fly as fast as he could.
“Prisoner Wolciek.” Langer stopped at his bunk.
“Rottenführer!” Leo leaped out of bed. His heart nearly jumped out of his chest.
“Put on your cap. You are to come with me.”
“Come where, Rottenführer, sir…?” Leo questioned, pushing back a stab of worry. To be asked for by one’s name was never a good sign, and never seemed to end with a positive outcome.
“Just get your ass up, you little shit, and don’t ask questions.” The corporal cracked his stick against the wooden boards of the bunk. “Come with me. Schnell!”
A tremor of nerves wound through Leo’s gut, though he put on his clogs and grabbed his cap without delay, doing his best not to show it. Had he done something? Was this it? Maybe they didn’t like the manner in which he had flaunted his skills at chess, or the games of memory he played, which could be interpreted as elevating himself above the other prisoners and flew in the face of everything the Nazis tried to ground into you—that you were nothing. His barrack mates all looked on with bowed but sympathetic faces as Leo was taken out the door. At the same time, all breathed sighs of relief that it wasn’t them the Rottenführer had come for.
“So where are we going, sir?” Leo asked outside with rising concern. Langer was a brutal pig who had never shown a moment’s hesitation about clubbing an innocent prisoner senseless at the drop of a hat. Just yesterday Leo had watched him take a shovel and send someone reeling into a ditch and then piss on the dead man while laughing to his fellow guards about a story he had just heard about one of the cooks, as if the dead man had not been a living, breathing person just thirty seconds before.
“Just walk,” the SS guard growled, prodding Leo ahead with his stick in the direction of the front gate.
Leo’s heart began to patter. Where was Langer taking him? They continued on past the rows of blocks, nothing ahead of them but bad places. The black wall that prisoners were thrown up against and shot. Or the flat-roofed crematorium from where the odor of death and the gray plume of smoke perpetually emanated. Maybe he would be given a job there, the thought occurred to him. Tossing dead, disfigured bodies into the ovens or cleaning out the ash afterward, picking through skulls and bones. He’d heard of such horrors taking place in there. And such jobs. The prisoners even had to live there.
Or maybe this was indeed it. His own private Himmelstrasse. If so, he would face it bravely, Leo sturdied himself. It was bound to happen soon enough. He just wished he hadn’t studied so much for his next match.
As he marched, the winding turns of the long journey that had brought him here came back to him. His father had had a small but successful law practice in Lodz and took pride in accompanying his young prodigy to chess tournaments. Once Leo even played in a competition in Warsaw. But his father was run over by a streetcar and killed when Leo was just eleven. He and his mother and younger sister moved in with her brother. When the Nazis came and things got bad, they were forced to move inside the ghetto. Leo’s promising chess career came to an end. A friend of his uncle offered to take Leo and two others south, through Slovakia to Hungary, where the pro-Nazi government had not yet given up its Jews. All agreed it would be safer for him there. They left in a large commercial truck filled with industrial parts and valves, and everything seemed to be going along as planned until they stopped at a vegetable stand only thirty kilometers from the Slovak border. The coast appeared clear, and Leo hopped out and ran back the thirty meters or so to buy some dates and plums with the little cash he had. At that moment, a German troop truck happened to drive by, and the stand owner, seeing what was ahead, grabbed the young boy’s arm. “Quick, son, over here,” he said, drawing Leo behind the stand. The Germans inspected the truck and discovered the two young passengers hidden in the back, clearly Jews. Over his uncle’s friend’s pleas, they marched them all into a field, Leo peeking out from behind a stack of crates to watch, and machine-gunned them all, the children too. Then the Germans came over to the stand and chewed on peaches and figs, commenting to the stand owner how delicious they were, all the while with Leo huddled and his heart racing only a few feet away.
After the Germans left, the stand owner gave Leo some fruit and a jacket, and for two weeks, he lived in the fields as he continued south toward his destination. One morning he awoke to find two black-clad local police standing over him. He was put in a room at a border checkpoint and then sent by truck to a wired-in camp named Majdanek, near Lublin. It was cold there, the conditions bleak and harsh. The guards treated them with a brutality Leo could never have imagined human beings would treat one another. Fortune had it that a distant cousin happened to be in the same bunk, and he taught Leo how to survive: work hard, do not stand out, do not make eye contact. Do everything double time. Leo grew so weak and thin, they stuffed newspaper into his cheeks to puff them out and make him appear healthier and able to work, so as not to be selected by the guards. And he started playing chess again. Eight months ago, his was part of several barracks that were crammed into a sealed train and transferred to Auschwitz. The prisoners were herded off the train and onto a long line. A call went out that they needed one hundred able workers. Leo’s cousin pushed him in front and whispered for them to volunteer, even though Leo was as scrawny as they came and only fifteen. “Stay by me,” his co
usin muttered. “Whatever you do, get on that line.” In the jostling, others pushed their way forward, separating them. An SS officer was counting off the volunteers, one by one. Leo was number ninety-eight. His cousin was three places behind. Those who missed the cut were herded the other way; they were told they would be deloused and take showers. All were dead, Leo had heard, barely an hour later, including his cousin. Of the thousand or so on his transport, Leo’s work group was the only hundred to survive.
And now as they approached the black wall, Leo thought maybe his charmed journey had come to an end. He remembered his cousin’s calm but knowing farewell look as Leo was marched off on the line of volunteers and he was left behind. He had trained Leo well.
“In here.”
To his surprise, Langer directed him into the delousing showers Leo had been put into on his arrival at the camp. It was empty. For a moment, Leo’s heart leaped with fear. The guard pushed him under a shower head and turned the water on. “Wasch dich,” he barked, pointing to a bar of soap. “Mach dich sauber.” Scrub yourself completely clean.
Leo stepped in, not quite understanding. But the freezing water actually felt good as the grime came off. All the while, Langer stood not ten feet away, and lit a cigarette. When Leo was done and had stepped back into his clothes, the German nudged him back outside with his truncheon. “Let’s go.”
To Leo’s further surprise, they continued on, past the front gates. Langer exchanged a few mocking jokes with a couple of soldiers standing guard, as if this was a big, important responsibility for the Rottenführer, escorting this skinny prisoner. Leo saw that it angered the SS guard.