The One Man

by Andrew Gross

  “Why are you such a little twig?” His father would look at Martin with shame. “Look at your brother. He has a future ahead of him. What will you be able to offer anyone at the factory? Germany needs tall firs to build its future, not spindly twigs.”

  Ernst, the middle son, wasn’t blessed with much between his ears, but in a brawl, you could always count on him to be the last one standing. When Ernst looked in the mirror with his father behind him, the old man saw an image of himself as a youth, someone tough, good with his fists, who had dreams maybe, until the reversals after the Great War had forced him into the mill. How often Ernst left Martin holding the bag for scrapes and transgressions at school or beer missing from the family icebox. He had the smug, self-righteous bravado of someone who knew he had nothing to contribute in life yet who everyone sought to line up with and who pretended he had it all. Even to this day, when Martin brought him to mind, all that came was the image of his brother’s flat nose and thick lips in a perpetual, supercilious smirk.

  Martin was the silent one, more of a watcher than a doer from an early age, never blessed with the agility or brawn of his older brothers. But he did have a methodical mind. Yet, his high marks in school produced more of an indifference than a badge of honor in his father’s beer-dulled eyes. No one ever went anywhere from their town except into the mill, which was like a giant furnace eating up youth like a forest of timber. After graduation, Hans, whose football skills never progressed further than a few mentions in the local paper, became a smelter at the ironworks. He worked alongside his father. In 1942, as a forty-six-year-old, he was drafted when they were throwing anyone who could walk into uniform, and word came even before the telegram that he had frozen to death in Stalingrad a year later. The bully, Ernst, was recruited into the SA in 1935 as Hitler rose to power and went around smashing windows at synagogues and kicking in storefronts and beating up Jews, his fists in high demand. In 1938, he was found dead in an alley in Dortmund with a knife in his khaki uniform and a Jewish star stuck to his chest.

  Martin meanwhile went on to the local police academy after graduation. His steady, watchful way gave him the skills of a standout investigator. Over ten years he worked his way up to becoming the most decorated inspector on the Essen force. In 1937, he was recruited by the Abwehr with the rank of captain. He was rewarded with a posting in France in 1940 and then a station at the embassy in Lisbon in 1942, and a promotion to his present rank.

  But by then his father had died in a lathe accident on the job, and he never saw a single medal on his son’s chest.

  And that was what Martin Franke was thinking of in the Lagerkommandant’s office that night, as he waited to catch his prey. How surprised his father would have been, if he was sober enough to even see, that by night’s end, his little twig of a son who could not stand up to his drunken old man would have unearthed a plot that all the big firs in Berlin would have to take notice of.

  * * *

  “So where is this orchestra member?” Ackermann said to Lieutenant Fromm as his aide came into his office. “You’ve had three hours.”

  “We have found two women, but according to our witness,” the young lieutenant said, “neither is the one. The third, the clarinet player—her name is Blum—did not show up for her performance this afternoon upon the return of the work details.”

  “So then pick her up. What is the delay? Bring her to me,” Ackermann insisted.

  “That is the problem, Herr Lagerkommandant. We went to her block, Thirteen, in the women’s camp, but she was nowhere to be found. In fact, she has not been seen since.”

  “Since this morning…?”

  “Since apparently a repair detail was sent to her block in the afternoon. The block matron claims she was seen talking with one of them. It was assumed at the time to have been a conjugal visit.”

  “Conjugal? I don’t understand.”

  “A water pump team was brought in. Though no one seems to have officially requested it.”

  “So there you have it!” Ackermann turned with excitement to Franke, who was at the table nearby. “I think we know now who your truffle hunter has come here to find.”

  Franke slowly stood up. He shook his head skeptically. “To find a sister? No, I do not think so, Major. That is not why he was flown in by plane and was able to connect with the local underground. No, I am certain there is a bigger prize that awaits us in here. We will see.”

  “The escape of a single prisoner is a big enough prize for me,” Ackermann said. He instructed the lieutenant, “Find me the repair chief of this team. I want him in front of me immediately.”

  “Yes, Herr Lagerkommandant…” The aide cleared his throat, but still remained.

  “Go, Fromm. Why are you still standing there?”

  “Because I think I already know where to find them, Herr Lagerkommandant,” the SS lieutenant said.

  “Out with it then. Or are you waiting for them to send you a postcard from London after they escape?”

  “Something unusual turned up from the men’s roll call this morning. It did not surface until a short while ago.” The lieutenant cleared his throat.

  “I’m waiting…”

  “One of the prisoners in Block Twelve used the name Fisher. A Pavel Fisher was recorded among the list of deceased. Yesterday. The Blockführer has confirmed that he was the only Fisher in his block.”

  “And what was this Fisher’s number?” Ackermann pressed his aide.

  “Today’s? A22327, Herr Lagerkommandant.” The lieutenant found his notes and read it off.

  “And…?” Ackermann waited. “I’m trying to determine if this Fisher’s number matched the dead man’s number, Obersturmführer Fromm, if you please?”

  “It did not, sir,” the aide said nervously. “In fact, the number A22327 belonged to an entirely different prisoner.”

  “Who?” Ackermann stared impatiently. He snapped his fingers. “Quick, Fromm. We are pressed for time.”

  “Rudolf Vrba.” The lieutenant swallowed hesitantly.

  “Vrba.” Ackermann stood up; the color draining from his face. The name was known, of course. Known to everyone in the camp, both guard and prisoner. He now knew if this got out, without the immediate apprehension of all involved tonight, things would not go well for him when Hoss returned and the conversation turned to his career. No matter what numbers he reached.

  “What is it?” Franke asked.

  “You are right, Colonel. This is far, far larger than someone who is simply here to rescue his sister. Bring out the entire block!” Ackermann said to Fromm. “Every fucking yid in there. I want it scrubbed and gone over so that even the fucking bed lice are accounted for. Do you understand me, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, Herr Lagerkommandant. I understand.” The SS aide came to attention and moved to leave.

  “Wait, Lieutenant…” Franke motioned for the aide to remain. “Major, there is more than just this man and an escape that is at stake. It is imperative we also find out precisely who he is here for.”

  “And what do you suggest, Colonel?”

  “I suggest we let it all play out.”

  “Play it out? Why take such a risk?” Ackermann said. “We know where he is. We have them now.”

  “It’s only a small risk, don’t you agree? The work teams are assembling shortly, are they not?” Franke checked his watch. A part of him flashed back to an image of his father—dull-eyed, in a sleeveless undershirt in the kitchen, hunched over a beer. His two shining sons now gone in shame, while his twig of an unworthy offspring was about to blow the lid off an Allied plot that might even put an Iron Cross on his chest. “I say let it all proceed as planned. In a few minutes, we know precisely where they will be.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  As the minutes passed, Alfred sat among the spent and exhausted workers in his bunk. He’d had his evening meal—his last at the camp, he hoped. Of all the things he had experienced and hoped to forget, the rancid swill they served twice a day that barely ke
pt them alive would be near the top of the list.

  His mind drifted to Marte and Lucy.

  How they had both talked of one day making it to America. To settle in some beautiful, bustling city with an esteemed institution there. Maybe Chicago. With Fermi. Or Berkeley in California with his old friend Lawrence. Or New York. He’d been there once to share a paper at the Atomic Science Symposium in 1936. To continue his work in a place that was safe and not hostile to the Jews would be a dream.

  It had been all their dreams, when they had crossed from Poland to Holland to France, papers in hand.

  But now it would just be him going on. If that was to be his fate. This pale, undernourished shadow of himself, so thin Marte might look at him twice and still not recognize him.

  He and this boy.

  It was just like Heisenberg’s theorem, Alfred reflected. Uncertainty is the only certainty in this world. The only thing you can completely measure. Even on the small scale of the atom, there were inherent limits to how precisely events could be known.

  And clearly on the grander scale of life as well.

  It made him smile, recalling what the great Einstein was said to have muttered when told that it was his theory, E = mc2, that had opened up this new world and unleashed the radioactive consequences of mass and energy.

  “Ist das wirklich so?” Is that really so?

  Even as vast a mind as Einstein never imagined the consequences that resulted from his random musings on a notebook page.

  The unknowable was the beauty of life, Alfred now knew. And also its greatest sadness.

  If you identified the position of a particle, he recalled, say, by allowing it to transfer through a zinc-sulfide screen, you changed its velocity and thereby lost its information. If you bombarded it with gamma rays, you inalterably changed its path as well, so who could then measure precisely where it was? Any new measurement always rendered the one before it, even an instant before, uncertain. And then the one after that and the one after that, so said Heisenberg.

  Only the wholeness of everything leads to clarity.

  And when does one ever get to see that? When do we ever get to see the whole picture?

  You see it now, don’t you, Marte? And Lucy? I know you do. And I am going on, for as far as God lets me.

  With this boy.

  The only moment of true clarity is at the end.

  He got up from his bunk, slipped his blue and swollen feet into his hard clogs. He carefully folded the thin, hole-ridden cloth that had acted as a blanket these past months and placed it neatly on the foot of his mattress.

  “Leaving, Professor?” Ostrow, the forager, who slept across from him inquired, noticing Alfred tidying up.

  “Just hungry,” Alfred said. “I intend to find myself a meal.”

  “Of what? Some bits of stale bread? A little grizzle perhaps? Boiled to perfection. Maybe a lump of fat?” The forager chortled.

  “No.” Alfred looked at him. “I was thinking crumpets, actually.”

  “Crumpets?” The cobbler watched as Alfred made his way to the front of the block, sure that with all those numbers and theorems clouding his head, the old man had finally lost his mind.

  “I’m working on the night shift tonight out on the tracks,” Alfred advised Panish, the Blockführer.

  “You?” Panish’s eyebrows arched up.

  “And why not? Is it so strange I would do my share of work?”

  “No, not strange, just…” The Blockführer thought to himself that it must be suicide. That, as many did from time to time, the old man was finally tossing it in. “Goodbye, Professor. God’s grace to you.”

  “Thank you, Panish. I will need it all.”

  The Blockführer made a note in his book that bunk number 71 would need to be filled.

  At the door, Alfred looked at his block for what he knew would be the last time. Bent, spindly shapes, more bone than flesh. Goodbye. Only wholeness leads to clarity, he thought. They will see that tomorrow. We only know bits and pieces. Fragments. What the universe allows us to see. The rest … The rest is just things flying around. Uncertainty.

  “Ist das wirklich so?” He smiled, and stepped out into the night.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Blum sat on the edge of the cot where his sister lay sleeping and stared at her.

  He put his hand on her shoulder, feeling her steady breathing beneath him, her lungs going in and out, and he wondered if, in her dreams, there was a faraway place she escaped to, a place of safety and trust, far beyond the odor of death that penetrated everything here. He brushed his hand along her cheek.

  Doleczki.

  He reminded himself why he was there. Why he had come back to this country that had only the cruelest of memories for him. Why he had put on this striped smock, snuck into this pit of hell, faced immediate death if it came out who he was and what his mission was.

  He knew now it wasn’t to help win the war for his new country, or even to get back at the Germans for what they had done to his parents.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  It was to bury the shame he had long felt for being the one who left. To pay the debt in his heart for those he had left behind.

  And now, as he stared lovingly at his sleeping sister’s face, he realized he had repaid that debt in the most remarkable way.

  He felt expansive.

  One of the first pieces Leisa had ever played at recital was from Orpheus in the Underworld. By the German Offenbach. It told of the grieved, desperate lover who ventured down into the underworld with his lyre, passing the ghosts and anguished souls of people unknown; charming Cerberus, the guardian of the deep with his three gnashing heads until even the cold heart of Hades melted just enough and he allowed Orpheus’s love, Eurydice, to go back to the world above with him.

  Whatever you do, don’t look back was the underworld ruler’s only condition.

  And in a way Blum felt like that lyre player himself. Seducing his way into Hell, cheating death not once but twice; past the wires and the guards, until the beautiful sound of music somehow lured him to her.

  Except this time he would not leave her behind.

  This, not the calculations of some professor, was why God had sent him here.

  “Leisa,” he whispered, squeezing her on the shoulder. “Wake up now.”

  His sister stirred with a start and then, as if reassured that Nathan still was beside her, smiled. “I had the most troubling dream,” she said. “We were back in Krakow. I was hiding. In the attic of Father’s shop. You remember how we used to play up there, amid the rows and rows of hats and size molds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Except this time I was locked in. It was dark, and no one could hear me when I called, and for a moment I was really scared. So I played. Somehow I had my clarinet, and I had to play louder and louder. I was sure no one would ever come. That I would be lost up there forever. But then you came. You found your way in. You rescued me, Nathan.”

  “I know,” he said with a smile. “I was having similar thoughts myself. Just like today.”

  She turned to him. “We’re going to make it, aren’t we, Nathan?”

  “Yes. We will.”

  “No, I mean, really. You can tell me. Because I couldn’t go on if I was causing you danger. I’d rather die here, Nathan. I—”

  “Hush now.” He squeezed her arm. “No one’s going to die. You remember the vow I made to Papa when he held you in the window…?”

  “I remember you telling me about it.” Leisa smiled. “I was just an infant.”

  “Just know that my promise to keep it is even stronger now. So yes, we will make it. I promise.” He looked at the man sleeping in the bunk across from them. “Now, put this on.” He handed her his cap and tucked it down over her brow. He put his hands in the gravel near the foundation and smeared a bit of dirt from his thumbs onto her cheeks. “Now you look like a tough young man.”

  “Not such a flattering thing to say, Nathan.”

  “May
be. But today it will save your life. So let’s go.” He pulled her to her feet. His heartbeat picked up with urgency. “It’s time.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  NEWMARKET AIR BASE, ENGLAND

  Strauss was on the tarmac briefing the flight crew that was preparing to leave when a radioman ran up and said he had an important call. He followed the man back up to the communication center.

  It was Donovan. Back in Washington.

  “So tonight’s the big night, Peter?” the OSS chief said.

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “I’m sure this is a stressful time for you. Have we heard anything more?”

  “Only what I’ve patched along. Blum’s inside. The plane crew is preparing their flight plan. We have diversionary bombers set for Hamburg and Dresden. The partisan attack will go off as planned in five hours.”

  “Well, you’ve done your job well, son. You should be proud, whatever the result. I just called to tell you good luck.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “How is it you say that in Hebrew, Captain?”

  “Beh-hats-la-khah, sir,” Strauss replied. “Literally, it means in success.”

  “In success…? You know, it’s generally not a good thing in this trade to set your hopes too high. There’s always more on these things that can go wrong than right and dash them. In this case, a lot more. We both knew from the start the odds of success were long.”

  “I understand, Colonel. But I’m thinking my man might just surprise you in this case.”

  “Well, nothing would make me happier than to inform the president so. So let’s say we both put in a little hope on this one.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.”

  “Beh-hats-la-khah then.” The OSS chief stumbled over the word. “You know, mazel tov would be a damn sight easier.”

  Strauss laughed. “Yes. We’ll see about that then, sir. A bit later.”

  “I’ll be at my desk as long as it takes awaiting the news.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll inform you as soon as I know something.”