The Night Before Morning
Page 17
‘We are indeed building a nuclear reactor,’ he said. ‘That’s why we need so much heavy water, and I’ve told the Germans that we don’t have enough. And I’ve told them that I fear that last night’s fire will cause delays. Perhaps six months to a year. That’s why, I am certain, the Germans are behaving in the way they are.’
Robert MacDonald nodded and asked, ‘Once the reactor is working, it will begin to use the deuterium as fissile material, splitting its atoms? This isn’t my field, and that’s about as much as I understand from what I’ve read in the literature.’
I understood very much less and, with the directness of the ignorant, unhampered by knowledge, asked, ‘What is the nuclear reactor for?’
Feldman lifted his head and looked directly at me. ‘And so, now we come to the point of the exercise, the point of all this brutality and bloodshed. We’ll use the reactor to make plutonium. It’s much lighter than uranium, and we’ll need to make ten kilos of it, at least. That will take some time – and can only happen after the reactor is working smoothly.’
Feldman paused but must have known that the conversation had reached a point of no return. ‘That amount of plutonium can become a warhead mounted on a missile. What we are making at the Bute Building, Mr Erskine, is an atomic bomb.’
XI
Griffith-Smith put down the telephone and for a minute or two tried to gather himself. His tears the previous evening had embarrassed him, especially in front of Jenny MacDonald. He still retained shreds of the schoolboy that needed to be a grown-up, to impress her, and he feared that tears would not do that.
With Katie, Jenny sat by the fire and when Griffith-Smith came into the room, she gave him a glass of whisky. There may have been no tears but his face was creased with anxiety. ‘What’s wrong?’ Katie asked as he sat down beside them.
‘Miriam has been telephoning her parents in Glasgow all day. Every hour. She wanted to wish them a happy new year. But there has been no answer at all. They go nowhere – they’re retired, too old for restaurants or nights out. When Miriam telephoned the Greens, their neighbours across the road, thinking they might have been with them, there was also no reply. And no reply from two other numbers she called. Something strange is going on. Miriam is worried, very worried.’
*
‘Why do the Germans need you, a group of Americans, to make atomic bombs?’ Despite the fact that, in the cold, dank air of the mine, we were all becoming chilled, I kept on with my daft laddie questions. ‘They seem to have at least two more bombs: those in the U-boats that sailed to New York and to Leningrad. And, presumably, they are making more?’
Feldman smiled and shook his head. ‘I’ve been wondering the same things. Perhaps they want as many atom bombs as possible? You said the Germans “seem” to have at least two more. No one who has seen the awful, apocalyptic photographs of London can doubt that they successfully built and delivered one bomb. Every week, I’ve been asking Colonel Kritzinger to put us in touch with the German scientists who made the London bomb, but he keeps telling me they’re too busy.’
Robert MacDonald interjected, ‘But that makes no sense. Their experience and expertise would be of enormous help to you, and save a great deal of time.’
‘Yes,’ said Feldman, ‘undoubtedly. And there’s something else I don’t understand. From ships lying off the harbour here, we’re receiving large shipments of heavy water from Norway. I know their volume of production is very limited. What are the German laboratories using to make plutonium?’
It was at that moment I blurted out what the professor seemed to be driving at, what was hanging in the air above this exchange. ‘There is no second bomb! No third bomb. Sending those U-boats was a huge, monstrous bluff. But after London, one that nobody wanted to call. There are no more bombs!’
Feldman agreed. ‘Yes. That is what I’ve come to suspect. My guess is that the German laboratories were bombed in the last day or two before the London attack and perhaps many of their scientists were killed. That is why Kritzinger is so desperate. It may be that my team and I are the only people who can make a new atomic bomb for the Germans.’
I finished the train of thought: ‘And, until you do, the bluff has to be maintained. The rest of the world has to believe that Hitler has more bombs and that if threatened, he would not hesitate to detonate them.’
In the silence that followed, Feldman looked at both of us as though he was weighing up what he might, or might not, say next. ‘The truth is,’ he began, ‘that I believe we’re much closer to being able to produce a prototype bomb than I have said to the Germans. My estimate of six months is not a fiction – things may go wrong – but it’s a gross overestimate, I think.’
What hit me like an express train in that damp tunnel was that there was hope. At last. If – and it was a gigantic if – there were no more bombs and Feldman’s team could make enough plutonium sooner rather than later, then that made resistance not only possible but essential. At that moment, everything changed.
*
‘Dr and Mrs Levinson. Come forward. Quickly!’
After a long, cold and bewildering journey huddled in the back of a lorry with their neighbours, Miriam’s parents stood at the head of a queue. Behind them a line of families, couples, widows and widowers stretched the length of the hangar-like building. At a desk with a ledger opened in front of them sat an SS officer and a clerk. Flanking them were two soldiers, each with a rifle.
‘Where are we, please?’ pleaded Dr Levinson. ‘We do not . . .’
But before he could finish the sentence, a soldier cuffed the old man hard around the head, sending his black Homburg hat flying across the concrete floor. ‘You will speak only in response to a question!’ shouted the officer. ‘Do you have your instruments with you?’
Dr Levinson hesitated. ‘No. I am retired. And you said that we could bring only one suitcase.’
The soldier hit the doctor again, this time with the butt of his rifle, drawing blood from his lip. ‘Then you are of no use to us. Or to your people. Stand over there, behind the yellow line.’ He pointed to the corner of the hangar. ‘Next!’
Many of Glasgow’s Jewish community had been forced into the convoy of lorries that left the city early on New Year’s Day. The soldiers had pulled down the rear tarpaulin and secured it tightly to the tailboard in each vehicle, making the interior dim. Facing each other on benches, some friends and neighbours were too stunned to speak. Others did nothing but speak: babbling, protesting uselessly to each other, asking questions that none could answer. Torn out of the warmth of their houses, leaving behind all that was familiar, all that they owned, saying goodbye to their lives in the city they grew up in, all were filled with great foreboding.
Sitting at the end of one bench, close to the tailboard, Rafael Levinson could see through a narrow gap in the tarpaulin and was able to get a sense of where they were going: ‘Great Western Road,’ then, later, ‘I’m sure that’s Loch Lomond,’ followed much later by, ‘Crianlarich, I think.’ But after that, the snow had rendered the Highland landscape anonymous. By the time the trucks came to a halt and the soldiers herded the prisoners into the makeshift reception hall at Cultybraggan Camp, it was late in the day.
*
For the first time in months, since the moment before I saw the mushroom cloud from the crane at Antwerp, I felt a surge of optimism, even the return of some confidence. Instead of constantly reacting, running, of allowing the Germans to mould and define the future, perhaps the initiative was swinging towards us.
I was convinced that there were no new bombs, but the odds against being successful in using this information – or, more correctly, this hypothesis – to defeat the Germans were mountainous. And the consequences of being wrong could be absolutely calamitous. In their BBC broadcasts, they had threatened more of our cities with atom bombs if we did not comply and accept the unconditional surrender that had been forced on us.
But we did have some time, perhaps six months if Professor
Feldman’s fictional estimate could be maintained, to work out a plan of action. It seemed to me that the American government was central to anything we might do with what we knew. If they could be persuaded to act, to challenge the Germans, then the bluff could be called. If it was a bluff.
*
By the time the SS officer and his clerk had recorded all of the new prisoners from Glasgow, most stood at one end of the hangar and others, including the Levinsons, were gathered behind a yellow line painted on the concrete floor. A double door at one end opened and in came four men, all wearing black-and-white-striped uniforms and caps. They pulled two barrows filled with identical clothes.
‘Pay attention!’ shouted the SS officer. ‘You will remove all of your clothes, pile them neatly in front of you and await further instruction.’
There were gasps, and cries of no, no, no. The officer ignored these as more prisoners came into the hangar. Each of them carried a chair and a set of hair clippers. Within a couple of hours, more than two hundred men, women and children had been dramatically transformed. From well- and warmly dressed people, they had become shaved, shivering, frightened captives who stood shocked and cowed, in striped uniforms, waiting to be told what to do.
Tables had been set up near the exit from the hangar and soldiers pushed and shoved the prisoners into a shuffling queue. Almost unrecognisable to each other, shamed by their forced nakedness and quietly obedient, each was given a piece of bread, some cheese and a cup.
‘Those who stand behind the yellow line will be escorted to Hut 21. Everyone else will go to the work camp. Move quickly. Now!’ shouted the officer as the soldiers herded the two groups out of the reception centre.
Lit by a single, naked bulb suspended from the centre of the roof, Hut 21 was spare and so cold that the Levinsons’ breath clouded in the air. Along each side were rows of low wooden beds and against one wall stood a woodburning stove and its flue. It was not lit. The semi-circular curve of the corrugated iron formed both walls and ceiling, and two windows, both heavily frosted, were let into each side. With the Levinsons were eight other couples and two widows, all of them retired, all of them friends or acquaintances. But no one dared speak as the German soldiers allocated beds. None wanted to earn the beating the doctor had suffered. Even after the soldiers switched off the light, locked the doors and left, there were only whispers in the darkness. After a few minutes, Jane Levinson got out of her bed, took her threadbare blanket and climbed in next to her husband. They might keep each other a little warmer.
‘Rafael,’ she said quietly, ‘will we die here?’
*
A world away from the cold and misery of Hut 21, in the warmth of the MacDonalds’ home in St Andrews, I sat at the kitchen table with Robert, Katie and her father while Jenny and Eileen made some supper.
‘We have some time,’ I said, ‘but not enough time to build any sort of organised resistance. We cannot do what the Maquis did in France. In any case, what would we achieve? We might hamper them a little, but that would just irritate the Germans into bloody and brutal reprisals. We’ve seen what they’re capable of. And so, I think, if we can, we should be bold: gamble everything on one throw of the dice.’
Thinking aloud, doing most of the talking, enthused by the hope we had found, I suggested that the nine American scientists led by Professor Feldman were the key to any effective resistance. If there really were no more bombs then it was clear that the Germans needed the scientists and their work desperately. If we could find a way of removing them, and their families, so that hostages could not be taken – a way of kidnapping them, in effect – then that would deal a tremendous blow to the Germans.
‘Supposing you succeed, and at the moment I can’t see how you could, what would you do then?’ asked Alan Grant.
I smiled at him and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but if we could somehow get them out of St Andrews, it would buy time.’
We agreed that Feldman might be sympathetic, though probably fearful, and we had no idea of the mood or circumstances of his team. Or, indeed, how the removal of twenty or so Americans, as well as six of us, might even be possible.
*
Jamie and Miriam Griffith-Smith sat close, side by side, in front of their fire. The children were all upstairs in bed, stories read and heads on their pillows. They took turns to go into the hallway and stand at the foot of the stairs to listen for chatter or restlessness, but the little ones seemed to have settled.
Staring into the flames, a handkerchief knotted in her hands, Miriam went over once more what she had discovered. From an afternoon phone call to a non-Jewish neighbour, it seemed that a truck had drawn up in her parents’ street and soldiers had gone knocking on doors. A few minutes later, Dr and Mrs Levinson appeared in their overcoats and hats with a suitcase and were bundled into the back of the lorry. As were the Greens, the Henrys, the Levys and all of the other Jewish families in the street.
‘They are doing it,’ said Miriam. ‘They’re rounding up the Jews. It’s beginning.’
Until now, having accepted the fait accompli of the surrender and the crushing threat behind it, and believing that service with the Department of Public Safety might help to make the best of a bad job, Jamie Griffith-Smith had gone some considerable way into the process of reordering his world. But if the Germans had any idea that he had become involved with David Erskine, then he would immediately be shot. And now his family was threatened by something he had taken no account of. Everything was now at stake. Inaction was not an option.
*
‘I have an idea,’ said Jenny as she poured some coffee, ‘and it’s a long shot, in every sense. But it just might work. In fact, something like it will have to work if Professor Feldman and his people are to be persuaded. They’ll not only need to agree to the very dangerous business of leaving St Andrews, however that can be managed, they will also want to know where they’re going. And if their families will be safe there.’ Jenny smiled at Robert, Alan and Eileen. ‘I think you know what I’m going to suggest.’
Out of a drawer in his study, Robert MacDonald produced a worn, much-consulted Ordnance Survey map, marked ‘Mallaig and Glenfinnan’. Having carefully unfolded it, he pointed to a scatter of islands and skerries off the Atlantic shore of the Morar peninsula. ‘You see the little bay marked Camas Geal? It means “white bay”, because the sand is not yellow but a brilliant ivory colour.’
I could see that it lay on the southern shore of a small sea loch whose narrow entrances were protected by a series of rocky reefs. To the north and east was the village of Arisaig and its railway station.
‘You remember it, Katie?’ Robert asked his niece. ‘You first visited when you were very small.’
He pointed to a building marked on the shore of the White Bay. ‘Darroch House is no palace but it has eight bedrooms, a comfortable sitting room with views down to the loch and a kitchen that could cater for a regiment.’ He explained that the house and some land around it had come down to him through a complicated path of Highland inheritance, and in case we began to see him as an absentee laird, he explained that at such a distance, it was difficult and expensive to maintain. But there was one road in and one road out. That made it difficult for anyone to arrive without being seen. And Arisaig was little more than a mile and a half away from it. ‘But the problems start here, in St Andrews,’ said Robert. ‘We go to Darroch House in the summer vacation. And I know that it’s exactly one hundred and seventy one miles by car, door to door. How will you get twenty or so people there in one piece, and quickly?’
I argued that these difficulties would be academic for the moment if Feldman could not be persuaded or he could not persuade his colleagues. But now we had a destination, a remote place, a wild harbour we could run to. If we could get there, it would at least delay the building of the bomb, buy time and allow breathing space to find a way forward. We could not dither or do nothing. And Robert and I had to get a message to Feldman.
2 January 1945
Rafael Levinson looked at his wife and shrugged. The Germans had taken everyone’s watches. ‘Best get to the toilet quickly, my dear,’ said the doctor. He used his thumbnail to scrape at the ice that had formed on the inside of the windowpanes. Although it was barely light, he could see that it had snowed overnight.
‘Rafael, Rafael, please,’ a voice rasped from a bed not far from the window. It was Morris Gerber, a neighbour. ‘I can’t breathe. Please help me.’
Dr Levinson helped the old man to sit more upright, so that his airway was clearer, and took his pulse. It was very irregular, missing beats and then racing for short periods. ‘Morris, you’re experiencing tachycardia – irregular or fast heartbeat. It’s uncomfortable but it won’t kill you. I promise.’ But the cold and the shock of what has happened might, thought Levinson. ‘Try to take deep breaths. You’ll probably feel better once you get moving.’ Anything to calm the old man.
Outside Hut 21, the prisoners were ordered to stand in two rows and an arm’s length apart. When their names were called out, they were told that the correct response was, ‘Present, sir.’ The soldier who had hit Levinson with the butt of his rifle walked up and down behind the two lines, waiting to pounce on and punish mistakes. But there were none. All were present and correct. It was bitterly cold and an icy wind blew over the mountains and down Strathearn.
‘And now,’ said the soldier taking the roll call, ‘we will do all of this again. We want no mistakes.’
By the time they finished, the twenty prisoners had been standing outside for an hour, with only their striped uniforms to keep them warm. Behind him, Levinson heard what sounded like a long sigh and then a groan as Morris Gerber crumpled to the ground. The soldier who had prowled behind the lines kicked the old man viciously, again and again. Paralysed by fear, all of the others did not move or turn to look at what was happening, even when Gerber’s helpless, heart-rending moans ceased after the terrible beating.