by Jack Livings
I didn’t meet many field agents during my time at headquarters. That came later. Just fleeting glimpses of them in Washington. They were ghosts. They trained in Canada or on the Chesapeake, and then sailed to England for deployment. Most were captured by the Nazis, who classified them as terrorists, which according to the laws of war allowed them to carry out on-the-spot executions, but in most cases it was torture and interrogation first, then execution. We were aware of this, of course. No one who went over actually expected to return.
That was a grisly business, field operations. When OSS officers did the killing, they killed intimately, in darkness. You were trained to creep through the brush, clinging to the shadows, emerge behind a sentry, embrace him, slit his throat. You felt the struggle of the life draining out of the man when you killed that way, pulling him back into your body, your hand over his mouth, his blood pouring out over your arms. You felt the heat of it. And you knew that at any moment you could suffer the same fate. You could be killed going in, killed coming out. Your drop plane could fly into the side of a mountain. You could parachute into the sea. You could complete your mission, reach the extraction site, lift off, break through the clouds, and be safely on your way to England, and somewhere over the Channel have your plane cut in half by ME-109s. Any number of ways to die. The instructors trained you to deal with your fear by cultivating an uncompromising belief in your own immortality, which isn’t all so difficult when you’re twenty, is it? But all the same.
And of course I was jealous of them, those dashing young spies, and that helped me take the work seriously. I absorbed the lessons of that manual. Anything—anything—could be an instrument of sabotage, and anything could be sabotaged. Doing your typing job poorly was a form of simple sabotage. Being stupid—we intended to teach people to be stupid, to behave like idiots, as a form of subversion. A difficult proposition during wartime, when a factory worker whose deepest sense of pride—the only pride he has left now that the Nazis have plundered everything else he had—is invested in the quality of his product. A bolt or a tank tread or whatever it might be. Consider who one of these potential civilian saboteurs was. He was too old to fight in his country’s army, or he was a cripple. For whatever reason, he’s unable to go to the front with his neighbors and defend his homeland. He’s left back home with the women and children. And his wages had been cut and cut, everything had been rationed, the food on his table was made of sawdust, his cigarettes tasted like kerosene, his alcohol was long gone. What little manhood he had at the beginning of the war had shriveled. German soldiers groped his wife and daughters. Was he angry? You bet. Was he angry enough to sacrifice the last of his pride, though?
That’s the question the operative had to pose. The worker is in conflict with himself, and must be convinced to work slower, to make mistakes, to use his tools incorrectly, to dull their edges, to break them, to waste oil, to forget procedure, and to pretend to be confused and weak. He must be made willing to sacrifice his intellect and spirit for the cause. And what a cause! A cause which ends not with an explosion and a curtain of flame, but a secret, impotent, dim fizzle. It’s quite a hurdle to clear. Yesterday, this factory worker was the best at his job—or at least competent. But now he must will himself to become even worse than the most contemptibly stupid son of a bitch in the entire factory. Other workers will all say, What the hell happened to old Tomasz, he used to be so efficient, and look at him now. And what can old Tomasz say? If he’s committed to his role in fighting Hitler, he can only shrug the idiot’s shrug. Unless, that is, he can convert his friends. And then you have something like the beginning of a revolution. That was the idea, at least.
Minuscule acts of subversion. Harass and demoralize. Millions of people, each one slashing a single Nazi tire. Delivering Nazi mail to the wrong address. An entire country slowly tipping over, felled by a plague of incompetence.
The manual went to press in January ’44. I moved back to the Polish section to work on propaganda but I wasn’t there long, maybe two weeks, before the field section started calling people in for interviews. I was called in first by the head of Morale Operations. I walked in and he said, Take a seat, Saltwater. Manual three, page fifteen, subheading E.
He had this way of speaking that made you feel the words were emanating from his chest, as though he wasn’t even moving his mouth. I was afraid that if I answered incorrectly, I wouldn’t be allowed to work on the next manual, so I closed my eyes and concentrated. Of course, I have no idea what’s on that page he’s asking about. I know the manual by heart, but I don’t have a photographic memory, so I think, Well, that’s somewhere in the Specific Suggestions section, and I worked it out from there, following the logic of the manual. Tools, lubrication, cooling systems, gas and oil, electric motors. A, B, C, D, E. So there I had it. Electric motors, I said.
I saw from his face I’d gotten it right and I felt a thrill, like a schoolboy who’d pleased his teacher. He wasn’t quizzing me to evaluate my fitness for more editorial work, of course. They were up against the wall. I have wondered: If I’d gotten the answer wrong, what might he have done? Probably would have sent me anyway. They’d lost so many field agents in Poland, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time they got to me. I wasn’t even an officer, but they hopped me right up to second lieutenant.
So I was off to Prince William Forest for A-4, Special Operations basic, without any clue why I was being put into an operational division. I knew there’d been losses—we all did—and I knew that my language expertise qualified me for a certain type of work, but I was no spy. They told me nothing. Go to SO, they said, then Fort Benning for jump school, then report back to D.C.
So that’s what I did. I’m taught to conduct myself with stealth and lethality, how to fight in close quarters, how to infiltrate and extricate, lay charges. In order to graduate basic I had to sneak into a hydroelectric plant in Maryland, make my way to the turbines, and leave a calling card inside a fuse box just outside the control room. No one at the plant was warned. If I’d been caught, I could have been shot by the guards. But I completed the mission, and then it was off to Fort Benning. Training there was quick. Doesn’t take long to learn how to fall out of an airplane. You know what they say? It’s the landing that kills you. And once I was back in D.C., they sent me to an intensive Polish course, three weeks, eight hours a day. Slang, cultural touch points. Every night after dinner we watched two movies, Waszyński mostly, we studied for another two hours, and we went to sleep listening to recordings of shows from Radio Warsaw. The language instruction—that was Turk Brunn’s father’s outfit, you know. Small world.
My father takes his hand from my arm, where it has been transmitting a kind of gentle Morse pressure all along, and raises both his hands to his face to rub his eyes, those tired eyes, sliding his forefingers up his nose, beneath the frames of his glasses, gently working the inner canthus with the tips of his fingers, moving them out along the closed lid, massaging the cornea beneath. He resettles his glasses and drops his hand back onto my arm.
About a year earlier, he says, the Royal Air Force had flattened Essen’s armament factories. They all but wiped out Krupp. Farben, Daimler-Benz, too. The Nazis had to relocate them to somewhere outside Allied bombing range, and whatever machinery hadn’t been destroyed was disassembled, loaded on trains, and shipped to Western Poland, to Silesia and Sudetenland.
There was a camp in Silesia, a granite quarry, called Gross-Rosen. The Nazis set up the factories in towns nearby, and by early ’44, they’d built about a hundred other sub-camps, all to supply slave labor to these factories. Gross-Rosen was a death camp—when you were sent there, you knew your end was the crematorium. In the sub-camps, maybe you had a better chance, because they needed live bodies in the factories. In the sub-camps there were Jews, but also Russian POWs, Ukrainians. French. Poles. Enemies of the Nazi Party.
The one I’m most familiar with was called Fünfteichen. It was three miles from the Krupp factory, and
the Jews who worked there were marched back and forth twice daily. In weather like this—my father gestured at the snowscape outside the window—they wore pajamas. They wore pajamas year-round. They had these wooden clogs, but the mud sucked them off their feet, and when you’re marching, you don’t stop to pick up your shoes or you’re shot, so most were barefoot. I don’t have to tell you what it was like there. The daily meal was warm water in a bowl. A rotten radish was a godsend. This is all well documented. In the morning they’d march to the factory, having spent the entire night unloading trains, or standing at attention outside their barracks as punishment for an escape attempt. Beatings were a matter of course. They’d march to the factory through whatever weather, wearing their pajamas, barefoot, and once they were inside, if they survived the march, then the suffering really began.
We had reports from inside the factory, through the Polish resistance, about all this—the Jews were being starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death by the kapos and the SS. And every week there were industrial accidents, electrocutions and the like. Limbs severed, workers burned alive. But it was most common that they—they were slaves, so I should call them slaves—the slaves died by being beaten to death on the factory floor.
In late ’43, Polish resistance intercepted a letter from Alfried Krupp, the chair of the company, to the Gestapo. If you can believe it, he was complaining about the conditions and the treatment of the workers. Ever mindful of his bottom line. “We’ve invested money and time in training these prisoners for our factories and your SS troops are killing them all! How are we supposed to make our quotas?” Krupp was crafty—he placed blame on the local administrators for mismanaging the factories, which gave the brass in Berlin a scapegoat. And sure enough, in early 1944, the old factory administration is kicked out, put on a train back to Essen, and the SS guards are reassigned. The execs at OSS thought it was our chance to inject simple sabotage into the bloodstream. Just so you understand: This was not an attempt to save the Jews, but to do further damage to the German armaments industry. As far as the War Department was concerned, the Holocaust was incidental.
So in February ’44, they sent me to London. My instructors were British army and my classmates were all Poles who’d been conscripted by the Nazis but had managed to surrender to the Allied forces. These boys had extraordinary knowledge about the inner workings of the German military, from strategic arrangements right down to what kind of toilet paper the troops carried. Who better to turn into spies? We trained as two-man teams. A radio man and a field officer. My radio man was Tadeuz Zachurski. By then I knew exactly where I was going, of course.
At the end of February, Tad and I parachuted into Poland. We connected with the partisans who would transport us to Markstädt, the town near Gross-Rosen, where our mission was to collect intelligence and spread the gospel of simple sabotage.
* * *
My father, religious in his avoidance of elevators, a man who couldn’t bring himself to ride a Ferris wheel with his own daughter, who once sat down in the middle of the sidewalk rather than cross the Brooklyn Bridge because he couldn’t stop replaying the image of the span buckling, cables snapping, the whole thing collapsing into the river, a man so wedded to his fears that he could not leave the apartment without his lucky hex nut in his pocket. A man whose editors, as he got on in years, took the elevators down from their offices on thirty-three to meet with him in the conference room of the law firm occupying the second floor of their midtown building because, without question, my father would have taken the stairs all the way up, and they didn’t want to be responsible for his cardiac arrest. Even at the Apelles, where he’d reached a perfunctory truce with the elevator at the end of our hall, he might yet detect a disharmony in the metallic scrape and jangle of the pulleys and say, Meet you down there. A resigned, guilty shrug of the shoulders as my mother and I stood in the hallway waiting for the doors to open: it was a force over which he had no control. One might be inclined to wonder why, if he was concerned about the mechanical integrity of the elevator, he would allow his wife and child to take it. Because he knew there was no real danger, no more so than actuarial tables allowed for, at least—it was just that he was nuts. That’s how he put it himself. I’m nuts, sorry. Lips drawn tight, he’d disappear into the stairwell.
He’d pulled the same thing on flights for London, Bonn, a puddle jumper to Cape Cod. Sorry, he’d say, and he’d step neatly out of the boarding line and head back to the ticket desk to see what the rest of the week’s schedule looked like. Can’t go today. Just can’t. He’d refused taxis, subways, trains, ferries, trams, funiculars.
Entire buildings failed to transmit the correct vibrations. It’s the maintenance crews, he’d say. Look at their uniforms, he’d say, gesturing at some admittedly sartorially challenged guys champing on cigars in a loading bay. You think those guys sweat the details? Think they’re sticking to the checklist?
And now I remember something. He once told me that most of what is considered evil in this world is nothing more than willful apathy. We had been walking on Riverside when he’d said that, and dusk had turned the buildings across the river into silhouettes, the sky shades of violet, and the air was still but crisp, everything around us obtrusively pensive. Even the traffic had seemed to hum in harmony. I was in college. He’d been explaining simple sabotage to me, the philosophy of ignorance, both blissful and malignant.
He’d been explaining it to me all along.
* * *
We were wearing mufti, he says. Every stich of it Polish cloth. I’d had a tooth pulled and replaced with a cyanide tooth.
What? I say.
He opened his mouth and inserted a finger. You know, a hollow molar, here, this one, he says. You remember, you old southpaw?
I nod, thinking, Yes, I do. Of course I do. How strange that you’d return to the night of the party, the night I sent your tooth down the heating vent.
We rendezvoused with the partisans, he says, who took us to a farmhouse about fifty miles from Markstädt. The idea was that we’d travel during the day in a horse cart loaded with sausage. Traveling at night was too suspicious. The partisans drilled us on every aspect of making krupniok before they’d let us set foot outside that farmhouse. Standard protocol because the Nazis were by then well attuned to the rhythms of a cover story. The day I’d arrived in London I’d been given a rusty knurled pipe and told to work it every night before bed so that I’d develop calluses. Can’t claim to be a peasant with ivory palms. The Germans took note of these things. Neither Tad nor I had bathed in weeks. Our toenails were the appropriate shade of green. Our teeth were mossy.
Even on the open road, nothing but farmland for miles around us, Tad and I spoke Polish. We discussed nothing but the sausage and the details of our cover story. To be anything less than one hundred percent Polish was to ensure exposure and execution. The Germans at the checkpoints were only too happy to liberate us of some of our cargo. This was by design, smart thinking on the part of our minders, and we’d been given explicit instructions to complain, but not too much—just the right amount of hopeless griping. We had letters from our cousins, we had our papers, everything was in order. They waved us through. Off to see our family in Markstädt, heil Hitler.
We arrived and made contact with the partisans there, our cousins who’d sent word that there’s work for us in town. We spent a couple of weeks selling sausage in the town market, letting everyone get a good look at us. Our cousins introduced us around. I got on as an apprentice to a master electrician who was part of the resistance.
I carried out my mission according to my training. Identify the disaffected, the bellyachers, and cultivate their sense of discomfiture. The Polish tradesmen were my primary marks. There was a pub where we all went for beer on Saturdays. Of course there were Germans there, too. We Poles played skat and drank and slowly, bit by bit, I formed bonds. A word here or there. It wasn’t uncommon to commiserate about the rotten szkopy sitting five feet away, just over a
t the bar, and after a while I could capitalize on that. The trick was to find the Pole whose hatred of the Germans was at a low boil, a pot that required only a touch more heat to froth over. He might, in passing, tell you what kept him up at night, staring into the dark. A couple of weeks later, he’d mention it again. Then you find out the Nazis had shot his brother or sent his father to a work camp. Everyone had been affected, but a family tragedy at the hands of the Waffen SS, for instance—well, there you had your opening. You’d think the anger that came from having the Nazis squatting over your country, showering you with excrement day and night, would be enough. But there had to be something more. Because you could endure the rest. If the scalpel cuts slowly enough, you might not even feel the extraction of your most dearly held beliefs. Abnormality repeated becomes the norm. But the single traumatizing event, that’s what breaks us, isn’t it? You know this.
My father looks at me with terrible sympathy. His face. My father’s kind face.
It’s only a trauma if you can’t process it, I say.
Like a computer? my father says.
I have this on good authority, I say. The best shrinks on the island have delivered their opinions. If you can’t stop reliving it, it’s trauma. I don’t relive it. I just miss Vik.
Of course, he says. Different for me, you see. My father taps his head. Bad input. Faulty wiring.
So, I played the dutiful apprentice, he says, all the while gathering intelligence and identifying my marks. Within a couple of months I had contacts in seven factories at Gross-Rosen. I adhered to my training, cultivated relationships, and hoped I could lead a few of them to some minor acts of sabotage. You touch a spark to kindling, and if conditions are right, the fire spreads.
