The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  But I had no way of knowing if my efforts were doing any good. It wasn’t like a bombing raid, with quantifiable successes defined by installations neutralized stroke body count. At best, I got something anecdotal from my marks, probably just bragging. I decided I needed to get inside a factory myself to assess the situation. This was a stupid idea, and my compatriots told me as much, but I persisted.

  At the Berthawerke, the Krupp factory that made howitzers, there was a Pole, originally from Lodz, who had an administrative job. A bookkeeper. He was sympathetic to the cause—he’d been the one who’d passed along the letter that had landed me in Poland in the first place. He’d told us that after the administrative purge a new SS unit had been brought in, more SS guards who’d worked for Krupp in Essen, and their Polish was bad, which I knew would give me extra cover. The foremen on the factory floor were German, so the same held for them. They only spoke basic Polish.

  The bookkeeper was staunchly against my plan. It was ludicrous and he told me so. The first thing he explained to me was that the factory’s production hadn’t improved an iota since the new administration’s takeover. In fact, escape attempts were up, and the Russian POWs were running their own sabotage schemes. So what’s there for you to see? he wants to know. Whatever you need to know, he says, I’ll tell you! The Berthawerke was a crap factory, the German staff continually on report for loafing. The foremen purposely trained their underlings poorly, did whatever they could to make sure that materials and tools were mishandled. You see, if a worker showed some talent for a job, he might have become foreman himself—not a Jew, of course, but there were German prisoners, Eastern workers, the Russians. Self-preservation dictated that the foremen keep production low.

  This is a fool’s errand, this bookkeeper tells me. If anything, you’ll be a danger to the prisoners. You’ll ruin whatever plans they’ve already laid.

  Obviously he didn’t think much of me, and for good reason. I was only a kid, after all, and had done nothing to earn his respect. Simply setting foot on the floor, he tells me, you put the entire resistance in danger. He would yell at me: You’re a child! You have no idea what goes on in a place like this!

  He could not have been more right.

  About half of the German foremen also served on B-Trupps, the roving guard squads who were called on to enforce the efficiency protocols—the same efficiency protocols they didn’t want their workers to maintain. They carried truncheons, metal pipes sheathed in rubber, and they’d mercilessly beat anyone the SS told them required discipline. And among these German foremen, the bookkeeper told me, the most brutal, the most bloodthirsty, were the same ones slipping the prisoners extra rations, cigarettes. Who would call this arrangement anything but madness? What option did anyone have, with the crematoriums blazing, but to live from second to second, to play the cards you’re dealt in that very moment? And what would happen to me in such a place, if I was found out, which I assuredly would be?

  I didn’t hear anything he was telling me. I was undeterred. The more the bookkeeper argued against it, the more insistent I became. The whole reason I was in Poland went back to the intercepted letter from Alfried Krupp—why wouldn’t I take the initiative and try to gather information from inside the very same factory? I insisted, out of a sense of defiance that I believed to be valorous but that was nothing more than a boy’s anger at being treated like a boy. Eventually I told the bookkeeper that I’d find a way into the factory with or without him, and he relented. It’s a miracle he didn’t have someone in the resistance kill me then. I was lucky that, in the midst of all that chaos, he’d held on to a shred of his humanity.

  He said he’d get me in for the express purpose of reconnaissance. I was not to try to recruit anyone, I was not to breathe a subversive word to a soul. I agreed. They had their own prisoner-electricians at the factory, but as it happened, by and by there was some high-voltage work to be done on a milling machine and it had to be done correctly, so the master electrician from town was summoned, and as his apprentice, I went along to assist. The factory administration told us that under no circumstances were we to speak to the prisoners except to conscript them if we needed labor for the repairs.

  The factory was cavernous. Furious noise and acrid air. Gray concrete and screaming machines carving steel. The first thing I saw when we walked in was a beating, a boy, a teenager, who’d fallen asleep at an inopportune moment and had been spotted by an SS guard. His legs were covered in open wounds, bruises. His feet were mangled.

  Twenty-five on the backside with the truncheon. I couldn’t believe that his heart didn’t stop, but he appeared to be alive when they dragged him off. If he’d been killed, they would have rolled him against the wall until the end of the shift and then the others would carry the corpse back to camp. Then tossed in a truck and carted to the ovens at Gross-Rosen.

  The master electrician leaned over and whispered to me, What’s wrong? You look like you’ve never seen a slaughterhouse before. He hated me for bringing him to that place, for putting him in such close proximity to the horrors there, for risking his life. In fact, he never spoke to me again after that day in the Berthawerke.

  It was a big job. The inside of the machine had been carbonized from a fire caused by a short, and we had to replace every inch of wire, from the heavy-gauge copper cabling down to the little switch wires for the on/off lights. Everything that wasn’t steel had melted. Of course, it had been sabotaged at the behest of our bookkeeper from Lodz. Now, this machine was German. It had been brought in from Essen, and there were a number of recessed panels within the machine, and etched into the inside of each door was a schematic with detailed instructions in German. Neither the electrician nor I could read them, so we requested a translator, and a Polish Jew was assigned the task, a man named Stern—Janusz Stern. He was old enough to be my father, a ring of gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses, a gentle man. Patient. He’d been a teacher in Poznań.

  He and I spent a considerable amount of time inside the machine together, in a space about the size of a phone booth, Janusz translating the panels aloud by flashlight, me with a pad and pencil taking transcription as he read, sketching up the schematics. He was all business. There was an SS guard standing just outside the hatch, and once we had a panel translated, Stern would crawl back out and wait by the guard. The master electrician would climb in to lay up the wiring. There were fifteen or twenty of these panels, each bank of instructions very detailed, and by the end of the day Stern and I had spent many hours together. To that point, as I say, he was all business, except for apologizing from time to time for his smell—it was wintertime, and he smelled no worse than I or anyone else, but it was his way of politely suggesting that he was something more than the prisoner crouching next to me. His hands shook from cold the entire time but there was nothing I could do for him, even though I had a nice warm coat and a hat. The guard might pop his head in at any time, and even if I’d only lent him the hat, that would be the end of Janusz. He didn’t complain once, and went about the work pleasantly. He seemed to know intuitively when to pause to allow me to catch up, when to carry on, and his translations were very precise. He never had to rephrase anything. He must have been a superb teacher.

  So we worked this way for the better part of the day, and as we finished up the final panel, he turned his face to me and looked into my eyes. He was between me and the hatch—there was no space for me to back into. I couldn’t even lean away from him, it was so tight. I said nothing, but I tensed, ready for close-quarters hand-to-hand if he gave the slightest intention that he meant to do me harm. His face came closer and closer, moving so slowly that I could hear him blinking. Closer and closer, as though he was moving in to kiss me. Then his lips were grazing my ear. He grabbed my hand, the way you’d take a child’s hand to cross the street. And in an almost imperceptible voice he whispered, Szybko, szybko, powiedz mi żart. Quickly, quickly, tell me a joke.

  I didn’t understand. Was it some sort of code? I shook my hea
d. He said again, Quickly, a short joke.

  A joke? Was this a trap? I had to decide on the spot. I say, loud enough for the guard to hear, Can you look at this section again? Is it correct? And he says, Yes, let me have a look, give me the pad.

  I turn my head so that now my lips are against his ear. A joke, I say. He’s as still as stone. I whisper: Field Marshal Keitel returns home from another long day at high command. He takes off his boots and coat, hangs up his hat, and calls out, Liebschen, I’m home! There’s no response, so he goes up the stairs to his bedroom. He opens the door, only to find his wife in bed with Field Marshal Goering. Keitel lets out a heartbroken moan, unholsters his sidearm, and puts it to his own temple. His wife starts laughing and says, You idiot! And Keitel screams, Don’t laugh, you’re next!

  This camp where the Jews were imprisoned—Fünfteichen. This was a place of absolute suffering. There were no Dantesque levels of punishment or Miltonian realms of existential pain. There was white, blinding horror, nothing more. There was no separation from god because the existence of the camp itself was confirmation that there was no such thing as god. In a place like that, each person was his own hell.

  Yet I was told they prayed even as the guards beat the life out of them. Their lips moved. Because what else can a person do? Hitler hated Jews because he believed they were responsible for creating the individual. Did you know that? He blamed them for introducing philosophies that distracted human beings from constant race war, which he believed to be the natural order. In Hitler’s philosophy, such as it was, the natural state was the state of the animal kingdom. The strong and fast devouring the weak and slow. The strong reproducing. Repeat. Hitler blamed Jewish philosophers for the invention of humanism. Self-knowledge was a Jewish disease. Hitler made them responsible for empathy and the principles that suggest all races might live together in peace. In Hitler’s new era, there was no concept of empathy. There were no nations, either, only races fighting for dominance.

  And what weaponry did I have to counteract Hitler’s insane machine? I had tactics for some sort of theory war, a war fought while sitting at a table. Clogging pipes and dulling files? His arsenal is the kitchen shelf?

  Of course, Hitler had already won. Within the walls of a concentration camp, everyone was an animal. He forced the Jews into a philosophy of immediacy, where an hour was a lifetime, where there was no thought, no contemplation, where there was only action, and every action had but a single goal: to live long enough to take one more breath.

  So you see? With the camps, Hitler succeeded in returning the world to its primitive state.

  And what had Janusz Stern asked me for? An inconceivable deviation from the unremitting beat of that Teutonic drum. A useless luxury, a joke. A profound subversion. And I gave it to him because it was nothing to me. Do you know what he did?

  No, I say to my father.

  He laughed, my father says. A whisper at first, a sort of wheezing, getting the bellows warmed up, and then his throat engaged, like a cough, and his body began to shudder—the sound was amplified in that enclosed space, but let me tell you, before I had time to cover his mouth, he was roaring, howling. There were tears streaming down his cheeks, he was gasping for air. To this day, I’ve never seen a person so consumed with mirth. He was writhing around, spasming. The guard was banging on the side of the machine, What’s going on in there? Everyone out! Now! Raus jetzt! Raus jetzt! He reached in, one big German paw, and grabbed me by my coat, yanked me out onto the floor. Janusz was thrashing around, the sound pouring full-bore out of the hatch, as if the machine itself was howling. But not for long. The guard dove in, dragged Janusz out, screaming, Raus jetzt, over and over, his eyes popping out of his head, but Janusz couldn’t stop. He couldn’t even stand. He was possessed, flopping around in paroxysms on the floor. Another guard came running, and then one of the B-Truppers, and they’re all screaming.

  He couldn’t stop. And that was the end of him. Just like that.

  Afterward, they sent for another Polish Jew who spoke German. Through this man they asked me what I said to the dead Jew that was so funny. I told him a joke, I said. What joke? they said. And I tell them the joke, only I tell it the way the Nazi propaganda machine wrote it. A Polack comes home from work one day and hangs up his coat. He calls out to his wife but she doesn’t answer. He goes up the stairs to their bedroom, where she’s in bed with his best friend. From his chest of drawers he pulls out a pistol and points it at his head. You idiot! his wife says, laughing. Don’t laugh, he says. You’re next!

  The Germans knew this joke well, and it was even more hilarious coming from the lips of the Jew interpreter. Of course, Janusz Stern had known the Nazi version, too. By some miracle, the Germans were satisfied by my explanation. They assumed he had gone insane. The guard tapped my forehead with the barrel of his rifle and said, No more jokes, Polack, or you’re next. And they all had a good laugh.

  Tad and I were called home not long afterward. Our greatest accomplishment had been eluding the Gestapo. Was the intelligence we gathered worth anything? Who knows? Probably not. Was the work I’d done to disseminate simple sabotage equal to the life of Janusz Stern? Well. We were instructed to make our way to Russia for extraction. When we left town, we passed by hundreds of Jews in the fields, digging pipelines for new factories.

  At Kraków we sold the horse and cart and bought train tickets. We were accompanied by a man from the underground on the train to Lwów, where we were handed off to a new man, and within a week we were on a plane out of Russia. London, debrief, from there I sailed back to Washington. The very definition of a smooth extraction.

  So I return to the Polish desk at headquarters. Nothing’s changed. I’d been gone only a few months, but it felt like years. I moved back into my room on Twenty-Fifth Street Northwest, same bed, same sheets. The other two rooms upstairs were occupied by new tenants, young officers, attachés, but otherwise the house was the same. The towels in the bathroom smelled the same. They had a stiff way of hanging off the racks. On Saturdays our landlady, her name was Sadie Mott, took out the wash, did everything by hand in a big tub on the back porch. She used Ivory flakes. The rasping sound of the washboard. She hung the sheets on the lines in the backyard. The sheets were white with flowers. Yellow petals, brown florets. Sunflowers, I suppose. I could hear them fluttering on the line, exactly as they had before I’d left. I’d lie in my bed on Saturdays and listen. The bathroom smelled like Old Spice and Brylcreem. Memories reconfirmed. Life magazine on the side table in the living room. Casseroles, stews, the thin white curtains billowing while we ate. It was summer and everything was wide open. Dinner was at seven thirty on the weekends, late in those days, on account of the heat. I started to fall apart.

  I didn’t sleep well, which wasn’t unusual, no one slept well, but no one complained. Everyone had troubling thoughts, nightmares, what have you.

  I’d been thoroughly debriefed in Washington, too, of course. I confirmed the intelligence Tad had radioed in, and I told them what I could about the Berthawerke, about the conditions there, but, again, the War Department—you have to understand that winning the war was all that mattered. The war effort was about defeating the Axis, not about rescuing prisoners. It wasn’t that they didn’t have information from inside concentration camps, written accounts of mass executions, bodies dumped in mass graves. British intelligence knew from early on. They had been intercepting diplomatic mail for years. There were stories coming out of the Polish Embassy, for instance, about the ghettos. The U.S. government knew. But it wasn’t until after the war, at Nuremberg, that a complete account of what had been happening at the camps became public. Who knew what, and when did they know it—this is all of tremendous importance, but in 1944 the government wasn’t looking for new reasons to win the war. Do you know how many civilians died during the invasion of Normandy? Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand French civilians, all killed by American bombers. Two hundred thousand Allied troops dead. The context in which the camps existe
d at that time—to the left, millions of troops dead, to the right, millions of civilians. Mr. Roosevelt, the Germans are rounding up Jews and gassing them! And Roosevelt says, Defeat the Nazis. If you want to make it stop, beat the goddamned Nazis. Let’s make a date to discuss the morality of our decisions after we’ve forestalled our own annihilation!

  Did I mention that my debriefing was thorough? What did I see. What did I hear. When did this happen, when did that. When did shipments arrive. What did I know about the production rate on such and so week. How many successful sabotage attempts, and in what factories, and carried out by whom?

  At no time did I bring up Janusz Stern. I had no doubt that Tad would give an account of the man’s death in his debriefing, and the story would have made its way to OSS through the Polish underground, anyway, so if I deserved retribution, it would find me. But it never came—from an official standpoint, Janusz Stern was only one more body on a pile so high it was blotting out the sun. My involvement was incidental. There would be no consequences for admitting my role in his death, yet I had decided I would never speak a word of it to anyone. I’d decided this before he’d breathed his last breath, while he was lying there on the concrete floor of that factory, the kapo standing above him, his truncheon slick with blood. That man wasn’t Janusz Stern’s murderer. I was. I was a coward who’d killed him with carelessness, and bravado, and a thousand childish decisions I’d made going back to the day I agreed to join OSS, an outfit I joined because it made me feel that I’d been chosen, that I was special—from that very first day I was a murderer. And even before then, I’d been sharpening my bayonet.