They eventually let the woman go. In the following days, I saw her a few times. Her cuts from the whip were infected and oozing blood and pus, and she still seemed only semiconscious.
Johnson read those last few paragraphs over and over again. Then, unexpectedly, he felt a tear trickling down his right cheek.
Surely this isn’t a coincidence? It must have been her . . . my mother . . .
He walked up and down Jayne’s living room several times, trying to compose himself, then went into the bathroom and washed his face.
Eventually, Johnson sat down on the sofa again and continued reading.
Then there were the shootings. Daniel and I saw so many murders committed by camp guards using their prized Lugers, usually on the slightest whim.
I personally saw the camp commanders Captain Albert Lutkemeyer and his deputy, First Lieutenant Erich Brenner, shoot at least sixty in cold blood. There were obviously many more I didn’t see.
Across the camp as a whole, I completely lost count. Hundreds. And that doesn’t include all the other methods of killing—the gassings, the hangings, the beatings, the furnaces.
This particular day, the commanders were in too much of a rush for their usual early morning sadism, much to the relief of we walking skeletons who were parading in front of them.
We were all given the usual breakfast of one piece of hard, dry bread and a mug full of dirty brown liquid.
Johnson read on. There was a lot more detail about daily life in Wüstegiersdorf, the beatings, and the murders. Following on from that was another section in which Jacob had written about the work the prisoners were forced to do and why.
All the commanders were terrified of Lutkemeyer’s boss, the top man, Captain Karl Beblo, who was a fearsome character with the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen. Beblo was the local commandant of the Third Reich’s civil and military engineering group, the Organisation Todt.
The Todt, together with the Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer, had decided that Książ Castle in Walbrzych (or Waldenburg, as the Germans called it) should be turned into a headquarters for Hitler.
I and other Poles hated the way the Germans had many decades earlier taken over the whole Lower Silesia region, originally part of the Kingdom of Poland. By the time Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, they saw it as their own.
Speer and his team planned to build a complex of tunnels under the beautiful old castle: a bolt-hole where the Führer could flee if the war went against Germany. A place beyond the range of British and American bombers.
They also planned to build more tunnels under the hills on which the castle stood, as well as under the Owl Mountains, which ran for twenty-six kilometres southeast from Walbrzych.
The idea was to use them as underground factories to produce sensitive and highly secret new weapons and other military technology.
The code name for this scheme was Project Riese—German for “giant.”
To build the tunnels, the Nazis brought in a small army of mining engineers.
But the actual digging, the dangerous bit, was carried out by concentration camp prisoners like Daniel and me.
Most of us were Jews, but there were also a few Slavs and other minorities. We were all kept at Gross-Rosen, the network of camps that included Wüstegiersdorf.
The SS cut corners and had no regard for safety. Thousands of the prisoners died, both in the camps and while digging the tunnels. Concrete supports weren’t put in place, and tunnel roofs were often unstable. We all knew there were many fatal accidents, all involving Jews. Even the SS guards and commanders were worried, because they had to supervise us.
Lutkemeyer said it was important the work that was to be done that day at the Sokolec tunnels be completed quickly, otherwise the Führer would be angry. This made me take notice.
I heard Lutkemeyer say there was a special delivery of boxes coming, which had to be stowed in Sub-Tunnel A, running off Tunnel Three.
That was bad news because although there was a narrow-gauge railway that ran up to the entrance to Tunnel Three, if anything needed to be transported farther, we had to carry it by hand.
Tunnel Three was a disaster waiting to happen. They had built it into soft sandstone, and it wasn’t as stable as some of the other tunnels across the mountain range. The SS were so concerned, they had a couple of small escape tunnels built, one of which I worked on.
There were six guards that day, which surprised me. Normally, there were just two or three. They loaded twenty-two of us onto a truck, then drove us to the railway station, herded us into two cattle trucks pulled by an old shunting engine, and then took us the thirteen kilometres down the valley to the village of Ludwikowice Klodzkie.
Brenner, to his obvious distaste, had been forced to travel with us.
From there, a smaller train took us on the narrow-gauge railway a couple of kilometres up to the tunnel complex in the hills near the village of Sokolec.
A little later, at just before ten o’clock, another Nazi train, pulling five trucks loaded with wooden boxes, chugged up to the Sokolec tunnel entrance, accompanied by heavily armed SS guards.
Our job was to unload the train and carry the heavy boxes far into the tunnels complex, where we had to stack them on pallets.
Johnson went outside onto Jayne’s balcony for another cigarette.
He tried to imagine himself in the position of the Kudrow twins and his mother. How would he respond?
Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance character; and character hope . . .
But I would lose my mind completely, he thought. Intelligent men and women were being treated worse than vermin by their fellow human beings.
Then he realized consciously why tracking down the perpetrators was so important to him, why projects such as this current one made him feel he was doing something meaningful with his life. He took a long drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out and went back inside.
When he resumed reading, the memoir went on to describe how Jacob, Daniel, and the others were forced to spend all morning carrying the boxes from the train, along Tunnel Three, and into the smaller Sub-Tunnel A.
By two o’clock that afternoon, we were all near to collapsing. We had spent four hours carrying the heavy wooden boxes on our shoulders from the train, one box at a time.
It was slow work. We had to walk in single file in the dimmest of light along the rough tunnel littered with pieces of rock that had fallen from the roof.
I had earlier overheard the first lieutenant telling the guards the boxes contained dynamite, but that didn’t make sense.
I had seen boxes of dynamite when we were working at the tunnels under Książ Castle during the summer, and they were very different, always with the Dynamit Nobel AG label on. These boxes had no label and were much smaller and heavier.
Given that dynamite is so unstable and dangerous to handle and store, why would they keep it in the tunnels?
Daniel was too tired to care. He kept telling me he couldn’t go on much longer.
I remember telling him that he could and must carry on, that we would have another life one day.
Soon afterward, another prisoner, Konstanty, tripped over a rock on the floor and fell to the ground near me.
His box landed on its corner, and one of the slats of wood partially splintered and came away, so I was able to see what was inside. I peered down at it, and I can remember now the shock I felt.
Inside, clearly visible, were gold bars marked with the Nazi swastika, tightly packed with cotton cloth.
There were two rows of bars, ten on each side. Both Daniel and I had trained as jewelers in our father’s business in Warsaw, so I knew genuine gold when I saw it.
Fortunately, the nearest guard, about fifty metres away, was engrossed in abusing another prisoner and failed to hear the crash as the box hit the ground.
But I knew instantly they would shoot us both dead if they saw us and realized we knew what was in the boxes. So I helpe
d Konstanty push the slat of wood back into place, and we banged the nails back in with a rock.
Yet, with the splinters sticking out and the broken wooden crosspiece, it was still obvious the box had been damaged.
I told Konstanty to turn the box over so the splintered section was at the bottom, and then told him to make sure that when he lowered it onto the pallet, it stayed that way up, so they wouldn’t see it.
He trembled and didn’t speak, but his eyes thanked me.
The guard turned around just as Konstanty picked the box up and yelled at him.
As Konstanty walked on, the guard smashed him on the back of his puny calves with his truncheon. But he failed to spot the splintered base of the wooden box.
Johnson checked his watch. It was half past three. He had completely lost track of time while immersed in the memoir. The account was interesting not just because of his mother. There were also strong links to the research work he did for his Ph.D. in Berlin in the early ’80s, on the economics of the Third Reich.
His thesis, which he still had at home in Portland, included details of how, for most of the war, Hitler’s regime had bolstered its thin foreign-exchange reserves, vital to purchasing equipment, machinery, and engineering products, by plundering the gold reserves of the various countries it had marched into. In all, an estimated $600 million of gold at 1945 prices had been looted from the central banks in Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and others. Most of it was melted down and reformed by the Reichsbank into new one-kilogram gold bars.
Johnson turned on his phone calculator app and punched in a few numbers. That was something like $30 billion at 2011 prices, he thought.
He had also done research into how, in late 1944 and early 1945, when the Russians were advancing rapidly west and the Americans and British moving east, the crumbling Third Reich scrambled to hide the treasure it had plundered.
Much of it was stored in disused mines. Some was dropped to the bottom of lakes.
But now it seemed that from what Jacob had written, some of it was also hidden in the tunnels of the Riese complex.
Johnson was enthused. It had been his love of history, international relations, politics, and diving into the minutiae of investigation that had driven him to join the CIA and then the OSI—the latter, especially, being a place where passion counted for more than money and power. Now he felt as if he was somehow back on home territory. He made himself another coffee and continued reading.
By three o’clock, there were only twelve wooden boxes left on the Nazi gold train out of the 200 delivered that morning.
By then, of the twenty-two prisoners who had started the day, one had died, Ben Stronski.
Ben was nineteen and so frail he was in a zombie-like state, the “walking dead,” as those who had given up all hope were called.
There was a delay while Ben’s body was carried out. So the human chain of prisoners bunched up, and we walked closely together as we carried the last few boxes into Sub-Tunnel A.
Then it happened.
Behind us, there was a sudden explosion as a large chunk of rock fell from the roof to the ground. Then came another, far louder boom, and the entire tunnel roof fell down.
Johnson put down the notebook and took a deep breath. Jacob’s description of the chaos in the tunnel almost seventy years earlier caused him to have a visceral reaction. He felt grateful just to have air to breathe at this point. He picked up the notebook again and read how Jacob had felt suffocated but had survived, and then he reached the point where Jacob saw some guards with flashlights headed toward him and the other prisoners.
One guard ordered us to pick up our boxes and take them to the pallet where Brenner stood. Then I realized four of the six guards were missing, presumably buried or left on the other side of the rockfall, where the Nazi gold train stood.
Brenner started to rant and complain about the engineers taking too many risks, too many shortcuts. He told the two guards to take us out via the emergency escape tunnel, the one I had helped to dig during a hellish eight weeks earlier in the year. I’d almost forgotten about it—tried to black out the memory.
Our group followed the guards, with Brenner limping along at the back. The only light in the emergency tunnel, cut roughly out of the soft sandstone, came from the flashlights. The passage was only a metre wide and barely high enough to stand in, with a rough roof, walls, and floor.
It cut directly through 150 metres of sandstone. The final stretch was too low to stand in, so we crawled.
At the end, we emerged through a small square opening into a dry, thankfully unused sewer tunnel. Then we proceeded through a metal grate into some woodland near a lake.
From there, the guards marched us through the snow back down the valley to the Ludwikowice Klodzkie train station. There, the guards pushed us onto the same two filthy metal railway cars that we had arrived in.
Daniel and I were among eleven in the rear car, where a guard began to tie our wrists to a steel bar running the full length of the wall.
I quickly realized the guard was ill with a high temperature. He sweated profusely, despite the freezing weather, and his face was gray.
The guard had tied eight of us, with me next, when his colleague in the front car called to ask for another piece of rope. He jumped out of the car, handed it to his colleague, and then returned.
I had placed my hands behind me, holding the steel bar, but the guard had forgotten me and moved straight to Daniel.
Then he sat on a low stool at the rear of the truck. I just left my wrists behind me, holding the bar, as if they had been tied.
The train moved slowly out of the station along the winding line that led back up the valley to Gluszyca.
After a few minutes, the guard fell asleep.
Unlike Daniel, I had often thought about escaping. I was always working out guards’ procedures and delivery truck arrivals and departures, checking which guards might be bribable, and practicing my German.
But the opportunity had never arisen, and the risks were high.
It was now or never. I wasn’t sure I still had enough reserves of will power and strength. But I had to try.
Jacob then went on to detail how he untied Daniel and attacked the guard with a wooden plank from the floor. When the guard was unconscious, he and Daniel jumped from the train and waded along a nearby river to throw off any scent, should the Nazis bring dogs to find them. But when they heard nineteen shots, they knew Brenner had killed them all—something that was confirmed much later. After that, there was only one line left in the narrative, a couple of pages from the end of the notebook.
I knew then he would have to pay the price, that there would have to be justice.
Johnson put the notebook down and rested in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
A Nazi gold train.
It was the kind of thing he’d read speculation about many times in newspaper stories over the years. He recalled that some similar treasure had in fact been found by American troops, stashed away in a mine in Germany just after the war had ended.
Johnson gave a suppressed laugh and mentally tried to work out what it would have been worth.
If there were two hundred boxes, each with twenty gold bars, and assuming they were Third Reich bars of a standard one kilogram each, that amounted to four thousand kilograms.
He checked the price of gold on a financial website. It stood at more than $1,800 per troy ounce, of which there were thirty-two to the kilogram. So safe to say, the haul would be worth about $230 million at 2011 prices.
Unbelievable. Had they removed all of it since the war? What had they done with it?
Two hundred thirty million dollars.
Johnson shook his head, almost unconsciously, then picked up the notebook. They must have laundered the gold somehow, reformed it, sold it on, maybe as jewelry. He recalled the array of gold-refining equipment he had seen during his nocturnal visit to the Kudrows’ workshop.
He sat think
ing for a while. The odd thing was, if they had procured that amount of gold, it wasn’t reflected in their lifestyles.
Okay, they were obviously well heeled. Old Jacob had a house in Mayfair, although he’d bought it a long time ago. But the workshop was very run-down. And both Jacob and Daniel still seemed to be working hard even in their late eighties. Weird.
He opened the notebook at the back. Then he noticed there was also some writing on the last page, in green ink and underlined twice.
Endgame: A Masterplan.
Next to it was a date, written very recently: October 10, 2011.
Underneath: nothing. The page was otherwise blank.
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sunday, November 27, 2011
London
Jacob walked to the safe and fiddled with the combination dial on the front. The door swung open.
A few seconds later, he lost his balance and grabbed the side of the wooden writing desk with his left hand to steady himself.
“Are you all right?” Daniel asked him.
“No. They’ve taken it. My notebook. It’s gone. Papers, all gone.”
“What notebook and papers?” Daniel asked. He stood and went over to his brother.
“My memoirs, in my red notebook. I told you about them. All my invoices and receipts, the gold sales. How could they have gotten in there? Nobody else knows the combination.”
Jacob put both of his wrinkled hands inside the safe, running them over the felt lining, not believing what his own eyes were telling him.
“I can’t tell the police,” Jacob said. “What are we going to do? Daniel, get me a whiskey, quickly, I’m not feeling very good.” Jacob sat down.
Daniel opened the drinks cupboard and poured some Scotch into a cut-glass tumbler.
Jacob took it and drank. “All the first part of our story was in that notebook. The camp, how the gold got into the tunnels, our escape, all that. I had a plan to expose him.” He put his head in his hands. “It’s all falling apart. More than fifty-five years and nothing happens. Now, all of a sudden, it’s gone crazy. Nathaniel’s dead. Keith’s dead. Burglaries, kidnappings, police everywhere.”
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 20
