The One Man

by Andrew Gross

  “The Jewish Congress and the World Refugee Board are imploring us to bomb the camp,” the treasury secretary advised him. “We cannot simply sit on our hands any longer.”

  “Which will accomplish what, exactly?” Henry Stimson, who had served in the administrations of two presidents prior to FDR and who had come out of public retirement to run the country’s war effort, asked. “Except to kill a lot of innocent prisoners ourselves. Our bombers can barely make it all the way there and back with a full payload. We’d suffer considerable losses. And we all know we need every one of those aircraft for what’s coming up.”

  It was May 1944, and word had leaked even to Strauss’s level of the final preparations under way for the forthcoming invasion of Europe.

  “Then at least we can disrupt their plans and bomb the railway tracks,” Morgenthau pleaded, desperate to convince the president to take action. “The prisoners are brought there on sealed trains. That would at least slow down the pace of the exterminations.”

  “Bombers flying all over Europe at night … Making precision strikes on rail tracks? And as you say, there are many such camps?” Stimson registered his skepticism. “I believe the best thing we can do for these poor people, Mr. President, is to get to them and liberate them as swiftly as possible. Not by sponsoring any ill-conceived raids. That’s my view.”

  The president drew in a breath and took off his wire glasses, the deep channels around his eyes reflecting the pallid cast of a conflicted man. Many of his closest friends were Jews and had urged action. His administration had brought more Jews into the government than any before it. And, as a humane and compassionate being, always seeking to give hope and rise to the common man, he was more repelled by the report of the atrocities he’d just read through than by any that had crossed his desk in the war, even more than the tragic losses of American lives on the beaches in the Pacific or the loss of troops at sea on their way to England.

  Yet as a realist, Roosevelt knew his secretary of war was right. Too much lay ahead, and all of it far too important. Plus, the anti-Jewish lobby was still a strong one in the country, and reports of soldiers lost predominantly trying to save Jewish lives would not go well as he sought to gain a fourth term. “Bob, I know how hard this is for you.” He put his hand on the treasury secretary’s shoulder. “It’s hard for all of us, to be sure. Which brings us to the reason we are all here tonight, gentlemen. Our special project. What’s it called, ‘Catfish’?” He turned toward the head of the OSS, Colonel Donovan. “Tell me, Bill, do we have any real hope that this project is still alive?”

  “Catfish” was the name known only to a very few for the undercover operation Strauss was in charge of to smuggle a particular individual out of Europe. A Polish Jew, whom FDR’s people claimed was vital to the war effort.

  As far back as 1942, it had been discovered that bearers of certain Latin American identity papers were awarded special treatment in Warsaw. For several months, hundreds of Polish and Dutch Jews were issued counterfeit papers from Paraguay and El Salvador to gain exit from Europe. Many had made their way to northern France, where they were interned at a detention center in the village of Vittel, while their cases were gone over by skeptical German officials. As doubtful as the Nazis were about the origin of these papers, they could not afford to upset these neutral Latin American countries, whose authoritarian rulers were, in fact, sympathetic to their cause. How these particular refugees were able to acquire these papers, purchased secretly through anti-Nazi emissaries in the Paraguayan and Salvadoran embassies in Bern, as well as their dubious provenance, was always clouded. What also remained unclear was how contacts friendly to the United States had been able to get them into the hands of the very subject and his family (aka “Catfish”) they were attempting to smuggle out. For a while, the prospects looked hopeful. Twice, transport out of Europe had been arranged, via Holland and France. Yet each time the Germans blocked their exit. Then, just three months ago, an informer from Warsaw had blown the papers’ suspect origins wide open, and now the fates of all the Vittel Jews, including the one they so desperately wanted, were completely up in the air.

  “I’m afraid we’ve hit a snag, Mr. President,” Donovan said. “We don’t know for certain if he’s even there.”

  “Or if he is, if he’s even still alive…” Secretary of War Stimson added. “Our intelligence on the matter has all gone dark.”

  The emissaries who had passed along the documents had been arrested and were now in Nazi jails.

  “So I’m told we still need this man. At all costs.” The president turned to his secretary of war. “Is this still true?”

  “Like no other.” Stimson nodded. “We were close in Rotterdam. There was even transport booked. Now…” He shook his head somberly, then took his pen and pointed to a tiny spot on the map of Europe that was on a stand next to the conference table.

  A place called Oswiecim. In Poland.

  “Oswiecim?” Roosevelt put back on his glasses.

  “Oswiecim is the Polish name for Auschwitz, Mr. President,” the secretary of war said. “Which, in light of the report we’ve all just read, is why we’re here.”

  “I see.” The president nodded. “So now he’s one of five million faceless Jews, forced out of their homes against their will, without papers or identity?”

  “And to what fate, we do not know…” Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau shook his head gravely.

  “It’s all our fates that are in the balance, gentlemen.” Roosevelt pushed his wheelchair back from the table. “So you’re here to tell me we’ve done everything we can to find this man and get him out. And now it’s lost. We’ve lost.”

  He went around the table. For a moment, no one replied.

  “Perhaps not completely lost, Mr. President.” The OSS chief leaned forward. “My colleague Captain Strauss has looked at the situation closely. And he believes there might be one last way…”

  “A last way?” The tired president’s gaze fell on the young aide.

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  The captain appeared around thirty, slightly balding already, and a graduate of Columbia Law School. A smart cookie, Roosevelt had been told. “All right, son, you’ve got my attention,” the president said.

  Strauss cleared his throat and glanced one more time at his boss. He opened his folder.

  “Go on.” Donovan nodded to him. “Tell him your plan.”

  THREE

  JANUARY, FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

  THE VITTEL DETENTION CENTER, OCCUPIED FRANCE

  “Papa, Papa, wake up! They’re here!”

  The shrill of whistles knifed through the frigid morning air. Dr. Alfred Mendl awoke in his narrow bunk, his arm wrapped around his wife, Marte, protecting her from the January cold. Their daughter, Lucy, stood over them, both nervous and excited. She’d been at the blanket-covered window of the cramped room that was fit at most for four, but which they now shared with fourteen others. This was no place for a girl to pass her twenty-second birthday, as she had just the night before. Huddled on lice-infested mattresses, sleeping amid their haphazard suitcases and meager belongings, everyone slowly stirred out of their blankets and greatcoats with the anticipation that something clearly was up.

  “Papa, look now!”

  On the landing outside, the French milice were going room to room, banging on doors with their batons. “Get up! Out of bed, you lazy Jews. All those holding foreign passports, take your things and come down. You’re leaving!”

  Alfred’s heart leaped. After eight hard months, was this finally the time?

  He jumped out of bed, still dressed in his rumpled tweed pants and woolen undershirt, all that kept him warm. They had all slept in their warmest clothes most every night for months now, washing them whenever they could. He nearly tripped over the family stretched out on the floor next to them. They rotated the sleeping arrangements a month at a time.

  “Everyone holding foreign passports packed and out!” a black-clad police
man threw open the door and instructed them.

  “Marte, get up! Throw everything together. Maybe today is the day!” he said to his wife with a feeling of hopefulness. Hope that had been dashed many times over the past year.

  Everyone in the room was murmuring, slowly coming to life. Light barely crept through the blanket-covered sills. Vittel was a detention camp in the northeast corner of France, actually four six-story hotels that formed a ring around a large courtyard, not exactly “four stars,” so the joke went, as it was all surrounded by three rows of barbed wire manned by German patrols. Thousands were held there—political prisoners, citizens of neutral or enemy countries whom the Germans were hoping to exchange—although the Jews, mostly of Polish and Dutch descent, whose fate was being decided by Berlin, were kept together on the same ward. The French policeman who entered their room stepped between the rustling bodies, prodding people along with his stick. “Didn’t you hear me? All of you, up, packed. Quick, quick! Why are you dallying? You’re shipping out.”

  Those who were slow to move, he nudged sharply with his stick and kicked open their suitcases that were strewn on the floor.

  “Where are we going?” people questioned in various languages and accents: Polish, Yiddish, and awkward French, everyone scurrying to get their things together.

  “You’ll see. Just get yourself moving. That’s my only job. And take your papers. You’ll find out downstairs.”

  “Take our papers!” Alfred looked at Marte and Lucy with a lift in his heart. Could this finally be their time? He and his family had waited so long there. Eight harsh months, after making their way with the forged identity papers gotten into his hands by the emissary from the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw. First to the Swiss border through Slovakia and Austria, where they were turned away; then by train through occupied France to Holland, all the while under the protection of the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw as a foreign national on a teaching assignment at the university in Lvov. Once, they literally got as far as the pier in Rotterdam where they were to board a Swedish cargo ship, the Prinz Eugen, to Stockholm, transport papers in hand, only to be turned back again as their papers needed to be authenticated. Literally in limbo, they were sent here to Vittel, while Jewish organizations in Switzerland and the United States’ and British governments argued their cases and pressured the Paraguayan and Salvadoran governments to honor their documents. Since then, they had been kept here in a kind of diplomatic hell. Always promised that the matter was being looked into. One more day, just another day, while the German foreign office and Latin American embassies worked it out. Alfred and his family had even taught themselves Spanish, to make their case all the more convincing. Of course they knew their documents were not worth the paper they were printed on. Alfred was Polish, had been born in Warsaw, and had taught physics at the university in Lvov after years in Prague and Gottingen with some of the best minds in the atomic field. At least until he was stripped of his position a year ago and his diplomas were trashed and burned. Marte was from Prague, now overrun by the Nazis, but had been a Polish citizen for years. They all knew that the only thing that had kept them from being shipped off somewhere and never heard from again was these papers, suspect as they were, that had been arranged by he knew not who with the promise that they would get the family out and to America, where he would be greeted warmly by Szilard and Fermi, his old colleagues. Still, whatever they had suffered these past months was far better than what they would have faced back home. Months ago he’d heard the university in Lvov had been cleared out just like those in Warsaw and Krakow. The last of his colleagues shot, kicked in the streets, or shipped off somewhere with their families, never heard from again.

  Bring your papers, the policeman said now. Was this a good sign or a bad one? Alfred didn’t know. But everyone around him was springing to life, pulsing with both nerves and anticipation. Maybe it had all been cleared up at last. Maybe they were finally leaving.

  A day hadn’t passed where he hadn’t dreamed of presenting his work to people who pursued good and not these Nazis.

  “Darling, come on, quick!” He helped his wife fill up her suitcase. Marte was frail these days. She’d caught a cold in November, and it seemed to have never left her chest. She looked like she’d aged ten years since they’d begun their journey.

  They’d had to leave everything behind. Their fine china. Their collection of antique pharmacy jars. All the awards that had been given to him. Anything of value other than a few photographs and, of course, his work. They stuffed whatever they had taken into their small bags. When the time came to leave, it had to be in a day.

  “Lucy, quick!” Alfred assembled his papers and threw them into his leather briefcase along with the few books he’d been able to bring along. He could lose his clothing, his academic diplomas, the photographs of his parents on the Vistula in Warsaw, the personal effects dearest to him. Even his best shoes. But his work—his work must remain. His formulas and research. Everything depended on getting them out. One day that would become clear. He hastily bundled it all together in his case and fastened the lock. “Marte, Lucy, we must go.”

  A few in the crowded room remained behind and wished those who were leaving well, like prisoners saying goodbye to a fellow inmate who’d been pardoned. “See you in a better life,” they said, as if they knew their fates would not be as rosy. A strange familiarity had built up among people whose lives had been thrown together for months in such close quarters.

  “God be with you! Goodbye!”

  Alfred, Marte, and Lucy made their way outside, melding into the river of people heading along the outside corridors and down to the courtyard. Parents held onto their children; sons and daughters helped the elderly as they slowly went down the stairs, so as not to be trampled in the rush. On the ground, they were herded into the large yard, shivering from the January chill, murmuring, wondering to their neighbors what was going to happen next. Above them, a crowd of those left behind pressed against the banisters, looking on.

  “Papa, what’s going to happen to us?” Lucy asked, eyeing the German guards with their submachine guns.

  Alfred looked around. “I don’t know.”

  There were Germans—there always were—but not so many as one would think if something bad was going to happen to them. They all huddled together in the cold. Merchants, teachers, accountants, rabbis. In long woolen coats and homburgs and fedoras.

  Whistles sounded. An officious-looking captain in the local French militia, a German officer following behind, stepped in front of the throng and ordered everyone to line up with their papers. The German was in a gray wool officer’s coat with the markings of the secret intelligence division, the Abwehr, which worried Alfred.

  He and his family grabbed their suitcases and joined the queue.

  The French officer went down the line, family by family, inspecting their papers closely and checking their faces. Some he instructed to remain where they were; others he waved to the side of the yard. Armed guards stood everywhere. And dogs, barking loudly and pulling on their leashes, scaring the young children and some of the parents too.

  “It will be a joy to be rid of this place,” Marte said. “Wherever we end up.”

  “It will,” Alfred said, though he was sensing something in the mood of the soldiers that didn’t seem right. They had their caps low and their hands on their weapons. There was no levity. No fraternizing.

  Those who didn’t speak French were directed to the side without knowing what was going on. One family, Hungarian, Alfred suspected, shouted loudly in their native tongue as a French militiaman tried to move them and then kicked open a suitcase, filled with religious articles, which the old man and his wife scampered vainly to pick up. Another man, clearly a rabbi with a long white beard, kept showing his papers to the milice captain in frustration. The French officer finally flung them back at him, the old man and his wife bending to pick them off the ground as eagerly as if they were thousand-zloty notes.

  No,
Alfred thought, it didn’t seem right at all.

  The captain and his German overseer made their way down the line. The soldiers and the guards gradually began to use more force to restrain everyone.

  “Don’t worry, these have been checked many times,” Alfred assured Marte and Lucy. “They will definitely pass.”

  But a worrisome feeling rose up in him as each interaction seemed to be met only by frustration and anger, and then people were brusquely shuffled into the growing throng ringed by heavily armed guards.

  Outside the walls they heard a train hiss to a stop.

  “See, they are taking us somewhere.” Alfred tried to sound optimistic to his family.

  At last the French officer made his way up to them. “Papers,” he requested impassively. Alfred handed him the travel documents showing that he and his family were under the protection of the Paraguayan government and had merely been residents in Poland these past seven years.

  “We have been waiting a long time to get home,” Alfred said in French to the officer, whose shifting black eyes never really looked at him, just back and forth, from the documents to their faces, as had been done many times these past eight months without incident. The SS officer stood behind him, hands clasped behind his back, with a stonelike look that made Alfred feel uneasy.

  “Have you enjoyed your stay here in France, señorita?” the milice captain asked Lucy in passable Spanish.

  “Sí, sir,” she replied, nervously enough so that Alfred could hear it in her voice. Who wouldn’t be? “But I am ready to finally get home.”

  “I’m sure you are,” the captain said. Then he stepped in front of Alfred. “It says you are a professor?”

  “Yes. Electromagnetic physics.”

  “And where did you acquire these papers, monsieur?”

  “What? Where did we acquire them…?” Alfred stammered back, his insides knotting with fear. “These were issued by the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw. I assure you they are valid. Look, there, you can see…” He went to show the officer the official seal and signatures.