The One Man

by Andrew Gross

  The escapee slid the photograph back across the table, as if awaiting a reply.

  “There is no answer,” Strauss said, meeting the man’s eyes. “There is only urgency. Though I understand your plea. And I will take it back with me to the highest levels of my government. You have my promise.”

  The escapee sniffed, flicking an ash into the ashtray. His eyes darted toward his friend, Vrba, as if there were a kind of silent agreement between them. Waiting a moment, Strauss went to place the photo of Mendl back in his briefcase.

  Then Rudolf Vrba suddenly said in heavily accented English, but with a begrudging nod: “He is there. Your man. Of course, that was two months ago. Hundreds die every day. So who knows for sure…?”

  Strauss felt a surge of optimism run through him. He is there. These were the very words he had traveled across the ocean to hear. “How can you be sure?” he asked the Czech. “There must have been thousands of faces there. And he must look different now. Everything has changed.” Recollection was one thing, but Strauss needed confirmation. Something firm.

  Vrba shrugged. “He was some kind of professor, is it not right? At least that was what people called him.”

  “Yes.” Strauss nodded, his blood galloping now. “He was.”

  “And besides, there is always LR seven…”

  “LR seven…?” Strauss looked back in confusion. He jotted the number down on a pad. “What is that?”

  “Lower right molar. I studied dentistry back home. They brought him to me once. For an abscess.” His impish mouth curved into a smile. “In the camp, I never looked at faces too closely. But I never forget a tooth.”

  EIGHT

  That night, Strauss sat at the bar at the Hotel Sao Mamede, on a dark side street, a world away from the noise and festive life of the casino. Even farther from the Pallácio Estoril Hotel and its bustling, wood-paneled bar where German and British spies mingled over cognac and where everyone who stepped in was sure to end up on someone’s list.

  There was only one other couple, drinking Aperol and nuzzling in a quiet corner.

  Here no one would notice him. No desk clerk would look through his messages. Strauss read over the cable he had just sent back to Washington, D.C.

  It was to a telex number established solely to get his message into Colonel Donovan’s hands unobserved. Mostly, it described the mundane details of his trip. Clients seen, orders pending. An application to the Department of Minerals. All fake, of course. Made up.

  It was only the message’s last line that carried any meaning.

  “You’re not going to help us, are you?” Alexander Katzner appealed to him after Vrba and Wetzler’s admission, the real purpose of Strauss’s visit now made clear.

  No. I cannot.

  Strauss had studied Torah until his teens. His father’s family still had relatives in Europe. He thought of the numbers he’d seen etched into Wetzler’s wrist. If they would send in planes to bomb the fucking sites, he would man the first plane himself.

  The barman came up to him.

  “Scotch,” Strauss ordered. “Whatever’s best.” He wasn’t normally a drinker, but tonight, thinking of what Donovan’s reaction would be, a drink seemed the right thing.

  Hundreds of innocent people die every day, Wetzler said to him. What has this man done that he deserves your attention above all others?

  “How do you not feel it yourself?” one of the war refugee officials looked in Strauss’s eyes. “As a Jew?”

  Yes, he felt it. How it ached him that he could not answer.

  It just wasn’t why he was here.

  The barman brought his scotch. Strauss downed it in a gulp. He felt his heart light up. He smiled, imagining his boss’s response, three thousand miles away, when he received the news.

  He ordered one more.

  An abscess … Strauss had to laugh and shook his head. At least now they knew where he was. In a place more hell than living. Now all they had to do was get him out.

  Fishing looks promising here, he had ended the cable. Get your pole ready. Catfish is in the pond.

  NINE

  EARLY MAY, TWO WEEKS LATER

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  THAT SAME MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE WITH FDR, STIMSON,

  MORGENTHAU, AND DONOVAN

  Roosevelt stared at Strauss, who set his papers on the table. “We’re talking about this man that’s in Auschwitz, Captain … You said there was another way?”

  “Yes.” Strauss glanced at his boss, Donovan. The OSS chief nodded for him to go on. “If we can’t buy him out, or can no longer barter for him,” the captain cleared his throat, “then I suggest we simply take him.”

  At first no one said a thing.

  “Take him…?” Treasury Secretary Morgenthau looked at him as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “You mean just go in there? Into a death camp guarded by a thousand Germans. In the middle of occupied Poland?”

  Strauss felt the dubious reaction. This was absolutely the biggest stage he had ever played on. And maybe the last, the thought occurred to him. He looked back at the treasury secretary, one of the president’s closest confidants, a man he knew he would need to convince, and nodded firmly. “Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting, sir.”

  Strauss turned toward Henry Stimson as the air in the room grew thick with skepticism. “You say you need this man, don’t you, Mr. Secretary?”

  FDR’s secretary of war nodded grudgingly. “He was a professor. In Lvov. Electromagnetic physics. He’s one of only two people in the world who has this precise expertise. Without him,” he turned to the president, “I’m afraid our people out West feel we would fall further behind.”

  It was the first time Strauss had heard that phrase, “out West,” but it was clear it was something big. Word had filtered out within the intelligence network that they were close to delivering a weapon of decisive magnitude.

  “You say he’s one of two…?” Roosevelt kept his gaze on Stimson.

  “Yes. But according to General Groves,” the OSS chief cut in, “the only one not currently working for the Germans in their own uranium experiments,” Donovan clarified.

  “I see.” Secret scientific experiments on nuclear fission to produce a chain reaction capable of creating a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the world had ever seen were racing forward on both sides of the Atlantic, in the United States, at Los Alamos, New Mexico—“out West”—headed up by physicist Robert Oppenheimer and his military overseer, General Leslie Groves. In this room, only Roosevelt and his secretary of war knew the real stakes of this race and that the outcome of the war would likely go to the winner.

  “So in that case,” Captain Strauss looked around the table, “that’s precisely what I propose we do.”

  * * *

  “You mean a raid?” Now it was the president’s turn to question him. “Into Nazi territory? Just send in a squad. Disable the guards. Find him and whisk him out?”

  “No, Mr. President,” the OSS captain explained. He opened a folder and took out a map, a rendering of the camp Vrba and Wetzler had drawn themselves. “A raid would be impossible. The camp is heavily guarded. Plus, there are additional detachments of troops nearby. It can’t be done by force, at least not that quickly. There are thousands of prisoners in there. I’m told they are identified by numbers, not even names. I saw this, in Lisbon.” He held out his arm. “Numbers burned into the prisoners’ wrists.”

  Roosevelt winced in disgust, then turned to Donovan. “Then what is your plan?”

  “One man.” The OSS chief took Vrba’s map. “We drop him in at night nearby. We link him up with local partisans, whom we’ve already made contact with. We can sneak him into the camp. Then he has seventy-two hours to find his mark. And get them both out.”

  “A single man? It would be like finding a needle in a haystack in that place,” Henry Stimson declared. “If he’s even still alive.”

  “Yes. I agree.” Donovan nodded soberly. “That is a big ‘if.’ The odds
would not be good. But the stakes of not having this man, as I understand it, are not good either.”

  “One man…” Morgenthau said out loud what they were all thinking. “Who would even undertake this mission? You read what atrocities are going on in there. If he’s caught, or can’t get out, it’s suicide. And he will be caught, Colonel Donovan, be sure of that. And then what?” He turned to FDR. “It’ll jeopardize all our larger negotiations at this time. Eichmann himself is set to barter for thousands of Jewish lives. And you can’t send in a trained operative. He’ll stick out in there like a sore thumb. In minutes. He’ll have to speak the language, look the part…”

  “We think we have someone,” Peter Strauss interrupted, opening another file. He passed around a photo.

  It was of a man with dark, Semitic features. In his twenties. A gaunt, narrow face, dark eyes.

  “He’s not an operative. He’s an intelligence lieutenant here in D.C.,” Strauss said. “Currently decoding German and Polish cables. His name is Blum. Nathan.”

  “He’s Jewish?” Morgenthau asked, picking the photo up and staring closely at it.

  “Yes.”

  Stimson looked at the OSS captain with incredulity. “You’re going to sneak a desk-bound translator into a labor camp in enemy territory on one of the most vital undercover missions of the war? Are you mad?” The war secretary’s disdain for what he took to be the recklessness of many of the OSS’s ventures was well known in the intelligence community.

  “He’s not just a translator. He came here from Warsaw in 1941,” Strauss explained. “He snuck out of the Krakow ghetto and risked his life to carry a revered religious document to safety in Sweden. He spent a year at Northwestern, where he was the school’s lightweight boxing champion, then he enlisted. He’s fluent in four languages, including Polish and German.”

  “And you think he’ll do this?” Roosevelt looked at the photo and then handed it back to Strauss. “Go back to the very place he risked his life to escape from? On a wild-goose chase to find this one man?”

  “We think there’s a good chance he will,” Colonel Donovan cut in. “He’s already asked to do something more.”

  “Oh, this definitely classifies as more.” Stimson snorted derisively.

  “Plus, there’s one other thing…”

  “And that is…?” Roosevelt’s war-heavy eyes fell on him.

  “His entire family was killed by the Germans six months after he was here.” Donovan looked the president in the eyes. “According to those who know him, he feels he left them there to die.”

  TEN

  THE NEXT DAY

  OSS HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Nathan Blum sat at his desk, one of a row of twelve, in the basement of the C building at OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C. A stack of cables, some in Polish, others in Russian and Ukrainian, often in code, from partisans in occupied Poland and Ukraine had come in. As a Grade C junior analyst, it was Blum’s job to translate them from the original and then pass them on, sorted by priority, to the appropriate personnel in his department, which was known inside the building as UE-5, or Underground Activities in Europe, the “5” for Poland, and was devoted to contact and coordination with insurgent activities there.

  That morning a series of photographs had arrived in the sealed pouch from London. They were of several large pieces of debris that had been picked up by the Polish resistance from the Bug River near the town of Siemiatycze in eastern Poland. Two weeks prior, they had intercepted cables detailing how two key German scientists from the secret missile laboratory at Peenemünde were headed to that area of Poland, where apparently the Nazis had set up some kind of secret testing facility. Now Blum had a sense why. Two days ago, partisans near Siemiatycze had reported a flash in the early morning sky, which then spiraled back to earth—clearly the failed test launch of some kind of secret missile. Combining the reports, Blum was certain these photos weren’t of just any debris. This was the real thing, he felt for sure, likely a test flight of the Nazis’ rumored guided weapon, the V-2, which they would be able to launch from the mainland against a defenseless England. The actual debris pieces were now in the hands of the Polish underground, awaiting transport to another location where they could be transported to England and gone over by experts, an action known as Operation Most, which meant “bridge” in Polish.

  The images Blum was staring at could turn out to be one of the biggest intelligence breakthroughs of the war.

  Though he was barely twenty-three, and the OSS’s principal day-to-day liason with the AK, the Armia Krajowa—the Polish resistance group that was actively engaged in a war of sabotage and assassination behind enemy lines, pretty much making life on the Nazis’ collapsing Russian front a bloody hell—Blum had spent the last year in this musty basement, aching to do more. Only three years earlier he had been a student at the university in his hometown of Krakow studying economics while continuing to practice Liszt and Chopin on the piano to please his mother, though he much preferred the more contemporary music of Fats Waller and the American jazz artists who had taken the continent by storm. He was a decent player, though never in the same league as his younger sister, Leisa, was on the clarinet; everyone said she would one day play with the national orchestra. His father owned the finest hat store in Krakow, on Florianska Street, with a small factory upstairs. They sold homburgs, Borsalinos, fedoras, even the smaller tweed Alpine hats so popular with the Austrians and Germans these days. Even rabbinical hats. Hats had no country, his father always said. Before the Nazis came, they lived not in the Jewish Quarter but in a spacious apartment on Grodzka Street near the Mariacki Cathedral. His father’s customers were businessmen, government officials, professors, rabbis, even members of exiled royal families. They had music in their life, and art, and friends from all segments of Polish society. They spoke Polish, not Yiddish. They didn’t even keep kosher.

  His mother always told the story of her visiting Aunt Rosa, who complained, “I know it doesn’t matter to you, but couldn’t you at least put out a different knife for buttering the bread and cutting the meat?”

  To which his mother replied, “But don’t you know, good aunt, the meat is fried in butter to begin with?”

  Their poor aunt went pale.

  That was all before 1941, of course, when all Jewish businesses were forced to close and Jews of all commitment were relocated to the ghetto.

  While at the university, Blum joined the free political youth movement there. He even helped publish an antifascist newsletter, HeHaluc HaLohem, The Fighting Pioneer. Then, in October, Jews were told they could no longer study there. His father’s store was looted and marked with a big yellow star, and they were all given armbands and patches which they were forced to wear. Then they were made to close, after sixty years in business. For two generations they had sold hats to the finest gentlemen in Poland. In the ghetto, they had to move into a cramped, run-down apartment on Jozefinska Street with their cousins, the Herzlichs, twelve of them sharing four small rooms. Blum became what was known as a ferret inside the walls, taking out mail regularly and passing along family messages, even money for safekeeping, bringing in food and needed medicine, and even guns. His friend from the university, Jakob Epstein, grew up in that area and showed Blum all the underground sewers and tunnels, the doors between buildings no one knew, secret hiding places if they were chased, even the chasms deep underneath the synagogue and the passageways over the rooftops, until he knew them as well as any local thief. To be captured smuggling something in meant certain death as well as harsh repercussions for his family. Blum’s main asset was his innocent face and trusting way about him, masking an inner resolve.

  Once, to avoid capture, he had to hide underneath the chassis of a German troop truck at the very moment a raid was under way and then roll out and duck behind trash cans as the truck pulled away, troops clinging to the side. Another time he was stopped outside the gate with packets of money and letters sewn into his rucksack and he produced
a forged pass that said he was a worker at Struhl, a German sugar factory in the outside sector. “You look a little young to be a worker.” The guard regarded him skeptically. “I’m not the manager,” Blum replied, never betraying his fear, “only the floor sweeper.” They let him pass. And once he was shot at as he fled across a rooftop; fortunately his arm was merely grazed, a reminder of how real the danger was, though his mother treated it as if it was a mortal wound.

  In the spring of 1943, the ghetto was closed for good and the treatment of Jews and his family worsened. A sense of uncertainty prevailed, rumors of executions in Lodz and Warsaw. Mass deportations to places unknown, where no one was ever heard from again. A perpetual sadness became etched into his father’s face. Everything his own father and he had built was now lost. All the government customers he’d had over the years, relationships with some of the wealthiest families in Krakow, who now wouldn’t even return his letters. One day Blum’s friend Epstein was pulled from his apartment and taken away to Gestapo headquarters in the Dom Slaski. No one ever heard from him again. Blum’s mother pleaded for him to stop; it was only a matter of time for him, Nathan, to be caught. Soon after, Rabbi Morgenstern came to his father. Krakow’s main synagogue had an important Talmud dating back to the twelfth century, with a commentary written by a student of the venerable Maimonides himself. The holy tract had to survive at all costs, the elders of the temple agreed. And who was the best prepared to smuggle it out and deliver it for safekeeping into the right hands?

  Blum.

  He didn’t want to leave, to abandon his parents and his sister, who had always been his closest friend. Rumors of mass deportations spread like wildfire through the ghetto. Who would watch out for his family? Who was better able to take care of them? Some of his friends spoke of remaining in the ghetto and putting up a fight.