by Andrew Gross
“We need someone who’s familiar with this area and who speaks the language. And who would…” Strauss looked at him. “Fit in.”
“Fit in…?” Blum repeated, still not sure what they were asking of him.
“What we’re proposing, Lieutenant,” the man known as “Wild Bill” Donovan leaned forward and set his deep-set eyes on Blum, “is to sneak you into there, inside the camp, I’m saying, and for you to bring someone back out.”
“Into the camp?” Blum stared back in consternation. “Who…?”
“A fair question.” Captain Strauss took over for his boss. “But I’m afraid we just can’t share that with you right now.” He removed a map from his file, a blown-up rendering of the area surrounding the camp. “We can drop you in by plane. At night. Here.” He pointed to a spot. “It’s about twenty kilometers from the camp. Have you ever jumped, Nathan? I didn’t see it in your file.”
“From a plane? No.” Blum shook his head. “Only in training.”
“No matter. We’ll take you through it. You’ll only have to do it once. On the ground, we can rendezvous with the local resistance. We know how to set this up. We can get you inside. As part of a daily work crew. That’s the easy part. Apparently local workmen enter and leave the grounds routinely.”
“You are certain of this?” Blum pressed. They made it sound as if it was like taking a trip on the Chicago rail line: First you take the L to Lake Street, then you switch to the Southside line, to Garfield, and then …
“As you might imagine…” Donovan leaned forward with the hint of a wry smile, “getting someone into a place like Auschwitz is not generally the issue.”
“Yes, of course,” Blum said, betraying that same smile. “And you can get me out? With this person? And then back?” His mind raced through how very risky this would be. Just getting into Poland itself would not be easy. This deep, behind enemy lines. The jump alone terrified him. And then what if he was unable to meet up with the local resistance? He’d be stranded there. Alone. Or if he was unable to find this man—even if he was able to get inside the camp. Or if the Germans saw through him. It would be certain death.
“Yes.” Strauss nodded with conviction. “I believe we can.”
“But once inside, you’d have to know you’ll be completely on your own,” Colonel Donovan said. “We’ll construct your laborer’s clothing to reverse into a camp uniform. We don’t know for sure exactly where this person is inside the camp. To be frank, we don’t know for sure that he’s even still alive. He’s fifty-seven, and not in the best of health. It’s probably more like seventy-seven there. And from what we’ve heard…” the Big Man tapped his meaty index finger on the table and his mouth twisted into a frown, “it’s not exactly a walk in the park in there.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the rumors,” Blum agreed. “May I smoke?”
“Please,” Colonel Donovan said, and reached for an ashtray and pushed it toward him. Blum took out a pack of Luckys, tapped the top, and lit one up.
From his file, Strauss removed a crude, hand-drawn map and slid it across. “This is the camp.” There was a double perimeter of wire, with several guard towers. Dozens of what appeared to be prisoners’ quarters, called “blocks,” all numbered. A women’s camp was marked nearby. Blum’s eyes were drawn to a small rectangular building that went by the sinister name Crematorium.
“We know he was there a month ago. We know how to get you in and out. What we need is for you to find him in there. We have an escape route that we’re confident will work. We also have the names of several people on the inside, fellow prisoners, even guards, who you may be able to rely on. The thing is, you’ll only have seventy-two hours, and no way to be in touch. The rescue plane will land precisely where it drops you, and only once. It can only remain on the ground for a few minutes, and then it will leave. You will have to be there.”
Blum looked at them. “And if I’m not…?”
“If you’re not, then I’m afraid you’re completely on your own.” Colonel Donovan knitted his fingers together. “In a very hostile place. You miss that plane, there’s no return ticket, son.”
“Seventy-two hours…” Blum ran the prospects through his head. None made the outcome particularly rosy. “And if I find him, are you sure he will even come with me?”
“In truth, Lieutenant,” Strauss sat back in his chair, “we’re not completely sure of anything, on the inside. We don’t know what health he is currently in. We don’t even know for certain if he’s even still alive.”
“Yet you are willing to risk all this? To send me there?”
Strauss looked to Donovan. “Yes. We are.”
“And you won’t even tell me who this man is? Or why he is so important?”
“I’m afraid we can’t,” Colonel Donovan said. “Not right now. Right now, we can only show you a photograph. And obviously you’ll have his name.”
Blum tapped an ash on the edge of the ashtray. “I’d be risking my life for this one man,” he said, looking at both their faces, “and you can’t even tell me what he does?”
The captain nodded. “I’m afraid that’s the case, Lieutenant. Yes.”
Blum looked back at the map, taking it all in. He did speak the language and look the part. He would, as Strauss said, “fit in.” And he had escaped before. But what if he couldn’t find the man? Or get himself out? He’d be stranded. His family was dead now. Many of his friends were likely dead as well. He had nothing left there. “How do you know all this?” Blum looked back up at them. “The layout. How to get in. This rendezvous you can set up with the local resistance.”
Strauss pulled out two more photos from the file. “I was in Portugal a week ago. I met with these two men, who, one month ago, were able to escape from Auschwitz. The first to do so.
“Rudolf Vrba…” The captain placed a photo on the table. “And Alfred Wetzler. They’re Czech. They told me everything. The layout of the camp. The routine there. The surrounding area. Prisoners inside who might prove helpful. Certain guards who can be bought. This map is theirs. It’s accurate up to one month ago. It will work, Nathan. They’ve even agreed to assist on this mission.”
Blum ran his eyes back over the map: the double perimeter of wire, the marked guard towers. They came to rest on the rectangular building. “And what did your two escapees tell you about what happens here?”
He pointed to the place marked Crematorium.
Strauss didn’t answer at first. He eyed his boss. Then he nodded, kind of circumspectly. “Are you certain you want to know?”
“You are asking me to risk my life, to go back to a place I was blessed to get away from, to find a single person who you won’t even tell me what he does. What is the expression here…?” He looked at Donovan. “A needle in a haystack? So, yes, what happens here?” Blum placed his finger on the building again. “I think it is fair to know what I might face, if I go, should all these detailed preparations of yours not fully come together.”
“I didn’t mean as a part of this mission, Lieutenant,” Strauss glanced at Donovan and said. “I meant,” he cleared his throat, “as a Jew. People are gassed there.” He moistened his lips. “In large numbers. Thousands. Tens of thousands. More. Then their bodies are burned. These are ovens.” The captain pointed to the building on the map Nathan had asked about. “Though what I’ve now told you is in the strictest confidence and cannot be repeated, either to someone in uniform,” he looked at Blum with the utmost seriousness in his eyes, “or not.”
A hollowness rose up in Blum’s gut. Ovens. He sat back, the color draining out of his face, nausea knotting inside him. Gassed. He drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, and let what Strauss had said out. Thousands. Tens of thousands. More. They’d all heard of such horrors. Killings on such an unprecedented scale. Still, everyone prayed it was only a rumor. Now he saw that it was all true. And he saw something else behind the gritted jaw and single-minded cast of the OSS captain’s face. Sorrow. Pain. Etched into the fi
xed resolve in his eyes.
“Bisse yid?” Blum inquired, speaking in Yiddish. Are you Jewish?
Strauss paused only a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes.”
“And this man…” Blum placed his index finger on the map of the camp. “This will not help any of them, these people who are already in here…?”
“Not a single one, sadly.” The captain shook his head, enough for Nathan to see that he had already asked that same question of himself.
Blum nodded, in the way a close relative might when told of grave family news, sinking back into his chair. “People being gassed … This man, who you won’t tell me a thing about … Only seventy-two hours to find him … Otherwise, no chance of coming back…” He turned to Donovan. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Colonel, you certainly know how to drive a hard bargain.”
“Yes.” The OSS chief chuckled back. “And that’s not all, I’m afraid. We’ll need your answer quickly.”
“How quickly?” Blum put out his cigarette.
“Tomorrow.” Donovan stood up.
“Tomorrow…?” Blum’s eyes widened in surprise.
The Big Man stood up, put his hand on Blum’s shoulder, and smiled again. “I believe you’re the one, Lieutenant, who expressed the interest in doing something more.”
“Yes.” Blum stood up too.
“You’re doing a fine job, son,” the colonel said, “for your new country. I’m sure that reassignment you put in to the Ritchie boys will be coming through at any time, if that’s how you’d like it to go.” He put out his hand. “You can only imagine how much we feel depends on this mission.”
“Thank you, sir,” Blum replied. The Big Man’s hand was firm and rough. “But I do have one question, if I may.”
“Of course. Go ahead.” His hand was still wrapped in Donovan’s.
“This man … If I get him out. Will it save lives or cost them, in the end?”
“In the end…” The Boss nodded, the dark side and shadows of the war etched in his deep-set eyes. “The answer is both, I’m afraid.”
Blum nodded and took his cap from the table and took a step toward the door. “Thank you, sir.” Then he stopped, hesitating a moment, feeling something rising up in him, courage or foolishness, he would decide later, and turned back. “Just one more thing…”
Donovan was already back behind his desk and had picked up a report. Strauss, reassembling his file, looked up. “Of course.”
“You still haven’t told me how you plan on getting me out.”
THIRTEEN
That night, after most of the base had gone to bed, Blum smoked a cigarette on the back stairs of the officers’ barracks near K Street. Thunder rattled in the far-off skies.
If his meeting in the A building earlier had been to confirm his transfer to Fort Ritchie, Blum might have celebrated by catching a film; a new one, To Have and Have Not, with Bogart and Bacall, based on the Hemingway book, was playing on the base. Or there was this girl he had taken out a couple of times, the cousin of a neighbor back in Chicago who worked in the cosmetics department at Woodward & Lothrop, the big department store chain there. She was pretty and laughed easily, which always reminded him of his sister. And, as opposed to many of the officers in his unit, she seemed not to mind his European accent.
Instead, he just stayed in his barracks. He felt in a similar way to how he’d felt the night he set out from Krakow, when he sensed in his heart he was saying goodbye to his family for the last time. That a choice had been put in front of him for which he had no logic or means to properly evaluate, but still, one he knew he must take.
Will it save lives or cost them, in the end?
Both, Colonel Donovan had said.
The night was warm. It reminded him of many such nights back home, humidity so thick you could spread it on bread with jam when there was no butter, his mother used to say.
So how was he to choose? Will it save lives or cost them? What other calculus was there for deciding? It is what his father would have asked the colonel. He could almost hear his measured voice, pipe in hand, posing the question.
Or Rabbi Leitner, his instructor? There was something from the Mishnah he recalled, one of those countless tenets of Jewish law that had been drummed into him in dark-lit rooms as a boy, while his thoughts drifted out the window to things he found much more fun: playing football with friends in Krasinski Park, or the Sabbath goose his mother might have waiting for him later. With barley soup and kreplach, and a kompot of stewed apples and prunes.
Pidyon shvuyim was how it was phrased in Hebrew.
To redeem a captive.
Taking a drag from his Lucky, Blum recalled the old rabbi once asking, his voice echoing in a corner of the empty synagogue, whether paying a ransom for the freedom of a man held hostage in the end would cost or save lives. Or just maybe, he explained, only bring additional hardship and suffering. “What is good cannot be fully known in the short term, do you understand that, Nathan?” The rabbi had come around the desk. Surely a life would be saved, he admitted. Yes. “But then would others then be taken and held in ransom the same way? Would funds that were meant for improvement of the temple be spent toward this ransom, and thus, let it fall into decline? Of course, if it was your son, or your brother,” the rabbi had shrugged, “the answer is not so clear.”
To Blum, if he did what Strauss and Donovan had asked of him, it was not so much that he would be “buying” back a life as putting his up in its place, in the same way a ransom would be offered. In effect, Blum would be the ransom. Sitting there, he smiled, as he could see the old rabbi pensively stroking his gray beard, muttering how else could you determine whether or not to pay for a captive’s life unless you know this answer? Will it save lives or cost them, in the end? Taking out of the equation whose life in fact it was that was held—a brother or a complete stranger. That was the only answer or reply.
Blum thought back to how since he was seventeen and the Nazis had first marched into Krakow, no answer was ever easy.
He reminded himself that his parents and his sister had forfeited their lives so that he could be here now. There were many others who could easily have been picked to go instead of him. There was Perlman, Blum recalled, or Pincas Schreive. They were just as skilled as Blum was at avoiding the Germans. Why did they not choose them? Blum’s mind brought back the glimmer of hope in his father’s eyes amid the sadness of their final goodbye. Hope dimmed, because they both felt a sense of the different fates that awaited them, like diverging branches of the same tree.
And now to go back, Blum reflected, on a mission that was clearly more suicide than hope. For some man, only a name and a face, whose value might never be known to him. It made his decision to leave Krakow—It was a great honor, his father had insisted—stand for nothing if he ended up forfeiting his life in the same place they had given up their lives for him to leave.
So how else could he decide? He had looked into the colonel’s somber eyes hoping to find the answer. You can see how vital we think this is … His look was just like his father’s that last time. But then, We don’t know for sure that he’s even still alive.
The odds against the mission’s success were long. He saw that clearly in Strauss’s and Donovan’s sober faces. Beneath the need and the strategic importance of this man, the two of them clearly knew precisely what they were sending Blum on.
He reached into his wallet and removed the small photograph he had of him and Leisa, she, fourteen, sitting on the sill of the open window at their family’s country house in Masuria. He, still barely able to shave.
She said, I have a gift for you.
They had sat on the fire balcony of their cramped apartment on Jozefinska Street, their legs dangling over the edge.
“I don’t want you to go,” she told him.
He swung his feet. “Neither do I.”
“Then why…?” she pleaded. “Tell Papa you changed your mind.”
When he was six and she was three, his fath
er had made him promise to always watch out for his sister, in school, at the park. Once, when she was an infant, his father even playfully held her aloft above their fourth-floor window, saying “I’ll throw her out. Unless you promise to look after her.”
“I promise. I promise,” Blum yelled, unaware there was a shelf beneath her and Leisa was never in any danger.
“I have to go,” he replied. “The temple is depending on it. You’ll be all right. I told my friend Chaim to watch out for you if something happens.”
“Weissman? He’s an ass.” Leisa turned up her nose.
True, Chaim was pompous and boastful. But he knew the paths and alleyways out of danger as well as anyone in the ghetto, and he always seemed to find a way to ask about Leisa.
“Nonetheless, if things get bad and he comes for you, you must go with him.” Blum looked squarely at her. “Even if Mother and Father don’t. This is important, Leisa. You must promise me.”
She just looked at the street below, spotting a vendor pushing a lorry of vegetables four stories beneath them.
“I need you to promise me,” he said again.
“All right, I promise,” she finally agreed.
Blum looked closely at her.
“You have my word. I do.”
Blum smiled. “Good.”
A bit of time passed before she looked at him. “You think we’ll ever see each other again?”
“Absolutely,” he replied. “I’ll stake my life on it.”
“We’ll see. I’m not so much worried about us, Nathan—Father always gets by—as I am about you. America is such a different place. And you don’t speak a word of English.”
“That’s not true. I can say ‘Put ’em up!’” he said in the kind of slow, Western drawl he’d heard in films and cocked his finger like a gun.
