Black Cross

by Greg Iles

  41

  One hundred and fifty miles west of Rostock, the RAF Pathfinder force turned southeast toward Magdeburg. But as the last of the Lancasters of the 300-bomber Main Force moved into position behind them, the twelve Mosquitoes of the Special Duties Squadron continued eastward.

  In the cockpit of the lead Mosquito, Squadron Leader Harry Sumner spoke to his navigator, who was crowded into the seat behind his right shoulder. “Going to max speed, Jacobs. Strict radio silence from here out. Make a visual check to be sure everyone’s with us.”

  “Right.”

  Sumner put his hand affectionately on the throttles. The De Havilland Mosquito had turned out to be the miracle bomber of the war. Built wholly of plywood for peacetime air racing, the “Mossy” carried no defensive armament, relying on its tremendous speed to avoid confrontation. It could cruise to Germany at 265 miles per hour with a full bombload, then accelerate to 360 to evade even the best Luftwaffe night fighters. When Harry Sumner went to max speed, the Merlin engines roared like lions loosed from cages.

  “Everyone still there, Jacobs?”

  “Right with us, sir,” said the navigator.

  “H2S radar working?”

  “So far.”

  “Let’s find that bloody river.”

  Rachel Jansen knelt beside the prison bunk and looked down at her two sleeping children. They lay side by side, impossibly small and vulnerable, their faces placid above the tatty prison blanket. For two days and nights she had prayed for and dreaded this moment. There was no way to make a just choice, or even a logical one. It was like being asked which eye one would prefer to have plucked out.

  She tried in vain to block out the memories that tortured her: Marcus’s face after seeing the babies for the first time, especially Hannah, who had been born in the attic in Amsterdam; the hours Rachel had simply stared at the tops of their little heads while they suckled at her breasts, weeping with a rapturous awareness of mortality that closed the throat and made the skin prickle with heat—

  Stop! she told herself. You must choose!

  Her first instinct was to send Jan with the shoemaker’s son. It was him she had feared for most these last two weeks. But now it appeared that Klaus Brandt was going to die. The danger would be equal for both children after that. Rachel thought briefly of Marcus; if her husband were still alive, he would choose Jan. Continuation of the family name, he would say sternly. Yet Rachel felt little obligation to the Jansen name. Marcus was dead. A blade of guilt pierced her when she thought of his father dying beside her in the E-Block, but she drove the image from her mind.

  Gazing down at the children’s faces, Rachel simply stopped trying to decide. She laid a hand on Jan’s forehead. Three years old. Three years old and already one of the last survivors of his generation. It was impossible to comprehend. Yet it was reality. Hannah’s second birthday had passed while she rode in a stifling cattle car full of sick and dying Jews. Rachel remembered wrapping the little dreidl in straw and giving it to her like a present. Hannah instantly recognized the old toy, but everyone had pretended it was a new and priceless treasure.

  Rachel felt gooseflesh rise under her burlap shift. She had always felt a preternatural sense of peace when she looked at her daughter. It was almost like looking at herself. Not a mirror image, but rather a reflection in water, as if an imaginative and flattering artist had rendered Rachel as a child, widening her eyes, making her mouth fuller, her forehead a little higher. And every word Hannah said, each question she asked, bespoke Rachel’s own curiosity. Jan was like Marcus: reserved, a little gentleman.

  Rachel started as the voice of Avram Stern cut through the dark. Her time was running out. For an instant she actually considered taking the dreidl from her pocket and spinning the top on the rough floorboards. She could assign two of its four Hebrew letters to Jan, two to Hannah, and let God decide. But she did not do this. Even God had no place in this decision.

  With that thought, Rachel suddenly understood exactly who and where she was. She was not like the mother of Moses, who had set her infant son adrift in an ark of bulrushes to save him from the soldiers of Pharaoh. She was a woman trapped on an island inhabited by a doomed race, an island sinking rapidly into the sea. She had the chance to send one child out upon that sea—an unfinished message in a bottle—her only message to the world.

  She pulled back the prison blanket and lifted her baby to her breast.

  Ariel Weitz was very pleased with himself. He had made a great deal of mischief in the last forty minutes, and every second had given him a warm and wicked satisfaction. During his years at Totenhausen, Weitz had managed to acquire keys to nearly every door in the camp. Some had been given to him by the SS to facilitate his daily tasks. Others he had stolen.

  One key opened a storeroom at the back of the headquarters building, which housed the overflow from the main camp arsenal. From this storeroom he had removed six potato-masher grenades, two land mines and a submachine gun, all of which he packed into a crate marked SULFADIAZINE. He carried this crate to the morgue in the hospital basement and with another key opened the SS bomb shelter. A long string of hanging light bulbs revealed a ramp descending at a shallow angle into a tunnel that ran fifty meters underground and then up to a second entrance in one of the SS barracks. The tunnel was lined with musty shelves and benches.

  With a mine in one hand and two grenades in the other, Weitz had scampered along the tunnel until he reached the barracks entrance. Just inside the door, square in the middle of the tunnel, he set the land mine on the floor and armed it. Then he took the two grenades and, using some string from his pockets, stretched tripwires across the tunnel and anchored them to the shelves. When pulled taut by panicked legs, they would detonate the potato-mashers and fill the tunnel with a hurricane of shrapnel. On the way back to the morgue, Weitz unscrewed every light bulb in the tunnel, cackling softly while he did it.

  He had booby-trapped the morgue entrance in exactly the same way as the barracks entrance, and as a final touch unscrewed every light bulb in the morgue. Any SS men who managed to find their way to the bomb shelter entrance would have little chance of seeing the explosives that were about to kill them.

  Yes, he was quite pleased with himself.

  “Your time is up!” Avram told the women. He stood with his back to the barracks door, his son beside him. “You cannot decide not to decide. To do that is to condemn everyone.”

  Once again the Frenchwoman stood up and gestured fiercely. “I say it again! No one here can choose fairly.”

  Avram took a step toward her. “I can choose fairly,” he said.

  “You!” she cried. “Your own son is the one who has come to kill us. Of course you will be saved.”

  “Am I not a man? The E-Block will be full of women and children. I will be with the other men during the attack. Thus, I alone among you can choose fairly.”

  The Frenchwoman looked incredulous. “You will die with the others?”

  “If that is our fate. Now, please listen to me.”

  The old woman who had likened the E-Block to a lifeboat got to her feet and pointed at the Frenchwoman. “You’ve sung your song long enough, little bird. The shoemaker knows what must be done. Sit down and hold your tongue.”

  The other women nodded in agreement. Jonas wondered if it was his father’s promise of self-sacrifice that had silenced them, or merely the fact that he’d volunteered to lift from their shoulders the responsibility of choosing.

  “Here is my decision,” Avram said. “Places in the E-Block will be given to Jewish women and children. No one outside this block will be told anything.”

  There was a sudden buzz of conversation, but it died quickly.

  “Any woman among you who has a child will be given a place. If you have a child, please raise your hand.”

  Fifteen women raised their hands from the floor.

  “Keep your hands raised. How many of those left are thirty years old or younger?”

  Eigh
t more women raised their hands.

  “That’s twenty-five adults,” said Avram, “including Rachel Jansen and the Sephardic woman who sleeps in the children’s block. How many women left are between thirty-one years and forty?”

  Fourteen women raised their hands.

  Avram counted silently. “That’s thirty-nine. There is room for only thirty-five adults. Please keep your hands raised.”

  “For God’s sake,” snapped a woman with her hand in the air. “Do four extra matter so much?”

  “Four extra could kill everyone,” Jonas said. “Depending on how long you must stay inside to survive. I was told to allow only twenty-five adults. I’m stretching it as it is.”

  Avram looked at the women who had not raised their hands. Some of them were staring at the floor, others weeping openly. The old woman who had spoken about the lifeboat tried to comfort them.

  Jonas blinked as he saw a hand drop. A woman who looked to be in her late twenties stood up where the hand had been. “I will stay here,” she said.

  “But you are young,” protested an older woman. “You will have children someday. You deserve a place.”

  The volunteer looked at the floor and shook her head. “I will never have children. I was sterilized at Auschwitz. The other girls died, and I was sent here. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. I will stay.”

  “God bless you,” said the old woman.

  “That’s thirty-eight,” Avram said stoically.

  Two more hands dropped. “I lost my children long ago,” said a voice. “And my husband in the last selection.”

  “The same,” said the other woman. “I don’t think it matters much where we are anyway. I’ve been under bombs before. If one bomb fell on the E-Block it would kill everyone inside. I will take my chances here.”

  Stern felt a stab of guilt because of his lie, but there was no help for it. He glanced toward the rear of the block. No sign of Rachel Jansen. He was about to call her name when a bald woman jumped up and pointed at someone seated on the floor.

  “She’s lying! She’s forty-two. How can you do it, Shoshana?”

  The woman being pointed at kept her hand rigidly in the air. “I’m thirty-nine,” she said.

  The accuser shook her head violently. “I know her from Lublin! She’s forty-two!”

  The accused woman stood up, her face working in terror. “Yes, I’m forty-two! Is that so old? Why shouldn’t I have a chance to live? Look at my hips! I can still bear children!”

  She turned around in place in an almost lewd exhibition of her surviving sexual charms. Jonas saw that some of the other women who had been excluded were becoming upset. He stepped forward, ready to restrain the overwrought woman.

  “If you want to keep living so badly, go in my place.”

  Another woman had stood up. She was emaciated and nearly bald, with skin like parchment, but certainly not older than thirty. “I lived in Warsaw,” she said. “There is no one left in my family. Take my place.”

  “No!” protested several women. “You deserve your place!”

  The young woman raised her hands, palms up, in a haunting gesture of resignation. “Please,” she said. “I am so tired.”

  Jonas stepped in front of his father. “Hands down,” he said. “It is decided.” He called to the back of the barracks: “Frau Jansen, it is time.”

  “How will we reach the E-Block without the Germans seeing us?” asked a young woman.

  “I plan to short out the electricity just before the attack. You only have to cross fifteen meters of open ground to reach the alley. Each woman must take at least one child to the E-Block, some two. Once inside, do whatever you must to fit everyone in. The ceiling is low, but you can hold the small children on your shoulders.”

  “What about the sentry they posted at our gate? We can’t get out that way, and many of the children can’t climb the fence.”

  “I’m going to kill the sentry,” Jonas said. “My father will put on his uniform and stand in his place until it is time for you to move. I suggest you begin moving them at ten minutes until eight. Use your own judgment. But no matter what happens, the E-Block door must be sealed shut before eight.”

  “How will we get out?” asked a worried voice from the floor. “There is no door handle inside the E-Block.”

  “I will leave my machine gun. One of you will have to shoot out a window. It’s the only way.”

  “How long do we wait?”

  “Two hours, if you can stand it. There should be two hours of air, plus a small oxygen bottle as a reserve. After that, you must get away from here quickly. Take a truck and try to reach the Polish border. There are partisans there in the forest.”

  Jonas’s chest felt suddenly hollow. Rachel Jansen was walking toward him like a specter out of the darkness. She held a small bundle in her arms, wrapped in one of the prison blankets. When she reached him, she immediately handed it over. There were tears on her face.

  “Take care of her, Herr Stern,” she said. “She won’t make any trouble for you.”

  Jonas pulled back the blanket. He saw the raven-haired head of Hannah Jansen. The little girl was fast asleep. He passed the child back to Rachel. “Just a little longer,” he said. “I have something to do before I go.”

  He handed the silenced Schmeisser to his father and drew the SS dagger from the black sheath at his belt. Its gleaming nine-inch blade was engraved with the motto, My Honor Is Loyalty. He closed his hand around the Nazi eagle on the black haft of the dagger and held it up before his father’s face.

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  “I need your assistance, Rottenführer.”

  The sentry standing at the block gate turned and peered through the darkness at Jonas Stern, who stood just inside the wire fence.

  “Jawohl, Standartenführer.” The sentry opened the gate, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.

  Jonas led him toward the Jewish Women’s Block. “I need to remove one of the Jews for further questioning, Rottenführer. Some of her friends may try to stop me.”

  “Allow me, Standartenführer!” The sentry shouldered his way in front of Stern and marched up the steps.

  Stern stayed close behind him. The moment the guard passed through the barracks door, Jonas clapped his left hand around the man’s forehead, jerked back his neck and dragged the double-edged dagger across his throat with his right hand. There was no cry, only a rush of air and warm blood. Stern held onto the head long enough to guide the body down to the barracks floor, then sheathed his knife and darted out of the block to stand at the gate while his father put on the sentry’s clothes.

  Within seconds the women stripped the dead corporal of clothes, boots, and weapons and gave all to Avram, who immediately put them on and went out to change places with his son.

  Jonas opened the gate for Avram to pass out, then slipped back inside and stood just behind his father.

  “Father, I beg you,” he whispered. “Please come out with me. Get away from this place.”

  Avram reached back through the gateposts and clenched his son’s arm. “No more talk of that.”

  “Then at least go into the E-Block. You can lead the women into Poland.”

  “No more, Jonas!” Avram looked back over his son’s shoulder and whispered, “Rachel.”

  Jonas turned and saw the young woman standing behind him, tears glittering in her dark eyes. Hannah was in her arms.

  “Open your hand, my son,” Avram commanded.

  Puzzled, Jonas slipped his hand between the gateposts. He felt something small and hard like seeds pressed into it.

  “Those are diamonds,” said Avram, finding Rachel’s eyes. “Yes, I kept two for myself. But I give them now to your daughter. Give yours to Jonas as well, Rachel. He will need them to buy passage to Palestine.”

  Rachel had all her diamonds ready, but when she saw the shoemaker give up his stones for Hannah, she pressed only two into Jonas’s hand.

  After pock
eting the diamonds, Jonas drew the bloody SS dagger from the sheath at his belt and held it out to Rachel. “If anyone tries to stop you in the alley,” he said, “use this. Move close to them and strike quickly. Aim for the upper stomach.”

  Rachel took the dagger and held it beneath the bundle that was Hannah.

  Avram turned his back to the fence again. “Listen to me, Jonas,” he whispered. “When you get to Palestine, take this child to your mother. Tell Leah to raise her as if she were your sister. You understand?”

  Jonas struggled to gain control of his voice. “Yes.”

  He was about to take the little girl from Rachel when he saw three SS men standing at the back gate of the camp. They were in easy sight of the open ground the women would have to cross to reach the E-Block. “Look!” he whispered.

  “My God,” said Avram. “What are they doing?”

  Jonas couldn’t make out faces or rank badges, only two men standing inside the gate smoking cigarettes and talking to the sentry who stood outside. He checked his watch. 7:35. He should be driving out of the front gate now.

  “Do you think they’ll go away in time?” Avram asked.

  “I don’t know. Father, walk with me to my car. With you in that uniform we can drive right out of here.”

  Rachel grabbed Jonas’s arm. “You can’t do that! You can’t leave Hannah behind!”

  “We’ll take her with us.”

  Awakened by her mother’s panic, the child whimpered softly in the darkness. Avram touched Rachel’s arm. “Have no fear,” he said. “Jonas, forget the men at the gate. Take this child and go. The E-Block was a long chance anyway.”

  Jonas stared at the three SS men, his mind whirling.

  Avram held up the dead corporal’s machine gun. “If they don’t move, I will try to kill them.”

  As Avram spoke these words, Jonas spied two more SS men. They were standing in the shadow of the hospital wall, examining the polished black Mercedes that had mysteriously appeared in camp. In that moment Jonas knew he would not reach the gas cylinders in time. It would be McConnell or no one.