The Final Reckoning (24 page)

Nuremberg, 1945

Aron never wanted me to be part of it: he did not believe I had enough hate inside me.

In the autumn of 1945 he told me that DIN was over, that from now on, justice would be up to the courts and the lawyers. We were to put down our guns and grenades and head off to the next front in the war for Jewish survival: Palestine. The British masters of the country were keeping a tight lid on Jewish immigration so entry would not be easy, but an underground network would smuggle us in. Another war was coming: the new Jewish homeland would not come without a struggle – against the British, against the Arabs – and the Jews would need all the soldiers they could get. I was barely fifteen but I counted as a veteran.

I was ready to leave when Aron called me in to see him. He asked me, for the first time, about my family and how they had been killed. I told
him how my father had been burned to death in his own barn by a mob. How my mother had hanged herself the day the Nazis arrived in Lithuania. Finally I told him about my sisters, shot into the pits at the Ninth Fort.

I did not cry as I told my story and he nodded, saying nothing. When I finished, he stared at me for many minutes, occasionally rubbing his chin. Eventually, in a quiet voice, he told me I should stay in Europe, that DIN had one last mission for me. I must have persuaded him that I had enough hate to be trusted.

There was never any briefing. To keep the plan secret, Aron told each of us only what we needed to know. It took me some time to put the pieces together so that I could see the entire picture.

It began with the Frenchman, then idling in post-liberation Paris. He ran into a former resistance fighter, a scientist, who told him the greatest threat in the second half of the twentieth century would not be the mighty atomic bomb but something much smaller, a weapon that could be carried in a briefcase. It would not be deployed on the traditional battlefield, but on the morning commuter train or in a theatre or in a soft drinks factory. Poison, that was the weapon of the future.

The Frenchman's curiosity was piqued. Discreetly, he began his own inquiries, speaking to chemists who told him of toxins that retained their potency even when mixed with great
volumes of water. It was in those conversations that Tochnit Aleph, Plan A, was born.

The day after Aron had told me that I should stay in Europe he sent me for what he called ‘training’, with a man I had not met before, a Jew from Palestine. He came from Germany but had left in the middle of the nineteen thirties. The moment I knew this about him, I hated him. What did he know of DIN and of vengeance, this man who had saved his own skin and got out early? I felt superior towards him and jealous of him, all at the same time.

But I had to keep silent and be his pupil. He introduced himself only as ‘the Engineer’ and it turned out that he was a real engineer, an expert in construction and so on.

Within one minute of meeting me, he threatened to walk out. ‘It's absurd to teach you these things, you are a child!’ But Aron's orders were final and so he taught me.

He spread out a number of complex blueprints on the table. They seemed to show pathways or underground tunnels. He explained that this was the water system for the city of Nuremberg. And that I was to seek employment with the Department of Filtration.

‘But I don't—’

‘I know. You know nothing. That's what I'm here to teach you.’

And so this engineer taught me to speak of regularized pressures, saline clearance and filtration
residues. At night, one of the DIN commanders drilled me in German, ironing out weaknesses in my vocabulary and accent. In these night classes, we devised yet another cover story – that my late father was Polish and that we had lived some time in the east – to explain any lapses.

I was handed a set of forged papers, including documents showing sterling service in the Hitler Youth and then the Wehrmacht. We worked out the youngest age that would be compatible with this life story and decided that I was eighteen. Luckily, I was not just blond, blue-eyed and uncircumcised, but also tall for my age.

On all this I was tested and tested again. ‘Where were you born?’

‘Leipzig, sir!’

‘What was your mother's maiden name?’

‘Fischer, sir!’

‘What was the name of your troop in the Hitler Jugend?’

After six weeks of this, Aron arrived one night at midnight. He examined my papers, walked around me, inspecting the suit I would wear for the job interview, and finally said, ‘Apply for the job tomorrow.’

My palms were sweating as I sat in the waiting room. Even though I had done it so often, I never got used to lying. I was summoned by a young secretary who, I noticed, swayed her hips more than was necessary as she walked in front of me, then gave me a smile over her shoulder. If only
she knew, I thought, that I am only fifteen years old. If only she knew that I would not hesitate to strangle her brother, her father or even her if I had even the slightest reason to do it.

The interview was mainly about my war service. The boss was in his early fifties and had missed the draft himself: he was envious of me, blessed with a chance to serve the Fatherland. I nodded but did not smile. I let him think I was a hardened soldier, too tough to chit-chat. As with most weak men, that only made him talk more. And at the end of it, he said how much he had enjoyed our conversation, even though I had said next to nothing. He told me to start at the beginning of the following week.

I still did not know what I was supposed to do. The commanders had told me nothing. Dressed in the overalls of a lab technician, I checked pressure gauges, lowered dipsticks and entered figures onto a form attached to a clipboard – and wondered what it was all for. You may ask whether, when I did understand, I ever questioned it. But the thing no one can appreciate, not unless you saw what we saw, is how deep our hatred had become. It was larger than any of us; we could swim in it and sink into it and we knew it would endure long after we had gone.

Who did we hate? We hated the people who could pick up a screaming baby by his ankles and smash his infant skull against a brick wall. We hated the people who could herd human beings
into fetid, medieval streets and starve them to death so that their corpses would be chewed by stray dogs. We hated the people who told us we were to be resettled in the east, tricking us into train trucks that were built for cattle, then separating us – to the left and to the right – making themselves angels of death, deciding by the ramp of a just-arrived train still exhaling steam, who should live and who should die. We hated the people who beat us and whipped us and pushed us, our children and our elderly, into concrete shower-rooms, saying they were ‘delousing’ us because we were infected like so many flea-bitten animals – still lying even at the very end – and watching us as we waited for the cleansing water that never came, watching through a spy hole as the gas generated by a canister of Zyklon B gas hissed into the room, the men and women and the young inside climbing over each other to get to what they thought, in their desperation, might be an opening in the ceiling or high up in the wall, a source of unpoisoned, breathable air. We hated the people who would pull the rings from our fingers and the gold from our teeth, who would melt them down for the money they could make. We hated the people who would tear the clothes off the backs of our dead, sending them home to be worn by their own wives, sons and daughters. We hated the people who, once they had mined the wealth from our very flesh, shovelled us into incinerators, choking from the ash
that could rise up and descend like snowfall for miles around. We hated them for their plan to remove us from the face of the earth, to smash our gravestones and to rip out the wombs of our women so that today's generation would be the last. We hated them for their insatiable hatred of us.

When a man burns with a rage as white-hot as this rage, made hotter still by the knowledge that the rest of the world is ready to shrug its shoulders and move on – he is prepared to do almost anything. If it will sate this fury, he is ready to do it. As I was ready to do it.

This is what Aron must have seen in me. He must have seen that mine were the eyes of a man who had seen his own blood spilled too often. Because he trusted that when I discovered the truth of Tochnit Aleph I would not hesitate.

And he was right. When I finally understood that DIN's plan was to poison the water supply not only from the plant where I worked in Nuremberg but in four other German cities – Munich, Hamburg, Weimar and the Wannsee suburb of Berlin – I did not baulk. I understood that we were going to kill at the turn of a tap, making no distinction between active Nazi and ordinary German citizen, no distinction between direct war criminal and silent bystander, no distinction between adult male and young child, no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. We were, in other words, to do to them what they
had done to us – killing them not one by one, but without discrimination and as systematically as we could. And even then our slaughter would only be a sixth of theirs.

For this was Plan A. It aimed to kill, in a single stroke, no less than one million Germans. And I did not question it for a moment.

He marvelled at his boss's ability to do this. He was on – what was it? – his fourth meeting of the morning, listening, nodding sagely, offering rounded little aphorisms for each occasion, leaving each person he met convinced that the great statesman had focused on his or her problem at the exclusion of all else. No one would have had a clue that the great man was, in fact, distracted beyond measure, that he was thinking throughout of a topic a world away from the one under discussion. His face could continue making all the right expressions, his mouth forming the right words, entirely on automatic. Meanwhile, like a computer programme running behind the screen, his brain was processing a different issue entirely. Compartmentalization, the business magazines called it, the psychological state required for high-powered, CEO multi-tasking. But that was far too mechanical a description for the magic this man was able to pull off. This was not compartmentalization. This was sorcery.

In the intervals between meetings – the ‘bilaterals’ that always took place in the margins of any international pow-wow, with UN General Assembly week no exception – the boss would turn to his aide, letting his rictus smile disappear and pick up the conversation they had been forced to abandon some twenty or forty minutes earlier. Always, the aide noticed, at the exact same point, as if there had been no interruption.

‘There's no point waiting for definitive proof,’ he said, pushing back to the junior official the exact phrase he had used before the half-hour discussion with the President of the World Health Organization.

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Because if you're able to get definitive proof it usually means you've left it too late. An example: if you're worried I'm going to kill you, then a bullet in your chest is definitive proof.’ He smiled a laughless smile. ‘But you wouldn't want to wait that long, would you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No. So we don't wait. If we even suspect—’

Instinct made him stop even before he could have heard the light knock on the door of the suite. It opened a crack to reveal the pretty assistant who was handling logistics. ‘The Italian foreign minister is here, sir,’ she said.

He showed her the hand gesture, peculiar to his country, that indicated she would have to wait
a moment. She closed the door, taking care to pull it to quietly.

‘If we even suspect they are getting close, then we will have to act. No point waiting.’

‘Act?’

The boss inspected his counsellor, his eyes scoping upward, starting with the younger man's shoes. His manner was less regimental colonel reviewing the troops than high school girl checking out a rival. His mouth curled in derision. Could now be the moment, the aide wondered. Would the double-fucking strike, apparently unprovoked and when it was least expected?

‘Try not to make your squeamishness quite so obvious. A man of your age should not reveal his fear quite so easily.’

‘It was just that I didn't—’

‘When I say act, I don't mean anything rash. Nothing hasty. I mean only that we should,’ he paused, the ostentatious searching for the right word that was part of his standard performance. ‘We should open up a dialogue. How's that?’

The aide knew better than to ask how he was meant to do such a thing. Perhaps the phrase was simply a euphemism deployed by the old guard to cover up heaven knows what ghastly practice from the early days. Interpreting it literally was bound to be a schoolboy error, for which he would receive another scalding reprimand. But he could not think about that now. He would get through the next meeting and find a way to ask after that was over,
some form of words that would not expose his own uncertainty, one that would not reveal what he felt most intensely in the company of his boss: his sheer lack of worldliness.

So he got up, opened the door and gestured at the neatly moustached man waiting, with leather portfolio case on his lap and comely interpreter at his side, to come forward. He gestured him into the room where the boss, the elder statesman, was already standing, his arms outstretched in readiness for a politician's hug:

‘Signor Ministro degli Esteri!’

Nuremberg, Winter 1946

My job in the filtration plant should have been boring, but it never was: I had to concentrate too hard for that. I had to make sure my German did not let me down. I had to avoid letting slip a remark that would contradict my false life story. And, most of all, I had to watch my face, to be sure I did not betray what I truly felt about the German murderers who surrounded me.

I kept turning up each day, doing my shift, eating my sandwiches, listening to the jokes in the canteen – including the ones about the kikes and the yids. People imagine that everything changed the day Hitler shot himself in the bunker, the day Berlin fell, but it was not like that. They were still the same people, it was still the same Germany.

Each day I would return to the safe house and wait for my orders. But in the end it was other news that came.

First, a message arrived that the plan had changed. The DIN man in Berlin had failed to get inside the water plant there: he had gone for an interview but he hadn't got the job. No one knew why; he had as much training as I had. But that was that. We were down to four cities.

Three weeks later, more bad news, this time from Weimar. Our man there had got inside the plant but he had been shifted to a desk job that allowed no access to the filtration areas. To get near them would run a high risk of getting caught. The commanders discussed it and decided his exposure would jeopardize the entire mission. He was ordered to stand down.

Not long after came word from Hamburg. Our most qualified man, an engineer in his own right who had required only minimal training, had been sacked. The managers of the pumping station had checked his documents. Apparently, they discovered a discrepancy which convinced them the papers were forged – which they were. Luckily, they assumed he was a common criminal seeking to hide his past. They did not guess he was a Jew.

The plan of five cities was down to just two: Nuremberg and Munich. The commanders did their sums and calculated that a total of one million three hundred and eighty thousand people drank the water supplied by the plants in those two cities. The target of reaching – poisoning – one million Germans could still be achieved.

But when I was established in my post in
Nuremberg, and Manik was installed in the water plant in Munich, the commanders hesitated. As they stood on the brink of a decision that they knew would reverberate around the world and change the history of nations, a decision for the ages, they paused. I look back on it now and realize what I could never see then: that they were only young men.

They decided they could not make such a fateful decision themselves. They needed to act on some higher authority. A similar conundrum had pressed in on them when they had first formed an armed resistance to the Nazi invaders: ‘By what right do you act in our name?’ Back then they had waved the question away with a simple answer: ‘If not us, who?’ No one else was fighting back; it was their duty to take up arms and save Jewish lives. But this was different. Tochnit Aleph would not save any Jewish lives, at least not directly. Perhaps it might generations from now, by warning that Jews could not be slaughtered with impunity. No: Tochnit Aleph's purpose was to take German lives, the innocent with the guilty. One million of them.

The commanders were not religious men; they would take orders from no rabbi. The higher authority they had in mind was the sovereign Jewish people: the men and women who were fighting for Jewish independence in Palestine. They were three years away from statehood then, but the apparatus of Jewish sovereignty was already in place.

DIN would seek the guidance of the elders of the Jewish nation before they acted in that nation's name. In their quest for a blessing, Palestine would be their destination.

The British rulers of that land had closed the gates to the Jews in 1939 – even in their darkest hour – and the limit on Jewish immigration remained. The only way in was via the secret and illegal network that criss-crossed Europe: a system that relied on backwoods paths through forests, then midnight rendezvous at tiny fishing ports, followed by the chartering – in cash – of trawlers for long, perilous voyages dodging storms, sickness and British gunboats, hoping, eventually, to reach the shores of Palestine.

That was Aron's journey to the promised land. I picture him, finally jumping off an old rust-bucket of a vessel into the cool Mediterranean, wading, along with perhaps two hundred other ragged refugees from old Europe, onto a beach in the dead of night – these new, secret migrants then smuggled out to the network of kibbutzim and farming villages of northern Palestine, the place the Bible speaks of as Galilee.

I can see our leader on that first night, hiding, like an item of illicit cargo, in the back of a lorry as it drove away from the shore. I imagine him, his eyes burning up the darkness, trying to see what he could in the gloom, trying to catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the land of Israel. For he had reached the place he believed would,
at long last, serve as the haven for a people who had just faced extinction.

He did not make his move straightaway. His reputation, as a leader of the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Europe, preceded him and there were many in Palestine who wanted to meet him. They honoured him as a hero, the epitome of the new Jew they wanted to create in Palestine: a Jew who fought back, who refused to go to his death like a lamb to the slaughter. He told none of them that the work of resistance had become the work of vengeance. They believed that his fight against the Nazis was in the past. They knew nothing of DIN.

He would reveal that to only one man and, after two weeks of moving in the circles of those set one day to govern the new Jewish state, he came face to face with him. He was seventy, a founder of the movement for a Jewish homeland, regarded first as its chief emissary and now, in old age, as its figurehead. No man carried greater moral authority. In an earlier age in the land of Israel, thousands of years earlier, he would have been revered as the Hebrews' chief elder.

The younger man sat with him in the private study of his home and told him what, until then, this elder had only read about in reports and cables. He told him the story of the whirlwind that had engulfed the Jews of Europe. How the Germans had set out to remove the Jews from the face of the earth, pushing them into the death factories
of Auschwitz and Treblinka as if they were products on a factory assembly line. He told him of the torture, the ‘experiments’ conducted without anaesthetic on screaming women and terrified children in the name of science. He told them of the world of death he had inhabited for nearly five years – and how the men who had created it had emerged unpunished.

And then he told him of Tochnit Aleph.

Now there was a reason why DIN's leader had chosen this man in particular. It was not just his seniority, the power his blessing would carry. It was also because this man, this leader, had earned distinction in an earlier life as a great scholar, specifically in the field of chemistry. Indeed, he had now retired from frontline politics and diplomacy and returned to his laboratory.

The elder listened throughout, his eyes darkening with each new tale of catastrophe. His head seemed to bow lower. Aron considered stopping or at least slowing the flow: give the old man a break, don't force it on him at once. He considered that and then suppressed the urge. It needs to be told, he said to himself. He needs to hear it.

So he carried on, sparing no detail, even as he saw the aged leader wince as if the grief of it was his own. By the time Aron spoke of Tochnit Aleph, the elder did not recoil or tell him to gather his things and get out. He simply nodded. And then he spoke.

‘If I had travelled the road you have travelled, if I had seen what you have seen, then I would do the same.’

Aron dipped his head, as if in grateful acknowledgement. But he was uncertain. The elder's statement had been ambiguous: it was quite possible to empathize with a man whose wife, say, had been murdered, swearing that you too would want to strangle her killer if you were in his shoes, and nevertheless believe that it was not the right thing to do. Was the elder simply expressing understanding for DIN's state of rage? Or was he doing what Aron needed him to do, namely offering moral approval for the plan to extinguish a million German lives?

An ambiguous answer was not sufficient, but Aron would not push the old man. He would tell the others that the plan was off. If the blessing did not come easily, then it was not a real blessing.

By the time Aron was standing, he could see that the elder had removed a fountain pen from his breast pocket and was writing a note. It took him a long two or three minutes to finish it, the scratch of nib against paper a loud accompaniment to the ticking clock in this room thick with books and wooden furniture – a corner of Europe in the sweat and heat of the Levant.

‘Here,’ the old man said eventually. ‘This is the name of the finest bacteriologist in Palestine. He is a student of mine, at the Institute in Rehovot. He is young but very brilliant. I have written him
a message, telling him what you need. And I have told him it his duty to give it to you.’

‘Thank you,’ Aron said.

Then the elder, still sitting, clasped Aron's hand, like a grandfather on his deathbed, desperate for the touch of those who would live on. His eyes closed and he began to incant what Aron thought was a prayer. He said,
‘Dam Israel Nokeam.’
The blood of Israel will take vengeance.