The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Nuremberg, Spring 1946

Our first task was to decide a target. This was not a decision for me; I was just a teenage boy. Others, the leaders, took those decisions. One of them was the man I had met in the cellar in the ghetto at Kovno, on that night of the candles. His name was Aron. The other two were dead by 1946, killed in the last Aktion which emptied the ghetto once and for all. I did not know that for sure, not then, but that was what I presumed. Unless you heard otherwise, unless you saw them or ran into them in the street or heard a rumour, it was best to assume this or that person were gone. In 1946 everyone was dead.

But a few leaders of the resistance had survived, emerging from the burnt-out ghettoes and the smoking ruins of the cities and they, along with a few from the camps, were the men who started DIN. I was still a teenager but I wanted them to think of me as a warrior, a man who had proved himself. Even though I was so young, they did indeed treat me like a man: anyone who had lived through what we had lived through was no longer a child, no matter how young you were. Your childhood was gone.

I was not the one who took decisions, but I had a good pair of ears and I listened. We were in a safe house in Munich and one night, as I was clearing away the dishes from our meal, I heard the commanders mention one place more than any other: Nuremberg.

They had heard that the Allies had set up a prison outside the city, to hold Nazis for ‘questioning’. And not just any Nazis either, but the important ones. ‘There are eight thousand SS in there,’ Aron said. His eyes were dark and fierce, his hair thick and kinked: I never once saw him smile. ‘No small fry,’ he went on. ‘They're being held for major war crimes. Major war crimes. They're all in there: senior staff at the camps, Politischen Abteilungen, Gestapo, Einsatzgruppen, everyone.’

It was obvious he was most excited by the men of the ‘Political Departments’, the Politischen Abteilungen. Among them would be some of the senior bureaucrats who had helped to organize the Final Solution. That was what the Nazis had called their killing. They did not call it mass murder, killing people by the hour, the way a factory makes products. No, they called it the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.

But I wasn't thinking about these bureaucrats as I washed the plates, pretending not to listen. I was thinking about the Einsatzgruppen. The mobile killing teams who had gone from place to place murdering and murdering and murdering. These were the people who had killed my sisters at the Ninth Fort.

Aron had done some research, using a DIN volunteer who had ended up in Nuremberg. He had tracked down the source of all the camp's bread, a medium-sized bakery on the outskirts of town. The leaders talked some more, their voices becoming low and hushed. Then they fell completely silent. I was scrubbing the grease off a pan when I turned around to see that they were all looking at me, with that same look I had seen before, three years earlier, in the cellar in the ghetto.

They gave me a street address and told me which man to speak to at the bakery: the works supervisor. They had described him to me, short and barrel-chested with a face almost always flushed red. I was to clean myself up, find him and give him my story.

The description was good and I recognized him as soon as I walked in. ‘My name is Tadeusz Radomski,’ I began, ‘and I need to learn how to become a baker.’ I told him I was a Pole, with an uncle in Montreal who was himself a baker and was ready to give me a job. ‘All I need is a visa, but for Canada it takes time. While I'm waiting, I want to learn. My uncle says I need experience-’

‘I'm sorry,’ the works supervisor said, wiping a flour-dusted hand on his apron. ‘There are no jobs here.’

‘I'm happy to work for free,’ I said.

‘No jobs.’

Then, as we had discussed back in the safe house, I continued: ‘My uncle said I should show you this,’ and I reached inside my canvas satchel. As soon as the man got a peek of what was inside, he gestured me to come into a back office. I had showed him a bottle of Scotch whisky and two bars of chocolate. Along with cigarettes, they were the currency of the occupation zone and he knew what they were worth. ‘My uncle says you can have this now and there will be more for you when I have done a month's work.’ I started that afternoon, with no pay.

And so I began as an apprentice baker, learning everything from kneading and rolling the dough to glazing and frosting cakes. I would volunteer for extra work, cleaning out the pans and scouring the ovens. If the manager needed a boy to run an errand, I would do that too. I said little and worked hard. I wanted there to be no complaints against me and for the manager to trust me completely, so that he would let me work anywhere in the bakery. My job was to find out exactly how the system worked, to understand every aspect of it: when the allocation of flour was received from the Americans, where it was stored, which shift came on when, when they came off and how the place was guarded. Above all I needed to discover how the thousands of loaves for Stalag 13, the holding centre for Nazi prisoners, were baked and when and how they were transported.

I did as much as I could, never asking a single direct question. I just watched and listened. I didn't chat to anyone – as far as I was concerned every worker in that place was a Jew-killer – but I wanted them to think the only reason for my silence was that I was a lonely orphan boy working hard for a new life abroad. The strange thing I realize only now, as I set down these words, is that I was not really acting at all: a lonely orphan boy was exactly what I was.

Then one day, the American army trucks arrived at usual, just before dawn, to pick up the bread. I had been doing the night shift – I had volunteered for it – and I was there, on the outside loading platform, when I heard one of the American drivers complain that his usual partner was off sick: he needed someone to help unload at the other end. The manager took one look at me and with an index finger guided me towards the truck. ‘He'll go.’

And so I rode up front in the cab, next to the American, trying not to stare at his uniform, refusing his offer of chewing gum but accepting a cigarette, even though I did not smoke, because I did not want to look like a kid who did not smoke. I held it between my lips, sucking every now and then, looking out of the window and saying nothing, passing the bomb site that was Nuremberg. My memory now is of a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. So much rubble, long stretches of it on either side of the road, interrupted by the odd building that had escaped the bombing, looming over the rest like an adult in a kindergarten.

When we got to Stalag 13, waved through by the American guard on the gate, I felt prickles on the back of my neck. This site, I knew, used to be a concentration camp. It was surrounded by barbed wire and filled with row after row of wooden huts: barracks that once housed Jews, worked like slaves and taken to their deaths, and now filled with the men who had tortured and killed them. I had to clench both my fists to get a grip on myself and stop myself shivering.

‘OK, here we go,’ the driver said in English, parking up and jumping down from the cab. He told me, in gestures and signs, to start unloading the wheeled trolleys, each stacked with a dozen racks, each rack containing two dozen loaves. We were parked outside the camp kitchens and I was unloading for a long time: I estimated that, along with the other trucks, we delivered around nine thousand loaves of bread. All black bread.

‘What about the white bread?’ I asked in German.

The driver shook his head, his brow furrowed. He did not understand. Somehow, through a combination of hand signals and pidgin German and English, I got the question out. Eventually he nodded and pointed into the distance, at a single truck unloading at the other end of the camp. So that was how it was done: nine thousand loaves of black bread for the Nazi prisoners taken in several trucks to the prisoners' kitchen, including the one I had just unloaded. And then a separate truck carrying one thousand loaves of white bread, delivered to a different kitchen for the American guards. The driver pointed at the black loaves and made a retching expression. Then he gestured in the distance, at the white loaves, and patted his stomach. He was telling me that the Americans couldn't stand the coarse, thick black bread and needed white, like they had at home.

I worked hard to hide my smile as we drove back to the bakery and, after that, as I walked home. Only once in the apartment we had rented in Nuremberg, a new hideout, could I let out a scream of delight. ‘This will be easy,’ I said. ‘This will be easy.’

I briefed the commanders that night, proud of the discovery I had made. We had only to direct our attention to the black loaves; anything we did to them would never affect the Americans. It would be DIN's simplest, but greatest, operation.

But then Rosa brought bad news. All of us had had to get jobs. My friend Sid Steiner – his first name then was Solomon – had also trained as a baker in Munich, because we hoped we would be able to repeat the Nuremberg operation there, perhaps even on the same night. Rosa's job was no less important. She had been told to find a boyfriend. Not any boyfriend, but an American. Plenty of women in occupied Germany were doing the same thing. Some were Germans, but some were Poles or Czechs or Hungarians, women who had washed up and landed in Berlin or Nuremberg like so much driftwood on the shore. They made themselves friendly with any man in an American uniform, a man who could provide attention, as well as coffee, cigarettes and corned beef in a tin. These women were desperate and would not hold back their affection. Rosa's task was to pretend to be one of them. What nationality she would adopt, I had no idea. But she did not look so Jewish – except for the deadness in her eyes, dead from all that she had seen, which would have been obvious to anyone who had looked. Luckily, these men were not looking so closely.

No one ever asked whether she minded being used in this way; it was simply her duty. The order was given and, as a fighter and partisan and now a soldier for DIN, she would obey. No one asked me either, even though, by that time, Rosa and I were together. Perhaps no one knew; perhaps people would have assumed I was too young for such things.

So Rosa set about throwing herself at the GI Joe responsible for the guards' canteen at Stalag 13. Did she sleep with him? At the time I told myself that she did not, but now I see something else: I imagine him on top of her, pounding away at her flesh, not noticing the eyes, still and glassy, in her face.

Anyway, this sergeant was joking about some of his officers, health-conscious types from Boston or New England. ‘You'll never believe this,’ he said, ‘but they refuse to eat American white bread. They want the brown stuff the Krauts eat!’ So each morning he has to arrange for one hundred loaves of Nazi bread to be separated from the rest and delivered to the American kitchen. ‘Crazy, they are.’

I received this news as you would word of a disaster. If we tampered with the black bread we would hit some Americans and they would not let such an attack go unpunished. They would hunt us down.

There were more complications. In what I imagined was an idle moment of pillow-talk, Rosa's boyfriend explained that he'd had a rough day. Not only had he had to keep his own mess running, but he'd had to do a spot-check on the prisoners' kitchen. They were meant to do it once a week or so: checking equipment, making sure no knives had been stolen and, more important, ensuring that the food supplies were not being used as cover for any smuggling. It had been known for prisoners to hide weapons, even cyanide tablets, inside a loaf of bread or a bag of sugar. Everything that went into that kitchen had to be checked, not every day, but often. What a drag it was; it added hours to his day. Rosa probably stroked the sergeant's brow in sympathy, quietly noting what she would tell the DIN leaders back at the flat: that they would have no guarantee that any tainted bread would not be probed, examined and, quite possibly, discovered.

Both Rosa and I did as we were told, uncovering every detail of the process and then relaying it to our commanders. I was asked to come up with a thorough blueprint of the bakery, including all measurements, as comprehensive as any architect's drawing. And of course I had to bring back several loaves of bread, black and white, so that they could be studied.

After two months of this, we were summoned for another meeting. This time, though, a man I had not met before was there. I remember him as an elegant, older character come to us from Paris – but that may be just how he looked to me, a fifteen-year-old boy who knew everything of the world and also nothing. This man was never introduced by name, but he was treated by the commanders as an expert. They showed him respect. It turned out that he was an experienced player of the black market – and that he had made contact with a chemist.

Aron asked this man to tell us what he knew.

‘Comrades,’ he began, in an accent that seemed only half-French. ‘The decisive question is how we introduce the poison to the bread.’

Poison. It was the first time the word had been uttered. We preferred a codeword: medicine. ‘If we're to treat the disease,’ Aron would say, ‘we need medicine.’ We avoided saying ‘poison’ out loud. Why? Because we feared it would betray our secret? That it might jinx our mission, that it would somehow bring bad luck? That we did not quite want to admit, even to ourselves, what we were about to do? All of the above.

But now he had said it, it gave us a strange confidence. This man, this adult, would make this crazy dream of ours come true.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘the obvious method would be to make the poison an ingredient stirred into the mixture for the black bread from the very beginning. This would be simple. Sadly, it is impossible. We now know that one hundred loaves of this bread go, in fact, to the Americans. If these Americans die, it would be a disaster! So we need another method, yes?’

Aron began shuffling in his seat.

The Frenchman reached into his bag, an oversized doctor's case of battered brown leather, and with a great flourish produced a huge, thick paintbrush.

‘You have seen it used by the house decorator, yes?’ He was smiling.

‘What's the idea?’ asked Aron, his patience dwindling.

‘To paint the poison onto each loaf.’

‘Paint? With those?’

‘The young man knows all about it, I am sure.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘The pastry chefs call it glazing, I think.’

He picked up from the table a loaf of black bread I had put there earlier for exactly this purpose. ‘First, you dip the brush into the liquid – for now we use only vinegar, of course – you paint one stroke up, one stroke down and there: Voilá!’

There was silence as the semi-Frenchman sat down, his demonstration completed. Our leader was frowning. None of us wanted to speak before he did. He picked up the bread, examined it, then placed it back on the table.

‘And that's enough?’

‘It is.’

‘You're sure the poison will have no taste?’

‘No taste.’

‘No colour?’

‘No colour. It's an arsenic mixture, odourless and colourless. I have seen it myself.’

I was nervous about speaking, but as the only baker in the room I felt I had some authority. ‘Won't the crust on the top be moist?’

The man from Paris widened his eyes into a smile and pointed at me. ‘Our young friend has asked a good question! This, for me, is our biggest problem.’

Aron was alarmed. ‘You mean he's right? The bread will be wet?’

‘For a while. But not for long. After an hour or so we think it is dried out.’

‘You think?’

‘If there is some dampness it would be so slight, no one would think anything of it. Remember, this is not the Ritz Hotel. What are the Nazis going to do, ask their waiter to take it back?’

Aron ignored the joke and turned to Rosa. ‘What time do they start eating breakfast?’

‘At 6.15 a.m.’

Now to me. ‘And the loaves are picked up at five?’

‘Yes. But most are baked by three.’

Aron turned to the not-quite-Frenchman. ‘And this method works?’

‘There is a dead cat in Paris who says it works very well.’

We waited as Aron picked up the bread once more, then placed it back down on the table. He rubbed his chin. Finally he gave his verdict, looking at each of us, his gaze steady. ‘The first night with a full moon, we do it.’

As it happens we did not choose the very first moonlit night. We waited for a Saturday. That was because of the way we had chosen to stage the operation.

It was the Frenchman's idea. I call him that because I never found out his name. Rosa said he was a Communist, or at least had been, and that he had been part of the resistance in Krakow. He had found his way to Paris, a place where it was possible to get hold of anything: cars, forged papers, douche syringes, poison. Why he was in DIN, what bitterness he stored inside, I did not know. But he covered it well, with his semi-French accent and his performance. Not many men in DIN smiled as often as he did.

Once Aron had said the operation could go ahead a new discussion began: how? When the commanders first hatched the plan, they assumed it would be a simple business: I would smuggle some poison into the bakery and, when no one was looking, would tip it into the vat of flour, stir and that would be that. But painting poison onto nine thousand individual loaves was a mammoth task even if it were done by several people working at once.

For the hundredth time I was called on to explain the process.

‘As soon as the bread comes out of the ovens, it's placed on a series of trolleys here.’ I was standing over the table, pointing at my own drawing of the bakery. ‘They're then wheeled, into the drying room – here. There's a door out onto the loading area here. Just before five a.m., the trolleys are wheeled outside for the Americans to pick up.’

Aron now questioned me the way he had questioned the Frenchman. ‘Once the bread is in the drying room, is the room empty?’

‘Not for long. People come in and out constantly.’

‘Even at four in the morning?’

‘Even then.’

He nodded. ‘And there's no way anyone could be discreet, working with that thing.’ He pointed at the housepainter's brush, still on the table. ‘You would have to be there, undisturbed, for hours. Damn!’ He slammed his fist down on the table.

Then the Frenchman spoke to me. ‘How many workers are there at that time of night?’

‘Normally it's about ten.’

‘Normally? And what is not normally?’

‘On Saturday night, once the work is almost finished, before three a.m., about half the workers go off. To drink.’

‘Leaving how many people in the bakery? Five, maybe, including you?’

I nodded.

‘In which case I think I have a plan.’

The preparations took weeks. After our meeting in the apartment, the Frenchman returned to Paris to meet with the chemist: between them they had calculated the amount of arsenic mixture we would need for nine thousand loaves. It took some time to prepare. Once it was done, the Frenchman despatched a courier, another DIN volunteer, to carry the liquid personally from Paris to Nuremberg. ‘There is no other way,’ he said.

When the courier appeared at our apartment, he was wearing an American uniform under a heavy overcoat. Rosa answered the door, but I remember wondering how such a man who had survived what we had all survived, a soldier of DIN, could be so fat. He was not just tall, he was enormous. But once the door was closed, I understood. He ripped off the coat and his jacket to reveal at least a dozen hot water bottles, all made of sweating rubber, strapped to his body. Before he had a chance to say a word, he took one look around and collapsed onto the floor: he could carry that huge weight no longer.

That night Rosa and I transferred the mixture into smaller bottles. We used whatever we could find: medicine bottles were the best, so long as they could fit inside my satchel. Each day I would take one or two into the bakery and, when I was alone in the drying room, I would stash them under the floorboards. In my head I kept a mental map of that room, memorizing each board, so that I would know exactly which boards to lift in the few minutes we would have to prepare the mixture.

When Saturday April 13 1946 came, I was more nervous than I had ever been before. Don't ask me why. Perhaps it was because, in the past, I had pretended to be this or that person for just a few minutes, long enough to get past a guard or onto a train. But I had been Tadeusz, the Polish baker boy, for several months now. I was part of the team at the bakery. You can't work alongside people every day, week in, week out, and remain a complete stranger. Sometimes one of the women, in hairnet and gloves, would tousle my hair, as if I were a playmate for one of her sons. The first time it happened, I had to run outside. I was gasping, as if I had been strangled. (Later I said I had had a coughing fit). Now that I am older I understand what I did not understand then. Maybe I had to be a father to understand what that fifteen-year-old boy felt that day, a boy who had not felt the loving touch of a mother for so long that even a hint of it was enough to turn him upside down. I read once of a prisoner who had been in jail so long that, when he was released, he was allergic to fresh air. Perhaps I was that way with a mother's love.

Tonight they were about to discover the truth of me and I think that was what made me scared. I had to force myself to remember what this operation was really about, to remember the men inside Stalag 13, to think of the Einsatzgruppen. When I did that, I could make my heart turn to flint.

I checked my watch. I had been on shift since five o'clock that afternoon and the hours had dragged. I was desperate for three o'clock to come. I did my work but I could not be distracted. I kept asking myself, will we have enough of the mixture, will we have enough time, will this crazy scheme work? I even began to wonder about the Frenchman. What did we really know about him? Could this all be some elaborate trap?

At seven minutes to three I heard the words I had been waiting for, spoken by the manager himself. ‘Come on, the beer is calling!’ He and seven others took off their overalls, hung them up and headed, as usual, for the tavern down the street. They said goodbye to me and the other ‘saps’ who had to stay behind.

I checked my watch again. Precisely six minutes from now and I would do what we had planned. For now, I had to stay put.

I knew what was happening outside. Once she had got the signal – they've gone! – from Manik, serving as lookout across the street, Rosa would have appeared from the opposite direction, wearing a short dress, in black and red; God only knows where she had picked it up. She had been given money to buy bright lipstick, too. Her instructions had been to look appealing and available – for the right price.

I can picture her strolling up to the gate in high heels, waiting for the night-watchman to emerge, as I had told her he would. She would have had just a few moments to make her impression. She was not the blonde these Germans liked, but she was beautiful and her body, at least, was young. I can see him unlocking the gate, then stepping forward to give Rosa a proper looking-over. She would have probably let him grope a bit, just to close the deal, and as he touched and squeezed, she would have moved nearer, more intimate until he was so close she would only have had to push the blade a few inches forward to find his heart.

Then Manik would have run from his hiding place across the street, his shoes soft-soled and quiet, to help Rosa drag the dead body out of the way. Then they would have given the signal to the truck over the road. The vehicle was from the British Army transport pool, signed out by a friendly member of the Jewish Brigade, using forged papers. With its lights switched off, it drove through, Manik closing the gate after it.

That was when I headed for the drying room and, from there, to the outside loading area. By the time I was there, keeping the door open, they were all out of the truck, five of them, their faces blacked up with boot polish. With Manik and Rosa, it made seven. All were armed.

I guided them through the drying room until they were huddled around the far door that led into the bakery proper. Silently, Aron counted the group off then one, two, three – they burst through, shouting ‘Achtung!’ and training their guns on the half dozen bakers, my fellow workers, they found within.

I did not go inside, but watched through the glass window in the door. The bakers offered no resistance. They had been sitting around, either playing cards or finishing up for the night: they were in no position to fight against a gang of armed men. All of them raised their arms in the air, a group of Germans surrendering to a gang of Jews. It should have been a sweet moment but it had come at least three years too late.

Three of the group began to bind and gag the bakers, tying their ankles and wrists and finally tethering each of them to a pillar or table leg.

I saw our leader swivel around, looking for me. He needed me to show him where the supplies – the sugar, yeast and flour – were kept. I emerged, ready to point at the storeroom. I tried hard to avoid meeting the eye of the men tied up all around me, but I could not do it. I looked into each pair of eyes, most of them aghast with surprise, some ablaze with hatred. So, the little Polish boy betrayed us. They could say nothing, but they did not need to.

Aron and one other set about emptying the storeroom, taking turns to go back and forth between there and the loading area, filling up the truck that was waiting outside. They took their time, making sure this activity lasted as long as necessary.

I was back in the drying room. Once the bakers had all been restrained, I set about prising open each memorized floorboard, bringing out the concealed bottles of poison. Earlier I had brought in a set of metal mixing bowls, the biggest I could find. Rosa and I began filling them as fast as we could. The Frenchman had been right: the fluid was clear and smelled of nothing.

The other four in our group opened up their bags and pulled out the paintbrushes. The first dipped the bristles in one of the full metal bowls, letting them absorb the liquid. He looked at me, waiting for guidance. I showed him to the wheeled rack, gesturing at the top row and, methodically, he started painting on the poison, loaf by loaf.

Soon we had a rhythm, a veritable production line as Rosa and I ensured at least five bowls were full of poison at any one time, shuttling again and again to various hiding places under the floor for fresh supplies.

Every ten minutes or so, Aron passed through the drying room but he could not stop for long: he had to maintain the charade of loading up the truck with sacks of sugar and flour. He could not let the bakers, gagged and bound inside, know that anything was going on inside the drying room. For that reason, we worked in silence and only occasional whispers.

The day itself had dragged but these two hours – less, of course, by the time we actually started – flew by. We were sweating through it, each of us possessed by the same fierce desire: to poison as many of those loaves as we could in the time. I counted the racks we had done and I estimated we had painted arsenic onto about three thousand.

Then Aron joined us, gesturing at his watch. It was quarter to five; the American trucks would arrive in fifteen minutes. He urged us to pack up. I began putting the unused bottles of poison back in their hiding places under the floorboards. Of course they would be found eventually, but by then, with luck, it would be too late to matter.

I hid the last bottle and caught my hand on a spike sticking out of the floorboard I had been trying to replace. My hand began to bleed. I was pressing the board in, harder and harder, but it would not stick. And now a pool of blood was spreading.

‘Come on!’ Aron said in a loud whisper, glaring at me. It was three minutes to five. The trucks would be here any second. Yet I couldn't leave, not while blood and an uneven floorboard were calling out to be noticed, advertising the poison hidden below. If I at least removed the bottle, then, even if they looked, the Americans would find nothing. They would assume this was just damage caused by the intruders as they went about their business.

I looked around. Everyone else had gone, Rosa and the rest of the poison team were all outside, in the truck by the loading platform waiting to go. Only Aron remained, now looming over me. I was on my knees, trying to retrieve the hidden bottle. He looked as if he was about to knee me in the face, to knock me out and drag me into the truck.

But when he saw the blood and the stubborn floorboard he understood. He shoved me out of the way and, in a single jump, he let his entire weight land on the uneven plank of wood. Still, it would not settle. We now had less than two minutes.

He stepped out of the way and gestured for me to remove the poison. Once I had, he wheeled over one of the racks and placed it over the board and the bloodstain. There was nothing else we could do.

He then marched out, heading for the truck. I was behind him and was already outside, in the loading area, when I saw it – lying on one of the steel counters, too close to the loaves not to be suspicious. An oversized paintbrush, too large and crude to be used for glazing pastries. In all the haste to rinse out and hide the mixing bowls, clearing them of arsenic, as well as filling our bags with the empty bottles that had once contained poison, someone had forgotten the biggest and most obvious piece of equipment. I rushed back and grabbed it and when I turned around I saw our leader, now crouching with the others in the back of the truck, aiming his pistol at me.

I realized then that if I had taken even a second longer he would have shot me in the back. Any further delay caused by me would have been simply too costly: better to kill me and leave me on site. It would not even have looked suspicious. The apprentice boy killed in the course of an armed robbery on a bakery. That, after all, was our cover story.

The Americans would untie the workers and draw the obvious conclusion. Armed thieves had come to steal the sacks of flour and sugar and huge quantities of yeast they knew were held within, filling their truck with the hoard and making off just before the Americans arrived at dawn. It would be no great surprise. Foodstuffs and raw materials fetched a good price on the German black market of 1946. The workers, gasping for breath and nursing the welts on their wrists, would tell them all about it. ‘It was an inside job,’ the manager would say. ‘That little Polish bastard let them in.’

The others would explain how the robbers had taken their time, stripping the place of everything that had value. The Americans would offer consolation, shake their heads at the loss of such costly resources and, perhaps, call for a military policeman to come and investigate. But they would not be diverted from the task of the morning. They had thousands of men to feed in Stalag 13 and – yes, look over here – as luck would have it, the intruders came in after baking time. The loaves are all here, stacked and ready for loading: the bread, at least, they did not steal. Well, our sympathies, gentlemen, but we need to be on our way.

That, anyway, was the plan, dreamed up by the Frenchman and pushed and pulled, kneaded and twisted, over weeks and weeks more thoroughly than any loaf I ever made in that bakery. Aron attacked the plan from every angle, each day thinking of new objections. But once he had thought of answers for everything – Rosa for the night-watchman, Manik for his corpse – he had decided that it was the only way. We would commit one commonplace crime – common at least in the chaos that was Germany after the war – in order to commit a much greater, more noble crime. One that was not, of course, a crime at all.

The truck travelled south, where Manik found a deserted spot to hide it. We would be fine so long as no one found the truck, or connected it with the robbery in Nuremberg, until it was too late. It would be a mystery why black market thieves had simply abandoned such precious booty, but that was a mystery we could live with. Besides, that little puzzle would be a perfect decoy, a false trail that would delay anybody coming after us.

The rest of us got out a few miles from the bakery and simply waited by the roadside: the city was already waking up by then, men making their way to the morning shift and, before long, a couple of taxis came by. We got in and Aron handed the driver a wad of notes and told him to take us to the Czechoslovak border.

Only Rosa stayed behind, to do one last job. Once more she had to act, but this time she would not play a slut or a whore. Instead she simply had to wander among the quiet, residential streets that surrounded Stalag 13, homes rented by the wives of the Nazis waiting to stand trial. She would pretend to be just such a wife as she stopped to ask women whether the rumours were true, that many of the prisoners had suddenly been taken ill. Some of these loyal maidens of the Reich stood sobbing with her, as they told her she was right: the hospital was full of their brave men. The doctors couldn't cope, more men were admitted than they could treat, all of them suddenly struck down by the same terrible plague. ‘What is it?’ Rosa would ask. A complete mystery. Food poisoning, the Americans said, but who knew whether to believe them. But it was serious. ‘I don't want to worry you, dear, but some of the men seem close to death.’

Rosa reported all this back to us, together with whatever scraps of information she could pick up. She had broken off with the mess sergeant a few weeks earlier. I liked to think that was because she had extracted all the information we needed and she ran from him as soon as she could. But I think Aron had told her to do it: if they were still together, he might become suspicious.

And, eventually, there were official accounts, in the newspapers and so on. We didn't believe every word: we knew they were censored and suspected the Americans would want to cover up what had happened. If they had not managed to protect the men they were holding, it did not look so good.

But the reports, including Rosa's, left no doubt. The poisoned loaves had got through and the Nazis, in their thousands, had eaten them. How many had died? We never knew for sure. It might have been three hundred or seven hundred. It might have been a thousand or even several thousand. Aron said the exact number did not matter. What was important was that the Nazis held in Nuremberg would have understood and, eventually, the world would have understood, too, that the Jews had not accepted their fate, but had come back to claim their revenge. That the story of Stalag 13 would live on and that no one could say again that we had been sheep to the slaughter. I tried to accept what Aron said but I cannot lie. I wanted to know, and I never stopped wanting to know, even years and years later, exactly how many Nazis had tasted that bread I had helped bake, that bread I had helped poison, how many had tasted it and died from it. I wanted to know if their death was painful. Above all, I wanted to know that among the thousands or hundreds or even dozens dead, was the man who killed my Hannah, my Leah and my Rivvy, my sisters.