The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

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.