The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

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.