The One Man

ONE

APRIL 1944

The barking of the dogs was closing in on them, not far behind now.

The two men clawed through the dense Polish forest at night, clinging to the banks of the Vistula, only miles from Slovakia. Their withered bodies cried out from exhaustion, on the edge of giving out. The clothing they wore was tattered and filthy; their ill-fitting clogs, useless in the thick woods, had long been tossed aside, and they stank, more like hunted animals than men.

But now the chase was finally over.

“Sie sind hier!” they heard the shouts in German behind them. This way!

For three days and nights they had buried themselves in the woodpiles outside the camp’s perimeter wire. Camouflaging their scents from the dogs with a mixture of tobacco and kerosene. Hearing the guards’ bootsteps go past, only inches away from being discovered and dragged back to the kind of death no man could easily contemplate, even in there.

Then, the third night, they clawed their way out under the cover of darkness. They traveled only at night, stealing whatever scraps of food they could find on the farms they came upon. Turnips. Raw potatoes. Squash. Which they gnawed at like starving animals. Whatever it was, it was better than the rancid swill they’d been kept barely alive on these past two years. They threw up, their bodies unaccustomed to anything solid. Yesterday, Alfred had turned his ankle and now tried to carry on with a disabling limp.

But someone had spotted them. Only a couple of hundred yards behind, they heard the dogs, the shouts in German, growing louder.

“Hier entlang!” Over here!

“Alfred, come on, quick!” the younger one exhorted his friend. “We have to keep going.”

“I can’t. I can’t.” Suddenly the limping man tripped and tumbled down the embankment, his feet bloody and raw. He just sat there on the edge of exhaustion. “I’m done.” They heard the shouts again, this time even closer. “What’s the use? It’s over.” The resignation in his voice confirmed what they both knew in their hearts: that it was lost. That they were beaten. They had come all this way but now had only minutes before their pursuers would be upon them.

“Alfred, we have to keep moving,” his friend urged him on. He ran down the slope and tried to lift his fellow escapee, who even in his weakened condition felt like a dead weight.

“Rudolf, I can’t. It’s no use.” The injured man just sat there, spent. “You go on. Here-” He handed his friend the pouch he’d been carrying. The proof they needed to get out. Columns of names. Dates. Maps. Incontrovertible proof of the unspeakable crimes the world needed to see. “Go! I’ll tell them I left you hours ago. You’ll have some time.”

“No.” Rudolf lifted him up. “Did you not vow not to die back there in that hell, just to let yourself die here…?”

He saw it in his friend’s eyes. What he’d seen in hundreds of other sets of eyes back at the camp, when they’d given up for good. A thousand.

Sometimes death is just simpler than continuing to fight.

Alfred lay there, breathing heavily, almost smiling. “Now go.”

From the woods, only yards away, they heard a click. The sound of a rifle being cocked.

They froze.

It’s over, they both realized at once. They’d been found. Their hearts leaped up with fear.

Out of the darkness, two men stepped forward. Both dressed in civilian garb, with rifles, their faces gritty and smeared with soot. It was clear they weren’t soldiers. Maybe just local farmers. Maybe the very ones who had turned them in.

“Resistance?” Rudolf asked, a last ember of hope flickering in his eyes.

For a second, the two said nothing. One merely cocked his gun. Then the larger one, bearded, in a rumpled hunting cap, nodded.

“Then help us, please!” Rudolf pleaded in Polish. “We’re from the camp.”

“The camp?” The man looked at their striped uniforms without understanding.

“Look!” Rudolf held out his arms. He showed them the numbers burned into them. “Auschwitz.”

The barking of the dogs was almost on them now. Only meters away. The man in the cap glanced toward the sound and nodded. “Take your friend. Follow me.”

TWO

EARLY MAY

WASHINGTON, D.C.

This was the first time he’d been asked to sit in with such esteemed company, and Captain Peter Strauss hoped, after what he had to propose, it wouldn’t be the last.

It was a drizzly Monday eve, and the mood around the table inside the Oval Office of the White House was as somber as the leaden skies outside. News of the two escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, had reached President Roosevelt’s inner circle within days of them making it across the Polish border to Slovakia.

As one of Bill Donovan’s youngest, but chief, OSS operations officers and a Jew himself, Strauss knew that suspicions of Nazi extermination camps-not just forced labor camps-went as far back as 1942, when reports filtered out from European Jewish groups of some 100,000 Jews forced from the ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz and likely killed. But the firsthand accounts from the two Auschwitz escapees, strengthened by actual documents they brought with them from the camp’s administrative offices listing names, numbers, and the factory-like process of mass liquidation, gave credence to everyone’s worst fears.

Around the oval table, Roosevelt; his secretary of war, Henry Stimson; Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau; William Donovan, his chief spymaster and head of the Office of Strategic Services; and Donovan’s aide, Captain Peter Strauss, pored over the grim report and pondered just what it meant. Even more troubling were the escapees’ claims that the death camp was rapidly expanding and that the pace of the exterminations, by mass gassing, had increased. Thousands upon thousands were being systematically wiped out each week.

“And this is only one of many such places of death,” Morgenthau, a Jew as well, and whose prominent New York banking family had seen that the escapees’ firsthand accounts got into the president’s hands, uttered grimly. “Reports suggest there are dozens more. Entire families are being sent to the gas chambers as soon as they arrive. Towns.”

“And our options are what, gentlemen?” A disheartened FDR looked around the table. A third, bloody year at war, worry of the upcoming invasion, the decision to run for a fourth term, and the advance of his crippling disease had all taken their toll on him but did not diminish the fight in his voice. “We can’t just sit back and allow these unconscionable acts to continue.”

“The Jewish Congress and the World Refugee Board are imploring us to bomb the camp,” the treasury secretary advised him. “We cannot simply sit on our hands any longer.”

“Which will accomplish what, exactly?” Henry Stimson, who had served in the administrations of two presidents prior to FDR and who had come out of public retirement to run the country’s war effort, asked. “Except to kill a lot of innocent prisoners ourselves. Our bombers can barely make it all the way there and back with a full payload. We’d suffer considerable losses. And we all know we need every one of those aircraft for what’s coming up.”

It was May 1944, and word had leaked even to Strauss’s level of the final preparations under way for the forthcoming invasion of Europe.

“Then at least we can disrupt their plans and bomb the railway tracks,” Morgenthau pleaded, desperate to convince the president to take action. “The prisoners are brought there on sealed trains. That would at least slow down the pace of the exterminations.”

“Bombers flying all over Europe at night… Making precision strikes on rail tracks? And as you say, there are many such camps?” Stimson registered his skepticism. “I believe the best thing we can do for these poor people, Mr. President, is to get to them and liberate them as swiftly as possible. Not by sponsoring any ill-conceived raids. That’s my view.”

The president drew in a breath and took off his wire glasses, the deep channels around his eyes reflecting the pallid cast of a conflicted man. Many of his closest friends were Jews and had urged action. His administration had brought more Jews into the government than any before it. And, as a humane and compassionate being, always seeking to give hope and rise to the common man, he was more repelled by the report of the atrocities he’d just read through than by any that had crossed his desk in the war, even more than the tragic losses of American lives on the beaches in the Pacific or the loss of troops at sea on their way to England.

Yet as a realist, Roosevelt knew his secretary of war was right. Too much lay ahead, and all of it far too important. Plus, the anti-Jewish lobby was still a strong one in the country, and reports of soldiers lost predominantly trying to save Jewish lives would not go well as he sought to gain a fourth term. “Bob, I know how hard this is for you.” He put his hand on the treasury secretary’s shoulder. “It’s hard for all of us, to be sure. Which brings us to the reason we are all here tonight, gentlemen. Our special project. What’s it called, ‘Catfish’?” He turned toward the head of the OSS, Colonel Donovan. “Tell me, Bill, do we have any real hope that this project is still alive?”

“Catfish” was the name known only to a very few for the undercover operation Strauss was in charge of to smuggle a particular individual out of Europe. A Polish Jew, whom FDR’s people claimed was vital to the war effort.

As far back as 1942, it had been discovered that bearers of certain Latin American identity papers were awarded special treatment in Warsaw. For several months, hundreds of Polish and Dutch Jews were issued counterfeit papers from Paraguay and El Salvador to gain exit from Europe. Many had made their way to northern France, where they were interned at a detention center in the village of Vittel, while their cases were gone over by skeptical German officials. As doubtful as the Nazis were about the origin of these papers, they could not afford to upset these neutral Latin American countries, whose authoritarian rulers were, in fact, sympathetic to their cause. How these particular refugees were able to acquire these papers, purchased secretly through anti-Nazi emissaries in the Paraguayan and Salvadoran embassies in Bern, as well as their dubious provenance, was always clouded. What also remained unclear was how contacts friendly to the United States had been able to get them into the hands of the very subject and his family (aka “Catfish”) they were attempting to smuggle out. For a while, the prospects looked hopeful. Twice, transport out of Europe had been arranged, via Holland and France. Yet each time the Germans blocked their exit. Then, just three months ago, an informer from Warsaw had blown the papers’ suspect origins wide open, and now the fates of all the Vittel Jews, including the one they so desperately wanted, were completely up in the air.

“I’m afraid we’ve hit a snag, Mr. President,” Donovan said. “We don’t know for certain if he’s even there.”

“Or if he is, if he’s even still alive…” Secretary of War Stimson added. “Our intelligence on the matter has all gone dark.”

The emissaries who had passed along the documents had been arrested and were now in Nazi jails.

“So I’m told we still need this man. At all costs.” The president turned to his secretary of war. “Is this still true?”

“Like no other.” Stimson nodded. “We were close in Rotterdam. There was even transport booked. Now…” He shook his head somberly, then took his pen and pointed to a tiny spot on the map of Europe that was on a stand next to the conference table.

A place called Oswiecim. In Poland.

“Oswiecim?” Roosevelt put back on his glasses.

“Oswiecim is the Polish name for Auschwitz, Mr. President,” the secretary of war said. “Which, in light of the report we’ve all just read, is why we’re here.”

“I see.” The president nodded. “So now he’s one of five million faceless Jews, forced out of their homes against their will, without papers or identity?”

“And to what fate, we do not know…” Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau shook his head gravely.

“It’s all our fates that are in the balance, gentlemen.” Roosevelt pushed his wheelchair back from the table. “So you’re here to tell me we’ve done everything we can to find this man and get him out. And now it’s lost. We’ve lost.”

He went around the table. For a moment, no one replied.

“Perhaps not completely lost, Mr. President.” The OSS chief leaned forward. “My colleague Captain Strauss has looked at the situation closely. And he believes there might be one last way…”

“A last way?” The tired president’s gaze fell on the young aide.

“Yes, Mr. President.”

The captain appeared around thirty, slightly balding already, and a graduate of Columbia Law School. A smart cookie, Roosevelt had been told. “All right, son, you’ve got my attention,” the president said.

Strauss cleared his throat and glanced one more time at his boss. He opened his folder.

“Go on.” Donovan nodded to him. “Tell him your plan.”

THREE

JANUARY, FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

THE VITTEL DETENTION CENTER, OCCUPIED FRANCE

“Papa, Papa, wake up! They’re here!”

The shrill of whistles knifed through the frigid morning air. Dr. Alfred Mendl awoke in his narrow bunk, his arm wrapped around his wife, Marte, protecting her from the January cold. Their daughter, Lucy, stood over them, both nervous and excited. She’d been at the blanket-covered window of the cramped room that was fit at most for four, but which they now shared with fourteen others. This was no place for a girl to pass her twenty-second birthday, as she had just the night before. Huddled on lice-infested mattresses, sleeping amid their haphazard suitcases and meager belongings, everyone slowly stirred out of their blankets and greatcoats with the anticipation that something clearly was up.

“Papa, look now!”

On the landing outside, the French milice were going room to room, banging on doors with their batons. “Get up! Out of bed, you lazy Jews. All those holding foreign passports, take your things and come down. You’re leaving!”

Alfred’s heart leaped. After eight hard months, was this finally the time?

He jumped out of bed, still dressed in his rumpled tweed pants and woolen undershirt, all that kept him warm. They had all slept in their warmest clothes most every night for months now, washing them whenever they could. He nearly tripped over the family stretched out on the floor next to them. They rotated the sleeping arrangements a month at a time.

“Everyone holding foreign passports packed and out!” a black-clad policeman threw open the door and instructed them.

“Marte, get up! Throw everything together. Maybe today is the day!” he said to his wife with a feeling of hopefulness. Hope that had been dashed many times over the past year.

Everyone in the room was murmuring, slowly coming to life. Light barely crept through the blanket-covered sills. Vittel was a detention camp in the northeast corner of France, actually four six-story hotels that formed a ring around a large courtyard, not exactly “four stars,” so the joke went, as it was all surrounded by three rows of barbed wire manned by German patrols. Thousands were held there-political prisoners, citizens of neutral or enemy countries whom the Germans were hoping to exchange-although the Jews, mostly of Polish and Dutch descent, whose fate was being decided by Berlin, were kept together on the same ward. The French policeman who entered their room stepped between the rustling bodies, prodding people along with his stick. “Didn’t you hear me? All of you, up, packed. Quick, quick! Why are you dallying? You’re shipping out.”

Those who were slow to move, he nudged sharply with his stick and kicked open their suitcases that were strewn on the floor.

“Where are we going?” people questioned in various languages and accents: Polish, Yiddish, and awkward French, everyone scurrying to get their things together.

“You’ll see. Just get yourself moving. That’s my only job. And take your papers. You’ll find out downstairs.”

“Take our papers!” Alfred looked at Marte and Lucy with a lift in his heart. Could this finally be their time? He and his family had waited so long there. Eight harsh months, after making their way with the forged identity papers gotten into his hands by the emissary from the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw. First to the Swiss border through Slovakia and Austria, where they were turned away; then by train through occupied France to Holland, all the while under the protection of the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw as a foreign national on a teaching assignment at the university in Lvov. Once, they literally got as far as the pier in Rotterdam where they were to board a Swedish cargo ship, the Prinz Eugen, to Stockholm, transport papers in hand, only to be turned back again as their papers needed to be authenticated. Literally in limbo, they were sent here to Vittel, while Jewish organizations in Switzerland and the United States’ and British governments argued their cases and pressured the Paraguayan and Salvadoran governments to honor their documents. Since then, they had been kept here in a kind of diplomatic hell. Always promised that the matter was being looked into. One more day, just another day, while the German foreign office and Latin American embassies worked it out. Alfred and his family had even taught themselves Spanish, to make their case all the more convincing. Of course they knew their documents were not worth the paper they were printed on. Alfred was Polish, had been born in Warsaw, and had taught physics at the university in Lvov after years in Prague and Gottingen with some of the best minds in the atomic field. At least until he was stripped of his position a year ago and his diplomas were trashed and burned. Marte was from Prague, now overrun by the Nazis, but had been a Polish citizen for years. They all knew that the only thing that had kept them from being shipped off somewhere and never heard from again was these papers, suspect as they were, that had been arranged by he knew not who with the promise that they would get the family out and to America, where he would be greeted warmly by Szilard and Fermi, his old colleagues. Still, whatever they had suffered these past months was far better than what they would have faced back home. Months ago he’d heard the university in Lvov had been cleared out just like those in Warsaw and Krakow. The last of his colleagues shot, kicked in the streets, or shipped off somewhere with their families, never heard from again.

Bring your papers, the policeman said now. Was this a good sign or a bad one? Alfred didn’t know. But everyone around him was springing to life, pulsing with both nerves and anticipation. Maybe it had all been cleared up at last. Maybe they were finally leaving.

A day hadn’t passed where he hadn’t dreamed of presenting his work to people who pursued good and not these Nazis.

“Darling, come on, quick!” He helped his wife fill up her suitcase. Marte was frail these days. She’d caught a cold in November, and it seemed to have never left her chest. She looked like she’d aged ten years since they’d begun their journey.

They’d had to leave everything behind. Their fine china. Their collection of antique pharmacy jars. All the awards that had been given to him. Anything of value other than a few photographs and, of course, his work. They stuffed whatever they had taken into their small bags. When the time came to leave, it had to be in a day.

“Lucy, quick!” Alfred assembled his papers and threw them into his leather briefcase along with the few books he’d been able to bring along. He could lose his clothing, his academic diplomas, the photographs of his parents on the Vistula in Warsaw, the personal effects dearest to him. Even his best shoes. But his work-his work must remain. His formulas and research. Everything depended on getting them out. One day that would become clear. He hastily bundled it all together in his case and fastened the lock. “Marte, Lucy, we must go.”

A few in the crowded room remained behind and wished those who were leaving well, like prisoners saying goodbye to a fellow inmate who’d been pardoned. “See you in a better life,” they said, as if they knew their fates would not be as rosy. A strange familiarity had built up among people whose lives had been thrown together for months in such close quarters.

“God be with you! Goodbye!”

Alfred, Marte, and Lucy made their way outside, melding into the river of people heading along the outside corridors and down to the courtyard. Parents held onto their children; sons and daughters helped the elderly as they slowly went down the stairs, so as not to be trampled in the rush. On the ground, they were herded into the large yard, shivering from the January chill, murmuring, wondering to their neighbors what was going to happen next. Above them, a crowd of those left behind pressed against the banisters, looking on.

“Papa, what’s going to happen to us?” Lucy asked, eyeing the German guards with their submachine guns.

Alfred looked around. “I don’t know.”

There were Germans-there always were-but not so many as one would think if something bad was going to happen to them. They all huddled together in the cold. Merchants, teachers, accountants, rabbis. In long woolen coats and homburgs and fedoras.

Whistles sounded. An officious-looking captain in the local French militia, a German officer following behind, stepped in front of the throng and ordered everyone to line up with their papers. The German was in a gray wool officer’s coat with the markings of the secret intelligence division, the Abwehr, which worried Alfred.

He and his family grabbed their suitcases and joined the queue.

The French officer went down the line, family by family, inspecting their papers closely and checking their faces. Some he instructed to remain where they were; others he waved to the side of the yard. Armed guards stood everywhere. And dogs, barking loudly and pulling on their leashes, scaring the young children and some of the parents too.

“It will be a joy to be rid of this place,” Marte said. “Wherever we end up.”

“It will,” Alfred said, though he was sensing something in the mood of the soldiers that didn’t seem right. They had their caps low and their hands on their weapons. There was no levity. No fraternizing.

Those who didn’t speak French were directed to the side without knowing what was going on. One family, Hungarian, Alfred suspected, shouted loudly in their native tongue as a French militiaman tried to move them and then kicked open a suitcase, filled with religious articles, which the old man and his wife scampered vainly to pick up. Another man, clearly a rabbi with a long white beard, kept showing his papers to the milice captain in frustration. The French officer finally flung them back at him, the old man and his wife bending to pick them off the ground as eagerly as if they were thousand-zloty notes.

No, Alfred thought, it didn’t seem right at all.

The captain and his German overseer made their way down the line. The soldiers and the guards gradually began to use more force to restrain everyone.

“Don’t worry, these have been checked many times,” Alfred assured Marte and Lucy. “They will definitely pass.”

But a worrisome feeling rose up in him as each interaction seemed to be met only by frustration and anger, and then people were brusquely shuffled into the growing throng ringed by heavily armed guards.

Outside the walls they heard a train hiss to a stop.

“See, they are taking us somewhere.” Alfred tried to sound optimistic to his family.

At last the French officer made his way up to them. “Papers,” he requested impassively. Alfred handed him the travel documents showing that he and his family were under the protection of the Paraguayan government and had merely been residents in Poland these past seven years.

“We have been waiting a long time to get home,” Alfred said in French to the officer, whose shifting black eyes never really looked at him, just back and forth, from the documents to their faces, as had been done many times these past eight months without incident. The SS officer stood behind him, hands clasped behind his back, with a stonelike look that made Alfred feel uneasy.

“Have you enjoyed your stay here in France, señorita?” the milice captain asked Lucy in passable Spanish.

“Sí, sir,” she replied, nervously enough so that Alfred could hear it in her voice. Who wouldn’t be? “But I am ready to finally get home.”

“I’m sure you are,” the captain said. Then he stepped in front of Alfred. “It says you are a professor?”

“Yes. Electromagnetic physics.”

“And where did you acquire these papers, monsieur?”

“What? Where did we acquire them…?” Alfred stammered back, his insides knotting with fear. “These were issued by the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw. I assure you they are valid. Look, there, you can see…” He went to show the officer the official seal and signatures.

“I’m afraid these papers are forgeries,” the milice captain declared.

“I beg your pardon?”

“They are worthless. They are as bad as your Spanish, I’m afraid, mademoiselle. All of you…” He raised his voice so that the entire crowd could hear. “You are no longer under the protection of the Paraguayan and El Salvadoran governments. It is determined that these visas and passports are not valid. You are prisoners of the French government now, who have no recourse, given your situation, but to turn you over to the German authorities.”

There was an audible gasp from the crowd. Some wailed, “My God, no!” Others simply looked to the person next to them and muttered, “What did he say…? That these are not valid?”

To Alfred’s horror, the French officer began to tear his documents into shreds. All that had kept them alive these past ten months, their only route to freedom, scattering from his hands like ashes onto Alfred’s shoes.

“You three, over there,” the officer pushed them brusquely, “with the rest.” Then he moved down the line without another word. “Next.”

“What have you done?” Alfred bent to scoop the shredded documents off the ground. He pulled at the arm of the officer. “Those papers are perfectly valid. They have been inspected many times. Look, look…” He pointed to the torn signature page. “We are Paraguayan citizens, looking to return home. We demand transit!”

“You demand transit?” The SS officer following the milice captain finally spoke. “Be assured, transit is arranged.”

Two guards edged their way in and pushed them with their guns from the line. “Take your bags. Over there!” They pointed toward the throng of other Latin American passport holders who were now being penned in by guards, a deepening hopelessness beginning to envelop them.

People began to shout out cries of outrage and objection, holding up their documents, eight months of waiting, hoping, being kept in pens, their dreams of freedom suddenly dashed. The French officer announced in several languages that those holding these travel papers had five minutes to gather their belongings and board transportation that had been arranged outside the camp grounds.

“Where are you taking us?” a terrified woman yelled. For months, rumors of dark places where no one was ever heard from again had spread through the detention camp like an outbreak of typhus.

“To the beach,” one of French militia laughed. “To the South of France. Where else? Isn’t that where you are looking to go?”

“We have an express train for you. Do not worry,” another chortled with the same sarcasm. “You Latin American aristocrats will be traveling first class.”

Pandemonium spread like wildfire. Some just refused to accept their fate. The old rabbi in the white beard and his wife sat down on their luggage, refusing to budge. Others screamed back in anger at the black-clad guards, who, now that the true purpose of what they were doing had come out and the crowd had grown unruly, began to close in, herding them like sheep toward the front gate, brandishing their weapons.

“Stay together,” Alfred instructed Marte and Lucy, tightly clutching their bags. They were separated for a moment by people charging to the front, cursing and showing their discredited papers in fits of rage. The crowd began to surge. The guards closed in, using their rifle shafts like cattle prods. The white-bearded rabbi and his wife still refused to move; a German guard had now taken over and was screaming at them like they were deaf. “Aussen.” Out. “Get up! Now.” Fights began to break out. Some faces were bloodied, struck by rifle shafts. A few old-timers fell to the ground, and the crowd moved over them despite desperate pleas and shrieks from those who stopped to help.

But family by family, there was no choice but to go. Worried, everyone grabbed their things. The milice herded them with their sticks and rifles in the direction of the front gate. Some prayed, others whimpered, but all, except the rabbi and his wife, went. Guards infiltrated the crowd, kicking along luggage. “Is this yours? Take it, or it stays!” Moving them like cattle through Vittel’s makeshift wire gate, dogs barking, pulling on their leashes, amid outraged shouts everywhere, wails, cries, everyone giving themselves over to their worst fears.

“Papa, what’s happening?” Lucy said, afraid.

“Come on, stay close,” Alfred said, clutching his and Marte’s valise along with his briefcase. “Maybe it will just be another detention center like this. We’ve lived through worse.” He tried to appear as positive as he could, though he knew in his heart it would not be. Now they had no papers. And Marte’s health was growing worse. They moved through the front gate, the first time in eight months they were beyond the wire.

A cargo train waited for them on the tracks. At first, people assumed it was not for them. More for cattle or horses. Then everyone was startled by the sudden rattle of the doors being flung open. The French guards remained behind. The soldiers along the tracks were now German, which sent terror into everyone’s heart.

“Here are your fancy carriages, Jews,” one of them cackled. “Please, let me help you.” He cracked a man in the head with his rifle stock. “Everyone up and in.”

There was resistance at first, people objecting, fighting back. This was transport fit for swine, not people. Then there were two short bursts of machine gun fire from behind them and everyone turned. The white-bearded rabbi and his poor wife were now lying on the ground in a pool of blood next to their luggage.

“Oh my God, they’re going to massacre us!” a woman screamed.

Everyone headed for the trains. One by one they hurried in, pushing the old and young, dragging their belongings with them. If it couldn’t be carried, or if someone stopped to load another article first, their bags were torn from them and tossed aside, clothing and pictures and toiletries spilling over the platform.

“No, those are my possessions!” a woman yelled.

“Get in. Get in. You won’t need them.” A guard pushed her inside.

“There are no seats in here,” someone said. Alfred helped Marte and Lucy up and someone pushed him up from behind. When they all thought the car was filled, they pushed more in. In minutes, you could barely breathe.

“There’s no room! There’s no more room! Please…” a woman wailed. “We’ll suffocate in here.”

They filled it even more.

“Please, I don’t want to go!” a man shouted over the wailing.

“C’mon, do you want to end up like them?” another urged him onward, glancing back to the rabbi and his wife in the courtyard.

“My daughter, my daughter. Sophie…!” a woman cried. A young girl, forced by the crowd into another car, cried out from afar, “Mama!”

The guards kept loading and packing people in with whatever they could carry, until the train car grew tighter and more crowded than Alfred could ever have imagined.

Then the door was slammed shut.

There was only darkness at first. The only light from outside angled through narrow slits in the side door. There were a few whimpers in the pitch black, but then everyone just became silent. The kind of silence when no one has any idea what will happen next. There was barely room to move, to even adjust your arms, to breathe. The car smelled, the odor of eighty people jammed together in a space that should hold half that, many of whom hadn’t bathed in weeks.

They stayed that way, listening to the shouts and cries from outside, until they heard a whistle and with a jerk the train began to move. Now people were whimpering, sobbing, praying. They stayed upright by leaning against each other in the dark. In a corner were two jugs, one filled with water-but hardly enough, given the number of them in the car. The other empty. Alfred realized what it was for.

“Where are they taking us, Alfred?” Marte asked under her breath as the railcars picked up speed.

“I don’t know.” He sought out her and Lucy’s hands and clasped them tightly in his. “But at least we are together.”

FOUR

Gruppen führer Colonel Martin Franke stepped out on the tracks outside the detention center as the train pulled away. It was over. The Jews were all packed up and gone. The deception had come out and now there was no more recourse for them. All he’d had to do was dangle the bait long enough and he knew someone would grab it. These Jews would fight for a half-eaten piece of tripe off the ground even though it meant giving up one of their own. He watched as the last railcar chugged off to who knew where. Where they were heading, no passport or visa in the world would do them good anymore.

“Captain.” He nodded to the French police officer, whose men were now cleaning up all the mess in the courtyard, including the two or three stubborn ones who lay behind in pools of their own blood who they’d had to make a show of. “A job well done, Captain.” Now not a trace of those who had just boarded the train would even exist.

“Permit me, Colonel…” The French officer bent down and picked up someone’s scattered ID papers from the ground. “But were they…?”

“Were they what?” Franke looked at him. “Speak up.”

“Were they, in fact, forged? The passports. Were they counterfeit?”

Franke took the boot-smeared document from him. The Jew’s own kinsmen had probably stomped all over it in their haste to board. “What does it matter anyway?” The officer shrugged. “They were never going anywhere from the start.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel…?”

“See that the rest of the documents are all accounted for. For our records,” Franke said without answering his question.

“Yes, Herr Gruppen führer.” The captain saluted and then went away.

Franke pulled his heavy, gray officer’s coat closed against the cold. He’d traveled two days from Warsaw, and where was he? Not in Paris; not in some warm, crowded café with a bottle of old médoc and nuzzling at the tits of some loose French barmaid on his lap. No. But packing up a bunch of immaterial, frightened Jews in a prison in the middle of a fucking forest. There wasn’t a day that went by when he didn’t miss his old post. A year ago, he was part of the German attaché in Lisbon, a plum assignment, spending the war attending parties at the roof bar of the Mundial and sharpening his diplomatic skills. With any luck, he would have been chief attaché within a year, and from there, however the war resolved, there would be influence to trade: Bribes. Exit visas for sale. Artwork stolen from the walls of palaces and stuffed away.

But his secretary, Lena, a piece of ass who couldn’t type for shit but who’d been screwing half the mission, proved to be part of a British spy network and fled to London with the names of half the Abwehr network in Lisbon and a notebook full of contact codes. Exposed half the contacts in Europe and Britain. Disgraced, Franke was transferred to Warsaw. G section. Sabotage, false documents, covert contacts with certain minority groups. There the only food was boiled, and the only fish came out of the fucking sewer. Not to mention the cold. It was the kind of cold that you never fully got out of your bones. It made Lisbon seem like the South of France. Then to top it off, his wife, whose family owned a thriving metal factory in Stuttgart which kept him in fancy linens and tins of caviar-his own family could barely afford to put meat on the table-wrote to say that she was leaving him.

Still, better the cold than a cyanide pill, Franke resolved. Now he was serving the war effort by twisting arms and running informants to root out resistance fighters on the Polish frontier or stubborn Jews still hiding out in the Aryan sector. Completely beneath his skills, of course, but it had been his network of informants that had unearthed the traitorous chargé d’affaires from the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw who was the source of those illegal forgeries. Franke had always been a man who would do whatever it took, whatever means, to accomplish what was necessary. He had been a detective back in Essen, and not some flashy ass-kisser who went straight for the headlines but one who turned over every page, got on his knees to find every shred of evidence, and a man like that was always poised to sniff out the one opportunity that would land him back on his feet. Otherwise, he would spend the rest of the war in this useless, forgotten city, or, if things went badly, as he was beginning to sense, until they sent him out to the front lines in the East to be shot, likely by his own men, while exhorting them to stand fast against the advancing Russian horde. These days, Franke craved only one thing, and that was the chance to prove his worth to his superiors in Berlin again.

But today had been a good one. His network had unearthed the informer in Warsaw who had given his kinsfolk up. The trail went from the ghettos of Warsaw to the embassies of Paraguay and El Salvador. Two hundred forty Jews. Only a drop in the bucket, given the big picture, of course, but 240 Jews who had come to arouse the interest of the United States and British governments and whom Berlin desperately needed certain proof of if it was to challenge the sovereignty of two neutral Latin American friends and resolve this thorny situation. He’d surely get a commendation from Berlin, maybe a nod from Canaris, admitting they had been hasty in their treatment of him in Lisbon. Or even the Reichsmarschall himself. They’d all have to take notice.

Because a man like Franke, who had been brought up in the iron smelting factories of Essen, knew it wasn’t so complicated. All that it required was to follow the scent and not be afraid to dirty your hands. That was the problem with these Abwehr stuffed shirts. They were too busy going to cocktail parties and flirting with dignitaries’ wives to know an informer from a bartender. But Franke was a person who was willing to risk everything for what had to be done.

Still, for now, he lamented, it was back to Warsaw, and the winter that still had two more months. Another success like this and they would have to offer him his old position. Perhaps Geneva this time, he sometimes allowed himself to dream.

Maybe even Paris.

The last plume of smoke had faded as the train went around a curve. His work here was complete. Franke took out the left-behind identity paper that the captain had handed him. The photo page of a visa that had fallen to the platform. A pretty little thing, for a Jew. Maybe twelve, with pigtails and a happy smile. He read the name: Elena Zeitman. Zeitman. No matter, Franke thought. He folded it neatly and placed it in his pocket. He did not know the precise location she was being sent. Some labor camp in Poland, he’d heard. But he did know, looking after the train, that whatever fate awaited her, no visa or passport in the world would be of help to her now.

FIVE

JANUARY, THE FOLLOWING DAY

At his desk at OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C., Peter Strauss read the cable from the War Refugee Board attaché in Bern, Switzerland, with a sense of deflation.

It concerned various civilians being held at the Vittel detention camp in northeastern France who were seeking transport out of Europe under the protection of certain Latin American passports.

Passports he had a keen interest in. And had helped arrange.

The cable read:

It is my misfortune to report that diplomatic protection for these applicants has been permanently denied. Documents ruled falsely obtained. All bearers rounded up and placed on a sealed train. Destination: labor camp in southern Poland. We believe it to be in a town named Oswiecim.

Strauss reread the cable as his stomach fell. It had been a year. A year of carefully setting this up, of getting the documents into the hands of the one man they sought, then routing him and his family out of Poland and through occupied territory. Secretly arranging transport. A year of petitioning the government of Paraguay to resist German diplomatic pressure and to stand behind them.

A year that was now lost.

All bearers rounded up and placed on a sealed train. Destination: labor camp in southern Poland.

Strauss put the cable down. Operation Catfish was finished.

As the son of a cantor, who could still recite the prayers and Torah as well as he could his own name, the hollowness in Strauss’s gut felt even deeper. His father’s brother was still in Vienna; they had no idea what fate had befallen him, or his entire family. In a way, Strauss had put all his faith and belief in a positive outcome for this war into the hope that this mission would succeed.

And now both had crumbled.

“Any reply, sir?” The young lieutenant who had delivered the communiqué was still standing there.

“No.” Strauss shrugged glumly. “No reply.” He took off his wire-rim glasses and started to wipe the lenses clean.

“So then it’s over? Two hundred and forty of them…” the aide inquired. That was as much as the lieutenant knew. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Two hundred and forty lives…” Strauss nodded. “All worth saving, no doubt. But only one that was vital.”

SIX

FOUR DAYS LATER

They heard the hiss of steam and the jolt of the brakes and after three agonizing days of pressed-together, foul-smelling confinement, the train finally came to a stop. “Where are we?” people asked in the dark. It was night. “Can anyone see?”

For a while they just stood there, hearing shouts in German outside. Dogs barking.

Someone said, “I’ve heard they let the dogs attack people right off the train. They just take their pick.”

“Shut up,” a woman replied harshly. “You’re scaring the children.”

Suddenly they heard the rattle of locks being opened and the doors of the train car were flung wide. Cold air rushed in, along with glaring lights.

“Rauss, rauss. Everyone out! Get out! Schnellen. Faster.” Gray-clad soldiers carrying sticks rushed up to the train and started pulling people down from the cars. “Quick! Now! Assemble on the platform with your things.”

Fear leaping up in their blood, Alfred, Marte, and Lucy stepped down from the packed car, pulling shut their jackets against the biting cold and shielding their eyes from the sharp glare. During the endless trip at least four in their car had died. An old woman who was sick; another, a pregnant one, just fell and gave up. Two were infants. There was a moment or two when Alfred wasn’t sure if Marte would make it; in the cramped quarters, the rattle in her chest seemed to grow even worse. There was little to eat except what people had brought along and were willing to share. And the thirst… Their throats were parched. There was only one water break per day. “You remember on our honeymoon in Italy?” Alfred had tried to cheer Marte up on the journey. “How mad you were at me?”

“Because you bought us third-class tickets.” She had nodded, her voice no stronger than a whisper.

“It was all I could afford. I didn’t have a teaching position yet,” he had explained to Lucy, as the cars rocked back and forth. “In retrospect, doesn’t seem quite so bad now, does it?” he had said to Marte with a laugh.

“Your father always knows how to turn a failed experiment into a life lesson,” Marte had joked to Lucy.

Then she had let her head fall against him and coughed. It made the time go by.

On the platform now, there was shouting everywhere, dogs barking. Lights being flashed. In the background, Alfred could see guards with submachine guns. Black-clad guards were blowing shrill whistles and herding everyone around.

“This way! Over here. Leave your things where they are! They’ll be taken care of.”

These past months, Alfred had grown to detest the French guards at Vittel, but now the French were no longer around, and the sense quickly set in that what they knew before would seem like a fond memory compared to what they faced now.

“Stay together,” he said, helping Marte amid the surging crowd. “At least we’re off that godforsaken train. Look…” He pointed upward to letters forming an arch high above the gate.

“What does it say, Papa?” Lucy asked. It was in German.

“Work will set you free. See, you have to get strong again, Marte. If we work here, we will be safe. You’ll see.”

She coughed and nodded and, jostled by the bustling throng, reached down for her bag.

“Here…” Alfred took it from her. “Let me help you.”

As the cars cleared, everyone huddled together for a time, mothers holding their children’s hands, people comforting the elderly, not sure what was next. They’d all heard the rumors of these dark and terrible places where no one was ever heard from again. Suddenly, to their amazement, the sounds of music started up. An orchestra playing. How could that be? It was Schubert. Alfred was certain. He’d heard it played in Prague at the Rudolfinum Hall.

“Schubert’s Violin Concerto in D Major,” someone confirmed.

“See, they even have an orchestra here.” Alfred put his arm around Marte. “What do you think, Lucy?” He tried to sound upbeat. “It can’t be so bad.”

“This way! This way!” Black-clad guards with SS markings elbowed through the crowd. “Women and their children form over here. All men, even fathers”-one pointed the other direction-“over there. Don’t worry, it’s just for processing. You’ll all be reunited soon.”

“We should try and stay together,” Alfred said, picking up both their suitcases and squeezing his briefcase under his arm.

“You there!” A large guard in a black SS cap jostled him. “You women and children to the left. You over here.”

“Meine frau ist nicht gut.” Alfred appealed to him in German. “She’s sick. She needs care.”

“Don’t worry, she’ll be well taken care of here. You’ll see her soon. Everyone will be happy. Just leave all your belongings.”

A large pile of luggage and satchels had formed on the platform, like that of a tour group awaiting transportation.

“But how will we find them?” a woman in a fur wrap asked. “How will anyone know whose is whose?”

“Don’t worry, it will all be worked out.” The German officer smiled politely. “Now, just go, quick, there, double time… You two as well…”

Amid the people crisscrossing, the dogs barking, and officers herding everyone around, Alfred noticed a handful of people in blue and gray candy-striped uniforms and tiny caps weaving through the crowd, taking people’s abandoned luggage and rucksacks and throwing them onto a rapidly growing pile. Hunched like downtrodden workers and rail thin, they avoided direct eye contact with the new arrivals as they went about their jobs, though one’s gaze seemed to land on Alfred’s. His gaunt, dark features, shaved head, and sunken eyes with a kind of soullessness in them seemed to tell a different story about what life was like here.

“Women and children must go here! Schnellen! Quick!” a German barked, grabbing Marte and Lucy by the arms and dragging them away. In a second they had been separated from Alfred, pushed on by the throng.

“Marte!” Alfred lunged after them. “Lucy!”

“Alfred!” his wife answered him, his name drowning into the din of shouting and wails as she desperately tried to grasp hold of him.

“Papa!” Lucy cried out. “I’m over here!”

Alfred dropped his cases and tried to make his way to them, fear lighting up in him as they were being pushed away. “Please, I need to get to my wife and daughter. I-”

“Don’t worry, they’ll be fine. You’ll see them soon,” an SS officer interceded. He pointed to the other direction. “You, over there.”

“I’m sure I will see you both soon,” Alfred called after them. “Be strong. I will find a way to contact you.”

“I love you, Alfred!” Marte called out. Through the dark sea of the crowd, he managed to catch a last, plea-filled glance, and in her surrendering eyes he saw a kind of finality he had never seen before.

He waved, giving them both a hopeful smile though his heart was suddenly overrun with sadness and terror and the feeling that he might never see them again. “I love you both, too.”

And then they were gone.

All around, on the platform, many were making their last, tearful goodbyes and futile pleas. “Be safe!” “I will see you soon.” “Watch over our son,” they would tell one another. “Don’t worry, I will.” The guards told the men to leave their valises and all belongings. Alfred clutched his briefcase. One of the candy-striped prisoners brushed into him and went to take it from him.

“No.” Alfred grasped onto it tighter. “These are my books. My formulas.”

“Don’t resist,” the prisoner said under his breath. “They’ll shoot you.”

“No, I won’t let them go,” Alfred said, tightening his arms around it.

“Don’t worry, you won’t be needing any formulas here, old man.” A German officer came up with a grin of amusement. “There’s only one formula here, and you’ll learn it fast, I promise.”

“I’m a physicist. This is all my research. My life’s work, Herr Obersturmführer,” Alfred said, observing his rank.

“This is now your work,” the officer said, and motioned to the prisoners hurling their belongings onto a pile. The officer tried to take the case from Alfred’s hands. “Do it well and maybe you’ll last. Your German is quite good.” He pointed to a line. “Go over there.”

“Please…” Alfred resisted even further. “No.”

In a flash, the German’s politeness morphed into something completely different. “Did you not hear me, I said, let go, Jew!” He reached in his holster and pulled out a Luger. “Or would you rather your stay here be short-lived?”

“Give it here. Please,” the prisoner begged, with what looked like a dire warning in his eyes.

Alfred could see the rage and anger stiffen in the German officer’s eyes and neck, knowing that if he resisted even seconds longer he would be dropped right here on the tracks, the way the old rabbi and his wife had been shot back in Vittel. He had to stay alive, if only for Marte and Lucy’s sake. He had to see them again.

Reluctantly, he let go.

“Now get over there.” The German pushed him toward the line of younger men assembling. “Your German will come in handy.” He blew his whistle and moved on to someone else.

Alfred watched as the prisoner took his leather case and flung it onto the mountain of bags and belongings that was growing by the minute. In horror, he saw the clasp become undone, and pages and pages of his work-equations, formulas, research for papers he had written for Academic Scientifica and the Zeitschrift für Physik, the toil of twenty years-slowly slide out of the case and scatter like debris over the mounting pile of bags, rucksacks, children’s toys and dolls, until they disappeared-every page, like bodies hurled indifferently into a mass grave and then covered over by the next.

If only they knew what that was…

He was handed a uniform and told to march to a processing building and change his clothes. Over the ubiquitous wailing on the platform and the desperate last goodbyes and shouts of “I love you!” and “Stay strong,” Alfred thought he heard his name. He spun around, his heart springing up with hope. “Marte!”

But it was likely only another person shouting for someone else. He searched the crowd for one last look at his girls, but they were gone. Then he was pushed along in the throng. Twenty-eight years… he said to himself. In all that time, they rarely spent a day apart. She had typed every one of his papers and listened to hundreds of his talks in advance, correcting his syntax and cadence. She made him cakes and meat pies, and every Thursday he came home with flowers from the market on King Stanisław Street on his walk back from the university. A panic rose up in him that he would never see her again. Neither of them. That they would all die in this place. He prayed they would be all right. Up ahead, he saw the line he was in being separated into two new ones. He sensed that in one he would live and in the other he would die. But it was too late for fear now, or for prayers.

Looking back and watching his papers scatter like dead leaves on that pile of bags and people’s belongings, the small part of him that was still even capable of fear or hope felt nothing.

It had already died.

SEVEN

LATE APRIL, THREE MONTHS LATER

LISBON

A black Opel pulled up to the curb at the Lisbon airport, and Peter Strauss climbed into the backseat, ducking out of the rain.

He was not wearing his officer’s cap, nor, beneath his raincoat, his army captain’s uniform. Only a sport jacket with flannel trousers, rumpled from the two-hour flight in from London. With his valise and leather briefcase, he might have been any businessman arriving who was trying to profit from the war, selling steel or food or buying Portuguese tungsten, as Lisbon was one of the last open and thriving centers of commerce in Europe during the war.

“Captain Strauss,” the Swiss-born driver who worked with the War Refugee Committee greeted him, taking his bags. “I know you’ve had a long trip. Would you like to stop off at the hotel and freshen up?”

“Thanks,” Strauss replied. He’d caught a diplomatic night flight to London, then spent two days absorbed with secret phone calls and cables in order to set up the meeting he was here to be part of. “But I’d just as soon get going if it’s all the same.”

“Very good.” The driver put Strauss’s bag in the front and climbed in behind the wheel. “Everyone’s waiting. Have you ever been to Estoril?”

In about forty minutes, they reached the coast and arrived at the posh seaside resort, home to the glamorous casino where the displaced royalty of Europe wagered for exit visas in evening attire, mingling with British and German spies. The car came to a stop in front of a tile-roofed, two-story home facing the sea behind a high iron gate and a stucco outer wall: 114 Rua do Mare. The villa could have belonged to any well-heeled Portuguese family seeking seclusion and a pleasing view of the sea, but, in fact, it was the summer retreat of the Catholic archbishop. The high walls and remote location, far away from the spy nests in Lisbon and before the summer crowds, made it the ideal location for the men Strauss had flown to meet.

The front gate opened and the Opel came to a stop in the courtyard. A large, Florentine-styled fountain stood in the center. Someone came out to meet him, a short, neatly tailored man with a goatee who introduced himself as Ricardo Oliva, from the International Refugee Committee, and escorted Strauss down a vaulted loggia into the main house. In a large room dominated by a huge stone fireplace and a candled chandelier, a small crowd was waiting for him. The first to greet him was the archbishop’s adjunct, a balding man of about fifty in a black frock and crucifix, who introduced himself as Monsignor Correa.

“Thank you for arranging this,” Strauss said, shaking the clergyman’s hand. “And please convey my government’s thanks to His Eminence for offering the privacy of his home.”

“Privacy is the only weapon we have today,” the monsignor said, nodding, “but soon, it is our hope that such vile business be seen by the world and out in the light of day. In fact, there are some things more pressing than political or religious neutrality. Even in the midst of war.”

“That is our hope too,” Strauss said to him.

He went around the room and met various representatives from the refugee groups from Bern and Stockholm, two bearded Orthodox rabbis who spoke no English and whom Strauss greeted with the traditional Hebrew “Shalom, rebi,” and finally Alexander Katzner of the Jewish World Congress, whose efforts in trying to smuggle Jews out of occupied territory was well known back home. They all seemed to meet Strauss with great anticipation.

“We are glad you’re here.” Katzner greeted him warmly. “It is time that the world see what we’ve known has been going on for some time.”

“Your president must now see,” one of the refugee committee representatives said, “what we’ve been facing. And then act.”

“Please, please… Leave our guest to get his bearings. Would you care for something to eat, Captain?” Monsignor Correa took Strauss by the elbow. “I know it’s been a long trip.”

Strauss thanked him but politely declined. “I’m eager to get going, if it’s all the same.”

“By all means. I understand. This way, then…” The monsignor opened an adjacent double door and led Strauss into a spacious, formal dining room. “They are waiting for you in here.”

Seated at the long, wooden table with two large, gold candelabras in the center were Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler.

The two men were dark and thin, dressed in suits that seemed way too baggy, and remained seated as everyone came in the room. They had been out of the camp for only a few weeks and their hair was only beginning to grow in. Wetzler, whom Strauss recognized from photographs, had a small mustache. His Czech compatriot, Vrba, was smoking, seemingly nervously, and remained seated. A Czech member of the War Refugee Committee acted as translator.

First, Strauss shook their hands and congratulated them on their brave escape. “You both showed remarkable courage. All the world owes you a great debt.” A cup of black coffee was put in front of him with a piece of hard sugar.

The Czech translated and the two men nodded, mildly enthusiastic.

“This is their report,” Katzner, of the Jewish World Congress, said, pushing a thick sheaf of papers in front of Strauss. “But I think you are already familiar with the important details. For a long time it’s been no secret what’s been going on. What everyone here wants to know is, what is the delay with a response? This is not war the Nazis are waging against us. It’s murder.”

“I’m a military man, not a diplomat,” Strauss said, “but I want to assure you that even the president has been made aware.”

“You are a Jew yourself, are you not?” a Swede from the refugee board inquired of him.

Strauss nodded. “Yes.”

“So you must see this clearer than anyone. Thousands upon thousands are dying every day. How does your government not act?”

“The U.S. government is interested in all lives threatened under the Nazi regime,” Strauss said, though the words sat like an undigested piece of meat in his gut and had a hollow ring. It was clear the people here looked on Strauss’s visit as a sign that the kind of military response they were all pleading for would soon follow. That the United States, home to the most Jews in the world outside of Europe, would send in an air strike against the camps or bomb the train tracks leading in. That his visit brought long-sought hope at last from the Allies.

But that wasn’t why he was here.

Nodding almost apologetically, Strauss turned to Vrba and Wetzler. He reached in his briefcase and took out a folder. “There is a photograph I’d like to show you both.” The Czech translated his words. Strauss took out an eight-by-ten photograph and slid it across the table. First to Rudolf Vrba, who took a sideways glance at it. “Do you recognize this man?”

As the Czech translated, the escapee looked at Strauss without giving any recognizable sign.

“At the camp,” Strauss explained further. “Have you seen him? Is he there?”

Vrba slowly picked up the photograph of Alfred Mendl.

Vrba had short dark hair, a flat nose, and sharp, low eyebrows. His mouth had an upward curve on one side, giving him an almost impish quality. While Strauss waited, he took a long look. Finally Vrba looked back at him.

“Sorry.” He shook his head, speaking in halting English.

Strauss felt a stab of disappointment. This was his last hope. Many people’s last hope. A year’s work hung in the balance. He passed the photo over to Wetzler. He had more of a studious face, with a high forehead and bushy eyebrows. He studied the photograph for a long time, but then slid it back across the table with kind of an indifferent shrug.

“Please,” Strauss urged him. “Look at it again. It’s important.”

Wetzler glanced at it again almost perfunctorily and then reached onto the table for a Portuguese cigarette. As he did so, his sleeve bunched up and Strauss’s eyes were drawn to the bluish numbers written into the underside of the escapee’s wrist. Wetzler lit the cigarette and took a drag. Then he spoke for a long time in Czech, never once taking his eyes off Strauss.

“Mr. Wetzler wants to know…” the Czech finally translated, “what has this man done that deserves your attention above all others? Hundreds of innocent people die every day. Women, children. As soon as they get off the trains they are stripped of the possessions and gassed. They are all good people…” Wetzler spoke quickly, and the translator did his best to keep up. “They all lead worthwhile lives. Who is this man, that you travel all this way and need to know if he is there?”

The escapee slid the photograph back across the table, as if awaiting a reply.

“There is no answer,” Strauss said, meeting the man’s eyes. “There is only urgency. Though I understand your plea. And I will take it back with me to the highest levels of my government. You have my promise.”

The escapee sniffed, flicking an ash into the ashtray. His eyes darted toward his friend, Vrba, as if there were a kind of silent agreement between them. Waiting a moment, Strauss went to place the photo of Mendl back in his briefcase.

Then Rudolf Vrba suddenly said in heavily accented English, but with a begrudging nod: “He is there. Your man. Of course, that was two months ago. Hundreds die every day. So who knows for sure…?”

Strauss felt a surge of optimism run through him. He is there. These were the very words he had traveled across the ocean to hear. “How can you be sure?” he asked the Czech. “There must have been thousands of faces there. And he must look different now. Everything has changed.” Recollection was one thing, but Strauss needed confirmation. Something firm.

Vrba shrugged. “He was some kind of professor, is it not right? At least that was what people called him.”

“Yes.” Strauss nodded, his blood galloping now. “He was.”

“And besides, there is always LR seven…”

“LR seven…?” Strauss looked back in confusion. He jotted the number down on a pad. “What is that?”

“Lower right molar. I studied dentistry back home. They brought him to me once. For an abscess.” His impish mouth curved into a smile. “In the camp, I never looked at faces too closely. But I never forget a tooth.”

EIGHT

That night, Strauss sat at the bar at the Hotel Sao Mamede, on a dark side street, a world away from the noise and festive life of the casino. Even farther from the Pallácio Estoril Hotel and its bustling, wood-paneled bar where German and British spies mingled over cognac and where everyone who stepped in was sure to end up on someone’s list.

There was only one other couple, drinking Aperol and nuzzling in a quiet corner.

Here no one would notice him. No desk clerk would look through his messages. Strauss read over the cable he had just sent back to Washington, D.C.

It was to a telex number established solely to get his message into Colonel Donovan’s hands unobserved. Mostly, it described the mundane details of his trip. Clients seen, orders pending. An application to the Department of Minerals. All fake, of course. Made up.

It was only the message’s last line that carried any meaning.

“You’re not going to help us, are you?” Alexander Katzner appealed to him after Vrba and Wetzler’s admission, the real purpose of Strauss’s visit now made clear.

No. I cannot.

Strauss had studied Torah until his teens. His father’s family still had relatives in Europe. He thought of the numbers he’d seen etched into Wetzler’s wrist. If they would send in planes to bomb the fucking sites, he would man the first plane himself.

The barman came up to him.

“Scotch,” Strauss ordered. “Whatever’s best.” He wasn’t normally a drinker, but tonight, thinking of what Donovan’s reaction would be, a drink seemed the right thing.

Hundreds of innocent people die every day, Wetzler said to him. What has this man done that he deserves your attention above all others?

“How do you not feel it yourself?” one of the war refugee officials looked in Strauss’s eyes. “As a Jew?”

Yes, he felt it. How it ached him that he could not answer.

It just wasn’t why he was here.

The barman brought his scotch. Strauss downed it in a gulp. He felt his heart light up. He smiled, imagining his boss’s response, three thousand miles away, when he received the news.

He ordered one more.

An abscess… Strauss had to laugh and shook his head. At least now they knew where he was. In a place more hell than living. Now all they had to do was get him out.

Fishing looks promising here, he had ended the cable. Get your pole ready. Catfish is in the pond.

NINE

EARLY MAY, TWO WEEKS LATER

WASHINGTON, D.C.

THAT SAME MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE WITH FDR, STIMSON,

MORGENTHAU, AND DONOVAN

Roosevelt stared at Strauss, who set his papers on the table. “We’re talking about this man that’s in Auschwitz, Captain… You said there was another way?”

“Yes.” Strauss glanced at his boss, Donovan. The OSS chief nodded for him to go on. “If we can’t buy him out, or can no longer barter for him,” the captain cleared his throat, “then I suggest we simply take him.”

At first no one said a thing.

“Take him…?” Treasury Secretary Morgenthau looked at him as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “You mean just go in there? Into a death camp guarded by a thousand Germans. In the middle of occupied Poland?”

Strauss felt the dubious reaction. This was absolutely the biggest stage he had ever played on. And maybe the last, the thought occurred to him. He looked back at the treasury secretary, one of the president’s closest confidants, a man he knew he would need to convince, and nodded firmly. “Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting, sir.”

Strauss turned toward Henry Stimson as the air in the room grew thick with skepticism. “You say you need this man, don’t you, Mr. Secretary?”

FDR’s secretary of war nodded grudgingly. “He was a professor. In Lvov. Electromagnetic physics. He’s one of only two people in the world who has this precise expertise. Without him,” he turned to the president, “I’m afraid our people out West feel we would fall further behind.”

It was the first time Strauss had heard that phrase, “out West,” but it was clear it was something big. Word had filtered out within the intelligence network that they were close to delivering a weapon of decisive magnitude.

“You say he’s one of two…?” Roosevelt kept his gaze on Stimson.

“Yes. But according to General Groves,” the OSS chief cut in, “the only one not currently working for the Germans in their own uranium experiments,” Donovan clarified.

“I see.” Secret scientific experiments on nuclear fission to produce a chain reaction capable of creating a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the world had ever seen were racing forward on both sides of the Atlantic, in the United States, at Los Alamos, New Mexico-“out West”-headed up by physicist Robert Oppenheimer and his military overseer, General Leslie Groves. In this room, only Roosevelt and his secretary of war knew the real stakes of this race and that the outcome of the war would likely go to the winner.

“So in that case,” Captain Strauss looked around the table, “that’s precisely what I propose we do.”

“You mean a raid?” Now it was the president’s turn to question him. “Into Nazi territory? Just send in a squad. Disable the guards. Find him and whisk him out?”

“No, Mr. President,” the OSS captain explained. He opened a folder and took out a map, a rendering of the camp Vrba and Wetzler had drawn themselves. “A raid would be impossible. The camp is heavily guarded. Plus, there are additional detachments of troops nearby. It can’t be done by force, at least not that quickly. There are thousands of prisoners in there. I’m told they are identified by numbers, not even names. I saw this, in Lisbon.” He held out his arm. “Numbers burned into the prisoners’ wrists.”

Roosevelt winced in disgust, then turned to Donovan. “Then what is your plan?”

“One man.” The OSS chief took Vrba’s map. “We drop him in at night nearby. We link him up with local partisans, whom we’ve already made contact with. We can sneak him into the camp. Then he has seventy-two hours to find his mark. And get them both out.”

“A single man? It would be like finding a needle in a haystack in that place,” Henry Stimson declared. “If he’s even still alive.”

“Yes. I agree.” Donovan nodded soberly. “That is a big ‘if.’ The odds would not be good. But the stakes of not having this man, as I understand it, are not good either.”

“One man…” Morgenthau said out loud what they were all thinking. “Who would even undertake this mission? You read what atrocities are going on in there. If he’s caught, or can’t get out, it’s suicide. And he will be caught, Colonel Donovan, be sure of that. And then what?” He turned to FDR. “It’ll jeopardize all our larger negotiations at this time. Eichmann himself is set to barter for thousands of Jewish lives. And you can’t send in a trained operative. He’ll stick out in there like a sore thumb. In minutes. He’ll have to speak the language, look the part…”

“We think we have someone,” Peter Strauss interrupted, opening another file. He passed around a photo.

It was of a man with dark, Semitic features. In his twenties. A gaunt, narrow face, dark eyes.

“He’s not an operative. He’s an intelligence lieutenant here in D.C.,” Strauss said. “Currently decoding German and Polish cables. His name is Blum. Nathan.”

“He’s Jewish?” Morgenthau asked, picking the photo up and staring closely at it.

“Yes.”

Stimson looked at the OSS captain with incredulity. “You’re going to sneak a desk-bound translator into a labor camp in enemy territory on one of the most vital undercover missions of the war? Are you mad?” The war secretary’s disdain for what he took to be the recklessness of many of the OSS’s ventures was well known in the intelligence community.

“He’s not just a translator. He came here from Warsaw in 1941,” Strauss explained. “He snuck out of the Krakow ghetto and risked his life to carry a revered religious document to safety in Sweden. He spent a year at Northwestern, where he was the school’s lightweight boxing champion, then he enlisted. He’s fluent in four languages, including Polish and German.”

“And you think he’ll do this?” Roosevelt looked at the photo and then handed it back to Strauss. “Go back to the very place he risked his life to escape from? On a wild-goose chase to find this one man?”

“We think there’s a good chance he will,” Colonel Donovan cut in. “He’s already asked to do something more.”

“Oh, this definitely classifies as more.” Stimson snorted derisively.

“Plus, there’s one other thing…”

“And that is…?” Roosevelt’s war-heavy eyes fell on him.

“His entire family was killed by the Germans six months after he was here.” Donovan looked the president in the eyes. “According to those who know him, he feels he left them there to die.”

TEN

THE NEXT DAY

OSS HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Nathan Blum sat at his desk, one of a row of twelve, in the basement of the C building at OSS headquarters in Washington, D.C. A stack of cables, some in Polish, others in Russian and Ukrainian, often in code, from partisans in occupied Poland and Ukraine had come in. As a Grade C junior analyst, it was Blum’s job to translate them from the original and then pass them on, sorted by priority, to the appropriate personnel in his department, which was known inside the building as UE-5, or Underground Activities in Europe, the “5” for Poland, and was devoted to contact and coordination with insurgent activities there.

That morning a series of photographs had arrived in the sealed pouch from London. They were of several large pieces of debris that had been picked up by the Polish resistance from the Bug River near the town of Siemiatycze in eastern Poland. Two weeks prior, they had intercepted cables detailing how two key German scientists from the secret missile laboratory at Peenemünde were headed to that area of Poland, where apparently the Nazis had set up some kind of secret testing facility. Now Blum had a sense why. Two days ago, partisans near Siemiatycze had reported a flash in the early morning sky, which then spiraled back to earth-clearly the failed test launch of some kind of secret missile. Combining the reports, Blum was certain these photos weren’t of just any debris. This was the real thing, he felt for sure, likely a test flight of the Nazis’ rumored guided weapon, the V-2, which they would be able to launch from the mainland against a defenseless England. The actual debris pieces were now in the hands of the Polish underground, awaiting transport to another location where they could be transported to England and gone over by experts, an action known as Operation Most, which meant “bridge” in Polish.

The images Blum was staring at could turn out to be one of the biggest intelligence breakthroughs of the war.

Though he was barely twenty-three, and the OSS’s principal day-to-day liason with the AK, the Armia Krajowa-the Polish resistance group that was actively engaged in a war of sabotage and assassination behind enemy lines, pretty much making life on the Nazis’ collapsing Russian front a bloody hell-Blum had spent the last year in this musty basement, aching to do more. Only three years earlier he had been a student at the university in his hometown of Krakow studying economics while continuing to practice Liszt and Chopin on the piano to please his mother, though he much preferred the more contemporary music of Fats Waller and the American jazz artists who had taken the continent by storm. He was a decent player, though never in the same league as his younger sister, Leisa, was on the clarinet; everyone said she would one day play with the national orchestra. His father owned the finest hat store in Krakow, on Florianska Street, with a small factory upstairs. They sold homburgs, Borsalinos, fedoras, even the smaller tweed Alpine hats so popular with the Austrians and Germans these days. Even rabbinical hats. Hats had no country, his father always said. Before the Nazis came, they lived not in the Jewish Quarter but in a spacious apartment on Grodzka Street near the Mariacki Cathedral. His father’s customers were businessmen, government officials, professors, rabbis, even members of exiled royal families. They had music in their life, and art, and friends from all segments of Polish society. They spoke Polish, not Yiddish. They didn’t even keep kosher.

His mother always told the story of her visiting Aunt Rosa, who complained, “I know it doesn’t matter to you, but couldn’t you at least put out a different knife for buttering the bread and cutting the meat?”

To which his mother replied, “But don’t you know, good aunt, the meat is fried in butter to begin with?”

Their poor aunt went pale.

That was all before 1941, of course, when all Jewish businesses were forced to close and Jews of all commitment were relocated to the ghetto.

While at the university, Blum joined the free political youth movement there. He even helped publish an antifascist newsletter, HeHaluc HaLohem, The Fighting Pioneer. Then, in October, Jews were told they could no longer study there. His father’s store was looted and marked with a big yellow star, and they were all given armbands and patches which they were forced to wear. Then they were made to close, after sixty years in business. For two generations they had sold hats to the finest gentlemen in Poland. In the ghetto, they had to move into a cramped, run-down apartment on Jozefinska Street with their cousins, the Herzlichs, twelve of them sharing four small rooms. Blum became what was known as a ferret inside the walls, taking out mail regularly and passing along family messages, even money for safekeeping, bringing in food and needed medicine, and even guns. His friend from the university, Jakob Epstein, grew up in that area and showed Blum all the underground sewers and tunnels, the doors between buildings no one knew, secret hiding places if they were chased, even the chasms deep underneath the synagogue and the passageways over the rooftops, until he knew them as well as any local thief. To be captured smuggling something in meant certain death as well as harsh repercussions for his family. Blum’s main asset was his innocent face and trusting way about him, masking an inner resolve.

Once, to avoid capture, he had to hide underneath the chassis of a German troop truck at the very moment a raid was under way and then roll out and duck behind trash cans as the truck pulled away, troops clinging to the side. Another time he was stopped outside the gate with packets of money and letters sewn into his rucksack and he produced a forged pass that said he was a worker at Struhl, a German sugar factory in the outside sector. “You look a little young to be a worker.” The guard regarded him skeptically. “I’m not the manager,” Blum replied, never betraying his fear, “only the floor sweeper.” They let him pass. And once he was shot at as he fled across a rooftop; fortunately his arm was merely grazed, a reminder of how real the danger was, though his mother treated it as if it was a mortal wound.

In the spring of 1943, the ghetto was closed for good and the treatment of Jews and his family worsened. A sense of uncertainty prevailed, rumors of executions in Lodz and Warsaw. Mass deportations to places unknown, where no one was ever heard from again. A perpetual sadness became etched into his father’s face. Everything his own father and he had built was now lost. All the government customers he’d had over the years, relationships with some of the wealthiest families in Krakow, who now wouldn’t even return his letters. One day Blum’s friend Epstein was pulled from his apartment and taken away to Gestapo headquarters in the Dom Slaski. No one ever heard from him again. Blum’s mother pleaded for him to stop; it was only a matter of time for him, Nathan, to be caught. Soon after, Rabbi Morgenstern came to his father. Krakow’s main synagogue had an important Talmud dating back to the twelfth century, with a commentary written by a student of the venerable Maimonides himself. The holy tract had to survive at all costs, the elders of the temple agreed. And who was the best prepared to smuggle it out and deliver it for safekeeping into the right hands?

Blum.

He didn’t want to leave, to abandon his parents and his sister, who had always been his closest friend. Rumors of mass deportations spread like wildfire through the ghetto. Who would watch out for his family? Who was better able to take care of them? Some of his friends spoke of remaining in the ghetto and putting up a fight.

But his father insisted that this Talmud was a treasure as great as in any synagogue in Europe. And what hope was there to remain here, except for Nathan to end up like his friend, Jakob, taken by the Gestapo. No doubt dead. It will happen one day for sure, he insisted to Blum. “Then where will your mother be?” Or to be taken off in one of the mass deportations. Then what had he gained by staying? “At least this way there is hope.” The underground had a way of getting Blum north. First, on a milk truck; then up the Vistula on a barge to the port city of Gdynia; and then across the Baltic to Sweden on a freighter. It was a great honor, his father said, to be chosen for this. In the end his father’s pressure wore Blum down. Against his wishes, he agreed. It took a month, but Blum delivered the tract that was bound and wrapped like a sausage into the hands of a Jewish refugee agency in Stockholm. His mother’s side had a cousin who lived in Chicago who put up the money for his transit to the United States, and so Blum, barely twenty, without speaking a word of English, but with a year and a half of avoiding the Germans, made the journey across the Atlantic.

English came quickly, watching the cinema, taught by his cousins; he had a skill for languages. The following year he was accepted by Northwestern University, where he went for a year and picked up his old subjects. Then news arrived that in retaliation for the shooting of a Gestapo officer, the Germans came into the ghetto and marched everyone from Blum’s family’s building into the square, his father, mother, and sister among them, and shot them. His cousins the Herzlichs as well. Forty for one, they called it. Forty lives, worthless Jewish ones, for every German. The smuggled-out letter that reached them spoke of his father’s bloody body hung up with several of the other men for days, unburied, putrefying in the public square, as a reminder to anyone else who harbored the same idea. Isidor Blum had been a gentle man whose only love in life, besides his family, was helping to choose the perfect hat for each head, Germans and Austrians among them. And poor Leisa, whom everyone said would one day play with the Polish National Orchestra. She didn’t even know about politics. All she knew was Mozart, and her scales. Blum was inconsolable at the thought of her. He would miss her most of all.

All he could think of was that if he had remained there, he would never have let them go outside. He would have seen the trucks pull up and found a way: the narrow passage out of their old building he had used after curfew a hundred times: through the basement, to the alley that led to the shirt factory next door and then out onto Lwowska Street. Or onto the roof, if the Germans were already in the building, and across to 10 Herzl, then down the fire stairs to the alley. If he was there, he would have warned them never to go out into that square. He had seen firsthand how the Germans dealt with retaliation.

After the news, life at the university no longer meant anything to him. He was in a strange place, studying subjects that meant nothing to him, in a new tongue. Everyone he loved was gone. After Pearl Harbor, all the students were signing up anyway, so Blum did too, hoping to be the first to march back into Poland, to proudly rid his country of the hated szkopy, German swine. But because of his language skills, he was placed in intelligence. It was a great honor, he was told again. This is the best way to serve.

A year later, he was still there.

There was an outfit that was being assembled: young soldiers, mostly Jews of German descent, who were being trained in intelligence at Fort Ritchie in western Maryland, who would go ashore as part of the invasion (which everyone knew was coming) and aid in the interrogation of German prisoners and establish contact with local partisans. Blum had already put in for a transfer with his superior officer. Here he was just sitting in a basement, using skills he had mastered as a child. Stamping and translating papers and transferring them upstairs. There at least he could put his life on the line for his family. The feeling had never stopped haunting him for a day: that he was the one who had left, while all those he loved had remained behind and died. He ached to do something that really mattered before the war came to an end. Otherwise he would see the images of his dead family in his mind’s eye for the rest of his life. He asked and pushed until he made himself a nuisance. He was told his file was being looked at. He should know any day.

But that morning… He put the photos of the debris in from London in a manila envelope marked URGENT and sent it up channels. Attention: Captain Greer. Inwardly, it gave him pride that Polish combatants were the ones who had put their lives on the line to find it. He was sure the right people would be going over them “with a fine-tooth comb,” as they said here, within a day. Then he took out the rest of the day’s incoming cables. From Pilava. Lodz. Troop movements sighted on the Ukrainian frontier. A bridge over the Bug River blown, blocking the German retreat routes. Warsaw in flames. It had taken a while but the Poles were finally fighting.

His mind went to his parents the day they had sent him off on his new journey.

“I don’t want to leave,” he had said to his father. “You need me to remain here with you. Who else will watch over you?”

“God will watch over us,” his father, who wasn’t religious, said. “God always protects the righteous, right?” He winked like he was letting Blum in on an inside joke. “Especially,” he said, “if he is wearing the proper hat.”

His father removed his hat, a prized homburg that his own father had worn, and placed it on Nathan’s head, brushing the felt and tilting the angle slightly, just right. His father always said you could judge a man’s character more by his choice of hat than by any other aspect.

“He hasn’t deserted us yet, Nathan.” He patted his son’s shoulders. “Now let’s go. To the rebi, shall we? Before curfew.” He stopped and looked at Nathan for a long time.

“What?”

“When I see you next you may finally have yourself a beard,” his father said, his eyes misting slightly. “But you will never be more of a man to me than you are today.”

They hugged, and Blum knew for certain as he felt his father’s arms around him that he would never see any of them again.

“Blum…”

His thoughts rushed back. The duty officer, a big, broad-shouldered redhead named Sloan, who had played football at the University of Virginia, stepped up to his desk.

Blum stood up. “Sir.”

“Take a break. You’re wanted over at the Main Hall.”

“Main Hall…?” That’s where all the bigwigs worked. Blum had been there only once, the day he arrived, to the administrative offices to receive his assignment and sign the confidentiality papers. He felt a surge in his blood. “Personnel…?” he asked, certain that his transfer to Fort Ritchie had finally come through.

“Not quite.” The duty officer chuckled knowingly. “The Big Man wants to see you upstairs.”

“The Big Man…?” Blum looked back as if the duty officer must be joking. “Me?”

“Look smart, Lieutenant.” The big redhead nodded and tossed him his cap. “Colonel Donovan.”

ELEVEN

A female JG led Blum, cap in hand, past rows of secretaries and chattering telexes, into a suite of carpeted offices on the third floor.

“Wait here.” The female duty officer knocked on the door of the corner office and put her head in. “Lieutenant Blum is here, sir.”

A voice said, “Have him come in, please.”

Not fully believing, Blum stepped into the large, red-carpeted office with a substantial oak desk flanked by an American and an Allied command flag and a photograph of President Roosevelt on the wall.

Colonel William Donovan, whom Blum had only even seen a couple of times on visits to the pen and whose hand he had shaken once as the Big Man passed his desk, stood up from behind it. He was of medium height, large-chested, with a strong Irish nose, a solid chin like a prizefighter, and narrow, deep-set eyes. Everyone knew he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for acts of valor in the previous war, acts that had earned him the nickname “Wild Bill.” At the long conference table, another officer stood up as well. He was shorter, thin, with dark hair that was slightly receding already, though he had a young face with thin lips.

Blum had no idea how the person responsible for the U.S. intelligence network for all the war even knew who he was.

“Lieutenant Blum, is that right…?” The white-haired Donovan came from around his desk.

“Sir.” Blum stepped up hesitantly, pushing back the urge to glance behind him in case there was another officer with the same name standing there.

“Lieutenant Nathan Blum, assigned to the Fourth Division, UE-5…?” the OSS chief rattled off, seeing Blum’s indecision. “I have asked the right officer up here, haven’t I?”

“Yes, sir. That is me.”

“Then relax, Lieutenant. Why don’t you take a seat over here.” Donovan motioned to the long conference table where the captain stood on the other side. “Please…” Colonel Donovan said, indicating a chair near the head. Then he pulled out his own chair at the head of the table and sat. “Cup of coffee?”

His legs feeling slightly rubbery, Blum took a seat. “Please.”

“How do you like it, Lieutenant?” the Big Man asked. A secretary came in with a tray and put it down at the far end of the long table.

“Black, please, sir.”

“Me too. Since I was a kid. There are many things that can get an old Irishman into trouble, but, in my book, coffee, and as much as you can drink it, isn’t one of them…”

Blum, who had been shot at before he was twenty and who had made his way past checkpoints after curfew with Germans who wouldn’t blink to execute him on the spot, had never felt his heart beat as rapidly as it did now as the man responsible for America’s vast intelligence network addressed him face-to-face. His eyes took in the office’s impressive surroundings.

“You can relax, Lieutenant. All reports are that you’re doing a first-class job down there. This is Captain Strauss.” He nodded to the thin, dark-featured officer. “He’s been handling some operations for me. I see a request in your file for a transfer, to that new outfit they’re putting together up at Fort Ritchie, boys of European Jewish descent…”

“Yes, sir,” Blum replied. He still felt a slight hesitation when addressing someone of stature and education in his new tongue. “I’m happy with what I do here, sir. It’s just that… that I feel I can best serve-”

“No need to explain, son,” the colonel interrupted him. “That’s a good outfit they’re putting together up there, and I have no doubt you’d be a real asset.”

“Thank you, sir.” The secretary poured the coffee.

“It’s just that Captain Strauss and I are putting something together too. I’ve spoken with your superior officers and they tell me you’ve been quite open with your desire to do something… how shall we say it…? Something more.”

“Yes, sir. That is correct,” Blum answered, his heart picking up a beat in anticipation.

“You already are doing something, son. My people tell me you’re one of the most capable translators we have here. That’s already important work,” he nodded, “and it all helps the war effort. In fact, I’ve read through some of the communiqués you’ve passed on.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir.” Inwardly, Blum felt a surge of pride. “Wild Bill” Donovan actually knew of him.

“Yes, the captain here was just briefing me… About your family. Back in Poland.”

Blum glanced at the other officer, who had so far remained silent. He assumed that what had motivated him to enlist was in his file. “Yes, they were killed in my hometown of Krakow,” he said in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could manage. “A Gestapo officer was shot in the ghetto and so they took everyone in my family’s building outside and executed them in retribution, right in the square. ‘Forty to one,’ they called it.”

“Yes.” Colonel Donovan nodded somberly. “I’m afraid I know all that. My condolences,” he added. “My father died young too. Though of natural causes. That’s quite a burden for anyone to carry. A man of your age…” He took a sip of coffee.

“My sister too,” Blum said. “She played the clarinet. She was very good. Everyone said one day she would play for the Polish National Orchestra. But that was all a while back. A different world. Anyway, thank you, sir.”

Donovan put down his cup and looked at Blum. Almost looked through him, Blum felt, as if he was studying him with those hard, deep-set Irish eyes. Even more-measuring him in some way. The impressive surroundings, the enormous desk and long table, the brass in the room, the official flags, all made Blum feel almost small.

“I see you made your way here, to America, completely on your own,” the colonel said.

“Yes, sir,” Blum confirmed. He was starting to get the sense that this was not about his transfer at all. “But with help. The Armia Krajowa helped me to Gdynia. Up north…”

“The Ar-nia Krajora…?” Donovan questioned, mangling the Polish like some rawboned Texan cowboy trying to speak Spanish Blum recalled from a film.

“It means the Home Army. The Polish underground. From there a Swedish diplomat arranged for transit to Stockholm. I have a cousin in Chicago, and he arranged for me to-”

“I’m quite familiar with the AK, Lieutenant,” the OSS chief let him know.

“Of course, sir,” Blum said.

“So why you…?” Donovan pushed back in his chair, his khaki uniform jacket decorated with several ribbons for rank and valor. “There must have been a million young men as yourself with an urge to get out of Dodge.”

“Get out of Dodge, sir…?” Blum looked at him. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I-”

“Just an expression, son. It means get out of town. Fast. It’s from a Western.”

“I like Westerns as well. I’ll have to see that one.” Blum saw the Big Man was still awaiting his answer. “I was asked to deliver an important package to safety. An historic text. The Talmud from our temple. It’s a collection of laws and interpretations, from the Torah…” This time Donovan merely smiled, glancing toward Strauss, indicating he knew what the Talmud was as well. “It was written in the twelfth century by a famous rabbi. But for the record, sir, I did not ask to.”

“Didn’t ask to what, son?” the OSS chief said back.

“I didn’t ask to leave. I wanted to stay and do what I could there. And take care of my family.”

“It was suicide to stay there, son, given the chance to get out. You know that now, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know that.” Blum glanced toward the quiet captain, Strauss, wondering if he might be Jewish too. “But in any event, that would not have changed my mind. It was my family, sir. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course. I understand perfectly. Nonetheless, you have to have a strong nerve, aren’t I right? Your file says you were a pretty good ferret back in your days there. In Krakow. That takes a load of courage. Do you have a strong nerve, son?”

Blum shrugged, feeling the colonel’s eyes fixed on him. Still, it wasn’t something you said about yourself. “There have been many times in my life, sir, since the Nazis came, where to survive, I’ve had to do what was necessary.”

“Yes, I think I understand what you mean.” Donovan nodded. “Each of us has to give of ourselves in some way. Ways we never imagined. That put you to the test.” Everyone knew the Big Man had single-handedly held off a German machine gun position while wounded several times, saving his entire unit. He flipped through Blum’s file for another moment, then placed it back on the table. “So we’re prepared to give you that chance, son, what you’ve been asking for, if you’re up for it…”

“The chance for what, sir?” Blum looked back at him, sure that somewhere he had missed their meaning.

“To do something more. Isn’t that what you asked for, Lieutenant?” The OSS chief took one more sip of coffee, then put down the cup. “As you said, to do what is necessary.”

TWELVE

They refilled their cups as Captain Strauss, whom Blum was now certain was a Jew himself, likely of German descent, mapped out why they had called him there.

The captain began a little vaguely. “As you know, Lieutenant, Poland is an extremely unforgiving place now… to be a Jew. And then to ask someone, someone who has been able to get himself out, at no small risk to himself, and then start to build a new life… to consider, at great personal sacrifice for his new country… perhaps even the world…” Strauss cleared his throat and looked at Blum. “There would, of course, be no negative consequences should you feel that what we’re about to ask of you is too much.”

Both Donovan and Strauss had their eyes fixed on Blum. There was an extended silence in the room.

“You want me… to go back?” Blum said, as it finally became clear to him just what they were asking.

“Not just go back…” the captain said. He got up with his file and came around the table, pulling up the chair next to Blum. “We want you to locate someone there for us. In Poland. And bring him back out for us.”

“Out of Poland?” Blum continued to stare, not quite believing. “You know how difficult that would be.”

The captain nodded. “I’m afraid what we’re proposing is even a bit trickier than that, Lieutenant…” He took a breath and opened his file. “No doubt you’ve heard of the labor camps over there?”

“Of course, but please forgive me, Captain, these are labor camps in name only. Word is, people are shipped there and never heard from ever again. Families, entire towns. In fact, these are death camps,” Blum stated. “I think we both know that.”

The captain didn’t reply, but in his knowing nod and Donovan’s continued steady stare, it became clear to Blum precisely what they wanted. “You want to send me back to Poland. To one of those… camps?” he asked.

“To a place called Auschwitz.” Colonel Donovan took the lead. “I believe Oswiecim is the town’s actual name. You’ve heard of it?”

Maybe not by that specific name, Blum nodded in the way when something terribly grave and unutterable is better left unsaid. But the whispers from Jewish enclaves all through Europe were rampant with what was happening in places like that-places so dark, so filled with evil and death, it stretched the mind to even believe they could be true. “Yes. I’ve heard.”

“We need someone who’s familiar with this area and who speaks the language. And who would…” Strauss looked at him. “Fit in.”

“Fit in…?” Blum repeated, still not sure what they were asking of him.

“What we’re proposing, Lieutenant,” the man known as “Wild Bill” Donovan leaned forward and set his deep-set eyes on Blum, “is to sneak you into there, inside the camp, I’m saying, and for you to bring someone back out.”

“Into the camp?” Blum stared back in consternation. “Who…?”

“A fair question.” Captain Strauss took over for his boss. “But I’m afraid we just can’t share that with you right now.” He removed a map from his file, a blown-up rendering of the area surrounding the camp. “We can drop you in by plane. At night. Here.” He pointed to a spot. “It’s about twenty kilometers from the camp. Have you ever jumped, Nathan? I didn’t see it in your file.”

“From a plane? No.” Blum shook his head. “Only in training.”

“No matter. We’ll take you through it. You’ll only have to do it once. On the ground, we can rendezvous with the local resistance. We know how to set this up. We can get you inside. As part of a daily work crew. That’s the easy part. Apparently local workmen enter and leave the grounds routinely.”

“You are certain of this?” Blum pressed. They made it sound as if it was like taking a trip on the Chicago rail line: First you take the L to Lake Street, then you switch to the Southside line, to Garfield, and then…

“As you might imagine…” Donovan leaned forward with the hint of a wry smile, “getting someone into a place like Auschwitz is not generally the issue.”

“Yes, of course,” Blum said, betraying that same smile. “And you can get me out? With this person? And then back?” His mind raced through how very risky this would be. Just getting into Poland itself would not be easy. This deep, behind enemy lines. The jump alone terrified him. And then what if he was unable to meet up with the local resistance? He’d be stranded there. Alone. Or if he was unable to find this man-even if he was able to get inside the camp. Or if the Germans saw through him. It would be certain death.

“Yes.” Strauss nodded with conviction. “I believe we can.”

“But once inside, you’d have to know you’ll be completely on your own,” Colonel Donovan said. “We’ll construct your laborer’s clothing to reverse into a camp uniform. We don’t know for sure exactly where this person is inside the camp. To be frank, we don’t know for sure that he’s even still alive. He’s fifty-seven, and not in the best of health. It’s probably more like seventy-seven there. And from what we’ve heard…” the Big Man tapped his meaty index finger on the table and his mouth twisted into a frown, “it’s not exactly a walk in the park in there.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the rumors,” Blum agreed. “May I smoke?”

“Please,” Colonel Donovan said, and reached for an ashtray and pushed it toward him. Blum took out a pack of Luckys, tapped the top, and lit one up.

From his file, Strauss removed a crude, hand-drawn map and slid it across. “This is the camp.” There was a double perimeter of wire, with several guard towers. Dozens of what appeared to be prisoners’ quarters, called “blocks,” all numbered. A women’s camp was marked nearby. Blum’s eyes were drawn to a small rectangular building that went by the sinister name Crematorium.

“We know he was there a month ago. We know how to get you in and out. What we need is for you to find him in there. We have an escape route that we’re confident will work. We also have the names of several people on the inside, fellow prisoners, even guards, who you may be able to rely on. The thing is, you’ll only have seventy-two hours, and no way to be in touch. The rescue plane will land precisely where it drops you, and only once. It can only remain on the ground for a few minutes, and then it will leave. You will have to be there.”

Blum looked at them. “And if I’m not…?”

“If you’re not, then I’m afraid you’re completely on your own.” Colonel Donovan knitted his fingers together. “In a very hostile place. You miss that plane, there’s no return ticket, son.”

“Seventy-two hours…” Blum ran the prospects through his head. None made the outcome particularly rosy. “And if I find him, are you sure he will even come with me?”

“In truth, Lieutenant,” Strauss sat back in his chair, “we’re not completely sure of anything, on the inside. We don’t know what health he is currently in. We don’t even know for certain if he’s even still alive.”

“Yet you are willing to risk all this? To send me there?”

Strauss looked to Donovan. “Yes. We are.”

“And you won’t even tell me who this man is? Or why he is so important?”

“I’m afraid we can’t,” Colonel Donovan said. “Not right now. Right now, we can only show you a photograph. And obviously you’ll have his name.”

Blum tapped an ash on the edge of the ashtray. “I’d be risking my life for this one man,” he said, looking at both their faces, “and you can’t even tell me what he does?”

The captain nodded. “I’m afraid that’s the case, Lieutenant. Yes.”

Blum looked back at the map, taking it all in. He did speak the language and look the part. He would, as Strauss said, “fit in.” And he had escaped before. But what if he couldn’t find the man? Or get himself out? He’d be stranded. His family was dead now. Many of his friends were likely dead as well. He had nothing left there. “How do you know all this?” Blum looked back up at them. “The layout. How to get in. This rendezvous you can set up with the local resistance.”

Strauss pulled out two more photos from the file. “I was in Portugal a week ago. I met with these two men, who, one month ago, were able to escape from Auschwitz. The first to do so.

“Rudolf Vrba…” The captain placed a photo on the table. “And Alfred Wetzler. They’re Czech. They told me everything. The layout of the camp. The routine there. The surrounding area. Prisoners inside who might prove helpful. Certain guards who can be bought. This map is theirs. It’s accurate up to one month ago. It will work, Nathan. They’ve even agreed to assist on this mission.”

Blum ran his eyes back over the map: the double perimeter of wire, the marked guard towers. They came to rest on the rectangular building. “And what did your two escapees tell you about what happens here?”

He pointed to the place marked Crematorium.

Strauss didn’t answer at first. He eyed his boss. Then he nodded, kind of circumspectly. “Are you certain you want to know?”

“You are asking me to risk my life, to go back to a place I was blessed to get away from, to find a single person who you won’t even tell me what he does. What is the expression here…?” He looked at Donovan. “A needle in a haystack? So, yes, what happens here?” Blum placed his finger on the building again. “I think it is fair to know what I might face, if I go, should all these detailed preparations of yours not fully come together.”

“I didn’t mean as a part of this mission, Lieutenant,” Strauss glanced at Donovan and said. “I meant,” he cleared his throat, “as a Jew. People are gassed there.” He moistened his lips. “In large numbers. Thousands. Tens of thousands. More. Then their bodies are burned. These are ovens.” The captain pointed to the building on the map Nathan had asked about. “Though what I’ve now told you is in the strictest confidence and cannot be repeated, either to someone in uniform,” he looked at Blum with the utmost seriousness in his eyes, “or not.”

A hollowness rose up in Blum’s gut. Ovens. He sat back, the color draining out of his face, nausea knotting inside him. Gassed. He drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, and let what Strauss had said out. Thousands. Tens of thousands. More. They’d all heard of such horrors. Killings on such an unprecedented scale. Still, everyone prayed it was only a rumor. Now he saw that it was all true. And he saw something else behind the gritted jaw and single-minded cast of the OSS captain’s face. Sorrow. Pain. Etched into the fixed resolve in his eyes.

“Bisse yid?” Blum inquired, speaking in Yiddish. Are you Jewish?

Strauss paused only a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes.”

“And this man…” Blum placed his index finger on the map of the camp. “This will not help any of them, these people who are already in here…?”

“Not a single one, sadly.” The captain shook his head, enough for Nathan to see that he had already asked that same question of himself.

Blum nodded, in the way a close relative might when told of grave family news, sinking back into his chair. “People being gassed… This man, who you won’t tell me a thing about… Only seventy-two hours to find him… Otherwise, no chance of coming back…” He turned to Donovan. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Colonel, you certainly know how to drive a hard bargain.”

“Yes.” The OSS chief chuckled back. “And that’s not all, I’m afraid. We’ll need your answer quickly.”

“How quickly?” Blum put out his cigarette.

“Tomorrow.” Donovan stood up.

“Tomorrow…?” Blum’s eyes widened in surprise.

The Big Man stood up, put his hand on Blum’s shoulder, and smiled again. “I believe you’re the one, Lieutenant, who expressed the interest in doing something more.”

“Yes.” Blum stood up too.

“You’re doing a fine job, son,” the colonel said, “for your new country. I’m sure that reassignment you put in to the Ritchie boys will be coming through at any time, if that’s how you’d like it to go.” He put out his hand. “You can only imagine how much we feel depends on this mission.”

“Thank you, sir,” Blum replied. The Big Man’s hand was firm and rough. “But I do have one question, if I may.”

“Of course. Go ahead.” His hand was still wrapped in Donovan’s.

“This man… If I get him out. Will it save lives or cost them, in the end?”

“In the end…” The Boss nodded, the dark side and shadows of the war etched in his deep-set eyes. “The answer is both, I’m afraid.”

Blum nodded and took his cap from the table and took a step toward the door. “Thank you, sir.” Then he stopped, hesitating a moment, feeling something rising up in him, courage or foolishness, he would decide later, and turned back. “Just one more thing…”

Donovan was already back behind his desk and had picked up a report. Strauss, reassembling his file, looked up. “Of course.”

“You still haven’t told me how you plan on getting me out.”

THIRTEEN

That night, after most of the base had gone to bed, Blum smoked a cigarette on the back stairs of the officers’ barracks near K Street. Thunder rattled in the far-off skies.

If his meeting in the A building earlier had been to confirm his transfer to Fort Ritchie, Blum might have celebrated by catching a film; a new one, To Have and Have Not, with Bogart and Bacall, based on the Hemingway book, was playing on the base. Or there was this girl he had taken out a couple of times, the cousin of a neighbor back in Chicago who worked in the cosmetics department at Woodward & Lothrop, the big department store chain there. She was pretty and laughed easily, which always reminded him of his sister. And, as opposed to many of the officers in his unit, she seemed not to mind his European accent.

Instead, he just stayed in his barracks. He felt in a similar way to how he’d felt the night he set out from Krakow, when he sensed in his heart he was saying goodbye to his family for the last time. That a choice had been put in front of him for which he had no logic or means to properly evaluate, but still, one he knew he must take.

Will it save lives or cost them, in the end?

Both, Colonel Donovan had said.

The night was warm. It reminded him of many such nights back home, humidity so thick you could spread it on bread with jam when there was no butter, his mother used to say.

So how was he to choose? Will it save lives or cost them? What other calculus was there for deciding? It is what his father would have asked the colonel. He could almost hear his measured voice, pipe in hand, posing the question.

Or Rabbi Leitner, his instructor? There was something from the Mishnah he recalled, one of those countless tenets of Jewish law that had been drummed into him in dark-lit rooms as a boy, while his thoughts drifted out the window to things he found much more fun: playing football with friends in Krasinski Park, or the Sabbath goose his mother might have waiting for him later. With barley soup and kreplach, and a kompot of stewed apples and prunes.

Pidyon shvuyim was how it was phrased in Hebrew.

To redeem a captive.

Taking a drag from his Lucky, Blum recalled the old rabbi once asking, his voice echoing in a corner of the empty synagogue, whether paying a ransom for the freedom of a man held hostage in the end would cost or save lives. Or just maybe, he explained, only bring additional hardship and suffering. “What is good cannot be fully known in the short term, do you understand that, Nathan?” The rabbi had come around the desk. Surely a life would be saved, he admitted. Yes. “But then would others then be taken and held in ransom the same way? Would funds that were meant for improvement of the temple be spent toward this ransom, and thus, let it fall into decline? Of course, if it was your son, or your brother,” the rabbi had shrugged, “the answer is not so clear.”

To Blum, if he did what Strauss and Donovan had asked of him, it was not so much that he would be “buying” back a life as putting his up in its place, in the same way a ransom would be offered. In effect, Blum would be the ransom. Sitting there, he smiled, as he could see the old rabbi pensively stroking his gray beard, muttering how else could you determine whether or not to pay for a captive’s life unless you know this answer? Will it save lives or cost them, in the end? Taking out of the equation whose life in fact it was that was held-a brother or a complete stranger. That was the only answer or reply.

Blum thought back to how since he was seventeen and the Nazis had first marched into Krakow, no answer was ever easy.

He reminded himself that his parents and his sister had forfeited their lives so that he could be here now. There were many others who could easily have been picked to go instead of him. There was Perlman, Blum recalled, or Pincas Schreive. They were just as skilled as Blum was at avoiding the Germans. Why did they not choose them? Blum’s mind brought back the glimmer of hope in his father’s eyes amid the sadness of their final goodbye. Hope dimmed, because they both felt a sense of the different fates that awaited them, like diverging branches of the same tree.

And now to go back, Blum reflected, on a mission that was clearly more suicide than hope. For some man, only a name and a face, whose value might never be known to him. It made his decision to leave Krakow-It was a great honor, his father had insisted-stand for nothing if he ended up forfeiting his life in the same place they had given up their lives for him to leave.

So how else could he decide? He had looked into the colonel’s somber eyes hoping to find the answer. You can see how vital we think this is… His look was just like his father’s that last time. But then, We don’t know for sure that he’s even still alive.

The odds against the mission’s success were long. He saw that clearly in Strauss’s and Donovan’s sober faces. Beneath the need and the strategic importance of this man, the two of them clearly knew precisely what they were sending Blum on.

He reached into his wallet and removed the small photograph he had of him and Leisa, she, fourteen, sitting on the sill of the open window at their family’s country house in Masuria. He, still barely able to shave.

She said, I have a gift for you.

They had sat on the fire balcony of their cramped apartment on Jozefinska Street, their legs dangling over the edge.

“I don’t want you to go,” she told him.

He swung his feet. “Neither do I.”

“Then why…?” she pleaded. “Tell Papa you changed your mind.”

When he was six and she was three, his father had made him promise to always watch out for his sister, in school, at the park. Once, when she was an infant, his father even playfully held her aloft above their fourth-floor window, saying “I’ll throw her out. Unless you promise to look after her.”

“I promise. I promise,” Blum yelled, unaware there was a shelf beneath her and Leisa was never in any danger.

“I have to go,” he replied. “The temple is depending on it. You’ll be all right. I told my friend Chaim to watch out for you if something happens.”

“Weissman? He’s an ass.” Leisa turned up her nose.

True, Chaim was pompous and boastful. But he knew the paths and alleyways out of danger as well as anyone in the ghetto, and he always seemed to find a way to ask about Leisa.

“Nonetheless, if things get bad and he comes for you, you must go with him.” Blum looked squarely at her. “Even if Mother and Father don’t. This is important, Leisa. You must promise me.”

She just looked at the street below, spotting a vendor pushing a lorry of vegetables four stories beneath them.

“I need you to promise me,” he said again.

“All right, I promise,” she finally agreed.

Blum looked closely at her.

“You have my word. I do.”

Blum smiled. “Good.”

A bit of time passed before she looked at him. “You think we’ll ever see each other again?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “I’ll stake my life on it.”

“We’ll see. I’m not so much worried about us, Nathan-Father always gets by-as I am about you. America is such a different place. And you don’t speak a word of English.”

“That’s not true. I can say ‘Put ’em up!’” he said in the kind of slow, Western drawl he’d heard in films and cocked his finger like a gun.

“Nathan, don’t tease me. Anyway, I have something for you. Wait here.” She crawled inside and came back out a minute or two later with a piece of sheet music. It was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major. One of her favorites. What she played at the conservatory’s recitals last year. She took the opening page and tore it from the binder.

“Leisa, don’t!”

Then she folded it in half, lengthwise, and neatly split the page in two.

“See…” She folded up one side into a small square. “You’ll keep this half and I’ll keep mine. When we see each other again, we’ll put them back together. Like this.” She unfolded hers and joined them again, the bars and passages once more fitting perfectly together. “That’s our pact, okay? It’s like a ticket. You won’t lose it, will you?”

“They’ll have to kill me to take it off me.” He grinned.

“Well, I prefer you don’t let that happen.” His sister looked at him, her dark eyes wide and bruised with an unknown foreboding. “But the same for me.” She threw her arms around his neck. “I’m going to miss you, Nathan.”

“I’ll miss you too, Doleczki.”

She wouldn’t let him go.

“Whatever you do, Leisa, you continue to play. That’s who you are. Never let them take that from you.”

“I won’t,” she said, her body trembling with fear.

“And remember, when the shit hits the fan…”

“Yes, Chaim.” She nodded, her head buried against him. “If you say I must.”

Outside the barracks, Blum opened the folded sheet music he had kept with him these past three years. “Wolfgang Ama-” his side read at the top. “Concerto ein-”

Then the opening bars.

He closed his eyes and imagined that Leisa was clutching hers when the bullets came. At least, he knew in her heart she was.

A couple of enlisted men hurried past and he stood up. The two saluted. “Sir.”

Blum saluted them back.

I’m sure that reassignment you put in to the Ritchie boys will be coming through at any time, Donovan had said, if that’s how you’d like it to go.

He remembered at his bar mitzvah in Krakow, he had spoken of aliyah. Like all Jews, he had made a promise to go to the Holy Land one day. A promise most would never keep. So maybe in a way this would be his aliyah. To honor his parents and their deaths. His heritage. Not to Jerusalem, to the Holy Land, but to a camp in the woods of southern Poland where terrible things took place.

His promised land.

To find this one man.

With no return ticket.

He folded Leisa’s music sheet back into a square and placed it inside his wallet, next to the small photo of her he kept there. Crushing his cigarette out, he picked up his cap and went to go in. He stopped a second. Thinking of her, which he tried not to do much these days, had brought a tear.

Months after he’d found out her fate, he’d also gotten word: Chaim Weissman had died in a fall off a rooftop onto Limanowa Street while fleeing the Germans the very morning Blum’s family was murdered.

When that troop truck pulled up in front of their building, the Germans ordering everyone to get outside, “Schnell!” she probably waited, just like Blum had made her promise. Hid in the stairwell, hoping. Maybe until the moment they barged in and dragged her, screaming, down the stairs.

He’ll be here, he’ll be here, she probably told herself. Nathan promised.

Even as they were lined up against the wall and the bullets came.

FOURTEEN

Before his work shift the following morning, Blum went back to the Main Hall and asked for Captain Strauss’s office, which turned out to be a small, poorly lit cubby on the third floor at the end of a long hallway. He stood in front of it for a few seconds, put his cap in his hand, and then knocked on the door.

The captain looked up from maps and reports and seemed pleased to see him. “Lieutenant.”

Strauss’s office was a world away from his boss’s. The only light was a bright lamp on the metal desk, other than what came through a shuttered window. One wall of shelves was stacked with heavy books and binders. A map of Poland and another of Europe were tacked to the other wall. On the desk, Blum saw two framed pictures. A pretty dark-haired woman, likely the captain’s wife, and two young kids, and another of an older couple, the man dressed in a dark suit with a short beard, his wife in a white dress and hat.

Strauss pushed back from the desk, waiting.

All Blum said was, “So when do I have to leave?”

The captain edged into a smile. He stood up and put out his hand. “Day after tomorrow. At least, for Britain. The actual mission date is set for the end of May. That gives us two weeks there to prepare. Familiarization with the local terrain and the camp. What you can expect inside. You’ll need to lose a few more pounds. Shouldn’t be so hard, on what they feed us these days.”

Blum grinned.

“The Boss will be pleased. Damn pleased.” Strauss sat on the edge of his desk. “He’ll want to congratulate you himself, of course. He’s up on the Hill today. Do you mind, can you let me see your wrists.”

“My wrists…?” Blum held them out.

Strauss nodded, turning the left one over. “You don’t happen to have a problem with needles, do you?”

“Needles…” Nathan shook his head. “No. Why?”

“Not to worry. We’ll explain it all later. I know this is all coming at you pretty quickly. Anyone here who ought to know?”

“Here…? You mean in the States? Just a friend, perhaps. No one special. Maybe my cousin and his wife back in Chicago. They brought me over.”

“Let’s just be sure we keep the real reason behind your trip to ourselves. How about we just simply tell them that you’re being deployed? Everyone’s being shipped over there these days. No need to mention anything more.”

“I understand.”

“Oh, and then there’s this…” Strauss reached across his desk and opened a file. He took out a photograph. “I suppose, no reason not to show you this now.”

It was of a man, middle aged, in his fifties maybe. A heavy but pleasant face, sagging cheeks, wire glasses, graying hair, combed over from the side.

“Here’s your man,” the captain said. “Though he may not look exactly the same now.”

Blum ran his eyes over the photograph.

“Don’t worry, before we’re done you’ll have every wrinkle on his face committed to memory.”

“What’s his name?” Blum asked. He looked kindly yet, at the same time, the eyes were serious, wise. There was a mole on the side of his nose. Who was he, Blum wondered, and what did he know, to make him, above all others, worth Blum risking his life to save?

“His name is Mendl. One ‘e.’ Alfred. He’s a professor. From Lvov. I’m afraid that’s about all I can tell you now.”

“Mendl…” Blum muttered out loud. “What is his area of specialty?”

“Electromagnetic physics. Something very heady like that. Know much about it?”

“I know an apple falls to the earth if you drop it.”

Strauss grinned. “That’s about my limit too. But a lot of very smart people here who do, say that what Mendl knows is indispensable. And that it’s worth whatever we can do to bring him here. I think you should know, Nathan-I hope it’s all right that I call you that, we’re pretty much going to be tied at the hip for the next two weeks-that this mission, long as the odds might seem, goes all the way up to the top. And not just in this building, if you know what I mean. All I can say is, what you’ve agreed to do, you’re doing your country a great service.”

Blum nodded, feeling a surge of pride. “Thank you, sir.”

“What you asked me yesterday…” Strauss sat back down and looked at him. “If I was a Jew. Actually, my father is a cantor.” He turned around the photo on his desk of the man in the dark suit with his wife. “His congregation is in Brooklyn. Temple Beth Shalom. Everyone always asks him why…? Why are we not doing more to help? So many horrible things coming out about what’s happening over in Europe. I tell him that we are, but I know, in my heart, that’s no answer. Shortening the damn war best we can, driving the Nazis from power, that’s the only answer. And this… what you’re helping us do, if we’re successful, though I can’t fully explain the details of what’s at stake, will help more than anything either of us will ever do. Do you mind…?” Strauss reached across the desk and took back the photo of Mendl with kind of a rueful smile. “It’s my only one right now. Don’t worry, you’ll know every pore on that face by the time you go. So I’ll inform your superior officer. I assume there’s someone there who can step in for you?”

“Mojowitsky,” Blum offered. “He’s in EU-4. He’s quite strong.”

“Good, then…” The OSS captain nodded and then stood up.

Blum stood up too.

“If you don’t mind,” the captain took off his glasses, “I’m curious about something…?”

“What is that?”

“I guess we’ve both thought out the risks of what you’re doing. I can only imagine, Colonel Donovan and I, we weren’t that good of salesmen…”

“You want to know why I would agree to go?”

“Yes. Keeping in mind, of course, I’d sign up myself in an instant if I was what they were looking for.”

Blum gave him a thin smile. His eyes lifted to the metal shelves on the wall. Amid the files and thick binders, he saw a couple of leatherbound books in Hebrew. Strauss was the son of a cantor. “I see a Talmud. Do you happen to have a Mishnah up there as well?”

The Mishnah Sanhedrin was the earliest written credos of Jewish law from the Torah, something a cantor’s son might have been read from in his very first lessons.

“Somewhere.” The captain shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“Chapter four, verse five.” Blum stood up. “I don’t have any better way to explain it.”

“Chapter four, verse five… I’ll see if I can find one then. Anything else?”

“No, sir.” Strauss saluted him; Blum returned it. “Actually, there is one last thing…” Blum said, turning in the doorway. “I do have a fear of something.”

“I hope it’s not small spaces,” the captain said. “Things are liable to get pretty tight in there once we drop you in.”

“No.” Blum shook his head and smiled. “Heights.”

After the lieutenant left, Strauss sat as his desk a long while. He felt buoyant. Catfish was back in the game! He picked up the phone to get word to Donovan-the Boss would be ecstatic too-but then he thought better of it and put the receiver back down. He stood up and checked the shelves for what Blum had mentioned. It was at the bottom of a stack. He didn’t even know why he had it. Certainly not because of any religious feeling on his part these days. He’d been to temple only on Yom Kippur for the past three years. To please his father, perhaps, who had given the holy books to Strauss before he left for duty and who was disappointed that his son, after law school and in the service, had pulled away from the faith.

One day you’ll come back, he told him. You will.

The Mishnah Sanhedrin.

Strauss pulled the book out and sat back down, paging through the blue, leatherbound copy until he found it: chapter four, verse five.

It was on the story of Adam. Some nameless scholar, Strauss had no idea whom, had written his commentary of the text, highlighted in red.

Then, starting to read the passage Blum mentioned, he let himself smile.

He knew exactly what came next; it was one of the first things ever drummed into him in religious school. He thought of Blum, the family he had left behind. All dead now. But whom he felt responsible for. It was a brave thing he was doing. But not so brave, when you’d lost everything. Everything but this one thing. All that he had left. And all that mattered.

God’s speed, Strauss muttered to himself. To all of us.

Then he read the next passage, though he already knew the words by heart:

It was for this reason that man was first created as one person, to teach you that anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and any who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.