The One Man

FIFTEEN

APRIL

In Block Thirty-Six, the barracks he shared two to a bed with 250 others, Alfred marked that he had been in the camp three months now. The biting Polish winter had finally given way to a late, muddy thaw.

They’d taken his books, his papers, everything, on his first day of arrival. They probably had all ended up in smoke like ordinary kitchen trash. If they only had some idea… Still, it gave him the slightest measure of satisfaction that it was a far better result than if these monsters had been able to use his work for their own ends.

Word was, even while he was in Vittel, that the Germans were making advances toward creating a fissionable isotope. He knew that work on this was taking place at a laboratory in Haigerloch on the Eyach River, using heavy water from Norway. But enriching uranium was only the first step of a long process. Then they needed to extract plutonium from the uranium and then separate the fissionable isotope, known as U-235, from its heavier cousin, U-238, which he’d heard that Fermi had successfully isolated at his cyclotron in Chicago. And to do this there were several untested methods. You could bombard the isotopes with electromagnetic waves. Lawrence had shown that an electrically charged atom traveling through a magnetic field moves in a circle whose radius is determined by its mass. Lighter U-235 atoms would follow a narrower arc than the heavier U-238s. But to separate the quantities needed, it could take years.

Then there was thermal diffusion, circulating uranium hexafluoride between cool water jackets and high-pressurized steam.

But the best path Alfred’s research had shown was through gaseous diffusion, which meant they could separate the needed isotopes by pumping uranium gas against a porous barrier, with the lighter molecules passing through more rapidly than the heavier ones. The rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its nuclear mass. Sooner or later they would all run into the problem. The Germans, the Americans, and the Brits. Though he had gotten word that after his escape to London from occupied Denmark Bohr was now in the United States, so maybe the Allies had combined their efforts. And there were only two men in the world who had been working on this kind of research. The other, Bergstrom, he’d heard, was with the Nazis now. For Bergstrom, it had always been about the work-no matter who funded it. And staying alive. Alfred had also heard the Americans were making progress too.

He knew now, as he jotted down some formulas in what remained of the thinning light, that he should have gotten out long ago. Everyone had pushed him to. “Make your way to Copenhagen,” Bohr had urged. “You can work with me. It will be safer for Marte and Lucy.” But Lvov was their home; Marte had family there. They had built their life there. For two years it had been safe, protected by the Russians under the nonaggression pact. But once the Russians fled, travel across Europe became impossible. One day, men in brown shirts and swastikas, boys really, barged into his office and told him he was no longer a professor. Just a Bolshevik yid. They ripped his books down from the shelves and trashed his papers-thank God he always kept his truly important work at home-and hurled him down the stairs. Right in front of Mrs. Zelworwicz, who had worked in the lab with him for eleven years. Alfred was lucky. Many of his colleagues were dragged out into the square and shot. Soon all Jews were forced to move into the ghetto. Rumors were everywhere about mass deportations to camps.

Then, two months later, an emissary from the Paraguayan embassy in Warsaw managed to find him and explained in a café on Varianska Street, We have a way.

He had thought of making a new life for himself in America with Marte and Lucy. Maybe taking a teaching position. At the University of Chicago with Fermi, or in California, reuniting with Bethe and Lawrence. Maybe even Bohr. All Nobel winners. As a scientist, he had never been on their scale, of course, when it came to the theoretical side. But as a researcher, his work had value too. Now look… Alfred stared gloomily around the barracks. People dragging themselves back to their bunks, exhausted, like soulless ghosts. The one or two who had something to barter for cigarettes were greedily inhaling them. Two had died today alone on his work detail. One from a club to the head, dropped where he stood; the other, simply from exhaustion, just gave up, and was shot.

Yes, he had waited too long.

Marte was dead. He knew that in his heart, as sure as he could bring her beautiful image to his eyes. She’d grown ill while at Vittel, and it had only worsened on the train. These animals didn’t even waste soup on sick ones like that. The only reason he had been directed to the left and permitted to remain alive was that he spoke German as well as a Volksherren, a prized commodity in here.

And Lucy… his beautiful, gentle Lucy. She was likely gone as well. He’d married late in life, and his daughter was an unexpected treasure to him, like uncovering the atomic theory and the principle of origin at one time. Early on, he’d gotten word through a barrack mate’s wife that she’d contracted typhus, which was as good as a death sentence in here. Alfred’s own strength had started to wane as well. And why not? What purpose was there to staying strong and remaining alive? Every day hundreds went missing. Entire barracks. The guards said they’d just been transferred to some other work facility. The nearby work camp at Monowitz. “They’re happy there,” they would say. But everyone knew. The stench emanating from the flat-topped building near the gate was damning enough, and the dark plume of smoke that came from neighboring Birkenau, just to the west, and hung over the camp was an everyday reminder. Himmelstrasse. “The road to heaven,” it was called. And each of them would walk it soon enough.

The road to death, it was better named.

A month or two ago, Alfred had begun to put together parts of his work by jotting them down on whatever scraps of paper he could find. He went through the hundreds of progressions again in his head, ten years of research, starting with the basic assumptions: The rate at which gases diffuse is inversely proportional to the square root of their densities-Graham’s Law; the various methods to separate the needed isotope U-235 from its much more abundant cousin, U-238. All jotted on the backs of food labels stolen from the kitchen or roll call lists crumpled and left in the snow. Rewriting the endless progressions of formulas and equations. He scribbled out rough sketches of the isotope as it passed through its various radioactive stages; his vision for the kind of membranes they would need to pass through; even his own thoughts on the triggering possibilities for the actual “device,” which was what they called it, in its most theoretical form: a device that would theoretically harness the gargantuan explosive energy created by the chain reactions from the separation of the isotope. He had first discussed this possibility with Szilard at a conference in Manchester in ’35. He rewrote much of his own early research in his head. Speeches to the Academic Scientifica; classes he’d given. His work with Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Ten years of research, whatever he could recall, all kept in the coffers of his brain. At the least, it kept him sane. He wrote it down and stuffed the papers in a coffee tin that he hid in the flooring underneath his bunk, covering it when either SS guards or their malevolent Ukrainian kapo, Vacek, came inside.

Everyone around him must have surely thought him a pathetic sight-the old professor, muttering to himself in his far-off world, scribbling down his endless equations and proofs. And to what end? they would snicker. It was all just nonsense that soon would die along with him here.

But it wasn’t nonsense. Not a single number. It all meant something. And it had to be saved. Life here was governed by a futile, mindless regimen: just get through the day, sleep, and then start another. Avoid eye contact with the guards and try to survive. “Schnellen.” Double time. Faster.

But thought had to continue, did it not? That was a principle of existence. Even if it was simply to declare that his life still meant something. Or that in the midst of this hell there was still hope; or amid the chaos, order. So each afternoon he threw himself onto his bunk, his feet raw and swollen from his ill-fitting wooden clogs, and, turning away from his bunkmate, wrote down whatever he could recall. Because he knew that in the right hands, this “nonsense” meant everything. They would pay a ransom for it. But each new day he felt his own will growing weaker. Because of his age and his language facility, he was assigned easier jobs. But he didn’t know how much longer he could survive. One day he knew he would be the one who simply looked into the face of the gun and gave up.

“Professor…” Ostrow, an ex-bookkeeper from Slovakia and the bunk’s most skilled forager, kneeled down and interrupted his work. “Care for a little treat for your afternoon repast tomorrow? Our chef has gone to great personal risk to procure this rare delicacy.”

The Slovak showed him a rind of crusty cheese in a grimy napkin, probably stolen out of the German mess garbage, as prized in here as a tin of caviar.

“Give it to Francois over there or Walter,” Alfred said. Either looked like any day could be their last. “Besides, I have nothing to trade.”

“Nothing to trade? You joke, of course,” the forager said for anyone around to hear. “Two of your formulas and they’re yours. An entire equation, I’ll get you a beefsteak.”

A few of their neighbors chuckled.

“E equals mc squared,” Alfred said to the forager. “How’s that? And, please, make mine medium rare.”

There were a few more laughs. It was good to laugh in here, even if he was the butt of it, for whatever the reason.

Suddenly things were interrupted by the shrill of whistles being blown. Guards stormed into the block, sticks clanging loudly on the walls and doors. “Everyone out! Out, filth! Schnell.”

Every heart came to a sudden stop. Every whistle, anything that was unexpected when it came to the Germans, everyone felt the dread that their time had finally come and it was over for them.

Hauptscharführer Scharf stepped into the block accompanied by two other guards, and Vacek, their soulless kapo, trailing behind. Scharf was one of the more brutal of the SS guards. He acted as if his only reward in getting through the war in this miserable camp was the infliction of as much pain and misery on the prisoners as he could. Alfred had personally seen him execute at least twenty or thirty himself, for nothing more than letting a shovel fall from their hands after ten hours’ hard labor and barely a drop of water, or when he had shouted, “Schnell! Schnell!” and a prisoner tripped or fell behind. Vacek was a petty criminal from Smolensk who, here, turned into a dreaded menace. He had an efficient, one-two method to bludgeon prisoners to death: a blow to the back of the legs to drop a person to their knees and then one to the back of the head to finish them off. Alfred could not believe that a Jew, no matter how low, could act that way toward another. They were all going to die in here at some point, even the kapos. What price was it worth to prolong it by inflicting misery on others?

“Aussen! Aussen!” the Germans barked, out, out, banging their sticks against the walls and wooden bunks. “Schnell!” Alfred stuffed his writings back under the floor beneath his bunk and replaced the floorboard. He fell into the line outside. “Faster, faster, you lice-ridden maggots.” The guards jabbed their sticks into their ribs. “Run! That means you, old man. Now!”

Though it was April, there was still a chill in the air at night, and everyone looked at each other with concern, huddling to keep warm. Any change of routine was always a cause for alarm. They awaited the dreaded word to march. They all knew where. It was only a matter of time anyway, and everyone knew at some point theirs would be up.

“Line up!” the guards barked, jabbing at them with their sticks. Everyone formed a line.

“So how is that steak tasting now?” Alfred leaned close and said to Ostrow, who had fallen in next to him. The ferret had ground the stolen cheese into bits under his pants and let the crumbs fall through his pant legs to the ground, grinding them into the dirt with his clogs.

“Perhaps a little tough, Professor, to be completely honest,” he replied with a complicit grin.

After a couple of minutes it became clear that this wasn’t the end, only an inspection. Nonetheless, if the guards found something, it was still a cause for alarm. Outside they could hear the guards tearing up the bunks, upending their flimsy, flea-infested mattresses and knocking their sticks against the floorboards looking for hiding spaces.

“Maybe the chef talked,” Ostrow leaned over and sniffed to Alfred.

“I think not,” Alfred said. “I don’t think it’s food they’re looking for.”

Vacek jabbed him in the back with his stick. “Quiet!”

After a few moments there was shouting from inside the block and then Scharf’s agitated voice. Everyone’s stomachs fell. The sergeant came out holding up a makeshift blade that had been fashioned from the top of a food tin. The prisoners only used it to slice the scraps of stolen bread or cheese that came to them.

“And may I ask whose is this?” the sergeant major asked, holding up the blade. His accusing gaze went down the line. With his furnace-like eyes, flat nose, and thick lips, the bastard even looked like a butcher. Everyone stood frozen. No one uttered a sound. It was common to punish an entire block for one prisoner’s offense. One thing you didn’t want to do was rankle Scharf when he was on a rampage.

“Speak up!” Vacek, the kapo, commanded, weaving in and out of the lines. He put a hand to his ear. “Cat got your tongue? Did I hear anyone?” He toyed with them like children, which only made their hatred of him worse. He stopped behind Ullie, a baker from Warsaw, one of Alfred’s friends. “Anything to say, baker?” Vacek uttered, close to Ullie’s ear.

The baker shut his eyes. The blade was his. He knew it was the end for him.

“Nothing?” Vacek took his stick and drove it into the back of Ullie’s legs, dropping him to his knees.

“It’s only for food, Herr Hauptscharführer,” Ullie pleaded, owning up to the offense. His eyes shook with terror. “Nothing more. I swear.”

Someone had ratted him out.

“Just for food, did I hear right…?” Scharf nodded agreeably. But everyone knew it was just an act. “Well, that’s okay then. Right, Vacek? I mean, if it’s just for food… Only, I find an actual knife works far better for cutting food.” His tone was clearly mocking. He circled around Ullie. “Don’t you agree that a knife works better, baker?”

“Yes, sir. It does, of course.” It was a joke. A mirthless one. Spoons were all they were allowed for the thin ladle of soup of overcooked, rotted potatoes and, if you were lucky, a sliver of grisly meat at the bottom.

“Don’t you agree, Herr Vacek?”

“I do, sir.” The Ukrainian nodded, his eyes lighting up with the obsequious lust he had for pleasing his ruthless bosses.

“Please, sir…” Ullie bowed his head, but knew what was in store for him. His eyes futilely found those of a few friends, as if saying his last goodbyes.

“Herr Hauptscharführer!” Another guard ran out of the barracks, holding a large tin in his hand, which, Alfred knew, contained his writings. His stomach fell. Scharf shook his head and grinned, not even questioning whose they were, and stepped over to Alfred.

“And what do we have here, Professor?” The SS killer glared. “Still with your silly fantasies? Didn’t we teach you to give them up?” He took out a fistful of papers and crumpled them into a ball. “For a professor, you don’t seem to learn very well. Herr Vacek, do you have a match?”

“Of course,” the Ukrainian said, and handed one to him.

“They’re simply writings, Herr Hauptscharführer,” Alfred begged. “Nothing. They mean nothing to anyone but me.”

“Who you were means nothing in here now!” the sergeant major shouted. He lit the match and glared at Alfred with a cold smile as the papers were caught up in flame. He dropped them to the ground, the edges curling and crisping. “Do you not understand? Forget who you were. You are just a worker now. A fucking number. You stay alive at my whim. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Herr Hauptscharführer.”

“I’m not sure you do. But I will remind you. Watch!”

He took out his Luger and put it to the back of Ullie’s head. “Did you think we had forgotten why we came, baker?” Ullie hung his head, knowing what was in store. “Next time anyone wants to hide weapons, think about this!” Scharf pulled on the trigger. Ullie shut his eyes and let out a whimper.

The gun did not fire.

Scharf spat out a curse and squeezed the trigger again. Again, nothing. “Fucking shit!” He pressed it to Ullie’s head and kept on squeezing. Click, click, click. Each time the gun jammed. His eyes were lit with rage. “Corporal,” he said to one of the other guards, “hand me your weapon.”

The Rottenführer moved toward him, unbuckling his holster. Then, from the direction of the main guardhouse, Scharf’s name was shouted.

The sergeant major turned around.

“Captain Nieholtz,” the guard replied. “He requests your presence in the guard room. Immediately.”

The muscles on Scharf’s neck, like a cord about to snap, were visible for all to see. In frustration, he kicked the kneeling baker onto his side. “Why waste the fucking bullet? Get back in line, you filthy rot. Your time is coming soon enough anyway.”

He stormed off, Vacek swinging his truncheon and chuckling with an amused smirk. “Next time, baker! I’d do you myself, but if ever there was a man who deserved the reprieve, you’re him.” He walked away as well.

Shaking, Ullie rolled over, his complexion white as the moon. He’d shat all over himself.

“Back among the living, comrade.” One by one, people helped him back up.

Alfred stared at the smoldering scraps of his work, now turned to ash on the ground. He went toward it-maybe there was one or two of them he could salvage. Then he just stopped.

What purpose was there now? Scharf should have just ended it here for both of them with one to the head. New ovens were being built every day. People no longer even came into the c & they were just sent off the trains over to Birkenau and disappeared. A hundred thousand Hungarians, he had been told, in just the past week alone. They were all going to die here too.

Poor Ullie, would it have been such a bad way to go? One to the head. He looked at the smoldering remains of his work, crisping at the edges.

Ten years.

What was the sense, could anyone explain it to him, of delaying it any further?

SIXTEEN

In the camp, the work never ended. The train tracks were being extended, right up to the gates of neighboring Birkenau, where the real killing was being done now. Two shifts, both day and night. Just three kilometers away there was an IG Farben chemical plant that was under construction. The joke was that it saved the Nazis the transportation costs of bringing the deadly gases in.

Every day, the work teams lined up after the morning meal. Construction workers, electricians, painters, diggers with hoes and spades. Lines endlessly straightened and counted, rolls called over and over. All marched out to twelve-hour work days to a procession of rousing music played by the orchestra. Then back at night, exhausted and battered, wheeling the dead in carts, to the same lifting tunes.

Still, there was downtime too. Before the work details assembled; in the minutes after roll call or after a meal. Or, during the day, if you were put on one of the night shifts. And getting yourself checked into the infirmary for a day or two was like a vacation.

Alfred’s latest job, with respect to his age, was cleaning the officers’ bicycles of mud every day. Endlessly polishing and polishing, scraping the tires of mud. The week after Scharf’s inspection, while replacing a punctured tire, he was instructed by Obersturmführer Meitner to escort a sick prisoner to the infirmary. There he came upon a small crowd watching two prisoners playing chess.

One was a middle-aged man with somber eyes and a serious expression who was said to be the camp champion. The other a boy, not a day more than sixteen, it would seem. They played with stones carved into rough shapes of pieces on a makeshift cardboard board. The Germans permitted this. Just as they allowed, even demanded, that the orchestra play as the trains of new inmates came in and when the work details marched out to their jobs. The music imparted a small feeling of everyday normalcy and even culture to the camp against the backdrop of death and madness. The level of chess that was played was said to be high, and now and then, even the SS guards would rest their sticks and weapons and watch the matches for a while. Even Dr. Mengele, it was said, took an interest on occasion. It was almost like the gladiators of ancient Rome; the longer you continued to win, the greater the chances were that you were kept alive.

After dropping off his patient, Alfred folded into the crowd observing the match. He hadn’t played much since his university days, but it was still intriguing. There was complete silence. SS officers and the lowly prisoners who routinely lived in fear of them each standing around and commenting amid their own ranks, completely absorbed. By the time Alfred came on it, today’s match was in mid-game. After each move, the older player removed his wire glasses and kneaded his doughy face, nerves showing. Conversely, his young opponent had an effortless air about him. A beginner could see the kid had the advantage. Even the Germans were muttering and nodding among themselves in admiration of how neatly the younger one was disposing of the other.

“Are you sure you want to continue this fight?” The boy sat back and put his hands behind his head.

“That kind of boastfulness has brought down players far better than you,” his opponent scowled back, declining the invitation.

“Because bishop to king’s knight four puts your rook in a real jam,” the youth pointed out to him.

“I’m not a fool,” the champion replied.

“No doubt. So then by moving my pawn to queen’s bishop five, should you choose to save the rook… I’m sure you’ll also see…” Even Alfred saw that the boy’s next move gave him complete control of the middle board. The outcome was inevitable.

The older player kneaded his jowl a few more moments, delaying his fate, then quietly nodded with a defeated sigh, offering his hand.

“We have a new champ!” The crowd cheered. “Young King Wolciek!” another crowned him. Even the Germans talked among themselves, impressed, two of them exchanging a few bills, clearly having wagered on the outcome. Then the guard who had lost the bet turned on the crowd. “Fun’s over, shits. That’s it. Get your asses back to work. Did you hear me?” He raised his stick at a few loiterers, no longer in a good mood. “Now!”

Now the Germans could return to the real business at hand of killing each one of them.

As the crowd dispersed, Alfred noticed an attractive blond woman in a printed dress and cardigan who had seemed to clap with appreciation at the conclusion of the match. The SS officers seemed to greet and address her politely. As the crowd cleared, she went back inside the infirmary.

“Pretty, eh?” The prisoner next to him nudged Alfred. He was a Frenchman with a red triangle on his uniform, signifying a political prisoner.

Alfred replied in French. “Who is she? A nurse perhaps? I haven’t seen her before.”

“Don’t know.” The Frenchman shrugged. “But quite the chess fan, it’s clear. I’ve seen her watching before. Brains and beauty, a nice combination, right?”

“Yes, a nice combination,” Alfred said. His thoughts immediately went to his own daughter, Lucy, and it made him sad.

“That kid’s something, huh?” The prisoner continued to chat on their way back to the barracks. “He’s beaten everyone he’s played here. Apparently, he’s got a photographic memory. Claims he can remember every game he’s ever played.”

“Is that so?”

“I was once in a barracks with him. He didn’t know a soul there, except one, a cousin from Lodz or somewhere. Someone put him up to a memory test. He said he would do it for fifty zloty each. We asked where he possibly had two thousand zloty to cover if he lost, and the brat replied cockily, Why did it matter? He wouldn’t lose. So we all went in on it. We gave him our names and our birth towns too, just to make it more difficult. Maybe thirty of us there.” The Frenchman stopped in front of a barrack. “This is my block. Twenty-two.”

“And…?” Alfred urged him to finish.

The Frenchman shrugged. “The kid recited back every one correctly. Every damn one. Someone got mad and accused him and his cousin of setting the whole thing up, so he went one better. One by one, he recited the town where each of us said he was from. Remarkable, huh…?”

“Yes, but I’ve known a lot of young men and women with minds like that. The secret is to put their skill to some kind of practical use.”

“And what do you do then, if you don’t mind me asking?” the prisoner inquired. “Teach, I suppose?”

“Currently I’m in transportation, sadly.” Alfred showed him the bicycle tire.

“Yes, we’ve all found new occupations here, haven’t we?” The Frenchman laughed. “I was mayor of my town.”

“So what’s his name?” Alfred asked, removing his glasses and wiping the afternoon sun off his brow.

“Wolciek, I believe,” the Frenchman replied, heading inside his barrack. “Leo. Watch him again if it all works out.”

They both knew precisely what “all works out” meant.

“Just watch your money. It could cost you fifty zloty.”

SEVENTEEN

A week later, Alfred happened upon the boy playing again, this time against an opponent named Markov, an Estonian, whom everyone said had been a local champion there. Leo used the King’s Indian Defense and, to the delight of the crowd, dispatched the more experienced man in just twenty moves.

Even Markov applauded the boy’s ability.

Alfred also noticed the attractive blond woman there again, leaning against a railing on the steps of the infirmary, quite absorbed in the game. But as soon as it was over, to the polite bows of the German guards, she went back into the infirmary. She must be a nurse. Or even a new doctor there.

As the crowd split up, Alfred made his way over to the winner, whose pockets were stuffed full of well-earned treats and cigarettes. “May I have a word with you, Pan Wolciek?”*

“With me? Do I know you, sir?” the boy questioned. It was natural to be suspicious here. Everyone, even those in a striped uniform, would either want something from someone they thought could protect them a bit longer or could possibly even be a spy.

“Well, I was called Herr Doktor Mendl while at the universities of Gottingen and Lvov,” Alfred introduced himself. “But in here, I suppose, simply Alfred would be fine.”

“And I was simply Leo while back in Lodz.” The boy grinned. “But in here I’ve become King Leo.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you by any name, young man.” He was clean-faced, tow-headed with blue, sparkling eyes. “Word is, you have quite the memory skills. You certainly know your chess.”

“I’m pleased if it keeps me around here an extra day… Back in Lodz, I was junior champion before we were forced inside the ghetto and then most of the competition dried up. Chess just didn’t seem so important then. What about you, Professor, do you play?”

“Not since my university days,” Alfred admitted. “And as you can see, that’s been quite a while.”

“Well, in here we are all pretty much the same age,” Leo smiled philosophically, “since you never know when any day may be your last. Anyway, it’s been a pleasure, Herr Doktor, but if you don’t mind, I’m afraid I have to-”

“Are you as good at math and science as you are this game?” Alfred confronted him. “We used to say, brains without application is like beauty without kindness. It’s all a waste.”

The boy shrugged. “I’m afraid much of my formal education was put aside when we were forced to move inside the ghetto. Still,” he grinned, slyly, “I suppose I could give you a quick demonstration, if you’re so curious.”

“I’d be honored.”

The boy had light features, blond hair if it was allowed to grow out, a narrow face with alert eyes, and clearly a wit as sharp as his chess with a kind of cocksureness to match. “Can you provide me the date of your birth, Herr Professor?”

“As I’ve said, I’m an old man. Maybe too old to play this game with you. But it’s October 7, if you must know. Fourteen years before the turn of the century.”

“That’s 1886, correct?” Leo replied quickly. He made a flourish with his arms and bowed. “See?”

“My, that is quite amazing,” Alfred said with mock praise.

“Oh, you expected more? All right, then… So October 7, 1886. That is what you said, correct…?”

“Sadly.” Alfred agreed.

“Then let me see…” The boy closed his eyes, put two fingers to his forehead, silently moving his lips as if in the midst of calculating. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Congratulations, Professor, you are a very special man to have been born on the Sabbath.”

Alfred’s eyes went wide.

“I can also calculate that it is only one in seven who can make that claim.” Leo grinned teasingly.

“The first trick was quite good enough,” Alfred said, undeniably impressed.

The boy was right! Alfred’s mother always joked that it was a wonder he hadn’t decided to become a rabbi and not a scientist, since he was virtually born at schul. For the lad to have gone through that many years and iterations, over five decades, and then having to factor in leap years as well… “That is quite amazing. If you don’t mind me asking, how did you manage it? And, without a pencil and paper, so quickly?”

“I devised a formula. It involves numerical properties for each day of the week as well as for each century. In any given year, the dates 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 tend to fall on the same day. Then you have to factor in leap years, of course. In your case, fourteen of them. So I can compute any day in my head. So how is that for ‘application,’ Professor?” the boy asked, gloating a bit.

“I would say it’s quite strong,” Alfred nodded grudgingly, “if you aspire to be a calendar.”

“And what is it you aspire to, old man? In the time you have left here.”

“How about try this…?” There was an exercise Alfred assigned to only his very top students as a means to calculate numerical primality. “I’ll give you a number. Memorize it.”

Leo stared at him and shrugged, seemingly ripe for the challenge. “Should be no problem.”

“It’s long: 9,007,199,254,740,991. Now repeat it back to me.”

“That’s it?” Leo shrugged. He gave the numbers back to Alfred in rapid order. “What’s the trick to that?”

“Now express that same number as a power of two,” Alfred instructed him.

“Hmmm… as a power of two…” Leo bunched his lips in thought. “That isn’t easy.” He took in a breath, as if accepting the challenge, his brow wrinkling and his gaze tunneling. He put a hand to his chin. “How much time do I have…?”

“A lad like you…” Alfred smiled. “I don’t know, two, three minutes… How much do you need?”

“Two or three minutes should be fine…” The boy started in, appearing to go through many abstract calculations in his head, muttering numbers to himself, shifting his index finger back and forth, like a musical metronome. Time passed. “Of two, you say,” he asked again, looking a bit frustrated. Ultimately he just looked back at Alfred, shaking his head, and shrugged. “I told you my formal education was interrupted by the war. It’s not that I can’t figure what you asked, it’s just… I would need maybe some paper and a little more time. I’m quite sure I could get it though.”

“I’m sure you could.” Alfred patted him on the shoulder. “No matter, it’s not so easy.” The guards were now ordering everyone to get back to their jobs. “Can we talk again, perhaps? I have some things I’d like to discuss with you.”

“You need me to teach you some chess, Professor? You said it’s been years. That might take a while.”

“Maybe it’s I who would like to teach you something,” Alfred responded.

“And that would be…?”

“Electromagnetic physics.”

“Electromagnetic physics…” Leo rolled his eyes. “Oh, that is useful indeed, Professor. That, and a note from Reichsführer Himmler himself might just keep you alive in here another day.”

“Don’t be so smug. Its applications are vital. So can we speak again? How about tomorrow?” Alfred pressed. He could see the guards had lost their good humor. The sticks had come out and they started prodding everyone along.

“I’m afraid that the chess takes up most of whatever time that is free here,” Leo said with an apologetic shrug. He started to back away. “But I enjoyed talking with you, Professor. And oh, just to be clear… On that other matter…” He raised his index finger in the air as if a thought had just come back to him. “I believe the answer you’re looking for is two to the fifty-third. Isn’t that right?”

“Excuse me?” Alfred muttered, taken by surprise.

“Your number, Professor. It’s two to the fifty-third power, is it not?” Leo grinned coyly. “That is what you wanted to know, right?”

Alfred’s jaw parted, as if a weight was attached to it. He had given the boy only two or three minutes… Even his most advanced students would have needed at least an hour and a notebook full of paper to calculate that out. “Yes, that is correct.” His mouth was as dry as cotton. “Well, almost, that is…”

“Yes, you’re right!” Leo agreed. “Stupid of me. It’s actually two to the fifty-third minus one,” he corrected himself with a victorious gleam in his eye.

Alfred blinked. “Yes, minus one.” He cleared his throat and nodded back, knowing the color had drained from his face.

“So yes, let’s talk again, Professor, by all means.” Leo backed away and waved, grinning.

Alfred just stood there, between shock and astonishment. A small smile crept onto his face. “And what is your birth date?” he called after him. “If you don’t mind.”

“Mine?” Leo said. “Why, January 22, Herr Professor. And to be clear, that would be twenty-eight years after the century.”

“Yes, after, of course…” Alfred followed him as the boy melded into the crowd. Over the years, he had encountered many great young minds. Some had gone on to have brilliant careers. Others just faded into the professions of the law, business, or civil service. But this one… Yes, the Frenchman was right. Astonishing. No other word for it.

And he was just sixteen.

EIGHTEEN

A few days later, a corporal named Langer entered Leo’s block as Leo rested after his twelve-hour work detail. Despite his age, Leo was assigned to the motor transport team because his first night off the train he had said that his cousin had been a mechanic back in Lodz, which was true, so they threw him on it, and he’d had to learn on the fly as fast as he could.

“Prisoner Wolciek.” Langer stopped at his bunk.

“Rottenführer!” Leo leaped out of bed. His heart nearly jumped out of his chest.

“Put on your cap. You are to come with me.”

“Come where, Rottenführer, sir…?” Leo questioned, pushing back a stab of worry. To be asked for by one’s name was never a good sign, and never seemed to end with a positive outcome.

“Just get your ass up, you little shit, and don’t ask questions.” The corporal cracked his stick against the wooden boards of the bunk. “Come with me. Schnell!”

A tremor of nerves wound through Leo’s gut, though he put on his clogs and grabbed his cap without delay, doing his best not to show it. Had he done something? Was this it? Maybe they didn’t like the manner in which he had flaunted his skills at chess, or the games of memory he played, which could be interpreted as elevating himself above the other prisoners and flew in the face of everything the Nazis tried to ground into you-that you were nothing. His barrack mates all looked on with bowed but sympathetic faces as Leo was taken out the door. At the same time, all breathed sighs of relief that it wasn’t them the Rottenführer had come for.

“So where are we going, sir?” Leo asked outside with rising concern. Langer was a brutal pig who had never shown a moment’s hesitation about clubbing an innocent prisoner senseless at the drop of a hat. Just yesterday Leo had watched him take a shovel and send someone reeling into a ditch and then piss on the dead man while laughing to his fellow guards about a story he had just heard about one of the cooks, as if the dead man had not been a living, breathing person just thirty seconds before.

“Just walk,” the SS guard growled, prodding Leo ahead with his stick in the direction of the front gate.

Leo’s heart began to patter. Where was Langer taking him? They continued on past the rows of blocks, nothing ahead of them but bad places. The black wall that prisoners were thrown up against and shot. Or the flat-roofed crematorium from where the odor of death and the gray plume of smoke perpetually emanated. Maybe he would be given a job there, the thought occurred to him. Tossing dead, disfigured bodies into the ovens or cleaning out the ash afterward, picking through skulls and bones. He’d heard of such horrors taking place in there. And such jobs. The prisoners even had to live there.

Or maybe this was indeed it. His own private Himmelstrasse. If so, he would face it bravely, Leo sturdied himself. It was bound to happen soon enough. He just wished he hadn’t studied so much for his next match.

As he marched, the winding turns of the long journey that had brought him here came back to him. His father had had a small but successful law practice in Lodz and took pride in accompanying his young prodigy to chess tournaments. Once Leo even played in a competition in Warsaw. But his father was run over by a streetcar and killed when Leo was just eleven. He and his mother and younger sister moved in with her brother. When the Nazis came and things got bad, they were forced to move inside the ghetto. Leo’s promising chess career came to an end. A friend of his uncle offered to take Leo and two others south, through Slovakia to Hungary, where the pro-Nazi government had not yet given up its Jews. All agreed it would be safer for him there. They left in a large commercial truck filled with industrial parts and valves, and everything seemed to be going along as planned until they stopped at a vegetable stand only thirty kilometers from the Slovak border. The coast appeared clear, and Leo hopped out and ran back the thirty meters or so to buy some dates and plums with the little cash he had. At that moment, a German troop truck happened to drive by, and the stand owner, seeing what was ahead, grabbed the young boy’s arm. “Quick, son, over here,” he said, drawing Leo behind the stand. The Germans inspected the truck and discovered the two young passengers hidden in the back, clearly Jews. Over his uncle’s friend’s pleas, they marched them all into a field, Leo peeking out from behind a stack of crates to watch, and machine-gunned them all, the children too. Then the Germans came over to the stand and chewed on peaches and figs, commenting to the stand owner how delicious they were, all the while with Leo huddled and his heart racing only a few feet away.

After the Germans left, the stand owner gave Leo some fruit and a jacket, and for two weeks, he lived in the fields as he continued south toward his destination. One morning he awoke to find two black-clad local police standing over him. He was put in a room at a border checkpoint and then sent by truck to a wired-in camp named Majdanek, near Lublin. It was cold there, the conditions bleak and harsh. The guards treated them with a brutality Leo could never have imagined human beings would treat one another. Fortune had it that a distant cousin happened to be in the same bunk, and he taught Leo how to survive: work hard, do not stand out, do not make eye contact. Do everything double time. Leo grew so weak and thin, they stuffed newspaper into his cheeks to puff them out and make him appear healthier and able to work, so as not to be selected by the guards. And he started playing chess again. Eight months ago, his was part of several barracks that were crammed into a sealed train and transferred to Auschwitz. The prisoners were herded off the train and onto a long line. A call went out that they needed one hundred able workers. Leo’s cousin pushed him in front and whispered for them to volunteer, even though Leo was as scrawny as they came and only fifteen. “Stay by me,” his cousin muttered. “Whatever you do, get on that line.” In the jostling, others pushed their way forward, separating them. An SS officer was counting off the volunteers, one by one. Leo was number ninety-eight. His cousin was three places behind. Those who missed the cut were herded the other way; they were told they would be deloused and take showers. All were dead, Leo had heard, barely an hour later, including his cousin. Of the thousand or so on his transport, Leo’s work group was the only hundred to survive.

And now as they approached the black wall, Leo thought maybe his charmed journey had come to an end. He remembered his cousin’s calm but knowing farewell look as Leo was marched off on the line of volunteers and he was left behind. He had trained Leo well.

“In here.”

To his surprise, Langer directed him into the delousing showers Leo had been put into on his arrival at the camp. It was empty. For a moment, Leo’s heart leaped with fear. The guard pushed him under a shower head and turned the water on. “Wasch dich,” he barked, pointing to a bar of soap. “Mach dich sauber.” Scrub yourself completely clean.

Leo stepped in, not quite understanding. But the freezing water actually felt good as the grime came off. All the while, Langer stood not ten feet away, and lit a cigarette. When Leo was done and had stepped back into his clothes, the German nudged him back outside with his truncheon. “Let’s go.”

To Leo’s further surprise, they continued on, past the front gates. Langer exchanged a few mocking jokes with a couple of soldiers standing guard, as if this was a big, important responsibility for the Rottenführer, escorting this skinny prisoner. Leo saw that it angered the SS guard.

“Where are we going, Rottenführer?” Leo asked him again. He had not been out here, the other side of the ramp, since his arrival a year ago.

“Don’t ask questions,” the SS corporal barked, having lost all patience. “Turn left here. Just march.”

Leo was sure the coldhearted bastard had him clean up just to march him out into a field outside the grounds and shoot him into a ditch. And then piss on him, just like Leo had seen before.

So this was it.

But they went on and past the ditch and turned on a road Leo had never been on before. There was a row of three brick homes. They stopped in front of the second one in, with gables and a red roof, stone steps, and a hanging flower basket on the recessed front porch.

“Wait here,” the Rottenführer said.

“Where are we?” Leo asked.

“Just look smart, yid.” The Nazi jammed his stick into the crook between Leo’s legs, making Leo wince. “No prisoner has ever stepped foot in here before. This is Lagerkommandant Ackermann’s house.”

Ackermann. A chill ran down Leo’s spine. The assistant commandant of the entire camp. What had he done that they brought him here? Maybe they wanted to turn him into an informer, Leo surmised. If they did, he would refuse. Even if it meant his death. There was no class of prisoner more reviled than those who it was known brought an earful back to the Nazis. Or maybe they wanted to do some vile experiments on him. Leo looked down at the row of homes, hedges, and transplanted fruit trees in the yards, like some bucolic postcard of normalcy amid all this hell, just across the wire. At the end there was an even larger house. This must be where Kommandant Höss resided. Or maybe the dreaded Mengele himself, whose very sight engendered such fear in everyone. This was where the shits could play their cherished Mozart at night and sing their beloved drinking songs, and pretend that the horrors of what they did during the day were just a dream.

Yes, that’s what they were going to do to him, experiments…

Langer went up the steps and knocked at the door. A few seconds later, it opened, and he spoke briefly to someone inside. “Up here. Now!” he called back to Leo.

Leo climbed up.

“Go.” The corporal pushed him to the door. “In.”

Warily, Leo stepped inside. His heart beat rapidly, as if speeded up to five times its normal rate by some drug they had already injected. An interior door was open to reveal a small entry foyer, decorated with flowers and portraits, that led to a tasteful family room. A patterned couch. Wooden side tables, photos on them. A polished wood armoire. Sconces with fluted candles on the walls.

Even a piano.

To Leo, everything about the place seemed to speak of normalcy. It reminded him of his uncle’s home in Moravia. Not the home of a man who had overseen the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

In the camp, Leo had seen Ackermann several times, darkly handsome and expressionless, looking on at roll call or touring the camp with guests, conversing and gesturing naturally as they passed prisoners being beaten like vermin, as if it were the most common thing in the world.

Another guard came up to him. This one, younger, no cap, dark hair, steely gray eyes. “In. There!” He pushed Leo into the family room. “Take off your cap, Jew. Don’t touch anything.” He gestured toward a sitting table, near the windows that were blocked from the sun by patterned curtains.

On the table, there was a chessboard, the pieces set to play.

In front of it were two chairs.

NINETEEN

Footsteps emanated from deeper inside the house, coming down the stairs. Leo’s heart quickened. Ackermann. He heard voices, the young guard snapping to attention in the hallway and announcing that the prisoner was in here.

A voice said, “Thank you, Corporal.”

But it was not the Lagerkommandant’s voice he heard, nor was it he who stepped into the room.

It was the pretty blond woman he had seen in the camp observing some of his matches. She had on a blue print dress, a white sweater over it, and her hair pulled back in a conservative bun, as his mother used to wear it.

He thought she was merely an attendee at the infirmary.

Instead, she was the Lagerkommandant’s wife.

“So you are the famous Leo?” she greeted him in proper German. She gave him a smile; there was a hint of kindness in it. But still at a distance. Not exactly warm.

Leo stood there with his cap in his hands, his mouth dry as sandpaper. “I am, ma’am. Not so famous, though, I think.”

“I am Frau Ackermann,” she said. She took two steps toward him but, of course, made no move to put out her hand. The young guard watched them by the door. “My husband is…”

“I know your husband, ma’am,” Leo said respectfully.

“Yes, of course. I hoped… You may relax. In fact, please, come over here. “She gestured to the chessboard.

Leo stepped over to it. It was hard to ignore the fine, hand-carved pieces in front of him. “May I…?” Leo asked if he could inspect them.

“By all means.” She nodded. “Of course.”

They were alabaster. As finely polished and smooth as any Leo had ever seen. With exquisite detail. The king carried an imperial staff with a crest on it, and the queen was draped in a long, flowing robe. The castles had the kind of finely carved turrets he had seen only in history books. He picked one up, then thought better of it, and placed it back down. “They’re very nice.”

“It was my father’s,” she said. “He liked to play after dinner. With his cigar. He was very good, actually. He could beat most anyone he played. Please, I want you to sit down.”

“Sit…?” He looked at her, not quite understanding. He could see that she seemed as awkward and unsure as him. A prisoner. A Jew, no less, in the Lagerkommandant’s house. Langer said, No one has stepped foot here before. “Me, madame?”

“You are the camp champion, are you not?”

He shrugged indifferently. “I suppose. Yes.”

“Then sit, yes. For many years, after my brothers left home, my father had only me to play with.” She gestured him toward a chair. “I asked you here to play.”

“Play…?” Leo looked her, unsure how to respond. “Ma’am.”

“Yes. Isn’t that what this board is for, Herr Wolciek? To play against me.”

He sat. Probably a good thing, as his legs suddenly felt numb and lifeless and almost gave way under him. His heart hammered inside. Play-with her. The Lagerkommandant’s wife. In their home. How could he even tell anyone about this?

Who could ever imagine?

“May I…?” she asked, inquiring if she could play white. She gave him the slightest of smiles. “After all, you are camp champion. I have watched you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I have seen you there, but… And of course, white.” Leo put out his hand and pulled up to the table.

She smoothed her dress and took her place on the chair across from him. “So…” she said, and met his eyes.

Leo’s head was dizzy. “So.”

She began. Pawn to queen four. Knight to king’s bishop three. Leo recognized it quickly as the King’s Indian Defense. A heady opening. Not many players these days started that way. Leo thought back to a famous match between the great Capablanca and an Englishman, Yates, and tried to recall through his daze how the moves developed. He was nervous. Petrified to make a wrong move. She played quickly, confidently. His heart beat through his chest. He had to keep his wits together just to keep up.

The young guard stood and watched them impassively at the door.

“This is good,” she said, pleased to see how Leo countered her advance. “My father used to say, if you can outwit the King’s Indian, you will have no difficulty outwitting the vast majority of people in life. Do you agree, Herr Wolciek?”

“I do not know, ma’am.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re a bit nervous to agree to anything. Please relax. It’s just chess. It is just the two of us. Well, three.” She eyed the young guard with the tiniest of smiles.

“Yes, ma’am.” Leo was too afraid to say anything else.

A housemaid stepped into the room.

“Coffee?” Frau Ackermann asked. “Maybe a cake? Or some fruit?”

Coffee? Fruit? A cake? Leo was sure she could see the lump travel down his throat. These were delicacies here, available only in the imagination of someone keen on torturing himself. Or maybe paid for by only the largest of bribes. And then, only scraps, stolen from the kitchen trash. Whatever the Germans left behind.

Leo licked his lips but still shook his head. He was too unsettled to even speak. He just moved his piece. Bishop to queen four. “Later then, Hedda,” Frau Ackermann said to the maid. “You may leave the basket.”

“Yes, Frau Ackermann,” the housemaid said, and left. She had seemed as nervous as Leo.

They continued on. He watched her thinking out his moves, a finger pressed to her lips, and then quickly replying. It was clear her father had taught her well. She saw through a few of his early ruses, meant to lure her into an unfavorable exchange. And when she did spot his intent, she met his eyes with the faintest of pleased smiles.

“I am happy to have already lasted this long with a player of your skill.”

Queen to king’s bishop five. Leo cleared his throat and barely got the word out of his throat. “Check.”

“I see.” She was beautiful. Even in the modest way she covered herself up. Early thirties, he thought. Her eyes were almond-shaped and a soft blue. When she thought she sometimes bit her lower lip, which had a soft covering of red lipstick on it. When Leo looked at her, he glanced at her only for a split second, and when she looked at him, he quickly averted his gaze.

In truth, he had never been alone with a woman before.

“Let’s see now…” She advanced a pawn, blocking her king from the danger.

They continued deeper into the game. A dilemma began to develop for him. How was he expected to play this? This was the Lagerkommandant’s wife. She held the power of life and death over him. Like any of the guards, if she snapped her fingers, she could just have him sent and killed. Should he let her win? Clearly she knew what she was doing, so it would take only a single careless move and would not be so hard. If this were her husband, or any one of the guards, he could see them disposing of any Jew with the audacity to insult one of them. Even a perceived insult. And this was the camp boss’s wife? His head went into a spin, and everything he knew about the game seemed to spiral away as if caught up in a swirling wind. He decided to give her a test. He moved up his bishop to attack her queen but left it open to her rook.

“Herr Wolciek,” she said, pausing after his move. “Your bishop…?”

Their eyes met. For the first time really. Leo’s heart was galloping three times its normal rate. He was afraid she would hear it above the silence, pounding like mad in his chest. He was afraid she would detect what was going through his head.

“But of course you saw that,” she said, letting him off the hook. Her eyes narrowed just a bit, both apologetic and in their own way, reproving, as if to say, Not again. Please.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The rest of the game they did not converse. They just played; the time between her moves grew longer. Once or twice, Leo let his eyes linger on the tempting shape of her dress. He could not help imagining what she looked like underneath. He let his mind wander, to her undergarments-he had never seen a woman’s undergarments, save his mother’s. The fluid curve beneath her sweater as she leaned to move. Her breasts…

“Herr Wolciek… I believe it is your move.”

“Sorry, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. Rook to queen five. With a blush.

They were set up for a multipiece exchange, which Leo saw would not be to his advantage. Nonetheless, he decided to take the plunge. It would leave him down a rook. They moved the five moves of the exchange in rapid succession. It left his castled king weakly protected. When she saw her position at the end of the exchange, she looked at him again, her eyes suspect, glistening a little, not quite sure.

“I should never have taken the bait,” Leo admitted with a shrug. “I fear there is not much point in letting this continue on.”

He could see, she didn’t know whether to be pleased or angry with him.

“You play very well, Frau Ackermann.” Leo turned over his king. “Your father has taught you well.”

“Thank you. Perhaps we will play again.” She met his eyes. “If you are lucky.”

Lucky. The word ran through him. Leo knew precisely what she meant. And it was nothing to do with the chess. “I hope that will be the case,” he said.

“And maybe the next time I will beat you for real,” she said with a tone of admonishment. Her sharp eyes contained the hint of a sage smile.

“Please get the Rottenführer,” she called to the young guard. “Our guest is set to leave. But you will take these, of course.” She wrapped two sugar cakes and an apple in a napkin. “With my compliments. Here they will only go to my husband’s waistline.”

“Thank you, Frau Ackermann.” Leo stood up and took the offering. The hair on his arms raised as their hands slightly touched.

“May I?” Leo asked. He pointed warily toward a large plum. It had a private significance to him. He had not even seen one since that fateful day at the fruit stand.

“Of course. See he gets back safely, Corporal,” she said to Langer, who had come in from the outside. “And with my gifts, if you please.”

“Of course, Frau Ackermann.” Leo could see Langer gritting his teeth with held-in anger at having to escort Leo back to the block with his cache of treasures.

She got up.

“And next time,” she looked back at Leo, the slightest smile in her eyes, “you will have to earn your treats, Herr Wolciek. Not be given them. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Leo bowed his head and smiled back. “I do understand.”

Next time… Leo said to himself on the walk back to camp. Those words were about the happiest he had heard since he first arrived in this godforsaken place.

The place didn’t look quite as bad as he came back to it. Even with Langer prodding him.

He had someone watching out for him now.

TWENTY

She sent for him again the following week. And then again, a few days after that.

The next week as well.

Each time Rottenführer Langer came around to the block to escort Leo late in the afternoon while her husband was still at work. And each time they stopped at the shower and he had Leo scrub himself clean. Though with each new visit the guard seemed to grow more and more displeased with the task.

And each time he marched Leo past the black wall and through the front gate, past the train ramp where he had arrived that first night, to the row of brick houses whose flowers were now starting to bloom. By the third visit the guards at the front gate merely shook their heads in amusement and rolled their eyes at Langer as he and Leo went by. And each time the same young SS private watched by the parlor door while Leo and the Lagerkommandant’s wife played their game. And no longer did Leo let her win unchallenged.

And each time he returned to camp he carried back with him a napkin wrapped with treats: cakes, fruit, even chocolates, worth a hundred cigarettes in there. Prizes he willingly shared with his block mates, some of whom laughed at him for his well-placed protectress. The Queen of Mercy, they named her, for as long as Leo remained under her protection, maybe his good fortune would spill over onto them. He was their Scheherazade. Just keep her amused, they all begged. “The longer you play, we will all be safe.”

Others scowled that Leo was no better than the lowest form of collaborator. How could he spend time sucking up to such filth? She was as guilty as any of them. “She shares the bed of the very bastard who makes sure the daily death quotas are met!”

“I am perfectly happy doing what I have to do,” Leo defended himself, “if it buys me one more day here. And you should as well, Drabik, if you had any brains in your head.”

Their second match, Leo played much more relaxed. Frau Ackermann tried a more conventional opening, which Leo easily handled. In truth, he could have put her away within twenty moves, but he enjoyed the time he spent there-in the spell of a beautiful woman, and the fact that no Jew had ever had this privilege. He didn’t want it to end so quickly. So he prolonged things by swapping a few pieces that made it a fight for territory in the end game, which he easily won.

Each new match, Frau Ackermann grew more relaxed as well. She actually dropped the formal “Herr” and called him by his given name now and then, and between moves, she even asked where he was from and how he learned to play. She volunteered that she was from Bremen, in the North, where all the big breweries were. “You like beer, Leo?” she asked. He felt sure she was toying with him a bit. “You’re probably not old enough. You’ve probably never had a good beer.”

“I’ve had beer,” Leo said, trying to make himself seem older than he was. In fact, it had only been once, a few sips, on his father’s last birthday before he was killed when Leo was eleven.

She had beautiful, large eyes, and when pleased, like when Leo complimented her on a move, or when she saw what he was up to and countered smartly, they were quick to brighten into a sage smile. And yet he saw that there was a sadness to her as well. Like a caged bird that had grown accustomed to her captivity but dreamed of something beyond. Or someone living a life other than what she had envisioned. He imagined that in a different setting, she could be charming and witty and smart, and in his mind he saw her, at a party, with a glass of champagne in her hand, in a free-flowing, red dress. Yet here, by his fourth visit, he began to get the sense that this was the one thing she looked forward to most. That freed her from the horror she was party to here. His fifth game, it was a warm, summery day and she no longer wore her sweater. Her collar was open another button and fell tantalizingly over her breast so that between moves, Leo’s mind roamed to what was underneath, the tiniest hint of cleavage showing through. Maybe once she even caught Leo leaning forward just a bit to stare at it.

“It is your move, Herr Wolciek,” she said with a slightly reproving smile.

“Yes. Of course.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

He was embarrassed at the sudden stiffness he felt in his pants. Both under the chess table and in his bunk at night. She was the wife of the Lagerkommandant. To her, he could be only a lowly Jew who would not live long. His only value was that he amused her. For all he knew, she had the maid wipe down the very pieces he touched with a cloth after he left.

Yet, that fifth match, he saw that she was happy to see him. She must have studied up for she played white and tried a new opening. A variation of the Sicilian Defense. It was the kind of passive opening that easily led to a long middle game and went against his standard Ruy Lopez, and Leo resisted a quick exchange of pawns and knights that would have resolved things sooner.

At some point she asked him where he was from.

“Lodz,” he said, looking up. “It’s in the center of Poland. We have beer there too.” He smiled and looked down.

“Polish beer, you say? Never heard of it. How could there be such a thing?” They played on a few more moves. “And your father… What does he do?” Leo looked up at her. “If you do not mind me asking.”

“He was a lawyer, Frau Ackermann. He represented people in small business transactions.”

“And he is…?” She hesitated, so that he assumed she either meant dead or even worse, was he here?

“No, he died, madame, before the war.” Leo moved up his rook to put pressure on her knight. Then he added, “Luckily, I think.”

Her eyes met his this time. It was the first time he had injected his position and fate into their game, and he was angry at himself because he felt it suddenly separate them. She retreated her knight and the game wound on. Leo glanced at the young guard. He was no more than twenty-two or -three. A private only, but surely this was a plum assignment to guard the wife of the assistant camp commander. Still, one that kept him away from all the “fun and games” going on next door. The way he looked at Leo-narrow, impassive, staring right through him-Leo couldn’t help but wonder just how many of his buddies on the other side of the fence this young private had killed. Emptied his Luger into the back of someone’s head as they kneeled and waited. Or clubbed them senseless with a blow to the head. Or clamped the “shower” door tight and chuckled to his pals at the gagging and cries for mercy coming from within. Maybe put down a few reichsmarks on how long they would last in there. Three minutes? Five? Eight?

Maybe she saw this in Leo’s eyes.

“Private, can you please call in Hedda?” she asked. The maid.

“Of course, Frau Ackermann.” The young private clicked his heels and left.

She picked up her queen and went to play-to king’s knight six, Leo assumed, uselessly attacking his queen-when she held onto it without placing it down and waited for him to meet her eyes.

“I know what you must think-what anyone would naturally think, of course. But I am not the monster you may imagine, Leo. I studied economics at the university in Leipzig. When I met Kurt, he was studying for his law degree. He was very dashing,” she said. “Driven. For a young girl, it was…”

It was what? Leo wondered what she was about to say. Impressive? Irresistible? He looked up and her gaze seemed to lock on his even more strongly now, more resolutely, and this time Leo did not pull his away.

“Just because I am here, because I am with…” She paused again, short of saying his name. Him. “It doesn’t mean that I endorse…”

Endorse what…? The hell that was happening day and night that her husband was overseeing just across the gate? Not for the first time Leo saw what looked to be sadness in her eyes. Something vulnerable inside her, from deep inside her heart, coming forth. The look seemed to say I don’t know how long I can save you, Leo. You understand, not forever…

But all he said back was “Yes, Frau Ackermann.” Though he met her eyes as if to say he understood. Then his gaze shifted back to the piece she still held in her hand. “Your queen, ma’am…”

“Yes, my queen, of course.” She placed it down on the very spot Leo was sure she would. “Check.”

At that very moment Hedda, the housemaid, came in. “Can you prepare some fruit and cakes for us, Hedda, please?”

“Right away, Frau Ackermann.”

“And please make sure that-”

No sooner had the words left her mouth than the sound of boots was heard coming up the front steps.

“Who is that?” She turned, nerves spreading on her face.

The front door opened. Leo’s heart came to a complete stop.

It was the Lagerkommandant himself, coming back to his home.

He turned to face them in the sitting room and took off his hat-dark hair, smoothed back, eyes to match, a jawline as rigid as stone.

“Kurt…” Frau Ackermann stood up, nervously smoothing out her dress.

“Greta.” He smiled back-his tone neither warm nor off-putting.

Then his gaze fell on Leo. Like a heavy weight plummeting deep into the sea. That same smile, but this time, a chill in it, unbending, cold as the wind rattling an open door in winter. Leo felt it remain on him for what seemed an eternity, almost draining the light out of the room. “I see you have a visitor.”

Leo lowered his eyes.

“We were just finishing…” Greta said. “We’re in the midst of a competitive game.”

“Then by all means…” he said, his eyes still fastened on Leo, seeming to indicate play on.

Leo felt too frozen to even lift a piece. He didn’t know whether to stand up in the presence of the camp commandant, in his own parlor, no less, and with his wife. Or drop to his knees. But his heart would not move a beat. So he just stayed. His throat like sandpaper.

“Whenever you’re done, of course, darling…” the commandant said, opening the top button of his uniform. Then he continued on into the house, his boots sounding heavily on the wood floor. “Hedda…!”

“I am sorry,” Frau Ackermann said, still standing, the color still gone from her face. “I didn’t expect him until later. I’m afraid we will have to continue this another time.” Her face was flushed and when she looked at Leo, he saw a combination of apology and nerves.

“Of course, Frau Ackermann.” Leo stood up too. He went to reset the pieces. He was sure that this was it. That he would never be invited to play again.

“Please, don’t.” Frau Ackermann reached out to stop him, touching his arm. “Next week, we will pick up from where we are.”

TWENTY-ONE

FIVE MONTHS EARLIER

LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO

The angular, lanky man in the plaid outdoors jacket and brown fedora went up to the dusty Ford sedan that had made the ninety-minute trip up from Sante Fe.

A man with thinning white hair, rounded shoulders, a high forehead, and almost sad, deep-set eyes stepped out from the back seat.

“Bohr.” Robert Oppenheimer went up and put his arms around the celebrated Danish physicist, welcoming him to the most heavily guarded scientific facility in the world, where dozens of the world’s foremost physicists, chemists, and mathematicians were sequestered on a research effort known only to a very few as the Manhattan Project.

“Robert.” The Dane warmly clasped the American’s hand. Even at fifty-eight, Niels Bohr was still among the most respected theoretical physicists in the world, one of the originators of the quantum theory, and before the war, his Copenhagen Conferences had brought nearly all of the world’s leading physicists to his doorstep at the university there.

“I trust this trip was a little easier than the jaunt over to London?” Oppenheimer grinned, patting the Dane on the shoulder.

During the war, Bohr and his family had chosen to remain in his native Denmark, sure that the Nazis dared not threaten one of the world’s most venerable scientists, recipient of the 1922 Nobel Prize. Still, he resisted every effort to cooperate with his captors. Then in September, barely three months ago, he was tipped off that because of his mother’s Jewish background, he was about to be arrested the very next day and deported to one of the camps, an arrest that would have likely been a death sentence for a man of his age. That very night, he and his wife, with only a single suitcase between them, crossed the Oresund by moonlight to neutral Sweden in a tiny boat, weaving between mines and German patrol boats. Two months later, with a parachute strapped on his back and literally passing out due to lack of oxygen, the world’s most celebrated physicist was secretly shuttled to the U.K. in the empty bomb bay of a British bomber, carrying the mail pouch between London and Stockholm. After such an escape, the winding ride in a Ford sedan up to the top-secret enclave in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains must have seemed like a trip to the shore.

“Immeasurably, it would be fair to say,” the Dane replied affably.

“Well, we’re glad you’ve come,” said Oppenheimer. “I think you’ll find some old friends who are awaiting you.”

An hour later, over lunch in his cottage, Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe, and the great Enrico Fermi sat by the fire and brought the Danish scientist up to date on their advances. Bohr had always been concerned about the consequences for humanity of creating such an instrument of destruction, and as he ate his steak listening to his fellow physicists, he suppressed both a theoretician’s thrill at the progress they had made and a feeling of impending worry at the same time. On matters that, only a few years back, were merely the musings of physicists over a cognac at scientific conferences.

The biggest obstacle they now faced was the separation of U-235 from its weightier and much more prevalent cousin, U-238, and in quantities sufficient to produce a series of suitable chain reactions.

And, as the clock was ticking, most important in the little time they had left.

They were eager to question Bohr about where he thought Heisenberg was in this process working for the Nazis.

They had narrowed it down to three possible methods of separation, which they mapped out for Bohr, sketching on napkins and tablecloths. Electromagnetic bombardment, thermal diffusion, and gaseous diffusion. All were laboriously time-consuming and required enormous outlays of funds. Massive cyclotrons were under construction, vast diffusion tanks in Oak Ridge, Tennessee-one a series of fifty-eight connected buildings, over forty-two acres, all capable of separating and then separating again the lighter, gasified isotope 238 in thousands of stages. Bohr was awed. It was the largest scientific apparatus ever conceived and built by man. And the most expensive.

Yet it all was trial and error, Oppenheimer bemoaned. At times, since none of this had ever been done, it was much like the blind leading the blind. The materials for these separation chambers had to be incredibly resistant and airtight. Any leak or erosion could cause them to be shut down. New compounds were being constructed. And it was all in a race against the clock, as they feared the Germans were ahead of them.

And to the winner went the war.

“This gaseous diffusion process…” Oppenheimer said, lighting his pipe after rhubarb pie. “We are beginning to think that that one is the way.”

To Bohr, it all spoke of a world of unimaginable and unforeseen consequences. And now Teller was talking about activating plutonium and creating even deadlier bombs. And what of the Russians? They were on it too. Did we share what we knew with them, our supposed allies? And if not, what of the world then when they finally got their hands on the same powers, as they would eventually?

“Gaseous diffusion?” Bohr said, nodding.

Oppenheimer took a bite of his pipe. “Yes. But it’s a crap shoot. The quantities are slim. And Bergstrom, as you recall, who knows this process, is now in bed with Heisenberg.”

“Yes, Bergstrom…” Bohr nodded after a long pause. He complimented the pie; such delicacies he had not been able to procure in Europe for some time. Then, “I may know of someone,” he said between bites. “On this gaseous diffusion process. A Pole. A Jew, in fact. He once worked in Berlin with Meitner and Hahn, you may recall,” he said to Bethe, “on this very thing. Kind of a narrow specialty for such a sharp mind, if you ask me.”

They all waited. There was too much room for error. They needed someone to shortcut this process.

“The only problem…” Bohr said, taking another bite of pie, with a disappointed shrug back at Oppenheimer. “I’m not sure he ever made it out of Europe.”

TWENTY-TWO

“Leo…” Alfred spotted the young man again in the yard after the afternoon roll call.

“Professor. Good to see you are well,” the boy replied. “Have you thought up any new brainteasers for me?”

“Not yet, but have you thought at all about what I asked you?”

“You mean your physics project? I’m afraid I’ve been a bit occupied.”

“Playing chess with your new admirer, I suspect. We’ve all heard. Perhaps the rigors of something truly important are just too serious for you right now, as opposed to a mere game.”

“Chess is no more a ‘game’ than what you do, Professor. And that admirer may just keep my block mates and me alive in this hole a bit longer. But just for argument’s sake, what was it you have in mind? To teach me electromagnetic physics, I think you said. To what end?”

“Not teach. Let’s talk somewhere for a moment. Just hear me out. I’ll explain.”

“All right. I guess a few minutes can’t hurt. Lead the way, Professor.”

They went back to Alfred’s block. Everyone was in their bunks stretched out from their day’s work, awaiting the evening meal. They wove through the block to where there was a small sick bay section in the rear. Six beds, so those who had a fever or dysentery wouldn’t infect the rest. And the latrine.

“Please sit down, Leo.”

“Your office, Professor?” Leo leaned back against an empty bunk. “Impressive.”

“Please, what I have to say is no joke, son. And though I can’t tell you why just yet, I promise, it’s more important than anything you have ever imagined. What I am proposing to do is to go over my work with you. Equations, formulas, proofs. You don’t have to learn it. I just want you to listen to me and to commit it to memory.”

“To memory…?”

“Yes. To keep it all locked away in that exquisite mind of yours. Will you do that, Leo? I am old and starting to lose my strength. You can see, my bones are starting to come through. Who knows how much time I have left?”

“Who knows how much any of us have?”

“But you, son… you are young. You have a chance to make it out of here. And if you do, what I will teach you will be more valuable than all the chess games ever played. You have to trust me on that. But it will not be easy. It will take a lot of time and concentration, going over things. I promise, even for you. Elaborate proofs and progressions. Things you’ve never heard of and may not understand how they all fit together. But it’s vital. Are you up for it?”

“Physics…?” Leo turned up his nose like he had asked what was for dinner and been told turnips.

Alfred nodded. “And math. And much of it very complicated.”

“So I can do what one day, if I manage to survive…? Teach this?”

“Physics is a lot more than just formulas and equations, son. It has real-world applications. Things people want to know very badly. For now, and for the future as well.”

“I don’t know what my future holds.” Leo shrugged. “But right now, chess seems like a better guarantor of it than this.”

“I need you, young man. In some way, the world needs you. Are you game?”

“The world? You make it sound like what you have there can win us the war. All right.” Leo took off his cap. “Let’s say I take the bait. Go ahead. Try me, Professor. Lesson One. As long as we’re already here.”

A smile crept onto Alfred’s lips. He sat down on the cot across from Leo. “You’re going to hear a lot about atoms, boy. And various gases. Things called isotopes.”

“Isotopes…?”

“You’re familiar with the molecular structure of mass?”

Leo shrugged. “I studied the elements chart in chemistry. Back in school.”

“That’s a start. Well, atoms of the same element can have different numbers of neutrons. The different possible versions of each element are called isotopes. For example, the most common isotope of hydrogen has no neutrons at all. There’s also a hydrogen isotope called deuterium with one neutron, and another, tritium, that has two…”

“Deuterium…? Tritium…?” Leo blinked at him hazily. “Must I know all of these in order to save humanity?”

“Don’t worry about that now. And please don’t mock me, son. So let’s start with something basic. Graham’s Law. It was formulated by a Scottish chemist in the last century. It states that the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of either its mass or its density.”

“Effusion? And just what does that mean, old man?” Leo rolled his eyes.

“Not ‘old man.’ If we’re going to do this, you can start by addressing me as Professor. Or even Alfred, if you prefer. I’m going to teach you things well beyond what you know or can imagine. So this will be like any class in school. There’s an instructor and a student. And it starts with respect. Respect for those who know more than you. Do you understand?”

For a moment, Alfred was certain the boy had already tired of him, and would just take his cap and walk out. Go back to the game that was clearly more fun, and had gotten him cakes and chocolates and all the adulation.

But to Alfred’s surprise, he remained, his eyes shifting from bored and then reproved, to apologetic, and finally even to interested, filled with some contrition at the same time. “I’m sorry, Professor. I didn’t mean to be rude. Please continue.”

Inside, Alfred smiled. Strip away the brashness, forgivable in such a precocious lad, and inside that perfect brain was an inexhaustible basin ready and waiting and an unquenchable curiosity to fill it with whatever knowledge there was.

“Good. Now to your question, boy, effusion is the rate of transference of a gas through a probe or, better yet, a membrane. Graham’s Law postulates that if the molecular weight of one gas is two times that of another, it will diffuse through a porous layer, or even an opening the size of a pinhole, at the rate of the other times the square of two. It is the key postulate in the separation of isotopes-which have the same molecular structure yet different atomic weights.”

“Separating isotopes… Porous layers… Why do you need to teach me all this?” Leo shrugged, clearly already a bit bored.

“For now, just let this all soak into your head, lad. Look-” Alfred took out a piece of chalk. He had a tin sheet, a scrap of metal left from the motor shed. “All that matters now is how it’s expressed as a formula.” Alfred scratched out:

He asked, “Do you have it?”

Leo stared at it, repeating it to himself. “I think so.”

“Therefore the inverse of this equation is…” Alfred erased it with his sleeve and wrote out a new formula, “that the density of a gas is directly proportional to its molecular mass.”

“Are you with me, son?” Alfred saw the boy’s eyes glaze.

Leo nodded, a little fuzzily. “I guess.”

“All right, then give it back to me, please. Just as I have written.”

Leo shrugged. “The rate at which a gas diffuses is inversely proportional to the square root of its densities.”

“Good. Now, here, write it out as a formula.” Alfred handed him the chalk and tin and covered up what he had done. “Exactly as I gave it to you.”

Leo hesitated for a moment, blew out his cheeks, then wrote it,

just as Alfred had conveyed.

“Excellent. Now how about the inverse of that? For density?”

Leo thought on it a second. “The density of a gas is inversely proportional to its molecular mass.”

“No. Not inversely. The opposite of that. It’s directly proportional,” Alfred corrected him.

“Excuse me, Professor…?” Leo scrunched his eyes.

“The density of a gas is directly proportional to its mass. It’s the exact inverse of the first equation I gave you. You see-”

“All right. Sorry. I think I’ve got it now.” Leo wrote out the formula,

this time correctly. “Directly proportional. Then this would be the symbol-he drew it with a stylish flourish:

∝

“Very good. Now, in gaseous diffusion, we’re dealing with the identical principle, except we are working with two radioactive isotopes. Uranium-235, which is a fissile property. Fissile meaning it can be split and is capable of creating what we refer to as a ‘chain reaction,’ if separated from its more plentiful, but not fissile, cousin, U-238.”

“Two thirty-five? Two thirty-eight? Sorry, but my head is starting to feel like it’s fissile, Professor.”

“Don’t try and understand it all now. You know of uranium, right?”

“Yes. Its symbol is U. And I think it has the highest molecular weight of any element.”

“Second highest. But no matter, plutonium is only newly isolated and probably wasn’t even on the element chart when you would have studied this. Uranium-235 occurs in a 0.139-to-one ratio in natural uranium ore. Meaning that only 7 percent of all uranium is U-235. The rest is 238. It’s quite rare. The trick, then, is to separate this rare, highly charged isotope, which has the same properties but a different molecular weight than its more common relative, U-238. To do that, or at least to do that in the kinds of quantities you would be seeking, you need not only a diffusing membrane but the only compound of uranium sufficiently volatile to engender this, uranium hexafluoride, UF-6, which is completely solid at room temperature but sublimes once it approaches-”

“Sublimes?” Leo’s eyes started to glaze over again. “I’m afraid you’re beginning to lose me, Professor.”

“Here…” Alfred took the tin again and scribbled a far more complex equation. “Just memorize this…”

“Which is equal to, I think…” Alfred closed his eyes and went through a series of calculations in his head. “One point oh oh four two nine eight or something… Where-and this is important, Leo-RATE One is the rate of effusion of U-235 and RATE Two is the effusion of…?” He looked to Leo to finish.

“U-238,” Leo replied, after a moment of thought.

“Correct! And M1 is the molecular mass of U-235 and M2 the molecular mass of U-238. The slight difference in weights explains the 0.4 percent difference in the average velocities of their neutrons.” He looked at his student. “So how does that sit?”

“To be honest, it sits a bit fuzzily, Professor.”

“Keep at it. I know this might as well all be Greek to you right now…”

“No, Greek I actually studied in school…” Leo rolled his eyes.

“Look, you don’t have to understand it all now. But what’s important is that you have a basic grasp and commit the equations…” he drew a double line beneath the equation, “into that stellar brain of yours. So, look at it again. Let it sink in.”

Leo ran his eyes over the equation again, then closed them.

“Do you have it?”

“RATE small 1 over RATE small 2 is equal to the square root of M small 1 over M small 2… Must I read you back all the numbers, Professor? I’m pretty sure I can… One point, zero, zero, four…”

“That’s not necessary. Anyone with a third-level math degree can calculate that out.”

“Then, where Rsmall1 is the rate of effusion of… UF6-235, and Rsmall2 is the effusion for UF6-238, and M1…” Leo pressed a finger to his forehead, “the molecular mass of U-235, and Msmall2, the mass for 238. And so on, and so on, and so on…”

“Bravo!” Alfred said, leaning forward and squeezing the boy’s knee. He coughed up a bit of phlegm.

“One question, Professor, if you don’t mind…?”

“Of course. Go ahead.”

“I still don’t understand why you need to separate this U-235 from 238? And you said before ‘in sufficient quantities…’ Sufficient quantities for what?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Alfred cast him a patient smile. “All that is to come, my boy. To come.”

“So that’s it? That’s what you needed me to memorize? The physics that will save humanity?”

“That’s Lesson One,” Alfred replied. “It’s enough for today.”

“Lesson One…” Leo cocked his head a little warily. “One of…?”

“Hundreds, my boy.” Alfred slapped him on the shoulder. “Hundreds. However, I must warn you, tomorrow it actually starts to get a little complicated.”

TWENTY-THREE

Weeks went by. They met whenever they were able, for a few minutes at a time after roll calls in the mornings, before meals, most every day.

Other than Tuesdays, when Leo was usually summoned to play chess with the Lagerkommandant Ackermann’s wife.

Which bristled Alfred. “Why do you choose to play a game when we have serious work to get done?”

“Because that game, as you call it, may one day be the difference in saving my life. And yours too, I should remind you. I tell her all the time that I share the treats she gives me with my uncle, the Professor. She promises to watch out for us.”

“Watch out for us… I think you just like to go because you are sixteen and you can stare at a woman’s tits. I may be old, but not so old that I can’t remember the pleasure in that.”

“That as well, I suppose.” Leo blushed, with just a little shame. “Still, she is nice to me. And, I believe, she is not her husband when it comes to what goes on in here. I think she is genuinely reviled by what she sees him do. That’s why she helps with the sick at the infirmary.”

“You think that’s so, huh? She shares all this with you?”

“She does. While we play.”

“I think that playing this game with you is how she puts her guilty conscience to rest,” Alfred said. “In a way, you are her absolution.”

“Ah, I see you are Dr. Freud now, too, as well as Dr. Mendl.” Leo sniffed with a roll of his eyes.

“In this case, boy, studying the atom is as good as studying the mind. In the end, she is the Lagerkommandant’s wife. And you are just a Jew.” He turned over Leo’s arm. “With that number on your wrist. She’ll watch out for you until your time is up. Then she won’t give you a thought.”

“We’ll see.” Leo shrugged. “In the meantime, the cakes and chocolates she gives me are nice.”

“Yes, well, you’re right, we’ll see…” Alfred coughed, bringing up a little phlegm, and wiped his mouth with his hand. “Anyway, let’s get back to work.” The cough had worsened, growing a bit more hacking with each day, and his bones and ribs were starting to show through even more. “Sorry that all you get to look at here is me.”

“Yes, the view is decidedly less appealing. Here, let me put a blanket over you, old man. Sorry, excuse me,” he grinned. “I meant, Professor, of course.” It was one of the thin, grimy pieces of burlap that did nothing to protect you from the cold.

These past weeks, Alfred had begun to grow fond of the boy. And he thought Leo felt the same about him. You learned on your first day in this place it wasn’t wise to have feelings for another prisoner or to even invest in a person’s history. You never knew how the next day might unfold.

“It’s nothing,” Alfred said. But he wrapped the cloth around himself nonetheless and, for a moment, it stopped the chill. “Thank you, boy.”

As Alfred warned, the work grew harder and more complex each day. Now he was taking Leo through something called Bessel functions-complex, mind-stretching equations that were almost like going through an entire chess game in his head. A dozen games, Leo felt, each requiring the concentration of playing against a master, though Alfred rattled off the detailed numbers and values without a moment’s hesitation, as familiar to him as was his own birth date or house address.

“Remember, we are dealing with highly charged materials here,” he explained, “that are in flux from state to state and, in the case of diffusion, through a confined space, in this case, cylinders. So we must introduce the general neutron diffusion equation for such a state.” He scribbled on the back of a torn-down health notice:

“Okay…” Leo stared at it, a little numb. “I see.”

“You have to know it, Leo. Know it cold. That is a must.”

“I’m trying, Alfred.”

“Then try harder. You must focus more. The goal here”-Alfred coughed into his rag-“is to apply the neutron population within a cylinder. The spatial part of the neutron density, characterized as N, will be a function of the cylindrical coordinates (p, o, z), and is assumed to be separable and expressed as…” He leafed through the scraps of paper he kept from yesterday’s session:

Npϕz (ρ,ϕ,z) = Nρ(ρ)Nϕ(ϕ)Nz(z)

Leo looked at him blankly.

“Are you with me, son?”

The boy puffed out his cheeks and blew out a long blast of air. “You’re going too fast, Alfred. I’m not sure.”

“Not sure? I thought we went over this yesterday.”

“I know, but it’s not like chess. I don’t fully understand why it’s important.”

“Right now, it’s important because I say it’s important. So let’s do it over again. What is the coordinate o in the equation, if you don’t mind?” Alfred asked him.

“O…?”

“Yes, small o. Where is your head, boy? We’ve been through this several times. It’s the angle between the cylinder’s width and radius. And p?”

“P…? P must be its height then?” Leo answered tentatively.

“Yes. Height. Dimension. I thought you were smart, Leo. I thought you could grasp this. You must concentrate, this is the easy part. Otherwise there is too much to learn.”

“Can we take a break, Professor? My head’s about to explode. And what is the purpose of all this, anyway? Did you invent it or something? This precious, gaseous diffusion process? We just keep going over and over the same boring things!”

“Because you must learn it, boy. Like you know your own name! Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you!” Leo leaped up from the cot. “I hear you. I hear you…” His head was bursting with all these numbers. A feeling of total frustration and pointlessness swept over him. “Maybe we should just call it a day.”

Alfred looked at him, knowing he had pushed too far. He let the boy calm a moment. Then, “No, I didn’t invent it,” he said. He put down the sheet. “In fact, the Brits are developing it as well at the same time. And I’ve heard researchers at Columbia University in New York are on the same track as well.”

“Then let them learn it,” Leo said testily.

“That would be easy, wouldn’t it?” Alfred nodded, sitting back. “All I’ve done,” he said, “is simply to carry the data to a further state. Here…” He took the back of a poster on the spread of typhus that had been put in the block and drew out a rough, hand-sketched drawing. A kind of an interconnected system of tubes with long cylinders feeding into smaller tubes, through a network of coils and pumps. “If the uranium gas, hexachloride 6, which is extremely caustic, is pumped against a porous barrier of some kind, the lighter molecules of the gas, containing the enriched U-235, would pass through the cylinders more rapidly than the heavier U-238. Right?”

Leo nodded. That much he had learned.

“Which is exactly what this formula represents. You must have this down cold, Leo. No matter how dull or complicated it may seem. This is the heart of what you need to know.”

“‘Need to know’ why…? Who gives a fart about this stupid diffusion process anyway? Or is it ef-fusion?” Leo snatched the drawing from the cot, crumpled it into a ball, and flung it into the corner. “Do you know what I saw today…? I watched as six men were pulled from my line at work and ordered to lie down. Then told to ‘Get up!’ And then, ‘Lie down’ again. Snap, snap, double time. And then, ‘Up again! Then down! Faster! Faster!’ And then to ‘Run in place!’ and then ‘Squat! Squat ten times!’ And then to ‘Get up again! Quick. And then lie down. On the double! Schnell! Schnell! Faster.’ Until, one by one, they all just stopped in complete exhaustion, totally out of breath, and were finished off with clubs while they attempted just to suck oxygen into their lungs. The last one, red in the face, barely able to lift his legs, the guards laughing at him as if he were a marionette on a vaudeville stage. Until they beat him dead as well. So tell me, what did Graham’s Law do for them?”

Alfred just looked at him.

“And did you hear? Two nights ago, everyone in Block Forty-Six was marched into the night and never came back. Did all these cylinders and diffusion equations save them? Soon it will be us. You’re a fool, Alfred, to think the Germans will ever let any of us leave. Any of us! You know that as well as me. We’re all going to die in here. You and I. So what does it matter, in the end, if it’s small p or large P… U-235 or 238? My head is bursting, Alfred. Every day we do this. Over and over. And why…? You force these things in my brain and you won’t even tell me why?”

Alfred nodded. He sat back against the wall and let out an understanding breath. “It matters a lot, my boy. You’re right, I probably will die in here. But you… The war has turned, Leo. You hear it from the new people coming in. The German Army is in tatters in the East. The Allies are set to invade. You can see it in the guards’ eyes. They are growing concerned. One day you may well get out of here, and I will give you the names of people to ask for. Respected people. Because what I am showing you on these torn slivers of paper and on the backs of these filthy food labels is worth more than all the gold the Germans take out of our teeth. A thousand times more.”

“I know. You keep saying that, Alfred. But why…?”

The professor bent down and picked up the crumpled diagram Leo had thrown against the wall and smoothed it out on the cot. “Right now, in laboratories in Britain and in the United States, even in Germany, the most accomplished scientists, ones who make me seem as dull as an oxen, are going over the very same things…”

“So then what do they need you for?” Leo pressed. “And all these equations you’re jamming into my head?”

“Ultimately, they don’t.” Alfred shrugged. “Except that I know this one thing, and know it very well. And that is how to assemble a sufficiently large mass of uranium to capture and use the secondary neutrons before they escape through the surface of the material. And though this may not seem like much to you, Leo, because there’s no chessboard to mull over or pieces to move, be assured that whoever understands this process, understands it first… it is they who will win the war. And all the guns and tanks and planes in the sky won’t be able to stop them.”

“This effusion process…?” Leo squinted back at him. “Or diffusion, whichever?”

“Diffusion.” Alfred nodded with a smile.

“You keep using the words ‘sufficient quantities,’ Alfred. Quantities sufficient for what?”

This time Alfred just looked at him, with an elder’s gravity that it was time to explain difficult things to a boy who would now become a man. “You asked me once, what is the purpose of separating U-235 from U-238…?”

“I can see now, it’s clearly some form of harnessing energy,” Leo said. “Maybe some kind of powering device? An engine. For a tank, perhaps? Or a ship?”

“Yes, but much, much larger than that, I’m afraid. And with a far more devastating effect.”

“You’re talking a bomb?” Leo’s eyes grew wide.

Alfred sank his back against the wall and smiled with a kind of resignation. “A small part of one, yes. But a larger and far more destructive bomb than the world has ever seen. More like a thousand bombs, Leo. In one.”

“A thousand bombs…” Leo looked at the flattened-out drawing again. “And all from this? This diffusion process?”

Alfred shrugged guiltily. “My friend Bohr postulated that the bombardment of a small amount of the pure isotope U-235 with slow neutron particles of atoms was sufficient to start a chain reaction great enough to blow up his laboratory, his building, and everything in the surrounding countryside for miles. If you can separate the isotope, Leo… And in sufficient quantities.” He nodded. “There’s your answer, boy.”

Leo sat back down. He saw the pallor on the old man’s face and his eyes grew solemn. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I crumpled your drawing, Professor…”

“That’s okay. Happens, from time to time. Among colleagues. Look, I know this is difficult. I know your head is loaded with things I haven’t fully explained. I know you’d rather be playing chess in whatever time is free here. Indisputably, I know your new opponent is a lot more captivating than me to look at.”

Leo grinned, a hint of guilt in his blush once more. “So who is it you want me to get this information to? All you’ve crammed in my head. If I make it out.”

“Scientists.” Alfred shrugged. “Famous ones. They will want to see this. Maybe in Britain. Or even America.”

“America?” Leo’s eyes grew wide. “That is a dream, Professor.”

“Yes. It’s a dream. But, trust me, it’s no dream that they will want you when they hear what it is you know. They will need you. They will.”

They both sat for a while, staring at the diagram. Leo seemed to be taking it all in. A bomb. The size of a thousands bombs. In one. Larger and far more devastating than the world had ever seen. The kind of knowledge that turns a boy into a man.

Then Leo looked back up at Alfred and said, without a blink in his eye: “Neutron density for coordinates, small p, small o, small zed, equals the neutron small p times small p, times the neutron small o times small o, times the neutron small zed times small zed… where p equals a cylinder’s radius, o equals the angle between the diameter and the radius, and zed equals the cylinder’s height.”

“Perfect.” Alfred’s eyes lit up. He clapped lightly.

“See, I am smart,” Leo said.

“Yes, you are.” Alfred coughed again, his whole body rattling.

“You’re sick. I should take you to the infirmary.”

“It’s just a cold. And if you don’t get better in there in two or three days, you know where the send you… up the chimney.”

“And if you don’t get better out here, who will deliver your theories and equations?” Leo asked.

“You have a point there,” Alfred conceded.

They sat for a while, the boy’s head swimming with what Alfred had told him. Then he said, “We’ll both get out.” He met Alfred’s eyes. “You’ll see. You’ll take your formulas and drawings to America.”

“Now, that is a dream.” Alfred smiled back fondly.

“Someone told me that there’s one thing they don’t get to take from you in here… and that’s your dreams.”

“Yes, I believe that as well.” Alfred nodded.

Leo looked at him with certainty. “We will. You’ll see.” Then he handed Alfred back the drawing. “We still have time. Teach me more.”

TWENTY-FOUR

He woke up in the night, shivering in sweat. He couldn’t remember exactly where he was or why he was in this scratchy bed gown. Only that his head was dizzy and reeling; his belly cramped. He called out, in the darkness: “Marte!” It was a warm night, yet he was shivering like it was January, not May. “Marte, where are you?”

“Shut up, old man!” the person in the bunk next to him growled.

Who is that? Alfred had a sense of someone staring over him.

“Shit, he’s got the fever,” his bunkmate said.

“I’m so cold,” Alfred said, teeth chattering. “Help me,” he called to anyone who would hear. “Oh God,” he shot up, “my stomach…”

They rushed a bucket to him from the latrine and he let it all out, retching his insides over the side of the bunk.

“The Professor’s sick. We have to get him out of here,” he heard someone say.

No, please. You can’t. Not yet.

Instinctively, he still knew that letting them take him to the infirmary would only result in his death. He heard a commotion-voices, cursing, people gathered around.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Where’s Marte?”

“Your wife’s dead, old man,” he heard someone tell him.

Yes, that’s right. She’s dead. Lucy too. Both dead.

“Wrap him in a blanket and keep him in the back,” a voice said. Ostrow the forager. “In the morning we’ll take him to the infirmary.”

“If he makes it to morning,” someone wagered.

“Hang in there, old man.” Ullie, the baker.

He felt himself lifted in the air. Almost, as if he could see what was happening below. Three people carried him, mummified, to the rear of the block where the sick were kept.

Maybe this was best. Maybe it was time to just give up. Marte would be waiting for him with his tea and almond biscuits and the afternoon paper.

“Professor, you’re going to be all right. Just hang in there,” someone exhorted.

“Christ, he’s burning up!”

“He’s got it bad,” he heard another voice say.

“Get him some water.” A minute later, he felt a thin stream of warm liquid moisten his parched lips.

“Thank you.”

In a flash of lucidity, he came out of the delirium for a moment and realized what it was he had. As a man of science, he knew what it meant. It was like a death sentence in here. The disease hadn’t yet reached his bowels. That was good. Still, it was fifty-fifty. At best. But in here, where no one gave a shit whether you lived or died, who could know?

He couldn’t die. Not yet.

There was still more work to do.

The voices died down. He lay there, bundled up, chattering like when he was a boy and went skating with his father on a frozen lake in the mountains and fell through a thin patch of ice and his father had to fish him out. It all seemed so real to him. The pond. His father’s grasp. In his life, he had never felt so cold.

Then someone else’s face crept into his mind.

The boy.

We need more time, Alfred said to himself, though it was likely out loud, and anyone who heard would just think him delirious.

It’s too soon.

First thing is that you mustn’t give yourself over to the fever, he told himself. You must keep your wits.

Your brain.

Fighting the urge to drift off, the oddest thing came into his mind. His friend Polanyi’s principle of chain reactions. A chemist, of all things. What was it now? “One center of a chemical reaction produces thousands of product molecules, which occasionally have a favorable encounter with a reactant and instead of forming only one new center, form two or even more, each of which is in turn capable of engendering a new reaction chain…”

An expression of it being 1; 2; 4; 8; 16; 32; 64; 128; 256; 512…

He lay there shivering but calculating it out. 1,024; 2,048; 4,096; 8,192; 16,384; 32,768; 65,536; 131,072…

How much farther can you extend it?

262,144; 524,288; 1,048,576; 2,097,152; 4,194,304… 8,388,608.

16,777,216.

Inside, he smiled.

You can’t die yet, Alfred. There’s still more for him to learn.

You haven’t discussed the Displacement Principle yet. Or your views on the composition of the diffuser membrane.

To his amazement, a universe of numbers and equations, spheres and mathematical proofs danced out of the darkness, swirling, reaching toward him.

Not yet. Please. It’s too soon, he told himself. You can’t. There’s still much more to learn.

But, Marte, you should see this! he said in wonderment. The sky was lit with numbers and equations. I’ll be there soon. He stopped fighting. A heaviness was making him close his eyes.

It’s too soon, he repeated. But it’s all so beautiful!

TWENTY-FIVE

MAY 20

NEWMARKET RACE COURSE, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND

The whir of propellers and the heavy drone of bombers taking off to drop their loads over the continent was a constant backdrop here. In the past two days, they had been battering the coast of France and pounding factories in the German homeland night and day.

“Softening up the defenses,” Strauss said. “For the big one.” The forthcoming invasion. Everyone knew it was coming.

“When?” Blum asked.

The OSS captain shrugged. “Who knows? Soon.”

Nathan had been in England for ten days. He and Strauss were being housed at this historic race course, once the site of two of the country’s Classics, seventy miles from London, now a bustling RAF base, home to the 75th squadron of Wellington and Stirling bombers. Assigned to them were two British MI-6ers, Majors Kendry and Riggs, and a Colonel Radjekowski, from the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army based in London, who was to set up the contacts with the local resistance.

On a strict diet, Blum had already lost eight pounds. His face, narrow to start with, now had the protruding cheekbones and sharp, gaunt jaw of someone living on a once-a-day diet meant only to keep you alive. Every night he inspected himself in the mirror in his quarters tucked away from the main barracks and saw his eyes grow dark and a bit more sunken.

They taught him to jump. From practice ramps. Taught by an RAF sergeant major. The big one was yet to come.

They worked on his gun skills, shooting at targets twenty yards away with a Colt 1911. Brushed up on his Polish, mostly slang and idioms, which had been dormant the past three years. Went over his identity. Mirek, his name was. A carpenter from the town of Gizycko in the lake country of Masuria. As a boy, Blum had shown a knack for woodworking. Such skills always have a place and value in the camp, Strauss said. And they pored over the maps. Over and over them. Endlessly. Maps of the surrounding area. The drop point, in a field near the Vistula, about twenty kilometers from the camp. The extraction location, a quarter mile to the southeast. “Though not to worry too much on this, the partisans will get you there.” The endless memorization of local roads in case it was necessary. The little hamlet of Rajsko that was nearby. A safe house he could call on there should things go awry.

“You mention the words ciasto wisniowe,” Radjekowski, the Polish intelligence officer, said.

“Cherry pie?”

“Short notice…” The officer shrugged apologetically.

“No matter.” Kendry, the Brit major with a pencil-thin mustache, tapped out his pipe. “Not to worry. If things do go awry on the ground, you’re probably dead anyway.”

Blum smiled flatly. Kendry was a man he didn’t much care for. “I will try and improve on that, sir.”

More maps. Maps of the camp itself, hand drawn by Vrba and Wetzler. Nathan went over them until his eyes ached. Every structure was committed to memory. The train tracks leading in. The front gate. The prisoners’ barracks, called blocks. The infirmary. The double perimeter of electrified wire. And the rectangular flat-roofed building he had asked about with Strauss and Colonel Donovan.

The crematorium.

Maps of the surrounding area outside the camp.

“This is particularly important.” Strauss kept driving this one point home. “You must have this area one hundred percent committed to memory.”

The IG Farben factory, which was under construction. The new train tracks almost leading to neighboring Birkenau. The surrounding woods and river. They went over and over these until Nathan had it all burned into his head as well as he did the neighborhood he grew up in back in Krakow.

They gave him the file on Alfred Mendl, his man. Photos and photos. At scientific conferences, at the university where he taught. His kindly face, graying hair pulled over to the side, high forehead, round, doughy jaw. The mole on the left side of his nose.

“He may not look like this now, so that mole will be your confirmation, Nathan. Look for it. Memorize every pore.”

So he did, including every detail they had amassed on Mendl. Where he was born: Warsaw. Where he studied: the universities of Warsaw, Gottingen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. His mentors: the famous Bohr, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. His particular area of expertise: electromagnetic physics. The gaseous diffusion process. Whatever the hell that was. Mendl’s wife and daughter, Marte and Lucy, who were shipped to Auschwitz with him and were very likely dead. They still wouldn’t divulge the real reason why they needed him so badly. Why they were sending Nathan in.

“In case you’re captured” was how Strauss explained it with merely a shrug. Blum saw the true meaning behind it.

Captured and tortured, he meant.

Back in his quarters, at night, Blum smoked and continued to read through Mendl’s file. Why him above all others? There were stray cats all over the base, foraging, and one of them hung around Blum’s quarters. A calico with wide, gray eyes. It reminded Blum of the cat they’d had on Grodzka Street. Leisa’s cat. The one they couldn’t bring with them to the ghetto. What was his name? Blum tried to recall.

Ah, yes, Schubert, of course.

Blum fed it crumbs of bread and let it lick the cream from uneaten desserts off his fingers. It brought back a life that seemed such a distant memory now. He preferred to remain by himself at night, going over his maps and files.

“You see this man?” Blum showed the photo of Mendl to the cat, who had jumped up on his open window ledge. The calico meowed for some milk and arched his back. “I am expected to find him, in a camp of thousands. Maybe a hundred thousand. Crazy, is it not? I suspect even you must agree. And if I can’t… locate him, I may end up like you,” Blum said, scratching his back. He pulled off a bit of a tart. “Stuck there forever. Except no one is going to give me bits of cream and pastries…” He let the cat lick his fingers.

“Since we’re at a race course, I suspect no one would bet too heavily on my success.” The cat meowed. “Ah, I see even you agree, Schubert, my friend.”

Day Five, they finally showed him his uniform. Sewn by tailors specifically assigned to MI-6, it was a laborers’ outfit, loose fitting, with thin pants that reversed to a zebra-striped burlap tunic and pants. Every detail on it had been gone over with the escapees, Vrba and Wetzler. It came with a pair of tight-fitting wooden clogs that Blum had to squeeze his feet into.

“A bit snug, I see?” Kendry bit on his pipe.

“They’ll be fine.”

“Probably a better fit than most in there, I suspect. You’ll have proper boots for the jump, of course, but you’ll have to ditch them before you go inside the camp.”

A few days after that they met in a small meeting room on the base where the mission commanders generally briefed the pilots. Strauss stepped to the blackboard, a rough map of the camp and the surrounding area drawn on it. “I know you’ve been waiting to hear with a bit more detail how we’re planning to get you back,” he said with a smile.

“A passing interest, yes.” Blum smiled too.

Even Kendry chuckled behind him.

“We’re told that camp labor is being used to help finish the new railroad tracks to Birkenau.” Strauss pointed to the blackboard. “Which is nothing but a death factory right next door. We have it that Hungarian Jews are being transported there and liquidated upon their arrival. By the thousands. Gassed.”

“Thousands…” The number hit Blum like a blow to the head, and he muttered under his breath. “Pieprzy.” Fuck.

“Every day. According to our sources, the work to finish these tracks goes on day and night. There seems to be quite a rush, it appears”-Strauss sniffed-“to ramp up the killings. What you’ve got to do is get yourself assigned to that particular work detail on the third night you are there. Vrba and Wetzler insist this is not a difficult task. The guard who generally oversees this assignment, an Oberführer Rauch, is known to be open to a bribe. In fact, they claim this is an everyday occurrence in the camp for all sorts of things. In the case of the night detail, apparently there are some who actually desire this particular work detail as it gets you a second meal.”

“Bribe? Bribe him with what?” Blum questioned.

“More on that later… In the meantime, what is important is that on this particular night, at zero thirty hours, local partisans, who the colonel here assures me are quite ready and capable, will organize an attack on the work detail from the nearby woods. Here.” Strauss tapped his pointer against the blackboard. “This is why it’s so important that you have the surrounding terrain committed to memory. You-and Mendl, of course, we’re counting on-will run from the attack not toward the woods but toward the river. Here…” Strauss pointed. “It’s vital that amid the commotion you and Mendl make your way there, Nathan. You’ll be met and taken to the landing site. The plane will be set to land precisely at zero one thirty hours. The guards should be occupied for at least a few minutes, till reinforcements arrive, and it would seem logical that anyone looking to escape would run in the direction of the woods, where the partisans will be firing from, and not toward the river. In any case, the ambush will give you cover. Do you have all that?”

Blum nodded. “Yes. I believe so.”

“Of course, should you somehow be unable to find Mendl, or in the event he’s dead or in no condition to escape”-Strauss shrugged-“then it will just be you.”

“I understand.”

“So that’s the plan. We’ll go over everything several more times.” Strauss sat on the edge of the table. “I’m sure you have questions…”

“Just one to start. I’m betting my life on the belief that the local Armia Krajowa will attack,” Blum said.

“They will,” Radjekowski, the Polish colonel, said. “You can be sure of it.”

“And”-Blum turned back to Strauss with a smile-“that this particular guard can be bribed.”

“Yes.” Strauss tapped the pointer twice against the map. “That is the case. So…”

A stiff silence settled over the room.

Blum felt it was time to ask the question. “So when do I go?”

Strauss glanced toward the Brits, receiving a last, confirming nod from the Polish resistance officer. “The twenty-third. It’s a full moon. Highest visibility. We’ll be needing it to spot the landing sight. You’ll be making the trip in one of the RAF’s brand-new Mosquito bombers. Lightweight, high speed. It’s able to fly well above the German radar. Oswiecim’s about a thousand miles one way, direct, but you’ll be flying over to Gothenberg, Sweden, then south, across the Baltic. The Mosquito cruises at about three hundred miles per hour. Given the detour, it should take around four hours or so. We’ll do our best to occupy the Luftwaffe with some diversionary bombing runs.” He looked at Blum, in the way a trial lawyer might look at the end of his closing argument when there was no more to say. “All clear?”

“So the twenty-third then…” Blum nodded. A stab of nerves edged through him.

“Yes.” Strauss put down his pointer. “Two days.”

TWENTY-SIX

The following day was Sunday, and Blum was given the morning off though he was up at dawn, his nerves unsettled. He leafed through the files one more time-the map of the camp, Mendl-even though everything was already firmly etched in his brain.

At noon, Schubert came around his bunkhouse, the cat’s food options clearly diminished elsewhere. Blum was putting a few crumbs on the sill when he heard a knock on the door.

It was Strauss. “Sorry to bother you, Nathan,” he said. He had an expression Blum couldn’t quite read. Sober. Unsettled. He was with Kendry, the quiet Brit. Blum didn’t trust him. “Mind if we sit?’

“Please…” Blum said, clearing his clothes and files off the other bed. Kendry chose to lean against the window and took out his pipe.

“So…” Strauss gave him a lukewarm smile. “Tomorrow night it is…” He looked at the files and pictures on the other bed. “You’re all set?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Got everything down?”

“Like I was from there.” Blum gave him a smile.

“Yes.” Strauss smiled too. “Of course, there’s a few more details we have to get settled. You’ll be pleased to know we’ve gotten the final thumbs-up from the people on the ground. They’re expecting you. And the weather looks spot on.” He took off his cap. “There is, though, just one more thing…”

“What is that, sir?”

The Brit took a step forward and took a puff on his pipe. “We’re concerned about one aspect, Lieutenant, that wasn’t part of the training.”

“What is that?” Nathan sat there, looking at them.

“The question, Lieutenant… can you kill?”

“Can I kill?” Blum looked back at them, unsure. He’d faced being shot at. Several times. But even in the ghetto he’d never had to kill someone. “I’m a soldier,” he said. “Of course I can kill. If I have to.”

“I’m afraid that’s just not quite good enough, Nathan.” Strauss stood up. “With all that’s on the line, with everything that’s at stake, there may well be a time on this mission when you will have to. When your life, and everything else that’s involved, will depend on it. And you won’t be able to decide there if you can or you can’t.”

“Then I will. You can count on it,” Blum declared firmly, looking at the two of them.

“So then we’d like you to prove it,” Kendry said. He unbuttoned his side holster and took out his Browning.

Blum regarded them in some confusion. “How?”

“I see you’ve made a friend,” the Brit said, smiling to Schubert on the sill. He held out his finger and the animal sidled over to him, arching his back, brushing against him.

“Yes, I think I told you about him,” Blum said. “He-”

The Brit looked back at him.

Suddenly it became clear to Blum just what they were asking. “You can’t be serious?” he said, shaking his head. The Brit’s gaze hadn’t budged. “He’s just an innocent cat. He’s my friend.”

“From here on out, you have no more friends,” the major replied. “And there’s no such thing anymore as guilt or innocence. Only people standing between you and what you have to get done. So, in fact, I’m perfectly serious…” He cocked the pistol and held it out for Blum. “We both are. Show us.”

Blum’s jaw parted, then he turned toward Strauss. The OSS captain offered him no relief. He merely shrugged. “Unfortunately, Nathan, we can’t quite run with this uncertainty. There’s simply too much on the line.”

Blum stared, disbelieving, at the gun. He could not accept what they were asking of him. “There is a difference,” he said. Schubert jumped from the sill to the bed. The Nazis were murderers. They killed innocent people, his parents and sister. Many of his friends. He’d talked his way past German guards and checkpoints with needed medicine in his pockets. He crossed Poland with a holy tract of the Talmud in his luggage; was snuck onto a Swedish freighter, when being discovered would have meant immediate death. But this… There was a line. This was on the other side of it. The cat jumped onto the floor and brushed up against the bed.

This made him just like them.

Strauss said, “You think this is any worse than what you will likely face when you land?”

Kendry continued to hold out the gun.

Blum’s gut felt as if a knife was tearing through it. It was as if whatever value he held dear, any remembrance of the life he once had, his parents and his sister, anything that separated him from the soulless goons who murdered them was being shredded for good.

You’re the one who wanted to do more…

“He’s innocent, I know, Nathan. But there may be others who are innocent who may threaten this mission. If you can’t,” Strauss stood there, waiting, “I’m afraid we cannot trust you to go.”

Schubert made his way along the floor. Run. Now. Please… Blum begged inside. The cat stopped at the door and looked up at Blum, likely expecting an affectionate pet or some food maybe, and meowed.

Blum took the pistol. “Forgive me,” he said, and stepped up to him.

He put the gun down and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud retort. The pistol jerked back in his hand. The cat fell over on his side. Blum stood there looking at it, as something hollow and shameful knotted in his gut, knowing something in him had now changed and gone over to the other side.

“Here.” He handed the Browning back to Kendry.

Strauss came over and put a hand on Blum’s shoulder. “Nathan, I’m sorry. I know what that took. Still, we had to be sure.”

Blum nodded. “I understand.”

“And trust me…” Kendry placed the gun back in his holster. “This won’t be the worst thing you’ll be forced to do on this mission.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

The day he was set to go, Blum was asked to take a call at the communication headquarters.

Strauss set him in a private room, with a radio receiver and a telephone handset.

He figured it was Donovan to wish him luck, or maybe a member of his new family, in Chicago, but when the caller got on, through the scratchy static and hissing, he recognized the famous voice from his speeches and “fireside” chats.

It was the president of the United States.

“Am I speaking with Lieutenant Blum?” FDR asked.

“Yes, sir.” Almost by reflex, Blum stood up, although the great man was an ocean away. “Mr. President…” His throat grew dry.

“I wanted you to know that I am fully aware of your mission, Lieutenant. And I called to wish you all good luck.”

“Thank you sir,” Blum said, swallowing. “I’m honored you were even told of it.”

“Told of it.” The president chortled. “I damn well ordered it, Lieutenant.”

A wave of pride washed through Blum. He looked at Strauss, the blood rushing into his face.

“I know the risks,” the president said, “and what you are giving up to do this. We owe you a debt, young man. But do not fail us. You have no idea how much depends on the success of what you do.”

“I won’t,” Blum said, his chest expanding. “Sir.”

“Good. Then all I can do is to wish you all God’s speed and that His watchful eyes will be over you. I’ve been assured on many levels that we have chosen the right man.”

“I’m humbled, sir,” Blum said again.

“Then I await the news of your safe and successful return.” The president signed off. “Good luck, young man.”

Blum heard a beep and the receiver showed that the line had disconnected. Still, Blum filled his chest and uttered, “Thank you, sir.”

Before he left he was given three last things.

The first was cash. Five hundred pounds sterling. “You’ll need something to bribe the guard with. It’ll be sewn into the lining on your tunic.” Strauss showed him. “Along with something else.”

He had a small blue pouch with him, which he tossed to Blum. Blum opened it, and his eyes went wide.

It contained a diamond.

Quite a large one. Larger than anything he had ever seen, even on the fingers of the fancy wives who would accompany their rich husbands into his father’s shop. Eight karats, Blum estimated.

“Ten, I can see you wondering,” Strauss said. “Nearly perfect quality. Worth a tidy sum. In case you get into trouble,” the captain winked at him, “and you have to buy your way out. It’s better than cash or gold in the camp and far more transportable. You know where to hide it, don’t you? In a pinch…?” Strauss gave him kind of a crooked smile.

“Oh. Yes. I see.” Blum said, blushing slightly.

“Use it wisely. And by all means, try not to forget it’s there.”

“No, I won’t. Of course not.” Blum cleared this throat.

“In the meantime, I’ll just hold onto it, if you don’t mind…” Strauss put out his hand. “For safekeeping, until you leave. Oh, and something else…” He dug into his pocket. “Not exactly sure how to broach this one with you. You’re going into a nightmarish place. Even I’m not sure myself just what you’ll run into in there. Especially, in the chance something goes wrong…” He opened his hand, and there were two reddish capsules in a plastic case.

Blum looked at them closely, then back at Strauss, the meaning clear. “I see.”

“Instantaneous, practically painless, I’m told. Have to admit, though”-he smiled sympathetically-“haven’t tested them myself. They’ll be sewn into the top of your tunic. I guess the idea is, even if your hands are tied, you can just, you know…” Strauss put his jaw close to his shoulder. “Bite. I leave it up to you. The official line is, we won’t be coming to your aid and the less known, of course, the better…”

“Of course.” Blum nodded, swallowing.

“And between us”-Strauss snapped the container closed and placed it back in his uniform pocket-“it might just be the best alternative, if you’re captured, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I understand,” Blum said.

Strauss shrugged. “I guess there’s not much more to add…”

Blum smiled and met his eyes.

“Other than…” Strauss put his hand on Blum’s shoulder. “Mazel tov, Lieutenant Blum. Colonel Donovan and I have nothing but one hundred percent respect for what you are undertaking…”

“A sheynem dank.” Blum grinned and replied. Thank you very much.

“Yes, a sheynem dank.” The captain smiled. “Certainly haven’t heard those words in a while.”

The two men shook hands.

There was a knock on the door. “Ah, almost forgot…” Strauss said. “One last thing.” A short, squat Brit in a civil defense uniform carrying a small metal kit came in.

“Captain.” Then he looked at Blum. “Leftenant…”

The man put down his kit and took out an electric shearer.

“Say goodbye to your hair for a while,” Strauss said.

Blum sat as the man put a sheet around his shoulders. Blum asked,“You were a barber before the war?”

“Not quite, sir,” the Brit said, turning on the shearer.

He shaved Blum’s head. The dark hair fell at Blum’s feet. Afterward, Blum looked at himself in the mirror. The sunken eyes and protruding cheeks seemed even more pronounced. He looked indeed like what he would be in a day: a prisoner. His heart swelled with the depth of the responsibility they were placing on him. A Pole. Someone with no standing. Who had escaped from the world of darkness only three years before.

Strauss shrugged. “That leaves one last thing…”

He nodded, and the Brit went back into his kit and came out with a tattoo needle. He plugged it in and dipped it in a bluish ink. “I did this before the war, sir,” he said to Blum. Strauss passed the man a six-digit number. The instrument began to vibrate.

“Sir,” the man said to Blum, “would you mind giving me your left arm?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

WARSAW

Colonel Martin Franke sat at his desk at German intelligence headquarters in Warsaw on Szucha Street. His aide, Lieutenant Verstoeder, put his morning kaffee on his desk. Not the watered-down gruel the Poles drank with sugar and cream to hide the taste. German coffee. Hearty. Black. Brought in from Dallmayr’s in Munich. He paged through the overnight cables that had come in over the intelligence wires. Some had been intercepted from coded transmissions; others from directly over the radio. From the BBC. Those that piqued his interest Franke kept in what he called the “A” box by his desk. The others just went in the “B” box to be filed. True intelligence wasn’t just a round of drinks at the bar in Estoril or wagering at the casino. That was Rule One. It demanded thoroughness. And follow-through. Follow-through, but instinct too. A good nose.

A good nose was worth all the drinks in Lisbon.

Still, Rule Two. Everything was filed.

The past four months since Vittel had only made Franke’s desire to reclaim his prior standing even stronger. The war was not going well. Any fool could see that. The Red Army was advancing; it was almost in Poland now. There was fighting as close as Lvov. Even the Poles were starting to rise up and make a nuisance of themselves. And everyone knew the Allied invasion was imminent; Normandy or Calais? It was only a matter of where.

In Warsaw, the ghetto had been burned and razed. The last Jews, other than those who had taken refuge in the Aryan sector, were either dead or shipped out to places they would not return from. His current job was to root out those still in hiding or with forged papers. And round up suspected Polish collaborators, toss them into the basement of Pawiak Prison, and basically let some Gestapo strongarm pummel their faces raw until they talked. Or didn’t, in the rare case. Either way have them shipped out to the Katlan Forest, lined up against a tree and shot.

The woods there were so thick with blood, the joke was going around, this spring, the grass was growing in red.

Still, Franke knew, it was all basically police work. Stuff for the Ordnungspolizei, perhaps. Not intelligence.

He had received merely a letter from SS Brigadeführer Schellenberg, his new overseer from Berlin, congratulating him for his “helpful role” in rooting out those phony passport holders in Vittel.

Helpful role? Two hundred forty Jews he had given them.

While the war was being lost by fools, he was being left behind.

Over his kaffee, Franke leafed through the day’s stack of cables and intelligence messages. Mostly phrases meaningful only to whoever they were intended for: “Lila’s shoes have arrived. Pick them up any time.” “Oskar wants you to know, the cello lesson is set for next week at the same time.” “Jani can’t wait to see you again. But this time, she asks you bring the red hat instead of the blue.” Everything meant something, of course. Part of Franke’s job now was to pick out any that might have a particular connection to the partisan network, whose members were starting to make pests of themselves on the front and in Warsaw, and then track them down.

Like this one perhaps… Franke reread one from last night that had caught his attention.

It was the kind of message that to most might well go unnoticed. It came in just before the BBC’s Evening with the Philharmonic. It mentioned a truffle hunter on his way to Poland. It read, “They are growing very well this season amid the birchwood trees.”

Birchwood trees?

“What are truffles?” his aide, Verstoeder, asked, as he went to collate the A and B piles.

“They are like mushrooms. Only far more expensive,” Franke said. “They grow in the roots of trees. But in Italy,” he remarked curiously, “not in Poland. That’s what strikes me of interest here. And in the fall. They use pigs to find them.”

“Pigs?”

Franke nodded. “Pigs and dogs.” The kind of message that to most might go unnoticed.

“So who is this truffle hunter?” Verstoeder asked. “And why is he coming to Poland?”

“In springtime…” Franke clarified.

“Yes, in the spring.”

“A good question.” Franke sipped the last of his coffee. “And another would be, who is the pig?”

The thought of truffles made Franke’s stomach growl yearningly, for it had been a long time since anything had found its way into it other than potatoes, cabbage, and sausage. But it was a game of scents, the colonel knew, and this one he could smell as clearly as if he held one of the little buggers in his hand.

“Keep or file?” the lieutenant inquired, deciding in which box to put the cable.

“Keep, I think. At least, for now.” There would be more to come, he suspected, about this truffle hunter.

He had a nose for things like this. And this one made it itch.

Franke placed the cable in the box marked A.

TWENTY-NINE

In the belly of the de Havilland Mosquito, flying fifteen thousand feet over Poland, Blum pushed back his nerves.

He looked at his forearm. It still smarted from the number etched into it in blue ink. A22327. Rudolf Vrba’s number. So if needed, it matched up against a number that was real. It hardly mattered anyway, Blum knew. If he was caught, he would be interrogated and shot straightaway as a spy. All the numbers in the world wouldn’t save him.

Or any diamond.

The plane rattled up and down. Occasionally antiaircraft flak could be heard in the sky. The Allies planned a bombing raid over Dresden to divert enemy aircraft and artillery, but still it was terrifying, knowing what lay ahead, the plane lurching up and down. He held onto the jump strap to settle himself.

He thought about the conversation he had had earlier with President Roosevelt. How much was riding on this; the faith they had in him. His blood still surged with pride. That a Pole, a Jew from the Krakow ghetto, should be speaking across an ocean with the most powerful man in the world. If only his father and mother could have known. They would never believe it. And Leisa. She would have rolled her eyes and told him, “Don’t get such a swelled head. In a minute you could be shot down. Or land on the back of a Nazi troop truck. And then what of your conversation?”

Blum smiled, reminding himself why he was there, trying to settle his nerves. The plane lurched, hitting turbulence. It shook so hard for a second Blum felt like the screws holding the fuselage together were about to come apart. He looked at his watch. Only another few minutes. Then…

Then the jump. His stomach shifted uneasily, thinking of it.

“Get ready!” the copilot called back from the cockpit. “We’re dropping to six thousand feet.”

Blum gave the thumbs-up sign, but inside his nerves were in a riot. If there was any light in this godforsaken place, he knew his face would appear like a white sheet.

“We’re jumping at twelve hundred feet! Six minutes.”

“I’m set,” Blum said, though there wasn’t a cell in his body that didn’t stiffen at the thought. He went through the contingency plan. What if the resistance wasn’t there to meet him on the ground? He’d have to make his way to the village of Rajsko, eight kilometers to the east. To the safe house. He went over the password again: ciasto wisniowe. Cherry pie.

He had maps. A compass. Money. A Colt 1911 holstered to his belt. The chute had been checked and rechecked. Five seconds, he reminded himself. His count before pulling the cord. He tried to block out of his mind, what if he botched it and fell? What then? Do not fail us, Lieutenant.

“Two minutes!” The copilot scrambled back into the fuselage. “Let’s get over to the hatch.”

Blum’s stomach tightened.

He checked his pack and made his way over, clipped himself to the jump line. He tightened his helmet strap.

“We’ll be back for you in seventy-two hours,” the airman said. “Aught one thirty hours. There’s a cleared field just off the main road. Three kilometers east of the drop site.”

Blum nodded. He’d gone over and over it. He had it in the map of his mind. But it wouldn’t matter; the partisans would take him there.

“Remember, we’ll stay on the ground for only two minutes. That’s all. Then we hightail it out of there, as fast as we can. You’d best be there.”

“I understand.”

“And whatever it is you’re bloody well doing down there”-he gave Blum a slap on the shoulder-“All good luck!”

“Thanks.”

“Hang on tight now…” The airman pulled open the outside hatch. Cold air rushed in.

“Look, down there!” The airman pointed into the darkness.

Straight ahead of them was an array of lights on the ground in the shape of an X. “That’s your mark. The wind is good. We’re under twelve hundred feet. Shouldn’t be too hard. Done this before, I assume?”

Blum shook his head. “Only in training. Off blocks.”

“Off blocks?” The airman rolled his eyes. “Well, it’s just the same.” He gave Blum’s helmet strap a tug. “Just take a deep breath and go on my mark. You’ll be down before you know it.” The plane lurched like a horse trying to throw him off. Blum had to hold onto the rail to keep from falling out.

Count of five, Blum reminded himself. Then pull. His chest was hammering inside him.

“Set, now. We’re almost there.” Cold wind battered him in the face.

“Remember…” The airman put his hand on Blum’s back. “Seventy-two hours.” He looked back to get his bearings, holding onto Blum’s strap. “Now, go!”

Blum’s heart leaped into the sky, but his feet, frozen in place, remained locked to the plane. He saw the lit-up X approaching below them. They were almost directly over it.

“Go, I said! Now! Hit it!” the airman shouted.

He took Blum by the shoulder straps and basically hurled him out into the night. Blum closed his eyes and let out a yell. It was freezing, pitch-dark; he felt himself falling faster than he imagined he would. “One, two…” He heard the roar of the plane pulling away, banking upward. Wind smacked him in the face, jostling him around. “Three… Four!”

Five!

He held his breath and yanked the cord. To his relief, it was like the elevator he was riding in jolted to an abrupt stop. For a second it felt like he had slipped through his chute and was plummeting on his own. Fear shot through him.

Then he opened his eyes.

He was okay. Floating. Everything completely dark. His heart settled back to a normal pace. He had overshot his mark by a ways. He wasn’t going to be landing near the X, but still not too far away.

A bolt of worry jolted him: What if the resistance had given him up? What if there weren’t friends but a truckload of German troops waiting for him on the ground? He saw the darkened tops of trees, coming up fast. This would be it then.

Hold on…

He floated to the ground, faster than he’d anticipated, hitting the field with an exhalation of air and nerves, and rolled. His pack almost knocked the breath out of him.

There wasn’t a light anywhere around.

The first thing he did was take out his Colt. The brush there was thick, and it was perfectly silent, dark. He gathered his chute together. He’d expected people to be rushing up to him but so far there was no sign of anyone, not even voices. He spotted a wood to the left-the south, according to the compass on his wrist. He balled up the chute and headed over to the cover. He got down and dug a hole in the brush. Fortunately the rains had been generous and the spring soil was moist. He stuffed the chute in it and covered it up, spreading a blanket of leaves and brush around it.

His heart was pounding.

For the first time, it dawned on him that he was back in Poland.

It was silent. Blum had no idea who was waiting for him. Resistance, or German soldiers? He peered out from the woods. No one. This wasn’t what he was expecting. Just what had he gotten himself into? he asked himself. What if no one comes? He’d be alone here. In occupied territory. He’d-

Behind him, he heard a twig crack. Blum’s blood snapped to attention. Someone was near… He stood as still as he was able, sweat inching down his temple. He raised his gun and placed his finger on the trigger. He was about to find out very soon, he thought, what he was capable of. Then he heard a clicking noise. This time, only a tree or two away. He knew there were friends around, but there could be enemies too.

He heard the clicking noise again. This time he recognized what it was.

The sound of a gun being cocked. Whose?

Blum wrapped his finger around the trigger.

He heard a man’s whisper. In Polish, thank God. “Lubisz trufle…?” the voice said. You like truffles…?

“Tak,” Blum whispered back. Yes. “But not nearly as much as beets.”

“Well, you’ve come a long way then…” Two people stepped out of the darkness. “For beets.”

A man and a young woman. The man in a hunter’s jacket and a hat. Carrying a rifle. The young woman in a knit sweater and cap with blond pigtails. Holding a Blyskawica submachine gun.

“Witaj w domu, przyjacielu,” the partisan said with a wide grin. He patted Blum heartily on the shoulder. Welcome home, friend.

THIRTY

They got in the farm truck, heading on the side roads, some not even paved, traveling without their lights on. “What happens now?” Blum asked.

“Now? Now you spend the night,” the driver in the hunter’s jacket said. “At least, what’s left of it. In Brzezinka. Fifteen kilometers north. In the morning, we will get you onto a work detail into the camp.”

“What’s your name?”

“Josef,” the driver said. “My niece is Anja.”

The girl, no more than twenty, and pretty, in her men’s garb, seemed to be smiling a bit at him.

“What’s so funny?” Blum asked Josef.

“My niece, she thinks you don’t look much like a commando. We were expecting someone, how do you say, a bit more…” He shrugged. “A bit more like a commando.”

“You can tell your niece she doesn’t look much like a soldier herself,” Blum said, not that his Polish needed any translation.

In the back, Anja giggled.

“Just know, if we hit trouble, you’ll be glad you have her,” Josef said. “She’s killed more Germans than men twice her age. Pretty on the outside, but ice in her blood.”

“Anyway, I’m not a commando,” Blum explained. “And if I did look like one, I wouldn’t exactly blend in inside the camp.”

“A fair point,” Josef acknowledged.

The truck bounced over an open field, then onto a dark, dirt road. At some point Josef stopped and Anja jumped out of the back to open a gate and then close it behind them once they’d passed through. They put on the headlights.

“You’re sure you know what you’re in for in there?” Josef glanced at him. “Where you’re headed.”

“I don’t know.” Blum shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“Tomorrow we’re having pierogi and sauerkraut. You’re welcome to stay. We’ll have you back here in three days.” He looked at Blum and grinned. “Who’s the wiser…?”

“That would be an enormous waste of petrol,” Blum said. “And a lot of planning.” He showed the man how under his jacket his tunic reversed to the prisoner’s stripes.

“Planning is cheap”-Josef shrugged-“but petrol…” He cut back through a larger bush and onto the paved road. “You’re right, can’t waste that. Anyway, you’re lucky, my wife can’t cook a lick,” he said with a wink.

Anja laughed from the back. “He’s right. Her dumplings are hard as bricks. If you drop one on the floor, it’ll leave a dent.”

“Yes, I admit that’s true.” Josef laughed. “But-shit!” He looked up ahead. “Hold on.” Literally in the middle of nowhere, they came upon the railroad tracks, two guards, German, with a troop car blocking the road. “Whatever the fuck are they doing here?”

Blum noticed the eagle with a swastika underneath on their uniforms.

“Einsatzgruppen…” Josef looked back at Anja. “Bad folk. Here for the Jews.” He slowed and pulled up a bottle of vodka from the floor. “Just pretend you’re drunk. And cover the weapons. We’ve just come from your cousin’s birthday party in Wilczkowice. If they ask us to get out”-he glanced at Blum and signaled toward his gun-“you know what to do.”

Blum nodded. His heart had started to race. He pulled down his cap over his eyes.

In the back, Anja threw the weapons under a blanket, but Blum heard her cock the action on her hidden pistol. “If they make a move,” she said under her breath, “it’ll be the last thing they ever do.”

“Don’t be so rash, niece,” Josef cautioned. “We have our guest to protect here. Dead Germans cause trouble.”

Josef pulled the truck to a stop. One of the guards jumped down from their vehicle and stepped up to the truck. A sergeant, Blum saw. But he also saw the two SS lightning rods on his collar.

“Evening, Untersharführer,” Josef said. He held out a half-empty bottle of potato vodka. “I know it’s a little early, maybe, but compliments of the Luschki family birthday celebration…”

“Keep your booze. Where are you heading this time of night?” the guard questioned them in German. “Have you never heard of a curfew?”

“Across. To Brzezinka. And I know it’s late, Sergeant. We were at my cousin’s. In Wilczkowice I assure you, the booze was flowing. Would have slept it off there, but it’s my job to make the bread in the morning. First thing. So I-”

“You’re a baker?” The German looked around the cab, eyeing them all with a hint of suspicion.

“If I’m not at the oven by five, no one in the village has breakfast.” He shrugged. “And I don’t make any friends.”

“And who is this?” The guard shined a light on Blum. “Let me guess, the butcher?”

“Mirek, sir,” Blum replied good-naturedly. “Actually, I’m a plumber. I told my cousin here it was way too late to drive all the way back home. But my sister, you see her back there, is in school”-he nodded to Anja-“and she can’t miss another day, or the nuns get… well, you know how they get… Plus, I took responsibility for her, and-”

“And what…?” The German shined a light in the back on Anja. “It’s the middle of the fucking night. Bakers and plumbers are exempt from curfew?”

“Of course not,” Josef said. “But, in truth, it’s rarely enforced out here in the woods…”

“So what else do you have in there?” The German flashed his light inside the cab. A bead of sweat ran down the back of Blum’s neck. His hand drifted to his gun.

“Nothing, sir. Only flour.”

“Flour? Still,” he peered around. “Maybe I’ll just take a look.”

Suddenly they heard the sound of a train approaching. Not a whistle, but a rumble, and a sharp light coming from down the tracks. The German still in the troop car jumped out and waved. “Sergeant!”

The sergeant flicked off his light. “Wait here.”

The two guards went to the checkpoint and stood there. In a minute or two the train rattled by. One of them put up a hand and waved to a guard atop the lead car. Blum had never seen a train like it. It was dark and boarded up, what looked like barbed strung wire over the blacked-out windows. It had about ten cattle cars, heading east. He knew where. It wasn’t exactly the first-class carriage to Warsaw.

“Oswiecim.” Josef grunted with a shake of his head and spat out the window. He crossed himself.

Blum’s blood simmered with anger. He could only imagine the horror inside. On their way to who knows what fate? People are gassed there… Thousands, Strauss had said. Sitting there, his free hand balled into a fist. He wondered how many of those who were inside would even be alive when he snuck in tomorrow.

“Far more direct, by the way”-Josef nudged him-“if you’d like me to flag it down for you and catch a ride.”

“Thanks,” Blum said, smiling back. “I’m fine here.”

In a minute, the train passed. One of the guards climbed back into the empty troop truck. The sergeant came back over to them.

Blum’s hand retreated back inside his pocket for his Colt.

“You’re lucky, baker,” the German said. “It’s late, and we’re in good spirits. Just know, if I catch you out and about again, you won’t be smiling next time.”

“I understand, Herr Unterscharführer. Thank you,” Josef said. “And here…” He offered him the bread and cheese.

“Keep your bread,” the guard grunted. “The bottle, though…” He beckoned with his fingers. “Here…”

Josef handed him the vodka.

The German took it and headed back to his troop car.

Blum finally removed his hand from his pocket. He let out a long breath.

“Hope it kills them in their fucking sleep,” Josef muttered, putting the truck back in gear. “Sorry, Anja. Next time we see him, we shoot first, then give him the vodka.”

They watched the sergeant show his loot to the other German in the half-truck.

Then they waved them through.

THIRTY-ONE

THE NEXT MORNING

GERMAN INTELLIGENCE HEADQUARTERS

SZUCHA STREET, WARSAW

Martin Franke sipped his kaffee. Another coded dispatch had been intercepted during the night.

This one from Britain. Over the BBC radio. It was one of twelve messages that were read off before the weekly concert, Famous Orchestral Marches.

“For cousin Josef. You’ll be happy to know the truffle hunter is en route.”

Franke knew, it could have been destined for anyone in Europe, but he had read the similar cable just two days before.

There he is again, Franke noted. Truffle hunter.

Separately, a report had crossed his desk that very same morning that a plane had been heard during the night. Low, over the forests near the small town of Wilczkowice, near Rajsko, some three hundred kilometers from Warsaw. Rajsko. He’d never heard of the place. A local farmer had spotted someone parachuting in. Probably making contact with the resistance, Franke suspected. Or more likely an arms drop. Or planning some sort of sabotage in the area. That was happening frequently now. But to send someone in for it…

Franke’s nose itched. “Verstoeder!” he called.

“Herr Colonel?”

“Bring me those dispatches from the other day. Our truffle hunter friend.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

In a minute the young lieutenant came back in with a file full of papers.

“What is in Rajsko?” Franke asked him.

“Rajsko? Not much, I believe.” The junior officer went over to a large wall map of Poland. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. Only a large birchwood forest. But I am told there is a work camp nearby. Where Jews are being held. Auschwitz. The Polish name is Oswiecim, Herr Colonel.”

Auschwitz… Franke knew of it, of course. The Jews of Vittel had been sent there. Along with half the Jewish population of Warsaw. No one knew much about what went on in a place like that. The SS kept tight control. Other than that no one ever came back from there. That much was certain.

“What has struck your interest, Colonel?” the aide inquired.

“Birchwood…” Franke said aloud, this time in English. “Quick, find me their last transmission.”

Verstoeder dug back into the thick file. “Tuesday, I believe, was it not?”

“Quickly, Lieutenant, today!”

“Here it is, Herr Colonel.”

Franke ripped the document from his hand. He ran his finger down the text until he came to the very spot he was looking for: They are growing very well this season amid the birchwood trees.

That’s what had struck his interest.

Someone parachuting in… Franke rubbed his chin in speculation. Into a fucking birchwood forest. Near Oswiecim. The truffle hunter… He got up and went to the map himself. Why would anyone be heading there? In the middle of fucking nowhere.

Nothing around but a birchwood forest and a labor camp.

Auschwitz. He kept on saying to himself.

“Ring me command,” he instructed the lieutenant. “General Graebner. Now.”

“Right away.” The junior officer ran out.

Franke let the pieces come together in his head. However loosely, one by one, they were all beginning to fit. If his hunch was wrong, what would it matter anyway? He was condemned to spend the war in this useless position.

But if he was right… There could be many reasons for it: An escape. Reconnaissance. Or even to bomb the camp.

If he was right, this might be just the opportunity he’d been waiting for.

Truffle hunter… What does a truffle hunter do? he asked himself, staring at the map.

He digs.

But digs into what?

The phone rang. Franke went back to his desk. He took a moment to compose his thoughts, then cleared his throat and picked up the receiver.

“General Graebner…”

He felt certain that the Allies had sent someone in to sneak inside Auschwitz.

THIRTY-TWO

TUESDAY.

At eight that morning, Blum sipped his coffee in the main square in the village of Brzezinka. He and Josef had managed to catch a couple of hours’ sleep at the resistance fighter’s cabin in the woods outside town. As Anja had said, the bread the man’s wife offered him around the fire would have broken a tooth if he tried to chew it, it was so hard.

The square was bustling. Blum counted ten German soldiers and a procurement officer organizing labor details, ordering people around. “You, here!” He pointed to one. “Carpenter, you say. Over there!” Prospective laborers huddled by several trucks pulled up to take them to various work sites. The IG Farben plant needed bricklayers and electricians. Birkenau needed carpenters and heavy laborers. Most of the work Vrba and Wetzler had described was performed by slave labor from the camps. Ten- to twelve-hour shifts without a break, prisoners pushed to the limits of their strength and stamina. Anyone who dropped, from utter exhaustion, from the unquenchable thirst, was shot on the spot.

But certain technical skills were needed for various projects: skilled carpenters, able plumbers, and mechanics. Masons. Strong workers who could do the job of ten undernourished prisoners. From all accounts, there was a vast amount of expansion going on-“ramping up the pace of the killing,” Strauss had called it. Barracks under construction at neighboring Birkenau, the rail tracks extended to its gate. The infirmary at Auschwitz, where various medical experiments were being conducted. The Germans paid a meager wage, and the contractors took most of it. But any wage was good if it could buy a loaf of bread or an undernourished capon in the midst of war.

“Come,” Josef said to Blum. “I spoke to one of the local contractors. Get in that line over there. It’s going to the main camp.”

About twenty workers were in line to board a rattletrap farm truck.

Josef went up to the stocky man in a thin flannel coat and flat tweed cap who seemed to be in charge. “This is my friend I was telling you about. He’s around for a couple of days. He’s very handy with a hammer.”

“What sort of work do you do? Roofing? Spackling? They need people in the main camp.”

“Yes,” Blum said.

“Well…” The foreman gave Blum, who didn’t exactly have the build or hands of a carpenter, the once-over, and not without a little skepticism. “If Josef vouches… I can offer you ten zloty a day.”

“Ten?”

“All right, twelve, once I see what you can do. Okay?”

Blum nodded.

“Climb aboard then,” the foreman said.

Blum hoisted himself into the truck. It was already mostly full. He found an open spot next to a man in overalls and a pipe, carrying his own tools.

A soldier came over and counted the people in the back of the truck. “Eins, zwei, drei…” Blum bent over to tie his shoe. “You there, up!” He counted again.

There were eighteen in his truck. They moved on to count another.

“Good luck, my friend!” Josef smacked the side of the truck. “Till Thursday night…” Though beneath his breath he was likely muttering, “God watch over you. I doubt we will ever see you again.”

“Thursday.” Blum waved.

The truck started up. A German private hopped in the front cab next to the driver. The officer got into a gray half-track with five or six soldiers in it and fell in behind.

Blum caught sight of Josef smoking, watching them leave. He pulled down his cap. When he looked back again, the partisan was gone.

The truck was filled with men of all ages. Many were in their forties or fifties, lifelong tradesmen, too old to have fought in the war. Quickly, the truck lumbered out of the small town and onto the paved main road, heading south. Blum had left his Colt back at Josef’s farm, along with his watch and compass. He had no need for them now. Sewn into his shirt lining though, was enough cash to buy everyone in the truck. He kept his eyes forward as the truck lurched into third gear. He glanced down at his pant legs. His cuffs had rolled and if you focused, you could make out the stripe of the uniform on the other side showing through. Blum’s heart clenched tightly.

Without attracting attention, he bent forward and calmly folded the cuffs down. No one saw. No one spoke much; a couple of locals were going on about the late frost this season and how crops were behind. Blum cast his eyes down. The road was uneven and there were only benches in the back to sit on, so everyone was jolted at every bump. The second truck followed close behind, and the half-track of soldiers twenty yards behind them.

Oswiecim, a road sign said. 8 km.

Blum’s heart picked up.

“First time in?” the man in the overalls asked in what Blum took as a Galician accent. He had a thick mustache and deep, hooded eyes under his cap.

“Yes.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Masuria,” Blum answered. “Gizycko. Near Lake Sniardwy.” He kept his face forward, wanting to remain as inconspicuous as possible, as he would not be on the truck on its trip home.

“A piece of advice.” The workman leaned close. His breath stank of nicotine. “Cover your nose when you get in. The stench can be unbearable.”

Blum nodded. “I will. Thanks.”

“And whatever you do, don’t ask what it is. Doesn’t go over well with the Nazis at all.”

“I hear you,” Blum said with a smile of thanks. He looked down at his hands, and to his dread, saw that his wrist was slightly exposed, showing the first two digits of the number that had been burnt into him. A2… If noticed, it would instantly give him away.

He glanced at the man across from him, who had closed his eyes a moment and seemed not to have noticed. Blum relaxed. He pulled down his tunic under his light wool jacket, his heart beginning to regain its normal rhythm in his chest.

He’d almost given himself away, twice.

The road went along the rim of a dense forest. And along the Soła River, where he and Mendl would hopefully head to sixty or so hours from now, which continued all the way to the Slovakian border. After about ten minutes the road left the trees and river behind. Blum saw a road sign. Rajsko. An arrow pointing east.

Then another for Oswiecim. 3 km.

To the west.

The truck jerked forward and made a left turn. Now the road picked up the line of the railway tracks. The first thing Blum noticed up ahead was a gray cloud, low above the trees. Hanging like fog over a bay.

Then a putrid smell in the air. What the man next to him had told him. A little like sulfur, Blum thought. Or lead. Only sweeter. Followed by the nauseating sensation in his gut when it became clear to him exactly what it was.

Noticing Blum reacting to the smell, the worker next to him caught his eye and winked with a grim chuckle.

Ahead, Blum caught sight of a long brick façade. A pointed tower atop it. Several towers. And wire, stretching for as far as he could see. Double rows of wire, maybe ten feet apart. Barbed and electrified. Signs of “Verbotten!” with skulls and crossbones underneath placed at intervals. Clearly a city inside. A city of death. Guard towers every hundred feet with machine gun tripods. The train tracks led right up to the front gate. Everyone around was German now. SS.

The truck stopped outside the gates.

A ripple of nerves wormed through Blum’s bowels. He found himself uttering to himself what he remembered of a prayer. The Kel Maleh Rachamin. For the soul of the departed. “Ayl molay rachamin, shochayn bam’romin…” O God, full of compassion, who dwells on high, shelter him who has gone on, with the cover of wings…

That was as much as he knew.

Suddenly there was shouting, voices elevated, in German. An officer came up to the truck, gesturing emphatically for them to continue farther down the road. He was telling the driver of the truck to move. “Nicht hier! Nicht hier!” Not here.

Blum’s heart stopped. He kept hearing the officer shout “Birkenau.” And point in that direction.

Birkenau was only a short way away but it was a completely separate camp, Vrba’s map made clear. Mendl was said to be here. In Auschwitz 1. The mission fully depended on Blum being here.

If he was diverted to Birkenau the entire day would be lost. The odds were already long that he would be able to find Mendl in the three days he had, let alone two, should he have to come back and try again tomorrow.

If he could even get himself on a new crew.

Shit.

Blum overheard the heated discussion among the new officer, the Polish foreman, and the SS work procurer Blum had seen back in Brzezinka. No one else in the truck seemed to care. Work was work, as long as they were paid. They didn’t give a damn.

Finally, the foreman got back in and the German waved emphatically toward Birkenau. Blum’s heart plummeted. Then he realized the officer was pointing toward the second truck, the one pulled up behind them, which pulled out of line and continued past them toward the new camp. Blum’s truck was waved toward Auschwitz. It continued right up to the main gate, which he recalled from Vrba’s drawings, then lurched to a stop. The foreman jumped out again and came around and brought down the rear hatch. He waved for everyone to get off. “Wychodzic.” Come on, come on! “To jest to.” This is it. “Let’s go!”

“Everyone forms a line,” the SS officer instructed them as they pooled together in front of the gate. “Break out of it, and you’ll be shot. No questions asked. Understood?”

Everyone nodded. The work team lined up.

“We hear it every time,” Blum’s truck mate whispered to him. “But I wouldn’t test it if I were you.”

“I don’t need convincing.”

But inside, Blum knew that that was precisely what he was about to do. Test it more than the workman in his wildest dreams could ever imagine. He looked around and tried to get a sense of where the railroad tracks led on to Birkenau. The woods were about sixty yards away. And the river…

“Forward!” the officer yelled. They started to march along the tracks up to the gate. A metal sign arched over it: “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

Yes, free, Blum said to himself. He muttered the prayer again, for the soul of the departed. As the dead are free. The dead.

For he surely was among them now.

He passed beneath the raised, arced letters into Auschwitz.

THIRTY-THREE

Leo walked up the stone steps of the Lagerkommandant’s house again, while Rottenführer Langer took a smoke and remained outside. This being Leo’s sixth visit, the guard no longer even followed him up to the door.

It had been six weeks since he and Frau Ackermann first began their matches. In that time Leo could tell that their visits were no longer exclusively about the chess. She had clearly grown fond of him, visibly looked forward to their time together, and even he had to admit, no matter how he tried to pretend to the contrary, he felt the same. She couldn’t quite beat him. That had long been established. And she understood that too, though he would let her linger in games he could have ended quickly in order to draw them out and extend their time together.

In these weeks she began to share things with him about her life, her feelings. Her parents, eager for advancement, had pushed her into marriage. She longed for a bit more freedom, even a career, teaching, which she had put on hold. Leo saw for certain she didn’t support the horrible things she saw go on there. In the infirmary, people said she tried to ease her patients’ suffering as best she could. And then there were the twisted things performed there by the sadistic Mengele. She had uttered his name only once with Leo, and her jaw stiffened and eyes grew baleful with the deepest contempt. Yet Leo saw it was her fate too that she was essentially trapped there, a captive, as confined here and isolated as any of the prisoners.

Once or twice she opened the collar of her dress just enough that he saw the marks she bore. A dark crease along the side of her neck. When she went to move a piece, a bruise on her arm. Her lower lip a little too puffy. Seeing them, if it were possible, he grew to detest the Lagerkommandant even more. He longed to mention these marks to her. To ask why she remained in this place. This marriage. Why she consented to it. She could leave. She was, in fact, the only one who could leave! The rest, guards, prisoners, were forced to stay.

But he did not dare bring up these things. He could not threaten the fragile footing they danced on in their games. He was still a lowly prisoner, and if he offended her, she could have him killed with just a snap of her fingers. Yet he could not imagine not seeing her again. Many times he could see into the cage of sadness she seemed to live in. To be with such a monster. Her hopes and desires dashed. Leo wished her to be happy. To be free. And he knew that was a little of what he brought her every Tuesday, even though she was a woman and he barely a man. Freedom. A brief flight from her cage. And he was afraid to close the door on them by overestimating their intimacy. To say the wrong thing and have it come to an end. Afraid also of the Lagerkommandant’s wrath should Leo lose her “protection.”

“Ah, Herr Wolciek.” She smiled, pleased, when she stepped into the parlor and saw him there, her blue eyes brightening.

“Frau Ackermann.”

It was May now. Warmer. The flowers were in bloom. She wore her print dress open around the collar with a light white sweater around her shoulders in a way Leo had never seen before.

A thin gold chain was around her neck. For the first time, in all his captivity, he smelled the scent of perfume.

“Where is Private Horschuler?” he asked. The impassive young guard who usually watched over their games.

“He’s away on some work detail, I believe. Clearing the woods. All hands on deck these days, I suppose.” She looked at him. “Why?”

“No reason, madame.” But it pleased him not to have the private looking at him so contemptuously.

“Shall we play?”

She took the white and began with the Ruy Lopez. He countered with a variation of the Brazilian defense. When she leaned forward to move a piece, he caught a glimpse of the strap of her bra underneath. And for an instant her chain danced at the very spot where her breasts came together.

His imagination did the rest.

After seven or eight moves, she picked up a piece and did not put it down, seeming distracted. “We will not be able to play next week,” she announced. “I am going home for a few days. To Bremen. To visit my family.”

Going home. How the thought appealed to him. “That is nice.” He nodded. “If only I…” He stopped himself in midsentence. If only I could do the same. If only I could even know if my family was even alive.

“I’m sorry.” She locked onto his eyes. “That was stupid of me to say. I only wanted you to know. If you didn’t hear from me.” She moved her bishop forward, making sure it was protected by her knight. “So you wouldn’t… think I no longer looked forward to our games.”

“The Lagerkommandant will be going as well?” Leo asked. He countered her advance by moving up his pawn.

“I’m afraid he will not.” She moved up a pawn as well. “Kommandant Hoss will still be in Berlin. So his business keeps him here.”

“I see.” Inside Leo shuddered. The business of murdering people. What burrowed through Leo’s mind was what might happen to him when she wasn’t here. Wasn’t here to watch over him. Was this her way of letting him know? That it was over. That she was powerless to stop the inevitable from happening now.

Then, out of the blue, she said, “You are the only ray of light for me in this godforsaken place.” She looked at him. “You know that, don’t you?”

He had never stared at her so closely. He had never noticed the tremulousness in the soft blue shade of her eyes.

“That this is the only thing I look forward to here. This time together…”

He nodded, his heart slamming off his ribs like a metronome on the highest speed. “Frau, the game,” he could only reply, averting his eyes back to the table. He sat there too afraid to take his gaze from the board. Inside, his heart beat with an insistence he had never felt before. He pushed back the embarrassing pressure going on between his legs, praying that his thin uniform wouldn’t give him away.

“Yes, of course, the game.” She smiled at him.

The match was now barely an afterthought. He was nervous to even pick up a piece, lest their hands casually touch. Desires he had kept to himself, ones he had let loose only in his bunk at night, praying that his Lithuanian bunkmate would not wake, sprang forward. Filling him with longing. He kept his eyes down from hers. He was unsure of what to do.

When he finally looked up she was looking at him.

He set up an exchange of pieces and she accepted. The moves came quickly. Four, five of them, taking off rooks, pawns, and a knight for a bishop. At some point, in the rapid exchanges, their fingers brushed against each other. This time instead of drawing them away, they stayed there.

Their eyes met again. “You know I can’t protect you forever, Leo.” There wasn’t insistence in her voice. More like sadness, and in her gaze as well.

“I know, madame.”

“Greta.”

He nodded. Swallowed.

“You can say it. Say it, Leo.”

He took a breath. The storm in his chest was raging now. It took everything inside him to summon the strength. The strength to say it. The sound barely fell off his tongue and onto his lips like a stone. “Greta.”

“See.” She smiled.

He did as well. He felt a tingling down his loins. What was happening…?

“Hedda!” she called out. For the maid. At the other end of the house.

Half a minute later she appeared at the door. “Frau Ackermann?”

“Would you go to the store please, in town? I believe my husband said he would like some ice cream tonight with his strudel.”

“I believe we have some, ma’am. I’ll just-”

“Fruit ice cream, Hedda. Any flavor. I’m sure you’ll pick the right one.”

The maid hesitated at the door and then said, “Yes, ma’am.”

The match was over. They didn’t make another move. They just waited, minutes it seemed, unending minutes, until they heard the sound of the back door closing.

“You are a virgin, aren’t you?” Frau Ackermann asked him.

Leo swallowed, wishing he could tell her differently, every cell in his body ajitter.

“Come on, you can tell me, Leo. Kurt is the only man I’ve ever been with. It’s all right.”

He knew this was the most dangerous thing he had ever done. To even answer such a question. If her husband happened to walk in, if she ever disclosed this, he would be dead barely a second after his pistol was out of its holster. “Yes.”

She got up. She came across the table and stood in front of him. The fullness of her breasts in front of his eyes, her breaths silent, but in and out. The curve of her hips. She put his hand there. Her eyes were liquid and pained. “I wish I could stop it all, Leo, but I can’t…”

“I know.”

She came over and straddled across him on the seat. The pressure between his legs was now impossible for him to conceal. Slowly, she unbuttoned her dress. One button, two… “Here, put your hand here…” she said, taking it in hers. Inside her dress. On her bra. “Like that. And here…”

She lifted slightly and took his other hand and put it inside her skirt, against her undergarment, where it was all soft and moist. He was locked on her eyes.

“You don’t want to die a virgin, do you, Leo?”

He swallowed, almost too nervous to even speak. “No.”

“You can kiss me.” She put her mouth close to his. She laughed. “You know, if he came in now he would kill us both. Are you prepared to die with me, Leo?”

He looked into her beautiful, deep eyes. “Yes.”

“Do you know why I am doing this…?”

He didn’t reply.

“Because you are good. And because I want to know what that feels like. Just once.”

She climbed onto him and looked down in his lap. His striped pants. In his dreams, he never imagined he could have an erection like that. He blushed and tried to cover it up.

“Don’t.” She took his hand away. “You don’t have to.” Her smile made it all seem okay. “Trust me, Leo…” She put his hands on her hips and gently began to rock. “You’ll leave today a much happier man than if you did with just an apple.”

THIRTY-FOUR

He was inside the camp.

Blum was placed on a construction team that was building additional barracks inside the main camp. He spotted prisoners everywhere. Thin, eyes sunken, wearing their loose-fitting zebra suits, many ravaged by what appeared to be sores and pestilence, scurrying around like mice, trying to stay one step ahead of their SS guards who constantly shouted at them and prodded them with heavy truncheons. Many looked so sickly and beaten down they wouldn’t even survive the day. Not a one made direct eye contact with any of outside crews. In the main staging yard, one prisoner had been hanged on a gallows, his neck crooked, left for everyone to see. A warning to the others, it was clear. As he hammered nails and sanded down the roof beams, Blum smelled the damning, sweet odor coming from the adjacent camp. A thin gray cloud hovered when they arrived and never left. They’re gassing them by the hundreds. Thousands… Strauss had said. And amid all the sickening brutality and hopeless misery these people were suffering, somewhere Blum heard the sound of an orchestra playing.

They all just did their work as ordered and stuck to themselves.

At noon, on a break, the work crew was fed a thin, tasteless gruel from a wooden bowl: a broth of cabbage and potato, accompanied by a piece of hardened bread. A couple of the prisoners who passed by seemed to eye the bowls covetously; clearly next to what they were being fed, this must be a delicacy! Blum would have happily left his half-finished bowl for one to take, but they’d been strictly warned by the officer in charge who had brought them inside to avoid even the slightest contact. The last thing Blum could risk was to be thrown off the work detail. He was here for a purpose, he reminded himself, and so, while it pained him, he simply did his work as best he could and kept to himself, trying not to make himself noticed. He wore his wool cap low over his eyes. The guards pretty much left them alone. He had to wait for just the right moment-at the end of the day, when the work crews were breaking up. It would cost him some time inside, but any earlier, and his disappearance might well be noticed. These Germans seemed to have a determination to count and recount, form a line and keep everyone in it. But even if there was a discrepancy, they would likely never know who was responsible for it, and once he switched uniforms, it would be impossible to find him in a camp of this size without tearing the whole place apart.

While he hammered in the joints, Blum kept his eyes peeled, staring at every face in a striped suit that passed by. He’d rehearsed what he would say, once he spotted Mendl. The shock and incredulity the man would undoubtedly feel. I’ve come for you, Professor. But no one Blum saw fit his looks or was even close to his age. At fifty-seven, from Blum’s view, Mendl would be an old man in here. We don’t even know for certain if he’s even still alive, Strauss had admitted. That would be the ultimate joke, Blum thought, helping to steady the roof beams as they hammered the flat roof in place: to come all this way, to have risked his life and possibly never make it back out, and all for a corpse. A dead man. A person who could never have helped them. And looking at the shaven, rail-thin mice scurrying by who seemed more like walking ghosts than men, Blum suspected with concern that that might well be the case.

The sun had moved to the west in the sky. Blum judged it was going on five p.m. They’d only be working for a few minutes more. He had to find the right time to make his move.

In the next few minutes the camp came alive with activity. Where there were hundreds of prisoners before, suddenly the number doubled, tripled. Now it seemed there were thousands of them, returning to the camp through the front gate, hunched over and exhausted, trudging more than walking upright, guards every ten paces or so. A few wore striped uniforms as well, yet they seemed more like guards in that they carried truncheons of their own, some with green or blue triangles on their chests, prodding the pack along with shouts and insults like cattle moving into a pen. The returning prisoners were all lined up in the main yard. Carts, being wheeled and pulled along, were filled with twisted corpses, their skinny limbs and open mouths protruding grotesquely. The ones who didn’t make it back that day.

The yard filled. Kapos and guards started counting each block. The constant drone of “eins, zwei, drei…” heard everywhere. Even the cart of dead bodies was counted; prisoners tossed out the dead like blocks of firewood. “Ten, eleven, twelve…”

Blum’s stomach turned.

The foreman called out for Blum’s work team to call it quits on the hour. Ten more minutes. “Take your tools and line up,” he alerted them. After, they’d all be loaded back in the truck.

This was it. He had to make his move. He had to summon the courage to do what every instinct for survival inside him cried out was suicide. Yet he knew it was now or never. This was either the bravest thing he’d ever done in his life or surely the stupidest, he reckoned. The most calamitous.

“Tak, tak.” He raised his hand to get the foreman’s attention.

“What is it?” The foreman came over.

“Toilet, sir.” Blum signaled. There was a latrine by one of the blocks that the work crew was allowed to use.

“Go ahead,” the foreman said, pointing to his watch. “But hurry.”

“I will, sir. Thanks.”

The man went back around to the other side of the half-built barrack and Blum set down his hammer. A while back, he had removed his jacket in the afternoon heat, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it in the bottom of one of the supply bins.

He made his way over to the latrine. No guards were near. Everyone was distracted by the counting and assembling of the prisoner work teams returning to the yard. Blum stepped inside. He stood for a second at first, his heart beating with more insistence and drumming louder than he had ever felt from what he was about to do. Cross a line he might never again be able to come back from. Amid the putrefying stench of the open hole, he reminded himself why he was there. Why he was doing this for a person he didn’t even know and for a country he might not even make it back to. This is your aliyah, he reminded himself. Your commitment.

Your penance.

His penance for being the one who had made it out.

You cannot go back now, Nathan.

He ripped off his shirt, pulling the arms inside out, and reversed it to the faded blue and gray burlap stripe on the other side. Then he flung it back over his head and buttoned it to the neck, to hide what was underneath. He kicked off the wooden clogs he’d had on all day that were similar to what they wore in the camp and reversed out his loose-fitting trousers.

He was in a prisoner’s suit now. From an inside pocket he took out the cap that was like a thousand he had seen that day and placed it on his head.

Less than sixty hours left to do what he had to do.

Sucking in a breath, his last moment of anything resembling freedom, Blum cracked the outhouse door and peered outside.

Across the yard, the foreman was rounding up his work crew. Two guards passed close by. His heart clenching, Blum pressed the door closed again. He caught his breath. If the wrong person saw him coming out of there, the game was over from the start. He’d be shot on the spot. He composed himself again, wiping off a bead of sweat making its way down his temple, instructing his heart to quiet and his nerves to calm. Inside him, a voice of doubt whispered he could just reverse back into his work outfit and rejoin his crew. He could hide with Josef and meet the plane in two more nights and say he was unable to find Mendl. Who would be the wiser…?

No… He opened the door and looked out again. This time no one was around. Go. He stepped outside and quickly shut the door. He took a look toward the work detail; no one was focused on him, only inventorying the tools and forming the line. He hugged the wall and went around the far side of the latrine, away from them, facing the wire.

He stared at the vast commotion in the yard, prisoners lining up in formations in front of their blocks. It was suicide. Thousands of sickly looking prisoners forming lines, raising their hands at the call. You will never come back. Guards shouting in their faces like vicious dogs. Like some stomach-turning nightmare out of a Bosch painting of hell. Suicide. Do not fail us, Roosevelt had said.

Now.

“Was machst du denn?” A voice barked sharply behind him. What are you doing?

Every cell in Blum froze.

He turned. A burly SS corporal was staring directly at him. A heavy rope twisted with several thick knots hung menacingly at his side. “Which block are you from?” the corporal asked.

“Zwansig, sir.” Blum cleared his throat, averting his eyes. The report was that the Ukrainian kapo who oversaw Block Twenty was as human as there was in this place, meaning he wouldn’t crack you in the head with his truncheon merely for the sport of it. There would have to be a reason. Blum’s heart began to pound with dread. He was sure the guard would hear it inside his chest.

“Then get the fuck on back, yid! Unless you’d rather I give you a nudge…” The German raised his knotted rope. Contempt and a total disregard for humanity oozed from him like an icy, terrifying vapor.

“No, Rottenführer.” Blum nodded, contrite. “I mean yes, now. Thank you.”

“Get your dirty ass out of here!”

“Yes, sir.”

He quickly ran toward the rows of barracks, praying as he did he wouldn’t feel the lash from the knotted rope strike him from behind. He knew just how arbitrary the line between life and death was here. The wrong guard, at the wrong time, one who just killed for the thrill of it or simply just to relieve the boredom, the way others might bet on the flip of a coin… And your time was up! Prisoners kept flooding into the large, staging area, guards shouting at them, beating them like angry dogs.

“Line up! Roll call. Now! On the double!”

Blum blended into the throng, melding safely into the vast numbers.

He wove through the crowd until he found a group lining up in front of a barrack.

“Dwadziescia?” he asked someone in line in Polish. Twenty?

The prisoner never looked at him, just nodded. “Ja. Dwadziescia.”

Across the way, Blum spotted the work detail he had been on forming a line and being marched toward the front gate and out of the camp. He watched them filing out, not knowing if, like any of them, he would ever see the outside again.

“Line up! Everyone line up!” the guards yelled.

He muttered a few words of the prayer he had recited earlier: Ayl molay rachamin, shochayn bam’romin.

This time it was for himself.

For he was truly in the middle of the nightmare now.