The One Man

EPILOGUE

On the wall of the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico, there is a large plaque, just behind the life-size statues of General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer, in his iconic, soft brimmed hat, commemorating the scientists who as part of the Manhattan Project helped oversee the development of the atomic bomb and changed the course of modern history.

There are 247 names on the wall. Some are names everyone knows who has studied this chapter of history. Einstein. Fermi. Bohr. Teller. Others, Kistiakowsky, Morrison, Neddermeyer, Ulam: theoretical physicists, chemists, mathematicians. People of uncommon brilliance, whose contributions were essential yet whose names are not widely known.

Of all the names, only one never actually worked on the Manhattan Project. He died in Europe during the war, in a concentration camp, far from the laboratories of Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the circumstances of his passing are cloudy. But his contribution, on the matter of gaseous diffusion, brought back by people of uncommon bravery, was thought by those who erected this tribute to be just as vital to the project’s success as that of those who toiled every day in Los Alamos.

You can find him, if you kneel down, between McKibben and Morrison near the bottom of the third row.

Alfred Mendl.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My father-in-law, Nathan Zorman, was raised in Warsaw, Poland, and, in a shift of fate that no doubt saved his life, he left in early 1939 to come to the United States, just months before the war.

He never heard from anyone in his family again.

In 1941, when America entered the war, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and, because of his knowledge of languages, was placed in the Intelligence Corps.

Sadly, he died months before this novel’s publication, at ninety-six, but like many survivors, never spoke a word about his experiences either during the war or while he was growing up in Poland. Bringing to mind the faces of the family he never saw again was simply too painful. Over the years, he never even made an attempt to find out his family’s fate. I always wanted to find a way to put his anguish in a book-the grief and the loss-the guilt at having survived, which, I thought, in spite of many blessings in his life, had left him detached from inner happiness for seventy-plus years.

Much of the story you have read was based on truth. Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba were indeed real, and their depiction of Auschwitz after their remarkable escape was circulated in the highest channels of the U.S. government and brought the horrors there out of the darkness. The meetings with President Roosevelt and his war cabinet on this very subject were based on truth, as his war chiefs reviewed several proposed plans to stop the genocide, such as raids on the camps or bombing the railway tracks leading into them, but ultimately rejected them all. The compelling saga of the Vittel Jews with their forged Latin American identity papers is true as well, as was their fate-after being betrayed by a Jew from the Warsaw ghetto, they were all shipped to Auschwitz in January 1944, all 240 of them, and never heard from again.

While looking into my father-in-law’s past, I came across the massacres that took place in Lvov, Poland (now part of Ukraine), in June-July 1941 under the German occupation. At the time Lvov had a thriving university and the third-largest Jewish population in Poland. In what was termed an act of “self-purification,” the university there was brutally purged by both Nazis and Ukrainians, and thousands of Jewish intellectuals-professors, scientists, and artists-were rounded up and either shot on the spot or sent off to the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. From there, it wasn’t too much of a leap for a novelist to ask: What if one of these esteemed thinkers carried some kind of vital knowledge that could change the outcome of the war or, even beyond that, the course of human thought? Something that needed to get out, or would, like a buried secret, die along with him.

It was with this idea in mind that I came across the figure of prominent Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Considered one of the founders of atomic theory, Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922 and was among the most revered scientific figures of his time. In the book I describe his harrowing escape from Denmark literally a day before he was to be arrested and likely sent off to a death camp and his even more harrowing voyage to London strapped into the bomb bay of a British Mosquito. A year later he was a member of the British mission to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. In addition to being a father figure to many of the other physicists there, as late as 1945 Robert Oppenheimer credited Bohr with making an important contribution to the modulated neutron initiators that were crucial to the bomb’s triggering device. Bohr’s vast knowledge never assisted the Nazis, but it was not too much of a stretch to imagine how, had Bohr been sent to the camps or even forced to succumb and aid the German war effort, the course of the war might have been decidedly altered or, at the very least, the outcome delayed.

Sadly, Alfred Mendl is not a real figure (and his mention in Los Alamos is fictional too). But the science he taught Leo-the gaseous diffusion process, whereby highly enriched uranium-235 is separated from its more common and nonfissile cousin, U-238-did become the most efficient separation method for the first atomic bombs. It was also not a European physicist who was at the forefront of this process in 1943 and 1944 but scientists from the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Berkeley. For that research I am highly indebted to several books (listed in the bibliography), but principally Richard Rhodes’s compelling and monumental study, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It was also very helpful to speak with Robert Kupp, a chemical engineer who actually worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge.

While researching this book, I also came across the real-life story of Denis Avey, a British soldier captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Poland, who actually snuck inside Auschwitz for a night and then back out to tell a firsthand account of the horrors there. His remarkable story can be read in his memoir: The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz (Da Capo Press, 2011). So it was not such a leap to imagine that Nathan actually could have gotten in and out.

I’ve tried to remain as true as possible to the actual history around the events described in this book. (Filip Müller’s testament, Eyewitness Auschwitz, Ivan Dee Publisher, was one of several indispensable firsthand accounts.) Never for a second did I think of writing the definitive book on Auschwitz-the atrocities there have already been ably recorded on far more graphic and personal levels than mine. Still, the subject matter is sacrosanct, and as a Jew, I respect that history as much as anyone. But I did take what I hope will be seen as a few small liberties with the actual truth in the following areas: One is that after 1942, the women’s camp was situated at Auschwitz’s sister camp, Birkenau, a mile and a half to the northeast. And although my story takes place in 1944, the train tracks leading through the gates of Birkenau were already completed by then. Other than that, I tried to remain as accurate as possible in my retelling of the place and the acts there. Several people, especially Morris Pilberg, recounted personal stories of their experiences that are included in the narrative. I was also lucky that my neighbor, Joanna Powell, shared two extraordinary memoirs of her family members’ Shoah testimonies to draw from on Jewish life in prewar Poland and then under the occupation. Their stories helped me enormously. Lastly, the Abwehr Intelligence Command was always a thorn in Hitler’s side, the upper ranks populated by non-Nazi Party members. The Abwehr was believed to have been involved in several assassination attempts on Hitler’s life and possibly in unauthorized negotiations with the Russians. Hitler finally shut it down in February 1944 (and its head, Admiral Wilheim Canaris, was arrested)-literally during the timeline of this book, in the months between the deportation of the Vittel Jews to Auschwitz and the bulk of the action that takes place at the camp. Therefore, I decided to push the date forward just a couple of months for the sake of the narrative, and I do hope you’ll forgive me for this slight.

As I said, once the United States entered the war, my father-in-law enlisted in the Army and, because of his facility with languages, was placed in the Intelligence Corps. As with his upbringing in Poland, whatever it was he did in the service has never been spoken of to any in his family. What you’ve read is my story, not his. But if I could somehow have pushed through his pained and brooding expressions when urged to speak about his past; through his inability to articulate the long-held-in burdens of guilt and loss; if he was able to tell his own story, the whole tale, of his past in Poland and the role he played during the war, I always imagined it would read something like this.