The Final Reckoning (20 page)

‘Oh, I expect he didn't like to talk about it. But Sid's not the only one here, you know. Lots of them have it. I sometimes think it's a blessing. To protect them from remembering too much. Although the trouble is, they do remember—’

‘Can we meet him, do you think?’ Rebecca was getting impatient.

Brenda now led them out of the hall and down a small flight of stairs. ‘This is the art room,’ she announced, like a head teacher guiding prospective parents around a school. Tom saw a man with white stubble carefully add a stick to a model steam train made entirely of matchsticks. ‘That's Melvyn,’ Brenda announced. ‘He used to be a watchmaker.’

Next, Brenda poked her head around the door of a room decked out as a hairdresser's salon, just like the one Tom's mother used to visit on alternate Fridays when he was a boy. It came complete with those sit-under, helmet-style hairdryers: Tom remembered manoeuvring himself as a five-year-old into one and pretending he was a cosmonaut.

‘I didn't think he'd be here, but checking never hurt. It's mainly the ladies who come here. For a chat.’ Tom saw a price list by the door: shampoo and set £5.

They ascended two flights of stairs. ‘They do wander sometimes, I'm afraid,’ Brenda said, catching her breath from the climb. ‘When they're
like that. Sometimes they leave the building altogether. And you know where we find them? Usually standing outside the house where they lived as a child.’ A sad look changed the shape of Brenda's mouth. ‘Although not in Sid's case of course.’ Suddenly her face brightened. ‘I think I can hear someone,’ she sing-songed. She pushed open a pair of double doors and they walked into a large room whose floor was almost entirely covered in a mat the colour of a billiard table. At the far end was a solitary upright piano and, hunched over it, a man with white hair on both sides of a bald head, playing scales over and over.

‘This is the room we use for mat bowls – oh, our gentlemen residents like that – and for line dancing,’ Brenda said, not to be diverted from her tour. ‘And there, at the piano, is Sid.’ She smiled with satisfaction, as if vindicated that the system worked after all. ‘Sid, visitors for you!’

The old man's gaze remained fixed on his left hand as it moved up and down the keyboard.

‘I say, Sid, these nice young people have come for a chat.’ She turned to Rebecca and Tom, her back deliberately to Sid Steiner. ‘Maybe now's not a good time. Could you come back tomorrow? Or at the weekend?’

‘We'd love to, we really would.’ The doctor voice again. ‘But unfortunately I lost my own father this week and there's something urgent that has come up. I think Sid might be the only person who can help us.’

‘I wish you long life, dear.’ Brenda took Rebecca's hand. ‘And you need to ask Sid something? You need to find out information?’

Rebecca nodded. Brenda's mouth formed itself into an expression suggesting scepticism verging on alarm. She looked at Sid, then back to Rebecca. ‘Lets see what a cup of tea can do.’

At the mention of tea, Sid halted mid-scale. He lifted his arm up and placed it back on his lap. Gently, Brenda took hold of his shoulders and turned him towards Rebecca and Tom.

His face was liver-spotted and veined but he was still recognizable as the man who had toasted the poker club's collective good health thirty years earlier. His eyebrows had become overgrown, like an unkempt hedge, and his earlobes were long and furred. He was, Brenda had reminded them, eighty-nine years old. When DIN were in their first hunting season, Sid Steiner would have been in his twenties: fit, strong and fearless.

‘Hello, Sid,’ Rebecca said gently. She gestured towards a column of stacking chairs, and Tom pulled out two of them. Once she was at eye level with the old man, she spoke again. ‘I'm Gerald Merton's daughter, Rebecca.’

‘Who?’

‘I'm Gerald Merton's daughter.’

‘What do you say?’

‘Gershon Matzkin.’

‘Gershon Matzkin? You're Gershon's wife?’

‘I'm his daughter.’

‘Gershon's a good boy.’

Rebecca dipped her head and, as it hung there, low, Tom could see the sides of her eyes: they were wet. Was it despair at the pitiful state of Sid Steiner or the notion of her father as a boy that had done that? Tom didn't know, but he felt such a strong urge to touch her, to console her, that this time he didn't fight it. He squeezed her shoulder and, in thanks, she touched his hand briefly. Even now, even here, he could feel the crackle of electricity.

‘Do you remember when you last saw him?’

‘My mother won't like me talking to a girl like you, you know. She's warned me not to talk to girls like you. From across the river.’

Tom could feel Rebecca tensing. She reached out and placed a hand on Steiner's sleeve, a gesture which exposed how withered his arms had become. With a shudder, Tom thought of the skin that was concealed inside that too-large sleeve and, on it, the number etched in purple.

‘Can you tell me anything Gershon said to you recently? Did he come and visit you here?’

‘Now, did you get married in the end? Or wouldn't he have you?’

‘Who?’

‘What did you say?’

At that moment, Brenda pushed her way through the double doors, back first, holding a tray of tea. She must have caught Rebecca's expression, because she gave a small nod of recognition, as if to say: this is what I meant. Dementia.

‘It's teatime, Sidney.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Teatime.’

‘What's that?’ He was pointing at the tray.

‘That's a cup.’

‘I know that's a cup. What's that?’

‘Guess.’

The old man scrunched up his eyes, a child's caricature of concentration. Eventually, he opened them again and said three words which made Tom's eyes prick. ‘I can't remember.’

‘That's milk, Sidney. That's a jug of milk.’

Rebecca got to her feet and spoke quietly, almost inaudibly, to Brenda. ‘I'm sorry to have taken your time, Mrs Jacobs. But I don't think this is going to work. We made a mistake, I'm sorry.’

‘What is it you need him to remember?’

Rebecca looked over at Tom, with a question in her eyes: how much can we say?

‘We need him to remember something from long ago,’ said Tom, pulling an answer out of the air. ‘Maybe fifty or sixty years ago.’

Brenda smiled. ‘You should have said. Now come with me.’

They passed through a door set with patterned glass, the way front doors used to look. Next to it was a brass plate:
The Y Dove Reminiscence Room.
The space had been divided into two areas. The first was wood-floored and done up like a hallway with a hat-stand and a sideboard cluttered with
objects: a portable, wind-up gramophone; a Philips wireless; a Frister & Rossman sewing machine and a heavy, black mechanical cash register, the buttons marking amounts in shillings and old pence. Opposite was a small kitchen area, including a big square sink, a washboard and a stack of battered enamel saucepans.

Sitting on the counter was a biscuit tin decorated with the face of George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Above it, a shelf laden with products not seen for decades: Flor Brite Mop Furniture Polish, Lipton's No.1 Quality Tea and Victory Lozenges.

The main part of the room boasted a floral carpet the like of which Tom had not seen since childhood visits to his grandparents in Wakefield. There was a fireplace, its surround made up of beige ceramic tiles, and on a sidetable a heavy, black Bakelite telephone. On the wall was a framed poster showing a strapping woman striding across a meadow with a pitchfork in her hand: ‘Come and help with the Victory Harvest’. A strapline at the foot of the poster read, ‘You are needed in the fields’. Beneath it, Sid Steiner sat in a big armchair.

This was the place residents with dementia came for sessions aimed at giving their ravaged memories a workout. Because, while short-term memory was the first casualty, the experiences of long ago tended to be forgotten last, with recollections of childhood clinging on until the very end. People who could not find the word for ‘cup’ or ‘jug’,
who could not recognize their own children, could come in here and, at last, remember.

Rebecca cleared her throat. ‘So Sid, when did you come to this country?’

Brenda shook her head. ‘Try to avoid factual questions, dates, that kind of thing,’ she whispered. ‘It can be stressful for them. Use the objects in the room, try to get him talking.’

Tom looked around and grabbed a packet of Park Drive cigarettes. He passed it to Rebecca who put it in Steiner's hands.

‘Do you smoke, Sid?’

‘We all do.’

‘Do you like smoking?’

‘It's warm.’

‘Did you ever smoke these, Sid?’

He looked down, turned the packet over a couple of times, then shook his head. ‘It's not easy to get cigarettes. Besides, when you get them, you don't smoke them. You use them. Don't you know that? Didn't they teach you anything in Warsaw?’

Rebecca leaned forward; it was the most coherent sentence they had yet heard from Sid Steiner. ‘What do you buy with them?’

‘Anything. To get in, to get out, to get past a guard. Cigarettes or jewels, it makes no difference.’

Neither Tom nor Rebecca knew where or when in his memory Sid had landed. Was it whichever ghetto he had been locked up in, or perhaps a camp; or was it the occupation zone of 1945, scene of DIN's first hunting season?

‘What about this?’ Hung up on a wall, among a display of documents and photographs, was the jacket from a British army uniform. Rebecca passed it to him.

‘Not bad.’ He assessed the three stripes on the upper arm. ‘Sergeant. That could be useful. What we need are MPs. If you can get me one of those, we can use it.’

Tom squeezed Rebecca's wrist in excitement: MPs were military police. This fitted precisely with the testimony Henry Goldman had given them, that MPs uniforms were the ones DIN prized most.

‘Use it for what, Sid?’

‘I'm not going to tell you that. If you're meant to know, you know already. If you don't know then you're not meant to know.’ Tom smiled: it was a smart answer.

‘Did you work with Gershon in DIN?’

‘You some kind of spy? I don't answer questions like that.’

‘I'm with Gershon.’

‘He's too young for a girl like you. He's only a boy.’

It must be 1945. Sid Steiner must have transported himself back to Allied-occupied Germany, probably the British zone. Maybe the uniform had done it. Tom looked around for another prop, something that might trigger a useful memory. In a glass case was a shoe-brush and, next to it, a Ministry of War Book of Air-Raid Precautions. That was no good; too British. He scanned the
walls and shelves, desperate for anything that might light a spark.

Then Sid spoke unprompted. ‘I know how to use that.’ He was pointing at one of the display cabinets. Rebecca stood up, trying to follow the line of the old man's crooked finger.

‘This?’ She held up a tin of National Dried Milk issued by the Ministry of Food.

‘No! Not that, that!’ He aimed his finger leftward, until it rested on a rolling pin. Tom sighed: and just when we were getting somewhere.

Rebecca returned to her seat, her posture now deflated. They were heading back into la-la land.

‘What did you use it for, Sid?’ It was Brenda. She had pulled the rolling pin from its case and was handing it over.

‘Well, I had to train as a baker, didn't I? If the plan was going to work.’

Rebecca leaned forward once more. ‘What plan, Sid?’

‘Ask Gershon, he'll tell you. He trained too. We both did. Kneading the dough, glazing the cakes. I was very good at doughnuts. Bread was hard, though.’

‘And this was so that you could implement the plan?’

‘Of course.’

‘What's the name of the plan?’

‘Plan B.’

‘B for Bakery?’

‘No. Wrong again.’

‘Did Plan B work?’

‘It made the papers you know.
New York
flipping
Times.
Nuremberg, April 1946. But we could have done more.’

‘What was the plan?’ ‘Everyone needs bread, no?’ ‘You were making bread. Who for?’ ‘You may be pretty, but Gershon's picked himself a bit of a dunce if you don't mind my saying so. Who do you think it was for?’

Nuremberg, Spring 1946

Our first task was to decide a target. This was not a decision for me; I was just a teenage boy. Others, the leaders, took those decisions. One of them was the man I had met in the cellar in the ghetto at Kovno, on that night of the candles. His name was Aron. The other two were dead by 1946, killed in the last Aktion which emptied the ghetto once and for all. I did not know that for sure, not then, but that was what I presumed. Unless you heard otherwise, unless you saw them or ran into them in the street or heard a rumour, it was best to assume this or that person were gone. In 1946 everyone was dead.

But a few leaders of the resistance had survived, emerging from the burnt-out ghettoes and the smoking ruins of the cities and they, along with a few from the camps, were the men who started DIN. I was still a teenager but I wanted them to think of me as a warrior, a man who had proved
himself. Even though I was so young, they did indeed treat me like a man: anyone who had lived through what we had lived through was no longer a child, no matter how young you were. Your childhood was gone.

I was not the one who took decisions, but I had a good pair of ears and I listened. We were in a safe house in Munich and one night, as I was clearing away the dishes from our meal, I heard the commanders mention one place more than any other: Nuremberg.

They had heard that the Allies had set up a prison outside the city, to hold Nazis for ‘questioning’. And not just any Nazis either, but the important ones. ‘There are eight thousand SS in there,’ Aron said. His eyes were dark and fierce, his hair thick and kinked: I never once saw him smile. ‘No small fry,’ he went on. ‘They're being held for major war crimes.
Major
war crimes. They're all in there: senior staff at the camps,
Politischen Abteilungen
, Gestapo, Einsatzgruppen, everyone.’

It was obvious he was most excited by the men of the ‘Political Departments’, the
Politischen Abteilungen.
Among them would be some of the senior bureaucrats who had helped to organize the Final Solution. That was what the Nazis had called their killing. They did not call it mass murder, killing people by the hour, the way a factory makes products. No, they called it the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.

But I wasn't thinking about these bureaucrats as I washed the plates, pretending not to listen. I was thinking about the Einsatzgruppen. The mobile killing teams who had gone from place to place murdering and murdering and murdering. These were the people who had killed my sisters at the Ninth Fort.

Aron had done some research, using a DIN volunteer who had ended up in Nuremberg. He had tracked down the source of all the camp's bread, a medium-sized bakery on the outskirts of town. The leaders talked some more, their voices becoming low and hushed. Then they fell completely silent. I was scrubbing the grease off a pan when I turned around to see that they were all looking at me, with that same look I had seen before, three years earlier, in the cellar in the ghetto.

They gave me a street address and told me which man to speak to at the bakery: the works supervisor. They had described him to me, short and barrel-chested with a face almost always flushed red. I was to clean myself up, find him and give him my story.

The description was good and I recognized him as soon as I walked in. ‘My name is Tadeusz Radomski,’ I began, ‘and I need to learn how to become a baker.’ I told him I was a Pole, with an uncle in Montreal who was himself a baker and was ready to give me a job. ‘All I need is a visa, but
for Canada it takes time. While I'm waiting, I want to learn. My uncle says I need experience—’

‘I'm sorry,’ the works supervisor said, wiping a flour-dusted hand on his apron. ‘There are no jobs here.’

‘I'm happy to work for free,’ I said.

‘No jobs.’

Then, as we had discussed back in the safe house, I continued: ‘My uncle said I should show you this,’ and I reached inside my canvas satchel. As soon as the man got a peek of what was inside, he gestured me to come into a back office. I had showed him a bottle of Scotch whisky and two bars of chocolate. Along with cigarettes, they were the currency of the occupation zone and he knew what they were worth. ‘My uncle says you can have this now and there will be more for you when I have done a month's work.’ I started that afternoon, with no pay.

And so I began as an apprentice baker, learning everything from kneading and rolling the dough to glazing and frosting cakes. I would volunteer for extra work, cleaning out the pans and scouring the ovens. If the manager needed a boy to run an errand, I would do that too. I said little and worked hard. I wanted there to be no complaints against me and for the manager to trust me completely, so that he would let me work anywhere in the bakery. My job was to find out exactly how the system worked, to understand every aspect of it: when the allocation of flour
was received from the Americans, where it was stored, which shift came on when, when they came off and how the place was guarded. Above all I needed to discover how the thousands of loaves for Stalag 13, the holding centre for Nazi prisoners, were baked and when and how they were transported.

I did as much as I could, never asking a single direct question. I just watched and listened. I didn't chat to anyone – as far as I was concerned every worker in that place was a Jew-killer – but I wanted them to think the only reason for my silence was that I was a lonely orphan boy working hard for a new life abroad. The strange thing I realize only now, as I set down these words, is that I was not really acting at all: a lonely orphan boy was exactly what I was.

Then one day, the American army trucks arrived at usual, just before dawn, to pick up the bread. I had been doing the night shift – I had volunteered for it – and I was there, on the outside loading platform, when I heard one of the American drivers complain that his usual partner was off sick: he needed someone to help unload at the other end. The manager took one look at me and with an index finger guided me towards the truck. ‘He'll go.’

And so I rode up front in the cab, next to the American, trying not to stare at his uniform, refusing his offer of chewing gum but accepting a cigarette, even though I did not smoke, because
I did not want to look like a kid who did not smoke. I held it between my lips, sucking every now and then, looking out of the window and saying nothing, passing the bomb site that was Nuremberg. My memory now is of a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. So much rubble, long stretches of it on either side of the road, interrupted by the odd building that had escaped the bombing, looming over the rest like an adult in a kindergarten.

When we got to Stalag 13, waved through by the American guard on the gate, I felt prickles on the back of my neck. This site, I knew, used to be a concentration camp. It was surrounded by barbed wire and filled with row after row of wooden huts: barracks that once housed Jews, worked like slaves and taken to their deaths, and now filled with the men who had tortured and killed them. I had to clench both my fists to get a grip on myself and stop myself shivering.

‘OK, here we go,’ the driver said in English, parking up and jumping down from the cab. He told me, in gestures and signs, to start unloading the wheeled trolleys, each stacked with a dozen racks, each rack containing two dozen loaves. We were parked outside the camp kitchens and I was unloading for a long time: I estimated that, along with the other trucks, we delivered around nine thousand loaves of bread. All black bread.

‘What about the white bread?’ I asked in German.

The driver shook his head, his brow furrowed. He did not understand. Somehow, through a combination of hand signals and pidgin German and English, I got the question out. Eventually he nodded and pointed into the distance, at a single truck unloading at the other end of the camp. So that was how it was done: nine thousand loaves of black bread for the Nazi prisoners taken in several trucks to the prisoners' kitchen, including the one I had just unloaded. And then a separate truck carrying one thousand loaves of white bread, delivered to a different kitchen for the American guards. The driver pointed at the black loaves and made a retching expression. Then he gestured in the distance, at the white loaves, and patted his stomach. He was telling me that the Americans couldn't stand the coarse, thick black bread and needed white, like they had at home.

I worked hard to hide my smile as we drove back to the bakery and, after that, as I walked home. Only once in the apartment we had rented in Nuremberg, a new hideout, could I let out a scream of delight. ‘This will be easy,’ I said. ‘This will be easy.’

I briefed the commanders that night, proud of the discovery I had made. We had only to direct our attention to the black loaves; anything we did to them would never affect the Americans. It would be DIN's simplest, but greatest, operation.

But then Rosa brought bad news. All of us had had to get jobs. My friend Sid Steiner – his first name then was Solomon – had also trained as a baker in Munich, because we hoped we would be able to repeat the Nuremberg operation there, perhaps even on the same night. Rosa's job was no less important. She had been told to find a boyfriend. Not any boyfriend, but an American. Plenty of women in occupied Germany were doing the same thing. Some were Germans, but some were Poles or Czechs or Hungarians, women who had washed up and landed in Berlin or Nuremberg like so much driftwood on the shore. They made themselves friendly with any man in an American uniform, a man who could provide attention, as well as coffee, cigarettes and corned beef in a tin. These women were desperate and would not hold back their affection. Rosa's task was to pretend to be one of them. What nationality she would adopt, I had no idea. But she did not look so Jewish – except for the deadness in her eyes, dead from all that she had seen, which would have been obvious to anyone who had looked. Luckily, these men were not looking so closely.

No one ever asked whether she minded being used in this way; it was simply her duty. The order was given and, as a fighter and partisan and now a soldier for DIN, she would obey. No one asked me either, even though, by that time, Rosa and I were together. Perhaps no one knew; perhaps
people would have assumed I was too young for such things.

So Rosa set about throwing herself at the GI Joe responsible for the guards' canteen at Stalag 13. Did she sleep with him? At the time I told myself that she did not, but now I see something else: I imagine him on top of her, pounding away at her flesh, not noticing the eyes, still and glassy, in her face.

Anyway, this sergeant was joking about some of his officers, health-conscious types from Boston or New England. ‘You'll never believe this,’ he said, ‘but they refuse to eat American white bread. They want the brown stuff the Krauts eat!’ So each morning he has to arrange for one hundred loaves of Nazi bread to be separated from the rest and delivered to the American kitchen. ‘Crazy, they are.’

I received this news as you would word of a disaster. If we tampered with the black bread we would hit some Americans and they would not let such an attack go unpunished. They would hunt us down.

There were more complications. In what I imagined was an idle moment of pillow-talk, Rosa's boyfriend explained that he'd had a rough day. Not only had he had to keep his own mess running, but he'd had to do a spot-check on the prisoners' kitchen. They were meant to do it once a week or so: checking equipment, making sure no knives had been stolen and, more important,
ensuring that the food supplies were not being used as cover for any smuggling. It had been known for prisoners to hide weapons, even cyanide tablets, inside a loaf of bread or a bag of sugar. Everything that went into that kitchen had to be checked, not every day, but often. What a drag it was; it added hours to his day. Rosa probably stroked the sergeant's brow in sympathy, quietly noting what she would tell the DIN leaders back at the flat: that they would have no guarantee that any tainted bread would not be probed, examined and, quite possibly, discovered.

Both Rosa and I did as we were told, uncovering every detail of the process and then relaying it to our commanders. I was asked to come up with a thorough blueprint of the bakery, including all measurements, as comprehensive as any architect's drawing. And of course I had to bring back several loaves of bread, black and white, so that they could be studied.

After two months of this, we were summoned for another meeting. This time, though, a man I had not met before was there. I remember him as an elegant, older character come to us from Paris – but that may be just how he looked to me, a fifteen-year-old boy who knew everything of the world and also nothing. This man was never introduced by name, but he was treated by the commanders as an expert. They showed him respect. It turned out that he was an experienced
player of the black market – and that he had made contact with a chemist.

Aron asked this man to tell us what he knew.

‘Comrades,’ he began, in an accent that seemed only half-French. ‘The decisive question is how we introduce the poison to the bread.’

Poison. It was the first time the word had been uttered. We preferred a codeword:
medicine.
‘If we're to treat the disease,’ Aron would say, ‘we need medicine.’ We avoided saying ‘poison’ out loud. Why? Because we feared it would betray our secret? That it might jinx our mission, that it would somehow bring bad luck? That we did not quite want to admit, even to ourselves, what we were about to do? All of the above.

But now he had said it, it gave us a strange confidence. This man, this adult, would make this crazy dream of ours come true.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘the obvious method would be to make the poison an ingredient stirred into the mixture for the black bread from the very beginning. This would be simple. Sadly, it is
impossible.
We now know that one hundred loaves of this bread go, in fact, to the Americans. If these Americans die, it would be a disaster! So we need another method, yes?’

Aron began shuffling in his seat.