The Final Reckoning (21 page)

The Frenchman reached into his bag, an oversized doctor's case of battered brown leather, and with a great flourish produced a huge, thick paintbrush.

‘You have seen it used by the house decorator, yes?’ He was smiling.

‘What's the idea?’ asked Aron, his patience dwindling.

‘To
paint
the poison onto each loaf.’

‘Paint? With those?’

‘The young man knows all about it, I am sure.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘The pastry chefs call it glazing, I think.’

He picked up from the table a loaf of black bread I had put there earlier for exactly this purpose. ‘First, you dip the brush into the liquid – for now we use only vinegar, of course – you paint one stroke up, one stroke down and there:
Voilá!
’

There was silence as the semi-Frenchman sat down, his demonstration completed. Our leader was frowning. None of us wanted to speak before he did. He picked up the bread, examined it, then placed it back on the table.

‘And that's enough?’

‘It is.’

‘You're sure the poison will have no taste?’

‘No taste.’

‘No colour?’

‘No colour. It's an arsenic mixture, odourless and colourless. I have seen it myself.’

I was nervous about speaking, but as the only baker in the room I felt I had some authority. ‘Won't the crust on the top be moist?’

The man from Paris widened his eyes into a smile
and pointed at me. ‘Our young friend has asked a good question! This, for me, is our biggest problem.’

Aron was alarmed. ‘You mean he's right? The bread will be wet?’

‘For a while. But not for long. After an hour or so we think it is dried out.’

‘You think?’

‘If there is some dampness it would be so slight, no one would think anything of it. Remember, this is not the Ritz Hotel. What are the Nazis going to do, ask their waiter to take it back?’

Aron ignored the joke and turned to Rosa. ‘What time do they start eating breakfast?’

‘At 6.15 a.m.’

Now to me. ‘And the loaves are picked up at five?’

‘Yes. But most are baked by three.’

Aron turned to the not-quite-Frenchman. ‘And this method works?’

‘There is a dead cat in Paris who says it works very well.’

We waited as Aron picked up the bread once more, then placed it back down on the table. He rubbed his chin. Finally he gave his verdict, looking at each of us, his gaze steady. ‘The first night with a full moon, we do it.’

As it happens we did not choose the very first moonlit night. We waited for a Saturday. That was because of the way we had chosen to stage the operation.

It was the Frenchman's idea. I call him that because I never found out his name. Rosa said he was a Communist, or at least had been, and that he had been part of the resistance in Krakow. He had found his way to Paris, a place where it was possible to get hold of anything: cars, forged papers, douche syringes, poison. Why he was in DIN, what bitterness he stored inside, I did not know. But he covered it well, with his semi-French accent and his performance. Not many men in DIN smiled as often as he did.

Once Aron had said the operation could go ahead a new discussion began: how? When the commanders first hatched the plan, they assumed it would be a simple business: I would smuggle some poison into the bakery and, when no one was looking, would tip it into the vat of flour, stir and that would be that. But painting poison onto nine thousand individual loaves was a mammoth task even if it were done by several people working at once.

For the hundredth time I was called on to explain the process.

‘As soon as the bread comes out of the ovens, it's placed on a series of trolleys here.’ I was standing over the table, pointing at my own drawing of the bakery. ‘They're then wheeled, into the drying room – here. There's a door out onto the loading area here. Just before five a.m., the trolleys are wheeled outside for the Americans to pick up.’

Aron now questioned me the way he had questioned the Frenchman. ‘Once the bread is in the drying room, is the room empty?’

‘Not for long. People come in and out constantly.’

‘Even at four in the morning?’

‘Even then.’

He nodded. ‘And there's no way anyone could be discreet, working with that thing.’ He pointed at the housepainter's brush, still on the table. ‘You would have to be there, undisturbed, for hours. Damn!’ He slammed his fist down on the table.

Then the Frenchman spoke to me. ‘How many workers are there at that time of night?’

‘Normally it's about ten.’

‘Normally? And what is not normally?’

‘On Saturday night, once the work is almost finished, before three a.m., about half the workers go off. To drink.’

‘Leaving how many people in the bakery? Five, maybe, including you?’

I nodded.

‘In which case I think I have a plan.’

The preparations took weeks. After our meeting in the apartment, the Frenchman returned to Paris to meet with the chemist: between them they had calculated the amount of arsenic mixture we would need for nine thousand loaves. It took some time to prepare. Once it was done, the Frenchman despatched a courier, another DIN volunteer, to
carry the liquid personally from Paris to Nuremberg. ‘There is no other way,’ he said.

When the courier appeared at our apartment, he was wearing an American uniform under a heavy overcoat. Rosa answered the door, but I remember wondering how such a man who had survived what we had all survived, a soldier of DIN, could be so fat. He was not just tall, he was enormous. But once the door was closed, I understood. He ripped off the coat and his jacket to reveal at least a dozen hot water bottles, all made of sweating rubber, strapped to his body. Before he had a chance to say a word, he took one look around and collapsed onto the floor: he could carry that huge weight no longer.

That night Rosa and I transferred the mixture into smaller bottles. We used whatever we could find: medicine bottles were the best, so long as they could fit inside my satchel. Each day I would take one or two into the bakery and, when I was alone in the drying room, I would stash them under the floorboards. In my head I kept a mental map of that room, memorizing each board, so that I would know exactly which boards to lift in the few minutes we would have to prepare the mixture.

When Saturday April 13 1946 came, I was more nervous than I had ever been before. Don't ask me why. Perhaps it was because, in the past, I had pretended to be this or that person for just a few minutes, long enough to get past a guard or onto a train. But I had been Tadeusz, the Polish baker boy, for several months now. I was part of the
team at the bakery. You can't work alongside people every day, week in, week out, and remain a complete stranger. Sometimes one of the women, in hairnet and gloves, would tousle my hair, as if I were a playmate for one of her sons. The first time it happened, I had to run outside. I was gasping, as if I had been strangled. (Later I said I had had a coughing fit). Now that I am older I understand what I did not understand then. Maybe I had to be a father to understand what that fifteen-year-old boy felt that day, a boy who had not felt the loving touch of a mother for so long that even a hint of it was enough to turn him upside down. I read once of a prisoner who had been in jail so long that, when he was released, he was allergic to fresh air. Perhaps I was that way with a mother's love.

Tonight they were about to discover the truth of me and I think that was what made me scared. I had to force myself to remember what this operation was really about, to remember the men inside Stalag 13, to think of the Einsatzgruppen. When I did that, I could make my heart turn to flint.

I checked my watch. I had been on shift since five o'clock that afternoon and the hours had dragged. I was desperate for three o'clock to come. I did my work but I could not be distracted. I kept asking myself, will we have enough of the mixture, will we have enough time, will this crazy scheme work? I even began to wonder about the
Frenchman. What did we really know about him? Could this all be some elaborate trap?

At seven minutes to three I heard the words I had been waiting for, spoken by the manager himself. ‘Come on, the beer is calling!’ He and seven others took off their overalls, hung them up and headed, as usual, for the tavern down the street. They said goodbye to me and the other ‘saps’ who had to stay behind.

I checked my watch again. Precisely six minutes from now and I would do what we had planned. For now, I had to stay put.

I knew what was happening outside. Once she had got the signal – they've gone! – from Manik, serving as lookout across the street, Rosa would have appeared from the opposite direction, wearing a short dress, in black and red; God only knows where she had picked it up. She had been given money to buy bright lipstick, too. Her instructions had been to look appealing and available – for the right price.

I can picture her strolling up to the gate in high heels, waiting for the night-watchman to emerge, as I had told her he would. She would have had just a few moments to make her impression. She was not the blonde these Germans liked, but she was beautiful and her body, at least, was young. I can see him unlocking the gate, then stepping forward to give Rosa a proper looking-over. She would have probably let him grope a bit, just to close the deal, and as he touched and squeezed,
she would have moved nearer, more intimate until he was so close she would only have had to push the blade a few inches forward to find his heart.

Then Manik would have run from his hiding place across the street, his shoes soft-soled and quiet, to help Rosa drag the dead body out of the way. Then they would have given the signal to the truck over the road. The vehicle was from the British Army transport pool, signed out by a friendly member of the Jewish Brigade, using forged papers. With its lights switched off, it drove through, Manik closing the gate after it.

That was when I headed for the drying room and, from there, to the outside loading area. By the time I was there, keeping the door open, they were all out of the truck, five of them, their faces blacked up with boot polish. With Manik and Rosa, it made seven. All were armed.

I guided them through the drying room until they were huddled around the far door that led into the bakery proper. Silently, Aron counted the group off then one, two, three – they burst through, shouting
‘Achtung!’
and training their guns on the half dozen bakers, my fellow workers, they found within.

I did not go inside, but watched through the glass window in the door. The bakers offered no resistance. They had been sitting around, either playing cards or finishing up for the night: they were in no position to fight against a gang of armed men. All of them raised their arms in the
air, a group of Germans surrendering to a gang of Jews. It should have been a sweet moment but it had come at least three years too late.

Three of the group began to bind and gag the bakers, tying their ankles and wrists and finally tethering each of them to a pillar or table leg.

I saw our leader swivel around, looking for me. He needed me to show him where the supplies – the sugar, yeast and flour – were kept. I emerged, ready to point at the storeroom. I tried hard to avoid meeting the eye of the men tied up all around me, but I could not do it. I looked into each pair of eyes, most of them aghast with surprise, some ablaze with hatred. So, the little Polish boy betrayed us. They could say nothing, but they did not need to.

Aron and one other set about emptying the storeroom, taking turns to go back and forth between there and the loading area, filling up the truck that was waiting outside. They took their time, making sure this activity lasted as long as necessary.

I was back in the drying room. Once the bakers had all been restrained, I set about prising open each memorized floorboard, bringing out the concealed bottles of poison. Earlier I had brought in a set of metal mixing bowls, the biggest I could find. Rosa and I began filling them as fast as we could. The Frenchman had been right: the fluid was clear and smelled of nothing.

The other four in our group opened up their
bags and pulled out the paintbrushes. The first dipped the bristles in one of the full metal bowls, letting them absorb the liquid. He looked at me, waiting for guidance. I showed him to the wheeled rack, gesturing at the top row and, methodically, he started painting on the poison, loaf by loaf.

Soon we had a rhythm, a veritable production line as Rosa and I ensured at least five bowls were full of poison at any one time, shuttling again and again to various hiding places under the floor for fresh supplies.

Every ten minutes or so, Aron passed through the drying room but he could not stop for long: he had to maintain the charade of loading up the truck with sacks of sugar and flour. He could not let the bakers, gagged and bound inside, know that anything was going on inside the drying room. For that reason, we worked in silence and only occasional whispers.

The day itself had dragged but these two hours – less, of course, by the time we actually started – flew by. We were sweating through it, each of us possessed by the same fierce desire: to poison as many of those loaves as we could in the time. I counted the racks we had done and I estimated we had painted arsenic onto about three thousand.

Then Aron joined us, gesturing at his watch. It was quarter to five; the American trucks would arrive in fifteen minutes. He urged us to pack up. I began putting the unused bottles of poison back in their hiding places under the floorboards. Of
course they would be found eventually, but by then, with luck, it would be too late to matter.

I hid the last bottle and caught my hand on a spike sticking out of the floorboard I had been trying to replace. My hand began to bleed. I was pressing the board in, harder and harder, but it would not stick. And now a pool of blood was spreading.

‘Come on!’ Aron said in a loud whisper, glaring at me. It was three minutes to five. The trucks would be here any second. Yet I couldn't leave, not while blood and an uneven floorboard were calling out to be noticed, advertising the poison hidden below. If I at least removed the bottle, then, even if they looked, the Americans would find nothing. They would assume this was just damage caused by the intruders as they went about their business.