My father looks at me with terrible sympathy. His face. My father’s kind face.
It’s only a trauma if you can’t process it, I say.
Like a computer? my father says.
I have this on good authority, I say. The best shrinks on the island have delivered their opinions. If you can’t stop reliving it, it’s trauma. I don’t relive it. I just miss Vik.
Of course, he says. Different for me, you see. My father taps his head. Bad input. Faulty wiring.
So, I played the dutiful apprentice, he says, all the while gathering intelligence and identifying my marks. Within a couple of months I had contacts in seven factories at Gross-Rosen. I adhered to my training, cultivated relationships, and hoped I could lead a few of them to some minor acts of sabotage. You touch a spark to kindling, and if conditions are right, the fire spreads.
But I had no way of knowing if my efforts were doing any good. It wasn’t like a bombing raid, with quantifiable successes defined by installations neutralized stroke body count. At best, I got something anecdotal from my marks, probably just bragging. I decided I needed to get inside a factory myself to assess the situation. This was a stupid idea, and my compatriots told me as much, but I persisted.
At the Berthawerke, the Krupp factory that made howitzers, there was a Pole, originally from Lodz, who had an administrative job. A bookkeeper. He was sympathetic to the cause—he’d been the one who’d passed along the letter that had landed me in Poland in the first place. He’d told us that after the administrative purge a new SS unit had been brought in, more SS guards who’d worked for Krupp in Essen, and their Polish was bad, which I knew would give me extra cover. The foremen on the factory floor were German, so the same held for them. They only spoke basic Polish.
The bookkeeper was staunchly against my plan. It was ludicrous and he told me so. The first thing he explained to me was that the factory’s production hadn’t improved an iota since the new administration’s takeover. In fact, escape attempts were up, and the Russian POWs were running their own sabotage schemes. So what’s there for you to see? he wants to know. Whatever you need to know, he says, I’ll tell you! The Berthawerke was a crap factory, the German staff continually on report for loafing. The foremen purposely trained their underlings poorly, did whatever they could to make sure that materials and tools were mishandled. You see, if a worker showed some talent for a job, he might have become foreman himself—not a Jew, of course, but there were German prisoners, Eastern workers, the Russians. Self-preservation dictated that the foremen keep production low.
This is a fool’s errand, this bookkeeper tells me. If anything, you’ll be a danger to the prisoners. You’ll ruin whatever plans they’ve already laid.
Obviously he didn’t think much of me, and for good reason. I was only a kid, after all, and had done nothing to earn his respect. Simply setting foot on the floor, he tells me, you put the entire resistance in danger. He would yell at me: You’re a child! You have no idea what goes on in a place like this!
He could not have been more right.
About half of the German foremen also served on B-Trupps, the roving guard squads who were called on to enforce the efficiency protocols—the same efficiency protocols they didn’t want their workers to maintain. They carried truncheons, metal pipes sheathed in rubber, and they’d mercilessly beat anyone the SS told them required discipline. And among these German foremen, the bookkeeper told me, the most brutal, the most bloodthirsty, were the same ones slipping the prisoners extra rations, cigarettes. Who would call this arrangement anything but madness? What option did anyone have, with the crematoriums blazing, but to live from second to second, to play the cards you’re dealt in that very moment? And what would happen to me in such a place, if I was found out, which I assuredly would be?
I didn’t hear anything he was telling me. I was undeterred. The more the bookkeeper argued against it, the more insistent I became. The whole reason I was in Poland went back to the intercepted letter from Alfried Krupp—why wouldn’t I take the initiative and try to gather information from inside the very same factory? I insisted, out of a sense of defiance that I believed to be valorous but that was nothing more than a boy’s anger at being treated like a boy. Eventually I told the bookkeeper that I’d find a way into the factory with or without him, and he relented. It’s a miracle he didn’t have someone in the resistance kill me then. I was lucky that, in the midst of all that chaos, he’d held on to a shred of his humanity.
He said he’d get me in for the express purpose of reconnaissance. I was not to try to recruit anyone, I was not to breathe a subversive word to a soul. I agreed. They had their own prisoner-electricians at the factory, but as it happened, by and by there was some high-voltage work to be done on a milling machine and it had to be done correctly, so the master electrician from town was summoned, and as his apprentice, I went along to assist. The factory administration told us that under no circumstances were we to speak to the prisoners except to conscript them if we needed labor for the repairs.
The factory was cavernous. Furious noise and acrid air. Gray concrete and screaming machines carving steel. The first thing I saw when we walked in was a beating, a boy, a teenager, who’d fallen asleep at an
