Black Cross

“My decision is made.”

Jonas turned to Rachel. “Two minutes,” he said.

Rachel hesitated, as if he might say something else, might somehow offer more hope. But he didn’t. She stood up slowly and walked over to the corner bunk where her children slept.

Avram laid his hand on his son’s knee. “Come,” he said. “Let us see what the women have decided.”

“Wait a moment,” Jonas said. “We have a problem. The women can’t move to the E-Block with that sentry at the block gate.”

Avram squeezed his son’s knee. “I know what must be done. Let us see what they have decided.”

41

One hundred and fifty miles west of Rostock, the RAF Pathfinder force turned southeast toward Magdeburg. But as the last of the Lancasters of the 300-bomber Main Force moved into position behind them, the twelve Mosquitoes of the Special Duties Squadron continued eastward.

In the cockpit of the lead Mosquito, Squadron Leader Harry Sumner spoke to his navigator, who was crowded into the seat behind his right shoulder. “Going to max speed, Jacobs. Strict radio silence from here out. Make a visual check to be sure everyone’s with us.”

“Right.”

Sumner put his hand affectionately on the throttles. The De Havilland Mosquito had turned out to be the miracle bomber of the war. Built wholly of plywood for peacetime air racing, the “Mossy” carried no defensive armament, relying on its tremendous speed to avoid confrontation. It could cruise to Germany at 265 miles per hour with a full bombload, then accelerate to 360 to evade even the best Luftwaffe night fighters. When Harry Sumner went to max speed, the Merlin engines roared like lions loosed from cages.

“Everyone still there, Jacobs?”

“Right with us, sir,” said the navigator.

“H₂S radar working?”

“So far.”

“Let’s find that bloody river.”

Rachel Jansen knelt beside the prison bunk and looked down at her two sleeping children. They lay side by side, impossibly small and vulnerable, their faces placid above the tatty prison blanket. For two days and nights she had prayed for and dreaded this moment. There was no way to make a just choice, or even a logical one. It was like being asked which eye one would prefer to have plucked out.

She tried in vain to block out the memories that tortured her: Marcus’s face after seeing the babies for the first time, especially Hannah, who had been born in the attic in Amsterdam; the hours Rachel had simply stared at the tops of their little heads while they suckled at her breasts, weeping with a rapturous awareness of mortality that closed the throat and made the skin prickle with heat—

Stop! she told herself. You must choose!

Her first instinct was to send Jan with the shoemaker’s son. It was him she had feared for most these last two weeks. But now it appeared that Klaus Brandt was going to die. The danger would be equal for both children after that. Rachel thought briefly of Marcus; if her husband were still alive, he would choose Jan. Continuation of the family name, he would say sternly. Yet Rachel felt little obligation to the Jansen name. Marcus was dead. A blade of guilt pierced her when she thought of his father dying beside her in the E-Block, but she drove the image from her mind.

Gazing down at the children’s faces, Rachel simply stopped trying to decide. She laid a hand on Jan’s forehead. Three years old. Three years old and already one of the last survivors of his generation. It was impossible to comprehend. Yet it was reality. Hannah’s second birthday had passed while she rode in a stifling cattle car full of sick and dying Jews. Rachel remembered wrapping the little dreidl in straw and giving it to her like a present. Hannah instantly recognized the old toy, but everyone had pretended it was a new and priceless treasure.

Rachel felt gooseflesh rise under her burlap shift. She had always felt a preternatural sense of peace when she looked at her daughter. It was almost like looking at herself. Not a mirror image, but rather a reflection in water, as if an imaginative and flattering artist had rendered Rachel as a child, widening her eyes, making her mouth fuller, her forehead a little higher. And every word Hannah said, each question she asked, bespoke Rachel’s own curiosity. Jan was like Marcus: reserved, a little gentleman.

Rachel started as the voice of Avram Stern cut through the dark. Her time was running out. For an instant she actually considered taking the dreidl from her pocket and spinning the top on the rough floorboards. She could assign two of its four Hebrew letters to Jan, two to Hannah, and let God decide. But she did not do this. Even God had no place in this decision.

With that thought, Rachel suddenly understood exactly who and where she was. She was not like the mother of Moses, who had set her infant son adrift in an ark of bulrushes to save him from the soldiers of Pharaoh. She was a woman trapped on an island inhabited by a doomed race, an island sinking rapidly into the sea. She had the chance to send one child out upon that sea — an unfinished message in a bottle — her only message to the world.

She pulled back the prison blanket and lifted her baby to her breast.

Ariel Weitz was very pleased with himself. He had made a great deal of mischief in the last forty minutes, and every second had given him a warm and wicked satisfaction. During his years at Totenhausen, Weitz had managed to acquire keys to nearly every door in the camp. Some had been given to him by the SS to facilitate his daily tasks. Others he had stolen.

One key opened a storeroom at the back of the headquarters building, which housed the overflow from the main camp arsenal. From this storeroom he had removed six potato-masher grenades, two land mines and a submachine gun, all of which he packed into a crate marked SULFADIAZINE. He carried this crate to the morgue in the hospital basement and with another key opened the SS bomb shelter. A long string of hanging light bulbs revealed a ramp descending at a shallow angle into a tunnel that ran fifty meters underground and then up to a second entrance in one of the SS barracks. The tunnel was lined with musty shelves and benches.

With a mine in one hand and two grenades in the other, Weitz had scampered along the tunnel until he reached the barracks entrance. Just inside the door, square in the middle of the tunnel, he set the land mine on the floor and armed it. Then he took the two grenades and, using some string from his pockets, stretched tripwires across the tunnel and anchored them to the shelves. When pulled taut by panicked legs, they would detonate the potato-mashers and fill the tunnel with a hurricane of shrapnel. On the way back to the morgue, Weitz unscrewed every light bulb in the tunnel, cackling softly while he did it.

He had booby-trapped the morgue entrance in exactly the same way as the barracks entrance, and as a final touch unscrewed every light bulb in the morgue. Any SS men who managed to find their way to the bomb shelter entrance would have little chance of seeing the explosives that were about to kill them.

Yes, he was quite pleased with himself.

“Your time is up!” Avram told the women. He stood with his back to the barracks door, his son beside him. “You cannot decide not to decide. To do that is to condemn everyone.”

Once again the Frenchwoman stood up and gestured fiercely. “I say it again! No one here can choose fairly.”

Avram took a step toward her. “I can choose fairly,” he said.

“You!” she cried. “Your own son is the one who has come to kill us. Of course you will be saved.”

“Am I not a man? The E-Block will be full of women and children. I will be with the other men during the attack. Thus, I alone among you can choose fairly.”

The Frenchwoman looked incredulous. “You will die with the others?”

“If that is our fate. Now, please listen to me.”

The old woman who had likened the E-Block to a lifeboat got to her feet and pointed at the Frenchwoman.