The One Man Read online

  “Because you bought us third-class tickets.” She had nodded, her voice no stronger than a whisper.

  “It was all I could afford. I didn’t have a teaching position yet,” he had explained to Lucy, as the cars rocked back and forth. “In retrospect, doesn’t seem quite so bad now, does it?” he had said to Marte with a laugh.

  “Your father always knows how to turn a failed experiment into a life lesson,” Marte had joked to Lucy.

  Then she had let her head fall against him and coughed. It made the time go by.

  On the platform now, there was shouting everywhere, dogs barking. Lights being flashed. In the background, Alfred could see guards with submachine guns. Black-clad guards were blowing shrill whistles and herding everyone around.

  “This way! Over here. Leave your things where they are! They’ll be taken care of.”

  These past months, Alfred had grown to detest the French guards at Vittel, but now the French were no longer around, and the sense quickly set in that what they knew before would seem like a fond memory compared to what they faced now.

  “Stay together,” he said, helping Marte amid the surging crowd. “At least we’re off that godforsaken train. Look…” He pointed upward to letters forming an arch high above the gate.

  “What does it say, Papa?” Lucy asked. It was in German.

  “Work will set you free. See, you have to get strong again, Marte. If we work here, we will be safe. You’ll see.”

  She coughed and nodded and, jostled by the bustling throng, reached down for her bag.

  “Here…” Alfred took it from her. “Let me help you.”

  As the cars cleared, everyone huddled together for a time, mothers holding their children’s hands, people comforting the elderly, not sure what was next. They’d all heard the rumors of these dark and terrible places where no one was ever heard from again. Suddenly, to their amazement, the sounds of music started up. An orchestra playing. How could that be? It was Schubert. Alfred was certain. He’d heard it played in Prague at the Rudolfinum Hall.

  “Schubert’s Violin Concerto in D Major,” someone confirmed.

  “See, they even have an orchestra here.” Alfred put his arm around Marte. “What do you think, Lucy?” He tried to sound upbeat. “It can’t be so bad.”

  “This way! This way!” Black-clad guards with SS markings elbowed through the crowd. “Women and their children form over here. All men, even fathers”—one pointed the other direction—“over there. Don’t worry, it’s just for processing. You’ll all be reunited soon.”

  “We should try and stay together,” Alfred said, picking up both their suitcases and squeezing his briefcase under his arm.

  “You there!” A large guard in a black SS cap jostled him. “You women and children to the left. You over here.”

  “Meine frau ist nicht gut.” Alfred appealed to him in German. “She’s sick. She needs care.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll be well taken care of here. You’ll see her soon. Everyone will be happy. Just leave all your belongings.”

  A large pile of luggage and satchels had formed on the platform, like that of a tour group awaiting transportation.

  “But how will we find them?” a woman in a fur wrap asked. “How will anyone know whose is whose?”

  “Don’t worry, it will all be worked out.” The German officer smiled politely. “Now, just go, quick, there, double time … You two as well…”

  Amid the people crisscrossing, the dogs barking, and officers herding everyone around, Alfred noticed a handful of people in blue and gray candy-striped uniforms and tiny caps weaving through the crowd, taking people’s abandoned luggage and rucksacks and throwing them onto a rapidly growing pile. Hunched like downtrodden workers and rail thin, they avoided direct eye contact with the new arrivals as they went about their jobs, though one’s gaze seemed to land on Alfred’s. His gaunt, dark features, shaved head, and sunken eyes with a kind of soullessness in them seemed to tell a different story about what life was like here.

  “Women and children must go here! Schnellen! Quick!” a German barked, grabbing Marte and Lucy by the arms and dragging them away. In a second they had been separated from Alfred, pushed on by the throng.

  “Marte!” Alfred lunged after them. “Lucy!”

  “Alfred!” his wife answered him, his name drowning into the din of shouting and wails as she desperately tried to grasp hold of him.

  “Papa!” Lucy cried out. “I’m over here!”

  Alfred dropped his cases and tried to make his way to them, fear lighting up in him as they were being pushed away. “Please, I need to get to my wife and daughter. I—”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine. You’ll see them soon,” an SS officer interceded. He pointed to the other direction. “You, over there.”

  “I’m sure I will see you both soon,” Alfred called after them. “Be strong. I will find a way to contact you.”

  “I love you, Alfred!” Marte called out. Through the dark sea of the crowd, he managed to catch a last, plea-filled glance, and in her surrendering eyes he saw a kind of finality he had never seen before.

  He waved, giving them both a hopeful smile though his heart was suddenly overrun with sadness and terror and the feeling that he might never see them again. “I love you both, too.”

  And then they were gone.

  All around, on the platform, many were making their last, tearful goodbyes and futile pleas. “Be safe!” “I will see you soon.” “Watch over our son,” they would tell one another. “Don’t worry, I will.” The guards told the men to leave their valises and all belongings. Alfred clutched his briefcase. One of the candy-striped prisoners brushed into him and went to take it from him.

  “No.” Alfred grasped onto it tighter. “These are my books. My formulas.”

  “Don’t resist,” the prisoner said under his breath. “They’ll shoot you.”

  “No, I won’t let them go,” Alfred said, tightening his arms around it.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t be needing any formulas here, old man.” A German officer came up with a grin of amusement. “There’s only one formula here, and you’ll learn it fast, I promise.”

  “I’m a physicist. This is all my research. My life’s work, Herr Obersturmführer,” Alfred said, observing his rank.

  “This is now your work,” the officer said, and motioned to the prisoners hurling their belongings onto a pile. The officer tried to take the case from Alfred’s hands. “Do it well and maybe you’ll last. Your German is quite good.” He pointed to a line. “Go over there.”

  “Please…” Alfred resisted even further. “No.”

  In a flash, the German’s politeness morphed into something completely different. “Did you not hear me, I said, let go, Jew!” He reached in his holster and pulled out a Luger. “Or would you rather your stay here be short-lived?”

  “Give it here. Please,” the prisoner begged, with what looked like a dire warning in his eyes.

  Alfred could see the rage and anger stiffen in the German officer’s eyes and neck, knowing that if he resisted even seconds longer he would be dropped right here on the tracks, the way the old rabbi and his wife had been shot back in Vittel. He had to stay alive, if only for Marte and Lucy’s sake. He had to see them again.

  Reluctantly, he let go.

  “Now get over there.” The German pushed him toward the line of younger men assembling. “Your German will come in handy.” He blew his whistle and moved on to someone else.

  Alfred watched as the prisoner took his leather case and flung it onto the mountain of bags and belongings that was growing by the minute. In horror, he saw the clasp become undone, and pages and pages of his work—equations, formulas, research for papers he had written for Academic Scientifica and the Zeitschrift für Physik, the toil of twenty years—slowly slide out of the case and scatter like debris over the mounting pile of bags, rucksacks, children’s toys and dolls, until they disappeared—every page, like bodies hurle
d indifferently into a mass grave and then covered over by the next.

  If only they knew what that was …

  He was handed a uniform and told to march to a processing building and change his clothes. Over the ubiquitous wailing on the platform and the desperate last goodbyes and shouts of “I love you!” and “Stay strong,” Alfred thought he heard his name. He spun around, his heart springing up with hope. “Marte!”

  But it was likely only another person shouting for someone else. He searched the crowd for one last look at his girls, but they were gone. Then he was pushed along in the throng. Twenty-eight years … he said to himself. In all that time, they rarely spent a day apart. She had typed every one of his papers and listened to hundreds of his talks in advance, correcting his syntax and cadence. She made him cakes and meat pies, and every Thursday he came home with flowers from the market on King Stanisław Street on his walk back from the university. A panic rose up in him that he would never see her again. Neither of them. That they would all die in this place. He prayed they would be all right. Up ahead, he saw the line he was in being separated into two new ones. He sensed that in one he would live and in the other he would die. But it was too late for fear now, or for prayers.

  Looking back and watching his papers scatter like dead leaves on that pile of bags and people’s belongings, the small part of him that was still even capable of fear or hope felt nothing.

  It had already died.

  SEVEN

  LATE APRIL, THREE MONTHS LATER

  LISBON

  A black Opel pulled up to the curb at the Lisbon airport, and Peter Strauss climbed into the backseat, ducking out of the rain.

  He was not wearing his officer’s cap, nor, beneath his raincoat, his army captain’s uniform. Only a sport jacket with flannel trousers, rumpled from the two-hour flight in from London. With his valise and leather briefcase, he might have been any businessman arriving who was trying to profit from the war, selling steel or food or buying Portuguese tungsten, as Lisbon was one of the last open and thriving centers of commerce in Europe during the war.

  “Captain Strauss,” the Swiss-born driver who worked with the War Refugee Committee greeted him, taking his bags. “I know you’ve had a long trip. Would you like to stop off at the hotel and freshen up?”

  “Thanks,” Strauss replied. He’d caught a diplomatic night flight to London, then spent two days absorbed with secret phone calls and cables in order to set up the meeting he was here to be part of. “But I’d just as soon get going if it’s all the same.”

  “Very good.” The driver put Strauss’s bag in the front and climbed in behind the wheel. “Everyone’s waiting. Have you ever been to Estoril?”

  In about forty minutes, they reached the coast and arrived at the posh seaside resort, home to the glamorous casino where the displaced royalty of Europe wagered for exit visas in evening attire, mingling with British and German spies. The car came to a stop in front of a tile-roofed, two-story home facing the sea behind a high iron gate and a stucco outer wall: 114 Rua do Mare. The villa could have belonged to any well-heeled Portuguese family seeking seclusion and a pleasing view of the sea, but, in fact, it was the summer retreat of the Catholic archbishop. The high walls and remote location, far away from the spy nests in Lisbon and before the summer crowds, made it the ideal location for the men Strauss had flown to meet.

  The front gate opened and the Opel came to a stop in the courtyard. A large, Florentine-styled fountain stood in the center. Someone came out to meet him, a short, neatly tailored man with a goatee who introduced himself as Ricardo Oliva, from the International Refugee Committee, and escorted Strauss down a vaulted loggia into the main house. In a large room dominated by a huge stone fireplace and a candled chandelier, a small crowd was waiting for him. The first to greet him was the archbishop’s adjunct, a balding man of about fifty in a black frock and crucifix, who introduced himself as Monsignor Correa.

  “Thank you for arranging this,” Strauss said, shaking the clergyman’s hand. “And please convey my government’s thanks to His Eminence for offering the privacy of his home.”

  “Privacy is the only weapon we have today,” the monsignor said, nodding, “but soon, it is our hope that such vile business be seen by the world and out in the light of day. In fact, there are some things more pressing than political or religious neutrality. Even in the midst of war.”

  “That is our hope too,” Strauss said to him.

  He went around the room and met various representatives from the refugee groups from Bern and Stockholm, two bearded Orthodox rabbis who spoke no English and whom Strauss greeted with the traditional Hebrew “Shalom, rebi,” and finally Alexander Katzner of the Jewish World Congress, whose efforts in trying to smuggle Jews out of occupied territory was well known back home. They all seemed to meet Strauss with great anticipation.

  “We are glad you’re here.” Katzner greeted him warmly. “It is time that the world see what we’ve known has been going on for some time.”

  “Your president must now see,” one of the refugee committee representatives said, “what we’ve been facing. And then act.”

  “Please, please … Leave our guest to get his bearings. Would you care for something to eat, Captain?” Monsignor Correa took Strauss by the elbow. “I know it’s been a long trip.”

  Strauss thanked him but politely declined. “I’m eager to get going, if it’s all the same.”

  “By all means. I understand. This way, then…” The monsignor opened an adjacent double door and led Strauss into a spacious, formal dining room. “They are waiting for you in here.”

  Seated at the long, wooden table with two large, gold candelabras in the center were Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler.

  * * *

  The two men were dark and thin, dressed in suits that seemed way too baggy, and remained seated as everyone came in the room. They had been out of the camp for only a few weeks and their hair was only beginning to grow in. Wetzler, whom Strauss recognized from photographs, had a small mustache. His Czech compatriot, Vrba, was smoking, seemingly nervously, and remained seated. A Czech member of the War Refugee Committee acted as translator.

  First, Strauss shook their hands and congratulated them on their brave escape. “You both showed remarkable courage. All the world owes you a great debt.” A cup of black coffee was put in front of him with a piece of hard sugar.

  The Czech translated and the two men nodded, mildly enthusiastic.

  “This is their report,” Katzner, of the Jewish World Congress, said, pushing a thick sheaf of papers in front of Strauss. “But I think you are already familiar with the important details. For a long time it’s been no secret what’s been going on. What everyone here wants to know is, what is the delay with a response? This is not war the Nazis are waging against us. It’s murder.”

  “I’m a military man, not a diplomat,” Strauss said, “but I want to assure you that even the president has been made aware.”

  “You are a Jew yourself, are you not?” a Swede from the refugee board inquired of him.

  Strauss nodded. “Yes.”

  “So you must see this clearer than anyone. Thousands upon thousands are dying every day. How does your government not act?”

  “The U.S. government is interested in all lives threatened under the Nazi regime,” Strauss said, though the words sat like an undigested piece of meat in his gut and had a hollow ring. It was clear the people here looked on Strauss’s visit as a sign that the kind of military response they were all pleading for would soon follow. That the United States, home to the most Jews in the world outside of Europe, would send in an air strike against the camps or bomb the train tracks leading in. That his visit brought long-sought hope at last from the Allies.

  But that wasn’t why he was here.

  Nodding almost apologetically, Strauss turned to Vrba and Wetzler. He reached in his briefcase and took out a folder. “There is a photograph I’d like to show you both.” The Czech translated
his words. Strauss took out an eight-by-ten photograph and slid it across the table. First to Rudolf Vrba, who took a sideways glance at it. “Do you recognize this man?”

  As the Czech translated, the escapee looked at Strauss without giving any recognizable sign.

  “At the camp,” Strauss explained further. “Have you seen him? Is he there?”

  Vrba slowly picked up the photograph of Alfred Mendl.

  Vrba had short dark hair, a flat nose, and sharp, low eyebrows. His mouth had an upward curve on one side, giving him an almost impish quality. While Strauss waited, he took a long look. Finally Vrba looked back at him.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head, speaking in halting English.

  Strauss felt a stab of disappointment. This was his last hope. Many people’s last hope. A year’s work hung in the balance. He passed the photo over to Wetzler. He had more of a studious face, with a high forehead and bushy eyebrows. He studied the photograph for a long time, but then slid it back across the table with kind of an indifferent shrug.

  “Please,” Strauss urged him. “Look at it again. It’s important.”

  Wetzler glanced at it again almost perfunctorily and then reached onto the table for a Portuguese cigarette. As he did so, his sleeve bunched up and Strauss’s eyes were drawn to the bluish numbers written into the underside of the escapee’s wrist. Wetzler lit the cigarette and took a drag. Then he spoke for a long time in Czech, never once taking his eyes off Strauss.

  “Mr. Wetzler wants to know…” the Czech finally translated, “what has this man done that deserves your attention above all others? Hundreds of innocent people die every day. Women, children. As soon as they get off the trains they are stripped of the possessions and gassed. They are all good people…” Wetzler spoke quickly, and the translator did his best to keep up. “They all lead worthwhile lives. Who is this man, that you travel all this way and need to know if he is there?”