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Henrik did not believe Neils. There were no death camps, no doomsday weapons, no “final solution” to eliminate the Jews. It was all just nationalistic rhetoric and propaganda. Hitler was just another statesman like Roosevelt or Churchill, Mussolini or Stalin. They were all the same. Politicians. They shook hands, kissed babies and drank expensive liquor. 45 days? Rubbish. The war would end, eventually. Esther and her family would return back to Holland and then he would find her.
The Jacobs family might have to start over, but Henrik would help them. And then, when the dust had settled and the world had returned to normal, he would marry Esther. But if he really believed this, then why was he risking his life by breaking into a top-secret weapons facility in the dead of night?
What else could he do?
Henrik waited for the guard to finish his cigarette before cracking him on the head with his father’s Luger. It was a professional courtesy. And then he slipped through the gate and into the compound. The weapons arsenals at Peenemunde were heavily guarded, and any attempt to break into the hangars that housed them would be foolhardy at the very least.
But Henrik wasn’t here for that.
He didn’t care about von Braun’s dreaded vengeance weapons, the V-1 robot plane and the V-2 rocket, if it even worked. And he especially didn’t care about the V-3 super cannon. If Hitler wanted to shoot his little toys over the English Channel at London, then Henrik wished him Godspeed. Bomb London into dust for all he cared. Henrik had other concerns.
He watched the seconds count down on his Swiss wristwatch. 3—2—1. The lights in the compound flickered and then went out, draping the field in the pitch darkness of a moonless night. Peenemunde was heavily guarded, but like all modern industrial facilities it needed power. Two miles away and hardly guarded at all was the power plant—Peenemunde’s Achilles heel.
Henrik was able to waltz into the plant and reset the timer for the power outflow without the night staff even asking his name, never mind raising an alarm. All it took was a borrowed hardhat and a clipboard from the maintenance hut. Sure, somebody would eventually find the problem and reset the clock, but at least Henrik would have the time he needed, and he didn’t even have to kill anyone.
There were startled voices coming from the guard posts all around the camp and a few handheld flashlights came on, but their beams were weak and far away. Now was the time to move. Henrik sprinted across the open field towards the thinly guarded prisoner barracks. In the pitch dark, Henrik moved like a wraith. An unlucky guard rounded the first barracks just as Henrik approached. He saw only a black shape like a giant bat before Henrik caught him with a flying front kick.
The guard, who couldn’t have been a day over sixteen, was dazed but not out. Before he could call for help, Henrik wrapped his arm around the boy’s neck and choked him into unconsciousness.
So far, Henrik had been lucky. But soon the lights would come back on and the unconscious guards would be discovered. He didn’t have much time.
Henrik dragged the young guard under the edge of the first barracks and searched his body for keys. There were more voices coming from in front of the barracks. They were calling out the name “Hessing.” Henrik saw a flashlight beam fan the corner of the barracks not two feet away. He pressed his body up against the wall and held his breath. After a tense moment, the talking stopped and the guards moved on. Henrik let out a quiet sigh.
He found a ring of keys in the guard’s upper jacket pocket and quietly inched towards the front of the barracks. He peeked warily around the corner, but no one was there. The guards were probably searching for poor Hessing by one of the other barracks. Henrik could see now in the dim starlight that there were at least ten barracks in the compound, each of them quite possibly housing up to a hundred prisoners. Henrik would never be able to search them all.
It seemed like a good plan last night when he lay awake sketching out the details in his mind’s eye. Take out the power. Break into the prisoner camp. Save Esther and her family. And escape. Did he really think it would be that easy? How would he find her in time? How did he even know this was the right camp? There were hundreds of letters on the map he’d memorized. What about BB and H and R and A1, 2, 3? It all seemed so pointless.
Henrik approached the door with the key ring. Ten barracks. Ten keys. At least that made sense. Unfortunately, none of the keys were marked in any discernible way. He would have to try them all, one at a time. The lock opened with the third key, but as he opened the door, a horrible stench hit him like a right upper cut. He fell back, nearly overcome by nausea. What was that rancid smell? Were they storing dead bodies? Henrik covered his nose and looked inside. There were dark shapes, moving. He heard hushed voices.
“Esther?” he called, not daring to lift his voice above a whisper. “I’m looking for Esther Jacobs?” There was no answer. They were probably afraid, thinking he was a German guard. Henrik decided to switch to Dutch. “Is Esther or Sarah Jacobs in here?”
“No. There are no women here,” a man’s voice answered back in Dutch.
“I think there’s a Jacobs in number 7,” another voice said, perhaps sensing that the man outside the barracks was no German soldier. “Have the allies arrived?”
“Are you here to save us?” the first voice chimed in with hope.
Excited voices followed this exclamation. Henrik became suddenly nervous. If he let these men loose now, an alarm would most certainly be sounded and then he’d never have a chance to search the other barracks. They would never escape anyways, not with the barbed wire and armed guard posts around the entire compound. They would probably be shot.
“Halt! Go back to bed before I shoot you myself,” Henrik blasted back in angry German. The prisoners fell silent and Henrik reluctantly closed the barracks’ door and locked it. He could hear dogs barking in the distance. Had they found the guard he’d waylaid at the gate? He would have to hurry.
He sprinted down the row of wooden barracks counting off each as he went. There were probably numbers on the doors, but he could not see them in the dark. He would have to hope that he got the order right. Just as he reached the seventh barracks, the power came back on and the entire camp was ablaze with light. Two guards appeared next to the barracks with flashlights in their hands and startled looks on their faces.
“What is the meaning of this?” Henrik barked angrily, still puffing from his short sprint down the row of barracks. “Why aren’t you at your posts?”
The two guards, both lieutenants, were taken completely off guard and speechless. A Luftwaffe colonel’s uniform, especially one decorated with shiny bronze medals of valor from the First World War, had that effect on most junior officers. At first, Henrik had been reluctant to steal his father’s uniform for this foolhardy clandestine mission, but now he was glad he had it. His own SS lieutenant’s uniform would have been too identifiable and much less imposing. He only had one medal, whereas his father had four.
“The black out?” said the fatter of the two lieutenants after a lengthy pause.
“Schweinhundt!” Henrik scolded, his voice a perfect imitation of his father’s deep-jowl grunt. “I know there was a black out. Some of the prisoners have escaped. Now open this door and be quick about it.”
The guards spared a quick glance at each other. “But we don’t have the keys. Corporal Hessing has gone missing,” the thinner guard explained shyly.
“Missing?” Henrik folded his arms and glared at the lieutenants with the same steady gaze that had so terrified him as a child. Henrik pulled Hessing’s key ring out of his pocket. “Use mine, if you must,” he said with an impatient frown.
The guards jumped to it, and if they were at all bewildered that a strange Luftwaffe colonel was roaming their compound during a black out at two in the morning, they didn’t show it. In seconds, they’d found the right key and the door was
open. Henrik looked up to see that it was indeed barracks number 7 and then entered. The same rancid odor assaulted his nostrils. He covered his nose and mouth and scanned the rows of bunks. A string of dull electric lights ran down the ceiling rafters, but the room was too crowded to pick out individual faces. His first estimate about the number of prisoners in each barracks was apparently quite far from the mark. There must have been over two hundred prisoners crammed into this little building, their bunks stacked on top of one another like hens’ cages.
“Stand up!” Henrik commanded in German, and immediately regretted it. The desiccated prisoners struggled slowly to their feet. Some didn’t move at all, their rotting bodies just empty shells. Traces of human filth and decay were everywhere. How could men treat other men this way? This wasn’t war. It was bestial, malevolent insanity. The two lieutenants, eager to appease the Luftwaffe colonel, set about rousing the slower, weaker prisoners with violent blows from black, wooden clubs that had previously hung from their belts. The prisoners were little more than human skeletons, raggedly dressed in black and white striped pajamas, and all men. Henrik’s last hope of finding Esther tonight was rapidly vanishing. But he had to play out his cards.
“Is there a Jacobs in this room?” Henrik asked loudly, albeit with less enthusiasm than before.
“Jacobs, step forward,” the guards bellowed angrily, smashing their clubs against the rickety bunks. An old man staggered slowly into the middle of the room. Henrik did not recognize him at first, and then he thought perhaps it was the old Rabbi. But no, the Rabbi was shorter. This man was about the same height as Esther’s father, but he was bald and shrunken like a raisin dried in the sun too long.
Henrik approached the old man slowly. He looked up and Henrik saw at once the recognition in his bulging, yellow eyes. It was Eli Jacobs, Esther’s father, sick, dying, only a shell of a man, a mere shadow of the intelligent businessman and professor he used to be. He mouthed Henrik’s name, but thankfully no sound escaped his lips.
“Guards, leave us. I wish to question this man alone.”
“But colonel?”
“Leave us!”
The lieutenants looked at each other with obvious concern and then saluted. “Yes, colonel. Heil Hitler.” The barracks door closed behind them and Eli fell to his knees. Henrik caught him in his arms, kneeling down beside him.
“Mr. Jacobs,” he whispered into the man’s ear, “how did this . . . ? What did they do to you?”
“So it is you,” Eli’s voice was less than a whisper. Henrik had to put his ear right up against the man’s wrinkled lips just to hear him. “And now you’re a colonel. You really do get around.” Eli’s laugh turned into a heart-wrenching cough. Henrik didn’t know what to say. Eli’s body had no weight to it. Henrik felt like he was holding a ghost.
“Where’s Esther?” he asked vainly. Eli shook his head. His eyes closed. And then, as if the mere mention of her name was torture to him, sobs wracked his body.
“I have not seen Esther or Sarah since they took us off the train in Westerbork. Where did they take them? Please, you must find my babies.” Eli grabbed Henrik’s arm with alarming desperation. “Henrik, you are a good man. I know you are. Please, you must find them.”
“I will,” he said, trying to console the dying man, although he had no idea now where to look for them. “But first I’m going to get you out of here.” He struggled to lift Eli up to his feet. Eli groaned. Beneath Eli’s threadbare shirt, Henrik could feel indentations. The man’s ribs were broken. He wasn’t going anywhere. The other prisoners looked on with morbid fascination. This was a drama they had not witnessed before—a German colonel cradling a dying Jew.
“We work in the day with only enough food to keep us alive. At first it was good. We built the factory, assembled their weapons of death. Why would God allow such evil men to have so much power? Oh why did we help them? But we were cowards and we wanted to live. It was dangerous work. Some of us died in horrible accidents, explosions, fires, but they fed us and gave us new clothes.” Eli’s voice seemed to grow stronger, building with the passion of his story.
“We are all engineers, scientists. I told the guards my father was a physics teacher so they let him stay with us. I thought I could keep him alive until the end of the war. But then things changed. They moved the factory underground, some secret place in the Harz Mountains. They stopped mass-producing rockets at Peenemunde. They didn’t need our knowledge anymore. The professor could no longer protect us. They stopped feeding us, stopped our exercise and letting us use the latrines. We waste away, wallowing like pigs in our own piss and filth. We dig bunkers, do the work of animals, and they treat us like animals, worse than animals. And when we can no longer work, they ship us off to Auschwitz.”
“The Rabbi?” Henrik asked. “Where is he now? In another barracks?”
Eli shook his head. “My father, the old Rabbi, fell ill and was too sick to lift a shovel. He was one of the first to go to Auschwitz, may God receive him.”
Henrik remembered the symbols A1, A2 and A3 on his map. “Auschwitz? What is that?”
“The death camp. We hear stories only. The guards like to taunt us, threaten us with stories of mass executions, gas showers and ovens. Horrible. Horrible.”
Eli fell silent. He had spent the last of his energy. He looked up at Henrik with a mask of death. “Henrik, my son. You must find my daughters.”
“Yes, yes. I will.” Henrik’s eyes filled with tears. He could not stop them now. It was all true—the slave labor, the death camps, the vengeance weapons. He had waited too long. He didn’t have 45 days to find Esther. She was probably dead already. He hated his countrymen for what they had done to this kind man. He hated the Nazis, the Gestapo, the SS. He hated the Fuhrer. But most of all, he hated himself for being a German and not stopping this madness before it was too late.
“I’ll get you out of here if I have to carry you,” Henrik said, wiping the tears from his cheeks. He tried to lift Eli again, but the old man groaned horribly. He was in too much pain to be moved.
“No, Henrik. It is too late for me. But there is something you can do.”
“Yes, father. Anything.”
“You can kill me.”
Henrik looked at Eli in horror. He was Esther’s father. He might have been his father-in-law, if there had not been a war, if the world had not gone insane. Henrik felt his chest constrict. He couldn’t breath. The guards were knocking at the door. They were getting nervous. This was taking too long.
“Please, Henrik. You are a good man. You must do it. You must kill me.”
“Kill him,” another prisoner urged from behind him. “He’s suffering. You must not let him suffer. You don’t know what they do.”
“I can’t.” Henrik released Eli’s body and he fell limply to the filthy floor. The guards had opened the door. They were coming down the aisle.
“Please, Henrik. You must do it now.”
“Kill him.” More ghostly voices. “Kill him.”
“Silence!” Henrik shouted. The guards came running, their clubs drawn. They must have heard the chants growing and sensed danger. Henrik held up his hand. “I’m all right. This is not the Jew I am looking for. He knows nothing. Give me my keys.” Henrik held out his hand and one of the lieutenants gave him Hessing’s key ring. “Wait here,” Henrik said gruffly. The guards obeyed, with puzzled looks on their faces, while Henrik walked down to the barracks door and promptly locked them inside.
The Luftwaffe colonel’s uniform worked its magic one more time on the guard at the south entrance to the compound and Henrik made good his escape. A few minutes later, young Hessing roused from his stupor and sounded the alarm, but by that time Henrik was well on his way to Berlin in his father’s Mercedes town car doing sixty miles an hour.
He arrived at home just before dawn. The stately country cotta
ge appeared quiet. The servants had not yet arrived to prepare breakfast and Kessler Sr. was still in his bedroom. Henrik parked the car in the garage and quietly slipped into his robe and slippers. He was just contemplating how to get his father’s uniform back in his father’s closet when there was a loud banging at the front door. Henrik parted the curtain just enough to see Heydrich’s military staff car idling in the driveway. The sun had barely risen.