Through the muddy streets, Jacob sprinted to catch up with Max, and before long they were in the vestibule of the clinic. Jacob saw Max’s look of surprise and concern as he stared at a blond-haired, blue-eyed, bespectacled gentleman sitting behind the desk. Roughly thirty years of age, Jacob guessed, the man was obviously a prisoner. He wore the requisite zebra-striped uniform and had bluish-green numbers tattooed on his left arm, though from this distance Jacob couldn’t read the numbers. Still, this was clearly not someone Max expected or wanted to see.
“May I help you?” the man behind the counter asked.
“Where’s my sister?”
“You mean Abigail? She’s your sister?”
“Yes, but who are you?”
The gentleman stood and extended his hand. “You must be Max. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“I’ve heard nothing of you,” Max replied, ignoring the man’s hand.
“I’m new. Just arrived a few days ago. They assigned me here. The name is Leclerc—Jean-Luc Leclerc—but everyone calls me Luc. It’s an honor to meet you.”
“You know Abby?” Max asked warily.
“Of course,” Luc said. “She’s been teaching me—not just about the clinic but about her friends in the camp. She told me I was likely to meet you this morning. She said you usually come around ten o’clock on Sunday mornings. We were sorry when you did not arrive.”
“Where is she now?”
“Dr. Mengele needed some supplies, scalpels and things,” Luc explained. “Abby volunteered to make the delivery. I offered to do it myself. I didn’t want her to be out in the rain. But she said no. She said I was new, and she was afraid I might get lost. She told me to wait here, so that’s what I’m doing.”
“How long has she been gone?” Max asked.
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen,” Luc said. “I suspect she’ll be back at any moment.”
Max mumbled something, then grabbed Jacob by the arm and began leading him toward the back of the clinic. “Are the doctors in?”
Luc shook his head. “They’re at lunch. May I help you?”
“No,” Max said. “We’ll wait for Abby back here. Make certain we are not disturbed. We have important business to discuss.”
When they got to the last exam room, Max shut the door. “Sit down,” he ordered, and when Jacob complied, Max started pacing the room. “First, do not ever get sick. Do you understand me? Ever.”
“Why not?”
“Good, then we’re clear on that,” Max said. “Second, don’t ever come into this clinic unless you’re with me. Ever. Not if you have a cold. Not if you have the flu. Not if you’ve got dysentery. Not if you’ve got bedbugs or lice. Not if you’ve broken your arm or lost an eye in a fight. Do . . . not . . . ever . . . come . . . here . . . without me. Got it?”
“No, I don’t,” Jacob replied. “What in the world are you—?”
“Good, then we’re clear on that, too,” Max said, cutting Jacob off in midsentence. “Third, whatever friends you make—real friends, people you care about—warn them not to ever come here either. I mean, if they get assigned here to work, that’s fine. But under no circumstances must you let a true friend come here to be treated. Enemies? Sure. Mere acquaintances? Fine. But not friends.”
Jacob still had no idea was Max was talking about. The place looked clean and orderly enough. There were dozens of nicely made beds, with clean sheets and fresh pillows. There were locked cabinets filled with pharmaceuticals of all kinds. There were various pieces of medical equipment and a friendly-enough man at the front desk. What exactly was the problem? He tried to ask again, but Max refused to elaborate, except to say that Jacob should never accept an invitation to meet with Dr. Mengele under any circumstances.
“Why not?” Jacob asked.
But Max merely replied, “If you’re ordered to see Mengele, run for the fences.”
And that was that. Then Max leaned forward, lowered his voice, and turned to their real business at hand.
“Jacob, can you keep a secret?” Max asked, his eyes searching Jacob’s for any sign of hesitancy or deceit.
Jacob nodded and leaned forward a bit as well.
“Things are about to change around here,” Max said.
“How so?”
“Leszek is leaving tonight.”
“Leaving?” Jacob asked. “What do you mean, leaving?”
“Escaping,” Max said in a voice barely above a whisper.
Jacob stiffened, unable to believe what he was hearing. “How? When?” he asked.
“I don’t know the details,” Max said in a way that made Jacob believe him. “I just know it’s going to happen, and it’s going to affect us.”
“How?”
“Von Strassen and his men are going to come after us and everyone in the Canada command,” Max said. “They’re going to assume we’re in on it. We’ll definitely be interrogated. We might even be tortured.”
Jacob tensed as a new wave of fear crept over him.
“But you and I must be strong,” Max continued. “We must not talk no matter what. You see, Leszek is a captain in the Polish army. He works for Polish intelligence. He actually volunteered to get arrested and sent here so he could report on what was happening. For the last two and a half years, he’s been sending coded messages out through letters to various people. But now it’s time for him to leave.”
“Can we go too?” Jacob asked.
“I wish,” Max said. “No, we can’t go. I’m helping him pull some supplies together for his trip, but that’s it. But here’s the thing. If he gets out successfully, and if he can link back up with the Polish underground, then he’s going to tell them about everything that’s happening here in detail. He’s going to persuade the Polish Resistance and the Allies to mount an operation and come liberate us. If all goes well, we could be out of here by summer.”
Jacob was stunned by what he had just heard. Could it really be true?
Unfortunately, just at that moment, one of the doctors came back from lunch and found them chatting in the exam room. He blew a gasket. His face and ears turned beet red, and a vein in his left temple looked like it was about to explode. The doctor yelled at the both of them and ordered them to leave or face punishment. It did not seem to matter that Max was waiting for his sister. They were clearly persona non grata, and though Max was indignant, Jacob pulled him out of there for fear the doctor would call a guard and really get them in trouble.
Life was difficult enough. They didn’t need anything else, especially not today.
48
Roll call began precisely at seven o’clock that night, just as it did every night.
The storm was now directly over them. Claps of thunder rattled windows and bones. The evening air flashed and crackled with bolts of lightning. The bitterly cold spring rains did not let up but were coming down as relentlessly as anything Jacob had ever experienced. Still, every man was ordered to stand at attention, waiting for his number to be called and the signal given that they could go back to their blocks, away from the elements.
Jacob’s heart raced. At any moment, the sirens would go off as someone discovered Poczciwinski was missing. The manhunt would begin, and Poczciwinski would be on the run. Would he make it out? Could he? It was electrifying to think that Leszek was part of the Resistance, that he had been part of the underground long before coming to Auschwitz, and that he had apparently operated as such ever since arriving. That was why he had heard of Avi. That was why he had been so interested in their operation to liberate the prisoners of train 801. And that was why he had moved quickly to recruit Jacob into the Canada command. As frightened as Jacob was of the interrogation and torture that was sure to come, there was one thing he felt good about tonight. His instincts hadn’t failed him. He had thought Poczciwinski was part of the Resistance—or hoped, anyway. And it turned out he was.
Indeed, Leszek Poczciwinski wasn’t simply part of the underground. According to Max, he was a professional intellige
nce operative. He’d been recruiting people throughout the camp—people like Max, Otto, Abe, and surely others—to gather critical information about the evil that was being done in Auschwitz-Birkenau and its forty-plus satellite camps. To get word to the Allies. To persuade them to come here and crush the Nazis and liberate the prisoners. For the first time in a long time, Jacob felt hope. He didn’t have to figure out a way to escape. All he had to do was stay alive. That’s what Leszek and Max were trying to tell him. He only had to make it a little bit further, and then everything would be all right.
Roll call finished without incident. Much to Jacob’s shock, there were no sirens. There was no manhunt. Jacob ran back to his block with the others, in the vain hope of drying off before bed. He listened to Josef tell him stories about all the beautiful girls he worked with in the records office, but the whole time he was wondering what Leszek was up to and when everything would be revealed. The tension was unbearable. Jacob was desperate to get an update. Several times he considered going to Max’s block to see if he had an update, but he knew that would be unwise and could draw unneeded suspicions. So he tried to pay closer attention to what Josef was saying and not look as anxious as he felt.
Eventually Jacob excused himself to go to the latrine.
But the line ahead of him stretched on forever. More and more of the men in his bunk room were becoming ill. Over the past few days, many of them had gone to the medical clinic, and they hadn’t come back. Jacob remembered what Max had told him about staying away from that place, and he felt a chill.
At least half of Jacob’s afflicted bunkmates were vomiting and suffering from extreme diarrhea, some of it bloody, and all of it quite painful. For the past several nights Jacob could hear them groaning in the lavatory, some of them throughout the night. In the last few hours, the guy in the bunk below him had begun complaining of terrible abdominal pain. He was writhing and moaning nonstop. Others had high fevers and chills. Many of them were rapidly losing weight.
Jacob was no doctor, but he had no doubt they had contracted dysentery. Once again he was thankful he had not drunk the water from the showers on the first day. However they had gotten it, he was growing terrified of catching it himself and dying a slow, miserable death like they were. He hardly wanted to enter the latrine when it was his time. The smell alone was horrific, and since the place was rarely cleaned, much less disinfected, the chance of catching something fatal was high and growing higher.
As he wiped his hands and face, he found himself obsessed with trying to figure out how Leszek Poczciwinski was going to break free. It didn’t seem possible. How was he going to move about the camp without attracting the attention of the guards? How was he going to get to the first fence without being shot? And even when he got there, how was he going to keep from being electrocuted? And even if he could manage that, what about the German shepherds patrolling the no-man’s-land between the first and second fences? And even if he got through all those—which wasn’t humanly possible—how then would he get past the second fence, not to mention the land mines beyond? Was someone on the outside helping him? If so, who? Did he really have a realistic chance of making it? On the face of it, Jacob certainly didn’t think so.
It was Leszek, after all, who had told him that close to eight hundred prisoners had tried to escape from Auschwitz and that not a single one of them had succeeded. Why was he so sure he would be different?
The questions kept coming. Jacob desperately wanted to join his Polish friend, to at least try to break free from this terrible nightmare.
It was a selfish thought, he told himself. He knew that’s what Avi would say. It was selfish to be consumed every moment of every day with how to slip away and go live his own life in obscurity someplace where the Nazis could not find him, somewhere he could marry and have a family and settle down and have his own cabin in the woods. It was selfish to want to escape from this nightmare and leave everyone else behind.
Avi had always been thinking about others, how to help them find a job or a house or a way to escape from the Third Reich or from a train to Auschwitz. That’s who Avi was. That’s how he thought. Jacob admired him for it, but unfortunately he was cut from different cloth. He wasn’t thinking about how to help others here in the camp. He wasn’t thinking about helping anyone else escape. He was just thinking about himself. Then again, was that wrong? In circumstances such as these, was that really so terrible?
When Jacob returned to the bunk room, he was surprised to find that some of the men had received letters from spouses, family members, or friends. Some even had received small packages with food and sometimes money with which to buy cigarettes. He couldn’t help but feel a sharp pang of jealousy. He hadn’t known there was a system here for incoming mail. He hadn’t imagined that it was possible for prisoners to have any contact from the outside world. But then again, even if he had known, what would it have mattered? Who was going to write to him? Nearly everyone he knew was dead. Micah, Henri, and Jacques were—at best—on the run across Europe, fleeing the Gestapo. They weren’t going to be writing to him. No one was. Seeing other men light up at the words and small gifts sent by their loved ones made him feel worse.
At nine o’clock, another gong sounded. It was time for lights-out and utter silence. Just then, Block Senior Gruder came into their room. To Jacob’s surprise, he informed them that the next day, Monday, would be treated like a partial holiday. Morning roll call would not be until eleven o’clock, after which they would report to their regular jobs. The men knew better than to show any emotion for fear of setting Gruder off. They simply nodded and waited for the man to leave for his own private quarters.
Yet as he sat on his top bunk, Jacob’s heart leaped. Leszek Poczciwinski knew what he was doing after all. Leszek had been here long enough to know the routine and rhythms of camp life on Easter weekend and the following morning. He had to know the guards drank heavily every year on Easter and that most if not all of them would be hungover in the morning. Everyone who wasn’t drunk or hungover would be sleeping in. If Leszek had left immediately after the evening roll call was completed, he’d have at least fifteen full hours before the next roll call was taken. If his plan was solid and he had the tools he needed, this would give Leszek the time to create maximum distance between himself and the camp before anyone even noticed he was gone.
Jacob could barely sleep that night. On the one hand, he was so excited by what was happening. As he tossed and turned in the wee hours, he wondered how much more Max really knew. If he knew the whole plan or even a significant part of it, and if the plan worked and Leszek wasn’t captured and hanged on the gallows in the camp’s main square, then maybe Max would share the plan with Jacob. Maybe they could escape together.
Max had said he was helping Leszek gather supplies. Those had to be from the Canada warehouse. So he must know at least some of the plan. Jacob figured Leszek had probably acquired a backpack, foodstuffs, a flashlight and batteries, good boots and extra pairs of socks, and civilian clothes to change into before or immediately after clearing the fences. The civilian clothes were especially important. Jacob thought he might even need two sets. He wouldn’t get far in the outside world wearing zebra stripes.
On the other hand, Jacob was scared. For Leszek, for Max, and most of all for himself. The moment the guards discovered Leszek was gone, Max had said they would come after the two of them and everyone in the Canada command. Jacob had never been interrogated. He wondered how long he could last. Suddenly he wished Max hadn’t told him anything about Leszek’s connection to Polish intelligence. He wished Leszek hadn’t introduced him to Otto and Abe.
Wasn’t simply knowing such things an automatic death sentence?
49
By Monday morning, April 26, the storm had passed.
As he finished a late breakfast and arrived for roll call at eleven, Jacob was amazed by how beautiful the weather was. The sun was shining. The skies were mostly blue with white wisps of clouds here and there
. For the first time he noticed how green the grass was. He even commented to Josef how flowers were beginning to bloom and the trees were beginning to bud.
Yet again roll call came and went without incident. Jacob wasn’t sure whether to be confused or worried.
When he arrived at the Canada command, Jacob was flabbergasted to see Leszek, who greeted him as usual. What in the world was happening? Jacob had no idea. He wondered whether he should say anything, but when Max arrived a moment later, he shot Jacob a look that told him to keep his mouth shut. Together, they quickly scarfed down some oranges and bread without saying anything of substance. Then Leszek sent them down to the main floor to catalog and store a large stack of fur coats, jackets, and stoles that they had not gotten to on Saturday.
To Jacob it seemed there were extra guards roaming the warehouse. All of them had bloodshot eyes and reeked of vodka. They barely seemed to be paying attention, but not once during the day—as relatively relaxed as it was compared to the previous week—did Jacob sense an opportunity to talk to Max about Leszek. Rather, he just listened as Max rattled on and on about some obscure passage in the Hebrew Scriptures that Jacob had never even heard of nor cared anything about.
For at least an hour, Max talked about the prophet Nahum preaching a message of judgment against the people of Nineveh, which much to Jacob’s ignorance was apparently “the wicked capital of the wicked Assyrian Empire.” Then Max droned on and on about how the prophecies of the judgment actually came to pass in 612 B.C. when Nineveh was completely and utterly destroyed. Jacob had little interest in any of it, but he assumed it was Max’s way of sounding normal to the guards. It also helped keep Jacob’s attention on the work in front of him and not drifting into unwise conversations.
– – –
And then it happened.