So I was off to Prince William Forest for A-4, Special Operations basic, without any clue why I was being put into an operational division. I knew there’d been losses—we all did—and I knew that my language expertise qualified me for a certain type of work, but I was no spy. They told me nothing. Go to SO, they said, then Fort Benning for jump school, then report back to D.C.
So that’s what I did. I’m taught to conduct myself with stealth and lethality, how to fight in close quarters, how to infiltrate and extricate, lay charges. In order to graduate basic I had to sneak into a hydroelectric plant in Maryland, make my way to the turbines, and leave a calling card inside a fuse box just outside the control room. No one at the plant was warned. If I’d been caught, I could have been shot by the guards. But I completed the mission, and then it was off to Fort Benning. Training there was quick. Doesn’t take long to learn how to fall out of an airplane. You know what they say? It’s the landing that kills you. And once I was back in D.C., they sent me to an intensive Polish course, three weeks, eight hours a day. Slang, cultural touch points. Every night after dinner we watched two movies, Waszyński mostly, we studied for another two hours, and we went to sleep listening to recordings of shows from Radio Warsaw. The language instruction—that was Turk Brunn’s father’s outfit, you know. Small world.
My father takes his hand from my arm, where it has been transmitting a kind of gentle Morse pressure all along, and raises both his hands to his face to rub his eyes, those tired eyes, sliding his forefingers up his nose, beneath the frames of his glasses, gently working the inner canthus with the tips of his fingers, moving them out along the closed lid, massaging the cornea beneath. He resettles his glasses and drops his hand back onto my arm.
About a year earlier, he says, the Royal Air Force had flattened Essen’s armament factories. They all but wiped out Krupp. Farben, Daimler-Benz, too. The Nazis had to relocate them to somewhere outside Allied bombing range, and whatever machinery hadn’t been destroyed was disassembled, loaded on trains, and shipped to Western Poland, to Silesia and Sudetenland.
There was a camp in Silesia, a granite quarry, called Gross-Rosen. The Nazis set up the factories in towns nearby, and by early ’44, they’d built about a hundred other sub-camps, all to supply slave labor to these factories. Gross-Rosen was a death camp—when you were sent there, you knew your end was the crematorium. In the sub-camps, maybe you had a better chance, because they needed live bodies in the factories. In the sub-camps there were Jews, but also Russian POWs, Ukrainians. French. Poles. Enemies of the Nazi Party.
The one I’m most familiar with was called Fünfteichen. It was three miles from the Krupp factory, and the Jews who worked there were marched back and forth twice daily. In weather like this—my father gestured at the snowscape outside the window—they wore pajamas. They wore pajamas year-round. They had these wooden clogs, but the mud sucked them off their feet, and when you’re marching, you don’t stop to pick up your shoes or you’re shot, so most were barefoot. I don’t have to tell you what it was like there. The daily meal was warm water in a bowl. A rotten radish was a godsend. This is all well documented. In the morning they’d march to the factory, having spent the entire night unloading trains, or standing at attention outside their barracks as punishment for an escape attempt. Beatings were a matter of course. They’d march to the factory through whatever weather, wearing their pajamas, barefoot, and once they were inside, if they survived the march, then the suffering really began.
We had reports from inside the factory, through the Polish resistance, about all this—the Jews were being starved to death, worked to death, beaten to death by the kapos and the SS. And every week there were industrial accidents, electrocutions and the like. Limbs severed, workers burned alive. But it was most common that they—they were slaves, so I should call them slaves—the slaves died by being beaten to death on the factory floor.
In late ’43, Polish resistance intercepted a letter from Alfried Krupp, the chair of the company, to the Gestapo. If you can believe it, he was complaining about the conditions and the treatment of the workers. Ever mindful of his bottom line. “We’ve invested money and time in training these prisoners for our factories and your SS troops are killing them all! How are we supposed to make our quotas?” Krupp was crafty—he placed blame on the local administrators for mismanaging the factories, which gave the brass in Berlin a scapegoat. And sure enough, in early 1944, the old factory administration is kicked out, put on a train back to Essen, and the SS guards are reassigned. The execs at OSS thought it was our chance to inject simple sabotage into the bloodstream. Just so you understand: This was not an attempt to save the Jews, but to do further damage to the German armaments industry. As far as the War Department was concerned, the Holocaust was incidental.
So in February ’44, they sent me to London. My instructors were British army and my classmates were all Poles who’d been conscripted by the Nazis but had managed to surrender to the Allied forces. These boys had extraordinary knowledge about the inner workings of the German military, from strategic arrangements right down to what kind of toilet paper the troops carried. Who better to turn into spies? We trained as two-man teams. A radio man and a field officer. My radio man was Tadeuz Zachurski. By then I knew exactly where I was going, of course.
At the end of February, Tad and I parachuted into Poland. We connected with the partisans who would transport us to Markstädt, the town near Gross-Rosen, where our mission was to collect intelligence and spread the gospel of simple sabotage.
My father, religious in his avoidance of elevators, a man who couldn’t bring himself to ride a Ferris wheel with his own daughter, who once sat down in the middle of the sidewalk rather than cross the Brooklyn Bridge because he couldn’t stop replaying the image of the span buckling, cables snapping, the whole thing collapsing into the river, a man so wedded to his fears that he could not leave the apartment without his lucky hex nut in his pocket. A man whose editors, as he got on in years, took the elevators down from their offices on thirty-three to meet with him in the conference room of the law firm occupying the second floor of their midtown building because, without question, my father would have taken the stairs all the way up, and they didn’t want to be responsible for his cardiac arrest. Even at the Apelles, where he’d reached a perfunctory truce with the elevator at the end of our hall, he might yet detect a disharmony in the metallic scrape and jangle of the pulleys and say, Meet you down there. A resigned, guilty shrug of the shoulders as my mother and I stood in the hallway waiting for the doors to open: it was a force over which he had no control. One might be inclined to wonder why, if he was concerned about the mechanical integrity of the elevator, he would allow his wife and child to take it. Because he knew there was no real danger, no more so than actuarial tables allowed for, at least—it was just that he was nuts. That’s how he put it himself. I’m nuts, sorry. Lips drawn tight, he’d disappear into the stairwell.
He’d pulled the same thing on flights for London, Bonn, a puddle jumper to Cape Cod. Sorry, he’d say, and he’d step neatly out of the boarding line and head back to the ticket desk to see what the rest of the week’s schedule looked like. Can’t go today. Just can’t. He’d refused taxis, subways, trains, ferries, trams, funiculars.