And what weaponry did I have to counteract Hitler’s insane machine? I had tactics for some sort of theory war, a war fought while sitting at a table. Clogging pipes and dulling files? His arsenal is the kitchen shelf?
Of course, Hitler had already won. Within the walls of a concentration camp, everyone was an animal. He forced the Jews into a philosophy of immediacy, where an hour was a lifetime, where there was no thought, no contemplation, where there was only action, and every action had but a single goaclass="underline" to live long enough to take one more breath.
So you see? With the camps, Hitler succeeded in returning the world to its primitive state.
And what had Janusz Stern asked me for? An inconceivable deviation from the unremitting beat of that Teutonic drum. A useless luxury, a joke. A profound subversion. And I gave it to him because it was nothing to me. Do you know what he did?
No, I say to my father.
He laughed, my father says. A whisper at first, a sort of wheezing, getting the bellows warmed up, and then his throat engaged, like a cough, and his body began to shudder—the sound was amplified in that enclosed space, but let me tell you, before I had time to cover his mouth, he was roaring, howling. There were tears streaming down his cheeks, he was gasping for air. To this day, I’ve never seen a person so consumed with mirth. He was writhing around, spasming. The guard was banging on the side of the machine, What’s going on in there? Everyone out! Now! Raus jetzt! Raus jetzt! He reached in, one big German paw, and grabbed me by my coat, yanked me out onto the floor. Janusz was thrashing around, the sound pouring full-bore out of the hatch, as if the machine itself was howling. But not for long. The guard dove in, dragged Janusz out, screaming, Raus jetzt, over and over, his eyes popping out of his head, but Janusz couldn’t stop. He couldn’t even stand. He was possessed, flopping around in paroxysms on the floor. Another guard came running, and then one of the B-Truppers, and they’re all screaming.
He couldn’t stop. And that was the end of him. Just like that.
Afterward, they sent for another Polish Jew who spoke German. Through this man they asked me what I said to the dead Jew that was so funny. I told him a joke, I said. What joke? they said. And I tell them the joke, only I tell it the way the Nazi propaganda machine wrote it. A Polack comes home from work one day and hangs up his coat. He calls out to his wife but she doesn’t answer. He goes up the stairs to their bedroom, where she’s in bed with his best friend. From his chest of drawers he pulls out a pistol and points it at his head. You idiot! his wife says, laughing. Don’t laugh, he says. You’re next!
The Germans knew this joke well, and it was even more hilarious coming from the lips of the Jew interpreter. Of course, Janusz Stern had known the Nazi version, too. By some miracle, the Germans were satisfied by my explanation. They assumed he had gone insane. The guard tapped my forehead with the barrel of his rifle and said, No more jokes, Polack, or you’re next. And they all had a good laugh.
Tad and I were called home not long afterward. Our greatest accomplishment had been eluding the Gestapo. Was the intelligence we gathered worth anything? Who knows? Probably not. Was the work I’d done to disseminate simple sabotage equal to the life of Janusz Stern? Well. We were instructed to make our way to Russia for extraction. When we left town, we passed by hundreds of Jews in the fields, digging pipelines for new factories.
At Kraków we sold the horse and cart and bought train tickets. We were accompanied by a man from the underground on the train to Lwów, where we were handed off to a new man, and within a week we were on a plane out of Russia. London, debrief, from there I sailed back to Washington. The very definition of a smooth extraction.
So I return to the Polish desk at headquarters. Nothing’s changed. I’d been gone only a few months, but it felt like years. I moved back into my room on Twenty-Fifth Street Northwest, same bed, same sheets. The other two rooms upstairs were occupied by new tenants, young officers, attachés, but otherwise the house was the same. The towels in the bathroom smelled the same. They had a stiff way of hanging off the racks. On Saturdays our landlady, her name was Sadie Mott, took out the wash, did everything by hand in a big tub on the back porch. She used Ivory flakes. The rasping sound of the washboard. She hung the sheets on the lines in the backyard. The sheets were white with flowers. Yellow petals, brown florets. Sunflowers, I suppose. I could hear them fluttering on the line, exactly as they had before I’d left. I’d lie in my bed on Saturdays and listen. The bathroom smelled like Old Spice and Brylcreem. Memories reconfirmed. Life magazine on the side table in the living room. Casseroles, stews, the thin white curtains billowing while we ate. It was summer and everything was wide open. Dinner was at seven thirty on the weekends, late in those days, on account of the heat. I started to fall apart.
I didn’t sleep well, which wasn’t unusual, no one slept well, but no one complained. Everyone had troubling thoughts, nightmares, what have you.
I’d been thoroughly debriefed in Washington, too, of course. I confirmed the intelligence Tad had radioed in, and I told them what I could about the Berthawerke, about the conditions there, but, again, the War Department—you have to understand that winning the war was all that mattered. The war effort was about defeating the Axis, not about rescuing prisoners. It wasn’t that they didn’t have information from inside concentration camps, written accounts of mass executions, bodies dumped in mass graves. British intelligence knew from early on. They had been intercepting diplomatic mail for years. There were stories coming out of the Polish Embassy, for instance, about the ghettos. The U.S. government knew. But it wasn’t until after the war, at Nuremberg, that a complete account of what had been happening at the camps became public. Who knew what, and when did they know it—this is all of tremendous importance, but in 1944 the government wasn’t looking for new reasons to win the war. Do you know how many civilians died during the invasion of Normandy? Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand French civilians, all killed by American bombers. Two hundred thousand Allied troops dead. The context in which the camps existed at that time—to the left, millions of troops dead, to the right, millions of civilians. Mr. Roosevelt, the Germans are rounding up Jews and gassing them! And Roosevelt says, Defeat the Nazis. If you want to make it stop, beat the goddamned Nazis. Let’s make a date to discuss the morality of our decisions after we’ve forestalled our own annihilation!
Did I mention that my debriefing was thorough? What did I see. What did I hear. When did this happen, when did that. When did shipments arrive. What did I know about the production rate on such and so week. How many successful sabotage attempts, and in what factories, and carried out by whom?
At no time did I bring up Janusz Stern. I had no doubt that Tad would give an account of the man’s death in his debriefing, and the story would have made its way to OSS through the Polish underground, anyway, so if I deserved retribution, it would find me. But it never came—from an official standpoint, Janusz Stern was only one more body on a pile so high it was blotting out the sun. My involvement was incidental. There would be no consequences for admitting my role in his death, yet I had decided I would never speak a word of it to anyone. I’d decided this before he’d breathed his last breath, while he was lying there on the concrete floor of that factory, the kapo standing above him, his truncheon slick with blood. That man wasn’t Janusz Stern’s murderer. I was. I was a coward who’d killed him with carelessness, and bravado, and a thousand childish decisions I’d made going back to the day I agreed to join OSS, an outfit I joined because it made me feel that I’d been chosen, that I was special—from that very first day I was a murderer. And even before then, I’d been sharpening my bayonet.