Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

Nuremberg, Spring 1946

Our first task was to decide a target. This was not a decision for me; I was just a teenage boy. Others, the leaders, took those decisions. One of them was the man I had met in the cellar in the ghetto at Kovno, on that night of the candles. His name was Aron. The other two were dead by 1946, killed in the last Aktion which emptied the ghetto once and for all. I did not know that for sure, not then, but that was what I presumed. Unless you heard otherwise, unless you saw them or ran into them in the street or heard a rumour, it was best to assume this or that person were gone. In 1946 everyone was dead.

But a few leaders of the resistance had survived, emerging from the burnt-out ghettoes and the smoking ruins of the cities and they, along with a few from the camps, were the men who started DIN. I was still a teenager but I wanted them to think of me as a warrior, a man who had proved himself. Even though I was so young, they did indeed treat me like a man: anyone who had lived through what we had lived through was no longer a child, no matter how young you were. Your childhood was gone.

I was not the one who took decisions, but I had a good pair of ears and I listened. We were in a safe house in Munich and one night, as I was clearing away the dishes from our meal, I heard the commanders mention one place more than any other: Nuremberg.

They had heard that the Allies had set up a prison outside the city, to hold Nazis for ‘questioning’. And not just any Nazis either, but the important ones. ‘There are eight thousand SS in there,’ Aron said. His eyes were dark and fierce, his hair thick and kinked: I never once saw him smile. ‘No small fry,’ he went on. ‘They're being held for major war crimes. Major war crimes. They're all in there: senior staff at the camps, Politischen Abteilungen , Gestapo, Einsatzgruppen, everyone.’

It was obvious he was most excited by the men of the ‘Political Departments’, the Politischen Abteilungen. Among them would be some of the senior bureaucrats who had helped to organize the Final Solution. That was what the Nazis had called their killing. They did not call it mass murder, killing people by the hour, the way a factory makes products. No, they called it the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.

But I wasn't thinking about these bureaucrats as I washed the plates, pretending not to listen. I was thinking about the Einsatzgruppen. The mobile killing teams who had gone from place to place murdering and murdering and murdering. These were the people who had killed my sisters at the Ninth Fort.

Aron had done some research, using a DIN volunteer who had ended up in Nuremberg. He had tracked down the source of all the camp's bread, a medium-sized bakery on the outskirts of town. The leaders talked some more, their voices becoming low and hushed. Then they fell completely silent. I was scrubbing the grease off a pan when I turned around to see that they were all looking at me, with that same look I had seen before, three years earlier, in the cellar in the ghetto.

They gave me a street address and told me which man to speak to at the bakery: the works supervisor. They had described him to me, short and barrel-chested with a face almost always flushed red. I was to clean myself up, find him and give him my story.

The description was good and I recognized him as soon as I walked in. ‘My name is Tadeusz Radomski,’ I began, ‘and I need to learn how to become a baker.’ I told him I was a Pole, with an uncle in Montreal who was himself a baker and was ready to give me a job. ‘All I need is a visa, but for Canada it takes time. While I'm waiting, I want to learn. My uncle says I need experience-’

‘I'm sorry,’ the works supervisor said, wiping a flour-dusted hand on his apron. ‘There are no jobs here.’

‘I'm happy to work for free,’ I said.

‘No jobs.’

Then, as we had discussed back in the safe house, I continued: ‘My uncle said I should show you this,’ and I reached inside my canvas satchel. As soon as the man got a peek of what was inside, he gestured me to come into a back office. I had showed him a bottle of Scotch whisky and two bars of chocolate. Along with cigarettes, they were the currency of the occupation zone and he knew what they were worth. ‘My uncle says you can have this now and there will be more for you when I have done a month's work.’ I started that afternoon, with no pay.

And so I began as an apprentice baker, learning everything from kneading and rolling the dough to glazing and frosting cakes. I would volunteer for extra work, cleaning out the pans and scouring the ovens. If the manager needed a boy to run an errand, I would do that too. I said little and worked hard. I wanted there to be no complaints against me and for the manager to trust me completely, so that he would let me work anywhere in the bakery. My job was to find out exactly how the system worked, to understand every aspect of it: when the allocation of flour was received from the Americans, where it was stored, which shift came on when, when they came off and how the place was guarded. Above all I needed to discover how the thousands of loaves for Stalag 13, the holding centre for Nazi prisoners, were baked and when and how they were transported.

I did as much as I could, never asking a single direct question. I just watched and listened. I didn't chat to anyone – as far as I was concerned every worker in that place was a Jew-killer – but I wanted them to think the only reason for my silence was that I was a lonely orphan boy working hard for a new life abroad. The strange thing I realize only now, as I set down these words, is that I was not really acting at all: a lonely orphan boy was exactly what I was.

Then one day, the American army trucks arrived at usual, just before dawn, to pick up the bread. I had been doing the night shift – I had volunteered for it – and I was there, on the outside loading platform, when I heard one of the American drivers complain that his usual partner was off sick: he needed someone to help unload at the other end. The manager took one look at me and with an index finger guided me towards the truck. ‘He'll go.’

And so I rode up front in the cab, next to the American, trying not to stare at his uniform, refusing his offer of chewing gum but accepting a cigarette, even though I did not smoke, because I did not want to look like a kid who did not smoke. I held it between my lips, sucking every now and then, looking out of the window and saying nothing, passing the bomb site that was Nuremberg. My memory now is of a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. So much rubble, long stretches of it on either side of the road, interrupted by the odd building that had escaped the bombing, looming over the rest like an adult in a kindergarten.

When we got to Stalag 13, waved through by the American guard on the gate, I felt prickles on the back of my neck. This site, I knew, used to be a concentration camp. It was surrounded by barbed wire and filled with row after row of wooden huts: barracks that once housed Jews, worked like slaves and taken to their deaths, and now filled with the men who had tortured and killed them. I had to clench both my fists to get a grip on myself and stop myself shivering.

‘OK, here we go,’ the driver said in English, parking up and jumping down from the cab. He told me, in gestures and signs, to start unloading the wheeled trolleys, each stacked with a dozen racks, each rack containing two dozen loaves. We were parked outside the camp kitchens and I was unloading for a long time: I estimated that, along with the other trucks, we delivered around nine thousand loaves of bread. All black bread.