Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘What about the white bread?’ I asked in German.

The driver shook his head, his brow furrowed. He did not understand. Somehow, through a combination of hand signals and pidgin German and English, I got the question out. Eventually he nodded and pointed into the distance, at a single truck unloading at the other end of the camp. So that was how it was done: nine thousand loaves of black bread for the Nazi prisoners taken in several trucks to the prisoners' kitchen, including the one I had just unloaded. And then a separate truck carrying one thousand loaves of white bread, delivered to a different kitchen for the American guards. The driver pointed at the black loaves and made a retching expression. Then he gestured in the distance, at the white loaves, and patted his stomach. He was telling me that the Americans couldn't stand the coarse, thick black bread and needed white, like they had at home.

I worked hard to hide my smile as we drove back to the bakery and, after that, as I walked home. Only once in the apartment we had rented in Nuremberg, a new hideout, could I let out a scream of delight. ‘This will be easy,’ I said. ‘This will be easy.’

I briefed the commanders that night, proud of the discovery I had made. We had only to direct our attention to the black loaves; anything we did to them would never affect the Americans. It would be DIN's simplest, but greatest, operation.

But then Rosa brought bad news. All of us had had to get jobs. My friend Sid Steiner – his first name then was Solomon – had also trained as a baker in Munich, because we hoped we would be able to repeat the Nuremberg operation there, perhaps even on the same night. Rosa's job was no less important. She had been told to find a boyfriend. Not any boyfriend, but an American. Plenty of women in occupied Germany were doing the same thing. Some were Germans, but some were Poles or Czechs or Hungarians, women who had washed up and landed in Berlin or Nuremberg like so much driftwood on the shore. They made themselves friendly with any man in an American uniform, a man who could provide attention, as well as coffee, cigarettes and corned beef in a tin. These women were desperate and would not hold back their affection. Rosa's task was to pretend to be one of them. What nationality she would adopt, I had no idea. But she did not look so Jewish – except for the deadness in her eyes, dead from all that she had seen, which would have been obvious to anyone who had looked. Luckily, these men were not looking so closely.

No one ever asked whether she minded being used in this way; it was simply her duty. The order was given and, as a fighter and partisan and now a soldier for DIN, she would obey. No one asked me either, even though, by that time, Rosa and I were together. Perhaps no one knew; perhaps people would have assumed I was too young for such things.

So Rosa set about throwing herself at the GI Joe responsible for the guards' canteen at Stalag 13. Did she sleep with him? At the time I told myself that she did not, but now I see something else: I imagine him on top of her, pounding away at her flesh, not noticing the eyes, still and glassy, in her face.

Anyway, this sergeant was joking about some of his officers, health-conscious types from Boston or New England. ‘You'll never believe this,’ he said, ‘but they refuse to eat American white bread. They want the brown stuff the Krauts eat!’ So each morning he has to arrange for one hundred loaves of Nazi bread to be separated from the rest and delivered to the American kitchen. ‘Crazy, they are.’

I received this news as you would word of a disaster. If we tampered with the black bread we would hit some Americans and they would not let such an attack go unpunished. They would hunt us down.

There were more complications. In what I imagined was an idle moment of pillow-talk, Rosa's boyfriend explained that he'd had a rough day. Not only had he had to keep his own mess running, but he'd had to do a spot-check on the prisoners' kitchen. They were meant to do it once a week or so: checking equipment, making sure no knives had been stolen and, more important, ensuring that the food supplies were not being used as cover for any smuggling. It had been known for prisoners to hide weapons, even cyanide tablets, inside a loaf of bread or a bag of sugar. Everything that went into that kitchen had to be checked, not every day, but often. What a drag it was; it added hours to his day. Rosa probably stroked the sergeant's brow in sympathy, quietly noting what she would tell the DIN leaders back at the flat: that they would have no guarantee that any tainted bread would not be probed, examined and, quite possibly, discovered.

Both Rosa and I did as we were told, uncovering every detail of the process and then relaying it to our commanders. I was asked to come up with a thorough blueprint of the bakery, including all measurements, as comprehensive as any architect's drawing. And of course I had to bring back several loaves of bread, black and white, so that they could be studied.

After two months of this, we were summoned for another meeting. This time, though, a man I had not met before was there. I remember him as an elegant, older character come to us from Paris – but that may be just how he looked to me, a fifteen-year-old boy who knew everything of the world and also nothing. This man was never introduced by name, but he was treated by the commanders as an expert. They showed him respect. It turned out that he was an experienced player of the black market – and that he had made contact with a chemist.

Aron asked this man to tell us what he knew.

‘Comrades,’ he began, in an accent that seemed only half-French. ‘The decisive question is how we introduce the poison to the bread.’

Poison. It was the first time the word had been uttered. We preferred a codeword: medicine. ‘If we're to treat the disease,’ Aron would say, ‘we need medicine.’ We avoided saying ‘poison’ out loud. Why? Because we feared it would betray our secret? That it might jinx our mission, that it would somehow bring bad luck? That we did not quite want to admit, even to ourselves, what we were about to do? All of the above.

But now he had said it, it gave us a strange confidence. This man, this adult, would make this crazy dream of ours come true.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘the obvious method would be to make the poison an ingredient stirred into the mixture for the black bread from the very beginning. This would be simple. Sadly, it is impossible. We now know that one hundred loaves of this bread go, in fact, to the Americans. If these Americans die, it would be a disaster! So we need another method, yes?’

Aron began shuffling in his seat.

The Frenchman reached into his bag, an oversized doctor's case of battered brown leather, and with a great flourish produced a huge, thick paintbrush.

‘You have seen it used by the house decorator, yes?’ He was smiling.

‘What's the idea?’ asked Aron, his patience dwindling.

‘To paint the poison onto each loaf.’

‘Paint? With those?’

‘The young man knows all about it, I am sure.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘The pastry chefs call it glazing, I think.’

He picked up from the table a loaf of black bread I had put there earlier for exactly this purpose. ‘First, you dip the brush into the liquid – for now we use only vinegar, of course – you paint one stroke up, one stroke down and there: Voilá! ’

There was silence as the semi-Frenchman sat down, his demonstration completed. Our leader was frowning. None of us wanted to speak before he did. He picked up the bread, examined it, then placed it back on the table.

‘And that's enough?’

‘It is.’

‘You're sure the poison will have no taste?’