Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘No taste.’

‘No colour?’

‘No colour. It's an arsenic mixture, odourless and colourless. I have seen it myself.’

I was nervous about speaking, but as the only baker in the room I felt I had some authority. ‘Won't the crust on the top be moist?’

The man from Paris widened his eyes into a smile and pointed at me. ‘Our young friend has asked a good question! This, for me, is our biggest problem.’

Aron was alarmed. ‘You mean he's right? The bread will be wet?’

‘For a while. But not for long. After an hour or so we think it is dried out.’

‘You think?’

‘If there is some dampness it would be so slight, no one would think anything of it. Remember, this is not the Ritz Hotel. What are the Nazis going to do, ask their waiter to take it back?’

Aron ignored the joke and turned to Rosa. ‘What time do they start eating breakfast?’

‘At 6.15 a.m.’

Now to me. ‘And the loaves are picked up at five?’

‘Yes. But most are baked by three.’

Aron turned to the not-quite-Frenchman. ‘And this method works?’

‘There is a dead cat in Paris who says it works very well.’

We waited as Aron picked up the bread once more, then placed it back down on the table. He rubbed his chin. Finally he gave his verdict, looking at each of us, his gaze steady. ‘The first night with a full moon, we do it.’

As it happens we did not choose the very first moonlit night. We waited for a Saturday. That was because of the way we had chosen to stage the operation.

It was the Frenchman's idea. I call him that because I never found out his name. Rosa said he was a Communist, or at least had been, and that he had been part of the resistance in Krakow. He had found his way to Paris, a place where it was possible to get hold of anything: cars, forged papers, douche syringes, poison. Why he was in DIN, what bitterness he stored inside, I did not know. But he covered it well, with his semi-French accent and his performance. Not many men in DIN smiled as often as he did.

Once Aron had said the operation could go ahead a new discussion began: how? When the commanders first hatched the plan, they assumed it would be a simple business: I would smuggle some poison into the bakery and, when no one was looking, would tip it into the vat of flour, stir and that would be that. But painting poison onto nine thousand individual loaves was a mammoth task even if it were done by several people working at once.

For the hundredth time I was called on to explain the process.

‘As soon as the bread comes out of the ovens, it's placed on a series of trolleys here.’ I was standing over the table, pointing at my own drawing of the bakery. ‘They're then wheeled, into the drying room – here. There's a door out onto the loading area here. Just before five a.m., the trolleys are wheeled outside for the Americans to pick up.’

Aron now questioned me the way he had questioned the Frenchman. ‘Once the bread is in the drying room, is the room empty?’

‘Not for long. People come in and out constantly.’

‘Even at four in the morning?’

‘Even then.’

He nodded. ‘And there's no way anyone could be discreet, working with that thing.’ He pointed at the housepainter's brush, still on the table. ‘You would have to be there, undisturbed, for hours. Damn!’ He slammed his fist down on the table.

Then the Frenchman spoke to me. ‘How many workers are there at that time of night?’

‘Normally it's about ten.’

‘Normally? And what is not normally?’

‘On Saturday night, once the work is almost finished, before three a.m., about half the workers go off. To drink.’

‘Leaving how many people in the bakery? Five, maybe, including you?’

I nodded.

‘In which case I think I have a plan.’

The preparations took weeks. After our meeting in the apartment, the Frenchman returned to Paris to meet with the chemist: between them they had calculated the amount of arsenic mixture we would need for nine thousand loaves. It took some time to prepare. Once it was done, the Frenchman despatched a courier, another DIN volunteer, to carry the liquid personally from Paris to Nuremberg. ‘There is no other way,’ he said.

When the courier appeared at our apartment, he was wearing an American uniform under a heavy overcoat. Rosa answered the door, but I remember wondering how such a man who had survived what we had all survived, a soldier of DIN, could be so fat. He was not just tall, he was enormous. But once the door was closed, I understood. He ripped off the coat and his jacket to reveal at least a dozen hot water bottles, all made of sweating rubber, strapped to his body. Before he had a chance to say a word, he took one look around and collapsed onto the floor: he could carry that huge weight no longer.

That night Rosa and I transferred the mixture into smaller bottles. We used whatever we could find: medicine bottles were the best, so long as they could fit inside my satchel. Each day I would take one or two into the bakery and, when I was alone in the drying room, I would stash them under the floorboards. In my head I kept a mental map of that room, memorizing each board, so that I would know exactly which boards to lift in the few minutes we would have to prepare the mixture.

When Saturday April 13 1946 came, I was more nervous than I had ever been before. Don't ask me why. Perhaps it was because, in the past, I had pretended to be this or that person for just a few minutes, long enough to get past a guard or onto a train. But I had been Tadeusz, the Polish baker boy, for several months now. I was part of the team at the bakery. You can't work alongside people every day, week in, week out, and remain a complete stranger. Sometimes one of the women, in hairnet and gloves, would tousle my hair, as if I were a playmate for one of her sons. The first time it happened, I had to run outside. I was gasping, as if I had been strangled. (Later I said I had had a coughing fit). Now that I am older I understand what I did not understand then. Maybe I had to be a father to understand what that fifteen-year-old boy felt that day, a boy who had not felt the loving touch of a mother for so long that even a hint of it was enough to turn him upside down. I read once of a prisoner who had been in jail so long that, when he was released, he was allergic to fresh air. Perhaps I was that way with a mother's love.

Tonight they were about to discover the truth of me and I think that was what made me scared. I had to force myself to remember what this operation was really about, to remember the men inside Stalag 13, to think of the Einsatzgruppen. When I did that, I could make my heart turn to flint.

I checked my watch. I had been on shift since five o'clock that afternoon and the hours had dragged. I was desperate for three o'clock to come. I did my work but I could not be distracted. I kept asking myself, will we have enough of the mixture, will we have enough time, will this crazy scheme work? I even began to wonder about the Frenchman. What did we really know about him? Could this all be some elaborate trap?

At seven minutes to three I heard the words I had been waiting for, spoken by the manager himself. ‘Come on, the beer is calling!’ He and seven others took off their overalls, hung them up and headed, as usual, for the tavern down the street. They said goodbye to me and the other ‘saps’ who had to stay behind.

I checked my watch again. Precisely six minutes from now and I would do what we had planned. For now, I had to stay put.

I knew what was happening outside. Once she had got the signal – they've gone! – from Manik, serving as lookout across the street, Rosa would have appeared from the opposite direction, wearing a short dress, in black and red; God only knows where she had picked it up. She had been given money to buy bright lipstick, too. Her instructions had been to look appealing and available – for the right price.