Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

The words were just flowing out of her now, as if on a tape recorded long ago, waiting to be played back. For a moment, Tom could see Rebecca as a child, listening intently in the darkness to bedtime tales of resistance, heroism and war. She seemed to have memorized every word.

‘So these-’

‘These must be the maps of the sewers.’

Tom looked hard at the maps which, he now realized, were indeed hand-drawn. He ran his fingertips across the paper. What an extraordinary document this was. Not just a precisely rendered map but a testament to an almost superhuman resourcefulness. And to think that, according to the late Henry Goldman at least, even the most senior of these people, these warriors, had not been a day over twenty-five years old.

But now, as he squinted at every inch of the paper, he examined more closely what had seemed to be a pattern, a printed stamp, in the bottom right-hand corner. Now he could see that it was not a printed badge at all but a block made up of words, written in a tiny, fine-point script. He could decipher none of them, except for one in block capitals: NURNBERG. He looked in the same place on the next map. München. The next three were Weimar, Hamburg and Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin.

He gestured for Rebecca to take a look and her brow instantly furrowed. ‘I don't understand.’

‘Your father was never in those places, was he?’ Tom hesitated. ‘I mean, there were no ghettoes in Germany itself, were there? The Nazis kicked the Jews out and set up the camps and the ghettoes in Eastern Europe, right?’

‘Yes.’

They both stared at the diagrams trying to decipher their meaning. Tom regrouped and spoke again. ‘But we do know that they were there after the war. We know that he was in Nuremberg.’ He pointed at the Nuremberg drawing. ‘And we know that this, all of this, somehow relates to Plan A. That's why it was hidden in the painting.’

But Rebecca was no longer listening. Something in the pile of discarded binding and paper had caught her eye. It was stuck so flat as to be barely visible, but taped to the backing board was a square of card whose edges had turned almost yellow. With great care she pulled at one corner, feeling the tug of adhesive as it came away. She moved slowly, as if she knew that to move too rapidly was to risk losing whatever buried message from the past was contained here.

She turned it over and Tom found himself staring at a line of random squiggles, half-squares and incomplete hieroglyphs which looked like no language he had ever seen.

‘What is it?’

Rebecca was gazing at it intently. ‘It's either one or the other.’

‘I don't understand.’

‘The characters I recognize,’ she said. ‘I'm just not sure of the language.’

The noise of the TV was even more distracting now, but it was his own fault. He had turned up the volume as soon as Rebecca had realized the postcard carried a message: if someone was listening, now was the time to stop them. But the background chatter of a daytime soap made concentration all but impossible.

Tom prided himself on his facility for languages. Even those he couldn't speak, he could at least recognize – he knew his Korean from his Thai – and he would have liked to think he could have identified a sentence of Hebrew when it was set down in front of him. But Rebecca had had to explain that the printed alphabet was not the same as the script used in everyday handwriting: the shape of each character was vaguely related, but not identical. Even to someone who would recognize a bible printed in Hebrew, a sentence of Hebrew handwriting could look like a string of corrupted computer icons.

Although Rebecca could make out each character, she wasn't sure she could do much more. ‘I can just about read Hebrew,’ she said, adding that she had endured basic Hebrew classes as a child. ‘Kind of like Jewish Sunday school.’

‘So what's the problem?’

‘The problem is, this might not be Hebrew. It could be Yiddish.’

‘I thought Yiddish was like German.’

‘It is, mostly. But it's written in Hebrew characters.’

Tom had to smile at that. Yiddish was surely tailor-made for undercover communication. A German might understand it if he heard it, but he would not be able to make head or tail of the written version. How many non-Jews knew the Hebrew alphabet at all, let alone in this handwritten form? Almost none. It meant DIN would have had no need of cryptography: their own language, written down, was sufficient.

‘OK,’ Rebecca said finally. ‘This much I've worked out. It says, Fargess nicht !’

'OK, said Tom. ‘That's simple enough. That means “Don't forget”.’

She read on. ‘Yir-mee-ya…Yirmiyahu! It's a name: Yirmiyahu, like Jeremiah.’

‘Keep going.’

‘ Yirmiyahu vet zine – and now there's the number twenty-three – then there's the word dem and then another number, fifteen. And then it finishes with another exclamation: Lomir zich freien!’

‘Lomir zich freien. It's some kind of exhortation, like “Come let's party, come celebrate”. Read the whole thing again.’

‘Fargess nicht! Yirmiyahu vet zine twenty-three dem fifteen. Lomir zich frein.’

‘Don't forget, Jeremiah turns twenty-three on the fifteenth. Let's celebrate!’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Don't tell me all we've got is a party invitation.’

Tom got up to pace, but it was no good. Finally he marched over to the TV set and stabbed at the off button. In the quiet, perhaps twenty seconds later, it came to him. ‘Oh, that's very neat. Very neat indeed.’

‘What's neat?’

‘Do you remember, in your dad's notebook, the message they gave him to take to the other ghettoes?’ Just as Rebecca was about to answer, Tom placed a finger over his lips – and turned the TV back on.

‘“Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4”.’ She paused. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘We need a Bible.’

It took them a while, wading through the rubble of books and junk heaped on the floor, but eventually they found one, a volume much larger than the Bibles Tom was used to. Not that he was an expert: his militantly atheist father had always refused to have ‘that sodding book’ in the house, since it had only brought ‘misery to millions’. This was perhaps twice the size of a hotel-room Bible, as large as a volume of an encyclopedia.

Rebecca turned the pages hesitantly, eventually turning back two pages, then forward one, like someone narrowing down to a single reference in a dictionary. ‘Here we go. The Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 23, Verse 15.’

‘Read it.’

Tracing each word with her finger, she read aloud: ‘“Therefore, this is what the Lord Almighty says concerning the prophets: ‘I will make them eat bitter food and drink poisoned water, because from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout the land’”.’

Nuremberg, 1945

Aron never wanted me to be part of it: he did not believe I had enough hate inside me.

In the autumn of 1945 he told me that DIN was over, that from now on, justice would be up to the courts and the lawyers. We were to put down our guns and grenades and head off to the next front in the war for Jewish survival: Palestine. The British masters of the country were keeping a tight lid on Jewish immigration so entry would not be easy, but an underground network would smuggle us in. Another war was coming: the new Jewish homeland would not come without a struggle – against the British, against the Arabs – and the Jews would need all the soldiers they could get. I was barely fifteen but I counted as a veteran.