Greg Iles - Black Cross

“Mother will not believe it,” he said, sitting on one of the narrow bunks. “Everyone tried to convince her that you were dead. To carry on, I told her that myself.”

“I was dead,” Avram said, taking a seat beside him.

“It doesn’t matter now. God has given us a second chance. No matter what the women decide, I am taking you out when I go. You will pretend to be my prisoner. In five minutes you will be outside that fence.”

Avram Stern looked into his son’s face. “Jonas, I told you before. I cannot go out with you. Please, listen. I cannot leave women and children here to die.”

Jonas took his father’s arm. “You’re not responsible for their deaths! It’s the Nazis! The British and the Americans!”

“I would be responsible for one death, Jonas.”

“One? Whose?”

“The child you could take out in my place.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How many people can you take out with you? Out of Germany?”

Stern heard sibilant voices rising and falling as the women argued in whispers. “I’m not supposed to bring anyone out. We’re going out by British submarine. Then from Sweden to England by plane. The plane is small. In the worst case, I’d planned to send you on from Sweden in my place and find another way back myself. Or we could both try to reach Palestine by an illegal route. I know some people.”

Avram was shaking his head. “Stop worrying. You’re going out just as you were supposed to. I’ve lived a long life, Jonas. My old friends are dead. I am not destined to go with you. But someone else is. You can take one Jewish child.”

Stern opened his mouth to argue, but his father clenched his arm with the iron grip of a man who has labored a lifetime with his hands. “Listen to your father! Even those who survive in the E-Block may die in reprisals. That’s how things work here, Jonas. The person that goes with you has the best chance for life. It must be a child. Small enough for you to carry in your arms, to smuggle into your submarine, to hold on your lap in the airplane. One child to live for all the thousands who have died in this insane country.” Avram held up his right hand and closed it slowly as if around some precious treasure. “One seed, Jonas. One little seed for Palestine.”

“You expect me to leave you to die again?” Stern said, seething with frustration. “What could I say to Mother? She would hate me forever.”

Avram shook his head. “No. Your mother is a practical woman. When I refused to leave Germany, did she stay behind to die? No. She carried you as far as she could from danger. My son, it is the fulfillment of my life to know both of you reached Palestine. I was wrong in 1935, but this time I am right. You must do as I tell you.” He looked up and motioned to someone in the darkness. Rachel Jansen appeared and knelt beside the bunk, her eyes wide with fear and hope.

“You remember her?” Avram asked.

Jonas nodded. The bright black eyes were not easily forgotten.

Avram reached out and squeezed Rachel’s hand. “Both nights since then she has smuggled her children here on the chance that you might come back. She knew you must have told me to wait here in case you returned. She is a brave girl, Jonas. She is like the daughter of Levi, who put Moses into the ark of bulrushes. And you are her ark, my son.”

Rachel’s lips quivered as she watched Avram’s face. “Is it—?”

“As I suspected,” Avram said firmly. “One child, Rachel. One can go. One must stay with you. You must decide.”

Jonas saw the young woman sway slightly on her knees. When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper. “How long do I have?”

Jonas looked at his watch. 7:26. “Father,” he whispered. “I beg you—”

“My decision is made.”

Jonas turned to Rachel. “Two minutes,” he said.

Rachel hesitated, as if he might say something else, might somehow offer more hope. But he didn’t. She stood up slowly and walked over to the corner bunk where her children slept.

Avram laid his hand on his son’s knee. “Come,” he said. “Let us see what the women have decided.”

“Wait a moment,” Jonas said. “We have a problem. The women can’t move to the E-Block with that sentry at the block gate.”

Avram squeezed his son’s knee. “I know what must be done. Let us see what they have decided.”

41

One hundred and fifty miles west of Rostock, the RAF Pathfinder force turned southeast toward Magdeburg. But as the last of the Lancasters of the 300-bomber Main Force moved into position behind them, the twelve Mosquitoes of the Special Duties Squadron continued eastward.

In the cockpit of the lead Mosquito, Squadron Leader Harry Sumner spoke to his navigator, who was crowded into the seat behind his right shoulder. “Going to max speed, Jacobs. Strict radio silence from here out. Make a visual check to be sure everyone’s with us.”

“Right.”

Sumner put his hand affectionately on the throttles. The De Havilland Mosquito had turned out to be the miracle bomber of the war. Built wholly of plywood for peacetime air racing, the “Mossy” carried no defensive armament, relying on its tremendous speed to avoid confrontation. It could cruise to Germany at 265 miles per hour with a full bombload, then accelerate to 360 to evade even the best Luftwaffe night fighters. When Harry Sumner went to max speed, the Merlin engines roared like lions loosed from cages.

“Everyone still there, Jacobs?”

“Right with us, sir,” said the navigator.

“H 2S radar working?”

“So far.”

“Let’s find that bloody river.”

Rachel Jansen knelt beside the prison bunk and looked down at her two sleeping children. They lay side by side, impossibly small and vulnerable, their faces placid above the tatty prison blanket. For two days and nights she had prayed for and dreaded this moment. There was no way to make a just choice, or even a logical one. It was like being asked which eye one would prefer to have plucked out.

She tried in vain to block out the memories that tortured her: Marcus’s face after seeing the babies for the first time, especially Hannah, who had been born in the attic in Amsterdam; the hours Rachel had simply stared at the tops of their little heads while they suckled at her breasts, weeping with a rapturous awareness of mortality that closed the throat and made the skin prickle with heat—

Stop! she told herself. You must choose!

Her first instinct was to send Jan with the shoemaker’s son. It was him she had feared for most these last two weeks. But now it appeared that Klaus Brandt was going to die. The danger would be equal for both children after that. Rachel thought briefly of Marcus; if her husband were still alive, he would choose Jan. Continuation of the family name , he would say sternly. Yet Rachel felt little obligation to the Jansen name. Marcus was dead. A blade of guilt pierced her when she thought of his father dying beside her in the E-Block, but she drove the image from her mind.

Gazing down at the children’s faces, Rachel simply stopped trying to decide. She laid a hand on Jan’s forehead. Three years old. Three years old and already one of the last survivors of his generation. It was impossible to comprehend. Yet it was reality. Hannah’s second birthday had passed while she rode in a stifling cattle car full of sick and dying Jews. Rachel remembered wrapping the little dreidl in straw and giving it to her like a present. Hannah instantly recognized the old toy, but everyone had pretended it was a new and priceless treasure.

Rachel felt gooseflesh rise under her burlap shift. She had always felt a preternatural sense of peace when she looked at her daughter. It was almost like looking at herself. Not a mirror image, but rather a reflection in water, as if an imaginative and flattering artist had rendered Rachel as a child, widening her eyes, making her mouth fuller, her forehead a little higher. And every word Hannah said, each question she asked, bespoke Rachel’s own curiosity. Jan was like Marcus: reserved, a little gentleman.