Greg Iles - Black Cross

Rachel started as the voice of Avram Stern cut through the dark. Her time was running out. For an instant she actually considered taking the dreidl from her pocket and spinning the top on the rough floorboards. She could assign two of its four Hebrew letters to Jan, two to Hannah, and let God decide. But she did not do this. Even God had no place in this decision.

With that thought, Rachel suddenly understood exactly who and where she was. She was not like the mother of Moses, who had set her infant son adrift in an ark of bulrushes to save him from the soldiers of Pharaoh. She was a woman trapped on an island inhabited by a doomed race, an island sinking rapidly into the sea. She had the chance to send one child out upon that sea — an unfinished message in a bottle — her only message to the world.

She pulled back the prison blanket and lifted her baby to her breast.

Ariel Weitz was very pleased with himself. He had made a great deal of mischief in the last forty minutes, and every second had given him a warm and wicked satisfaction. During his years at Totenhausen, Weitz had managed to acquire keys to nearly every door in the camp. Some had been given to him by the SS to facilitate his daily tasks. Others he had stolen.

One key opened a storeroom at the back of the headquarters building, which housed the overflow from the main camp arsenal. From this storeroom he had removed six potato-masher grenades, two land mines and a submachine gun, all of which he packed into a crate marked SULFADIAZINE. He carried this crate to the morgue in the hospital basement and with another key opened the SS bomb shelter. A long string of hanging light bulbs revealed a ramp descending at a shallow angle into a tunnel that ran fifty meters underground and then up to a second entrance in one of the SS barracks. The tunnel was lined with musty shelves and benches.

With a mine in one hand and two grenades in the other, Weitz had scampered along the tunnel until he reached the barracks entrance. Just inside the door, square in the middle of the tunnel, he set the land mine on the floor and armed it. Then he took the two grenades and, using some string from his pockets, stretched tripwires across the tunnel and anchored them to the shelves. When pulled taut by panicked legs, they would detonate the potato-mashers and fill the tunnel with a hurricane of shrapnel. On the way back to the morgue, Weitz unscrewed every light bulb in the tunnel, cackling softly while he did it.

He had booby-trapped the morgue entrance in exactly the same way as the barracks entrance, and as a final touch unscrewed every light bulb in the morgue. Any SS men who managed to find their way to the bomb shelter entrance would have little chance of seeing the explosives that were about to kill them.

Yes, he was quite pleased with himself.

“Your time is up!” Avram told the women. He stood with his back to the barracks door, his son beside him. “You cannot decide not to decide. To do that is to condemn everyone.”

Once again the Frenchwoman stood up and gestured fiercely. “I say it again! No one here can choose fairly .”

Avram took a step toward her. “I can choose fairly,” he said.

“You!” she cried. “Your own son is the one who has come to kill us. Of course you will be saved.”

“Am I not a man? The E-Block will be full of women and children. I will be with the other men during the attack. Thus, I alone among you can choose fairly.”

The Frenchwoman looked incredulous. “You will die with the others?”

“If that is our fate. Now, please listen to me.”

The old woman who had likened the E-Block to a lifeboat got to her feet and pointed at the Frenchwoman. “You’ve sung your song long enough, little bird. The shoemaker knows what must be done. Sit down and hold your tongue.”

The other women nodded in agreement. Jonas wondered if it was his father’s promise of self-sacrifice that had silenced them, or merely the fact that he’d volunteered to lift from their shoulders the responsibility of choosing.

“Here is my decision,” Avram said. “Places in the E-Block will be given to Jewish women and children. No one outside this block will be told anything.”

There was a sudden buzz of conversation, but it died quickly.

“Any woman among you who has a child will be given a place. If you have a child, please raise your hand.”

Fifteen women raised their hands from the floor.

“Keep your hands raised. How many of those left are thirty years old or younger?”

Eight more women raised their hands.

“That’s twenty-five adults,” said Avram, “including Rachel Jansen and the Sephardic woman who sleeps in the children’s block. How many women left are between thirty-one years and forty?”

Fourteen women raised their hands.

Avram counted silently. “That’s thirty-nine. There is room for only thirty-five adults. Please keep your hands raised.”

“For God’s sake,” snapped a woman with her hand in the air. “Do four extra matter so much?”

“Four extra could kill everyone,” Jonas said. “Depending on how long you must stay inside to survive. I was told to allow only twenty-five adults. I’m stretching it as it is.”

Avram looked at the women who had not raised their hands. Some of them were staring at the floor, others weeping openly. The old woman who had spoken about the lifeboat tried to comfort them.

Jonas blinked as he saw a hand drop. A woman who looked to be in her late twenties stood up where the hand had been. “I will stay here,” she said.

“But you are young,” protested an older woman. “You will have children someday. You deserve a place.”

The volunteer looked at the floor and shook her head. “I will never have children. I was sterilized at Auschwitz. The other girls died, and I was sent here. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. I will stay.”

“God bless you,” said the old woman.

“That’s thirty-eight,” Avram said stoically.

Two more hands dropped. “I lost my children long ago,” said a voice. “And my husband in the last selection.”

“The same,” said the other woman. “I don’t think it matters much where we are anyway. I’ve been under bombs before. If one bomb fell on the E-Block it would kill everyone inside. I will take my chances here.”

Stern felt a stab of guilt because of his lie, but there was no help for it. He glanced toward the rear of the block. No sign of Rachel Jansen. He was about to call her name when a bald woman jumped up and pointed at someone seated on the floor.

“She’s lying! She’s forty-two. How can you do it, Shoshana?”

The woman being pointed at kept her hand rigidly in the air. “I’m thirty-nine,” she said.

The accuser shook her head violently. “I know her from Lublin! She’s forty-two!”

The accused woman stood up, her face working in terror. “Yes, I’m forty-two! Is that so old? Why shouldn’t I have a chance to live? Look at my hips! I can still bear children!”

She turned around in place in an almost lewd exhibition of her surviving sexual charms. Jonas saw that some of the other women who had been excluded were becoming upset. He stepped forward, ready to restrain the overwrought woman.

“If you want to keep living so badly, go in my place.”

Another woman had stood up. She was emaciated and nearly bald, with skin like parchment, but certainly not older than thirty. “I lived in Warsaw,” she said. “There is no one left in my family. Take my place.”

“No!” protested several women. “You deserve your place!”

The young woman raised her hands, palms up, in a haunting gesture of resignation. “Please,” she said. “I am so tired.”

Jonas stepped in front of his father. “Hands down,” he said. “It is decided.” He called to the back of the barracks: “Frau Jansen, it is time.”