The Shield: a novel (29 page)

The interrogator assured him that they would find a way to keep his f
amily safe. Bohdan wanted to believe them.

At the end of the day, Bohdan was escorted to a concrete building separated from the rest of the sprawling complex. Inside this jail he had a reasonably sized cell, with a desk on which to write detailed reports to his German masters, reports dictated by the military intelligence officer that had taken over from his interrogator. It was Bohdan’s responsibility to rewrite the reports so that the Germans would not suspect that they were fabricated and transmit the encoded reports on his radio set once a week in Morse code from a special room. He was very diligent in his work. He sincerely hoped that the skinny, short man forgot all about him. He also hoped that his German masters believed his reports and left his f
amily alone.

There were several radio sets similar to his in the radio room he used. Apparently he had not been the only spy caught in the Jew’s security net.
Many spies were not caught. Those who were Jewish and used their proper identities were extremely difficult to detect. One item that would have been a clear giveaway was a radio transmitter but the Germans issued them only to very few of their spies. The rest were supposed to use local Arab contacts to communicate with their German masters. As far as the Security Service knew none of the Jews tried.

Several Germans using their own n
ames and pretending to be Jewish did get through. The high degree of assimilation of the German Jewish community made post Holocaust records somewhat fuzzy and unreliable. These were trained spies and could have used local connections if they would have traveled to Mandatory Palestine. As it happened they found themselves temporarily helpless in 21
st
century Israel.

***

“Sir,” Hirshson’s second in command said dubiously, “I think that we may have a security breach. Our people overheard the crew of the German freighter Tannenfels talking about their last visit to Haifa. They were discussing the size of the city and the fact that it was brightly lit at night. Most worrisome was the fact that they saw a couple of Israeli flags on some of the buildings and on one of our naval ships. It seems that they put their binoculars to good use. Is there anything I should do about this?”

“
Let’s see. There’s no way for them to send a radio message – the jammers we installed on all the foreign ships will take care of that and our people on board will see that it is not disabled. The crews know that they will die if they don’t follow the exact course we prescribed. So, in my opinion, the danger of information leaking is quite small.”

“
Sir, the Germans are not stupid and will, eventually, realize that something is not kosher,” the officer insisted.

Hirshson was losing his patience
. “They certainly will, and they’ll be right, it is more like halal,” referring to the Islamic definition of foods allowed for consumption by Muslims. “Whether it will happen because somebody on one of the ships finds a way to communicate, or, more likely, through their spies in Britain, or even some that will slip through our security, is immaterial. Our time will run out. We need to make sure that when it does, there are few Jews left vulnerable. I’m sure that some people will decide to stay where they are and will pay the price. There’s nothing we can do about that. The scouts have increased the numbers willing to escape by so much that we will soon have problems shipping everybody.

”
In the meantime, we need a reevaluation of our transportation and housing capabilities. I believe we’ll reach about fifty thousand a day soon. This means that our refugee population here will grow by ten thousand a day. We need to accommodate them. As I ordered you yesterday, I need plans for expanding the base. In a couple of months we may have to keep close to a million people here. I hope it won’t come to that, but we have to be ready in case it does. I’d rather have them waiting here than in territory controlled by the Nazis.”

A
group of fifteen scouts sent by the Vilnius Jewish groups went to the railway station in Brindisi, from there to Rome, and from Rome, on a commercial flight, to Berlin continuing on a military transport to Warsaw. They were harassed by the Germans only once – When they got off the plane in Warsaw a Gestapo agent checking their documents took them to a small office and questioned each of them at length. The Israeli who accompanied them threatened the Nazi, but to no avail. The man seemed to be ignorant of what their ID cards meant. The whole debacle ended when the door opened with a crash and a SS major stormed into the room. “Are you crazy?” he yelled at the confused Gestapo man. “These are representatives of a friendly foreign power. I am taking them with me. You will report to your superior and ask to be punished for this. I will make sure that you go to the Eastern Front for this stupidity.” The Gestapo agent opened his mouth but closed it when two more SS came into the small room.

In Vilnius the scouts were escorted into the larger ghetto and left there. Jacob immediately went to the headquarters of the Revisionist movement on Strashuna 25, not far from where he had lived in the ghetto. He was greeted with surprise
. “That was a fast trip,” the young guard in the inner courtyard said. The three leaders of the movement, its chairman, secretary and defense coordinator, were also surprised. Jacob told his story. He did mention that the commander of the Brindisi facility was his relative and explained that he was the son of a cousin who had left for Palestine at the beginning of the Great War.

The discussion of what to do and how to do it took up the rest of the day. By the time they were done, it was too late to go anywhere
. The ghetto was under curfew and breaking it meant, if one was caught, spending a week or so in jail on half rations.

The next day Jacob went to visit his uncle Chaim’s f
amily. The visit was difficult. None of the family members were Zionists and they saw no good reason to move to the backwards land of Palestine. At yesterday’s meeting everyone had been dubious about his story. They had difficulty believing in a large compound in Brindisi free of Germans or Italians let alone a British troop carrier waiting in port to transport Jews to the Promised Land. They were finally convinced by Jacob’s eagerness to return to Italy and his story about his relative. An equally convincing argument, at least for his uncle, was that if he didn’t like Palestine he would be able to go somewhere safer and more developed. Chaim conceded that there was no future for them in Vilnius.

“I can’t tell you all I saw. You will understand when you get there
. But please, go as soon as you can. There is a train later today, do your best to be on it.”

“
Will you come with us?” Chaim asked.

“
I wish I could, but I want to convince as many of my friends as I can to go. There are also Grandma’s cousins. Everyone should leave as soon as they can. When I’ve met with everyone here, I’ll go to the ghetto in Kaunas with some others that came back from Italy with me. There are people there that know us and will believe what we say. We are trying to save as many as we can.”

“
You’re not staying here then?” Jacob’s cousin Tzipora asked.

“
Oh no! I don’t want to die! I’ll do my best to get on a train after we are done in Kaunas. Probably in two weeks. When you get to the compound in Italy, tell my mother and sister that I will be there as soon as I can. They’ll get reports about me every couple of days but will want to hear from you.”

Chaim hesitated for a day, but in the end decided he trusted his nephew and got on a train with his f
amily. So many people had been contacted and convinced by the Jewish agents, that the Germans started loading a hundred people per car, which made the passage very hard.

Jacob’s friend Zalman was convinced more easily.  After their conversation he got on a train as soon as he gathered his extended f
amily.

Not everyone in Vilnius and Kaunas believed the story. There were people who knew Jacob and other members of the scout group
, mainly through their Zionist organizations. They listened and got out as fast as they could. Other groups, including the Kaunas Yeshiva and, paradoxically, the local Bund leadership, concluded the whole thing was just propaganda and refused to go. The head of the Yeshiva changed his mind after meeting with two agents who were making the rounds of religious institutions.

A large portion of the Bund members ignored their leadership and went anyway as word spread
about the scouts and as their friends left. Those unaffiliated with any political or religious group – a large majority in both cities – were mostly leaving as well. The Germans were of some help, in their usual brutal way. They cut the rations while at the same time allowing the Ukrainians and Lithuanians to beat up Jews. They tried to be careful not to kill anyone, but they really didn’t care.

Jacob’s f
amily decided to wait in Brindisi. They studied Hebrew. Both Sheina and Chaim’s daughter Tzipora were making great progress. Their parents were acclimatizing at a slower pace. Their main concern was with finding good jobs when they finally got to Israel. They did not want to be a burden on anybody and state handouts were an alien idea to them.

***

Jacob’s group, like others that operated throughout Europe, carried with them a short wave radio transmitter. Theirs was state of the art for 1941, made by Blaupunkt and supplied to the Caliph by the Germans. Other groups carried German, British or American made radios. The group’s leader, an Israeli, used it to send messages to the Brindisi base. The messages followed a predefined pattern and reassured the people in Brindisi that the team was OK. Since the pattern of the messages was agreed upon before the groups left and was calculated to last for a month, there was no code to break and the Germans could not send a fake message without being caught.

The group Jacob traveled with consisted of four people: Morde
chai, a native of Palestine, was the leader and carried the radio, Jacob from the Revisionists, Hirsh Goldstein from the Zionist Halutz movement, and Rabbi Zerah Litvin from the Yeshiva of the Forty in Vilna.

They finished their assignment in Vilna a week after arriving there. They spoke to all the leaders and did their best to convince them to go. It was time to cover more territory. The plan was to travel from Vilna to Mari
ampole, from there to Kaunas and then return to Vilna. Some towns had no Jews – they had already been deported by the Germans to one of the larger ghettos. This made the job a bit more manageable.

The three Vilna natives carried letters from their respective organizations attesting to their membership and explaining that these organizations asked their members to move to Palestine. They also had personal connections they used. Mordechai was there to witness to the safety of Palestine and to persuade those who wanted to go to
America or other places that they would be able to do so from Palestine. It also helped that people who arrived at the Brindisi base were encouraged to send letters to their friends and family. Many did.

Their mission went well. Traveling in a horse drawn cart was not the fastest way, but it aroused minimal suspicion. They went unmolested from ghetto to ghetto delivering their message. The Germans and their helpers, the Ukrainian and Lithuanian police, recognized their special ID cards and mostly cooperated, though from time to time the group was subjected to verbal harassment.

They arrived in Kaunas almost two weeks after leaving Brindisi. It was close to the end of August. The sky was leaden and a fine rain was falling. Something was different here. Instead of inspecting their IDs as usual and letting them into the ghetto, the Germans politely but firmly escorted the group to waiting a truck and took them to the Ninth Fort.

The Fort had been built by the Russians as a military fortification before the First World War; it was never used for its intended purpose. After the Russian Empire disintegrated, beginning in 1924
, the Fort was used as a prison by the independent Lithuanian state. The Germans used it as a torture and extermination camp. Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies and other undesirables from the surrounding area were brought to the Ninth Fort, “interrogated” and executed.

Mordechai, the “Palestinian”, was the only one in the group f
amiliar with the Fort’s infamous history. He was shocked to discover that the facility seemed to be busy. All the guard towers were manned – some by Ukrainians and some by Germans – and prisoners were going about their business in the inner courtyard where the truck stopped and the group got off. They were searched and all their meager possessions were confiscated – including the special ID cards and the radio. When Mordechai protested, a guard hit him in the stomach with his rifle butt and proceeded to break his nose and split his right ear. At this point the prisoners were separated and locked in solitary cells. Mordechai, as the leader, was locked up in a cell under the main staircase. Three times a day, when the prisoners ran down the stairs to be counted, the noise in the cell was deafening. The rest of the time Mordechai couldn’t fall asleep because of the reverberating noise of footsteps. This went on day and night.

Jacob spent two days in his cell. It had a small window with a reasonable view of the fields and he could hear noises from the outside. On the second day he heard shots. They
came from the right, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t see what was happening. It sounded like a machine gun, then single shots. After about an hour the machine gun again, then single shots again. The sequence repeated the whole day. In the evening his cell door opened and he was taken to a small room with no windows. A table and chair were in the middle of the room. He was told to wait standing in the corner. Several hours later a dapper looking civilian accompanied by a uniformed guard came in. The civilian sat in front of the table, took out a notebook and a pen from the elegant leather briefcase he was carrying, and started the interrogation.