A riel went to Rebekkah’s aid. The laundry bag was nearly as big as she was, and Rebekkah was battling to load it into the back of a battered blue van that made the daily run, carrying the SS officers’ laundry into the little town of Mauthausen. Ariel and Rebekkah turned to go back for the last of the bags, but the driver, a young woman with pale-blue eyes, beckoned to them from the side of the van that was hidden from the watchtowers.
‘Listen carefully,’ she whispered. ‘My name is Katrina and you must do exactly as I say. There’s a space in the back of the van near the cabin, and when the truck is full you must climb over the bags and pull them on top of you. I will lock the doors behind you.’ Katrina glanced calmly to the left and right to make sure they were not being observed. ‘Quickly now, get the last two bags.’
‘But what about Mama?’ Rebekkah pleaded with Ariel.
‘Mama said we have to do exactly what the lady says,’ Ariel said reassuringly, displaying a maturity beyond his years.
‘Was ist los?’ The Nazi guard’s piggy eyes narrowed as he walked out of the laundry shed.
‘ Beeilen Sie sich! Hurry up, you lazy scum! I haven’t got all day.’ Katrina shoved Ariel and Rebekkah past the guard towards the doors of the loading dock. ‘They’re so lazy, those two,’ she said, shaking her head at the guard and getting into the driver’s seat.
‘What do you expect? They’re Jews!’ The guard turned to follow Ariel and Rebekkah.
Katrina switched on the ignition. The engine turned rapidly, but didn’t fire. Katrina tried again and then a third time, but the engine still refused to start. The guard, Katrina noted, was coming back.
‘ Scheisse! ’ Katrina swore. She lifted the van’s stubby bonnet and retrieved from her pocket a rotor coated in green powder.
‘It’s the rotor,’ Katrina said, looking at it in disgust. ‘Do you have any sandpaper in your workshop?’ she asked, slipping the guard a packet of Sleipner cigarettes.
‘Jawohl!’ the guard replied, smiling snidely at Katrina. ‘Come with me.’
Katrina let the guard walk in front of her and turned back to Ariel and Rebekkah, giving a quick jerk of her head towards the back of the van.
Ariel grabbed a corner of his sister’s bag and dragged it along with his own. He helped Rebekkah onto the tailgate, climbed in after her and closed the van doors quietly.
‘Quickly,’ he whispered, glancing through the van window. He could see Katrina walking alongside the guard, scrubbing something with a piece of paper. ‘They’re coming back!’ They climbed over the piles of laundry bags, sat against the back of the cabin, and covered themselves with the bags in front. Rebekkah was breathing hard and Ariel reached for her hand and squeezed it.
‘There’s always something,’ Katrina complained, snapping the plastic cover back onto the distributor and slamming the bonnet. ‘ Vielen Dank.’
‘ Bitte. Any time. Perhaps you would like a drink after work?’
‘We’ll see.’ Katrina let out the clutch and eased the van towards the heavy wooden doors and granite towers that marked Mauthausen’s entrance. The fat guard gave a wave and headed off towards the toilet block for a smoke. Katrina drove slowly, expecting the guards to open the gates, but the thin, spindly man on duty climbed down from the watchtower and signalled for her to stop.
‘Was ist in der Lastwagen?’ he demanded.
‘ Nur schmutzige Wasche. Just some dirty laundry,’ Katrina replied.
‘ Offnen Sie! ’
Katrina shrugged, got out and opened the back doors of the van.
Ariel and Rebekkah instinctively pressed themselves against the metal back of the cabin. One by one the guard pulled the big blue bags out of the truck until there were only two rows remaining. Suddenly, the guard fixed his bayonet to his rifle and thrust it between two of the bags. Ariel and Rebekkah winced as the blade flashed between them and punctured the flimsy metal of the cabin.
‘ Entschuldigung? ’ Katrina inquired nonchalantly.
‘ Was! ’
‘I just thought I’d mention that Obersturmbannfuhrer von Hei?en’s uniforms are in those bags. Perhaps the kommandant will not be too pleased if he finds a bayonet tear in his tunics?’
The SS guard grunted and got out of the truck. ‘Load them back in and get on your way!’ he ordered, turning on his heel and climbing back into the watchtower.
Ariel squeezed Rebekkah’s hand again. With his other hand he checked to ensure the map he’d managed to keep from the Nazis was still in his pocket.
Half an hour later, Katrina slowed the van to a stop on a side road in a forest. She opened the back doors and passed in a small bag.
‘There are some clothes in there. We’ll be in Vienna in another couple of hours, but I want you to get changed while we’re moving, because when you get out, you’ll be going straight on board a ship.’
‘Thank you,’ Ariel replied numbly. ‘Would you have a piece of paper and a pencil?’
‘Yes; just a moment.’
‘What do you want paper for?’ Rebekkah asked as the van regained the highway.
‘I tried to memorise those figures on the map the German took. Papa said they were important.’ A tear dropped onto the paper as Ariel reproduced the map as best he could, but he could only remember one of the three bearings. When he’d finished, he carefully put both maps into the bag Katrina had given them.
A further two hours down the road Ariel looked through the window and recognised some of the buildings. ‘I think we’re near the docks,’ he whispered. Suddenly, they stopped and the van doors were opened. A late-afternoon mist had descended on Vienna, and a small group of soldiers were lounging on some wool bales, smoking and telling jokes. No one was paying any attention to the small, rusted coal freighter rubbing against the tyres on the pylons. A wisp of smoke curled from the Wilhelm Kohler ’s single grimy funnel, mingling with the mist. The Danube, brown but powerful, eddied past the steamer’s rusted plates, while further out in midstream, a blackened barge loaded with timber chugged determinedly towards an unknown destination upstream.
‘These are the last two,’ Katrina said to the deckhand from the Jewish Agency in Vienna. She turned to Ariel and Rebekkah. ‘Good luck, and may God go with you.’ With that, Katrina was gone.
The deckhand ushered Ariel and Rebekkah up the narrow gangplank and below decks.
The children’s escape from Mauthausen might have gone unnoticed until the evening roll call, but von Hei?en was still furious over the missing figurine. Having ensured their father would never reveal the figurine’s whereabouts, von Hei?en was determined both Ariel and Rebekkah would witness their mother’s demise, before they too were added to Doctor Richtoff’s list of specimens.
The siren wailed ominously, warning the locals of a prison break.
‘We’ve searched the entire camp, Herr Kommandant. They were last seen loading the laundry van, but they’ve disappeared.’ Brandt was nervous.
‘The laundry company?’ von Hei?en demanded.
‘Their normal driver was off sick, and both his replacement and the van have disappeared, but the guard on the tower insists that he searched the van, and that’s been corroborated by the other guards.’
‘The Jews are behind this,’ von Hei?en seethed. ‘Bring the laundry manager in for questioning.’
‘Should I inform Vienna?’
‘No! I will handle that myself,’ von Hei?en declared, determined there would be no blemish on his record. He would use his contacts in the Gestapo to seal off any escape route through Vienna or Istanbul.
‘Do you want to cancel the experiment with the Weizman Jewess?’ Brandt asked. ‘Doktor Richtoff is ready to start.’
‘Tell Doktor Richtoff to go ahead. I will be there shortly. We’ll make other arrangements for the two brats… very special arrangements.’
‘Jawohl, Herr Kommandant!’
In less than two minutes, von Hei?en was through to Adolf Eichmann in Vienna, providing him with the registration number of the van.
‘Kein Problem, mein Freund. The borders are sealed and if they’re attempting to get them out through the docks, we’ll intercept them.’
‘ Danke, Adolf. Much appreciated.’ Von Hei?en hung up the phone, satisfied the Weizman children would soon be back behind Mauthausen’s walls.
Ramona lay naked on a stainless-steel gurney outside the pressure chamber. She shivered violently in the cold, unable to move. Black metal cuffs bit into her ankles and wrists, and behind her a series of leads attached to her body were connected to a machine. Fear for her children tore at her very being.
‘As soon as you’ve recorded its temperature and blood pressure, have it placed in the chamber,’ Doctor Richtoff ordered his assistant, a lanky pale-faced medical student in his early twenties.
‘ Jawohl, Herr Doktor. ’
Von Hei?en, together with Hauptsturmfuhrer Brandt, stood at one of the observation windows. Two orderlies wheeled the gurney into the chamber and Brandt ran his eyes over Ramona’s naked form. For a woman in her forties, she was in good condition, he thought. The doctor joined them in the observation booth. ‘How long do you think she’ll last, Doktor?’ he asked.
Richtoff shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hard to tell. This one looks pretty fit, but unfortunately we don’t have much data on females, so we’ll have to wait and see.’ Richtoff picked up a small microphone at the side of the observation window.
‘Ready?’
‘ Ja, Herr Doktor,’ his assistant answered, his reply strangely muffled by the intercom. ‘Temperature 99.9. Blood pressure 160 over 115 and heart rate 110.’
‘So,’ Richtoff observed, ‘the specimen is running a fever and the blood pressure and heart rate are up. This may not take long, but we’ll see.’ He pressed a red button and a purple light started to flash above the steel door of the pressure chamber. The two orderlies and Richtoff’s assistant evacuated the chamber, and one of them spun a silver-spoked wheel, sealing the chamber bulkhead.
‘Achtung! Achtung! Wir beginnen!’
The Turkish captain of the coal carrier Wilhelm Kohler, Mustafa Gokoglan, reached for a frayed cord just above his head. Three mournful blasts reverberated through the mist surrounding the docks. Gokoglan looked out of his wheelhouse and waved the gangplank and mooring ropes away. He’d been reluctant to take on the human cargo, but he understood the language of money. Now that the twenty-one Jewish children were crammed into four cabins below decks, he was impatient to get away. The rest of his cargo manifest wouldn’t stand too much scrutiny by the authorities either, and he was wary of the German soldiers on the docks. He leaned out of the wheelhouse. ‘Let go for’ard!’ The dockworker loosened the heavy hawser from its bollard. Gokoglan took a sip from a battered mug of steaming coffee, grasped the smooth, brass handle of the telegraph and rang for ‘slow ahead’. ‘Let go aft!’
Three decks below, the Wilhelm Kohler ’s wiry little engineer, a Kurd by the name of Hozan Barzani, wiped his dark brow with some oily cotton waste and reached for the old silver throttle wheel. He opened it gently and steam hissed into the Penn and Company triple-expansion steam engine. Barzani opened it a little further and more high-pressure steam shot into the first and smallest of the old cylinders, expanding into a second and then a third, each piston larger than the first to adjust for the progressive loss of pressure. The old engine towered over Hozan, and the worn big-end bearings on the one-metre-long connecting rods protested as the great pistons slowly gathered momentum.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Barzani swore in Kurdish. He’d been arguing with his obstinate captain for months, but to no avail. Not only were the con-rod bearings worn, but the bearings that held the drive shaft in place were dangerously overdue for maintenance and the lubricating oil was leaking badly, causing the bearings to overheat. Sailing the great river was not without its dangers, especially at night, but Barzani had been told that once they left the Romanian delta, they would cross the Black Sea and enter the Bosphorus Strait: fourteen nautical miles of twisting, turning waterway where thick fog could reduce visibility to a few hundred metres; where ships coming in the opposite direction were obscured by sharp turns. In places the straits were only a few hundred metres wide. When they reached Istanbul, ferries and other small craft would add to the hazards. From there Barzani had been told they were sailing for Palestine.
‘Your father’s a dog!’ he swore, shaking his fist at the rusted deck above his head. It was madness.
Clouds of black smoke belched from the Wilhelm Kohler ’s funnel, and the old tramp steamer moved away from the dockside and out into the Danube. Gokoglan sipped his coffee, oblivious both to the insults being hurled at him from below decks and the sirens gathering in the distance.
The dark, dank cabin to the aft of the steamer smelled of rotting canvas and fuel oil. As the deck vibrated beneath her feet, Rebekkah felt as if she might be sick, and she reached for her brother’s hand.
‘I’m scared, Ariel.’
‘We’ll be all right, Rebekkah… I promise.’
Hauptsturmfuhrer Brandt peered through the observation window at the pressure chamber. The specimen appeared to be crying, but other than that, it was all fairly boring. ‘Not much happening, Doktor?’ the young SS captain remarked, a note of disappointment in his voice.
Richtoff grunted. ‘There won’t be for a while. First we have to reduce the temperature to zero degrees centigrade and pressure to one atmosphere – what we call standard temperature and pressure, which replicates sea level. Under those conditions, our specimen would still take quite a while to die from the cold, but the pressure is dropping now, simulating altitude.’ A large red needle on the pressure gauge started to quiver and slowly wound back over the black gradations that marked the millimetres of mercury.
Von Hei?en watched the needle on the temperature gauge plunge past zero. He was still seething over the children’s escape, but his connections with Himmler were well known in the Reich and he was confident the Gestapo would soon recapture the escapees. The borders were sealed and the docks in Vienna would be thoroughly checked, as would the shipping schedules and arrivals in Istanbul.
Ramona stared uncomprehendingly through her tears at the frost forming on the large pipes above her head, and she shivered violently on the bare steel gurney. Her head ached and every so often a razored needle seemed to pierce her wrists. Death would be a merciful escape, but she knew she had to hold on. The children were without their father now and they would need her; but it was becoming more difficult to breathe and she could feel her pulse quickening. Another bolt of pain burst through her brain and she gritted her teeth.
‘Twenty thousand feet,’ Richtoff observed. ‘This one is tougher than I thought.’
Hauptsturmfuhrer Brandt nodded, his eyes riveted on the barometric pressure gauge. The experiment had been running for nearly twenty minutes and the red needle was falling more steadily now. The height equivalents were clearly marked in feet: 20 000… 21 000… 22 000…
‘It’s twitching,’ Brandt observed as the falling pressure simulated 23 000 feet.
‘ Much tougher than I thought,’ Richtoff observed. ‘Pulse is now 180. It’s amazing how hard the heart can work before it collapses. See how its head wiggles. Even at this temperature it’s perspiring.’
Ramona fought desperately for breath as violent cramps racked her body. ‘My children. My children,’ she gasped.
‘I think it’s finally unconscious,’ Richtoff remarked casually. ‘The breathing is slowing dramatically.’
‘And there’s frothing at the mouth,’ Hauptsturmfuhrer Brandt observed excitedly.
Richtoff turned to his assistant. ‘Make a note of severe cyanosis.’ The circulation of de-oxygenated blood had turned Ramona’s face a deep blue.
‘And now the breathing has stopped,’ Richtoff observed. Five minutes later he turned to von Hei?en. ‘It’s dead, but quite an amazing specimen. Nearly 25 000 feet… I can’t recall one lasting for so long at that altitude, let alone a female. The autopsy will hopefully provide us with some more data.’
‘Good. Let Hans here know if there’s anything else you need.’ Von Hei?en headed back to his office where two immediate cables were waiting for him. The first was from Alberto Felici, indicating that he would shortly be travelling to Istanbul on Vatican business. The second was from Adolf Eichmann, indicating the Weizman children were believed to be on a tramp steamer bound for the Bosphorus, and giving him authority to liaise directly with the German Defence Attache in Istanbul.
Von Hei?en buzzed for his adjutant. This time there must be no mistake, he mused, vowing to see to it personally.
‘ Herr Kommandant? ’
‘Make arrangements for me to leave for Istanbul on the first flight out of Vienna tomorrow, and get this cable off to the Vatican,’ he commanded, handing Brandt his reply to Felici, suggesting they meet at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul.