For three days and nights, Avi and Jacob stayed on the move. Avi did allow for a few breaks. And they did stop a few times to take brief naps. But only brief ones, and then they were moving again.
On the fourth day, Avi and Jacob slipped over the German border into Belgium. They were not safe, Avi told him in hushed tones, but he had friends who could help them.
Along the way, when they were high up in the mountains or moving through a thick forest, Avi allowed Jacob to talk, and to both of their surprise, Jacob spilled his guts. He told his uncle everything that had occurred after Avi left the house on Sunday night. Jacob explained what had happened when the Gestapo came and how both of his parents had been shot, one after the other. He explained how his mother’s last words were for him to run and how he had run for his life, reached the motorbike, and raced immediately to the cabin. As he and Avi compared notes on all that had transpired, Jacob found that though they grieved, they did not cry. They had lost everyone dear to them except each other. But fear was a tonic that somehow calmed their nerves and focused their minds.
Soon they were deep inside Belgium and holed up in a barn behind a farmhouse, hiding in a loft under bales of hay.
“So where exactly are we?” Jacob whispered as the sun began to rise.
“Zellik,” Avi whispered back.
“Where?”
“A little village northwest of Brussels.”
“How little?”
“Don’t know—too small for us to go wandering around in daylight, that’s for certain.”
“You know anybody here?”
“One guy.”
“Who?”
“You’re about to find out. Come on. It’s time.”
Avi climbed out of their hiding place and brushed himself off, then brushed pieces of straw off Jacob. Moving quickly and quietly, they sneaked to the side door of the barn, made sure the coast was clear, then sprinted for the farmhouse. When they reached a cellar door, Avi began knocking with some sort of a code.
Moments later, someone with a rifle opened the door. They entered and the door was closed and locked behind them. They were immediately directed to a young boy, no older than ten or twelve, who proceeded to lead them through a labyrinth of farm equipment and supplies to a small, enclosed workshop, guarded by two burly men with rifles. “Wait here,” the boy said, and he scampered inside the workshop.
A minute later, a tall, gaunt, pale man—probably in his early to mid-fifties—with thinning blond hair, tattered work clothes, a brown felt cap, and a kindly expression emerged from the workshop. He lit up when he saw Avi, and the two gave each other a bear hug.
“Morry, this is the nephew I’ve been telling you about.”
The man put out his big, calloused hand. “You must be Jacob.” He spoke with a thick French accent.
“I am,” Jacob replied, surprised to be known. He shook the man’s hand with a sturdy, firm grip, just as his uncle had taught him.
“My name is Maurice,” the man said. “Maurice Tulek. My friends call me Morry, but I let your uncle call me Morry too.”
The two men laughed, but Jacob didn’t find it funny. He didn’t see any humor in the moment. His pain was much too fresh.
Avi explained that Maurice was a Jew. Originally from Bourgogne, Maurice had moved to Brussels several years before, joined the Resistance, and was now commander of a critically important cell. Avi briefed his friend on the latest situation inside Germany and on the death of Jacob’s parents, then asked Morry to lay out the plan for Jacob’s training.
“Training?” Jacob asked, dumbfounded. “I thought we were going to England.”
“England?” Morry said. “No, no, no. You’re not going to England. We need you here. We have to be ready.”
Frightened and confused, Jacob looked to Avi, but rather than correct his friend, Avi confirmed the plan.
“Morry’s right,” Avi said. “We’re not going to England, Jacob. We’re needed here.”
“But I thought . . .”
“No, Jacob. We cannot run. We cannot be selfish. We cannot think only of ourselves. The Jews of Germany are in danger. So are the Jews of Belgium. We need to help them get to England and America and Palestine.”
“But, Uncle,” Jacob protested, “you said we had to get out. You said that we had to get to someplace safe.”
“Things have changed,” Avi calmly replied. “Everything has changed. You and I can’t fix what happened to your family. But we can help other Jewish families in Siegen and beyond. After all, Jacob, if we don’t help them, who will?”
Jacob said no more. He stared into his uncle’s eyes, searching for any sign that the man could be persuaded, but there was none to be had. Instead Jacob saw a deep and fierce resolve. Indeed, his uncle seemed electrified by the opportunity to save lives.
At one level, the whole notion seemed ludicrous, even suicidal. Yet in a way that he could not explain even to himself, his uncle’s intense sense of conviction about the matter struck a mystifying yet riveting chord deep in Jacob’s soul. Finally he shrugged and nodded, and as he did, Avi and Morry beamed with what appeared to be joy, a rather odd emotion to be feeling under the circumstances, Jacob thought.
“Very good,” the Frenchman began. “I will personally oversee your training. You two must both get in much better shape. Physical conditioning is critical. Then we’ll cover setting up safe houses, forging documents, Morse code, building and fixing and operating all kinds of radios, surveillance, weapons training, hand-to-hand combat. But we don’t have much time. We’re expecting the Germans to invade by the end of the year. You sure you’re up for this?”
Jacob looked at his uncle, then to Maurice Tulek, and nodded. “I’m ready.”
“Good,” Maurice said. “Then let’s get to it.”
19
The Nazi invasion didn’t happen by the end of 1939 after all.
The German seizure of the Low Countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—didn’t occur until May of 1940, and Jacob was grateful for the extra months of training and conditioning.
Maurice, Avi, and Jacob used the time to recruit and assemble the rest of their team of young Jewish insurgents.
Their first recruit was Micah Kahn. A twenty-six-year-old Belgian Jew, Micah was a medical doctor and the son of a military physician. Tall and handsome with slicked-back dark hair, a brilliant mind, and an athletic build, he possessed an uncanny gift of leadership that could persuade just about anyone to do just about anything.
When Avi first met Micah and his equally sophisticated older brother, Marc, at a café in Brussels, he sensed their potential immediately and tried to recruit them both. Both were passionate in their hatred of the Nazis and fearful for the fate of Belgium. Marc, however, had decided to become a Communist and was committed to working with the Reds to overcome the Nazis. Micah, on the other hand, had become increasingly sympathetic to the Resistance—even more so after the invasion, when he was forced by the Nazis to stop practicing medicine and start wearing a yellow Star of David, which he considered degrading and humiliating. He didn’t commit to becoming active in the Resistance, though, until a number of his friends began disappearing. Rumor had it they had been arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and either killed or shipped out to various concentration camps. Micah couldn’t be certain exactly what had happened in each and every case, but he was sure about one thing: he had to do everything in his power to save his fellow Jews.
Once Micah was in, he was all in. He became like a brother to Jacob, and Avi taught him everything he had learned from Maurice. Micah then set about recruiting two of his childhood friends, Henri Germaine and Jacques Bouquet, to join the Resistance, even though neither of them was Jewish.
At twenty-two, Henri was four years younger than Micah but just as tall, though somewhat thinner, with wild, curly hair that gave him a look reminiscent of a young Albert Einstein. Henri and Micah had grown up in the same neighborhood—just around the corner from one another, in fact
. They met on their grade school playground and became good friends despite their difference in age. They had remained close ever since.
In some ways, the two were cut from similar cloth. Like Micah, Henri had a father who was a doctor in the Belgian military, and he, too, had a brother who was six years older. Henri found Micah’s love of books and music and films absolutely compelling, and it resonated with his own love for the arts and for new ideas.
Micah had often invited Henri to join him in games and hikes and outings of all kinds growing up, so Henri always felt included in Micah’s world. Over the years, though he himself was not Jewish, Henri also got to know Micah’s family, and he developed both an appreciation for Jewish wit and a sympathy for the Jewish people, given all the ridicule and persecution they faced. With the rise of the Third Reich came a commensurate rise in Henri’s antipathy toward Herr Hitler and his Nazi forces. Many of the friends Micah lost to the Nazis were friends of Henri’s, too. So when Micah asked him if he wanted to do damage to the Reich that was crushing their country and destroying their futures, it was not a hard sell.
Micah also brought Jacques, who was the same age as Micah and just as brilliant—perhaps even more so. A fanatic about mathematics, he also loved art and poetry and music and films. Indeed, in many ways he had competed all his life with Micah to know more and accomplish more as well as to laugh more and have more fun. Growing up with Micah and Henri, Jacques had developed a love for adventure and for the outdoors.
Whereas Micah was the leader and Henri was the professor, Jacques was the class clown. Mischievous and full of life, he was always playing pranks yet narrowly escaping getting caught by teachers and other authorities. And though he was no more Jewish than Henri, he, too, was very fond of the Kahn family and their Jewish friends. He abhorred the Nazi goose-steppers and the ugly anti-Semitism of the times.
In Avi’s and Jacob’s eyes, these three young men were ideal recruits for the Resistance. They proved to be fast studies, hard workers, and exceedingly brave. They were also natives of Belgium, and this Avi prized above all. They knew Brussels in particular, inside and out, and they not only had excellent contacts throughout the country but seemed to excel at making new contacts that proved equally valuable.
Jacob had never had friends like this in Siegen. His friends were not as interesting, not as well-read, and not nearly as committed to a common goal against a common foe. But here, in the danger-drenched climate of Nazi-controlled Europe, it was a combination that quickly bonded these four young men to each other and to Avi.
At first the team’s primary goal was helping Jewish families escape the Third Reich. Together, they helped more than three hundred families pass through Belgium. Some went to England, and some made it to Canada. Jacob and his new friends provided safe houses, basic provisions, clothes, and false documents along the way.
Once the invasion occurred, however, Maurice Tulek redirected them from rescuing Jews to other tasks considered more vital to the Allies. For the next several years, they gathered critical intelligence on German troop movements, blew up fuel depots, stole Nazi uniforms, and sabotaged lorries. Once, Avi and Jacob were ordered to attack a police station and grab any uniforms they could. They captured two police uniforms, two pistols, a small box of ammunition, and a money box with over ten thousand francs inside. What’s more, they escaped with a bonus neither of them had expected—a stash of six thousand food-ration coupons, which they promptly gave to Morry to distribute among the various Jewish Resistance members scattered throughout the country.
The fact that they had not yet been caught was a source of many arguments among them. Some attributed their good fortune to dumb luck. Others to their great skill and cleverness. Jacob wondered whether it was the hand of divine Providence. Regardless, each of these men loved the game, and they played it exceedingly well.
They rarely stayed in the same place two nights in a row. It was harrowing, thankless work, but Jacob was proud to be doing it and grateful to be at the side of an uncle he so deeply admired.
And then one day, without warning, they were blindsided.
20
FEBRUARY 2, 1943
HERSTAL, BELGIUM
The second of February fell on a Tuesday.
Jacob remembered it distinctly because it was his twenty-second birthday, and he was annoyed at being awakened by his uncle at 1:17 in the morning. But Avi had no time to be sentimental. He ordered Jacob to hightail it with him through a bone-chilling winter night to get to some safe house they’d never been to before and make it there by the top of the hour.
Jacob had been hoping to sleep in a little and maybe eat a half-decent meal before sitting down to plan the sabotage of a radio tower near Antwerp, an operation scheduled for the coming weekend. But none of that was to be. Instead Avi insisted they risk their lives by defying the Nazi curfew to get to a top-secret “emergency” meeting with Maurice Tulek and three other underground cell commanders, none of whom Jacob had ever met.
“Gentlemen, thank you for agreeing to meet with me, and especially on such short notice,” Avi began as they huddled in the uninsulated attic of a farmhouse on the outskirts of a town called Herstal. “A few hours ago, I received credible intelligence that the Nazis have moved a total of nineteen trainloads of Jews—mostly women and children, but also men, especially the elderly—out of Belgium to a concentration camp in Poland, a camp known as Auschwitz.”
Jacob, silently grumbling at his uncle, had been half-asleep as the meeting began. But the man now had his full attention. Was this true? Where had Avi gotten such intel?
“The nineteenth train departed the Mechelen camp on the fifteenth of January,” his uncle continued. “According to my sources, some sixteen thousand Jews have been deported to date. This would be bad enough, but there are reports that Auschwitz is not simply a slave-labor camp, as it has been described. At least one Nazi official in Brussels has privately told colleagues that Auschwitz is a ‘slaughterhouse’ or a ‘death factory.’ Some believe the Nazis are systematically killing Jews there by the hundreds, maybe by the thousands.”
“Come on, Avi, those are baseless rumors,” Morry sniffed. “The Nazis are killing Jews—how did you put it—‘systematically’? Rubbish. What would be the point? They need Jewish labor to build and run their factories. They need Jewish hands to produce matériel for the German war effort.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Avi replied. “I agree it sounds incredible. But this much we know for certain: our own people are being shipped out of Belgium to the most feared camp the Nazis have. What exactly happens at Auschwitz? I have no idea. But I’ve just learned that Kurt Asche—Hitler’s personal representative in Belgium on the ‘Jewish question’—is making plans as we speak to fill a twentieth train with more Jews and send them to Auschwitz as well.”
“When?” asked one of the cell commanders.
“I’m not yet sure,” Avi conceded. “But very soon.”
“You’re not sure because you can’t get reliable information?” another cell commander asked. “Or because Asche hasn’t decided yet?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure about that either,” Avi said. “At the moment, we believe they have about eight hundred Jews in the transit camp. I’m told when they get to fifteen hundred, the twentieth train will depart.”
“How do you know this?” Morry asked.
“I have two reliable sources. One is inside Asche’s headquarters,” Avi replied, referring to the Gestapo’s feared Avenue Louise compound in Brussels. “The other works at the prison at Boortmeerbeek. They are both patriotic Belgians. Both are civilians who have been forced to work for the Nazis. Neither knows of the other, but their stories match, and I have great confidence in these sources. Neither believes Asche has made a final decision on timing, but both believe that it’s possible the decision could have already been made and simply not yet communicated down the ranks. Either way, they are terrified. At first, both thought the Jews were just being sent to work ca
mps. But they, too, are beginning to hear whispers of ghastly things happening at Auschwitz.”
“Why are they talking to you?” one of the commanders inquired.
“One is doing it for money,” Avi said bluntly. “The other is stricken with guilt. He no longer wants to be part of organizing these convoys. Indeed, he’s actually planning to flee his post and try to leave the country, too, though we’ve begged him to stay.”
“Begged him to stay?” Morry said. “What on earth for?”
“Precisely for the reason I have gathered you all to discuss: I want your permission as representatives of the Jewish Defense Council to attack the twentieth train and set these captives free,” Avi said. “I need my source to remain in place at least until we can get all the intel we’ll need for the attack. Then he can go. In fact, I’ll personally do everything I can to help him get out of the country.”
The commanders were incredulous.
“Attack a heavily guarded train full of Jewish prisoners?” one asked. “Have you lost your mind, Avi?”
“Of course not—have you?” Avi retorted, his face flush with anger. “They’re Jewish prisoners. Isn’t it our job to save them—or some of them, at least—if we possibly can?”
“Not if it’s a suicide mission,” the commander shot back. “How do you plan to do it?”
“I’d like twenty-two men,” Avi said. “Two experts in explosives to blow up the tracks. Two snipers plus another half-dozen trained marksmen to take out the SS troops and provide cover. I’ll also need a half-dozen men with bolt cutters and wire cutters and the like to open up the train cars, and a third half-dozen to drive the getaway cars.”