The Final Reckoning. Sam Bourne

of the time he just disgusted me.

      Then one night there was a knock on the door. An urgent knock, three times, four times. At first, the woman in the apartment looked terrified. She believed it was the Gestapo. She glared at me in terror. What misfortune had I brought down on them? Had I been seen smuggling?

      Then we heard the voice on the other side of the door. ‘Polizei, open up!’

      It was the Jewish police of the ghetto. Everyone knew they could be as vicious as any Lithuanian collaborator. I looked over to the window, wondering if I should jump down onto the street and make a run for it. We were two floors up: could I drop down on the ground without breaking any bones? I saw that my hands were trembling.

      Before I had even had a moment to make a plan, the woman had made her decision. She opened the door and there he was, the policeman who had pulled me off the convoy some three weeks before. Here, at my door, in the middle of the night.

      ‘You, boy, come now.’

      I was frozen with fear. I did not move.

      ‘NOW!’

      I was still wearing all the clothes I had. You did not dare take them off at night because they might be stolen. I let the policeman lead me away.

      He marched me down the stairs and into the street, loudly promising to take me to the authorities for what I had done. I did not understand what I had done.

      Eventually, he turned left and right, then into an alley and down an outdoor stairwell to the entrance of a cellar. This, I knew, was not the police headquarters. By now he had stopped shouting about how I was going to be punished. I felt the fear tighten in my stomach.

      Then the policeman knocked on the door. Not a normal knock, but in a strange rhythm. Three quick blows, then two slow ones. A voice spoke on the other side of the tiny basement door.

      ‘Ver is dort?’ Who goes there?

      ‘Einer fun di Macabi.’ A son of the Maccabees.

      The door creaked open and the policeman darted in, grabbing me with him. Inside were three other men, their faces lit by a single candle at the centre of a small, rotting table. To me they looked old, their eyes dark and sunken, their faces gaunt. But now I know they were young, one of them barely twenty.

      They stared at me until one, who seemed to be the leader, said finally, ‘It's a miracle.’

      Then another nodded and said, ‘He's perfect. Our secret weapon.’

      The leader then spoke again, his face harsh. ‘Take off your trousers.’

      I hesitated and he repeated it until I realized I had no choice. I lowered my trousers slowly.

      ‘All the way down! So we can see.’

      And once they had seen, the three men all gave a small smile. One even managed a brief laugh. None spoke to me. ‘Well done, Shimon,’ they said and the policeman nodded, like a child praised by his teacher. ‘You have truly brought us a Jewish miracle.’

      I had heard about the Jewish underground, but I had not believed it. The kids spoke about a resistance that was coming, how some Jews were trying to get guns to fight the Nazis, even to break out of the ghetto. But we had seen no sign of it. I believed it was a fairy tale, the kind of story boys tell each other.

      Now though, I understood where I had been taken. The policeman had called himself a ‘son of the Maccabees’: that had been the password. I knew that the Maccabees had been the great Jewish fighters, the Hebrew resisters who had battled to save Jerusalem.

      I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with an uncircumcised penis. I could pass for an Aryan. Perhaps they would use me to smuggle food into the ghetto. I was excited; I knew I could do it. After all, had not Hannah sent me out as a little Lithuanian orphan boy, to beg from our gentile neighbours who might take pity on a gentile child?

      But then the leader of the men sent Shimon away and began whispering in Yiddish with the others, oblivious to the fact that I was still there, standing right in front of them. One said they could not afford to wait: ‘The boy has seen our faces.’ Another nodded. ‘He knows about this place. We can't afford to risk it.’ I did not know what they were going to do to me.

      Finally, the leader raised his hand, as if the discussion was over. He had reached a decision. Only then did he turn and look straight at me. He told me his name was Aron. ‘Are you brave?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘Are you brave enough to perform a task that carries with it a grave risk – most likely a mortal risk?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said, though of course I had no idea of such things. I was saying what I thought would save me.

      ‘I am going to give you a task on behalf of your people. You are to travel to Warsaw, to an address I will give you. You will give them this message. Are you ready?’

      I nodded, though I was not ready.

      ‘You will go there and you will say these words. Do not change them, not even one word. This is the message: “Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4”.’

      ‘But I don't understand—’

      ‘It's better you don't understand. Better for you.’ He meant that if I were tortured I would have nothing to reveal. ‘Now repeat it back to me.’

      ‘Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.’

      ‘Again.’

      ‘Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.’

      ‘OK.’

      The policeman came back into the room and led me away. Standing in the alley outside he told me the plan. He repeated every detail, so that I would not forget.

      And so it happened that the next morning I left the ghetto with my work company as always. Except this time that same Jewish policeman was on duty at the gate, to ensure there was no trouble as I peeled away from the others.

      A few seconds after I had crossed the bridge over the river, I did as I had been told. I removed the yellow star from my coat and immediately stepped onto the pavement. I was no longer a Jew from the ghetto but an Aryan in the city of Kaunas. I held my head high, just as I had been told.

      I walked until I reached the railway station. It was early, there was still a mist in the air. Even so, there was a group of three or four guards standing outside, with one man in an SS uniform supervising them. I spoke in Lithuanian. ‘My name is Vitatis Olekas,’ I said, ‘and I am an orphan.’ I asked for permission to travel to Poland where I had family who might look after me.

      As I dreaded, and exactly as Shimon, the Jewish policeman, had predicted, it was the SS officer who took charge. He circled me, assessing me, as if I were a specimen that had been placed before him. One of the Lithuanians asked where in Poland I was headed, but the SS man said nothing. He just kept walking around me, his shoes clicking. Finally, from behind, I felt a tug on the waist band of my trousers.

      ‘Runter!’ he said. Down.

      I looked over my shoulder and saw that he was gesturing at my trousers. ‘He wants to see you,’ said another one of the Lithuanian men, a smirk on his face.

      I looked puzzled, as Shimon had said I should, and then the officer barked, ‘Come on, come on.’ Hesitantly, I lowered my trousers and my underpants. The SS officer looked at my penis, eyed its foreskin, then waved me away.

      So began my journey, armed with the right Aryan identity papers and a travel document for Warsaw. I can't remember if I pretended to be fifteen or older or younger, but the truth is that I was just a twelve-year-old boy travelling alone through Europe in wartime, showing that precious Kennkarte to Nazi border guards in Marijampolé and Suwalki and Bialystok, over and over again. The Kennkarte made everything possible. It was not a forgery, but the real thing. With that paper