As the clock ticks down the final minute of World War II in Europe, Sixty Seconds tells the stories of nine people on both sides of the Atlantic—a legendary war correspondent, a madwoman and her unwitting accomplice in a deranged assassination attempt, a fifteen-year-old girl singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Times Square, her soldier brother still in Germany, a Nazi war criminal undergoing interrogation, a German foot soldier frantically dodging Russian patrols as he attempts to surrender to Americans, and a Polish couple who endured the seemingly unendurable only to be separated by an ocean as they are about to become parents. Individually and together, these seemingly disparate and yet inextricably intertwined people hurtle toward their own climactic finishes as midnight and the official beginning of V-E Day approaches on 7 May 1945.
Chapter One
7 May 1945
1759:00 to 1759:10 Eastern Standard Time
2359:00 to 2359:10 Central European Time
Farley
From his glass-walled broadcast booth perched on the side of a temporary stage in Times Square, Farley Sackstead watched and listened to the girl with reddish hair as she stood before a phalanx of microphones. She was talented and at an age when the woman she would become was still hidden by a schoolgirl’s pleated plaid skirt, bobby sox and loafers, and a spray of faint freckles around her nose. Already fifteen seconds into her performance, Farley was inclined to let her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” stand on its own. The girl was an excellent singer, and better yet, had chosen to move through the song quickly, without unnecessary runs or notes held too long.
The broadcast enclosure was tiny with enough space for only two compartments, and as the young woman continued to sing, the sound engineer motioned at Farley through the glass separating their cubicles, one hand tapping the earpiece of his headset, the other flapping like the bill of a quacking duck. His lips moved, the words muted but unmistakable.
Say something!
The veteran broadcaster shook his head and the engineer then scribbled a message on the back of his script notes. He held it up against the glass for Farley to read.
Nobbie wants commentary!
Farley clenched his teeth. Former sports announcer and current director of ad sales Nobbie Wainwright was the producer for the broadcast because everyone else in management wanted the night off to celebrate the eve of V-E Day. Nobbie liked telling other people what to do and had a lot of ideas on how a straight news radio program was supposed to play out. He’d not been shy about sharing his views with Farley, acting as if the wartime voice of CBS Radio in Europe was a cub reporter. Nobbie’s biggest beef was with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In his baseball play-by-play days he’d favored the traditional, mid-seventh inning “God Bless America,” a hymn he’d routinely sung to a wincing radio audience at the top of his lungs and off-key. He wanted Farley to add commentary that would elbow the national anthem into the background if not off the air altogether. “Talk about the crowd size or something, Sackstead,” he’d told him during the production meeting that morning. “Or ad lib one of those preachy things you used to close out your London broadcasts. Add some gravitas.”
“It’s the national anthem, Nobbie,” Farley had countered. “I think it’s got enough gravitas of its own.”
“‘…whose broad stripes and bright stars,’” the girl sang as the sound engineer continued to quack with one hand, encouraging Farley to underscore the performance. Farley sighed, then nodded. He didn’t like Nobbie Wainwright but agreed with him on one thing. The national anthem should be “God Bless America,” an evocative melody with lyrics more representative of the country. Farley considered “The Star-Spangled Banner” to be the tuneful version of a stutter, pauses and run-on phrasing necessary to match words and music. Fortunately the girl was an excellent singer, her voice strong and pleasing. Better yet, she’d chosen to march directly through the cumbersome piece without side trips for notes held too long or extra ones not in the original sheet music. She was pretty, he thought, and so terribly young to step into a role that put her in front of thousands, her voice sent out to millions over the radio.
Farley reached out and switched on his microphone, then spoke in his low distinctive voice, employing the familiar idiosyncratic cadence his listeners found both trustworthy and reassuring.
“As we listen to fifteen-year-old Jenny Doyle from Queens, New York, sing “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’” it is a moment of both joy and sadness…of profound gratitude and profound regret.”
“‘…through the perilous fight.’”
“Let us never forget those who gave their lives that we may all be free and pray God the world will never again be embroiled in a conflict of this magnitude.”
The sound engineer replaced his quacking duck with a circular motion, one finger extended as if he twirled a tiny hoop on it, his lips again moving.
Keep it going!
Farley frowned. The impossibly young technician had too much hair and too little respect for his elders, treating Farley as if this were his first broadcast.It was annoying and Farley wanted to mute his microphone long enough to remind him that the anchorman of “This is London” had likely forgotten more about broadcast journalism than this snot-nosed little fart from NYU would ever know. The veteran newsman was on the air and didn’t do it—wouldn’t have, anyway, because of Marta. “Be patient, liebchen,” Farley’s Austrian-born wife had gently reminded him when he called during the most recent commercial break. “I seem to remember another snot-nosed little fart who knew more about everything than everyone.”
The engineer plastered more instructions from Nobbie against the smudged glass that separated him from Farley, his twirling finger picking up speed.
“‘O’er the ramparts…’”
“And now…” Farley intoned, ignoring the engineer in favor of the upturned faces that filled the streets and plaza below the stage. “I’ll be quiet and listen along with those of you beside your radios here in New York, in America, and across the world as the final countdown begins to V-E Day. I’m Farley Sackstead. This is CBS radio.”
Selma
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Selma Filbert called out. A chorus of meows sounded, one cat atop a kitchen cabinet, another crawling out from a rip in the underside lining of the box springs in her bedroom, a third from inside one of Carl’s boots, the rest from every corner of her small house. “We’ve got some new guests,” she told her favorite from among the Sidneys. The calico glanced at the nearest newcomer and hissed. “Don’t be like that, dear,” Selma scolded him. A bag of dry cat food was on the kitchen table, a metal measuring cup inside. She went to it, retrieved a couple of scoops, and then scattered them across the kitchen floor. It provoked a feeding frenzy, the cats whining and yowling as they scrambled after the food. Selma smiled with satisfaction. No matter how many cats were in her family the night before, mornings seemed to add another, a flap Carl had installed in the back door for their long-departed dog serving as an invitation to homeless feline immigrants. Carl would hate it, Selma thought. He’d hated cats.
“But I love you,” Selma said as the cats battled each other over the kibble. “And who would take care of you if I weren’t here?”
Earlier that day a policeman had been at the door. Again. “There’s been some concern about your cats, ma’am,” he’d claimed. “I’d like to get a look inside if that’s okay.”
“It isn’t okay!”
“Ma’am, please let me come in. Otherwise, I’ll just get a search warrant.”
“You’ve got no probable cause for a search warrant.”
Selma knew about probable cause. After the first policeman dispatched by the Voice, she’d retrieved her long winter overcoat from its hanger on the front porch, donned it even though the day was approaching eighty degrees, and walked to Rockefeller Center, afterward taking a bus down Fifth Avenue to reach the free legal clinic at the law school. A nice young law student with more acne than whiskers had listened to her complaint and then told her about probable cause.
“I know my rights and you gotta have probable cause,” she’d shouted at the cop. “… Which you haven’t got! Now go away!”
And he had.
The radio in the parlor was on, a woman singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She sounded young, her voice clear. She’d been singing for fifteen or twenty seconds.
“‘…through the perilous fight.’”
I had a good voice too. Mrs. Birdicko picked me to sing the solo.
Selma had frozen that day, terrified by the expectant faces in the audience waiting for her to perform. Eventually Mrs. Birdicko, her sixth-grade music teacher with the kind eyes, had emerged from the wing and gently led her off the stage.
The food Selma had scattered about was gone, the scramble abating as some of her cats made for one of several pans filled with malodorous sand, others slipping through the dog door, a few seeking privacy in corners and then defecating on the kitchen floor.
“No, no, dears,” Selma softly scolded the squatting cats. She retrieved a paper towel, sank to her knees on the cracked linoleum, and began to clean up the feces, nose wrinkled, a pinched expression forming when the song coming from her radio in the next room was joined by the Voice.
“It is a moment of both joy and sadness, of profound gratitude and profound regret…”
Selma rose, wincing when her arthritic hips protested, then made for the parlor where the radio sat unevenly on a displaced kitchen chair. Selma crossed to it, at the same time retrieving a tiny container of Miracle Holy Water from the pocket of her housecoat. She’d received her latest allotment of the precious stuff from Reverend Woodrow Dodge only that morning, a two-ounce vial with a picture of Jesus on the label. It came in a padded envelope with a prayer card and a request from the radio pastor for more money. She twisted off the vial’s cap and sprinkled water on the radio. The Voice was undeterred. Caramel smooth and rich, his timbre evoked temptation incarnate.
“…listening along with those of you beside your radios here in New York…”
“I know where his laboratory is. That’s where you’ll find him,” she’d promised Riley before sending him off on his mission. She’d given the boy Carl’s pistol and the special bullets. She hoped it would be enough. If not, more Miracle Holy Water would be needed and Selma made for the kitchen drawer where she kept her checkbook, scattering cats in every direction as she plowed through them. The words of the Voice followed her, stinking of sulfur and sin as they poured from the radio.
“…in America, and across the world as the final countdown begins to V-E Day. I’m Farley Sackstead.”
Jenny
Jenny Doyle was more than twenty seconds into the song. The high notes were still ahead, but so far her voice hadn’t wavered. About sixty seconds were left if she followed her father’s advice.“The damned thing shouldn’t last more than one and a half minutes. The season’ll be over by the time she’s done,” Brian Doyle griped when one of the prima donnas the Yankees hired to perform the anthem before games took twice as long to warble through the convoluted lyrics. This was not Jenny’s first performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a large crowd. She’d stood on the pitcher’s mound and sung before a Yankees’ game the previous September, chosen after an audition in front of new owners MacPhail, Topping, and Webb. She’d been the youngest to try out and the only one without formal training—the other aspirants experienced vocalists, some from Broadway and one from the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera company. But Jenny took the day, her voice pure and truthful, her range enviable. The Yankees’ owners unanimously picked her and when the night arrived she hadn’t missed a note. The bored crowd politely cheered after she was finished, their cries crescendoing to an ovation when their beloved Yankees streamed onto the field for the top half of the first. The players had trotted past Jenny as she made her way off the diamond. Shortstop Frankie Crosetti, her favorite player, winked at her. “One minute, twenty-two seconds,” Dad proudly revealed after she joined him in the stands. The Bronx Bombers won that day, beating the White Sox nine to eight. Dad credited her performance.
Tonight was different. Tonight, Jenny Doyle wasn’t at Yankee Stadium, standing before a few thousand baseball fans with hands over their hearts, the urge to gleefully hurl insults at the umpires dampened by obligatory respect for their nation’s anthem. Tonight, she was on the radio and the world was listening.
As six o’clock approached and afternoon in New York City eased into evening, there were more tears than cheers coming from the crowd gathered in a plaza created by the junction of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and Forty-Second Street. They cried with relief and joy, with longing and grief. Jenny did not cry. She could not. Her voice might fail if she cried and she’d vowed to keep it strong. For the radio microphones. For America and the world. For Jimmy.
A row of chairs filled with dignitaries was behind her, Mayor LaGuardia among the notables. Dad didn’t like him, had voted for O’Dwyer in ’41. “Brian Doyle ain’t never voted for a wop and he ain’t never gonna,” he’d avowed. Still, LaGuardia was the mayor and Jenny Doyle was a pipe-fitter’s daughter from Queens, so she’d demurely taken Hizzoner’s hand when they were introduced. “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” she’d told him. LaGuardia had been immensely impressed to get respect from an Irish girl and winked. Then the announcer called her name. “Please stand and remove your hats for our national anthem, performed tonight by fifteen-year-old Jenny Doyle from Queens, New York.”
She’d practiced over and over, determined that her rendition would not exceed one minute and thirty seconds—that she would reach her final held note at six p.m., coinciding with midnight in Europe and the official end of war with Hitler’s Germany. But the mayor’s wink before she began, her name echoing across Times Square from the public address system, and the imposing cluster of microphones at center stage had been momentarily unnerving. She’d frozen, losing three seconds before the reverent, upturned faces in the crowd restored her confidence and she was able to begin—her voice steady and assured even though this wasn’t Yankee Stadium on a balmy Wednesday night in September; even though it was Times Square, the war was about to officially end, and Jenny Doyle from Queens had been picked to sing the national anthem live to thousands amassed in the plaza and via radio to millions across the world.
Jenny surveyed the crowd as she sang, making eye contact with the most receptive faces, just as Mrs. Petroff at John Adams High had taught her. Soldiers from all the services peppered the throng and she was again reminded of Jimmy. His uniform had been crisp, his face unlined when his train pulled away in ’43, the grin on his face so different than the unexpected photo Bridget had discovered in Life magazine. Jenny’s best friend had run all the way from her home on Killarney to the Doyle residence off Huron and 155th that day, holding up the magazine when Jenny answered the banging on the front door.
“Look at this!”
And there it was on the cover: Jenny’s brother, Jimmy Doyle, and his fellow crewmen stood in front of their B-17 bomber—the Daisy Mae—cartoonist Al Capp’s heroine with the hourglass figure painted on the nose alongside twenty-five tiny bombs, each representing a successful mission. Seventeen years old with an easy grin when he left for Europe, Jimmy in the photo had just turned eighteen, but his face in the picture was older. He wasn’t grinning. None of the men were. That was more than a year and twenty-one tiny bombs ago.
Jimmy…
Jenny felt her voice tremble, stumbled on the next lyric, then regained her composure and pressed on. “‘O’er the ramparts…’” she sang as the second hand on a huge clock mounted at the rear of the stage crossed over the 2. She was on schedule. Her performance and the war in Europe would both be over in fifty seconds.
Stangl
Stangl lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling. I did my part! he fumed. And yet none of it had gone as planned. The car hadn’t come even though the former commandant of the death camp at Sobibor arrived at the appointed place exactly on time, his beloved and distinctive uniform exchanged for the ill-fitting gray suit provided by Hudal’s man.
Without a tie! Did they not know who I am?
They’d known at Sobibor and Treblinka. He’d done good work there, efficient work. The nasty business at Sobibor was after he left, and yet many in SS command blamed him, claiming he’d left lax security in place for the new commandant.
Lax security! One hundred thousand or more cleansed during my tenure. No one complained about lax security then!
After the Americans captured him in Vienna, Stangl had been unceremoniously transported to Linz, Austria in the back of a troop carrier, the only passenger in the cavernous rear bed of a vehicle designed to carry twenty-five soldiers. They’d left before dawn, the chilly early morning air flapping the truck’s canvas siding. Shivering and miserable by the time they reached their destination, Stangl had been happy to exchange the truck for the stockade even though his current six-by-eight-foot room with its cinderblock walls and narrow bunk was hardly the accommodation an SS officer of his stature deserved. Three days had elapsed since then.
The radio was on in the guardroom outside the cellblock, the sound carrying through an open door. The guards played it day and night, turning up the volume if he complained. Fortunately they mostly listened to music rather than news reports: romantic ballads from Frank Sinatra, wistful lilts from Dinah Shore, jazzy instrumentals by the Benny Goodman Quartet or Glenn Miller’s orchestra. A few minutes earlier a tune by Miller’s band—“In the Mood”—had played. Miller had been a favorite of Stangl’s before the war, and even though the SS officer publicly shared the Führer’s disapproval of American music, he’d privately mourned when the trombonist’s plane went missing. After “In the Mood” ended, the guards had picked up the CBS Radio feed and now a female singer was a few measures into the national anthem of the United States.
Suddenly the voice of the famous American broadcaster, Farley Sackstead, intruded upon her performance.
“It will be a moment of both joy and sadness, of profound gratitude and profound regret…”
Stangl didn’t understand much English, but Sackstead’s tone was unmistakable. It was the voice of a gracious victor. The former SS officer scowled in the darkness of his tiny cell. “Taunt the conquered,” the Führer had encouraged his disciples. “Be proud in victory.” And Stangl had gladly obeyed the directive, taking great pride in his work on behalf of the Reich, particularly at Sobibor. He’d arrived at the camp in 1942 to find the processing disorganized and quickly established order: two lines upon arrival, the shorter one destined for the workers’ barracks, the other for the chambers in Lager III. The monthly numbers had subsequently ballooned, a result he’d found immensely satisfying. The precision and order of it all, he’d written his wife, Theresa. The indisputable logic. The finality. It’s like taking out the trash. What is purged is forever gone and no longer stinks. As time went on, however, he’d lost interest and by the end of his brief tour rarely left his bivouac and the company of his maid, Gosia unless it was to venture out to nearby Wlodawa in the back seat of his staff car. There was one good restaurant there and he’d especially enjoyed their pierogi and polskie naleśniki, even though the rich cuisine played havoc with his bowels.
Stangl frowned, his face dimly illuminated by light from a single overhead bulb in the outer corridor of the cellblock. It shone through the open view slit of an otherwise solid door, bringing with it the earnest, dignified voice of Farley Sackstead from the radio in the guardroom. Stangl gritted his teeth. The once glorious mission of the Third Reich would end ignominiously in less than a minute, the aftermath of the conflict that had consumed Europe and the world for five-and-a-half long, bloody years a radical departure from its inception—no Panzer tanks triumphantly rampaging across borders, no Wehrmacht paratroopers dropping from the sky like winged Goth warriors. Instead, disarmed men in raggedy uniforms were already making their way back to homes they hoped had survived, disconsolately plodding along bomb-ravaged roads and past confused refugees, their square-jawed pride replaced by despair. Indeed, all the proud victories of the German people were about to be rewarded with nothing more than retribution. I’ll probably hang, Stangl mused, the once-feared man known as the “White Death” dangling from the gibbet like a dried chicken.
Unless Hudal can intervene…get me out of here.
The woman on the radio sang on, her voice gaining confidence. She sounded young—perhaps not a woman, like Gosia, but a girl. He rolled onto his side in the bunk, conjuring an image of his maid at Sobibor, imagining that she lay next to him, her body warm.
“…as the final countdown begins to V-E Day.”
The low, somber voice of the American broadcaster on the radio dragged him from Gosia’s embrace, abruptly returning him to his cold cell with its concrete floor and damp cinderblock walls. The mattress on his bunk was thin, the pillow starved of feathers even thinner. Nevertheless, Stangl held it against his chest, spooning with it as if the pillow were Gosia, imagining he could feel and hear her breathing as the girl on the radio sang, her performance underscored by Farley Sackstead’s unwelcome commentary.
Jimmy
Jimmy Doyle strolled up the dark road, heading back to Feucht Airfield outside Nuremberg, Germany, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. It was part of his plan to quit smoking. “Du rauchst zu viel,” a whore had told him. “Sie stinken danach.” Jimmy had an excellent memory and grasp of accents, repeating the words perfectly when he later saw Antoni, the interpreter. “‘You smoke too much. You reek of it,” Antoni had translated for him, his English offering merely a hint of his native Poland. Afterward Jimmy tried to quit, cold turkey, but it was impossible. Every night, after two or three beers in a Nuremberg rathskellar, he bummed a smoke that led to another and another and then a pack he later picked up from the commissary. Jenny would hate it, he mused. She believed cigarettes ruined a good singing voice. His sister was four years younger and four thousand miles away, yet he could feel her presence.
I’m trying, Jenny.
Cap had quit smoking by constantly chewing gum while occasionally taking a drag from an unlit cigarette, inhaling deeply as if the divine essence of tobacco could be captured without the evil of its demonic smoke. “I ain’t lit me a butt in two months,” the tall West Virginian claimed, urging Jimmy to give it a try. Jimmy had taken the advice and so far it was working. He took a pull from his unlit cigarette, then tossed it into the high grass bordering the roadway. It was a beautiful night—quiet, cool, and nearly windless. He tested out his singing voice, launching lyrics from Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” into the air.
The hoot of an owl silenced the young airman, reminding him that the official end of hostilities wouldn’t begin for another minute or so, even though a ceasefire was supposedly in place. “Renegade Krauts are out there,” Cap had repeatedly warned Jimmy and the rest of his crew, recommending they stay inside the fences at the temporary American airbase a few kilometers east of Nuremberg. “Most o’ them German boys wanna surrender to ’Mericans ’stead o’ Russians,” Cap had conceded. “But I hear tell a few think ol’ Adolph give ’em a license to keep huntin’.” It was sound logic Jimmy had disregarded every night for more than a week now. The Daisy Mae’s belly gunner spent much of his day curled into the cramped underside turret of their B-17. “I need to stretch my legs a bit, Cap,” he told the command pilot of their bomber before heading out each night. “I’ll be careful.”
Despite the end of bombing runs the Daisy Mae was still flying. Jimmy and his crewmates continued to rise in the fog of early morning, and after chow, don fleece-lined coats and boots before climbing into their Flying Fortress where Jimmy stuffed himself into the belly turret. “You’ll love the view without all the ack-ack,” their ground crew chief had promised, but the young belly gunner hadn’t liked it at all in the beginning. His reliable twin 0.50 caliber machine guns had been removed and replaced with a camera, and with nothing but Plexiglas separating him from the vast sky and the ground below, it had felt as if he were about to plunge earthward at any moment. At least with the twin 0.50’s, he’d had something substantial to grab if the turret catastrophically came loose from the plane…or inexplicably evaporated.
Jimmy was on the return leg of his nightly walk, Feucht Airfield still an eighth of a mile away. The road was dark save beams of light from the base spotlights that illuminated a sharp leftward bend fifty yards ahead. Jimmy looked at the watch he’d purchased in Nuremberg from a German wearing a once expensive but now tattered suit. It had cost him a dollar and a pack of cigarettes. “Es ist ein Stowa,” the old man told him, weeping when he handed over the timepiece. The brand name had meant nothing to Jimmy. He’d wanted the watch because of its luminous hands, both now pointed up.
Jenny!
“Dammit!” he muttered. Her letter had arrived a few days earlier and he’d planned to be back before she began, but the night had been peaceful and his mind had wandered.
Dear Jimmy,
You’ll never guess what’s happened. I’ve been picked to sing The Star-Spangled Banner in Times Square on May 7th. They’re going to broadcast it on radio all over the world. You’ll be able to hear me wherever you are as long as there’s a radio around. It’ll start just before six o’clock in the evening here in New York. I don’t know what time that will be where you are.
Jimmy stopped. Without the sound of his boots against the pavement he could hear Jenny’s voice coming from distant loudspeakers. “You should hear my sister sing,” he’d bragged to his buddies on the Daisy Mae after sharing the letter with them. “Mark my words…one day Jenny’s gonna be on the radio.” And now it was true, her broadcasted performance enriching a night otherwise eerily quiet, her mezzo-soprano voice exactly as he remembered.
No… It’s better.
He stopped to listen, his eyes welling with tears—not for the anthem and the nation—but for the little sister he’d not seen in so long. Her delivery of melody and lyrics were assured—no longer tentative in the shy, breathy way of a girl but with the confidence of a woman; indeed, while Jimmy Doyle had been away transforming from a boy to a man, his little sister had apparently grown up too.
“Pray God we never again see the world embroiled in a conflict of this magnitude,” the radio commentator added to Jenny’s performance. His voice was familiar, his words professionally articulated. “… And as we listen to fifteen-year-old Jenny Doyle from Queens, New York, sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner…’”
The man continued to offer commentary in hushed tones, Jimmy struggling to tune him out, listening only for his sister’s voice—sweet, pure, innocent, brave.
“And now, I’ll be quiet, listening along with those of you beside your radios here in London, in America, and across the world,” the man at last intoned.
“Then be the fuck quiet,” Jimmy muttered.
Gosia
Malgorzata “Gosia” Pietkowski grasped the bedsheets knotted to the footboard, closed her eyes, lifted her shoulders, and pushed as hard as she could. The baby refused to move.
Stubborn…like Antoni.
“Push!” the midwife exhorted. “Just push, Gosia, push!”
The contraction began to fade, but Gosia kept pushing, trying not to scream lest the frustrated midwife again scold her in English that Gosia’s aunt would have to translate into Polish.
“Don’t scream, You’re giving up the power in your push if you scream.”
The midwifewas in her forties, desperately trying to reclaim her twenties, and had arrived at the apartment above the delicatessen in a party dress, anxious to join the crowds celebrating V-E Day in Times Square. Her name was Rita. She didn’t like her job. She didn’t like foreigners. She didn’t like Gosia. She didn’t hide her opinions.
“Just push, dammit! Stop screaming!”
The contraction was nearly gone, but Gosia squeezed her eyes more tightly shut, held her breath, and continued to push. A whimper escaped her lips, leaking out like air from a punctured tire. She looked at Rita, pleading with her eyes to make it all stop—to pull out the baby through her belly button if necessary. Instead, the midwife frowned as her hand on Gosia’s abdomen felt the contraction dissipating.
“Lift your butt,” she said.
Gosia looked at her aunt.
“Podnieś tyłek, kochanie” Ewa told her niece. Lift your bottom, dear.
Gosia lifted her hips off the mattress, closing her eyes as Rita used a wet cloth to clean her, afterward replacing the paper pad used to protect the bedding. She wrapped the soiled cloth in the old pad and then handed it to Ewa, wrinkling her nose.
“Przykro mi,” Gosia said. I’m sorry.
“I don’t understand Polack.”
“I…sorry.”
“Whatever… You all do it.” The midwife pinched her nose shut with two fingers. “Jesus, it stinks in here.”
It was true. The room stank of Gosia’s sweat and her shit, and she was embarrassed even though Aunt Ewa had warned it could happen. Gosia’s aunt had given birth to four children, all now grown, and after her niece’s arrival two months earlier had gently explained what to expect during childbirth. “You might have a bowel movement, Gosia, but don’t worry about it,” she’d reassured her niece. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Your baby is making room to get out. I did it too.”
The contraction was fully spent, the room now quiet save the voice of a girl on the radio singing the American national anthem.
“‘…bright stars through…’”
Earlier, Uncle Jakub had relocated the countertop radio from the kitchen to the studio where Gosia now labored, afterward pulling his wife aside for an exchange of whispers. Fragments of their conversation had been loud enough for Gosia to hear.
“How will…”
“I don’t…”
“HIAS?”
Gosia knew about HIAS—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—knew, as well, that her aunt and uncle couldn’t afford a doctor and hospital if she were unable to push her baby out. “No doctor, no hospital,” she’d told them. “I’ll keep trying.” And she had, pushing with each contraction for the last hour. It was no use. The baby refused to descend.
Stubborn, stubborn baby…
Gosia wished Antoni were there. Her husband would have found a way to distract her, to make the insistent pain less ferocious. An honest man, he was a good liar when a good lie was needed. At Sobibor he’d lied to her every day until the revolt, reassuring his wife each morning that the Americans would soon liberate them. “Don’t give up, Gosia. They will be here today,” he’d promised, pivoting when evening came and SS guards still manned their machine guns in the watch towers. “Don’t worry. The Americans will be here tomorrow.”
“‘the perilous night…’” the girl on the radio continued. She had a lovely soprano voice although her song was uncomfortably reminiscent of the marching band music played when German soldiers goose-stepped into Warsaw, their steely Aryan chins pointed upward in triumph. Gosia and Antoni had been forced to bear witness that day, weeping openly as the jackbooted Nazis swaggered in step down the Nowy Swiat, provoking fear and grief, humiliation and regret. When news of German incursion into the Polish frontier reached them, Antoni had wanted both their families to make for the countryside where ragtag fragments of Poland’s regular army were coalescing to organize a resistance. But Gosia’s father had forbade his daughter to leave, and despite her nascent marriage to Antoni, Father’s decisions still ruled. “The family must stay together,” he’d insisted. “All this will pass. We must keep our heads down…not cause trouble.” Gosia now both missed and hated her father, grieving his immediate assignment to Lager III after stumbling out of the railcar at Sobibor, angry with herself for listening to him rather than her husband.
“‘O’er the ramparts…’” the girl on the radio went on as Gosia lay back on her pillow, the voice of the famous broadcaster, Farley Sackstead, underlining the singer’s. He spoke in English Gosia could not understand although she recognized the gravity and portent in his tone. The war in Europe, although not officially over, was now history. The death camp at Sobibor, like her last contraction, was a memory too and she once more wished that Antoni was at her bedside, knowing what he would tell her.
“Don’t worry, Gosia. The baby will be here today.”
Zimmer
The distant sound of a woman singing made Zimmer stumble and he once again cursed the dense obstacle course of gnarly, exposed roots, fallen trees, and thorny brambles. Even though the city of Nuremberg was nearby, its adjoining forest—the Lorenzer—was thick enough to be daunting in the timid light of a slivered moon. He stopped to listen. The words of the song were in English, the singer’s accent American.
“‘Whose broad stripes and bright stars…’”
There had been talk up and down the line for days before he and Braun deserted, all of it eventually funneling into a single rumor that streaked through the exhausted regiments: General Froetsch planned to surrender all troops between the Bohemian Forest and the Upper Inn River. “Surrender to whom?” Braun had sniffed. “Russians? They’ll likely shoot us on the spot. Fuck Froetsch! We must get out of here… Make our own surrender.” The two young Wehrmacht solders—combat veterans dating to the invasion of Poland—knew the U.S. Army controlled Feucht Airfield near Nuremberg. “We’ll go there and surrender to airmen,” Braun decided for them both. “They haven’t looked up our nostrils for the last five years. They’re less likely to shoot us.”
Zimmer had believed him. It was a habit: believing Braun. Fighting together on two fronts, separated by a few weeks after the uprising at Sobibor when their platoon was briefly diverted to help round up escapees, his friend had rarely been wrong. So they’d made for Feucht Airfield, staying together until earlier that day. Zimmer was alone now and wondered if Braun were still alive. Fifteen kilometers east of their destination they’d encountered a Russian patrol. Zimmer had been exhausted and hungry. He’d wanted to surrender and ignored Braun’s advice. Pulling away from his friend’s grasp, he’d stepped into the open from their hiding spot above the Russian soldiers, his hands raised.
“Wir geben auf. Nicht schießen.” We give up. Don’t shoot.
The Russians immediately opened fire and Zimmer and Braun had run for their lives, dodging massive boulders and leaping over fallen limbs as shots buzzed past their ears, kicked up dirt at their heels and clipped small branches from the trees that pelted the two Wehrmacht soldiers like dead birds. Eventually one round produced the unmistakable thud of a bullet hitting solid flesh and he’d heard Braun go down. Zimmer hadn’t turned back to help, hadn’t even slowed because he knew Braun would not have stopped for him either. It was counter to the training they’d received after mustering into the Wehrmacht five and a half years earlier. “If the man next to you falls,” their platoon sergeant had advised. “…keep going unless you want to join him!”
Zimmer and Braun had been the last survivors from their original platoon of raw recruits. Now only Zimmer was left and the cumulative enormity of the loss made him stop at the edge of the forest, the roadway to Feucht Airfield thirty feet away and the height of an average man below. Looking up, he contemplated the night sky, seemingly enormous after hours in the dense forestation of the Lorenzer. Earlier that day, an American bomber had passed low overhead. “Getting ready to land,” Braun had observed. “The American airfield must be close. We’re going to make it.” Now the sky was empty of both aircraft and clouds, allowing stars and their formations to possess the night.
Zimmer knew all the constellations. They’d taught the boys how to navigate by the stars in the Hitlerjugend. He’d been among the best of them and now searched for Ursa Major, recalling his instructor, Herr Grohe. “Find the seven brightest stars of Ursa Major, the papa bear,” he’d taught his boys. “Those make up the Big Dipper. The two stars on the outside of the cup are the pointer stars. They’ll direct you to the end of the tail on the Little Dipper. That’s Polaris, the North Star.” Most of the boys, save Engel, had very much liked Herr Grohe. Engel was a rabid little National Socialist constantly vigilant for traitors to the cause. Herr Grohe—gangly and bespectacled—was a reluctant Nazi, less embarrassed by the knobby knees that perturbed the hem of his khaki shorts than his armband with its prominent swastika. The camp counselor regretted joining the party, a confidence he’d inadvisably shared with the boys in his Section over a late-night campfire on one of their survival maneuvers. He’d made them promise to keep his secret, but the zealous Engel had promptly betrayed him and Herr Grohe disappeared, his quarters expeditiously occupied by a new man with less knowledge of astronomy and greater pride in his armband.
That’s one thing about the party, Zimmer mused. They were efficient.
Zimmer found the North Star, then looked for Cassiopeia. The W-shaped constellation would be due west at midnight.
From there, Feucht Airfield is southwest.
He looked at his watch, amazed that its second hand continued to reliably complete its 360 degrees of arc. The timepiece with its scuffed leather wristband had been through hell since he’d scavenged it from a dead Russian officer. Shaken by mortar fire on the retreat from Leningrad, repeatedly slammed against the brick walls and cobblestone streets of Bautzen as they fought to hold the city against advancing Soviets, and then plunged underwater when he and Braun crossed the Pegnitz River, its hands still shone in the dark. They were pointed nearly straight up. Less than one minute remained until midnight.
Riley
Riley Blaine fought his way through the crowd, several rows of the standing-room-only audience still separating him from the stage. He could see Jenny and hear her voice coming from the huge loudspeakers on the dais. On one side of the stage a glass booth had been constructed. Two men were inside, one half-standing. He wore headphones and held a piece of paper against the glass that bifurcated the transparent enclosure.
“Watch it, buddy!”
Riley looked to the voice. An unapologetically drunk sailor in dress blues glared at him. “Don’t be crowdin’ me,” the swabbie added, afterward struggling unsuccessfully to sustain a frown that morphed into a wide grin. He slapped Riley on the back. “That’s okay, pal. The war in Europe is over. Everything’s okay now.” He swayed drunkenly, shifting his attention to the girl standing next to him, a sandy haired beauty wearing a red dress with white polka dots.
“The war’s over, sister. Howsabout a kiss?”
The young woman responded with a homicidal stare the inebriated sailor conveniently mistook as invitation. He grabbed her and planted a kiss on her lips, holding on until she got a handful of his ear and pulled. Yowling, he released her and she promptly belted him with a closed fist. The sailor fell back, his stunned expression quickly replaced by another grin.
“Helluva right hook, doll!” he exclaimed, rubbing his chin.
The girl answered by winding up again, but before she could launch another punch the sailor stumbled off, leaving her with a raised fist and no one to hit. She eyed Riley, glowering.
“Whaddayou lookin’ at, buster?”
Riley bowed his head.
“I shoulda got here early,” he murmured. “…before the crowd.”
“What?”
Riley lifted his eyes enough to see her, then quickly lowered them back to the street. The girl was very pretty.
“She sent me to the wrong place,” he mumbled. “… The Cat Woman. She told me to wait outside the building and then sneak in.”
The girl lowered her fist, cocking her head. “What’s wrong with you anyway?” she asked. “You retarded or something’?”
Riley’s head jerked up. “I ain’t—”
The girl cut him off by turning away, afterward edging through a crease in the crowd and then disappearing into a jumble of bodies. Riley looked up at Jenny. She stood at the center of the stage five feet above the street, her eyes surveying the huge gathering as she sang. It was almost time and he was still too far away from the stage.
It’s not my fault! She sent me to the wrong place! I ain’t retarded! I ain’t no imbecile!
Earlier, he’d wasted nearly an hour, hidden behind a dumpster in the parking lot outside CBS headquarters, waiting for a chance to slip into the building. “When people exit to the lot, the door doesn’t lock unless it’s shut hard,” the Cat Woman had promised. “No one ever closes it right. You can get in.”
“‘…through the perilous fight,’” Jenny sang, the outdoor speakers lending an artificial warble to her voice that belied its natural clarity. On Riley’s single night in the Doyle home she’d played the piano and sung “Someone to Watch Over Me,” a pretty and sweet girl so unlike the two young women who’d exited the CBS building just an hour previous, one of them a natural redhead, the other literally dyeing to be. Riley had seen them before, watching from his perch atop the building across the parking lot. They were always laughing, their voices not musical, like Jenny’s, but coarse and loud like the girls at School 87 in Buffalo—the popular and not so popular ones who’d taunted the boy born with a split lip, the repair drawing his mouth up at the center in a way that made him resemble a cat. Laughing and issuing high pitched meows when he started across the gym floor at the eighth-grade dances, they were sirens with stuffed bras—girls who wanted the football players to whirl them around, to pull them close, to graze their soft bottoms with sweaty fingers.
Just as the Cat Woman predicted, the two women at the CBS building hadn’t pushed the door shut, leaving it slightly ajar and then strolling to the middle of the parking lot where they’d talked for a few minutes. Everything was so funny.
“And then he said… Ha, ha, ha!”
“And then I told him… Ha, ha, ha!”
The redhead had lingered after her friend headed for the Fifty-Third Street subway station, and before long, Nobbie Wainwright drove up and parked his car next to the only other vehicle in the otherwise empty lot. He and the woman had greeted each other with indiscreet pawing. Afterward they’d gone into the CBS building together. Nobbie had been wearing his blue corduroy jacket with leather patches on its sleeves, reminding Riley of Pastor Wondercheck back in Buffalo. The pastor owned a brown one he typically paired with a turtleneck sweater. Both men—Nobbie Wainwright and Pastor Wondercheck—were tall and thick and mean. They both called Riley “Felix the cat.” Pap had taunted Riley with the same nickname, lamenting that he’d been cursed with a slut for a wife and an idiot for a son. An engineman on one of the massive freighters that ferried grain, iron ore, and other commodities along the Great Lakes to and from the port at Buffalo, his disposition was as black as the oil he periodically drained from the huge motors in his charge. Like Nobbie and Pastor Wondercheck, Pap was mean; indeed, reveled in his meanness.
Before the pretty Polish girl came to work at Jakub Dworak’s Kosher Delicatessen Nobbie had eaten his lunch elsewhere but since her arrival had become a regular, often remaining after he picked up his order to talk at her. He stood too close during the one-sided exchanges, gestured too flamboyantly, and brayed like a donkey when he laughed. She never responded, keeping her eyes down, her shoulders rolled forward. “He talks too much,” Riley once told her after Nobbie was gone. Her aunt had translated and when the Polish girl smiled at him he’d felt his face redden.
“‘O’er the ramparts we watched,’” Jenny Doyle sang as Riley shouldered his way closer to the stage, pushing through a jungle of sharp elbows and peeved expressions. He kept one hand on the pistol in the pocket of his coat. The time was nearing and he was still too far away.
It’s not my fault. She sent me to the wrong place!
Antoni
“A man who shakes his fist can overturn a boat even in calm water,” Antoni Pietkowski’s father had advised his four sons when they were boys. That was before Sobibor where Jan was worked to death and Filip shot by a guard for sport; beforethe White Death in his immaculate linen coat watched from the low porch of his bivouac as Father and Szymon filed past in an unbroken line that led to the chambers. The Nazi hauptsturmführer had smoked a cigarette and made a joke as Antoni’s father and last surviving brother trudged to their deaths like sheep destined to become lamb chops rather than smoke and ashes. For Antoni, the uprising had taken hold that day, an infant growing to manhood long after the White Death was replaced by Reichleitner and the hated Untersturmführer Nieman.
He sat in the guardroom just outside the cellblock, the radio tuned to the Armed Forces channel. A girl was singing the national anthem of the United States of America.
“‘Whose broad stripes and bright stars…’”
Antoni had resisted the trip from Nuremberg to Linz to assist in the interrogation of Franz Stangl. “I’d prefer not,” he told the major after learning the identity of the prisoner who would require his services as a translator. The American officer had been surprised.
“I would think you’d want a crack at him, Antoni. Don’t you want to see the look on his face when you walk in?”
“I doubt he’ll admit he knew me. It’s beneath him.”
“You never know. A familiar face might loosen his lips… Make him believe he can talk his way out of a noose by giving up some of the others.”
The first interrogation had gone exactly as Antoni predicted, the White Death refusing to look at either man as he sat on his low bunk, wearing green prison fatigues bereft of the medals and emblems once adorning his SS uniform. “I believe you and Mister Pietkowski are already acquainted,” the major began after they entered the cell. Stangl had denied it. “Ich kenne inh nicht,” he’d muttered without looking up. I don’t know him. It was a lie. Three years earlier, Stangl had plucked Antoni from among the new arrivals stumbling off the cattle cars used to transport he and Gosia from Warsaw to Sobibor, installing him as his camp interpreter after overhearing the young man converse with guards and inmates in several languages. It had put the young linguistics professor in a line headed for the barracks along with those who had craftsmen’s work skills or appeared hale enough to survive the hard labor they would be forced to perform until starvation and brutality made them no longer hale. A second line had formed that day, as well, its members taken directly to Lager III, the extermination area.
“‘…through the perilous fight,’” the girl on the radio continued, joined by a familiar voice that added subtext in low dignified tones. The famous journalist, Farley Sackstead, spoke of the approaching moment when the nightmare would be over, a measure of finality in his voice that belied reality for Antoni. Some of the monsters who had administered the holocaust would die on the scaffold, others languishing in prison. But he knew that many would be hired to administrate the peace because they’d made the trains run on time. Even more would go home. And they would have homes. Battle-weary foot soldiers and German civilians might have to dig out from under bombed buildings, scrounge for food and shelter, and follow the edicts of new masters, but the land they’d called home before the war would still be home to them.
Not for us.
Warsaw had always been home to Antoni. Born and raised in the Polish capital city, he and Gosia had married, believing they’d raise a family there. Now they were homeless, hoping to become Americans. Gosia was already in the United States, Antoni to join her once the interrogations and trials were over. He still wasn’t sure they’d made the right decision. After accepting the major’s offer of a job for him and a visa for Gosia, they’d been approached by Zionists. “We’ll need men like you to help establish a Jewish state in Palestine,” they’d proposed, citing his command of languages. Antoni had been tempted. Not Gosia. “No matter what they say, Antoni, it’s not an interpreter they want,” she’d insisted. “They’re looking for soldiers. They want you to kill for them, to die for them. I don’t want you to die. I want a husband and our child will want a father…not a martyr.”
Antoni had spurned the Zionists’ efforts to recruit him but now regretted it, his nights wracked with loneliness. He and his wife could have been together in Palestine. Instead, she was in America while he translated questions the major posed to unrepentant men whose Third Reich had destroyed most of both Antoni’s family and Gosia’s.
“Should we take another crack at him?” the major asked. Antoni looked up from his seat on a bench in the stockade’s guardroom The major stood in the open doorway connecting the guardroom to the cellblock.
Antoni shrugged. “I don’t see any point, Major. Stangl won’t give us anything…especially with a Jew in the room.”
The major nodded. An affable man when Nazis weren’t in his sights, he continued. “Have you heard from Gosia? She’s got to be close to delivery. That must feel good…to be a father. And your baby will be an American. That must feel good too.” It was true, Antoni conceded. Their child would be an American, grow up in the land of milk and honey, have children and grandchildren who would know all the words to the song now being broadcast across the world. It was what he and Gosia had both wanted and yet, as the girl on the radio sang the national anthem of his soon-to-be adoptive country, he no longer found it comforting.
