The Trinity Paradox (36 page)

Daniel had always feared he would die here. Somehow he had known it in the back of his mind. But the desperate need to survive refused to let him believe, though now it had become even worse: not only was he going to die, but he was going to die without knowing the reason, without knowing what this infernal device was for, how the Nazis would use it ... to win the war? To destroy the world?

Saul looked at him before returning to his work, as if knowing what Daniel was thinking. Saul kept his voice low and bleak. “We are all dead men here. How many more days before they carry us out? Before you carry me, or I carry you?”

Daniel saw a flash of anger behind Saul’s eyes. The anger startled him, and he realized that his own anger had slept for too long. While he remained passive, had his own dignity been trampled beyond the hope of recovery? Why had he let them do everything to him? Was it just to survive? If survival cost that much, was it worth living?

Daniel looked at his hands, blackened from the carbon bricks and the ever-present graphite dust. These were the hands that had just carried a man, a human being, out into the mud, where he would be thrown into a trench and buried with the others.

Daniel took a step closer to Saul. He kept his voice low, as if afraid someone might hear him, though none of the Nazis would dare enter such a dangerous place. “You see what they are doing to us. Why are we helping them?” Saul’s face hung slack, as if the brief flash of anger had been all the emotion remaining within him. “We don’t even know what this does.”

Daniel remained silent, and then stared into Saul’s eyes. They were bloodshot, with dark pupils that looked blasted and shrunken from everything the other prisoner had seen and done.

“But I bet we could break it.”

Saul blinked and took a step backward. He looked down at his own hands, at the tattooed number on the inside of his forearm. “We don’t know how it works. It has no mechanical parts. I used to build and fix machines. This is not a machine.” It seemed an empty objection. “We could knock down the pile?”

Daniel shook his head. “No, they would shoot us and have someone else rebuild it in a day. We must cause more damage than that.”

He jerked a bony shoulder to indicate the cooling pipes where water rushed through the reactor, bursting into steam and pouring out the smokestacks above. Day after day, when not assigned to other work details, Daniel had watched the smokestacks, looked at the white steam, wondering what it was like inside the reactor building. He hoped and prayed that his name would be picked because that would give him a slim but definite possibility that he could escape this place and go back to his old world, to his jeweler’s shop, back to an imaginary life with Emmi.

He knew that would never happen. Emmi was gone. His shop was smashed, the windows broken out during the one frenzied night called Kristallnacht. He could not go back, but he could get out of here. Or so Daniel had thought. Now he knew otherwise.

“Saul, we cannot let it continue. Who knows what they are going to use this for? If we smash the cooling pipes, that is the only thing that could perhaps cause enough damage to stall them a little while. They will kill us for it, but we are dead anyway.”

Saul now looked as if he had second thoughts. “I do not want to die to serve no purpose. What if we do no good?”

“Does it not serve a purpose just to do
something,
just to strike a blow against them?”

Saul pondered this a moment. The other prisoners continued their aimless jobs, but some had stopped to listen.

“Yes,” Saul said. “It does.”

Daniel and Saul spoke to the other workers in the reactor detail. All agreed, except one man who hung so close to death he could barely keep himself moving.

“I heard that other Dachau prisoners sabotaged the construction work on showers that were to be used to gas Jews,” Daniel said. “We will do the same to this project, whatever it is. The Nazis will have no success from our labors.”

Saul found a small wrench used to adjust some of the apparatus and handed it to Daniel. “You should be the one to do this first,” he said.

Daniel took the wrench and looked at it. The tool was too small to be used as a weapon against any of the guards, not that the guards would fear them anyway, strutting around with their rifles and machine guns. The Jewish prisoners outnumbered the guards hundreds to one, but still none of them did anything. The guards enjoyed taunting them, knowing the prisoners would not resist; they had all been too cowed.

The lack of guards inside the reactor building was another reason why working there was such an attractive assignment. Regardless of the chance for freedom, even if they knew they were likely going to succumb at the end of a week, a few days without the taunting, without the nightmare of having a rifle barrel pointed at your back every moment, was perhaps worth dying for.

Daniel took the small wrench over to the red-painted valves protruding from the main cooling pipes. He slipped the wrench through the padlock and twisted, although he had not the strength to break it. Black spots danced in front of his eyes and he felt dizzy from the effort, but still he pushed and twisted.

One of the other prisoners, wearing a pair of the burned gloves, came back with a brick of the soft graphite and pounded on the wrench with it.’ The graphite crumbled into splinters of glossy black powder, but it added enough force to snap the hasp of the padlock.

Daniel took the lock off and dropped it. The rushing sounds of water pulsed next to his ear just on the other side of the pipe. He didn’t hear the padlock as it struck the concrete floor. He yanked out the chain holding the valve in place and, with a burst of strength, tossed the chain toward the towering, silent reactor.

Saul and Daniel turned the valve together, cranking it on resisting threads until they had shut all the water off. The other prisoners used the wrench to break smaller, secondary padlocks off, turning valves.

Saul opened up a large shunt valve, which sent a jet of water blasting into the echoing reactor bay. The water looked clean and cool as it splashed up on the concrete. Daniel stared at it. One of the prisoners held his hands out and stood in the stream, but the force knocked him backward. Daniel let the water run over his own hands and feet, feeling it soak into his clothes.

The river water felt icy, and his whole body numbed in an instant. Daniel didn’t mind. He wanted to feel numb. The weakness and nausea welled up in him again, and he fell retching onto the floor. He spat blood into the swirling water.

Through eyes blurred with tears of pain, he gaped at the blocky, dark leviathan of the reactor. Already he could feel waves of heat pulsing, growing hotter. The water felt cool, but Daniel could not concentrate. The dizziness roared in his head. As the water swirled and the reactor continued to eat itself alive from within, he slumped cross-legged in the churning pool.

They had done something. They had made a point. This wasn’t useless. In response to his thoughts, his lips made their own small smile.

Saul hunkered down beside him. The gushing water continued to echo in the empty building. All the prisoners remained silent as the heat rose. They had no strength to scream, or cheer.

“Are you all right?” Saul asked. “How do you feel?”

Daniel hung his head and felt water dripping down his back, down his chest. He looked up. “I feel fine.”

Dr. Kurt Diebner sat in his austere, tiny office in the administrative barracks near the camp processing center. All day long he heard the movements, the banging, the wailing, the complaints of prisoners being taken into Dachau. He had his own small window covered with a splintered set of wooden blinds he had insisted upon installing. He did not want to look upon the wasteland of the camp all the time.

Diebner doodled on a piece of paper, ostensibly working on plans to improve the efficiency of his graphite-moderated pile, but he had nothing else to work on, nothing he could do except sit and resent what had been done to him and his career.

The radioactive dust dumped on New York had bought them time. Hitler had been so pleased, he had allowed them the freedom to go back to their original work. They would produce a bomb to write their names larger in history than any other incident in the war. But not Diebner. He was stuck here, in this place.

He rubbed his hands to slick back his thinning hair and pressed his black glasses against his face. He had worked for the Ministry of Armaments to develop new munitions, though he had no interest or skill in such activities. He had served a short assignment at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, leading all the Virus House researchers, before he had been reassigned to a different team. He had not felt comfortable until he worked with his own group at Göttingen, with Paul Harteck and Walther Bothe and the others. Together, they had used the information taken from the Joliot-Curies in Paris to further German nuclear research.

But then Abraham Esau, with his Cambridge education and his arrogance, had snatched it back from him, pushed him down like a naughty child. Now Diebner had been thrown here in this hellish pit of Dachau. He had welcomed the responsibility at first, to run a project by himself, no matter where it was located—until he realized what it meant. Now his digestion was bad, his attitude bad, his health declining. He found he could no longer care about the reactor project or the plutonium they had begun to produce. He had seen the deaths caused in New York by the radioactive by-products from this reactor, but the Jews here seemed to be dying in numbers as great.

Before long, they might have enough material to make Hitler’s super bomb.

A draft whistled through the chinks in Diebner’s window. It had been a breezy day, a cold November morning. He snapped open his wooden blinds and stared out at the bleak camp, at the muddy barrenness surrounding the reactor building.

He noticed that the smokestacks had stopped giving up steam. For a moment he felt only puzzlement, knowing it should have been days yet before they disassembled the pile and removed the irradiated uranium rods. Then, when he saw the gathering black smoke coming from the walls and roofline, he panicked.

He had just turned around when one of the guards pounded on his door. Bursting into the small office, the guard shouted over the normal chaos of the processing center. “Dr. Diebner! You must come to the reactor building immediately!”

“I can see already. What happened?”

“There is a fire! We can hear it through the walls, but the prisoners have blockaded the door. We don’t know what they have done.”

A fire in the reactor, Diebner thought. A blaze hot enough to burn the graphite. It would be an inferno inside the building already. He could see black smoke gushing out the stacks, through cracks around the ceiling, through the lips of the large doors.

The reactor was melting down, the core burning. He felt an ice lump inside himself. He alone knew what that meant.

“Dr. Diebner, you must come and see! Tell us how to fix it.”

But Diebner didn’t move. His knuckles grew white as he gripped the corners of his desk. “There’s no way to fix it. This is a disaster!”

Inside the blaze, uranium rods would be melting. All the graphite slumping together into a mass, all contaminated, everything radioactive. They had constructed the reactor building so rapidly that they added no containment, nothing to trap all the deadly by-products and keep them from spraying through the air if such a catastrophe happened. The smoke gushing into the sky would be poison, dumping death just as the small rockets had spread radioactive dust on New York City.

“Get my car. Immediately! I must leave within the next two minutes! All of your men must evacuate. Everyone must flee.”

“Evacuate? But what about the prisoners?”

“Go! Now!” Diebner slapped his hand on the desktop. “Do not worry about the prisoners.” He lowered his voice. “They’re already dead.”

The guard finally ran out. Diebner himself left. He looked around to see if he should take anything with him. He had only a moment—if it wasn’t too late already. But then he realized that there was nothing here he wanted to keep.

He hurried outside. Prisoners gathered near the reactor building, staring at the spectacle. Flames came out from the roofline, through chinks in the side. Guards scurried about, some directing firefighting efforts, others trying to escape.

Diebner waited for his car, and kept waiting. He looked around to find some other way he could flee. He wanted to get moving, put distance between himself and the invisible death. He didn’t know if he should hold his breath, duck his head and cover his mouth. He could never hide from the radiation.

Black smoke rolled out from the fire, swirling in the mild autumn breezes, some of it settling like a blanket on the camp.

Diebner’s hands were trembling.
This,
he thought,
is a true holocaust.

He wondered why his car was taking so long.

Part 5

21

Trinity Site November 1944

“Those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially contributed to its development have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.”