of their new homes, herding them into a column and ordering them to march. They were to make the four-kilometre trek to the Ninth Fort, the old encampment built in Tsarist times and designed to keep the Germans out.
It was an uphill walk and it took hours; the aged and the sick falling by the wayside, sometimes helped to their deaths by the rifle-butt of one of the militiamen. The route was lined, from beginning to end, with local Lithuanians, curious to see these strange creatures emerging from the ghetto – just as they had been curious to see us all led inside.
The Nazis had a name for this route. They called it: Der Weg zur Himmelfahrt. The Way to the Heavenly Journey.
They did not arrive till noon and once they had there was no respite. The Lithuanian thugs were quick to grab any jewellery, pulling off earrings and bracelets, and then ordering the Jews to strip naked. Only then did they lead them to the pits.
These were vast craters dug into the earth. Some said they were one hundred metres long, three metres wide and perhaps two metres deep. Others said they were not as long, but twice as deep. Each one was surrounded on three sides by small mountains of earth, freshly dug. On the fourth side, there was a raised wooden platform. And it was here that the SS men stood with their guns.
Those who had survived the march now began to scream; they understood where this heavenly journey had led them. Some tried to escape but they were shot instantly. And so the killing began.
First the Nazis tossed the children into the pit; then the machine gunners, in position for precisely this purpose, opened fire. The women were lined up at the edge of the crater and shot there, in the back, so that they would fall in on top of the children. The men were last.
They killed them in batches of three hundred, with no guarantee that one batch was finished when work began on the next. They had to work fast. Besides, ammunition was rationed so that the Nazis could not afford more than one bullet to the back per victim. And most of the gunmen were drunk.
The result was that many Jews were not dead when they fell; they were buried alive. This was the fate, especially, of the children. But not only them. Those who saw it told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed.
This is the event they call the ‘great action’ of October 28 1941, when ten thousand Jews were driven out of the Kovno ghetto and put to death.
And this is how my sisters were killed.
The girl who had found her way back, shivering and starving, to the ghetto, was one of those who had been buried but not shot. She had passed out as she fell, but some time later she had awoken to the realization that there were corpses all around her, above and below her. She was wedged in by dead flesh, pressing on her so hard it made her choke.
Most of those buried alive were too weak to climb out of the pits, to use the limbs of the dead as rungs on a ladder. They gave up and suffocated under the bodies. Those who did manage to haul themselves out were usually spotted and shot, and this time with no mistakes made. But this girl, she was nervous and cautious. So she waited till the middle of the night, when the drunken chanting and singing of the Nazi gunmen and their Lithuanian comrades had faded into sleep. And so she had escaped, out of the Fort and back to the ghetto.
This was the story she told once she was clothed and fed and could speak. And this was the story which had reached the leaders of the Jewish underground in Kovno, those men in the cellar. Perhaps for the first time they understood what kind of threat they faced. And so they had decided they must spread the word to those who were also trying to fight back. Which was why they sent me to Warsaw.
And so, many years later, I came to understand the meaning of the message I had carried. I also understood why the men in the cellar did not explain it to me. It was not just because I might be tortured. It was also because they did not dare tell me what had happened to my sisters. Perhaps they thought I would have been so blinded by anger, so broken, that I would not have been able to carry out my mission.
But I did carry it out and I met the man I was meant to meet in Warsaw. I waited for him for three hours, but I met him. He was the leader of the underground in the Warsaw ghetto; he too was a young man who looked old.
When I said the words, ‘Aunt Esther has turned up again and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4’ he looked bemused. But then he asked for someone to bring him a book, a holy book rescued from the ruins of a synagogue in the ghetto. It was the Book of Esther, which Jews call the Megilla of Esther. It is the book we read for the festival of Purim, which commemorates a plot many hundreds of years ago to destroy the Jews.
This leader of the underground turned to chapter seven, verse four and then he understood everything. He read it out loud, as if it would help him think. ‘“For I and my people are sold to be exterminated, slain and lost; but if we were only being sold as slaves and maidservants, I would have stayed silent”.’
The more Tom read of Gerald Merton's life story, the more he found himself thinking about Rebecca. How ironic that a woman who seemed to bubble and throb with life, as if she were keeping the lid on an almost volcanic vitality, should have emerged from a world choking with death. She was even named for a grandmother who had hanged herself.
He tried to focus on his task, the job of work Henning Munchau had asked him to do. There was no denying it: the bind from which he was meant to extricate the UN was only getting tighter. They had not only killed a survivor of the Holocaust but apparently one of its heroes: the young boy who, in disguise, had travelled across occupied Europe carrying word of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.
And Tom had accused him of being a suicide bomber. Thank God he had kept to himself his earlier intuition: that old man Merton, birthplace Kaunas, was some kind of Baltic war criminal who had sought post-war asylum in the UK. He had been as stupid as the German and Lithuanian guards young Matzkin had dodged again and again: he had seen the blue eyes and the uncircumcised penis of that corpse on the pathologist's slab and he had never once considered that he might have been looking at a Jew.
His phone rang; a New York number. If it were Henning, he would explain the depth of the trouble they were in and suggest he needed more time. This was going to require diplomatic footwork of great dexterity if it were not to turn into a grave blow to the reputation of the United Nations.
‘Tom? It's Jay Sherrill. I have some news.’
‘OK.’
‘That New York number we saw on the cellphone? Belongs to the Russian, to the arms dealer.’
‘Really? Wow.’
‘I know. Incredible, isn't it? That's not all. Overnight I had a team do a deep search of Merton's hotel room, unscrewing floorboards, the works. They found something hidden in a wall cavity in the bathroom, just by the extractor fan. Very professionally concealed.’
‘What is it?’
‘A state-of-the-art, compact, plastic-build revolver. Russian. ·357 Magnum calibre. A gun specially designed and marketed to escape detection by security scanners. All you have to conceal are the steel inserts and the bullets; the gun-frame itself gets through unnoticed. Ballistics have examined it. Get this: apparently it's the weapon of choice in the assassin community.’ Tom could hear Sherrill's amusement at his own joke.
‘Hold on, Detective.’ There
