Mila 18

The next number was a medley of Yiddish songs. She watched the faces of the children searching their memory for a faint voice in the past which had sung to them.

“Should I be a rabbi?

I don’t know my Torah,

Should I be a merchant?

I have nothing to sell.

“And I have no hay,

And I have no oats,

And I’d like a drink of vodka,

But my wife will curse me,

So I’ll find a big rock,

And I’ll sit me down and cry.

“Should I be a

schochet?

I cannot use a

chalef,

Should I be a

melamed?

I don’t know an

alef.

“Should I be a cobbler?

I don’t have any last.

Should I be a teamster?

I have no cart or horse.

“Should I be a blacksmith?

I won’t have any anvil,

Should I run a tavern?

No, my wife would get too drunk.”

“What would you like to hear next?”

“Palestine!”

“Rachael! Sing to us about Palestine!”

“Palestine!”

“Palestine!”

“The roses bloom in Galilee,

And the land rejoices.

Round the day and through the night,

We lift our thankful voice.

“We love you, our Galilee,

Your land makes our hearts sing.

We guard it dear with soul and gun

And fear not what fate brings ...”

Susan Geller entered at the rear of the hall. She looked round quickly, then whispered to her second nurse. The woman looked startled for an instant, then nodded and whispered to another nurse.

“All together now, children!”

“The roses bloom in Galilee,

And the land rejoices ...”

Susan Geller looked around once more and spotted Stephan. She wove through the pack of children, took his hand, and led him to a side door. “Make no outcry, Stephan. The building is surrounded by Militia. Get upstairs. There are twenty-five or thirty children in an attic classroom. Do you know where it is?”

Stephan nodded.

“Take them over the roof to Mila 19. Tell Alexander Brandel to get to the Umschlagplatz quickly.”

Rachael frowned as she saw Stephan slip out of the hall.

“We love you, our Galilee,

Your land makes our hearts sing ...”

Susan sat on the bench beside Rachael. “At the end of this song I will make an announcement. You keep playing. We want no panic. Do you understand?”

“Oh God ...”

“Keep playing, Rachael, keep playing.”

“I ... understand ...”

Susan stepped before the piano and held up her hands. “Children!” she said. “Aunt Susan has a most wonderful surprise! Today we are going to the country on a picnic!”

The announcement was greeted with “ohs” and “ahs” of disbelief.

“We are all going on a train ride out of the ghetto and we will see all of those things we have talked about—trees and flowers and farms. All those wonderful things which you have never seen before. This is going to be the greatest experience of your life. Now we will all file out of the hall and to the street. Don’t be frightened of the soldiers, because today they are there to help us. Now, Rachael, would you play something while we march out?”

Susan stepped into the corridor just as Piotr Warsinski entered the building. She blocked the door to the assembly hall.

“We are quite ready,” Susan said. “If you will kindly tell your men not to alarm the children we will keep them calm.”

“We just want the children, not you.”

“We choose to go too.”

Warsinski shrugged. “Have it your way. Get them out into the streets.”

“Quickly,” Stephan Bronski ordered two dozen six-year-olds in the attic classroom. Ghetto life had conditioned them to respond to his order with unqualified discipline. Stephan was first up the escape ladder to the roof. He nudged the trap door open an inch and peered around.

A Ukrainian on the roof!

Stephan signaled for the line behind him to be still. The guard paced back and forth, sweating in the heat through his dirty brown, black-sleeved shirt. He turned. Stephan could see his face and the epaulets with the skull and cross-bones and the big knobby hands gripped around a rifle.

The guard stopped near the corner of the roof. The ridge was built up fifteen inches over the roof level. The guard knelt on it, peering past a steep tile roof which partly blocked the view to the street five stories down.

Clump ... clump ... clump ...

The man looked around at the thing flying over the roof at him. Before he could gather his wits or straighten up it was on him at a dead run. Stephan slammed his body at the Ukrainian at the same instant the man tried to stand up. It threw him off balance. His legs buckled and he fell onto the overhang, dropping his rifle on the roof.

In a frantic grab he snatched the top of the ridge. Stephan lifted the guard’s fallen rifle and with its butt smashed the clinging man’s hands.

A shriek!

The guard slid down the tiles, flailing in panic for something to grab. His body swooped over the edge and became smaller, smaller, smaller, until it stopped suddenly on the pavement.

“Quick!” Stephan cried, ruling out fear or revulsion at his deed. One by one the children climbed onto the roof.

Rifle fire cracked from the street. Shouts below! “Juden Kinder! Jew children!”

The ghetto rat knew his way well. He fled over the ceiling of the city with the knowledge of a craftsman. Then a dead end.

The line of buildings dropped from five stories to four. A chasm four feet wide separated the buildings. Stephan looked for the mattress which had been laid on the lower roof to break the falls. It had been removed! The decision was already made for him. He could neither stay nor turn back.

“Now we are going to have to jump over to that roof. We will have to stand on the very edge so we can reach the roof. When you land, land on your feet and use your legs as though they were big giant springs. Bend and then throw yourselves on your tummies.”

A little girl wept in fear.

“You,” he said to the largest youngster, “you be my assistant commander. You stay till last. Everyone choose a partner.” He quickly took the crying girl by the hand. “You will be mine.” Before she could register a protest they leaped over the drop onto the next roof.

Piotr Warsinski reported to Haupsturmführer Kutler.

“How is it?” Kutler asked.

“The most successful ‘kettle’ we have ever made. Every orphanage is cleaned.”

“How many?”

“Maybe ten, twelve thousand heads.”

That’s a lot of Jew babies. Well—they’ve got no valuables. Start loading them up. Send the leftover bastards to the top floors for storage till tomorrow and the day after. I want all your people around the Umschlagplatz on guard tonight. Bastards in the ghetto liable to try something.”

Warsinski turned to leave. “Good job, Chief,” laughed Kutler.

Kutler walked out to the selection desks and frowned at the sight of the nurses mingling with the children. “Warsinski!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are all those people doing here?”

“They wanted to come with the children.”

Susan Geller came up to them. “Surely you cannot object to having us resettled with our wards,” she said.

Kutler sneered. He did not like her homely face. He glanced around at the other nurses, teachers, doctors, and workers holding their tiny flocks together. Goddamned Jews, Kutler thought. They got some kind of strange love for dying like martyrs. He remembered the fathers holding their hands over their sons’ eyes on the edge of the pits at Babi-Yar at Kiev.

“You people aren’t wanted in this transfer,” Kutler said.

“The children will enjoy their picnic in the country so much more if they have us with them to explain everything. You see, many of them do not remember being out of the ghetto.”

Kutler turned his eyes way from Susan Geller’s insistent stare. “What have you got in that bag?” he asked.

“Chocolates. I’ve been saving them for a wonderful occasion like this.”

Kutler cracked. “Be heroes,” he muttered, and dashed back to his office and closed and bolted the door. He yanked viciously at a desk drawer, unable to open it quickly enough, and smashed the top of the schnapps bottle, guzzling until a hot wave of alcohol flooded his blood and crashed into his brain, dulling his thoughts. “Heroes ... martyrs ...”

The courtyard bulged with ten thousand ragged, emaciated children with a sprinkling of nurses who kept up a play of gaiety. Some of the older children who knew where they were going kept it to themselves.

“Jew babies, start moving up the ramps!”

“Well, children, now begins our wonderful picnic in the country.”

“Aunt Susan, when will we come back?”

“Oh, probably later tonight.”

“Keep moving down to the end of the platform to the first car!”

The engine warmed up with a few puffs of steam.

The line of tykes straggled up the ramps. Curses and kicks moved them quicker.

Kutler, in a thick drunk, staggered out to the courtyard and watched the march. He snarled semi-intelligible sounds, screaming to hurry it up. He sighted a dozen small children leaning against a far wall, doubled up from exhaustion and hunger, too weak to drag themselves to their feet. Kutler wove toward them. “Up, you Jew babies!” he shrieked.

Two of the three nurses converged on them, helping them to their feet.

A rachitic girl of three clad in filthy rags toppled to the cobblestones, dropping a torn baby doll which had neither arms nor legs. Her little hand reached for it.

Kutler’s shiny black boot stomped on the doll.

The ragamuffin stared curiously at the tall black-uniformed man hovering over her. “My baby,” she whined weakly, “I want my baby.” Her hand tugged, trying to pry it from under the Nazi’s boot. His Mauser pistol came out of the holster. A pistol shot echoed.

“Let me through! Let me through!” cried Alexander.

A half dozen bulky Jewish militiamen restrained the desperate Brandel before he could get into the selection center. He was dragged screaming and fighting across Stawki Street to the warehouse where Warsinski had the Umschlagplatz detail office.

“I demand to be allowed in the Umschlagplatz!”

Warsinski let Alexander babble, plead, coax, argue. Then he spoke. “Your immunity is running short, Brandel. Take him back to the ghetto.”

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack the train rolled over the countryside.

“Now, children,” Susan Geller said, “I have another surprise. Chocolates!”

“Chocolates!”

She passed the bag of poisoned candy about the car.

“Doesn’t that taste wonderful?”

The train rolled on.

“Let’s all sing together.”

“Onward, onward,

On to Palestine.

Onward, onward

Join the happy throng ...”

“I’m sleepy, Aunt Susan.”

“Well, why don’t you lie down and rest?”

“I’m sleepy too, Tante Susan.”

“Well, all of you take a nap. It must be the excitement and the fresh air.”

One by one they closed their eyes. Susan Geller snuggled between a pair of her babies and held them close to her and slowly swallowed the last square of chocolate.

Shluf mine faygele,

Mach tzu dine aygele

Eye lu lu lu,

Shluf geshmak mine kind,

Shluf un zai-gezund,

Eye lu lu lu.

Sleep my little bird.

Shut your little eyes,

Eye lu lu lu,

Sleep tight my child,

Sleep and be safe,

Eye lu lu lu.

Chapter Twelve

STURMBANNFÜHRER SEIGHOLD STUTZE WAS adept at aping his God, Adolf Hitler, down to the slightest gestures. Thumbs in belt, he limped up and down the courtyard holding the massed assemblage of Jewish Militia. He stopped before a microphone and glared at his captive audience with seductive authority. The board of the Jewish Civil Authority was lined up on his right and a company of his Reinhard Corps on his left.

Throwing a hand above his head, he shrieked in a high pitch which echoed off the stones of the yard. “Fat Jews! You are fat because we have rewarded you too much. Despite our loyalty to you, you continue to permit publication of lies about us! You allow these Communist agitators to exist under your noses! They will be found and destroyed! Because of these lies we have not received a single volunteer for four days for orderly deportation for honest labor in the east!” Stutze whirled around to Warsinski. “Read the new orders!”

Warsinski opened a document. “ ‘From this day forward every member of the Jewish Militia has a personal daily duty to bring three people to the Umschlagplatz for deportation for honest labor. In the event a militiaman fails to meet his quota, he and his family will be deported immediately.’ ”

The respite in the Big Action, the show of “common justice” by executing the Big Seven, and the reopening of the schools, all became part of a master scheme to lure the people into relaxing their vigil long enough for the Germans to reorganize for the next onslaught.

A terrorized Jewish Militia under Warsinski’s obedient haranguing had long ago sold their souls; now they sank to a new depth of decadence. It became a common sight to see them dragging their own relatives to the Umschlagplatz for deportation when they were unable to fill their quotas.

Ghetto Kennkarten stamped for labor were long believed to be a magic key to life. In a stroke of the pen they were all declared invalid. All but a handful of people in the ghetto had lost their immunity to deportation.

Each day new “kettles” and “pots” were executed. Streets or blocks of houses were hermetically sealed off and methodically raked from cellar to attic for occupants.

The constant fountain of trickery spouted. The lure of food was used to gain new spies. Children were tortured before the eyes of their mothers to reveal the locations of secret bunkers.

An immunity to tragedy became normal. Yet the roundup of the orphans accomplished what the master planners knew it would. It seemed to crush whatever morale and will to exist remained.

Alexander Brandel, long the symbol of love and dignity, long the symbol of food and medicine, turned into a morose, depressed man overnight. Speechless day followed speechless day. He no longer functioned as the dynamic force for survival.

Rabbi Solomon sat in the dank cellar next to the sewer pipe under Mila 19 and wailed ancient Hebrew prayers day and night to the sound of rushing sewerage.

Deborah Bronski was the sole nurse remaining from the Niska Street orphanage to take care of the two dozen boys and girls Stephan had led over the roofs to Mila 19. Yet another room was dug out alongside the pipe and fitted with bunks and a classroom.

Deborah flicked on the light in her bedroom. She opened the dresser drawers one by one and filled a suitcase. An item or two came from the jewelry box. A few things of a personal nature. Everything else was to be left. She checked the children’s room for the mementos they wanted, then walked down the long hall.

There was a light from Paul’s study. She entered and could see the back of his head as he sat in his swivel chair in front of his desk.

“I am leaving you, Paul. I should have done so long ago. Stephan and Rachael will be with me.”

Paul was motionless.

“Good-by, Paul.”

As she turned to go, she saw that his hand hung limply over the arm of the chair, a crumpled sheet of paper in his fist. On the floor lay a bottle. She recognized it as his sleeping pills. The bottle was empty. It had been filled only a few days earlier. Deborah walked slowly to the front of the desk. Paul was rigid, his eyes closed. She set down the suitcase and felt his hand. It was icy. There was no pulse.

Paul Bronski was dead.

“May God forgive me,” she said, “but I wish I could say that I am sorry.”

She pried the paper loose from his hand. “My dear Deborah,” the note read, “I wish I knew what to say or what I have done to deserve this scorn from you. Boris Presser has an envelope explaining various affairs which I’m sure you’ll find in order ...” And there the scrawling stopped.

The top of the desk was tidy. Paul was meticulous in his habits. Everything would be in order. Even his death. He had closed out a business day by suicide simply because there was no alternative.

Deborah shook her head in a final bewilderment. She looked squarely into his sallow, lifeless face. “Oh, Paul, Paul, Paul. Even this had to be done so properly. Why didn’t you write a message for your son and daughter? Why didn’t you make this act an outcry for justice and protest? Paul, Paul ... Why?”

She picked up her suitcase. Without remorse, without tears, without regret, without pity, she left everything that had been between them, forever.

“We must have help!” an impassioned Andrei cried.

Roman, the Home Army commander in Warsaw, listened with head cocked, eyes lazily half shut. The nobleman placed a cigarette in the long holder delicately and lit it. A frustrated Andrei waved off Roman’s offer of a smoke.

“Jan Kowal,” Roman said softly, “just last week we sent you thirty-two rifles.”

“Of six different calibers with a hundred and six rounds of ammunition. One of the rifles becomes obsolete the moment it fires its three bullets.”

“If there is suddenly a downpour of heavy-caliber automatic weapons from the skies, I’ll be the first to let you know.”

Andrei smashed his fist on the table.

Roman got up and clasped his hands behind him dramatically. “Just what do you want?”

“We haven’t the strength to mount an attack without help from outside. If you had three companies of the Home Army make simultaneous diversified strikes in the suburbs, we can push out of the ghetto.”

Roman sighed with frustration. Despite the rigors of living underground, he had lost none of the fine edge that characterized a French-bred snob. “It is impossible,” he said.

“Can you be that much of a Jew hater to watch us cooked alive?”

Roman leaned against the window sill and bit on the ivory holder with the studied gestures of one who knows he is on stage. His eyebrows raised on his high forehead. “Shall we get coldly realistic? What if I carry through your plan? Where will you go? How many will you break out?”

“As many as you can make provisions for.”

“Ah,” beamed Roman, “that is the rub. Ninety per cent of the peasants would turn in a Jew for a bottle of vodka. Ninety per cent of the city people are quite certain this war is being fought because of international Jewish bankers. Not my personal feelings, mind you, but I am in no position to carry out a program to educate the Polish people.” Roman was deadly accurate again.

“Then at least let the fighting force find its way out with the children.”

“Children? Those convents and monasteries which take Jewish children are filled to the brim. Most won’t. The few others want ten thousand zlotys a head in advance with the right to convert them to Catholicism.”

Andrei closed his eyes.

Roman warmed up to his arguments, sliding his tongue over his teeth as he paced. “I cannot allow partisan units made up of Jews. I do not command an army on discipline. The underground depends upon secrecy and loyalty. You know full well you will be betrayed just as you were betrayed when you gave us the report on extermination camps. It was sold by someone to the Gestapo.

“At least—at least give us guns and money. At least the money you’ve stolen from us.”

Roman frowned and sat at the table, lifting some papers to read to demonstrate he was too busy for further bickering. Andrei snatched them out of his hand and flung them to the floor.

“All right, Jan!” Roman snorted. “Your precious report was smuggled out of Poland by someone or other and has been published in London. Have you heard the heads of state make impassioned cries for justice? Has the world suddenly stormed to its feet in indignation? Jan Kowal, no one really gives a damn.”

Andrei pushed back from the table. “Don’t slop your Polish garbage on the rest of the world, Roman. This is the only corner of the world where extermination camps could exist. The German army doesn’t have enough divisions to guard against the people if they tried it in London or Paris or New York. Only in your goddamned Warsaw! All over this continent men and women are behaving with basic Christian decency. You are a Christian, aren’t you?”

Roman went through arrogant gestures of indulgent disgust.

“You won’t walk away from this free. They’re already starting to gas Poles at Auschwitz only because you let them get away with it with us. March into the chamber with your chin up, Roman, your turn is coming.”

Andrei stormed out.

Roman broke the shortened cigarette from the holder and squashed the tip out. He looked up at a stunned aide. “If those blasted Jews try to contact me again, I am not to be reached, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Jews are so emotional. Oh well, at least we won’t have a Jewish problem when the war is over.”

Simon Eden smashed his fist into his open palm as Andrei related the meeting with Roman. The attic room fell into gloom. Tolek, Alexander Brandel, Ana, Ervin, Wolf Brandel, Simon Eden. A ghastly morbidity crushed them. It was all over. Everyone thought the same thing at the same moment. It was all over ... done.

The alarm bell sounded five short rings to indicate a “friend” was coming up. Rodel, the Communist, entered. For an instant everyone looked eagerly with a flickering of hope beyond hope that some miracle had happened. Rodel shook his head. “They can give us four armed men, no more. They can’t even really spare that.”

Tolek droned the names of writers, doctors, actors, journalists, and Zionists who had been taken to the Umschlagplatz in the last few days. He went on and on, moaning a death march.

“Be quiet,” Andrei said.

But he droned on. The last of the rabbis—one saved by the Catholic Church as some sort of relic of a past civilization, the other was in their cellar. The rest, dead. “Dead, all dead,” Tolek said. “Farm gone ... farm gone ... everyone is dead.”

“Shut up,” Andrei repeated.

Ana Grinspan, an unwavering symbol of strength, a figure of daring, collapsed and cried hysterically. There was no one in the room who could comfort her.

“Say something, Alex,” Simon Eden pleaded.

But Alex said nothing these days.

“Dead ... all dead. Nishtdoo, keiner, keiner nishtdoo.”

“Stop your goddamned crying!” Andrei screamed.

Ervin licked his dry lips. Tears wet his thick glasses, so that the people before him were blurred images. Within five days he had lost his wife Susan and his mother. He had tried gallantly to carry on for Alexander Brandel after the children were rounded up. “Simon ... Andrei ... Comrade Rodel ... I ... have taken all the notes and volumes of the Good Fellowship Club and hidden them in milk cans and steel boxes. I had occasion to speak to your committees today. They are in full accord with me that if this last try for help was unsuccessful we should burn the ghetto and commit mass suicide.”

“You have no right to hold meetings behind my back,” Simon said without conviction.

“We had no times for rules of procedure,” Ervin said.

“Who among us hasn’t thought of suicide?” Ana cried.

And then silence. There were no arguments.

“As a Labor Zionist ... as a Labor Zionist,” Simon mumbled. He brushed the hair back from his eyes. “As a Jew and Labor Zionist,” he floundered and fumbled. Oh God, he thought, death would be so sweet, so very sweet. “As commander of Joint Forces, I cannot and will not give an order for a suicide pact. But if this is the wish of everyone, then I will resign my command and also abide by the decision.”

Andrei stared up at his comrade. Simon had been a soldier. Simon had been a strong man. Simon had been a leader. His innards were shot. The fine features of his dark face sagged with the loss of will.

Wolf Brandel, the youngest commander in the ghetto, walked slowly toward the door. “I will not obey that order,” he said. “My girl and I are going to live, and if we’re captured we are going to make them pay. If they want me,” Wolf cried, “let them come in and try to get me!”

He slammed the door behind him.

“Well,” Andrei whispered, “one of us is left with enough strength to want to live.”

Tolek fell on his knees. “Oh God! God! God! Please help us! What have we done? What have we done?”

No one looked at the other. Their faces fell into their hands. All through the night they sat wordless until the dawn broke them with weariness and they dropped off into snatches of nightmare-filled sleep.

And then, as suddenly as it began, the Big Action ended. On September 16, 1942, there were no more deportations or “kettles.”

The Warsaw ghetto, the largest human stockyard in man’s history, once held nearly six hundred thousand people. That number was decimated by starvation, disease, executions, deportation to slave labor, and finally assembly-line murder in Treblinka. When the Big Action ended, less than fifty thousand remained.

Chapter Thirteen

HORST VON EPP CUT the classic conception of the ramrod German baron as he stood framed before the tall window of Chris’s flat, transfixed by the first snowfall of the winter, and the strains of a Chopin record.

Chris came in from the outside, slapping the cold from his bones. He nodded to Horst, denoting he was pleased at the unexpected visit.

“Hope you don’t mind my breaking in and helping myself to the whisky?” Horst said, fixing a scotch for Chris.

“Why should I mind? There’s nothing in this apartment your friends haven’t examined twenty times.”

The Chopin record came to the end. “I like Chopin. All those blockheads play is Wagner. A tribute to Hitler in absentia. Isn’t there something enormously enchanting about the first snow?”

Chris threw open the drapes to the alcove bedroom, tugged off his shoes and wet socks. He fished around under the bed for his slippers.

“O the snow, the beautiful snow,

Filling the sky and the earth below,

Over the housetops, over the street,

Over the heads of the people you meet,

Dancing,

Flirting,

Skimming along,

Beautiful snow, it can do nothing wrong.”

“Ye gods, Chris, that’s horrible.”

“James Whittaker Watson, 1824-90. My recitation for the second-grade graduation. My mother didn’t come to the graduation. I never forgot snow, beautiful snow.”

Horst handed him a tall drink. They clinked glasses.

“Fröhliche Weihnachten—Christmas cheer,” he said. “I’ll be a sad bastard. Christmas. I forgot all about it.” “I toast those poor misled Aryans laying on their wet bellies in snow, beautiful snow on the eastern front for the glory of the Fatherland,” Horst said.

“Amen. Well, how does it feel to get clobbered?”

“We are going to lose at Stalingrad, aren’t we, Chris?”

“It’s going to be a catastrophe, Baron. Your Chief of Staff should have read Napoleon’s memoirs and taken a lesson of what mother winter does to trespassers.”

“I had it about a week ago. The sudden realization Germany is going to lose the war. It is making a mess out of all the Christmas parties. Everyone is so damned glum. Stalingrad, El Alamein, the landings in North Africa. But you know what really confounds me is those Americans. Guadalcanal. Now there’s a romantic name. Everyone underestimates Americans. Why?”

“The mistaking of gentleness as weakness is like underestimating a Russian winter.”

“Next year,” Horst said, “Berlin is going to be bombed. What a pity. Oh dear, how they are going to pay us back. Well, Christmas cheer.”

Horst set down his drink and again became enchanted with the falling snow. “Chris,” he said, looking outside, “a report has just been published by the Polish government in exile in London. A hasty White Paper detailing alleged extermination camps operating in Poland. Heard about it?”

“Something or other.”

“Tell me,” Horst said, “how did you smuggle it out of Poland?”

Chris made only a nominal attempt to cover his deed. “What makes you think it was me?”

“My male vanity. When a beautiful piece of tail, Victoria Landowski from Lemberg, turns out not to be a piece of tail and not even Victoria Landowski, my masculinity was offended.”

“Find the woman. They are behind all sinister plots.”

“The trouble was, I couldn’t find the woman. My friend Christopher de Monti had become deliciously decadent, a quivering alcoholic mass of sponge. Then Victoria Landowski enters and Christopher undergoes a magic transformation. He returns to being—what do you call it?—a clean-cut All-American boy. I began to add this sudden spiritual resurrection. It was not difficult to figure the rest of it.”

“By God, Horst, you’re downright clairvoyant. Well, does Gestapo Chief Sauer put his dogs on me, feed me a quart of castor oil, or use testicle crushers to make me talk?”

“Oh, cut that nonsense out. Those dreary people at the Gestapo won’t figure this thing out for months. How did you get the reports out? Italian diplomats?”

“Something like that,” Chris answered.

“See! I told Hitler personally not to trust the Italians. Those people are far too romantic to really carry out a first-class war of annihilation. As soon as we come to the acid tests, they abandon us.”

Chris laughed. “I’m only an Italian by passport. Come to think of it, I’m really not much of anything. But I do know the Italian people. They were sold a bill of goods that they were a reincarnation of the noble Romans, twenty centuries removed. So why in hell shouldn’t they believe it? All they really wanted was to be somebody again.”

“On German coattails.”

“The bride awoke to find her maidenhead broken, but the Teutonic god she married had turned into an ugly black gorilla. Sort of a beauty and the beast in reverse. Horst, the Italian people have no stomach for what you are doing in Poland. It was no chore at all getting five men to carry out five separate copies of the extermination-camp report.”

“Archetype German villain that I am,” Horst said, “I cannot comprehend why those who are utterly crushed insist on dying gestures of defiance. Martyrs are dreadful. I watched you sink to degeneration. What was that voice that called you out of Satan’s arms? What did it say to you?”

“It told me ... I must become worthy enough to receive the spit of a man who was once my friend.”

“Morality.” Horst shook his head. “Just before the war I saw that big hammy American baritone—what was his name?—Tibbett. Lawrence Tibbett. He sang in Paris. After a song about mother’s southern-fried cake he bellowed some more dreadful poetry. Somehow, the damned verse keeps going through my mind these days.

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be ... “

“ ‘For my unconquerable soul,’ ” Chris said. “To William Ernest Henley, 1849-1903.

“Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

“This immediately brings to mind the question of why all poets have three names and why wasn’t my mother at the fifth-grade commencement ceremonies, either?”

“It will never replace Schiller or Heine—that is, before Heine became a Jew. I know, you cannot put man’s soul in a ghetto or gas his spirit at Treblinka. It looks fine in the hands of poets but puzzling when it really happens. Why did you do it, Chris? A few sermons by minor bishops, a few editorials by minor newspapers, a few pasty statements by minor politicians, a few protest suicides by minor idealists. What did you hope to gain? Ach. Now I have to spend the whole winter writing counterpropaganda.”

“I’m sorry it’s making you lose so much sleep, Horst. I thought perhaps the report itself might annoy you.”

“Don’t give me that snide journalist’s sneer. I know—how could we do this? The fine, cultured German people, after which I rattle off the names of musicians, poets, doctors, and list all our gifts to mankind. How could we do this? It will take the great philosophical and psychiatric brains a hundred years to find a standard of morals to explain this behavior.”

“I’ll simplify it,” Chris said. “You’re a pack of beasts.”

“Oh no, Chris, we are not even to be classed with beasts. Man is the only animal on this planet which destroys its own species. But how in the devil did I get involved in this? I’m no more guilty than you are. Less, perhaps. I’m trapped. But you, dear Chris, are all the moralists in the world who have condoned genocide by the conspiracy of silence.”

“The conspiracy of silence,” Chris mumbled. “Yes, I buy that.”

“Hell, my own skin isn’t important. After the war all this business will be unearthed and mankind will register a proper shock and horror. Then they will say, ‘Let us all forget about the past. Let bygones be bygones.’ And all over Germany you’ll get a chorus of ‘Amen.’ What will the song be? There was nobody here in Germany but us anti-Nazis. Extermination camps? We knew nothing about them. Hitler? Always did think he was crazy. What could we do? Orders were orders. And the world will say, ‘Look at all the good Germans.’ They will string up a few Nazis as showpieces, and all the good German folk will slink back to their cobblers’ benches and sulk and wait for the next Führer.” Horst broke into a sudden sweat and lost his composure. He downed a shot of whisky quickly.

“What’s eating you, Horst?”

“The Jews. They’ll pin a curse on us. They’ll make us a scourge among men for a thousand years.”

“History is written by survivors. There will be no Jewish survivors,” Chris said.

“Hell! They’re uncanny. They have this maddened, insatiable desire to put words on paper. This mania to document their torment.” Horst calmed and thought. “Last time they documented their destruction we got a Bible, then a ‘Valley of Tears’—now what? You know, Chris, my brother was in a Knight Templar colony in Palestine before the war. Every winter he would climb around in caves near the Dead Sea looking for ancient Hebrew letters.”

“Why, Horst, you’re afraid of your hereafter. I wouldn’t have dreamed it.”

“I have a crawling suspicion that inside that ghetto wall are ten thousand diaries buried beneath the ground. And that is what is going to crush us. Not the allied armies, not a few tokens of retribution, but the voices of the dead, unearthed. From this stigma we can never. ... Forgive me, Christmas has a habit of putting me in a mood.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Chris asked sharply.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought I can’t let you out of Poland. I mean, after all, we have to play the game. We both played fairly and I lost I made a bad guess. On the other hand, no use letting Sauer get his hands on you. I am a believer in grandiose gestures! Pack a bag!”

Horst steered his auto down Jerusalem Boulevard. About them a dismal attempt to find Christmas cheer was being made by the Poles and despondent German soldiers.

“Chris, one thing I must know. This Victoria Landowski. Was she a good piece?”

“The truth? I wouldn’t know.”

“Amazing. Simply amazing. Well, we will find her one day.”

“When you do, do me one last favor. Give her a chance to finish herself off before Sauer roughs her up.”

“Chris, you’re asking entirely too much.”

“She is very important to me.”

“Oh well, it is Christmas. My promise. By God, I’m forgetting all my good German training and turning into a downright sentimentalist.”

The car stopped before the ghetto gate opposite the Tlomatskie Synagogue. Horst handed Chris a Kennkarte and special papers. “Into the ghetto. These papers will keep you out of police hands until you find your friends. In three days I’ll turn in a report you are missing. That should give you enough time to get buried in there.”

“I am afraid I have no friends left,” Chris said.

“Don’t be too sure. Jews have an Infallible intelligence system. They will somehow know how the extermination-camp report was spirited out of Poland.”

Chris got out of the car. “You’re one for the books.”

“Well, three cheers for the final triumph of morality in men. If we ever run across one another after the war, put in a good word for me. There is always a demand for ex-German barons as gardeners, bartenders, villain parts in movies. I am a man of many talents.” He sped away.

The ghetto streets were devoid of life. Chris turned up his coat collar and walked aimlessly through the swirls of snow. Eyes were on him from the rooftops the instant he entered. He wandered until he grew weary. Where to go? Whom to see? What a strange ending. Were there people behind the stillness? Was there life left?

Where to go? Where to turn?

“You!”

Chris whirled about. He saw no one in the courtyard from which the voice came.

“You!” it called again.

Chris walked toward the voice. It was coming from an indentation in the building.

“Turn around and walk,” the voice commanded. “Don’t look around. I will give you directions.”

He sat alone on the cot in the attic of Mila 19. Andrei Androfski entered.

Finally Chris stood up and turned his back on Andrei. “Divine retribution. The sinner has come to face his makers. Poetic justice in its purest form.”

Andrei sat at the wooden table and placed his elbow in the center. “Want to hand-wrestle? I haven’t eaten as well as you, but I can still beat you.”

“Don’t you know me, Andrei? I stood by with my hands in my pockets and my ears deafened to the cries of the dying.”

“Must you be so dramatic? All I want to do is hand-wrestle.”

“Andrei ...”

“We know how that report reached London, Chris. Thank you.”

Chris bit his lip to hold off tears.

“We got a horse over the wall this morning. Steaks tonight. Take this pistol. Later I’ll show you how to move around. I’ll put up another cot here for you. When you hear five alarm bells in short rings, it is a friend. Long dashes, we go to the roof. We must be very careful. The roofs are icy.”

“Andrei ...”

“Never mind. I understand.”

Chris was alone. He peered out of the slanting garret window. The snow had stopped, revealing the spires of churches beyond the wall. The churches would be filled with kneeling, praying, singing people. Meager gifts would be exchanged, and for an instant the spirit of goodness would pass through people. Would they think for a fleeting moment of those inside the ghetto? Would they remember that Jesus was a Jew? Chris was flooded with a strange, wonderful, warm sensation, and peace filled his body and his heart. It was a comfort he had never known in a restless, searching life. Now he had captured it.

Five short rings.

“Deborah ...”

“Don’t say anything. Just let me hold you, Chris. Don’t speak ... don’t speak ... Just let me hold you.”

Part Four

DAWN

Chapter One

Journal Entry

ALEXANDER BRANDEL CONTINUES TO be morose and uncommunicative. He has barely spoken to any of us all winter. The Orphans and Self-Help Society still “legally” exists and carries immune Kennkarten. I have assumed Alexander’s duties, such as they “officially” remain. There is still much intercourse with the Civil Authority on rations, etc.

The ghetto is like a morgue. It is impossible to believe that the face of the moon could be more quiet and deserted than the ghetto streets. During the Big Action the women going to the Umschlagplatz for deportation wanted to carry their silk comforters and feather beds, but they were too bulky. So they cut them open and dumped the feathers and goose down on the roofs so they could carry the outer cover (in hopes of finding something to refill them with at their destination). In some places the feathers are ankle-deep on the roofs, and when a wind blows it looks like snow coming down. Always, feathers drift down to add to the haunting stillness.

We think there are forty thousand of us left. Several thousand are at the Brushmaker’s and the uniform factory. There are some of us “authorized” personnel left, a thousand or so. (Why, we do not know.) Mostly there are Wild Ones. The ghetto has been transformed into an underground city with mazes of tunnels, hidden rooms, and cellars dug under cellars. The Militia and Nightingales wrecked all the vacant houses, so they are thoroughly uninhabitable.

We are completely shut off from the little ghetto, which has been devoid of Jews for almost a year, except for the woodwork factory, which has now closed. Poles are moving back into the former little ghetto, scrambling for the fine houses on Sienna and Sliska streets, which they are able to get without compensation to the departed occupants.

This winter we have concentrated in getting key people into the Aryan side. David Zemba reluctantly left the ghetto with his family, but I hear he continues to live in Warsaw, refusing to leave the country. We have been able to place six of the children (who escaped the Niska orphanage and live in the cellar of Mila 19) in the Franciscan Sisters’ convent in Laski.

Joint Forces has about seven hundred fighters in training, learning street-fighting tactics, the handling of our various weapons, and the routes over the roofs. We have twenty so-called battle companies, about one third armed. There are seven Labor Zionist companies, two Bund, four Communist, two Bathyran, and religious and mixed groups. The Revisionists outside of Joint Forces have a well-armed group of fifty, or more at their bunker under Nalewki 37.

Arms, food, and medical stores are hidden in dozens of alternate store bunkers all over the ghetto. Our standard weapon is the Polish 35 rifle. We have about thirty of these with a thousand rounds of ammunition. Next in importance are the fifty-six various models of 9-mm. pistols (German Mausers, Parabellums and Swedish Lahtis). The odd weapons are a nuisance, but we take them despite the difficulty and cost in obtaining ammunition. We have a few Italian Berettis (cal. 32) and Glisentis 10.35. The two Hungarian Baby Frummer .380’s have only eight rounds between them. (A round of ammunition for the Baby Frummer costs two hundred zlotys apiece, whereas 9-mm. ammo runs from eighty to a hundred and twenty zlotys.)

We have several thousand fire bottles and nearly a thousand water-pipe grenades manufactured from a formula by our genius, Jules Schlosberg. We have also three dozen Polish grenades and assorted knives.

Schlosberg’s newest concoction is a tin can filled with nuts and bolts. The open end of the can is sealed with plastic percussion caps and covered with a light wax. The theory works. We tested four of them in empty houses. The impact was so great that some of the bolts shot clear through the plaster walls into the next rooms. We call this “weapon” the “matzo ball.”

Joint Forces operates out of four primary bunkers. Simon Eden’s headquarters (Leszno 92) under Bund House, Gensia 43, and our bunker at Mila 19 (which now holds almost a hundred people, including eighteen children) form the “Central Command.” Rodel has a series of small bunkers at the southern end around the uniform factory. His main bunker is under the Convert’s Church! Father Jakub hears nothing. A good friend. The other command in the Brushmaker’s district is held by Wolf Brandel, who is barely twenty years old. Wolf amazes us all with his imagination and complete calm. His main bunker is at Franciskanska Street, almost at the ghetto wall and under two parts of the factory complex. Rachael Bronski, now a soldier, has gone to live at the Franciskanska bunker. Stephan Bronski, incidentally, is considered the best runner in the ghetto.

The Brushmaker’s factory still turns out six thousand brushes a day for the Wehrmacht. This means, of course, a constant flow of raw supplies in from the outside. Wolf has capitalized on this by paying off a few key people in shipping and receiving. Food cans and supplies coming in can be easily marked and used for smuggling in pistols and ammunition.

Before David Zemba went over to the Aryan side we held a final meeting of the Good Fellowship Club (half our original number are left). It was decided that everything except the current volume in progress should be hidden immediately. Fifty completed volumes have been stuffed into fourteen milk cans and sealed and buried in fourteen different places. Ten more milk cans and iron boxes contain unclassified or unentered material, such as photographs, diaries, poetry, essays. Only six people know where the twenty-four cans and boxes are hidden: David Zemba, Andrei Androfski, Gabriela Rak, Alexander Brandel, Christopher de Monti, and myself. David, Andrei, Gabriela, and Alex each know where part of the cache is located, so if captured they cannot possibly reveal the entire archives.

Only Christopher de Monti and I know the location of all the cans and boxes. We have placed the most urgent priority in getting Chris out of Poland, for he alone is our greatest hope of bringing world attention to the holocaust which has befallen us. However, there is an unparalleled man hunt for him on the Aryan side, and getting him out of Poland will be nearly impossible.

One bit of good news. Although Finland is an ally of Germany, she has adamantly refused to turn over her Jewish community (of two thousand) to Eichmann. In fact, old Marshal Mannerheim has threatened to use the Finnish army to protect the Jews. We hear similar reports of defiance, particularly from Denmark. Also, we hear that Bulgaria and Rumania will not yield Jews to Eichmann’s fanatical pressure. Lord, Lord, what couldn’t we do with the protection of the Polish Home Army, which now has a quarter of a million men!

With the Good Fellowship Club archives hidden, I feel that my work has come to an end. I am so lonely without Susan and Momma. I am almost blind from the years of working in the cellar in bad light with these notes. My hands and shoulders are swollen with arthritis from the dampness. I am in pain all the time. How much longer can we go on? How many of us will escape? Two? Five? Fifty? How many? And what of Joint Forces? A fool’s army. No one in their wildest dreams believes we can hold out against assault for more than two or three days. So what is the use? When will we fight? Or will we fight? Who among us will dare to fire that first shot against them? Who?

Entered as the first entry of a new volume by Ervin Rosenblum on January 15, 1943.

Chapter Two

BLOND, BLUE-EYED, TRIM, intelligent, industrious SS Oberführer Alfred Funk stood, posture correct, at the head of a polished table. Listening in rapt attention on his left sat Rudolph Schreiker and Dr. Franz Koenig. Opposite them, Gestapo Chief Gunther Sauer and Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze, newly appointed as security police head for all of Warsaw. Not so rapt in his attention, Horst von Epp, bored, stared out of the window at the opposite end of the table.

Funk had carried verbal orders from Berlin to Poland on the “Jewish question” for so long that meanings were understood beyond their thin veils. He spoke in an uninspired monotone.

“Those who remain in the ghetto are Communists, criminals, perverts, and agitators.”

Four of them agreed. Von Epp played with a paper clip.

“Himmler has decided that for the sake of common justice we must erase this blot. We will proceed shortly with the final phase of the liquidation of the ghetto.”

Each of the men immediately translated the order into his own personal sphere of action.

For Rudolph Schreiker the removal of the Jewish problem in his area would be a relief. It was getting far too complicated for him to understand; besides, many of his business dealings could be buried in the ghetto.

Franz Koenig had been way ahead of it, anticipating the ghetto-liquidation order. He had already negotiated new war contracts, using labor at Trawniki and Poniatow.

Sauer took the order with unconcern. A policeman is always busy. Old problems are solved, new ones pop up. The Gestapo never rests, never will rest. Put out one fire, two more ignite. It did not matter.

Horst von Epp wanted the meetings to break up so he could get to a telephone and check to see if the new girls had come in from Prague.

Stutze was the most outwardly concerned. To him would fall the actual job of digging the vermin out. The Jews had shown great ingenuity in hiding themselves, and with an entire winter to dig in he would need more help.

“You are, of course, aware that the Jews are subterranean,” Stutze said. “One can walk in the streets of the ghetto for hours without a sign of life. They live like moles. According to their Civil Authority records, there are forty to fifty thousand of them left. And one cannot overlook the fact that they have been arming themselves.”

Funk cut Stutze short “You do not suggest that Jews will fight?”

“Of course not, Oberführer,” the Austrian said too quickly. “But you yourself said that criminals and Communists have taken refuge in the ghetto.”

“I have full faith that your Reinhard Corps will be more than equal to the situation,” Funk concluded abruptly.

Stutze blanched. Funk had put him in such a position that he could not request additional troops. “Of course, Oberführer.”

“Fine ... fine,” Funk said. “Tomorrow evening I should like to hear your plans for completion of the liquidation.”

“Of course, Oberführer.”

“You, Dr. Koenig, shall submit your requirements to have the machinery in your factories transferred.”

Koenig nodded.

“Until tomorrow evening, gentlemen.”

They came to their feet sharply.

“Heil Hitler.”

“Heil Hitler.”

“Herr Sauer ... a moment please.”

The Gestapo chief returned to his seat. Horst von Epp also remained. When the others were gone, Funk turned to Sauer.

“On this matter of the archives in the ghetto of which I spoke to you on my last visit. What have you been able to ascertain?”

“Not too much. The Jews protect these historians with an uncommon devotion. Not even their Militia will inform on them. Fear of retribution, I suppose.”

“What’s this about?” Horst asked.

“The Jewish mania for diaries. We have unearthed thousands of them in reservations around Poland and particularly in the special-treatment camps. We have long been aware of an entire organization here writing records.”

Well, well! Horst thought.

“We cannot proceed with the final liquidation of the ghetto until these records have been found,” Funk continued. “Hitler himself gave me specific instructions to see that these Jew lies are found. We cannot permit their distortions to be published.”

Sauer was unmoved by Funk’s double talk. The general sensed it. “Isn’t it enough,” Funk pressed, raising his voice to a sharper pitch, “that this filthy pack of lies about our labor camps was smuggled out of Poland?”

“Perhaps,” Sauer said softly, “the Führer should take the matter up with our Italian friends to learn how this was done.”

“It is the job of the Gestapo to learn these things and stop them before the crime is committed.”

Horst became fascinated at the sudden sharpness of argument. Someone had to give.

“We want positive information on these ghetto archives,” Funk snapped.

“Certain people,” Sauer answered, “were in such a hurry to cover their business transactions, they did away with the Big Seven prematurely and in a single fell swoop destroyed my entire system of informers.” The implication was obvious. Half of Warsaw’s Nazis wanted Max Kleperman’s lips sealed.

The policeman rubbed his eyes and meditated, speaking as if to himself. “If anyone in the ghetto knows about these papers it would be Alexander Brandel, but he has not been seen all winter. We know there is a bunker under Mila 19. We have not been able to determine the entrance.”

Funk, anxious to oversimplify the matter and get rid of Sauer, whom he could not bully, made an abrupt decision. “I shall have Stutze find this Brandel immediately. Then we can proceed with the liquidation of the ghetto.”

Later that evening Horst walked down two flights in the Bristol Hotel to where a brace of SS guards flanked the door leading to Alfred Funk’s suite. Funk’s orderly let him in.

“The Oberführer is taking a bath,” the orderly Said. He mixed a drink for Von Epp and disappeared into the bedroom.

Funk bathing again. Funk bathed before and after all conferences. Some days he took five or six baths. Often, when a good party was moving into its second stages and the women were getting deliriously vile, Funk would excuse himself and run off to a shower.

Reading the Jew Freud was legally banned, but Horst had brought several volumes to Warsaw nevertheless. Freud’s interpretations afforded him a never-ending, amusing list of clues to the strange behavior of his Nazi cohorts. Alfred Funk’s mania for cleanliness, he concluded, was an unconscious effort to wash his soiled soul with soap. However, the ersatz soap was of a very poor quality these days.

Horst reflected on the bizarre reactions at the earlier conference. He had attended many conferences at long polished tables where Funk and other Nazis announced dogma and sent everyone on his merry way with crisp “Heil Hitlers.” But today there was a roomful of unusual performances. The first cracks. The minute trace of doubt and fear.

Rudolph Schreiker loosened with a dozen audible sighs of relief that the ghetto was to be liquidated.

One could see the wheels of Koenig’s mind spinning to shift his fortune to Argentina, which alone showed a friendship for the Nazis.

Stutze was afraid to execute the final liquidation. In a moment he showed outright cowardice.

Sauer. A fine chap, like myself. Sauer never wavers. Knows his job. Plods on. He and I are true stalwarts.

It was Funk who had put on the real show, reflecting Berlin’s panic over some obscure Jewish archives. Funk had backed down from Sauer, something he had never done before.

Funk bundled himself into a large towel robe and padded, still dripping, into the living room.

“You look tired, Alfred,” Horst said. “I have just the relaxation the doctor ordered.”

Funk’s orderly was all over him, trying to dry his master’s hair. He dismissed the man curtly and lit a cigarette and flopped into a big chair, stretched his legs and arms, opening the top of his robe enough to reveal the double streaks of lightning tattooed under his left armpit, the mark of an SS Elite.

“I’ve got a pair of Czech sisters just in from Prague. They come highly recommended. They’re not much to look at, but I understand they do fantastic contractions.”

“Good. I need a little sport.”

Funk left the room with a drink, leaving the bedroom door ajar so that they could speak.

In the beginning of their relationship, Funk had detested Horst von Epp. His cynical attitude, his snide mockery and obvious lack of sincere devotion to Nazi ideals and his constant barbs at the conferences irritated Funk no end. Then Horst began to grow on him.

Horst von Epp ran his office with enviable German efficiency. Moreover, he was the best officers’ pimp in Europe, and once one got used to his sense of humor it lost much of its offensiveness. Funk came to understand that Von Epp was actually berating himself most of the time through his jokes.

He liked Von Epp for another reason too. He was reluctant to admit it, but he liked to talk to Horst. Since he had joined the party in 1930 he was in a league of tight-lipped, humorless men who considered it dangerous to speak one’s inner thoughts or even admit to having them.

He had taken vows as harsh as those of a monk in one of those silent ecclesiastical orders.

After the first shocks of Von Epp’s curt observations of the Nazis subsided he found himself looking forward to coming to Warsaw. With Von Epp he could share thoughts, speak, fence verbally, confide frustrations. He could indulge himself in a way he dared not, even with his own wife and children.

Horst leaned against the doorframe while Funk primped himself to his blond Aryan best before the mirror.

“How is our defeat at Stalingrad being taken in Berlin? Graciously, I hope.”

Funk dropped the hairbrush and spun around angrily, then contained himself. “We will break through at Stalingrad.”

“That is what I was afraid of. You spoilsports will be too bullheaded to see the handwriting on the wall. And the crushing of our Afrika Korps in Tunis?”

Funk quickly spouted the line of Nazi logistics. The Russians would collapse soon. America was too weak-spined to fight a sustained war, give up her sons and her luxuries and make the sacrifices necessary for victory. England? Washed up.

“Oh, for Christ sake, Alfred,” Horst said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I wrote most of that nonsense after Dunkirk. Know what I’ve been doing lately? Soul-searching. Do you ever soul-search?”

“That is a dangerous avocation reserved exclusively for those whose advanced age makes them otherwise useless. I gave it up twelve years ago when I joined the party.”

Funk pulled up his suspender straps and assured his servant he was capable of buttoning his own tunic. Horst followed Funk back to the living room, where they settled down to await the arrival of the sisters from Prague.

“Why is Hitler suddenly concerned over a few Jewish writings? Is it guilt? Is there a realization that Germany will lose the war unless they break through to Stalingrad? Does Hitler liken these writings to the other book the Jews wrote which has tormented the conscience of man for two thousand years? Does he fear two millennia of a Jewish curse gnawing at the souls of unborn German generations, thwarting their growth? Is it a fear of divine retribution?”

“Nonsense,” Funk snapped. He was about to recite the Nazi line about the war’s being fought because of international Jewry but decided to spare Horst, or rather spare himself from Horst’s retorts.

“Would you say this strange desire to find a few books when you own half the world points out that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword?”

“Nothing of the sort. Every conqueror has justified his actions. In our case the obliteration of the Jews is our holy mission, just as the obliteration of other peoples has been a holy mission for other empires.”

“Would you say that this desire to find the archives is more like a dog scratching frantically to cover up his dung pile?”

“Put it away, Horst. You talk as though the German people have committed some sort of crime.”

“Haven’t they?”

“Of course not. Precedent is all around us. Even the ancient Hebrews destroyed their enemies ... attributed to the commands of their God. Mongols made pyramids of skulls. The Chinese used human bodies as mortar to build the Great Wall. Napoleon had his Gestapo and the Russians have theirs. We are merely making variations on an ancient theme. Every man wants to be the best. The drive to rule is a completely natural expression of human behavior. In an individual the drive finds its expression by pushing the writer’s pen to create a book, by driving the athlete to strain his heart and his muscle. When the drive becomes a national expression it takes the form of conquest. Every people in every age have taken their turn. The world has only one standard for proof that one is better than the other, and that is conquest.”

Horst grunted at Funk’s cruel but accurate logic. “Granted,” he said, “that the desire to dominate is an unalterable trait in the human being. Let us take it a step farther. A woman wants to commit adultery. She has a family, children, position in the community. Does she walk naked in the streets to her lover and perform sex acts in a store window? No. Why? Adultery is a sin we all indulge in, but the woman finds a secluded place, deceives her husband, and avoids scandal. She plays by the rules. You see, Alfred, even the game of sin must be played by the rules. So must war be fought by the rules.”

Funk set his glass down. “What you are saying is that when the sloppy aim of the Luftwaffe kills women and children in London it is permissible. When it is deliberate we break the rules. Isn’t that a hypocritical double standard? Is it a greater sin for a submarine to kill a man on a ship without warning or to blast him, gentlemen’s style, off a battlefield? Your rule says ‘Kill soldiers.’ Is the killing of an armed man really less a murder than the killing of a child? We have learned that other conquests have failed because one cannot go to war with compassion. Total war means total death. If victory means reducing Poland to a pool of cultureless serfs, then that is what must be done.”

“Then why not use poison gas on their armies?”

“This is not a decision of compassion but of expediency. We would certainly not hesitate if we knew they would not do the same to us. You cannot measure brutality by degrees. All conquerors justify their aims on a political theory. In our case the Nazis provide our various frills. No country goes to war without the belief in its own justice—we take it a step farther. We act out what others only theorize. In the concentration camps we reduce our political enemy until he takes the physical appearance of a subhuman. This makes us supermen by comparison.”

“Alfred, does any of this ever annoy you as an individual?”

“No. I decided by 1930 that you either become a Nazi or drown. My personal views on this Jewish business fail to be important. Horst, have you witnessed a gassing?”

“No.”

“I’ll arrange one for you.”

“Thanks, anyhow.”

“The first time I witnessed one it was with a sense of complete fascination. I slept very well that night. The only thing that annoyed me a little was some of the Jewesses carrying their children into the chambers who looked at me with a mocking Mona Lisa smile.”

Horst was sorry he had brought the whole subject up.

“I shall tell you why the German people will be able to achieve what others have failed. It is because we are capable of the perfect state of mind necessary. We can give absolute obedience, respond to total authority, like no others.”

Horst spun the ice cubes with his forefinger. He glanced up into Funk’s face. The Oberführer was in a state of detachment, the cruel and impersonal monster qualities dominating his appearance.

“Others talk of love of country. We act it out through absolute obedience. Four years ago I was commandant of the Waffen SS youth training school at Dachau. We got boys at the age of sixteen for a year’s indoctrination, complete with live prisoners to experiment with. The entire course was geared to teach absolute unquestioned obedience to the Fatherland. Each boy was given an Alsatian puppy of six to eight weeks of age when he entered training. During the year part of their study was to train the animal, live with it, compete it against the other dogs. We encouraged them to develop the natural affection a boy does for a dog.”

Funk clasped his hands behind him.

“The last graduation test to see if the boy was worthy to become an SS officer was by calling him into a private room with his dog. As he stood before me at attention with his dog at his side I would say, ‘Hans, I order you to strangle your dog this instant.’ ”

Horst thought he was going to vomit.

“Oh, a few were unable to do it. Some even broke and cried. But! Almost all of them, without a trace of remorse, without a second of hesitation, said, ‘Jawohl, Herr Kommandant,’ and proceeded to snap their dog’s neck without a trace of emotion. And this, Horst, is the supreme state of absolute obedience which we Germans have attained.”

Horst poured himself a triple drink. “Heil Hitler,” he said.

Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze paced his room in the barracks wildly. Gestapo Chief Sauer had just left him with orders to set up a massive pot around Mila 19 and not to leave until the underground bunker was located and Alexander Brandel found.

It was just like that bastard Prussian, Alfred Funk, to give him the dirty work, he fumed. Where was his promotion to Standartenführer? He had more than earned his colonelcy. It was all part of the German plots against the Austrians.

All winter the Jews had been arming in the ghetto. No telling what those crazy Jews were liable to do. He broke into a sweat.

Damned if he’d walk into a trap on Funk’s whim. Funk simply didn’t understand how dangerous it was.

And then the idea came to him as he heard a shriek down the hall. It was that damned Kutler and his nightmares again. Wait! Kutler. That drunken beast was becoming completely useless. Yes! That was it. Kutler would lead the force into the ghetto. Kutler would set up the kettle. Good idea ... good idea.

Chapter Three

“AHA!” ANDREI CRIED WITH fiendish delight, rubbing his hands together. “Aha, you stupid man. You have made a fool’s gambit!” Andrei moved his knight over the chessboard. “Check!”

Chris countered immediately, lopping off an exposed castle, putting Andrei’s chessmen in an impossible position. “Fool’s gambit, all right,” he said, “but you have the wrong fool.”

Andrei studied the board a moment and cursed under his breath.

Chris pulled back from the table and paced the tiny garret room restlessly.

“What’s the matter, Chris?”

“I’m hungry, I want a smoke, I’m sick of being cooped up—I want to see Deborah.”

“I have yet to hear the first person speak in favor of ghetto living,” Andrei said.

“It has its advantages. It got me out of some bad drinking habits.” Chris patted his stomach. “And notice how slim I’ve become.”

“What’s bothering you?” Andrei asked again.

“To go or not to go. Hell, I know how important it is to get out of Poland knowing where the archives are buried, but it was impossible to leave Deborah before, even believing she hated me. Now, I swear, I don’t know if I have the strength to leave.”

“Women,” Andrei grunted, “they have a way of getting under one’s skin.” He walked up behind Chris and put one hand on his shoulder. “I am confident that when the time comes you will make the correct decision, and if you are very lucky the decision will be made for you.”

Both men froze at the same instant, trying to hear something that alerted a sixth sense beyond their normal waves of hearing. A few seconds later the alarm bell erupted in a series of dashes.

“I’ll never get used to that goddamned bell,” Chris said.

Wolf Brandel came in carrying a large suitcase. He looked at the chessboard. “Who played black?” he asked. Chris jerked his thumb at Andrei. Wolf grimaced and went “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Got a cigarette?” Chris asked.

“Don’t smoke.”

“Hell.”

“Hey, Andrei. Three Kar 98’s came in with seventy rounds of ammo. Pretty good. We got a line on four Mauser 9-mm.’s day after tomorrow.”

“Good work,” Andrei said. “At this rate we’ll have weapons for half our force in another few weeks. How is Rachael?”

“Fine.”

“What do you have in the suitcase?”

“I want to get some matzo-ball grenades to take back to my bunker. We tested one yesterday. Blam! Nuts and bolts everywhere. I want to talk to Schlosberg about designing a real big matzo ball.” Wolf held his hands out to indicate a four-foot diameter. “Something like a land mine we can detonate with a hot spark. Something packed with a couple thousand nuts and bolts.”

“Good idea,” Andrei said.

Wolf put the suitcase on the table. “Take a look.”

Andrei opened the lid, not knowing what to expect. He unfolded a blanket. An automatic weapon and five clips of ammunition burst into view.

“My God,” Andrei said, not believing what his eyes saw, “my God! A Schmeisser machine pistol. My God!” Andrei licked his lips; his hands trembled to pick up the weapon but feared it would disappear like a mirage. “Where on earth did you get it, Wolf?”

“German tank sergeant, lost a leg on the eastern front. Sold it for only four thousand zlotys.”

“My God!”

“Go on, Andrei, pick it up.”

Andrei lifted the weapon out of the suitcase. He patted it with a gentleness reserved only for Gabriela. He slipped the bolt, sighted in, cradled it against his hip, clicked the trigger.

“It’s yours,” Wolf said.

“Mine?”

“A gift from the Brushmaker’s command.”

“I couldn’t accept it.”

“We had a meeting and a vote. We decided in a democratic manner it would be most effective in your hands. Of course most of the voters were Bathyrans.”

Andrei was seized with emotion. “I love it so much there is only one name for her. Gaby! Perhaps Gaby will fire a shot heard around the world! Wolf, I love you!”

The alarm bell sounded again. Simon Eden came in.

“Got a smoke?” Chris asked.

“Only German ersatz, but they’re yours.”

Chris retreated to the cot, caressing the pack of cigarettes with the same affection Andrei had shown for the Schmeisser.

“Look!” Andrei said, showing Simon the machine pistol.

“Yes, I know,” Simon said. “As commander of Joint Forces, I was given the nominal courtesy of being allowed to cast my vote with the Bathyrans for its disposition.”

It was immediately clear to Andrei that Simon’s dark eyes were trying to shield trouble.

“What’s on your mind, Simon? You’re a worse faker than I am.”

“Funk arrived in Warsaw last night.”

It had been long expected. Everyone knew it would come and what Funk’s arrival meant. Final liquidation. Yet the silence was long and frightened.

“Alfred Funk,” Chris said at last. “The harbinger of spring. The messenger of peace and light.”

Andrei patted his Schmeisser. “Gaby, dear girl, you arrived just in time.”

The tall, angular commander looked doubtfully from Wolf to Andrei to Chris, then exploded his message. “I am making a change in strategy,” he said. “I am pulling our companies out of their exposed positions, breaking them up and putting them into bunkers.”

“Why?” Andrei demanded. “To have them wait in the ground like shivering dogs to be hunted down and butchered bunker by bunker?”

Simon shook his head in defeat. “I have reappraised our strength. We cannot make a street fight.”

“What? Wasn’t it Simon Eden who came to me a year ago oozing Zionist purity from every pore, saying, ‘Don’t fight now, Andrei. Wait! Make your shots heard! Do not die in silence!’ ”

“God damn it, Andrei. Do you think I like this decision?”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“Because ... because I believed with all my soul that we would gather an angry army of ten thousand soldiers. We can’t last more than two or three days. There will be no help from the Aryan side. Nothing ... nothing.”

He unfurled a large blueprint and flattened it on the table. “Look,” Simon continued, “a city engineer’s map of the sewer system under Warsaw. We move our companies into bunkers which can connect to the sewers. I have sent Rodel over the wall to buy trucks and get drivers. The Communists will set up escape routes and hiding places in the forests. We go under the wall a group at a time and move through the sewers, and we will come up five or six miles beyond the ghetto in prearranged locations.”

Andrei snatched the blueprint off the table and crumpled it.

“Do we destroy ourselves with a futile three-day gesture?” Simon screamed. “Or is it our duty—yes, our duty—to get a handful of survivors out? If we stay, we die—all of us. At least this other way a few may get through to tell the story.”

“He’s right, Andrei,” Chris said, stepping between them. “This story must be told.”

Andrei looked slowly to Wolf Brandel.

“I don’t know,” Wolf pleaded.

Andrei sat down slowly and contained his temper. “What story will they tell, Simon Eden? Will they unearth the Brandel journals and read about how five hundred thousand sheep walked silently, without protest, to their deaths and the high-sounding idealists who stood for honor crawled out on their hands and knees through crap-filled sewers to tell the world our heritage? What story, Simon? What story? Have you no shame? Have you no anger to avenge dead children? Simon! One week! Let us stand and fight like men for one week!”

“We cannot hold a week. It is impossible.”

“Betar! Masada! Jerusalem! We must show them Jews can still fight, Simon!”

“It is our duty to try to survive,” Simon said.

Andrei turned to Wolf. “Order the Bathyrans back to Mila 19. We will not be a partner to this final debasement of our people.”

“Don’t pull your people out of the command,” Simon pleaded.

“Do you hear me, Wolf? I have given you an order!”

Wolf looked again from one to the other in utter confusion.

Ring! Ring! Ring! screamed the alarm bell in long dashes. Ring! Ring! Ring!

Wolf stole a glance at the street “It’s swarming with SS.”

The four men quickly checked their weapons and bolted out to the ladder to the roof. Andrei was the last one through. He closed the trap door behind him and rubbed his arms in the sudden burst of January cold.

“Down through Mila 5,” Andrei said. “Be careful not to stir up those feathers and give our position away.”

They crouched low and stepped on the feathers as though they were walking on eggs. Chris’s foot hit a hidden ice slick and he crashed down, unable to contain a pain-racked scream.

“My knee!” he cried, torn with pain.

“What is it?”

“Trick basketball knee. Fine time to jump out.”

“Look over the side,” Andrei said. Wolf crawled off with Simon.

Chris grimaced as he tried to slip the loose cartilage back into place. It cracked as it found the slot Chris turned white-lipped.

“Can you move?”

“Wrap it up in something so it won’t jump out again,” he grunted.

Andrei whipped off his leather jacket then tore the sleeve from his shirt and with it deftly locked Chris’s kneecap into place.

At the edge of the roof Wolf and Simon peered down on a street swarming with Germans. The kettle was set up all the way from Nalewki to Zamenhof streets with the main force concentrating on the Orphans and Self-Help headquarters at Mila 19. They slipped back to Andrei.

“We’re boxed in,” Simon said.

“Can we make a break for your headquarters?”

“No,” Simon answered. “We’d have to cross an open courtyard at Mila 5. We’d never make it.”

“Can’t stay here,” Wolf said. “They’ll be all over the roof in minutes.”

“I have a hiding place up here,” Andrei said. “I think it will hold all four of us.”

Chris struggled to his feet. Simon and Wolf draped an arm over his shoulders and Chris was able to hobble. Andrei led them to the last house at Mila and Zamenhof.

The roof slanted at a sharp pitch for fifteen yards to the rain gutters. Near the very edge, before the overhanging eaves, was a large chimney.

“We’ve got to get down there to the chimney,” Andrei said. “Lie absolutely flat and move in a direct line with the chimney so you won’t be observed from the street.”

Andrei went on his belly, headfirst down the steeply angled tiles, the Schmeisser cradled in his elbows. Inch by inch he wiggled his body downward. Watch the ice, he said to himself, dig your toes in, don’t look at the edge—that’s a five-story drop—easy ... easy. The blood poured into his head and made him giddy for a moment, and he was suddenly struck with the weakness of three days without food. The tile nails jammed into his legs and belly and sliced his leather jacket, and the cold cramped his body. A few feet more ... just a few feet. Andrei lined up the chimney and rolled against it.

With his back braced against the chimney, he waved for the next man to come down. Simon went over. Andrei removed a loose tile nail, the first key to a Chinese puzzle. He slid a tile out and loosened five more, which he set down into the sub-roof. He had made a hole just large enough for a man to get into the sub-roof and eaves.

Simon made the mistake of coming down feet first. Although he was in a better position to grab with his hands, he could not see his direction or the ice slicks and could conceivably miss the chimney, for Andrei was unable to shout up directions without drawing attention from the street. Midway down, Simon had to turn his body so that he would come headfirst.

Come on, Simon. Come on, for Christ sake, Andrei muttered to himself. Time drawled on. Come on, Simon. If they get on top of us, we’ll be clay pigeons.

Simon Eden reached the chimney, put his back against it, and dropped his head between his legs, close to tears of sheer fright.

Next Chris. Wolf crouched in a rear guard, watching the rooftops.

Chris was racked with pain, dragging the game leg, but he came down fast and without hesitation. Andrei dared a peek around the corner of the chimney to the street. Luck was with them so far.

“Simon, get down there. Crawl forward as far as you can go. Stay on the crossbeams. The flooring under it is rotted away. Chris, follow him in. Move up as close against him as you can so there’ll be room for all of us.”

Simon went headfirst into the hole. He slid his body over the beams. The joists formed a sharp angle at the beams, so a large man like Simon Eden was all but wedged in a vise. He pushed forward with the greatest effort until he came to a dead end.

Chris followed him, struggling with the painful leg.

Andrei looked up the roof to Wolf and waved for him to begin his descent. Wolf hated the roofs. They made him dizzy. He had moved a few yards when all he could see was the edge below him and all he could think of was his body hurtling down a sheer plunge of five stories to the pavement. He closed his eyes. Everything began to spin. He froze on the spot Andrei and the chimney seemed miles away.

Andrei snarled. He wanted to shout up to Wolf, curse him, prod him, order him. Time was running out. Should he crawl up after Wolf? No, that would certainly attract attention from the street. But if he allowed Wolf to stay where he was, Germans would be above him at any second.

“Come on, lad,” Andrei prayed. “Come on. Move, boy, move.”

The sweat in Wolf’s eyes turned icy. He lifted his head. “Got to ... got to ... got to ...” He crawled an inch ... another ... “Got to ... got to ... got to ...” Closer, closer, closer. Andrei scampered up, snatched his hand, and dragged him down the last six feet. Wolf was shaking.

“Get down there,” Andrei said, hurling him headfirst into the hideaway.

Andrei went into the roof last. He was greeted by an accumulation of sixty-five years of filth and cobwebs. He stretched his body downward until he was stopped by Wolf’s feet, then eased his upper half down. He lay flush against the chimney. Andrei lifted the tiles from his prone position and slipped them back into place. When the last tile was fitted, the eaves were plunged into darkness.

The four men were locked in a lightless coffin. They lay inside a triangle formed by beams, rafters, and the wall. Each man lay on three two-inch boards which supported his body at his calves, thighs, back, and shoulders. Beneath the beams was a rotted floor, part of which extended into the eaves, directly over the street.

The face of one man touched the feet of another end to end. Their movement was limited to a few inches. They could turn over from back to stomach only with a slow effort.

“Everybody all right?” Andrei whispered.

They answered in the affirmative.

“How’s the leg, Chris?”

“Going up like a balloon.”

“Painful?”

“Let me suffer in peace.”

A bug bit Wolf under the eye. “How long did you stay here, Andrei?”

“Once for six hours.”

“Holy Mother.”

“Of course I didn’t have such nice company. Don’t lie on the sub-floor. It’s rotted. Pieces may fall down on the street. And reach up and rub your partner’s feet so his blood will circulate.”

Andrei tucked the Schmeisser firmly into the apex of the joist and beam and saw a slit of light at the extreme end of the eaves. By the most difficult of straining and contortion, he could lift his head and put his eye to it.

“By God. Some boards are split. I can see the pavement.” He worked the blade of a pocketknife back and forth between the boards, separating them a half inch. “I can see Mila 19.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s swarming with Germans. They must be looking for the bunker.”

Wolf and Simon felt Chris writhe as spears of pain lashed up and down his leg. Chris’s leg twitched against Wolf’s face. Simon handed Chris a handkerchief. “Bite on this,” he said.

Luminous eyes peered at the four strangers who had invaded their home. A scraping of claws.

“Rats!”

“Get out of here, you bastards!”

“Oh God, I hate rats,” Wolf moaned.

“You’ll find them quite friendly in a few hours,” Andrei said. “It’s the bats at night that get you.”

Wolf’s skin crawled as he felt the animal dash over his chest and brush up against his face. “Oh God damn it,” he cried, “I hate rats.”

They became silent. The sound of guttural orders bounced off the deserted houses in the street below and echoed up to them. They had found a Jew on Mila Street and were torturing him for the location of the Mila 19 bunker.

Cries of agony below settled them down to adjust to their own discomfort. And then the automatic silence when one breathes only with controlled quiet, for there was movement on the roof above them.

“No Jews down this way, Sergeant!”

“You can never tell where the vermin hide. Post a guard here and one at the opposite end of the roofs.”

“Yes, sir.”

Andrei calculated that the guards were at that point where the roof began its pitch, some fifteen yards away. From their speech, they were Ukrainians.

The beams cut into their bodies, but no one dared change his position. The slightest sound now could give them away.

They muted themselves into a deeper stillness at the sound of noises in the attic under them. A smashing of glass. The sound of hatchets and sledge hammers bursting the walls and doors. The building was undergoing a dismantling for secret hiding places.

Each of them touched his weapon at the same instant for a comfort which did not really exist.

Curses penetrated their tomb from the frustrated, grunting hunters.

Screaming whistles in the street. Another Jew had been located, cringing in a courtyard sewer.

More men were on the roof above them.

Chris’s body convulsed in pain. His eyes rolled back in his head. He clamped his teeth into the cloth in his mouth. Simon was trying to decide whether or not to knock Chris unconscious with the pistol barrel, but at that moment Chris straightened out and was still.

Chris saw his father kneeling at the altar next to the library in their villa outside Rome. So funny to see his father praying. Poppa was a hypocrite! He drank, he gambled, he was a libertine ... he was a Fascist. But Poppa prayed. Poppa told him to learn to pray. I’ve wanted to pray but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t without damning myself.

Oh Mary, Mother of God! Help me! I’m going to scream! My leg! Jesus! Jesus! Help me!

“Have your men smash holes in the roof. Jews hide in the roofs!”

They could feel the vibration of the sledge hammers as they splintered the tiles. The ancient beams rattled under the pounding and shot needles of fear through their bodies. Wolf wept softly to himself. Each new blow brought the enemy closer and closer to the edge of the roof.

All Chris could see was his father’s chapel.

Andrei had no thoughts but of that moment when the hammer would burst through and reveal him. He would fire the gun into their rotten faces.

Simon Eden was calm. It did not matter much any more, Simon thought. His parents, his sister and brother were gone. The years as a Labor Zionist organizer had taught him that when the fountains of idealism ran dry one weighed the odds without emotion and accepted reality. This was the end. Trapped in a coffin with rats and spiders. There had been no sweetheart, really. A marriage ended in failure. To be the wife of a Zionist organizer, one had to be a woman like Sylvia Brandel. There had not even been a sweetheart like Gabriela. He envied Andrei. Simon’s only marriage was to Zionism.

They were coming down the roof with ropes around their waists. Andrei prayed as he held his machine pistol ready, his finger quivering on the trigger. There was only one hope.

Perhaps we are so far out on the edge they won’t come down, he thought.

An hour passed. Then two, then three.

At last the hammering above and below them stopped.

The relief from the tension brought on a new realization of physical agony. Their bodies had been cut to a blissful numbness. Chris mumbled hallucinations. They stretched one by one and shifted their positions slightly and massaged themselves and each other to restore circulation.

They had to be quiet; the Ukrainians were still up there. The terror on the streets was unabated.

Wolf played a chess game in his mind. It was the most magnificent jeweled board one could imagine. The black squares were made of solid gold and the white of ivory, each pawn and piece carved of a different precious gem. Move the pawn ... no, the bishop. He tried to think. Then the board would become muddled and the opponent’s chessmen turned to rats and spiders. Why can’t I keep the board straight? Why? I’ve played blindfolded before! The rats ate his chessmen and he could not move his hands to help them. Stop eating my chessmen! Rachael ... Please don’t let me think of Rachael. I’ll cry if I do.

Andrei licked his lips. Food! Oh, look at it. Deborah, you shouldn’t have cooked so much. You cook just like Momma. The gefilte fish is just right. So tasty.

Andrei sniffed. He came out of his trance slowly. Smoke! The brick chimney next to him was becoming warm. German efficiency. Many fireplaces in the ghetto had false coveys for hiding places. This was countered by burning fires in them so any bricked-up Jews would be smoked out. Their hiding place turned into a stifling furnace. The sweat gushed from their bodies, driving them deeper into agony. Whiffs of smoke slithered into the eaves through the crumbled mortar. Andrei gagged and twisted his head to the slit in the eaves to try to suck in a whiff of pure air.

“The smoke is coming through that one down there!” he could hear someone shout “Mark it off the list.”

Andrei closed his eyes again and dreamed of food.

The high-pitched multi-thousand-cycle cries of bats.

Simon’s dream of cold and wet made him urinate.

Andrei opened his eyes. He could hear the flapping wings and the vibrations. Dream or real? Dream or real? Dream or real? Oh God, I’m hungry. Tiny droplets of light sparkled off and on, off and on. Andrei looked through the slit in the boards. Outside, a glaring, artificial light. He turned over again and watched the sparkling overhead. They were beams of searchlights pushing through cracks in the roof. It must be night. He listened for several moments. He could hear nothing on the roof.

“Simon!” Andrei dared whisper. “Simon!”

“Andrei!”

“Chris!”

“He is unconscious,” Simon said. “He passes out and comes to, passes out and comes to.”

“Wolf!”

Andrei was answered by a feeble groan. Andrei kicked against Wolf’s shoulder. “Wolf!”

The return was an incoherent babbling.

“Must be night. They’re using searchlights.”

“That’s the way I figured it,” Simon said.

Andrei looked through the boards again, squinting to see through the glare. There was still a concentration of SS at Mila 19. He groped around for his weapon and toyed with the idea of breaking out of the entombment and firing at the searchlights. No, he’d be shot off the roof in seconds.

“I guess we’re no worse off than those poor bastards in the bunker,” Andrei said. “At least they’re not looking for us.”

“Nothing to do but wait,” Simon said.

“Yeah ...”

And then quiet once more as they heard the steps of men patrolling the roof over them, complaining about their bad fortune of nighttime duty.

Nothing to do but wait. Andrei slumped back, hoping for a misty dream to take him where there were plates piled with food.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“I know your name, Miss Rak. Like so many, I am an admirer of the work of your late father, so my name is unimportant. You can just snap your fingers and say, ‘Hey you,’ and I’ll know you are addressing me.”

“You do dance, Lieutenant?”

“As a matter of fact, I am an excellent dancer, but frankly, I do it only as an accommodation.”

Gaby! Gaby! I am afraid! Gaby! I am so afraid!

Whistles!

Andrei forced his eyelids apart. I must be dead, he told himself. I am nowhere. In the sky. In hell. I am dead. There was no movement in his body. No feeling. No pain.

But then the cold sent a chill through him and his stomach knotted with hunger.

Like hell I’m dead! He tried to move his arms. Numb. Neck and shoulders without feeling from the pressure of the beams. First my fingers ... just my fingers first. He drew them up like claws, back, forth, back, forth; then he shook his wrists. His fingers scratched against his leg and sides, over and over to make some feeling return. His body tingled as he tore at it harder and harder. He pinched himself again and again and slapped his face. Inch by inch circulation flowed.

“Simon!” he croaked.

“Andrei!”

“The others?”

“Out cold. Neither of them has spoken for two hours. I've been counting seconds. It must be day again.”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you see down on the street?”

His head felt like a lead ball. He pushed it to the crack. The searchlights were gone. It was misty out. Germans were still all over the street.

“They’re still down there.”

“I think they’ve left the roof. I heard them ordered down. No sounds for over fifteen minutes.”

“Think it may be a trick?”

“We’ve got to take a chance,” Simon said. “We can’t hold out here another day.”

Andrei rolled over on his back. Sharp needles of pain greeted his effort to raise his arms over his head. He fished around for the key tile and wiggled it. He tugged desperately. It slid away, letting in a show of light, nearly blinding him. Andrei pulled the other five tiles loose. He drew himself up on all fours, his knees resting on a pair of beams, and shoved the upper part of his body through the hole.

“Clear! Simon, it’s clear!”

He pulled himself outside to the roof and crouched against the chimney, reaching in until he found Wolf’s head. Straining with every sinew, he slid Wolf over the rafters until his body appeared beneath the opening. Next Chris was pushed by Simon until Andrei could hook onto him.

Simon jammed past the two unconscious, prostrate bodies. Simon and Andrei looked at each other. Their faces were swollen and misshapen by bug bites, their clothing ripped to shreds. Blood and bruises were everywhere, and layers of filth hid their features. They stared like strangers.

“Do you look like hell,” Andrei said.

“You’re no lily of the valley, Androfski.” Simon looked at his watch and held it against his ear. “Thirty hours we’ve been in there.”

Andrei looked at Simon again and began laughing. And Simon laughed too. They burst into a hysterical, uncontrolled laughter in each other’s arms until they ached and tears fell down their cheeks. And it ebbed slowly, each shaking his head alternately. Andrei wiped his Schmeisser clean and counted the clips of ammunition, then got to his knees and reached down and slapped Wolf’s face.

“Is he alive?”

Andrei slapped him again and again.

Wolf groaned convulsively and sucked at the air. He blinked his eyes, shrank away from the light.

At the same time Simon worked on Chris.

Wolf came to enough to look up at his comrades and smile at the sight of them.

“Listen, Wolf. Stay here with Chris. Massage yourself and keep massaging him. There are holes all over the roof, so this one won’t draw further attention.”

“Where are you going?”

“Up to take a look. They’ve stopped patrolling the roof, but they’re still in the streets. Stay here until we come back for you with ropes.”

Andrei crawled up, with Simon close behind him. When the roof flattened, they inched to the edge to get the best possible look down on Mila Street.

Andrei’s fists tightened around the Schmeisser, enraged at what met his eyes. A double cordon of bayonet-wielding SS Reinhard Corps men formed a corridor and circle around people straggling out of the building, flushed from the bunker. He saw Rabbi Solomon thrown to the ground. Alex knelt over to help him up. Sylvia Brandel held the child, and Tolek and Ana and Ervin stood by Deborah, keeping the children calm.

Kutler barked orders, clapping his hands in delight that the search was over.

“Schnell!”

“Move quickly, Jews!”

Andrei backed away slowly. “Come on, Simon,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?”

“You’ll destroy us all,” Simon snapped. He stood up quickly and blocked Andrei’s path.

“Let me pass,” Andrei hissed.

“You’re a damned fool,” Simon said, grabbing his shirt.

Andrei’s fist smashed into Simon Eden’s mouth. The big man went flat on his back. Before Andrei could make a step, he found himself looking into the muzzle of Simon’s Luger leveled at his heart.

They glared, neither daring to move.

“Jews ... move out!”

Simon’s face went slack. His pistol hand dropped. “I’m coming with you,” he said.

The two men moved swiftly over the rooftops to Mila 5. The stairs were clear. They ran down, jumping half a flight at a time, and stopped in the courtyard.

“It’s clear.”

They sprinted through the courtyard, down into the basement of Mila 1, and into a tunnel that came up on the edge of Muranowski Place. A fast straight run down Niska Street brought them to the intersection ahead of the slower-moving cordon.

Andrei flattened his back against the corner house, gasping for air, his legs wobbly. He looked around the corner. Kutler strutted, laughing and jovial, with a dozen SS men in the lead of the quarry, SS men on either sidewalk, and Nightingales in the rear.

Andrei beckoned Simon to get close to him. “Kutler and some SS men are in front of our people—about ten yards. Let them get past us. We’ll hit them from behind.”

“How many guards?”

“Hundred.”

He shoved a clip of ammunition into the Schmeisser and threw the bolt. Simon unclicked the safety lock on his pistol.

Step by step, as in a funeral procession, the bagged game of Mila 19 walked for the Stawki Gate to the Umschlagplatz. Alexander Brandel stood tall and brave despite the ordeal in the bunker. He walked like a patriarch toward Calvary, and those behind him found courage in his presence.

A dozen black uniforms passed the corner of Niska Street.

Rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat!

A flame erupted from the end of Andrei’s machine pistol. Kutler pitched forward on his face, the back of his head shot away. Four of his cohorts tumbled around him.

Rat-a-tat-tat!

Wham! Simon Eden’s pistol crackled with deadly accuracy. Wham! Wham! Wham! Shrieks, Germans toppled to the ground.

Andrei stepped into the intersection and blasted at the row of flanking guards.

A wild melee. The Nazis broke and scattered.

“Run, you sons of bitches! Run! Run! Run!”

Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!

“Run, you lousy bastards! Run! Run! Run!” Andrei screamed, spewing death into them.

A calmer Simon Eden picked his shots, sharp-shooting the stunned Germans. A hidden fire bomb came out of Tolek Alterman’s shirt and arched into an alcove filled with cowering SS. They shrieked out into the streets, trying to put out the flames devouring them.

“Scatter!” Simon commanded. “Alex! Tolek! Ana! Move, everybody! Go!”

The captives fled from the street.

“Sons of bitches!” Andrei screamed. “Sons of bitches! Die!” He tore down Zamenhof, looking for the terrified enemy. Bullets came back at him. He knelt and poured fire.

And then he was whirled around with a sudden impact that cracked his head on the side of a building. He slid to the sidewalk. On hands and knees he tried to fight to his feet, but he could not get up and it all became a blur. His face hit the sidewalk ... blood oozed from the corners of his mouth ... oblivion.

Chapter Four

“IDIOT!”

SS Oberführer Funk slapped Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze across the mouth. The Austrian winced, then came Stiffly to attention.

“Imbecile!” He slapped Stutze again, leaving streak marks on his cheek. Stutze stood at an even more ramrod posture.

“Swine!” Another slap.

“Herr Oberführer,” Stutze whined.

“Chased by Jews! Eleven SS men killed!” Whap! Whap!

“Herr Oberführer. We were attacked by fifty madmen!”

“Liar! Coward! Assemble your officers at the barracks immediately.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberführer!” Stutze snapped his heels together. “Heil Hitler!”

“Get out of my sight, you worm.”

Horst watched the performance, somewhat amused. “It seems,” he said when Stutze had left, “that I detect flaws in the lofty theories of absolute obedience. Oh, I grant you that the German people are the most likely to succeed as robots, but we are still riddled with human frailties. Stutze is a coward, Schreiker a damned fool, Koenig a thief, and myself—well, I’d rather not go into that.”

Funk didn’t hear a word. He was too immersed in his own sudden dilemma. “Has the world gone entirely mad?” he said. “First Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated by Czech bandits, and now—this.”

“Yes, dear Reinhard. We shall all miss his noble soul,” Horst said.

Funk kept talking aloud to himself. “Ach! Himmler will have a wild tantrum when he learns about this.” He lit a cigarette and pressed his fingertips together in a rapid motion, noticing the nails needed trimming and cleaning. Better get it done. Dirt annoyed him. “Tomorrow I personally will direct operations to begin the liquidation of the ghetto.”

“Do you think that’s wise, Alfred?”

“What?”

“To go into the ghetto tomorrow.”

Funk took it as an immediate affront to his courage. He was no Stutze!

Before he could answer the challenge Horst held up his hand. “Just a moment. Today the Jews have burst another one of our pet theories like a bubble. They have discovered that we are not supermen at all. Hit a German with a bullet and he will drop dead like any other man. This delicious taste of blood after three years of torment will obviously spur them into greater efforts.”

“I have no time for your nonsense today,” Funk cracked back with the full cruelty revealed in his eyes. He was incensed with the very idea that the sub-human rabble could present an obstacle, but he did not wish to argue, for Horst had a needle under his skin and was prodding him.

“Do you have any idea of the Jewish strength?” Horst asked.

“What difference does that make!”

“A good general should know the weight of the enemy forces.”

“Enemy forces, indeed! Since when do we recognize Jews as a fighting force?”

“I should say that as of today would be a good time.”

Funk slammed his fist on the table. Horst refused to be intimidated and obviously was not going to be slapped around like the Austrian. Funk recalled why he had hated Horst von Epp in the beginning. That attitude of knowing something Funk did not know. That ability to operate on a level of shrewdness that eluded the stern, dogmatic, rigid SS devotion. Funk smiled faintly in an attempt to play the game with Von Epp. “And what do you propose might happen if I take the Reinhard Corps into the ghetto tomorrow?”

“I don’t propose it, nor do I suggest it. I know it,” Horst said. “You will lead three hundred men into a massacre.”

“And I say they will flee and bury themselves at the sight of us. Jews won’t fight.”

“How unfortunate that you have become victimized by our own propaganda. Oh yes, I know. You have proof. We have translated our theories by acting out our superiority on helpless people. You’ll find another caliber of man left inside those walls.”

“Do you really believe that I would hesitate in the face of Jews?”

“When I was in the ministry in Berlin I spent week after week inventing and expounding the theories of Jewish cowardice, Alfred. The plain and simple fact of the matter is—we are liars.”

Funk’s entire face reacted with shock.

“I doubt if any warriors in the world were as furious in battle as the ancient Hebrews, nor did any people in man’s history fight harder for freedom. Not once, but many times, they made Rome totter. And since their dispersion, because they have not had the opportunity to fight under a Jewish flag, we have been able to isolate them into individual units and riddle them with inferiority complexes. German torment has taken these segregated masses and jelled them together as a people for the first time in two thousand years. We cannot measure their determination to acquit themselves, but we can make an educated guess that we’d better be damned careful from this point on.”

Funk sprang to his feet. “I will not listen to this anarchy. You defile the noble purposes of the Third Reich!”

“Oh, stop shouting, Alfred. I invented half the noble purposes of the Third Reich.” Horst walked to the window and drew the curtains apart. Across Krakow Boulevard and beyond the Saxony Gardens some of the ghetto roofs could be seen. “Who is left in that ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of forces within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to the Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk. We have pushed him to the wall.”

Oberführer Funk became confused. Von Epp, one of the very creators of the Aryan myth, was ripping it apart. Suddenly it became clear to him. “I have been ordered by Himmler to have the ghetto liquidated, and that is what shall be done,” he snapped.

Horst flopped his arms to his side in disgust “Simple, eh? Orders are orders.”

“Naturally.”

“Alfred, you represent that confounding German idiocy which is unable to improvise from a fixed plan. Forget that orders are orders before you perform a monumental blunder.”

“You know, Horst I really should report your conversation to Himmler. I really should. What possible blunder can I make by fulfilling orders? Say that these noble creatures do fight. So what? We shall destroy them.”

“For a decade we have been preaching a gospel of Jewish cowardice. It is Nazi dogma. What happens if the Reinhard Corps is wiped out tomorrow in the ghetto? How shall we explain it to the world? Shall we say that Jews fight, after all? How would we look to those whom we have impressed as supermen to be forced even to admit that Jews were standing up against us?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Funk admitted.

“Suppose this defiance in the ghetto lasts a week ... ten days ...”

“Impossible.”

“But suppose it does. It could ignite rebellions all over Poland. ‘See,’ the Poles would say, ‘the Germans have lied to us. Let us take a crack at them too.’ Perhaps the Czechs and the Greeks may like to have a crack at superman hides. You invite insurrection.”

Funk sank to the seat, completely confused now. “Hitler will be out of his mind with rage,” he mumbled.

“Get back to Berlin immediately,” Horst said. “We must put across to them that this liquidation can be completed only if it can be carried out with no further armed conflict. We could invite a dangerous precedent, otherwise. As for this unfortunate incident today, I will say that it was a band of Communists or bandits. You know, minimize it with the usual stories. Then we proceed carefully. We outwit them. We use cunning to lure them out.”

“Very well,” Funk agreed, “very well.”

Andrei’s eyes fluttered open. He was in a bunker cell somewhere. Someone hovered over him. It was Simon.

“My gun!”

“It’s under the cot. No ammunition left mind you, but the gun is there.”

Andrei closed his eyes. He tried to separate the blur of events that all ran together. He remembered seeing Kutler fall in the street parts of the agony in the rafters, snatches of things that might have been dreams or might have happened. Simon fed him a drink of water. Half of it spurted out of his mouth, unable to penetrate the thick dry caking lining his throat. He sipped again.

“What happened?”

“We put on quite a brother act. We make a colorful pair.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Scattered in a half dozen bunkers.”

“Did Alex get away?”

“He’s in the cell across the passage.”

“My sister?”

“At the Franciskanska bunker with the children.”

“Chris ... Wolf ...”

“They are safe.”

Andrei forced himself up on his elbows. He ached all over. He pushed himself to a sitting position on the edge of the cot and was stricken with a spell of dizziness. He lowered his head between his legs to let blood circulate.

Simon moved a small crude table beside the cot and placed a bowl of gruel on it with a hunk of stale bread. It was the first food Andrei had eaten in nearly five days. His stomach growled and his hand trembled as he sloshed the bread in the bowl to soften it. The food was taken slowly, carefully.

“Where am I? At your bunker?”

“Yes.”

“How did I get here?”

“I scraped you off the sidewalk. You fell short in your one-man effort to annihilate the entire German garrison, but not too bad, eleven SS killed, two Ukrainians. You’re the rage of the ghetto.”

Andrei felt his pain-racked body. “Did I get hit?”

“Grazed. The doctor said that normally it wouldn’t have stopped you from playing soccer an hour later, but combined with hunger, exhaustion, and a few other discomforts, you fainted.”

“Fainted? What a ridiculous thing to do. Only women faint.” He mopped the bread around in the bowl more rapidly, cleaned the dish, and licked his fingers. Simon was acting strangely, he thought. His voice rang with bitterness and he was avoiding Andrei’s eyes. Simon never did that. He could win most of his arguments by his penetrating look alone.

“One of our people didn’t make it,” Simon said. He set a familiar notebook on the cot beside Andrei. Andrei recognized it as a volume of the Good Fellowship Club’s study. Simon laid a pair of thick-lensed glasses on top of the book.

“Ervin?”

“Yes. Stray bullet. He lived long enough to tell me where he had hidden this volume. It was the one he was working on. We went to the Mila 19 bunker immediately to find it. Rest of the bunker is destroyed, but we were able to find many hidden things. We salvaged all the arms stores.”

Tears welled up in Andrei’s eyes. “You would think that we would get used to our friends dying after a time. I loved Ervin. Lot of years together.” Andrei bit his lip, but the tears fell anyway. “Quiet, gentle little man. Believed in what he was doing without shouting, breast-beating. He just stayed in the cellar month in and month out, working on the archives. He never said why. He just did it because somebody had to. Ever see how swollen his hands were from the damp? Blind as a bat, but he stayed and kept working after they took Susan. He stayed and went about his business ... never raised his voice.”

The cot groaned as Simon sat beside Andrei. Simon picked the book up, opened it, and turned the pages, then pulled the candle on the table directly to him. “This was his last entry.” He read, “ ‘When will we fight? Or will we fight? Who among us will dare to fire that first shot against them? Who?’ ” He closed it and set it down. He hunched his massive frame forward and rubbed the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other. “I don’t deserve to be the commander. I want you to take over.”

“No, Simon, no.”

“Don’t humor me, Andrei. I was the man who was planning to send our companies through the sewers to escape. You were the one who fired the shot—and I pointed my pistol at your heart to stop you.”

“Don’t you think I know how torn up you are to have to give an order that will turn us into a suicide force?” Andrei said.

“You don’t understand,” Simon snapped, standing up abruptly with his back to Andrei. “I aimed that pistol at your heart because I was afraid to go down on the street. I was afraid, and I’ll be afraid again.”

“You were afraid, but you went anyhow, and while I was in a blind rage you brought them to safety, because when the moment was needed you were calm and deliberate, as a good commander must be.” Andrei walked up behind him and put his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “I had a lot of time to think while we were up in the rafters. I found answers to many questions. I guess when one is close to his Maker many perplexing problems suddenly become amazingly clear and simple. Who fights what kind of war? The quiet courage it took to be a soldier like Ervin Rosenblum. Simon ... I ... I’m no damned good for anything but leading cavalry charges.”

“Perhaps,” Simon whispered, “if you stuck close by me to knock me flat on my back ...”

“I don’t think it will be necessary again.”

“There were too many mistakes today,” Simon said with a quick surge of excitement. “We have to have scouts in observation posts so that nothing can get into the ghetto before we can move our companies into battle position.”

Andrei nodded in agreement.

“And we have to teach them that the cardinal rule is to pick up enemy weapons and strip their uniforms. We missed on that today.”

Andrei nodded again and smiled slightly at the knowledge that Simon was again in full control and eager.

“I’m thinking. We should find a new bunker close to the central area for a command post.” Simon stopped abruptly, watching Andrei look at the volume of the journal and Ervin’s glasses. “Andrei, what made you go into the streets?”

“I don’t know. Just that this was the moment which could not pass. It wasn’t even seeing my sister. It was Alex. I couldn’t let them take Alexander Brandel to the Umschlagplatz.” Andrei picked up the book. “So damned much time has gone by, and Alex and I have barely talked to each other. I wish I knew how to apologize.”

“Why don’t you try?”

“What can I say for being a damned fool?”

“Come,” Simon said.

Andrei trailed him haltingly out of the cell and across the narrow passageway to the opposite cell. Simon pulled back the sack curtain. The three of them were there. Sylvia with her little boy on her lap. Moses Brandel at the age of four was disciplined to the silence of underground living; pale, scrawny from the lack of sun and air and nourishment. Alexander gazed emptily at the floor in much the same way as he had since the children were taken to the Umschlagplatz. Sylvia stood and put the boy down. She blocked Andrei’s way, but Simon nodded for her to leave the room. She looked from Andrei to Alex, then took the child and led him out.

Andrei hulked helplessly over the dejected man, groping for words. He knelt slowly beside Alex. Alex turned his face, recognized Andrei and hung his head.

“I ... uh ... wanted to give you this,” Andrei said, showing the book. “They ... uh ... were lucky enough to salvage it from Mila 19.”

Alex did not answer.

“I think that—well, with Ervin gone, you’ll want to take up the work again.”

Again, nothing.

“It’s very important that the archives be continued and—Look, I know something I didn’t know. What I mean to say is, it takes many kinds of men and many kinds of battles to fight a war.”

Andrei reached out and touched his shoulder, but Alex shrank away.

“Please look at me, Alex,” Andrei whispered. “You must hear what I’m saying. Alex, once I told you that the Brandel journal would never take the place of the Seventh Ulany Brigade, and you answered that truth is a weapon worth a thousand armies. I never understood that till now. It’s true, all of the divisions of the German army can’t defeat these words.”

Alex shook his head slowly.

“You ... you were right. You’ve won a great battle with this,” Andrei said.

The mouth in Alex’s bearded face fumbled to form words in a cracked, wavering voice. “I called my dearest friend a man who thirsts for personal revenge. I ... took the weapons from your hands. I am the vengeful man. Your way has always been the only way.”

“You’re wrong about that, Alex. My way hasn’t been the only way. I would have destroyed us all long ago. You see, only because of men like you and Simon has a moment like today been possible for men like me.”

“The children are gone ... Everyone is gone ... I have failed.”

Andrei clutched Alex’s arms hard and pleaded with fervor. “Listen to me!” he cried. “We’ve all done the best with what we’ve had. No man has ever fought a better fight than you! And it was the only fight. It was, I swear it.”

“Don’t patronize me, Andrei. It is I who should be on my knees to you.”

Andrei released his grip and stood up slowly, and his voice mellowed with softness. “All my life I have believed I walked in the darkness, battling windmills, crying for lost causes, living a life in dubious battle. My father gave me a country which hated me, and you have given your sons a ghetto and genocide. God only knows what kind of a world Wolf will hand to his sons. We enter this world in the middle of a war that is never won. It has always been this way—this endless war. No one of us ever really wins in his life. All you have the right to ask of life is to choose a battle in this war, make the best you can, and leave the field with honor.”

Alex mumbled, “Make your battle ... leave the field with honor.”

“You’ve fought your good fight. Now the war goes on. I must fight my way now.”

“Oh, Andrei, stop! What is there left but doom?”

“Left? We have a lot left. We can go out like men. ... “What though the field be lost? All is not lost—unconquerable will, the study of revenge, immortal hate ... The courage never to submit or yield.’ I never understood those lines till now. But I know—it is not a dubious battle.”

Alexander picked up the book, and his fingers caressed it lovingly. He opened it, glanced up at Andrei quickly, then thumbed hungrily through Ervin’s notes. He came to the last entry. “Who will fire the first shot?” Alex took out a pencil, and his hand wrote:

Journal Entry

Today a great shot for freedom was fired. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marks a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of return to a status of dignity we have not known for two thousand years. Yes, today was the first step back. My battle is done. Now I turn the command over to the soldiers.

Chapter Five

PIOTR WARSINSKI SLAMMED THE phone receiver down. He scratched his scaly hands. Again he had pleaded in vain with Sieghold Stutze to issue firearms to the Jewish Militia. After the outbreak of January 18, Warsinski was positive that the Germans would return to the ghetto immediately with an overpowering force. Instead, several days had passed in silence and his police were becoming afraid to patrol the streets.

Warsinski scoffed at the idea that the ambush at Niska and Zamenhof streets was anything but an insane gesture by a madman. He knew there was no real planned insurrection. He had no fear of this so-called Joint Jewish Forces. But he was afraid of what would happen if Sieghold Stutze decided he was no longer able to command the Militia effectively.

Piotr growled in frustration and became restless. He decided to leave the barracks and go to the Pawiak Prison. A girl had been brought in earlier who was suspected of being a member of the Joint Forces. He would work her over, and that would relieve the tension. Perhaps he could force from her the location of Eden or Andrei Androfski or Rodel. If he could deliver such a prize to Sieghold Stutze it would reaffirm his ability.

But, Piotr mused, it was getting more and more difficult to beat information out of these people as time went along. Those who were left simply could not be tortured for information. But what the devil, he could rip the clothing from the girl and smash her up. That would be a good evening’s sport.

Piotr was not afraid to go into the streets alone. He told his men so. Yet it was stupid to invite another attack from a madman. He called in his personal bodyguards, six fat, faithful huskies, to escort him to the Pawiak Prison a few blocks from the barracks.

When he arrived at the ugly reddish brick structure a phone call awaited him. He took it in his office.

“Sturmbannführer Stutze here,” the Austrian said.

“Yes?”

“Warsinski, I have been thinking over your request for arms. Perhaps we can supply some guns for a special squad of your men—in exchange for certain new duties.”

“When can we talk about it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Fine. I shall expect you at the barracks, then?” Warsinski asked.

“No, no, no,” Stutze said quickly. “We meet outside the ghetto at the Stawki Gate at noon.”

“Noon. Stawki Gate.”

Warsinski unbuttoned his long gray coat and hung it up. He took off his jacket and lowered his suspenders. His big belly, released from restraint, poured over the top of his trousers. His hands itched. He scratched them until they pained, then opened the desk drawer and wiped a thick oozy green salve over them. The ointment stung tears into his eyes. He stretched back on his cot, holding his hands under his head, his underwear gray with sweat stains under the armpits.

What was Stutze up to? Warsinski’s bulgy face became mobile with thoughts and counterthoughts. He had to keep the appointment. Was it a trick? Perhaps Stutze was a coward afraid to come into the ghetto, and wanted the Militia to carry out Reinhard Corps duties. Why else would he give arms? Had Stutze decided that a convert like Warsinski wasn’t really a Jew and therefore could be trusted with guns, like the Ukrainians? He brushed his long handle-bar mustache. Why not arm him? He had been loyal. But ... the Big Seven had been loyal too.

Crash!

A splintering sound bolted him to a sitting position. He saw the door fly open with such impact that it nearly tore off its hinges.

“What the hell!”

Three pistols were leveled at him. One man closed the door, the second went to the desk and tore the phone wire out. Warsinski squinted at the third. Knew him from somewhere. Alterman ... Tolek Alterman from the Bathyrans.

Warsinski scowled at them fearlessly.

“I have the pleasure of carrying out the judgment of Joint Forces to execute you as a traitor to the Jewish people,” Tolek said.

Warsinski laughed in contempt. “Guards!” he roared. “Guards!”

“They don’t hear you, Piotr Warsinski. They are all locked up. Pawiak Prison is in the hands of Joint Jewish Forces. The prisoners are being freed at this moment.”

The smirk came off Warsinski’s face. The guns on him were in steady hands. He folded his hands and closed his eyes and lowered his head. “I don’t beg like Jews,” he said. “Go on. I am ready.”

“It is not so simple,” Tolek said. “There are a lot of questions you are going to answer first.”

Warsinski snarled at them. He thought so. Yellow Jews unable to carry out the execution. It is all a bluff. Talk ... negotiate ... bargain ...

Tolek’s boot suddenly came up into Warsinski’s fat stomach, sinking in from toe to heel. The air left Warsinski. He sank from the bed to his knees. A second kick caught him alongside the jaw, thudding his head against the wall. He sat dazed. Tolek nodded to his two comrades. The first, Pinchas Silver, tossed a thumbscrew and a pair of pliers onto the desk. Adam Blumenfeld revealed a barb-tipped whip.

“We picked up a few of your toys from the interrogation room, Warsinski. Get up and sit at the desk.”

Warsinski did not move.

The lash cut through his underwear. Piotr crawled quickly on his hands and knees to the desk and sat.

“Thumb ... let’s have your thumb.”

The lash ripped once more over his neck.

“Thumb!”

He extended a green-ooze-covered paw. Tolek locked Warsinski’s thumb into the screw and slowly turned the top bolt to apply steady pressure.

“You’ve got no guts for torture,” Warsinski snarled in defiance, “no real guts for it. Jews are too weak!”

Tolek slipped his pistol into his belt, grabbed Warsinski’s out-sized mustache in his fist, and ripped it from his face.

“Yaaaaaahhhh!” Warsinski screamed, clutching a gory upper lip with his free hand.

Tolek slipped the pliers onto a big dirty fingernail of Warsinski’s free hand.

“Adam, tighten the thumbscrew. Warsinski can loosen the bolt if he wants to reach for it. It will cost him a fingernail to try.”

Adam Blumenfeld tightened the bolt, crunching the vise into Warsinski’s knuckle. He gasped. The sweat poured from his face and turned his underwear to a soggy rag. Adam turned the thumbscrew a quarter turn.

“Yahhhh!”

Warsinski suddenly tried to reach for the screw, but Tolek held the pliers tight and a fingernail tore loose.

Mucus spurted from his nose, and his eyes ran.

“Will you co-operate?”

“Stop! Stop! I’ll talk!”

As his thumb was freed he stumbled blindly around the room, wailing and bouncing off the walls. He sank in a blubbering, groaning hulk to the floor. A mass of sweaty ugliness.

Tolek and the other two looked down at him with disgust, and Tolek was sick to his stomach with himself for his brutality, but he knew he could not puke in the presence of an enemy who regarded it as a weakness.

“He didn’t even last five minutes,” Pinchas said. “I didn’t think he would.”

They dragged him to the cot and flung him on it.

In a few minutes Alexander Brandel came in and after shuddering at the first sight of Warsinski grilled him for twelve hours from questions and knowledge gained from the Good Fellowship archives. Piotr Warsinski revealed his own crimes, the crimes of his officers, his own fortunes, the places of hidden stores, information about Stutze, Schreiker, Koenig, the Nightingales, and the Reinhard Corps.

Next morning Piotr Warsinski was killed in accordance with the Joint Forces’ judgment by a single bullet through the back of his head.

Chapter Six

THE IMMEDIATE PROBLEM FACING Joint Forces was locating a new command bunker in the central area. The other bunkers were already jammed to capacity, and the hundred people from Mila 19 added to the problem. To build a suitable underground complex for two to three hundred people would take weeks.

Alexander Brandel’s knowledge through his past dealings became invaluable. By one means or another he knew of most hiding places in the ghetto.

Alex suspected there was a large bunker under Mila 18, across the street from his own former headquarters.

He had often done business with a smuggler named Moritz Katz, a rotund little chap who in pre-war Warsaw had been a furrier. His business was always considered on the fringe; a tightrope between the legal and the unlawful. It was difficult to come right out and say that Moritz fenced stolen goods. His clientele was always high class. He carried an ethical concept with him into the ghetto. He was a decent fellow, as smugglers went. After all, smuggling was an honorable necessity in ghetto life. Moritz bought and sold at reasonable prices. Moreover, he was softhearted. When things got particularly desperate, Alex could always get Moritz to make an urgent delivery of essentials at cost price.

Moritz had two distinguishing features. He was in a never-ending card game, and his mouth always chewed sweets, fruit, cake, candy. For the latter frailty, he was known as Moritz the Nasher.

The Bathyrans who guarded the rooftops around Mila 19 detected Moritz the Nasher entering and leaving Mila 18 so many times that it had to be suspected as his headquarters.

These suspicions were advanced after the bunker at Mila 19 was expanded until its rooms stretched to the sewer under the middle of the street. Deborah Bronski had the room next to the sewer pipe with the children from the orphanage. Many times they heard foreign sounds coming from either the inside of the pipe or beyond it.

From this Alex concluded that Moritz the Nasher had a bunker under Mila 18, separated from his own by the twelve-foot pipe. He discussed this possibility with Simon and Andrei.

“I am positive there is a bunker under Mila 18, and if it is what we think, it will be a large one.”

“It would be a perfect location for a command post,” Simon said. “Particularly since the Germans have located and wrecked Mila 19, they’d never suspect we’d be in another location so close.”

“But,” Andrei said realistically, “how the hell do you find the entrance? Moritz Katz is the shrewdest smuggler in the ghetto.”

“Can we get a message to him?” Alex suggested.

“No one has seen him for weeks, since his gang was caught at the Gensia Gate and taken to the Umschlagplatz.”

They mused and pondered. The idea of a large, ready-made command post was terribly appealing.

“Well. What’s to lose if we cut a hole through the children’s room and make another on a direct line across the Kanal? If we’re lucky we might hit the bunker.”

“You know how tricky sound is in the sewers. The children may have been hearing an echo coming from a hundred meters away.”

“What the hell?” Andrei said. “Let’s cut through and look around. Nothing to lose.”

Simon shrugged a dubious okay. No one had a better suggestion.

“I think I’d better go in alone,” Andrei said. “If Moritz is still down there he will panic if he sees an army coming after him.”

Later that day Andrei entered the shambled Orphans and Self-Help building at Mila 19. He went to the converted water closet where the false lavatory once covered the secret entrance to their underground rooms. The lavatory was smashed, but the pipe leading to the cellar was still intact.

Andrei tucked a flashlight and short-handled pick and sledge hammer into his belt, strapped the Schmeisser “Gaby” on his back, and slid down the pipe. He flicked on the light. The beam probed over mounds of wreckage. The retaining walls and overhead crossbeams had been knocked loose, caving in the main tunnel in many places. Andrei inched forward, digging away the blockage with his hands.

He came to the room which had belonged to the children. It was a shambles. The layers of bunks had been wrecked with axes and the books torn to shreds and the few toys smashed. Andrei moved along a ten-foot wall which lay against the Kanal pipe. Seepings oozed through.

He could hear the flow of sewage. He calculated in order to line up Mila 18.

Any decision would most likely be wrong. “Well, I’ve got to start someplace.”

He fixed the flashlight on a single spot, sank his pick into the dirt wall, and hacked away until it crumpled to the outer shell of the pipe.

Andrei smoothed a place big enough for him to carve out a manhole and bashed at the concrete with a sledge until it cracked under the beating. Once through the outer layer, he jarred loose enough bricks from the inner lining of the pipe so that he could fit through.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes and refixed the tools in his belt, cursing that he was on a wild-goose chase, then knelt at the hole and looked into the Kanal with his light. It was not too bad. The tide on the Vistula River was low, as he had calculated, so the sewage was only waist-high.

Andrei squeezed through the hole into the sewer. His feet skidded in the slime. He pulled the strap of his weapon several notches tighter so it would ride higher on his back and not get wet. In both directions dim streaks filtered through the manholes, sending an eerie bluish light glistening on the bricks.

He waded to the middle and looked behind him so he would remain in a line with the children’s room. On the opposite side of the sewer he thrust his ear against the brick, hoping for sound. There was none.

His flashlight moved first in one direction for several yards, then another.

Andrei splashed down a dozen yards. A cluster of bricks were not laid in the same pattern as the rest, as though they had been knocked loose and replaced. Could it be! He felt with his fingers. The bricks were definitely not cemented in. There was room for a man to fit through if they were removed. Was there a bunker on the other side? Were the children hearing smugglers coming in and out of the sewer?

Andrei hit his sledge against the bricks for a sounding. Hollow ring! It was not solid on the other side. There was a room!

He picked at the bricks. They came out easily.

It was hollow on the other side. Andrei shone the light in.

He crawled in and moved his fight in a complete circle.

“Holy God!” he muttered, and whistled with disbelief. He stood at his full height in a huge subterranean room. It was the most magnificent underground structure he had ever seen. Along one wall were sacks of rice, flour, sugar, salt. There were crates of medicine. Salted meats. Cases of tins of food. A bin of dried vegetables. Beautiful couches, easy chairs, furniture, bed.

“Holy God!”

He found the exit into a corridor and inched down it. Five more large rooms were on either side of the corridor, and each as big as the first one and each held stores. Overhead an electric line with light bulbs.

Andrei came to the end of the corridor. It turned into a smaller tunnel holding a series of cells.

“Don’t move,” a voice behind him commanded. “Hands over your head. High!”

Andrei lifted his arms. It had all been too good to be true. He cursed himself for forgetting to unstrap his weapon in the excitement of locating the bunker.

“Put both your hands on the wall,” the voice commanded. Andrei did as he was told. “Now turn your face.”

He looked into a blinding light.

“Andrei Androfski?”

“Is that you, Moritz?”

“How in the hell did you figure out where this bunker was?”

“We added two and two. Put that goddamned gun away and take the light out of my eyes.”

“Don’t rush me into any decisions. I’m not sure whether I have to kill you or not.” He shifted the light toward one of the cells. “Step into my office. What I’m holding on you, for your information, is a shotgun.”

Moritz lit a lantern and settled in back of his desk. He had a grizzly beard and an anemic color. Much of his chubbiness had shrunk away. Underground living had been hard on him. Moritz kept the shotgun leveled at Andrei’s chest Andrei was too busy being awed by the office. In addition to electrical wiring, there was a phone on the desk and a low-wattage radio transmitter.

“What a setup.”

Moritz shrugged modestly at the compliment “We tried to give our customers good service. Only trouble is that we’ve got no more customers. We got no one. Most my boys were grabbed on a haul. Just me and my wife Sheina and a few others. You’ve met Sheina? She’s asleep in the other room. She sleeps through anything, that woman. Even your banging holes into my bunker. She’s sick. She needs a doctor. Change of life.”

“How in hell do you run the lights—the radio?”

“Generator, what else? Used to be able to send messages to my contacts on the Aryan side. Simple code.”

Telephone?”

“One of my boys worked for the phone company. There’s a million ways to screw the phone company. We tied in on a Ukrainian line from the guards at the Brushmaker’s and we speak Yiddish. They’ve never been able to figure it. No, Andrei. I’m sorry you had to find this place because I’ve always held you in high esteem. You were a very smart man to locate my bunker, but naturally I’ve got to kill you.”

“Not so fast, Moritz. Obviously I wouldn’t pull a move like this without a cover. You’ve heard of Joint Jewish Forces?”

Moritz screwed up his face. He suspected he was about to be taken. “I still get around.”

“They know I’m here and what I’m looking for.”

“Oh crap!” Moritz the Nasher said. He lay the shotgun on the desk in disgust. “Minute I saw you barreling through the sewer into the bunker I said to myself that this bastard is too smart to come in exposed. Now you talk to Alexander Brandel. He’ll tell you I’ve been right down the line with his Orphans setup. I always did business on the square with him.”

“Moritz, for God’s sake, stop apologizing. Do you hear me pushing you around?”

Moritz the Nasher was hungry. He opened the top desk drawer and took out a packet of German chocolate, unwrapped it, nibbled, and decried the lack of fresh fruit. “You want my bunker, no doubt.”

“No doubt.”

“And seven hundred thousand zlotys’ worth of food.”

“I feel bad, Moritz—believe me.”

“What a kick in the ass life is. If one thief doesn’t get you, another will,” Moritz opined.

Andrei sympathized with him. Moritz the Nasher was a gambler, a smuggler, a man who existed by wit. But he was also a supreme realist. He knew that he had been caught flat. At least Andrei Androfski and the Joint Forces held him no malice. Maybe he was lucky, after all. Had the Germans or the Militia found him first ... curtains ... Umschlagplatz. He had hoped that he and his wife Sheina could ride the war out in Mila 18. They had enough supplies and medicine to see through a year or two without ever coming up. But ... what kind of a life was it for a man? Never to see the sun. Nobody to play cards with. Candy running out. Always in fear that the next minute or the next or the next those goddamn German dogs would sniff him out.

“Let me ask you something, Androfski,” Moritz asked. “This here Joint Forces—you the ones who blasted the SS men at Zamenhof and Niska?”

Andrei nodded.

“You the ones who fixed up Warsinski?”

Andrei nodded again.

“You guys really mean business?”

Andrei nodded for the third time.

“Let me tell you something. You work, you live, you do your best, but you never quite get onto the idea of the way they’re kicking you around. In the last week—since the ambush—for the first time in my life I’m proud to be a Jew.”

“That’s the way we all want to go out.”

Moritz shrugged. “So, maybe I’m glad you found me first. Obviously, you realize you have me over a barrel.”

“Obviously,” Andrei agreed.

Moritz munched on another square of chocolate, somewhat relieved that his long, taut vigil was over.

“Moritz,” Andrei said, “the one thing that Joint Jewish Forces really needs is a quartermaster.”

“What’s a quartermaster?”

“Someone high class to get in supplies.”

“You mean a smuggler?”

“No. Quartermaster is a respectable position. Every army has them.”

“What’s the cut?”

“Well, a regular army—like ours—doesn’t work on cuts.”

“Oy vay! What a day this has been. All I’ve ever done is run a nice clean business.”

“Moritz, you’re too much of a gambler to ride this war out in a hole. We’ve got doctors. Sheina will get treatment You’ll have lots of interesting people here to share this bunker.”

“I bet I will. Tell me honest, Androfski. This post of quartermaster. It is important? I mean, like a Ulany colonel?”

“In our army,” Andrei said, “it’s the most important.”

Moritz sighed in resignation. “One condition. No one inquires into my past finances.”

“Done,” Andrei said.

They clasped hands, Moritz pulled a faded double deck of cards, shuffled, and began to deal. “Before you move in, one game of sixty-six.”

Chapter Seven

AN ANT LINE OF laborers in a Brushmaker’s building bent their backs, pushing large clumsy carts. The line moved in an endless circle from the lumber store to the lathe room to the assembly room.

An emaciated slave named Creamski, who had kept alive somehow for ten months, loaded the cart with finished toilet-brush handles from the lathe room. He grunted down the corridor, pushing the load at a snail’s pace.

The assembly room consisted of ten long tables, each forty feet long. Each table had a series of varied drilled holes to stuff bristles, tie the wires, and attach the handles. Fifty men worked each table.

Creamski pushed his cart to table number three; toilet brushes. A “leader” stood at the head of each table. “They are here,” Creamski whispered to the “leader.”

He pushed his cart along the table, placing several handles before each bench.

“They are here,” he whispered.

“They are here.”

The word passed down the line and over to the next table and the next—“They are here.”

“You there!” the German foreman shouted from the balcony. “Hurry up!”

Creamski moved faster, emptying the cart. He turned it about and pushed it out of the room, down the corridor, past the lathe room, and into the lumber warehouse.

While his cart was being loaded with boards he stepped into the checker’s office.

“Now!” he said to the checker. The two of them shoved the desk aside, revealing a trap door. Creamski pulled it open.

“Now!” Creamski called down into the black hole.

Wolf Brandel’s head popped out of the tunnel. He moved quickly out of the checker’s office, scrutinizing the long high stacks of lumber. “Move them out,” the beardless commander ordered. One by one, forty Jewish Fighters emerged from the underground passage. The Franciskanska bunker a few blocks away connected to the Kanal. Wolf’s company had followed the sewer to a point inside the Brushmaker’s complex and dug the tunnel into the checker’s office.

With hand signals he dispersed his force of ten women and thirty men to pre-fixed positions. They ducked behind the lumber with their weapons ready. Wolf blew a long breath and nodded for Creamski to return to the assembly room.

Creamski grunted and strained to put the loaded cart into motion. As he turned into the lathe room he gave a hand signal which could be seen by a table “leader” in the assembly room. Every eye in the room was on the “leader.” He nodded.

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

The feet of the inmates thumped against the floor in unison.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

They took their wooden handles and banged them on the tables, setting up a din.

“What’s going on!” shrieked the foreman through a megaphone from his balcony cage. “Stop this noise! Stop it! Do you hear!”

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

The clatter from the building swelled over the compound.

“Guards!” the foreman shouted into his alarm phone. “Guards! Building number four! Quick!”

Alarm sirens erupted all over the complex in a series of short whistles to draw the guards to assembly building number four.

The foreman locked the barred door of his office. He snatched the pistol from his desk and looked down at the five hundred pairs of maddened eyes staring up at him.

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

“Krebs dies! Krebs dies! Krebs dies! Krebs dies!” they chanted his name.

Ukrainians, Latvians, and Estonians poured out of the guard barracks with whips, guns, and dogs, racing for the spot of the insurrection.

Part of Wolf Brandel’s force, hidden around the outside of the building, let them pass through. There was only one entrance, through the main corridor. He watched the first of the guards pass into the assembly room from his position in the lathe room.

“Now!”

Wolf and ten of his Fighters stepped into the corridor and faced a mass of guards. The Ukrainians had trapped themselves. A pipe grenade shattered in their midst, followed by a tattoo of pistol fire.

The Ukrainians outside plunged backward for the exit, but the Jewish Fighters outside moved in to cut them off. A massacre ensued.

A half dozen guards reached the assembly room. The slaves leaped from their benches. In pent-up wrath they attacked their tormentors and their tormentors’ dogs with bare hands. Within seconds the guards and dogs were pummeled to death and their bodies smashed with spit and kicks and disembowelment and decapitation.

Benches were overturned and smashed, lathes broken up by sledge hammers.

“Krebs! Krebs! Krebs! Krebs!”

The foreman was bug-eyed, insane with fright, locked in his own prison. They were coming up the balcony after him. No way of escape!

“Krebs! Krebs! Krebs! Krebs!”

He placed the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger as the outstretched arms of the slaves reached through the cage for him.

Ana Grinspan, with a company in the central district, was the highest-ranking woman commander in the ghetto. Her company was the most integrated of the various parties and final proof that unity had been achieved. Thirty-two Fighters came from the Bathyrans, Poale Zion, Gordonia, Dror, Communists, Akiva, Hashomer Hatzair, Hechalutz, and the Bund. She even had four members from religious Zionist Mizrachi who could no longer stomach the passive attitudes of the Orthodox Agudah.

The secondary objective at Brushmaker’s was the confiscation of the fleet of five trucks. The instant Brushmaker’s was secured Wolf turned the trucks over to Ana, who put into operation a pre-set plan. Each truck had a driver, four fighters, and liberated Brushmaker’s slaves.

They struck at every known remaining warehouse, store, shop, medical station, bakery, and private cache in the ghetto, holding anything usable for Joint Forces. Loading rapidly under the protective guns of the Joint Fighters, they whisked off to a series of small bunkers scattered all over the ghetto.

No protest or conversation was permitted.

“Load! Move!”

And away.

Every sack of flour, every grain of food was carted off.

One of the bunkers in the central command was located almost beneath the Jewish Militia barracks, where the Fighters kept the barracks under scrutiny. Simon Eden ordered a raid to bring back a half dozen militiamen.

They were dragged off to the new command center at Mila 18 to confront Alexander Brandel, who had drawn up a list of dozens of persons suspected of collaboration, concealing wealth, and illegal operations. The captured militiamen were quick to sing out all they knew about the location of these people.

Squads of Jewish Fighters made forays, unearthing one person after another on the list. The most notorious of the collaborators were executed. The others were fined.

“You are fined ten thousand zlotys for passing information to the Germans.”

“You are fined twenty thousand zlotys for collaboration with the Jewish Militia.”

“You are fined ten thousand zlotys for failure to protect Jews taken to the Umschlagplatz within your power to warn them.”

These fines were collected on the spot, on pain of death, without argument or equivocation.

Rodel, the squat, blocklike commander of the southern area, had been a member in good standing in the Communist party most of his adult life. He deemed it ironic that his command bunker was located under the Convert’s Church with the open knowledge of Father Jakub.

Moreover, the war had compelled him to enter strange alliances with Labor Zionists holding completely diverse political views. Zionism was the drug of the Jewish people, he had said on numerous occasions. However, he worked not only with Labor Zionists but Jabotinski Revisionists, whom he considered fascists, and religious elements, whom he considered mentally inept. It was a strange war to Rodel, but no stranger than the Soviet Union and America fighting as allies.

From the moment of Warsinski’s assassination, Rodel ordered the workers in the uniform factory to sabotage the product. In the following days, uniforms left Warsaw with flies, armholes, and neckholes sewn shut, buttons with no buttonholes, and seams that would rip away under the slightest stress.

An hour after Wolf Brandel captured Brushmaker’s, Ludwig Heinz, the manager of the uniform factory, sent a message to Rodel through Father Jakub that the Lithuanian guards had fled. Heinz, an ethnic German, was one of an infinitesimal number who displayed a measure of humanity toward the slave labor under him. Within the strict limitations permitted, Heinz was credited with saving a number of lives. He walked untouched to the corner of Nowolipki and Karmelicka streets to open the main gates and allow the Jewish Fighters in.

“I’m glad my part in this is over,” Heinz said to Rodel.

Rodel shook his shiny, hairless head. “It is a strange war,” he said. “You’ve been decent within your means. Joint Forces has ordered me to see you safely through the ghetto gates.”

“I’m glad it’s over,” Ludwig Heinz repeated.

“Let’s go,” Rodel said, pointing in the direction of the Leszno Gate two blocks away.

As Ludwig Heinz turned, Rodel whipped out his pistol and struck the man across the back of the ear with the barrel. Heinz pitched forward to the street, unconscious. Rodel leaned down and ripped part of his clothing off and bloodied his face with a series of blows.

“All right,” he ordered two fighters, “take him to the Leszno Gate and dump him. I’m sorry I had to beat him up, but it’s for his own good. If he walked out unharmed, the Germans would suspect him. This way they may get the impression he barely escaped.”

As they hauled Heinz away, he shook his head again. “Strange war,” he said.

Samson Ben Horin, commander of the Jabotinski company of Revisionists, had remained outside the jurisdiction of Joint Jewish Forces, but the events of the day compelled him to look upon Eden’s army with a new respect. He dispatched a runner to Eden with an offer to keep runner contact with their bunker and join in limited cooperation.

Simon soon found an assignment much to Ben Horin’s liking.

On the last day of January, Samson Ben Horin led a combined company, half Revisionists, half Joint Forces, through the sewer pipes under the wall into the Aryan side. He picked the hour of the Vistula’s lowest tide, when the sewage was only knee-deep. Using Simon’s engineer’s map of the sewer system, he had only a mile to negotiate. Ben Horin’s party came to a stop beneath a manhole close to Bank Square near the Ministry of Finance.

Three Aryan side contacts waited. One was dressed as a sewer worker, the second sat in the driver’s seat of a parked teamster wagon, and the third watched at the corner in a position to observe the German Exchange Bank on Orla Street.

It was the day before payday for the German garrison. At precisely noon an armored truck from the ministry would stop to deposit part of the payroll at the Exchange Bank.

The watchman signaled the arrival of the armored truck.

The horse-drawn wagon moved from the curb and stopped beside the manhole. A long ladder was taken from it and set down in the sewer. Samson Ben Horin led his party out of the sewer. They scattered with startling rapidity so that both ends of the block-long Orla Street could be sealed.

A dozen German soldiers formed a guard around the armored truck before the bank. They passed the money sacks in.

Samson Ben Horin arched a homemade matzo-ball grenade. It landed at the right front tire of the truck.

Nuts and bolts flew everywhere, ripping into the bodies of the Germans.

A second grenade.

A third.

Half of the Germans were on the ground, groveling with iron in them. The truck was disabled, but guards inside fired back.

A fire bottle splattered against the side of the truck, igniting into flame and driving the defenders out.

Samson Ben Horin signaled for his men to converge. They pressed in from both ends of Orla Street. The Germans were pinned against the wall and the flaming truck. A few plunged into the bank for safety.

Half of the raiders grabbed every money sack in sight. The other half pushed into the bank and forced the vaults open. Within eight minutes of the time they had come from the sewer, they disappeared the same way with more than a million zlotys.

Simon Eden referred to the actions as practical field training to teach his army that the invulnerable enemy was indeed vulnerable.

Within a week after Andrei’s ambush at Niska and Zamenhof streets, which signaled the uprising, Joint Jewish Forces had purged the ghetto of collaborators, added millions to their treasury, controlled the streets, confiscated tons of food, wrecked the two major slave-labor factories, and freed the workers.

There were two large jobs left. The Jewish Militia, who cowered in their barracks, and the Civil Authority. The act of mere vengeance: doing away with the Jewish Militia was overruled by more practical considerations of settling with the Jewish Civil Authority.

On February 1, 1943, a hundred fifty men and women of Joint Forces surrounded the Jewish Civil Authority building at dawn. Simon Eden broke down the doors and entered with fifty more Fighters.

From his office on the third floor Boris Presser watched the scene below with Marinski, his assistant.

“Get into the outer office,” Presser said quickly. “Stall them. Keep them out of here.”

Presser sat behind his desk and tried to think. Every day he had been phoning Rudolph Schreiker to report on the rampaging of the Joint Forces. Murder in the streets, assassinations, looting, extortion. Boris was positive the actions would result in a murderous reprisal from the Reinhard Corps, but another day passed and another and another and nothing happened.

Each day his people cringed in the Civil Authority building with their families, trying to push him into a decision. Boris didn’t like decisions or involvements. He had made a career of evasiveness. The Germans had always told him what to do. He did it. He had the ready-made excuse of throwing up his hands and saying, “What could I do?”

Marinski bolted into the room, crying semi-coherently, “Stop them! They’re taking our families!”

“Stop shouting. Shouting will do no good. Get out there and delay Eden from coming in.”

Boris locked the door and ran to the phone. First Schreiker, then the Militia. The line was dead. He clicked it desperately. Nothing. Presser rubbed his throbbing temples and slipped to the window. Women and children, families of the Civil Authority, were being prodded out into the street at gun point. A ruckus in the outer office. Authoritative knocks at his door.

Stall ... play for time ... debate ... stall.

He unlocked the door. Simon Eden stood before him. Black-eyed; long, wiry frame; intense. Simon hovered over the smaller man, shoved the door wide, and looked around the office. He stepped inside the room and closed the door behind him, shutting out Marinski, who was too terrified to protest the abduction of his wife and daughter.

Boris backed up, bringing everything within him to the fore to maintain control and not show his fear. “I protest this humiliation of the Civil Authority,” he said.

Simon ignored him; his eyes showed almost boredom.

“You have no right to barge in here and kidnap our families. You have no right to treat us like collaborators.” Boris prodded to find a point of argument.

Simon would not argue. “History will pass judgment of the Civil Authority,” he said dryly.

Careful, Presser said to himself, careful. Don’t anger him. “You must realize,” Boris fenced, “that I have no personal authorization to grant you recognition.”

“Just recognize what comes out of the end of this muzzle. It is quite simple. We have your families. We want your treasury.”

Beads of perspiration popped out on Boris Presser’s upper lip. To refuse would be to admit that he was truly a puppet of the Germans, for in fact Joint Jewish Forces now represented the authority in the ghetto. But if he did recognize Eden, the Germans would eventually punish him when they returned. Boris was in a vise. He opened his arms benevolently. “Surely, Simon, as a man who knows organizational structure, you are aware that I do not control our very insignificant treasury. I have no way of acting.”

“Find a way,” Simon interrupted. “In an hour we shall deposit three corpses at the doorsteps of this building. One will be a member of your own family. Each hour thereafter, three more hostages will be shot until you deliver two million zlotys to Joint Forces.”

Marinski, eavesdropping, burst in, “Give him the damned money!”

Boris was dying to drink a glass of water to relieve his parched throat, but he knew that if he lifted a glass his hand would spill it with trembling. “Let me discuss this with my board,” Boris said, continuing the role of a reasonable man. “There are many touchy legal problems. Mind you, I am certain they can be solved, but this is rather sudden. Let us thrash it out. We will come up with a suitable compromise.”

Simon Eden looked down at him with final disgust. “You have no alternative,” he said, and before Boris Presser could speak again, Simon left.

An hour later the two million zlotys were turned over to Simon, half from the denuded treasury and half confiscated as ransom from personal fortunes.

“I was in favor of dumping you at the Stawki Gate with Piotr Warsinski,” Simon said impassively. “But Alexander Brandel is a dreamer. He believes in the poetic justice of making you and your people burrow into the ground and live like rats ... as the rest of us have.”

The Jewish Fighters released the hostages. Boris Presser’s action ended any further use the Germans may have had for the Civil Authority.

Boris Presser and the rest who had served as message boys of the Germans were cast loose to spend the rest of their days despised and scorned by both their own people and the enemy.

The next morning posters were nailed over the front door of the abandoned Civil Authority building and posted on the walls throughout the ghetto.

ATTENTION!

AS OF TODAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1943, THE JEWISH CIVIL AUTHORITY IS DISBANDED. THIS GHETTO IS UNDER THE SOLE AND ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY OF JOINT JEWISH FORCES, ORDERS ARE TO BE OBEYED WITHOUT RESERVATION, SIGNED:

Atlas, Commander, Joint Jewish Forces

Jan, Executive Commander

Chapter Eight

Journal Entry

THE STAR OF DAVID flies over the Warsaw ghetto!

On February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad. We feel for the first time that Germany will lose the war. But how quickly will the flood-waters recede?

None of us are so foolish as to believe we will ever live to see a Jewish state in Palestine, but we have sounded the great trumpet of the return. A Jewish army controls the first autonomous piece of Jewish land in nearly two thousand years of our dispersal. Our “nation” is only a few square blocks and we know we shall not hold it long, but, as Tolek Alterman says, “This is living Zionism.” No matter what happens hereafter, for this moment we are a proud and free people.

The first “capital” of our “Jewish state” is Mila 18. I shall describe it. There are six main rooms. These are named for the six Polish extermination camps. Rooms: Belzec and Auschwitz hold a hundred and twenty fighters of two companies, one Bund and one Bathyran. This group is under Andrei’s personal command (in addition to his other duties).

Majdanek is the room which runs alongside the Kanal. Joint Forces had voted to keep this room (and several others around the ghetto) for the exclusive use of as many children as we can care for. We have rounded up forty. Nothing takes priority over the continuation of the Orphans and Self-Help tradition. As soon as we can place these children on the Aryan side we find others to bring into Majdanek. Although Rachael Bronski lives at the Franciskanska bunker (under Wolf’s command—I am very proud of him. To think such a soldier and leader is my son), she spends a great deal of time on the “children” operation. We keep a program of schooling and games. At night they can go out for exercise and fresh air. Pray God a few of them will survive. They are our harvest.

Treblinka holds food stores and is the “hospital” for the central command (two doctors, four nurses.) Sobibor keeps relatives of the Fighters and those few intellectuals we have been able to salvage. A smattering of writers, scientists, artists, theologists, historians, and teachers, who represent the last voice of our dying culture.

Chelmno is the arsenal and munitions works. Jules Schlosberg and a dozen workers manufacture and store fire bombs and grenades. (Actual weapons—i.e., pistols, rifles—are as scarce as ever.)

The second hallway is filled with small cells which are also named in “honor” of the lesser camps.

Stutthof is a closet holding the generator; Poniatow has the office and living quarters of Simon, Andrei, Tolek (operations and training officer), and Christopher de Monti. Stutthof holds two other cots for the radio and telephone operator on watch. Trawniki is a tiny cell for the exclusive quarters of Rabbi Solomon. He is the last rabbi left in the ghetto. Father Jakub tells me the Church is hiding Rabbi Nahum, probably to preserve as a historic relic. Dachau is shared by Moritz and Sheina Katz and Sylvia and me. (What privileged characters we are!)

Our number varies, but two hundred and twenty persons is the limit. We could not fit another in sideways. Thanks to the ingenious engineering by Moritz the Nasher’s departed gang, circulation through air vents is not too bad. We use the generator for lights, sparingly. Petrol is hard to get and is needed for fire bottles. Candles are used most of the time. But candles burn oxygen.

Mila 18 has six entrances: the sewer through the children’s room, a removable stove in the house above, and four tunnels in different directions running one hundred to three hundred feet away from Mila 18.

Expansion of our army is almost nil. Few left in the ghetto are fit to fight. Secondly, the arms shortage is as bad as ever. Our forces, combined with the three Revisionist groups at Nalewki 37 (Jabotinski, Chayal, and Trumpeldor), gives us a total of six hundred soldiers. Less than one in three has a firearm. The operations of the last week have seriously depleted our ammunition. We average less than ten rounds per weapon.

Our “quartermaster,” Moritz the Nasher, made his first major acquisition yesterday—several hundred pairs of boots. Boots, long time a symbol of German oppression, have become a symbol of our defiance. In Poland only strong men wear boots these days. Simon knew that the boots would be a great morale factor.

The Joint Jewish Forces work in three operations. One third: duty on the rooftops watch and in roving patrols. One third: constructing underground bunkers. One third: in training. The commanders (Eden, Androfski, and Rodel, sometimes Ben Horin) have set up a system of rooftop fighting based on ambush tactics. Each company has alternate bunkers, so that we continually shift our positions. The key is a continued building of a skilled runner system to keep communications intact. Although we have had simulated combat drills for several days, the main question is yet to be answered. Can this rabble army with few weapons maintain discipline under fire? Is there enough individual courage and ability to improvise among these unskilled soldiers to really tell upon the greatest military power the world has ever known?

The task of holding for a week seems impossible, but there is an unmistakable air of optimism. Morale is splendid. A new feeling of dignity among the surviving population is infectious.

We await the enemy. We know that this fight for freedom is entirely without hope. But does the fight for freedom ever really end? Andrei is right. All we have left is our honor and the historic duty to make our battle at this moment.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

An ingenious phone circuit had been rigged from Mila 18 through the sewers directly to the other command posts at Wolf Brandel’s Franciskanska bunker and to Rodel beneath the Convert’s Church. A half dozen phones, mainly in German factories, were used on occasion for contact beyond the wall, along with the low-wattage radio transmitter.

Tolek Alterman dozed on his cot next to the phone in the commander’s office in Poniatow at Mila 18.

The phone rang. Tolek swung to a sitting position. He had let his hair grow long again since he stopped going to the Aryan side. He brushed it out of his eyes and fished for the receiver.

“Jerusalem,” he said. “Roberto speaking.”

“Hello, Roberto. This is Tolstoy in Beersheba.” Tolek recognized the bull-horn voice of Rodel. “Get me Atlas.”

Andrei, who was standing behind Tolek, walked quickly around the el of the corridor to Chelmno, where Simon fretted over the plans of the matzo ball-land mine being designed by Jules Schlosberg.

“Phone,” he said. “Rodel.”

“Hello, Beersheba. This is Atlas in Jerusalem.”

“Hello, Atlas. Tolstoy, Beersheba. My angels see the Rhine Maidens and their Swans at Stalingrad. One thousand bottles. It looks as if they are coming through the Red Sea.”

“Don’t take any wine unless it’s offered.”

“Shalom.”

“Shalom.”

Simon set the phone down and looked up at Tolek and Andrei.

“I heard,” Andrei said. He went quickly to Belzec and Auschwitz. “All right! Let’s go! Up to the roofs!”

The Fighters snatched their weapons and crowded to the ladder which would take them through the stove into Mila 18.

“Move along, move along,” Andrei prodded.

Alexander Brandel stumbled from his cell, coming out of a deep sleep. “A drill, Andrei?”

“No drill. They’re coming.”

“Runners!” Simon Eden barked.

A dozen swift, daring boys in their teens clustered around the entrance to Poniatow. Simon towered over them. “The Germans are massing before their barracks with their Auxiliaries. We expect them through the Zelazna Gate. One thousand in number. Alert all companies. Hold fire unless fired upon. Move out!”

The ghetto rats scampered through the six exits to alert the scattered bunkers.

Andrei watched the last of his men go up the ladder to the stove upstairs. Stephan, Andrei’s personal runner, followed his uncle as though he were glued to him. Andrei poked his head into Poniatow. Simon was afraid. Andrei slapped Simon’s shoulder hard. “We won’t fire until we can smell their breath,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“We’ll soon find out,” Simon said. “I wish I could be up there with you.”

Andrei shrugged. “Such are the fortunes of a commander,” he said, and was gone with Stephan close behind him.

Tolek ran up and down the tunnel. “Stop the generator! Combat conditions! Deborah, keep the children quiet. Rabbi, I’ll have to ask you to pray silently. Moritz, card game’s over for now. Button up, everyone—button up!”

Adam Blumenfeld at the radio threw a switch to put the receiver on batteries as the generator ground to a halt and the lights went out.

Beep ... beep ... beep ... beep ... he heard in his earphones. He pulled the headset off and called out in the darkness.

“Are you there, Simon?”

“I’m here.”

“Radio confirmation. The Germans are moving.”

Beep ... beep ... beep ... beep ... warned the mobile transmitter from the Aryan side.

Simon struck a match and found the candle on the desk. He cranked the phone handle.

“Haifa ... hello, Haifa.”

“This is Haifa.”

“This is Atlas in Jerusalem. Let me speak to Chess Master.”

“Chess Master speaking,” Wolf Brandel answered from the Franciskanska bunker.

“The Rhine Maidens and their Swans are at Stalingrad. One thousand bottles. They’re coming through the Red Sea. Don’t drink any wine unless it’s offered.”

“Oh boy!”

Simon hung up. He could see Alex and Tolek on the fringe of the candle glow. Now was the commander’s agony. Waiting in the dark. The acid test was here. It was deathly still. Even the endless prayers of Rabbi Solomon trailed to a silent movement of the lips.

Across vacant courtyards, flitting over rooftops, sloshing through sewage, darting up deserted staircases, the runners from Mila 18 flashed from cover to cover to alert the Fighters. The companies moved in ghostlike silence to their positions behind windows, on the roofs, from sewer cover. Yes, it was all quite like a drill.

The streets had a stillness like the face of the moon. Some feathers fluttered down from the rooftops in sudden gusts of wind. Hidden eyes watched the ethereal stillness.

A dim sound of heels cracking against cobblestones. Clump ... clump ... clump ... clump ... clump.

The SS at the Zelazna Gate, barricaded behind machine-gun nests, darted out to remove the barbed-wire gate blocking the entrance.

Rodel looked from the window in the uniform factory out to the picket fence where the black-uniformed marchers flickered past with the broken motion of a film running to a halt. The bootless brown uniforms of the Auxiliaries made a softer tread. Rodel watched, his teeth tightening in his moon-shaped face. On and on they passed.

“Hello, Beersheba,” Rodel phoned to his bunker. “This is Tolstoy. Advise Jerusalem that the Rhine Maidens and their Swans have passed the Land of Goshen. Brunhilde is leading them. They are going up the Jordan River.”

Andrei Androfski looked up and down the rooftops at his dispersed Fighters. He was satisfied that they were deployed properly. Once on the roofs, the Joint Command was able to keep their companies in communication by signal posts from roof to roof. A message was relayed from Ana Grinspan’s company that the Germans were marching up Zamenhof Street almost at the same moment that Rodel’s command had phoned the information to Simon Eden.

Andrei crawled on his belly to the corner overlooking the intersection of Mila and Zamenhof streets, with Stephan at his heels. He wiggled into a position to observe Zamenhof Street through a pair of field glasses.

Andrei grumbled to himself and sharpened his focus. “Brunhilde himself,” he said. “Stutze. How nice.”

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump! The boot heels cracked, their echoes reverberating off the hollow shells of the buildings.

“Halt!”

The SS, Wehrmacht, and Auxiliaries broke ranks and scattered at the corner of Zamenhof and Gensia streets under the eyes and guns of Ana Grinspan’s company.

With the enemy three blocks away, Andrei shifted his position, risking a little more exposure to get a better view. He saw the Germans surrounding the Civil Authority building and the Jewish Militia barracks. SS men smashed into the abandoned Civil Authority. In a few minutes Andrei watched a confused command meeting in the middle of Zamenhof Street. Stutze pointed and ranted.

“Hello, what’s this?” Andrei whispered.

Jewish militiamen appeared in the streets for the first time since they had been terrorized into their barracks, but now they came at the end of Wehrmacht bayonets. Several Jewish militiamen, obviously of rank, were pulled from the herd and beaten into the Civil Authority building.

The sounds of machine pistol shots split the air.

“Runner!” Andrei snapped. Stephan crawled alongside him.

“Get a message to Simon. The Germans are rounding up the Jewish Militia. Some of them are being executed in the Civil Authority building. Apparently the Germans don’t know that the Civil Authority has defected. We can anticipate the Germans taking the Militia straight up Zamenhof to the Stawki Gate and the Umschlagplatz. We want instructions.”

Stephan repeated the message, then scooted down the middle of the roof for the short run through the skylight of Mila 18 and down the stairs to the bunker. Stephan appeared at the same moment that Ana Grinspan’s runner appeared with an identical message.

Simon looked to Tolek and Alex.

“Andrei wants instructions,” Stephan said.

The Germans would march the Jewish Militia under the massed guns of Andrei’s companies and a company of Wolf’s Fighters near the Stawki Gate. There were a thousand Germans in the street. They would be sitting pigeons. Should the rebellion begin on a note of saving Jewish traitors? Would it not be poetic and historic justice to see those ghouls marched off to the Umschlagplatz just as they had taken their own blood and flesh? An outburst which would give these bastards a chance to spread and hide would all but deplete the ammunition stores of the Joint Forces.

Command decision! God. If only Andrei were down here to knock me on my back. Tolek and Alex continued to watch him in the dim light. Simon sucked in a deep breath, then another. The Germans were in a box such as they might never be caught in again. But ... did it not take just as much courage to make the decision to let them pass out of the ghetto to give his Fighters a day, a week, ten days to find more ammunition?

“Tell Andrei ... to keep absolute discipline. Let them pass.” He spun the cranks of the phone to confirm his opinion, to assure himself. “This is Jerusalem. Atlas speaking. The Rhine Maidens are at Herod’s Palace and are taking Korah and Absalom to Egypt. Let them pass.”

In the bunker of the Revisionists at Nalewki 37, Samson Ben Horin faced the commander of his Chayal group who were spread along the roofs over Zamenhof near Ana Grinspan’s company. The Chayal officer, Emanuel, snorted at Ben Horin.

“We will not let them pass!”

Samson Ben Horin stroked his newly grown beard. He liked it. The liaison runner from Eden’s headquarters looked from Ben Horin to his officer.

“We are not obliged to carry out orders from Eden,” the officer prodded.

“You are obligated to take my orders,” Ben Horin answered. “By coincidence they are exactly the same. Let the Germans pass through.”

Emanuel was enraged. “The Germans are in a box!”

Ben Horin shrugged.

“You are a flunky of the Labor Zionists,” Emanuel cried.

“I shall relieve you of your command this instant if you cannot obey,” Ben Horin threatened angrily.

Emanuel sulked, simmered, calmed, and was returned to his post, distressed that Ben Horin had taken a position concurrent with that of the Joint Forces.

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

Andrei crawled as close to the roofs edge as he dared. He looked over his people. Their sweaty hands tightened around their weapons. Black eyes blazed from hidden corners. Andrei poked his fist into the air in a “hold fire” signal.

Beneath him the Germans took the Jewish Militia toward the Umschlagplatz and Treblinka.

Andrei licked his lips. He sighted “Gaby,” the Schmeisser, on Sieghold Stutze’s heart. “Ah,” he whispered to himself. “What a lovely, magnificent target. So full of nice plump syphilitic blood.” He clenched his teeth, pulling his itching, wiggling finger off the trigger.

The Fighters strewn out above Zamenhof Street looked down on their tormentors, gnawing pains of restraint holding them from unleashing their wrath.

“Look at that juicy Austrian. Ah, Stutze ... Will I ever get such a lovely shot at you?” Andrei half cried to himself. “What a goddamn war!”

“Hello, Jerusalem,” Wolf Brandel said. “The Angel from Lebanon advises us that the Rhine Maidens have taken Korah and Absalom into Egypt. They are boarding the train for hell. All is clear.”

As the tail end of the German force disappeared out of the Stawki Gate, the hands gripping the guns and grenades and bottle bombs relaxed and their bodies slumped in exhaustion, drained by tension.

A waving of signal flags, rooftop to window, window to rooftop to street. A scampering of the runners. “All is clear.”

The generator in Mila 18 sputtered and spun into life. The lights flickered on. The children in Majdanek, lying tightly against Deborah on the floor, resumed their reading game and Rabbi Solomon lifted the chant of his prayer and Moritz the Nasher cut the double deck of cards for another round of sixty-six and Alexander wrote down the notes in the journal.

Simon Eden was doubled over the desk with exhaustion. Andrei came in and slammed him across the back. “Simon! Did I have that syphilitic Austrian in my gun sights! I ached from head to toe to blast his head off. What discipline! Not a whisper up there! Not a sign. Not for a single second did Stutze know he was under our guns! Simon! Simon! By God, we have an army!”

Simon nodded weakly.

“You know,” Andrei whispered confidentially, “I will wager anything you own that we can hold them for a week.”

Chapter Nine

OBERFÜHRER FUNK ARRIVED IN Berlin somewhat regretful that he had allowed Horst von Epp to muddle his thinking. It was preposterous to suggest a new set of tactics for the liquidation of the ghetto. He should have followed orders and returned with heavily armed men the day after the January 18 act of banditry. But it was too late. He had no choice. When Funk proposed Von Epp’s theory of pacifying the Jews he was chagrined that Himmler thought it an excellent idea. In fact, it was so well received that Funk took full credit for thinking up the entire scheme.

In Berlin, problems were cropping up everywhere. The shock of the catastrophe at Stalingrad rocked the High Command, which was now facing a mammoth Russian winter counteroffensive.

In North Africa, Rommel’s magnificent Afrika Korps was engaged in furious actions with the ever-strengthening Allied Forces. A second disaster seemed in the making.

Italy was all but militarily impotent. One could smell that Italy was about to defect politically, as well.

In the air, the Luftwaffe had failed in its mission to crush the morale of the dogged Englishmen, and now all of England was being transformed into a gargantuan air field poised to return German bombs tenfold.

In the Pacific, the Americans had wrested the initiative. They seized island after island, which the Japanese had been certain was beyond the stamina of the American fighting men. The Japanese had not reckoned the extent of the uncommon valor of the United States Marine Corps.

Throughout the German Empire one could sense the restless awakening of the conquered. Despite brutal reprisals for underground activities, secret armies continued to grow. Indeed, Yugoslavia was gathering a force potent enough to divert badly needed German divisions off the eastern front. The policing of Greece and Poland required men and arms needed elsewhere.

To a lesser degree, sabotage, assassination, harassment, espionage flared up from Prague to Copenhagen to Oslo to Amsterdam to Brussels. Pin pricks, indeed, but enough stings were causing a painful swelling. Even in northern Italy a partisan army was forming.

This was the sudden realization of the brute who thought himself invincible being felled and stunned for the first time and crawling to his feet with a new appraisal of his adversary. Germany was stunned and smarted. The contemptuous smile was wiped from his lips. He was in pain.

Funk’s visits with Eichmann at Gestapo 4B showed that Eichmann was still going about his job of rounding up the Jews with uncommon zeal, but he was hitting stone walls. Finland flatly defied German orders to turn over the Jews and threatened to use the Finnish army to defend them. A second flat refusal came from the Bulgarians. Then Denmark. King Christian of Denmark responded to the German order for Jews to wear the Star of David by putting on the first one himself and ordering all Danes to follow suit in a display that one Dane was the same as the other.

In France and Belgium and Holland, Jews were hidden in convents and attics, and even the Rumanians balked and the Hungarians split on the issue. Italy refused to become a partner to genocide.

Although Eichmann’s agents were able to flush out Jews, get them through subterfuge and threat and strong-arm methods, nowhere in western Europe were they for sale for extra rations as they were in Poland, Ukrainia, and the Baltics.

Funk arrived in Berlin during a period of agonizing reappraisals. Himmler, Eichmann, and those most interested in the final solution agreed that the Warsaw ghetto, largest symbol of European Jewry, had to be liquidated quietly. It would indeed be a terrible propaganda setback for Berlin to admit the Jews were capable of fighting. It would be worse if Jews were to conduct the first rebellion against the Nazis that could start a chain reaction among the restless undergrounds.

Alfred Funk returned to Warsaw just long enough to turn the matter of peaceful liquidation over to the district Kommissar, Rudolph Schreiker. He left immediately for Denmark, where the pesky Danish underground was chopping the rail system to bits and leading in British bombers. Denmark, symbol of the “little Aryan” brother, was behaving badly.

Throughout February 1943, Rudolph Schreiker bumbled through a fruitless campaign to lure the forty thousand survivors out of the ghetto. Joint Jewish Forces had a standing order that anyone volunteering for deportation or attempting to leave under German auspices would be shot.

Joint Jewish Forces allowed small numbers of Germans to enter the ghetto unmolested. Schreiker’s emissaries went to the factories, attempting to win “labor transferrals” by guaranteeing good working conditions in Poniatow or Trawniki. To back up his intentions of good faith, Schreiker shipped in some food and medicine.

A few prominent Jews in prison in Warsaw were sent into the ghetto to form a new Jewish Civil Authority to open schools and hospitals and resume cultural activities.

But no one budged from his hiding place.

In a week Schreiker realized the new Civil Authority was powerless and in an angry rage over his own failure had them executed in the bloody Civil Authority building.

The newspapers and the radio decried the lack of Jewish co-operation in the resettlement for “honest labor.” The Polish people were fed a line that it was Jewish behavior that was to blame for the Polish misfortunes, for if Jews reported for “honest labor,” then Poles would not be needed. It was a “logic” the Poles accepted.

Simon Eden had the one thing he wanted most, time. It was time he had played for when he held fire when the Militia was taken to the Umschlagplatz. Time gave him the chance to augment his meager forces.

The Revisionists made firm contact with a small right-wing underground group, the ND Brigade, on the other side. Through the ND Brigade, the Revisionist groups—Chayal, Jabotinski, and Trumpeldor—were the best-armed company in the ghetto.

The Communist underground People’s Guard was ill armed and could not spare a bullet for the ghetto, but they gave Joint Forces a strong liaison on the Aryan side with radio contact and hiding places in Warsaw.

By March of 1943 the tiny Jewish Forces were deeply hidden in the catacombs of the ghetto, were quick in their response to discipline, had as good observation and communications and contacts as circumstances allowed. The small teams of Fighters had shown extraordinary restraint in holding fire and maneuvering without being seen and had developed leadership to such a degree that even the pessimistic Simon Eden was beginning to feel they could hold the Germans at bay for a week.

Mid-March. Two months had passed and the Jews still held the ghetto. Alfred Funk roared into Warsaw, locked Rudolph Schreiker in his office, and berated him with obscenities for an hour. Schreiker was stripped of the duty. He was allowed to retain his post, for the Nazis could not admit failure in Jewish matters, but ghetto liquidation was turned over to Horst von Epp and Dr. Franz Koenig.

On March 17 a single German staff car drove through the Leszno-Tlomatskie Gate with a pair of large white flags attached to either fender. It moved at a crawl up Zamenhof Street and stopped before the Civil Authority building. A single soldier without rank stepped from behind the wheel and held up another white flag.

The car was under observation by Jewish Fighters the instant it entered the ghetto. The soldier shifted nervously from one foot to the other, unnerved by the quiet.

Heads began popping out from behind doorways, crevices, windows, courtyards, in a circle around him. He waved the white flag vigorously. Then his eyes narrowed as a woman holding a German rifle and wearing German boots approached him, leading a dozen men.

Ana Grinspan had seen Germans in her rifle sights before, but this was different. The mutual curiosity of enemy looking at enemy. The practical application of Andrei’s continued lectures that these were not supermen. Hit them with a bullet and they will go down. The soldier was clearly puzzled at the face of his enemy. The “sub-human” was a tall handsome woman leading men whose prowess he had no desire to contest.

“I have a message for your commander from Dr. Franz Koenig representing the German authorities,” he recited.

“Runner.” Ana commanded, “go to Atlas in Jerusalem and tell him that Pharaoh has sent a messenger under truce. We will hold him at Herod’s Palace.”

A runner dashed off down Zamenhof Street.

“Blindfold him,” Ana ordered.

Moments later Simon Eden spoke to the back of the soldier. “I am the commander,” he said.

“Dr. Koenig wishes to have a meeting under truce with you and your command. He guarantees complete safety—”

Simon interrupted. “Tell him that if he wishes a conference he will walk alone through the Leszno-Tlomatskie Gate holding a white flag and he will stop before the Civil Authority building. He will come between twelve and twelve-ten o’clock.”

The single obese figure of Franz Koenig waddled into the unearthly stillness. He quaked with fear, waving an oversized white flag back and forth with each step.

Down the middle of the empty street. The eerie sensation that a thousand pair of eyes were on him. Hidden. Looking at him. He stole glances at the windows and the roofs. Not a stir. How could anything be so deserted?

Koenig had wanted to wear civilian clothing, but he feared the Nazis would think he was afraid to wear a uniform. He did slip off the swastika armband the instant he was inside the ghetto. No use antagonizing them, he thought.

He inched farther up the street, past Dzielna, past Pawia. Still no sign of life. He stopped at the intersection of Gensia and looked in all four directions. Nothing. Only a snowfall of feathers. The structure of the Civil Authority building was behind him.

“Anyone here?” Anyone here ... anyone here ... anyone here? echoed his voice.

“Hello!” Hello ... hello ... hello.

Ten minutes passed. Koenig was numbed with fear.

“Koenig!”

He looked for the voice.

“Koenig!”

The front door of the Civil Authority building was ajar. He walked gingerly up the steps and shoved the door open. It groaned. He narrowed his eyes to slits to see down the shadowed corridor and waved the white flag.

“Truce!” he called. “Truce!”

The door slammed behind him. He turned and looked into the bearded face of Samson Ben Horin.

“Hands up,” Ben Horin said. He frisked Koenig. “March!” Down the corridor. The walls were stained with dried blood from German executions. The plaster chipped away. Debris everywhere.

“Turn in there. Sit.”

Franz didn’t like the sordid room. It was overturned and smashed. It smelled bad. He swallowed to loosen his throat and stared at the table, afraid to look into the eyes of Samson Ben Horin. Samson smirked.

“So you are a superman,” he said.

Koenig felt inept before the lean, fierce, black-eyed young Jew who could obviously rip him to shreds. Samson sat in the window sill and swung his leg back and forth. “So you are a superman,” he repeated.

The door opened. Simon Eden towering over six feet three inches and like a band of steel, Andrei Androfski with the power of a lion, Rodel with the build of a tank—all came in and leaned against the wall.

Koenig knew instantly that not only were the Joint Forces not a myth, but the survivors were a fierce breed.

Alexander Brandel helped Rabbi Solomon into the room. He and the old man sat opposite Koenig.

“Stand up in the presence of our rabbi,” Andrei said, “and cover your head.”

Koenig pushed the chair back from the table and arose.

Rodel did not particularly subscribe to the idea of having Samson Ben Horin and Rabbi Solomon attend the conference. To him, Ben Horin’s Revisionists were akin to fascists. Moreover, Ben Horin would not bind himself to Joint Forces. As for Solomon, it was sentimentality and nonsense. But for the sake of unity he did not protest.

“Talk,” Simon said.

“On behalf ... on behalf of the German authority, I am authorized to negotiate a settlement of our difficulties.”

The pronouncement was made without reaction. Koenig cleared his throat and continued.

“We would like to put the past behind us. Let bygones be bygones. I mean, there is no use dragging out old skeletons in the closet. Let us forget yesterday and talk about tomorrow.”

Still no reaction from the six men he faced.

“What we wish to do is complete the resettlement of the ghetto. Now, before you say anything, let me assure you that I came here fully prepared to guarantee excellent working conditions at camps you are free to examine.”

Ben Horin swung his leg back and forth from his seat in the window. Rodel glared hatred. Simon and Andrei looked aimlessly at the floor. Only Alex registered some amazement.

Koenig cleared his throat again.

“We are prepared to sign a pact. Our word. A treaty, if you please ...” He stopped. All six pairs of hard eyes were on him now, registering disdain. He was making no progress whatsoever and he was getting more nervous,

“All right. I ask you, under what conditions will you consider abandoning the ghetto?”

There were no German tricks left, no more cunning or wile or ruses.

“You must consider it,” Koenig continued. “Mind you, I am not making threats, but surely you must know that your position is impossible.”

Still no reply. Koenig had come to barter, prepared to fall back to a line of retreat to get what he wanted; peaceful liquidation. Their continued silence had left him with no choice but to make the final offer at once.

“You men here represent the leadership of what we estimate to be forty to fifty thousand people. To show you we mean business, we are prepared to pay you a handsome indemnity. Several hundred thousand zlotys. We will deposit it in Swiss francs, American dollars, or however you desire, and we will give you two thousand visas to Sweden. We guarantee safe conduct under Swedish or Swiss auspices. If you wish, you can leave in lots of one hundred and arrange coded messages to assure each other of safe arrivals. Now, gentlemen, what could be fairer than that?”