Mila 18

“Please tell me about it ... please.”

“Twenty-two or twenty-three of us went into the sewer ... Did you get our signal?”

“Yes, but we couldn’t distinguish it. Good Lord, have you been in the sewer for twenty-four hours?”

“Yes. Maybe sixteen, seventeen left. Few went crazy from thirst ... drank the sewage ... told them not to ... some others drowned.”

“Where are they now?”

“Trying to make Prosta Street. We’ve got to get water to them.”

“There’s nothing we can do for another hour and a half, until it turns light and the curfew is lifted. Kamek will be here by then.”

Gabriela studied the thing before her. “Your voice. Don’t I know you?”

“Tolek.”

“Oh, my poor dear. I didn’t even recognize you.”

“Don’t suppose anyone could.”

“Who else is down there?”

“Christopher de Monti. We must get him out.”

She nodded and her eyes widened. “Who else?”

“Rachael ... Wolf ... Ana ...”

He stopped, and the pained expression she bore both asked the wordless question and answered it. She stood up and walked to the kitchen chair and sagged into it. She bit her lip. The last tears she had left in her trickled down her cheeks. Andrei was still out there in the ghetto ... leading cavalry charges ... Andrei would never come out. She knelt beside Tolek once more and helped him to his feet.

“Come,” Gaby said, “let’s steam you out so you look presentable.”

Gabriela filled the last of four shopping bags with bread, cheese, and bottles of water. Each bag had a rope tied to the handles so it could be lowered quickly into the Kanal.

Kamek was a picture of his usual calm. “Today is Sunday,” he recited for his own benefit. “Sunday is trouble. We cannot ride through the streets with a load of hay on Sunday. I must get a covered truck and try for the best.”

Tolek came in from the bathroom. He had been soaking and scrubbing for two full hours. It brought him back to the semblance of a man. He tucked a short crowbar into his belt for lifting the manhole cover quickly and took two of the shopping bags from Gabriela.

“I hope they made it,” Tolek mumbled. “They were in a bad way when I left them.”

Kamek stood up. “After you get that food and water down to them, wait in the café down the street. Watch for my truck.”

“Hurry with that truck,” Gabriela said. “They’ve been down there almost thirty hours.”

“Leave it to Kamek,” Kamek said.

“It’s day,” Wolf said, looking up to the manhole cover atop him. “It’s day and we’re at Prosta Street Today we’ll be saved.”

Weeping ...

“Our Father which art in heaven.”

“O Merciful God ... save us ... save us ...”

Christopher de Monti leaned against the bricks. He held Ana with one arm and Rachael with the other. Both of them were semi-conscious.

Death closed in with each passing second. There were only twelve left.

“O help us, merciful God ...”

“Today we’ll be saved,” Wolf cried. “Today we’ll be saved.”

Christopher skidded to his knees and struggled to his feet, pulling the girls up. Feverish fire tore through his body.

Shadows over them!

“Shh ... someone’s up there ... silence ...”

“Merciful ... merciful ...”

“Sshhh!”

Their eyes looked up in terror. The cover slipped off. It’s me, Tolek! It’s me, Tolek! Are you down there? Are you down there?”

“Help ... help ...”

“Tolek ... help ... us ...”

“Thank God! They’re alive. Listen, down there. We are lowering bread and water. We will remain close by until the truck arrives. Do you hear me?”

“Water ... water ...”

“Water!”

“Water!”

“Water!”

“Quiet,” Tolek commanded. The bags were lowered. “There is smelling salts in one of the bags.”

Mass weeping broke out as the bottles were opened and they gurgled and wetted their dehydrated bellies. They tore at the bread and the cheese with the savagery of starved animals and grunted and wept and prayed.

Even the calm Kamek was worrying. He was running out of chances. Two covered-truck owners had their vehicles in repair. Three others were out of the city in the countryside to bring in food from villages.

It was almost eleven o’clock.

Church bells pealed. The pious were coming and going to Mass.

Kamek walked into the Solec to the house of Zamoyski, the teamster of thieves. He did not like to do business with Zamoyski. He was a slimy crook. Kamek had no choice. From time to time on desperate occasions the People’s Guard used Zamoyski’s truck ... for a price.

When Kamek came to his house Zamoyski was in his usual Sunday pose—coming out of a bombastic Saturday-night hangover.

“Sunday?”

“Special load.”

Must be important, Zamoyski thought. I'll take him for plenty. He grunted disdainfully. “It’s heathen to drive on Sunday. Besides ...”

A roll of green American dollars from Kamek’s pocket to the center of the table cut short the oration and bargaining.

“Wait till I get my shirt on.”

“Bring a ladder.”

“A ladder?”

“Yes. The guns we are running are up in a loft.”

Noon.

Gabriela and Tolek drank their fourth cup of tea in a café on Prosta Street. Bells pealed. Tolek was a nervous wreck.

The pious paraded in their finery after their hour with God. “What the hell is holding Kamek up?” Tolek sputtered. “They’ve been down in that hole almost thirty-six hours.”

Gabriela patted his hand. “Kamek won’t let us down,” she said.

In the sewer the food and drink had restored the twelve survivors to a state of consciousness and gave them enough strength to cling to life for another few hours.

They could hear the church bells.

Children played in the street almost directly above them. The children stood in a circle and threw a ball and sang a song and clapped hands.

“Raz! dwa! trzy!

One! Two! Three!

The ball was thrown.

The Roman king had many sons,

Until one born became a Caesar,

Low to the ground, high to the air,

Raz! dwa! trzy!

One! two! three!

Yes he was, yes he was,

The great Caesar.”

Zamoyski’s truck rumbled up Jerusalem Boulevard.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Prosta Street.”

He turned up Zelazna, then into Prosta.

“Where?”

“Stop by the manhole halfway up the block opposite the café.”

Zamoyski’s face opened with the sudden discovery. “What’s this all about, Kamek? I don’t like this business. Wait a minute. Jews! I’m not getting mixed up in Jew business!”

Zamoyski felt something cold against the side of his face. It was the barrel of Kamek’s pistol.

The truck screeched to a halt beside the manhole. Kamek held Zamoyski at bay. Tolek and Gabriela sprinted out of the café. Tolek knocked the cover off the manhole, ran to the back of the truck, and pulled the ladder off. Gabriela took a short-barreled shotgun from inside her trench coat.

The burst of light from the street blinded those in the Kanal for an instant. Chris held one side of the ladder, Wolf the other. They dragged the other ten and literally threw them up. Tolek reached down and pulled them through.

“Raz! dwa! trzy! One! Two! Three!

The Roman ...”

The children stopped and gawked at the things emerging from the sewer. Gabriela’s shotgun menaced them back.

People stopped their Sunday stroll and looked at the sight.

Stunned customers of the café gaped in amazement.

Zamoyski cried and cursed. “I am ruined! I am trapped! Holy Mother! I am dead!”

Wolf Brandel tumbled out last and hobbled heavily. He was thrown bodily atop the others in the back of the truck, and within two minutes of their stopping they sped away toward the bridge and Brodno.

Chapter Twenty-four

Journal Entry—December 1943

I, CHRISTOPHER DE MONTI, shall make the final entry in the Brandel journals of the Good Fellowship Club. After months of hiding I have arrived here in Sweden with Gabriela Rak, whose child is due at any moment. She does not want it to be born on Polish soil. I shall see to it that neither she nor her child shall ever want.

Little is known here about the uprising despite the fact that Artur Zygielboim, a Jewish member of the Polish government in exile in London, committed suicide last June in protest to the world’s indifference to the genocide of his people.

What of the Warsaw uprising? How does one determine the results of such a battle? Jewish casualties were in the tens of thousands while the Germans merely lost hundreds.

I look through the books of history and I try to find a parallel. Not at the Alamo, not at Thermopylae did two more unequal forces square off for combat. I believe that decades and centuries may pass, but nothing can stop the legends which will grow from the ashes of the ghetto to show that this is the epic in man’s struggle for freedom and human dignity.

This rabble army without a decent weapon held at bay the mightiest military power the world has ever known for forty-two days and forty-two nights! It does not seem possible, for many nations fell beneath the German onslaught in hours. All of Poland was able to hold for less than a month.

Forty-two days and forty-two nights! At the end of that time SS Oberführer Alfred Funk ordered the Great Tlomatskie Synagogue dynamited to the ground to symbolize the destruction of Polish Jewry. He received the Iron Cross for valor.

But Alfred Funk failed, just as all the other Pharaohs failed.

The new year will see Nazi Germany crushed. Germany’s cities are destined to be dismantled brick by brick and her people to perish in flames in much the same way as they destroyed the Warsaw ghetto.

What of the murderers? What of Horst von Epp and Franz Koenig? No doubt their ilk will die in bed of old age, for the world is a forgiving world and they will say they were merely following orders. And the world will say ... let us forget the past. Let bygones be bygones. Even the Alfred Funks may escape. Already we hear the verbal gymnastics of the Polish government in exile spouting theories of apologetics in behalf of their people who committed the conspiracy of silence.

I, Christopher de Monti, swear on the eternal soul of my late friend, Andrei Androfski, that I shall not let the world forget. I shall return to Poland. I shall find the Brandel journals and I shall make it a brand on the conscience of man forever.

Wolf Brandel and Rachael Bronski, Tolek Alterman and Ana Grinspan are fighting in a Jewish partisan unit near Wyszkow. Stephen Bronski is alive and well in the home of a woodcutter named Gajnow in the Lublin Uplands. We shall all meet again someday.

I shall close this final entry with the words of the man who wrote the first entry and who is responsible for the historical documents of the Good Fellowship Club. On our last night together in the bunker of Mila 18, this is what Alexander Brandel told me:

“If the Warsaw ghetto marked the lowest point in the history of the Jewish people, it also marked the point where they rose to their greatest heights. Strange, after all the philosophies had been argued, the final decision to fight was basically a religious decision. Rodel would decry my words; Rabbi Solomon would be outraged if I told him this. But those who fought, no matter what their individual reasons, when massed together obeyed God’s covenant to oppose tyranny. We have kept faith with our ancient traditions to defend ‘the laws.’ In the end we were all Jews.” And Alexander Brandel, always mystified by ways of God and strange ways of men, shook his head in puzzlement. “Isn’t it odd that the epitome of man’s inhumanity to man also produced the epitome of man’s nobility?” Alexander Brandel told me something else. “I die, a man fulfilled. My son shall live to see Israel reborn. I know this. And what is more, we Jews have avenged our honor as a people.”

CHRISTOPHER DE MONTI

Acknowledgments

Past experience forewarned me that I would be dependent upon the assistance of tens of dozens of individuals and organizations to research this book. Again, I was fortunate to be the recipient of selfless hours by those who transmitted to me their knowledge of this subject.

Without the devotion of the Ghetto Fighters House International Museum and Shrine, the individual members of the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz in Israel and their comrades in the International Survivors Association, these pages could scarcely have been written.

Sheer weight of numbers precludes my thanking the others, but I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the contribution of the Yad Vashem Memorial Archives in Jerusalem and the University of Southern California Library.

Within a framework of basic truth, tempered with a reasonable amount of artistic license, the places and events described actually happened.

The characters are fictitious, but I would be the last to deny there were people who lived who were similar to those in this volume.

LEON URIS

A Biography of Leon Uris

Leon Uris (1924–2003) was an author of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays who wrote over a dozen books including numerous bestselling novels. His epic Exodus (1958) has been translated into over fifty languages. Uris’s work is notable for its focus on dramatic moments in contemporary history, including World War II and its aftermath, the birth of modern Israel, and the Cold War. Through the massive popularity of his novels and his skill as a storyteller, Uris has had enormous influence on popular understanding of twentieth-century history.

Leon Marcus Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the son of Jewish parents of recent Polish-Russian origin. As a child, Uris lived a transient and hardscrabble life. He attended schools in Baltimore, Virginia, and Philadelphia while his father worked as an unsuccessful storekeeper. Even though he was a below-average student, Uris excelled in history and was fascinated by literature; he made up his mind to be a writer at a young age.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Uris dropped out of high school to enlist in the Marine Corps. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a radio operator in the South Pacific, and after the war he settled down in San Francisco with his first wife, Betty. He began working for local papers and wrote fiction on the side. His first novel, Battle Cry, was published in 1953 and drew on his experience as a marine. When the book’s film rights were picked up, Uris moved to Hollywood to help with the screenplay, and he stayed to work on other film scripts, including the highly successful Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1957.

Uris’s second novel, The Angry Hills (1955), is set in Greece but contains plot points that center on Jewish emigration to the territories that would eventually become Israel. The history that led to Israel’s earliest days is also the subject of Uris’s most commercially successful novel, Exodus. Not long after Israel first achieved statehood, Uris began researching the novel, traveling 12,000 miles within the country itself, interviewing over 1,200 residents, and reading hundreds of texts on Jewish history. The book would go on to sell more copies than Gone with the Wind.

Uris’s dedication to research became the foundation of many of his subsequent novels and nonfiction books. Mila 18 (1961) chronicles Jewish resistance in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghettos, and Armageddon (1964) details the years of the Berlin airlift. Topaz (1967) explores French-American intrigue at the height of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis, while The Haj (1984) continues Uris’s look into Middle Eastern history. Much of Uris’s fiction also draws explicitly from his own travels and experiences: QB VII (1970) is a courtroom drama based on a libel case against Uris that stemmed from the publication of Exodus, and Mitla Pass follows a Uris-like author through Israel during the Suez crisis. Ireland: A Terrible Beauty and Jerusalem: Song of Songs are sensitive, nonfiction documentations of Uris’s travels and include photographs taken by his third wife, Jill.

Throughout his career Uris continued to write for Hollywood, adapting his own novels into movies, and working as a “script doctor” on films such as Giant and Rebel Without a Cause. QB VII was adapted for television, becoming the first ever miniseries. Uris passed away in 2003 at his home on Long Island. His papers are housed at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

Leon with his parents, William and Anna Uris, who divorced in 1929. William “Wolf” Uris emigrated from Russia to America in 1921 and worked a string of blue-collar jobs before settling into a position as a Communist Party organizer. Anna, who came from a close-knit Jewish family in Maryland, raised Leon and his sister, Essie, mostly in Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia.

A young Uris in 1929, probably at his family’s home in Baltimore. Throughout much of his early life Uris was shuttled between his father in Philadelphia and his mother in Baltimore. He eventually came to regard his mother as “psychologically unhinged” and his father as a “failure.” This led him to seek success in the world at all costs. “I can say without hesitation,” he once wrote, “that, from earliest memory, I was determined not to be a failure.”

Uris as a young soldier in the Marine Corps. Uris enlisted in the Marines during the height of World War II when he was just seventeen years old. He subsequently served as a radio operator and saw combat in the South Pacific. His war experience represented a defining moment in his life, shaping his outlook on politics and providing rich material for his first book, the blockbuster novel

Battle Cry

.

Uris with his first wife, Betty Beck, in 1945. The two met during the spring of 1944 in San Francisco, where Betty was stationed as a marine sergeant and Uris was hospitalized for malaria, a disease he contracted during his tour in the Pacific theatre. Initially their relationship caused some friction between their respective families since Leon had been raised Jewish, while Betty hailed from a Lutheran family of Danish descent in rural Iowa. However in 1945 the couple tied the knot and began a happy life in the Northern California suburbs.

Uris at his house in Larkspur, a small town just north of San Francisco, California, in 1948. Although disillusioned with his day job at a local newspaper, Uris mostly enjoyed his new suburban lifestyle. “We have a big front porch where we eat dinner in the summer. Inside I have a nice roomy house with a fireplace,” he wrote his sister, Essie. The family lived there for several years before relocating to Southern California.

Uris with his first wife, Betty, and their two children, Karen and Mark, outside their Larkspur home in the late 1940s. At the time Uris worked as the manager of a delivery service for the

San Francisco Call-Bulletin

and Betty was employed at California’s infamous San Quentin State Prison.

Uris in London during his 1964 libel trial. In his epic novel

Exodus

, Uris wrote about a doctor named Wladislaw Dering, who conducted experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz. The real Wladislaw Dering, at the time a resident of England, admitted to working as a doctor in Auschwitz but denied participating in the Nazis’ notorious genetic experiments. He sued Uris for defamation after the novel was published. The jury awarded Dering a halfpenny in damages, which, according to English law, required him to pay the defendant’s court costs. The proceeding was the longest libel trial in British history.

Uris with his second wife, Margorie Edwards, a fashion model, and son Mike while shopping for antiques in the English countryside outside London in the winter of 1967. The following year Uris’s new marriage ended tragically when Margorie committed suicide outside their home in Aspen.

Uris in his office in Aspen, Colorado, where he lived for nearly twenty years. Uris was known to conduct extensive research for all of his novels, and his office was decorated with relevant maps, papers, and photographs. “Aspen was always a refuge of sorts where he could pursue his actual writing,” explained his third wife, Jill. Uris completed several novels there, including

The Haj

and

Trinity.

Uris enjoying the view of the Colorado landscape from the balcony of his Aspen estate, which he built on Red Mountain in 1963. Prior to that, Uris had gone to Aspen each year on ski trips with his first wife, Betty, and their three children.

Uris shortly after receiving an honorary degree from the University of Colorado at Denver. (photo by Ellen Caruso)

Leon with his third wife, Jill Peabody, and their son, Conor, and daughter, Rachael, in Aspen in 1987. Leon met Jill, a photography instructor, in the early 1970s when she was invited over to his house to teach his son Mike how to use his new Super 8 camera. The couple married six months later at New York’s famous Algonquin Hotel. Jill became Leon’s travel companion, often helping him with the research he conducted for his novels. The couple later collaborated on a book about Ireland that was published in 1976 and another about Jerusalem that was published in 1981.

Uris on the back porch of his house on Shelter Island, New York. Uris moved to Shelter Island in 1989 to escape the thin air of the Rocky Mountains. After moving to New York he completed three more novels:

Redemption,

A God in Ruins,

and the posthumously published

O’Hara’s Choice. He continued to live at his home on Shelter Island until his death in 2003.

copyright © 1983 by Leon Uris

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa