Mila 18

The flat was as he had left it. He looked about. The library. Some to Wolf, some to Stephan to read later—if there would be a later. The trinkets which once had been shined to a dazzling polish and adorned his uniform were tarnished. He threw them with his medals into a box. Stephan would want these.

The records and the player for Rachael.

What else was there? Very little. A Zionist organizer had no time for the accumulation of personal wealth. It was a shame that there were so few bits of tangible evidence of what this shabby room had meant. There had been much happiness here once.

The photograph album. The brown oval-framed pictures of Momma and Poppa. The pictures of his own bar mitzvah. Deborah would want these.

Should he see Alex? Rosy? Susan Geller? He heard Rosy and Susan were married. He really should. Hell, saying good-by is a rotten business. Just skip it. This was no bon voyage.

He sat at the table and wrote a note, which he was certain that Rachael and Wolf would receive, dividing his things and saying farewell.

He blotted and folded it.

The door creaked open and closed. Simon Eden was in the room with him.

“Bad news travels fast,” Andrei said.

“We have had a twenty-four-hour watch here. We hoped you’d come back.”

Andrei didn’t want to get into a discussion with Simon. He wanted nothing to sway his mind, throw him into turmoil, challenge his loyalty, play on his sympathy. He had made his decision.

“I’ve spent my life arguing,” Andrei said quickly. “I don’t want one now.”

Simon Eden was acquainted with the reality of Andrei’s words. Two Jews in a room will give you three opinions. His life had been an endless debate. Minute interpretations. Interpretations of interpretations. The kinds of Zionism, the variations of Judaism. Every man an eminent literary and musical critic. Every man having the personal answer to every problem. Debate ... talk, talk, talk, talk.

“I didn’t come to argue. Just to ask you what you are going to do. My people on the Aryan side tell me you made a contact with Roman. Did he give you a commission in the Home Army?”

“They don’t want anyone but tenth-generation red-blooded Polish Catholics.”

“I could have told you that. Jews in the ranks of the partisans are getting murdered for their boots and guns. And I could have told you the Home Army won’t back Jewish units. Going to make a run for it?”

“I think so.”

“Strange damn thing about us, Andrei. We are a race of individuals like none other. We are savage about our right to seek truth as individuals. We are ridiculous sometimes at the numbers of answers we have to the same problem or how we can confuse a simple issue with conversation.”

“It was the lack of unity that lost us Jerusalem in ancient times,” Andrei said. “It is the same damned thing that will destroy us here.”

Their talk was without anger. Simon was one who was always held in esteem by Andrei for his strength and for his unique ability to hold together a dozen factions of Jews engaged in ideological differences. “You say individualism is a weakness. I agree that it has been, at times. At the same time, it is also our greatest source of strength. The constant search for truth by a single man has been the key to survival.”

“Don’t trick me, Simon. I said I did not want to argue. Now you are trapping me into an argument on my right to argue.”

“Can I say that you have expected too much?”

“I? All I’ve ever wanted to do is—”

“I know damned well what you’ve wanted to do. Did it ever occur to you that we don’t have six hundred thousand Andrei Androfskis in the ghetto? They are just ordinary people clinging to a thread of life. They cling to a magic Kennkarte which allows them to work in slave labor. Some even sell their daughters’ bodies—they beg and plead—”

“Without leaders!” Andrei snapped.

“Do you forget that this country was trampled and its leaders killed? Do you dare say Alexander Brandel is not a leader? And Dave Zemba? Do you think Emanuel Goldman was not a leader? Are you ashamed of the courage of Wolf Brandel? Andrei, Alex hears nothing and sees nothing but the cry of hungry children. His only dogma is to put food into their bellies. And damn you, he has fought a hell of a war in his own way.”

Andrei shoved out of the chair. “Thanks for the lecture.”

Simon grabbed his arm. “Hear me out for one more minute.”

Andrei pulled his arm free. Simon was not begging or pleading. He had too much respect to slough Simon off.

“Go on.”

“You have begged to die stupidly, irrationally, unheard, in vain. No underground army will form until the people want one. We’re coming to the end of 1941, and in 1942 the people will want an army. They hear about the massacres in the east and they see the death rate climb to a hundred a day in the ghetto and they are not so afraid of reprisal any more and not so certain that Brandel has the answer for survival. Andrei, every idea, every man’s thinking is good or bad because it comes at the correct time. It was not the correct time for a fighting force before. Now it is becoming the correct time. People are thinking about it more. They are talking about it. They are starting to plot. To think in terms of guns.”

Andrei slipped back into the chair. Simon hovered over him, burning his arguments home with intensity.

“So much has been lost,” Andrei whispered. “So much to do.”

“Recontact Roman.”

“That bastard.”

“Never mind your personal feelings. Press him for arms.”

“Hell, you’re crazy, Simon. It’s too late. The Home Army will give us nothing but evasions. Piotr Warsinski has a gang of ghouls, and the Gestapo has a thousand informers. Our contacts on the Aryan side are flimsy. There is no real unity. We have no source for arms.”

“Did you ask for victory or the right to fight?”

“Are you with me now, Simon? Are you really with me?”

Simon dug into his pocket and pulled out a fat wad of bills. Hundred-zloty notes. “Buy guns,” he said.

From the moment that Gabriela heard the lightness in his steps, she knew that something wonderful had happened. He flung open the door, his face beaming, and he threw the money on the table and picked her up and whirled her around and around.

For the first time since the war Andrei seemed at peace. There was much to do and his own people would be battling him all the way, but by God, they were thinking his way. They knew, in some degree, that they had to find means to defend themselves.

Too little ... too late ... it did not seem to matter.

Chapter Twenty-nine

CHRIS PARKED HIS CAR opposite the ghetto gate facing the Square of the Iron Gates. An unshaven Polish Blue policeman picked his teeth with his little fingernail as he examined Chris’s pass and waved the barrier up.

A few steps inside the wall Chris was challenged by a pair of huskies in long gray coats and mirror-polished boots of the Jewish Militia.

Chris oriented himself quickly. He knew from Rosy where Deborah was most likely to be. His best chance to see her alone would be at the orphanage on Niska Street. The ghetto was filled with spies and informers, yet he felt that Horst von Epp was both too clever and sophisticated to use the crude tactics of having him tailed. Horst had Chris boxed in, anyhow. If he were to force his luck, the German risked scaring his prey to cover.

Chris walked along the wall beyond which the “Polish corridor” split the big and little ghettos. The streets were sticky with unswept dirt, and the pungent odors of filth filled his nostrils.

He approached the bridge which ran over the “Polish corridor” to the big ghetto. He stopped. There! On the foot of the bridge steps. The corpse of an emaciated woman. Enormous ghastly circles formed on the skin pulled taut by protruding bones. Chris backed away. He had seen corpses on the eastern front by the thousands—he remembered the massacre—but ... here ... dead of starvation. It was different. Foot traffic moved around the dead woman with no one paying the least attention.

Chris edged up the steps to the top of the bridge. He was imprisoned in barbed wire. He looked down into the “Polish corridor.” He had stood down there on the street so many times, looking up to where he now stood, hoping for a look at Deborah. He had been caught down there and beaten. He continued quickly over the bridge and down the steps into the big ghetto.

High barbed-wire walls surrounding Dr. Franz Koenig’s uniform factory greeted him. Slow movement on the other side of the wire by half-starved slave laborers. Brisk, arrogant movement along the guard posts by the Jewish Militia.

Each step now made him catch a vignette of squalor, of pain. Each step churned his queasy belly close to a vomit. A lice-riddled ragged remnant of what had once been a human being lay in front of him.

The mosaic of misery, the montage of horror became blurred. He was walking on a small square.

“Armbands! Buy armbands!”

“Books for sale. Twenty zlotys a dozen.” Spinoza for a penny, Talmud for a dime. A lifetime collection of wisdom. Buy it in gross lots for kindling ... keep my family alive one more day.

“Mattress for sale! Guaranteed lice-free!”

Two children blocked Chris’s way. Warped, inhuman. “Mister, a zloty!” one whined. The second, a smaller brother or sister too weak to cry for food. Only the lips trembled.

“Do you want a lady’s company? Nice virgin girl from a good Hassidic family. Only a hundred zlotys.”

“My son’s violin. Imported from Austria before the war ... Please, a beautiful instrument.”

“Mister, how much for my wedding ring? Solid gold.”

A long line of scraggly, ragged humanity getting a dole of watery broth at a soup kitchen. The line pressed forward, stepping wearily over a corpse of one who had died en route to the soup.

An old man collapses in the gutter with hunger. No one looks.

A child sits propped up against a wall, covered with sores and lice bites and burning with fever, moaning pitifully. No one looks.

Loudspeakers boom. “Achtung! All Jews in Group Fourteen will report tomorrow to the Jewish Civil Authority at 0800 promptly for deportation for volunteer labor. Failure to report for volunteer labor is punishable by death.”

The “kings” from the Big Seven with flour and meat and vegetables make their barters quietly, in whispers against the walls, in the alcoves, in the courtyards.

A Nazi sergeant from Sieghold Stutze’s Reinhard Corps stands in the middle of Zamenhof Street. Bike rikshas, the basic mode of transportation, swirl around him. Each riksha comes to a halt before the “master” and doffs his cap and bows.

Clang! Clang! The bulging red and yellow streetcar with the big Star of David on its front and sides.

“Achtung! Jews, listen! Green ration stamps are hereby ruled invalid.”

Another corpse ... another ... another.

Billboards filled with directives, BY ORDER OF THE JEWISH CIVIL AUTHORITY the building at Gensia 33 is declared contaminated.

Walls hold torn corners of posters and publications of the underground press ripped down by the Jewish Militia.

The Jewish Militia. Fat and brutal, beating a herd of hapless girls with their clubs as they push them north to their destination in the Brushmaker’s factory.

Chris doubled over in the seat before the desk in Susan Geller’s office at the orphanage. His face was chalky, his stomach churning, ready to rebel at one more sight, one more smell.

Susan closed the door and stood over him. He stumbled to his feet.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” Chris said. “I got back from the front and ran into a pile of trouble. You know it’s very difficult for me to get in here.”

Susan was immobile, wordless.

“I tried to get Rosy back.”

“I’m sure you did everything you could,” she said coldly. “It is just as well for him to be in the ghetto. With Ervin’s Jewish nose, the hoodlums would always attack him, even with his fancy immunity papers.”

“Where is he, Susan?”

“We live at Mila 19 with the others.”

Chris grunted. “Lord, I didn’t even bring you a wedding present.”

“It isn’t necessary.”

“Susan, is there anything I can do? Anything you want or need?”

She walked to the glass door which overlooked a sea of cots jammed together holding a hundred typhus-riddled children. Do? “Surely that must be the understatement of all time.”

Her coldness reached him. “Susan, what have I done?”

“Nothing, Chris. There is one thing you can do. It will be a very fine wedding present for me and Ervin. You know what kind of work Ervin does. I beg you not to betray him to the Germans.”

“I am sorry that you feel it necessary to say that to me.”

Susan turned on him. “Please, Mr. de Monti. No lectures about honor and humanity.”

“Rosy is my friend—”

“Horst von Epp is also your friend.”

Chris sank into the chair, shattered.

“I am sorry for the unpleasantries, Chris. These are unpleasant times. When a person is trying to survive he is apt to be rude to an old friend. Now, if you’ll let me go back to work ...”

“I want to see Deborah Bronski.”

“She isn’t here.”

“She is here.”

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

“She is going to have to.”

“I’ll give her your message.”

“Susan, before you go ... You’ve been close friends for many years—”

“We were the only two Jewesses allowed to study in a class of fifty nurses. We clung together for self-preservation.”

“Do you know about—”

“Ervin is my husband. He confides in me.”

“I have a chance to get her and her children out of Poland.”

Susan Geller turned from the door. Her homely face was clearly puzzled. There were many things she did not like about Christopher de Monti. There was something about him that reminded her of a Polish nobleman despite his loyalty to Ervin. The one thing she had no doubt about was his love for Deborah Bronski.

“Can you influence her?”

“I don’t know,” Susan answered. “Strange things happen to people under this pressure. Most people will do anything to survive. Many completely lose their souls, their sense of morality is shattered, they turn to weak masses of jelly. A very few seem to find sources of unbelievable strength. Deborah has become a single symbol of humanity to many dozens of children. I would say that a lesser woman would grab the chance to flee. ...”

“Tell her that I am waiting,” Chris said.

It took all the restraint he owned to contain the overpowering drive to sweep Deborah into his arms. She was thin, and the signs of weariness were in her face. But she was more beautiful than he remembered. Her eyes spoke a compassion that one can gain only through suffering. They stood before each other with lowered heads.

“I have never stopped hungering for you for a minute in all these months,” Chris blurted.

“This is hardly the time or the place for a balcony scene,” she answered stiffly. “I only agreed to see you to avoid an embarrassing argument.”

“All of this great pity you give. Is there none for me? Is there no word of consolation for the hours I’ve stood beneath the bridge praying to get a glimpse of you? Is there no iota of sympathy for all those nights I’ve drunk myself into a stupor from loneliness?”

The hardness flowed out of her. She had been cruel. She sat down and folded her hands in her lap, and they rested like a Mona Lisa’s.

“Listen to me without haste or anger,” Chris pleaded. “I can get you and the children safely out of Poland.”

Deborah blinked her eyes and frowned as though she really did not comprehend what he was saying. She stole a glance at him.

“Do you understand what I am saying?”

“There’s so much work here. Every day we lose two or three or four of our babies.”

“Deborah, your own people encourage escape. It is no sin. You owe the gift of life to your children.”

She became confused; she tried to piece together a line of logic. “My children are strong. We will fight this out as a family. Rachael and I have work ...”

He knelt before her. “Listen to me. I was at the capture of Kiev. Within a week after the German army entered, Special Action Kommandos rounded up nearly thirty-five thousand Jews. They were dragged out of basements and closets and barns. The Ukrainians helped hound them down for an extra ration of meat. Then they were marched to a suburb called Babi-Yar—Grandmother’s Pits. A thousand at a time they were stripped naked—men, women, children. They were lined up at the edge of the pits and shot in the back. Then bayoneted, then covered with lime—then another thousand were marched in. Thirty-three thousand in three days, and the Ukrainians cheered every time the guns went off. An insanity has taken over the Germans.”

Deborah was glassy-eyed with disbelief.

“I saw it with my own eyes!”

“Paul will keep us alive.”

“Paul has brought you to this. He has dishonored himself and sold himself to them so completely, they will never let him out alive.”

“Paul has only done this for us!”

“You don’t believe that yourself. He has done it for Paul. Now, listen. You’re leaving. I’ll have you picked up and forced out beyond your choice before I’d let you die.”

“You’ll never touch me again.”

Chris nodded and stood. “I know that,” he said weakly. “I have already resigned myself to the fact that I will never see you. I know that there can never be a life for us if Paul is left here. That doesn’t matter to me—all I want is for you to live.”

“I can’t leave him,” Deborah said.

“Ask him! I think he will let you and your son and daughter die before he faces this alone here.”

“That’s not true.”

“Ask him!”

Deborah tried to push her way to the door, but Chris grabbed her arms with a vise-like grip. She started a useless resistance. Then she stiffened.

“I’ll haunt you, Deborah. Every day and every night I’m waiting beyond the wall.”

“Let me go!”

“Haven’t we been punished enough? Do you want the death of your children as part of the penance too?”

“Please, Chris,” she begged.

“Tell me you don’t love me and you’re free of me.”

Deborah leaned against him and put her head on his chest and sobbed softly, and his strong arms folded about her gently. “That is my greatest sin,” she cried, “still loving you.”

Chris’s arms were empty. He watched her disappear among the cots in the ward.

Paul dozed in the overstuffed chair. She was sick with worry about him since the Germans closed the Civil Authority and moved their headquarters to the big ghetto at Zamenhof and Gensia, in the former ghetto post office. They would have to move soon, too, she was certain. House by house, the Germans were emptying the little ghetto on the south.

Deborah watched him over the top of her book. Sometimes his mind would go blank in the middle of a sentence and he would stare aimlessly, then try to mumble his way back to reality. He wanted to sleep, only to sleep. He was taking greater doses of pills to block from his mind the torment of the German directives.

The children never said it, but she knew. She knew they were ashamed of him.

God, why did I have to see Chris? No rational human being could avoid being swayed by the thought of leaving this chamber of horrors. There was less and less she could do about the wails of the pitiful ragamuffins. Babi-Yar ... Would it happen in Warsaw? Did she have the right to deny a try for life for Stephan and Rachael?

She doubted that Rachael would leave. She had sent her own daughter to a woman’s bed at the age of seventeen. She felt it would be the greater sin to yield to society’s dogmas of morality and find some morning the boy was gone forever and her child bear a lonely and unfulfilled cross. They had so little and so little time. But Rachael would not leave the boy. Deborah knew that as surely as she knew she would not leave Paul.

Perhaps she should send Stephan away by himself. He was a tenacious little boy, so much like his Uncle Andrei. So eager to fight. He would rebel.

Suppose she asked Paul. Would he let them go, or would he let them die first? Was Paul’s weakness for survival at any price so consuming that he would bring his family to doom out of sheer fear?

Paul blinked his eyes open and saw Deborah’s black eyes searching him questioningly.

“I must have dozed,” he said groggily. “Dear, what is it? Why do you look at me that way?”

She started at the realization that she had not heard him.

“Is something wrong, Deborah? Is there something you want to ask?”

“No,” she said. “I have the answer.”

Chapter Thirty

Journal Entry

IF YOU WANT TO be in movies,

You don’t have to travel far,

The ghetto is like Hollywood,

All here, have a

STAR.

COMPLIMENTS OF CRAZY NATHAN

Ervin Rosenblum has done a magnificent job as cultural secretary of Orphans and Self-Help. We now have a full Ghetto Symphony Orchestra, fifteen theatrical productions in Yiddish and Polish, a secret school for both primary education and religious training in each orphanage; art exhibitions, debates, poetry readings, etc., etc. Several individual artists perform in roving troupes. Most well known is Rachael Bronski, who has made her debut with the symphony playing Chopin’s Second Concerto. She is called the “Angel of the Ghetto.” A pity Emanuel Goldman was not there to see her great talent.

But ... our situation continues to degenerate. The death rate, mainly from typhus and starvation, climbs upward: July, 2200; August, 2650; September, 3300; October, 3800. So far in November, 150 a day. Strange, the suicide rate continues to drop. Conclusion: The weaker ones have killed themselves already. The rest are determined to survive. Each morning families deposit new corpses on the sidewalk. No money for funerals. The “sanitation teams” come along with hand pushcarts, shovel the corpses up, twenty or thirty to a cart, and wheel them to the cemetery for burial in mass graves. The spectacle of death and starvation no longer impresses anyone. We must immunize ourselves. How crass.

Food comes in daily to Transferstelle. There is simply not enough to feed everyone. The Big Seven has shoved prices so high. Orphans and Self-Help is barely able to get bare minimum rations. The Big Seven has a virtual control on the licensed bakeries. The bakers are the “kings” of the ghetto.

Smuggling has become a way of life. No one can stop it. Napoleon tried and failed. The Germans cannot stop it. Even if they were scrupulous and honest, it would be impossible. Every guard is corrupt, Jewish Militia on the inside, the Polish Blues and the Germans on the outside. They all “play” for the right price. Why should the Germans even try to stop smuggling? Payoff money is lining the pockets of their top officials.

Smuggling runs from primitive forms to highly organized operations. In its most basic form, small, quick children dart about and move through small cracks in (or one of a half dozen tunnels under) the ghetto wall. Some of these children are sole providers for their families. They risk going into the Aryan side to scavenge in the garbage cans, barter if they have anything to barter, beg at the squares, or steal. One poor child was stuck in a crack in the wall. He was beaten by police on both sides of the wall.

The main transfer point of smuggled goods is outside the ghetto where the Jewish and Catholic cemeteries have a common wall. It has been breached in a dozen places and is a sort of “free trading zone.” Grave-diggers who work the detail for mass graves are the main contact people. However, one must be in the upper bracket of smugglers to work the cemeteries.

Needless to say, the Big Seven has the most profitable and highly organized operation. They have paid off all down the line. However, every once in a while the Germans put on a show and catch a Big Seven smuggler and shoot him. It makes Kleperman appear not to be in league with the Germans. I’m certain he knows in advance.

The Big Seven built an underground pipe under the wall to pipe in milk from the Aryan side. Sacks of flour and other goods are thrown over the wall at given times in given places. Portable ladders come up out of nowhere, go against the wall, and in three or four minutes, while the guard turns his back, in come the goods. The Big Seven has even constructed a portable ramp and brought in a live cow on it.

Epitome of the smuggler’s art is the large funeral (which only the wealthy can afford). The Big Seven controls the undertaking licenses. Their funeral vans always re-enter the ghetto with a ton or so of goods. When business is slow, I hear the Big Seven stages fake funerals with empty coffins.

To control prices, the Big Seven sells only part of its goods; a shortage raises prices. Food is stored all over the ghetto in basements. I hear that Mila 18, directly across the street from us, holds one of the largest caches. An “independent’ smuggler, Moritz Katz, runs a band from Mila 18.

Oddity. Along Leszno Street is the freak boundary of the “Polish corridor.” The wall slices the courthouse in half, so it can be entered from both sides. Jews enter from the ghetto through a basement. Poles use the main entrance on the Aryan side. Meetings are held in certain chambers, offices, and corridors. Kleperman’s “authorized” representatives have space in the courthouse much like one buys a seat on the Stock Exchange (or a London prostitute has a station). For a broker’s fee, Kleperman’s “authorized” representatives trade gold, dollars, and precious stones.

The most horrible of all sights in the ghetto are the “snatchers.” Starved children prowl near the bakeries and, driven by hunger, grab bread from people as they leave. They eat it on the run. Often children have been beaten half to death while cramming the bread into their bellies.

The Good Fellowship Club appointed a special committee to analyze the always elusive mystery of what the Germans are really up to. Information from the massacres in the east. There are definitely four main groups of “Action Kommandos,” SS men trained for massacre.

Group A. Commanded by SS Major General Franz Stahlecker in the Baltic-Leningrad area.

Group B. Commanded by SS General Artur Nebe, White Russia.

Group C. Otto Rasch (rank?) in Kiev on the southern front. The Babi-Yar massacre of thirty-three thousand in three days seems to be his brain child.

Group D. SS Major General Otto Ohlendorf (is he the noted engineer of pre-war times? Hard to believe) in central Russia.

The method is basic. Roundup, victims dig their own graves, are stripped, shot in the back. This apparently amuses the local populations, who are giving full co-operation. The SS have augmented their ranks with Ukrainians and Lithuanians. Reports of massacres so far at Rovno, Dvinsk, Kovno, and Riga. They say seventy thousand have been shot at Wilno.

We are trying to determine what the shifts in general German policy are and how these massacres will apply to us in Warsaw and the General Government Area. Have the Germans established the number of people they will need to run their slave-labor factories? Obviously the action groups were formed in advance of the invasion of Russia.

Ervin Rosenblum develops the theory of the German “apologetics.” They go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “innocence” and establish their “justifications.” This, of course, means they know they are doing something evil and feel they must cover their tracks.

The German language has been bastardized by the Nazis with their “joy through labor” ... “Aryan-master race” ... “land to live” ... “German destiny” ... “the true ones” ... “folk people” ... “führer” ... “inhuman treatment of ethnics,” etc., etc.

The whole text on behavior toward Jews also has been compounded in this new “language.” The basic “theory” is that the Jews have always been the enemies of the German people and are therefore trying to destroy them, so the Germans must destroy the Jews purely out of “self-defense.” They point up to the economic competition with classic portraits of the cunning Jew who has “always hated the German” and robs the German of his right to make a living.

Here are examples of their new double-meaning language:

Reservation—ghetto.

Legitimate war booty—wealth stolen or confiscated from Jews.

Contaminated—to be confiscated.

Sanitation measures—an excuse for mass executions.

Unpleasantness—the carrying out of mass murder.

Shot while trying to escape—a common phrase for someone killed in prison.

Resettlement—deportation with confiscation of all property.

Voluntary labor—slave labor.

Sub-humans—Jews, Slavs, gypsies, political and criminal prisoners, clergy, homosexuals (other than German), and others unfit to breathe Aryan air.

Mongrelization—the excuse to “get rid of sub-humans” who will contaminate the pure German blood lines.

Bolshevik-profiteer-warmonger—almost always used before or behind the word “Jew” to pound in the identification.

Now then, theorizes Silberberg, the playwright, the Germans go to fantastic trouble to make themselves truly believe what they are saying. The verbal acrobatics are played out. Basis: In order to live in the ghetto, one must break the law. Therefore, everyone who is alive is a criminal in the German lexicon and can legally be executed. Incredible?

Here are some of their “proofs”:

They will go to great trouble to hold a kangaroo court trial, documented fully, to punish a common thief or vagrant. They will make an exhaustive investigation over a single typhus death to “prove” their interest in human lives. They will show “shock” at the brutality of the Jewish Militia, which must be brutal to enforce their rule.

They allowed a few schools to reopen to “prove” German love of freedom of education. Because we are unable to support many schools, have no textbooks, fuel, facilities, and the children are too sick and weak to attend, this “proves” the subhuman Jews will not educate their children.

Ghettos have been made to “isolate” the warmongers and filthy Jews from the Poles. And to protect the Jews from the vengeance of the Poles once the Poles understood what the Jews had brought upon them.

More “proof of the German case: Special SS film units have entered the ghetto. They film the delousing sheds. Have you, ever seen a man fifty pounds underweight, freezing cold, and hairless? German narration shows this is a “sub-human” disease carrier, and the appearance portrays just that.

Bearded rabbis are forced to pose in the warehouses at Transferstelle beside tons of food while the narration “proves” how the Gestapo located secret caches which these old bearded Jews hoarded while their neighbors starved.

The Jewish Militia is always willing to oblige with a show of brutality which, when captured on film, finds the obvious commentary of Jew destroying Jew.

Their prize exhibits are the smugglers’ orgies. The smugglers are mostly men of low mentality, lower morality. At their clubs they gladly pose gorging food, drinking, brawling, in orgies with prostitutes. The Germans then plant garbage cans filled with scraps outside the clubs and photograph beggar children clawing around in them.

Most sinister move in the German master plan is the creation of the illusion that the Jews are doing all this to one another. The dregs of society in the Jewish Militia, the emasculated Jewish Civil Authority, the smugglers. This is “final vindication” for the Germans—of themselves.

What is next on the Nazi blueprint? Who knows? Nothing out of Berlin comes in the form of written orders (further indication of their knowledge of their evil). SS General Alfred Funk carries it all in verbally. Two phrases in the German lexicon appear more and more. We do not know what they mean and they terrify us.

En route to unknown destination.

Final solution of the Jewish problem.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Only a man of Rabbi Solomon’s stature would dare risk walking the ghetto streets alone at midnight. He turned the corner into Mila Street in a half trot, then slowed to a walk when his ancient legs rebelled, then took up the trot again.

At Mila 19 he grunted up the steps and pounded on the door. The girl on night watch opened it, alarmed. “Rabbi, what are you doing out this hour of night?”

“Where is Alexander Brandel?” he gasped, fighting to regain his wind.

“Come in.”

Through Alex’s office, down the corridor to the basement landing. The girl scratched a match and lit a candle and took the old man’s hand. They went down a step at a time. The stairs creaked beneath their weight. He squinted to adjust his eyes to the sudden blackness. The basement was musty and dark. An aisle cut through two rows of packing cases all marked with supplies for the Orphans and Self-Help Society. She led him down the row and stopped before a particular crate some four feet in height. She knocked on the case with six short raps, then pulled open a false door, lowered her head, and entered the secret room where Alexander and Ervin Rosenblum looked up from the voluminous notes being prepared for entry in the journal.

“Rabbi! What on earth ...”

“The news! I have just heard the news on the radio. America is in the war!”

Part Three

NIGHT

Chapter One

Journal Entry

SINCE PEARL HARBOR, EVENTS have occurred with stunning rapidity. Our first natural impulse of gladness has faded to bitter reality. America is being badly beaten in the Pacific. Suddenly we are cut off from our main source of income, American Aid. Our cash reserve can only hold us for days. We are frantically trying to find new avenues of revenue.

Two days after Pearl Harbor, detachments of Waffen SS from Trawniki Concentration Camp carried out a swift roundup raid at our farm at Wework. In a fell swoop we have lost fifty of the cream of our youth. Was I wrong to keep the farm in operation, knowing this might happen? Where could we have put fifty extra people at Mila 19? I do not know. After the roundup they were put on a cattle car (along with a trainload of deportees from the Baltics).

Then unfolds a most unusual tale. The train took a crooked, uncertain course toward Germany. Obviously slave labor at the end of the line. By some miracle, Ana Grinspan was working in the ghetto of Czenstochowa at the time the train stopped there. (Second thought, Czenstochowa is quite a site of miracles; i.e., Christian versions. This is the home of the “Black Madonna,” the “Luminous Mountain,” and the “Miracle of the Mount.”) Ana (traveling as the Aryan Tanya Tartinski) learned somehow that there were Bathyrans in one of the cattle cars. She followed the train into Germany. The internees were put up at a temporary relocation camp near Dresden. Ana entered the lager armed with false papers, a tall story, and Jewish hutzpah and managed to bring out Tolek Alterman and ten of our youngsters.

This girl, Ana Grinspan, is fantastic! This is the fourth time she has crossed into Germany, walked into concentration camps, and freed key people. Her own story is recorded fully in Volume 4A of the journal. Someday when it is read I wonder if her exploits will be believed?

Tolek and Ana got back here to Warsaw. Tolek immediately went to work for Andrei. The other ten who escaped are scattered. Shall we ever hear from them again? Or the ones in the Dresden lager?

Tolek tells one story of the trip into Germany that I must record here. The train was all open cars; everyone half froze to death. It was a torturous, stop-and-start trip. It took three days to reach the town of Radomsk near the German border, where they stopped again at a siding to give priority to a military train for the eastern front. Dozens of curious peasants gathered about the train. Our people, who had not eaten or drunk for three days, were near dead with thirst. They begged the peasants to pass them a few handfuls of snow to quench the thirst. The peasants first made them throw out their rings, money, and valuables. Then ... they got a handful of snow.

Mira and Minna Farber were captured on the Aryan side of Warsaw along with our major contact, Romek. Both girls died under torture at Gestapo House. Romek is still alive, but I understand he is blind and badly crippled. This shatters our major contact on the Aryan side. I am sick about the Farber girls. They were wonderful, sweet, quiet girls. Twenty-two or -three, I believe. Cursed with non-Jewish faces which made them natural “runners.” Thank God their parents are both gone.

Ana Grinspan is staying in Warsaw to try to reset our shattered runner system. Things are black in Krakow, anyhow. Bathyran House was raided and the underground press there seized.

The day after our farm was raided at Wework all the Toporol farms were closed. We lost several hundred of our best people and irreplaceable food supplies.

A.B.

Wolf Brandel, eighteen, wisened and toughened, became the first lieutenant of Andrei Androfski. Although Andrei and Alexander made peace with each other, a certain coolness had developed between them.

Alexander had enough of a sense of history to realize that the initiative and his philosophy were slowly slipping from his control. Andrei’s approach to resistance was creeping over them. From time to time Alexander held a line, but if Andrei pressed an issue he retrenched. At first Alexander would permit no illegal activity at Mila 19. Now Andrei demanded a second secret room in the basement of Mila 19 be dug for the manufacture and storage of arms. Alex avoided a showdown, afraid of the growing power that Andrei could gather behind him. He allowed the room to be built.

This second room was carved out so that it ran beneath the center of Mila Street. Andrei brought in Jules Schlosberg, a pre-war chemist of note, for the purpose of creating weapons which could be made cheaply with accessible components. Jules’ first weapon was a bottle bomb requiring only low-grade fuel, a wick, and a plastic detonation cap. It was a foolproof fire bomb. Next Schlosberg worked to perfect a more complicated weapon: a grenade which could be built inside the casing of an eight-inch length of water pipe and exploded by contact percussion.

On the Aryan side, arms were difficult to obtain. As soon as they came into demand, the price spiraled. The Home Army had the money and the contacts to corner the market Roman evaded the frantic efforts of Simon Eden and the Jews to obtain a share of weapons.

Each purchase of a pistol became a large, involved project. A weapon such as a rifle was almost unheard of. A machine gun did not exist. For his arsenal Andrei concentrated on Schlosberg’s “inventions,” which were manufactured by Bathyrans in hidden rooms around the ghetto. While Rodel, the Communist, co-operated on matters of Self-Help, he was jealous of his arms sources. The Revisionists at Nalewki 37 remained aloof on both self-help and arms. Andrei was able to obtain ten pistols of six different calibers, each with only a dozen rounds of ammunition. Although it seemed completely ridiculous in the face of a German army that had conquered all of the world it sought, Andrei was content with his work and had a rather pleasant attitude that at the right time and the right place his microscopic might would cause a mighty roar.

Andrei’s main source of pistols was a small ordnance shed near the main train depot on Jerusalem Boulevard, where wounded German officers were transferred from the eastern front back to Germany. Their sidearms were checked in for reissue, and in a rush a few could conveniently be “lost” by the German sergeant in charge of the detail.

Immediately after American Aid folded, Alexander Brandel got a radio message to the two Jewish members of the Polish government in exile in London, Artur Zygielboim and Ignacy Schwartzbart, with a plea for emergency funds. A message in Hebrew was radioed back using passages in the Bible as reference to advise them that the funds were being flown in by British aircraft and would be parachuted to the Home Army. A later confirmation of the parachute drop came, and Tolek Alterman was dispatched from the ghetto into the Aryan side to receive the money from Roman.

When Alterman returned to the ghetto, Andrei and Ana Grinspan were called to Alexander Brandel’s office.

Tolek came in and took off his worker’s cap, appearing strange to them, as they had not yet adjusted to the shaved head. The long floppy hair that had been his trademark had been ordered shorn to give him a more Aryan appearance.

Tolek dramatically placed a bundle of American dollar bills on Alexander’s desk. “I was only able to get one third of the amount that was parachuted in for us,” he announced.

Alex’s face sagged.

Andrei sat with his legs stretched out, the heel of one boot balanced on the toe of the other. He stared at the tip of his toe.

“That arrogant son of a bitch Roman,” Tolek snorted in growing rage.

“Don’t waste your time chewing up the furniture, Tolek,” Andrei said softly. “The fact that you were able to contact that bastard Roman and even get him to admit he received the money, much less turn any of it over to you, was an accomplishment.”

“I’ll tell you why he turned over part of it,” Ana Grinspan said. “So we would not stop future parachute drops. Roman knows that so long as we get a crumb we’ll keep the money coming.”

Alex rubbed his temples, tried to think. “We need more so badly. When will the British fly in more?”

“Ten days. Two weeks,” Andrei answered. “As quickly as it arrives from America.”

“Then, Andrei, we have to get one of our people there when it is dropped.”

“Forget it. Roman won’t permit that. Take what he gives us and keep our mouths shut.”

“But we can’t hold the line,” Alex cried. He was about to accuse Andrei of skimming too much off for his fool weapons inventions in the basement but thought better of it. “Dave Zemba told me this morning that he has a plan to obtain zlotys here in the ghetto,” he said with desperation in his voice. “But we must have the other money.”

“One thing is obvious,” Ana Grinspan said. “With Romek gone, we must have a new contact on the Aryan side. As soon as we do we must get in direct contact with our people in London and arrange our own drops.”

Andrei looked up from the toe of his boot, sensing Ana’s thoughts, anticipating her next words. She stood over him. “What about Gabriela Rak?” she asked.

Andrei did not flick an eye. He shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “I’ll ask her.”

He left the meeting knowing what he must do. Andrei had always felt that someday he must lose Gabriela, that his time with her was borrowed time. When the ghetto was formed he knew, too, that it would be only a matter of time before someone brought up her name for underground work. The moment had arrived. He had carefully rehearsed for it so that when her name was mentioned he would show no evidence of concern.

Andrei sat alone in his flat, meditating and gathering himself for the task ahead. He began collecting memories of her from that first moment at the grand ball of the Ulanys. It was so very long ago. He had been sitting right here at this table reading—what was it?—Steinbeck, when Gabriela came through the door and begged for the right to love him. And he remembered all the individual episodes of the warmth and comfort always there when he plunged into depths of despair.

The next day, still showing no outward sign to his friends, he went to the basement of Mila 19 where Jules Schlosberg had completed his first pipe grenade. Andrei, of course, was most anxious to test the weapon somewhere in an open field away from the ghetto. He tied the pipe to his left forearm. It had been designed so that it could be hidden on a man, fitted between the elbow and wrist. He told Ana that he would see Gabriela about setting up her place on Shucha Street as a contact point, then left the ghetto.

At Gabriela’s apartment, the moment he saw her he thought he would falter. She wore that same expression that told of the strain of listening for him, anxiety, relief at the sight of him. The weak smile. The trembling embrace. When she touched him he thought he would die before being able to go through with it.

“Come, dear,” she said, “I have some dinner.”

“Sorry. I can’t stay.”

“You’ll be back later tonight?”

“No.”

“You look so strange, Andrei. What is it?”

“I want to talk to you about something.” He managed to look placid, almost bored. “We’ve had to do a lot of reorganizing. It’s getting more and more difficult for me to get in and out of the ghetto. Today I had to tag onto a labor battalion going out as a road gang. Anyhow, everyone feels I should stay in the ghetto,” he lied. “Besides, it’s getting extremely dangerous for me to see you. It would be only a matter of time until I’m trailed here.”

“Then I’ll come into the ghetto with you, of course,” she said.

“Well, as a matter of fact, that wouldn’t be suitable.”

“You never did make a good liar,” she said. “What’s really on your mind?”

“This is the last time I’ll be seeing you, Gaby. I came to say good-by. It’s not easy—”

“Why? I have a right to know.”

“I don’t want a scene.”

“I assure you there will be no scene.”

He sucked in a deep breath. “Ana has been in Warsaw since a week after Pearl Harbor. We’ve had a lot of business together and naturally have been seeing a lot of each other.”

“Go on.”

“I wish you wouldn’t insist.”

“I do insist.”

“Very well. The night that Romek and the Farber sisters were taken to Gestapo House she was at my flat. Ana was pretty tired and upset as you can imagine. Well, one thing led to another ...”

Andrei watched Gabriela’s back stiffen with the hurt from his words and he watched her eyes grow watery. “I don’t have to draw you a diagram. You know that Ana and I were once ... Well, she’s older and better now. All things equal, it is a very good arrangement for both of us.”

He stopped when she abruptly slapped his face. Then he shrugged. “I don’t see why you have to take that attitude. Frankly, let’s admit it. We are getting a little tired of each other. At least I am. Well, that’s life. We should be civilized and shake hands and wish each other luck. After all ...”

“Get out!”

Andrei walked briskly down the street, knowing that her eyes were on his back. He turned the corner out of her sight and stopped and leaned against the building and touched the place where she had slapped him and choked back the tears. Insurmountable grief overcame him, and he sank to a sitting position on the pavement and dropped his head into his arms, which were drawn around his knees.

“Drunk,” several people commented, passing him by.

A pair of Polish Blue policemen hovered over him. “Get to your feet,” one ordered, prodding him with the club.

“Leave me alone,” Andrei mumbled, “just leave me alone.”

They bent down on either side of him, grabbed him under the armpits, and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s see your Kennkarte!”

Andrei grabbed them by the scruffs of their necks and banged their heads together. Both of them reeled about, bloody and half-senseless. Andrei staggered down the street, blinded by his own tears.

Across the street a pair of German soldiers crisscrossed in square movements before the iron gates of the home of a high Nazi. Andrei became aware of the pipe grenade tied to his arm. His right hand fished up the sleeve of his left arm and pulled it free.

He waited until the Germans approached each other and timed his throw to hit at their feet as they crossed. The pipe arched end over end, hit the sidewalk, gave one short clatter. Then a flash and a racket and then screams.

Ana waited in Andrei’s flat. His dazed eyes, his incoherent movement alarmed her.

“Andrei!”

He shook his head hard, spiraling back to reality.

“What happened? What’s wrong? What did she say?”

Andrei lurched for the cabinet holding his hoard of a half bottle of vodka. A stiff drink straightened him up. “What would you expect her to say when I broke in unannounced and found her and her Polish lover rolling around on the bed?”

“Oh, Andrei! I am sorry.”

“Never mind—never mind. I’ve been suspecting it for a long time. No matter. Tomorrow I’ll go out and start setting up other contacts.”

In the days after, Andrei suffered a torment he did not realize existed. Throughout the nights he sulked in agony, trying to find a secret source of strength to keep him from crawling back to Gabriela. He was unable to eat. He became weak. He slept only when drugged exhaustion came over him, and his sleep was in snatches filled with teasing, hurting dreams. Each memory of his Gabriela plunged him to a new depth of torment. He moved about the ghetto with a listlessness that matched the listlessness of life around him. It was as though the will to live had left him for the first time.

A few days before Christmas, Andrei dragged himself up the stairs to his flat.

Gabriela Rak stood behind the table. He had seen her in dreams with haunting reality. But now—a hallucination in the middle of the day! The end was coming. He knew he was losing his mind. The vision refused to disappear. “Gaby?” he said, half frightened.

“Yes,” she answered in a voice so crisp as to dispel the illusion.

“What the hell are you doing in the ghetto!” he roared. “How did you get in?”

“You are not the sole custodian of cleverness in the human race.”

“I demand to know—”

“Kindly don’t shout.”

“—how you got in.”

“I work for the Ursuline Sisters, remember? The convent has a church. My good friend Father Kornelli is the priest. Father Kornelli told me that Father Jakub at the Convert’s Church needed more candles for Christmas day, so I volunteered to bring them. Wasn’t that nice of me?”

Suddenly Andrei felt the presence of someone else in the flat. He turned his eyes slowly to the kitchen. Ana stood in the doorway. “Hello, Andrei,” she said.

He looked from Ana to Gabriela to Ana to Gabriela. He turned crimson. Caught red-handed!

“Really, Andrei,” Ana said, “you have become a frightful liar. I should be angry, for you assault my honor.”

“Which do you think is worse, Ana, Andrei’s story about you and him or the story about me rolling around in bed with my Polish lover?”

“Actually, both are corkers. By the way, Andrei, did you ever get around to telling Jules Schlosberg that his grenade works? Fortunately for us, the Gestapo has blamed it on Home Army.”

“All right—all right,” Andrei said, “enough fun. Ana, tell Gaby how Mira and Minna Farber died.”

The mood of foolery burst.

“Go on, tell her, Ana. No? Well, I will. After the Gestapo finished with them they were turned over to the Reinhard Corps barracks for sport. Stutze led the parade. A hundred more of his sportsmen followed. They continued raping them for hours after they were dead. Raping their corpses. Ana sent me to ask you to take their place in Warsaw.”

“That would never happen to me, dear. I carry a vial of poison.”

“I don’t want any of it to happen to you. None of it!”

“You’re shouting again.”

“Ana, for God’s sake—tell her.”

“I’ll tell you, Andrei,” Gabriela said. “I’ll tell you I have watched the only man I have ever loved come to me time after time after time with his heart eaten away because of the indifference of the Polish people. I am ashamed and I am humiliated for the way they have turned their backs on this terrible thing. Now you ask me, too, to be indifferent I am going to carry my share of this. I am going to work with Ana, whether you forbid it or not.”

Andrei turned his back on both of them and stared glumly, blankly, out of the window.

“I guess you don’t need me here,” Ana whispered to Gabriela. Gabriela saw her to the door. They touched cheeks and she left. Gaby drew the bolt on the door and walked to the center of the room. Andrei continued his sulking for a long, long time, berating himself for the rotten break he had given Gabriela by ever meeting her. Finally he turned around.

Gabriela had taken her dress off. It lay on the floor at her feet. She whisked her slip over her head in a delicate motion and let it crumple on top of her dress.

“Why, Andrei, you’re blushing.”

“For God’s sake, this is no time for ...”

She retreated to the bed and lay down and beckoned him with her forefinger. “Come,” she said, “let me show you how I take care of my other lover.”

Andrei Androfski surrendered unconditionally.

It was night. Gabriela came out of her sleep laughing. Andrei sat up, startled. When his heart stopped racing he turned to her. “What’s so damned funny at two o’clock in the morning?”

“I forgot to deliver the candles to Father Jakub!”

And Andrei roared. “Hell! They’re only converts. In a pinch they can de-kosherize some of Rabbi Solomon’s stock.”

They settled into each other’s arms and spoke with that particular endearment known only to those who are very much in love and who feel they have discovered something unique in the universe.

“We have had something, Gaby. More than most people have in a lifetime.”

“There is only one Andrei Androfski. He makes me very sad and he makes me very happy, but I am so glad he is mine. I have more wonderment—more fulfillment—than a hundred ordinary women have in their hundred ordinary lives.”

“No regrets?”

“No regrets. I have been happier with you than a woman has a right to expect.”

“I feel that way about you, Gaby. I wonder why God has been so good to me.”

“Promise me, Andrei, you'll never again try to send me away.”

“I promise—never again.”

“Because I am prepared to take anything. Whatever lies ahead, we go it together, and if the very worst comes, I am happy.”

“Oh, Gabriela ... Gabriela ... Gabriela ...”

“Love ... love ... love ... love ...”

Chapter Two

Journal Entry

GABRIELA RAK HAS GIVEN us all a shot in the arm. Why didn’t we use her earlier? I guess because Andrei tried to shield her. A natural, forgivable impulse. Her first action was to have Father Kornelli organize a dozen young priests about Warsaw who agreed not to register the deaths in their parishes with the authorities. In this way Gabriela (through the priests) can purchase the Kennkarten from the families of the deceased. We estimate in the neighborhood of twenty thousand hidden Jews on the Aryan side. With Aryan Kennkarten they can at least get ration books.

The Ursuline Sisters have always been sympathetic and have taken as many children from us as they possibly can. They have enlisted similar help from the Sisters of the Order of the Lady Immaculate and the Sisters Szarytki of the municipal hospitals in Warsaw.

Gaby has rented flats for three more of our runners (code names: Victoria, Regina, Alina), whose main job is to supply money to hidden Jews.

Andrei tells me her flat on Shucha Street contained a windowless alcove two meters deep. A bookcase was built across it on hinges. Andrei says it is impossible to detect there is a hidden room behind the bookcase.

Zygielboim and Schwartzbart in London radioed us that fifteen thousand dollars had been dropped for us to the Home Army. Tolek Alterman was able to get only $1650. We have put an urgent priority on establishing our own direct contact with England.

Gabriela traveled to Gdynia (where her father was a key engineer in building the port) to see an old friend, Count Rodzinski. He is almost unique, a sympathetic nobleman. His estate includes several kilometers of coast line and he owns several boots. He made a successful trial run to Karlskrona, Sweden. This could be an enormous break for us. From his estate we can smuggle out key people, and from Sweden we can bring in American funds as well as visas and passports. (Our forgeries here are expensive and crude.)

What could we accomplish with a thousand Poles like Gabriela Rak—or a hundred—or two dozen?

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Of the two, Father Kornelli was far more nervous than Gabriela Rak as they sat in the anteroom of the office of Archbishop Klondonski. The room had a bare, cold, dark, musty appearance. The walls were lined with expressionless statues.

Father Kornelli was young and highly excitable, one of a handful of priests moved to action by the happenings in the ghetto. To him it was a simple basic rule that the saving of lives was the carrying out of Christ’s work.

Monsignor Bonifacy opened the door to the archbishop’s office. “His Grace will see you now.”

Archbishop Klondonski studied them from behind his desk. He was a square, squat man with blond hair, blue eyes, and rugged features that revealed his Slavic peasant ancestry. He was deceptively simple in appearance.

The monsignor, on the other hand, was a thin, gaunt man with slender, even delicate features and dark, penetrating eyes which hinted a shrewd, probing mind.

Gabriela and Father Kornelli kissed the archbishop’s ring, and he waved them into chairs opposite him. Monsignor Bonifacy slipped into a chair across the room, watching, listening, unnoticed.

“Gabriela Rak!” Klondonski said expansively, in the manner of a politician running for office. “By chance the daughter of Fryderyk Rak?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A fine man. A great Pole. I remember him when he was one of the engineers building the port of Gdynia. I was a young priest at the time, not much older than Father Kornelli. Gdynia was my first parish.”

Gabriela studied his open pleasantness and calculated it was a ruse with which he disarmed his visitors.

“If I am not mistaken,” the churchman continued, “he met an untimely death in Switzerland.”

“Your Grace has a phenomenal memory.”

“And your mother—and sister, was it?”

“They live in America.”

“A good place these days. Great Pole, your father. Now, tell me about yourself, young lady.”

“After finishing my schooling I returned to Warsaw and until the war I worked as an aide in the American Embassy. I am now teaching at the Ursuline Convent.”

“Ah, yes.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling like an amiable Friar Tuck, reasonably assured her request would be nominal and in the nature of a personal favor. “And your problem, my child?”

“I am here to speak to Your Grace in behalf of the Jewish Orphans and Self-Help Society in the ghetto.”

The momentum of the conversation stopped. Kiondonski’s blue eyes lost their sweet sparkle. He covered his temporary puzzlement by tapping his fingertips together in mock meditation.

“There is imminent peril that thousands of children will die of starvation in the next few months unless immediate help is forthcoming.”

Bonifacy spoke quickly. “Your Grace has studied the report on the situation.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, taking the cue. “Yes, we have been concerned, naturally.”

“While His Grace expressed concern,” Bonifacy continued to refresh his superior’s memory, “and we concluded in our report that there are hardships in the ghetto, it is a reflection of the times in Poland.”

“Yes, my dear,” said Klondonski, “we are all undergoing hardships.”

“It is difficult to comprehend,” Gabriela answered swiftly, “that Your Grace could study an impartial report and fail to discern the difference between mass starvation and rampant disease in the ghetto and mere privation out here. People are dying off in there at a rate of over five thousand a month.”

Bonifacy spoke in a slow measured whisper now. “Our reports are based on examinations of the ghettos in Poland by a responsible international body, a commission of the Swiss Red Cross. They will be in Warsaw again next week. To date their reports do not bear out your contentions. We feel that the Jews are inclined to a natural tendency to exaggerate.”

Gabriela looked to Father Kornelli for support. Willful cowardice? Closed minds? Fear? A crass expression of anti-Semitism?

“Your Grace ... Monsignor ...” Father Kornelli said unevenly. “You must necessarily realize that any Swiss report is based on expediency and fear. While I do not have the details of their investigations I am quite certain they are seeing only what the Germans wish seen, listening only to those with whom the Germans will let them speak. Switzerland is vulnerable to German invasion and defenseless. They have everything to lose by getting the Germans angry. If you wish the truth, I suggest you call in Father Jakub, who heads our Convent’s congregation inside the ghetto.”

“You do want the truth, Your Grace?” Gabriela asked bluntly.

The round Polish face of Archbishop Klondonski reddened. He did not want the truth. He simmered down and weighed his words with astute care, for his adversaries were sharp and persistent. “We do have a natural humanitarian concern. Yet the Catholic Church is not a political body, a welfare agency, or an underground. Whether or not we like the present occupants of power is a moot point. The fact is, they do constitute the government of Poland. We have a clearly outlined duty to perform. We cannot enter the Church into any schemes in wholesale defiance of authority.”

“It seems to me, Your Grace, that our Church was born in defiance of the authority of Rome,” Gabriela said. “If you would only see the cardinal in Krakow. If we could organize a thousand convents to take five children each ... If ...”

The archbishop held up his hand. “I have closed my eyes and turned my back and shut my ears to those priests and nuns who have engaged in these activities. But my office is for the spiritual welfare—”

“Your Grace, this is basic Christianity we are pleading for.”

“—the spiritual welfare of the Polish people,” he finished, ignoring the interruption.

“Those are Polish people behind the wall.”

“Not really, Miss Rak. The fact of the matter is, we could do more for them if they agreed to conversion. Now, if they allowed us to give their children instructions in Catholicism—”

Gabriela came to her feet. “Your Grace! I am shocked! You cannot demand what God has decided.”

“I will overlook your rudeness and forgive because of the tensions of the times. I suggest penance.”

What was left of Gabriela’s restraint exploded. “I will not forgive yours. And I suggest penance for you, sir! For every child who dies within your power of saving.”

The archbishop was on his feet, as was Monsignor Bonifacy. A frightened Father Kornelli knelt and kissed the archbishop’s ring. He held it in Gabriela’s direction.

She looked at his hand. “You are not the representative of the Jesus Christ my father taught me of,” she said, and walked from the room.

Chapter Three

Journal Entry

STRANGE STUDIES ARE BEING initiated. Dr. Glazer told me six months ago that he had cancer and his time was limited. A few weeks ago he became very ill. Subsequent examination also revealed a severe case of malnutrition. Glazer has chosen to starve to death so that the Orphans and Self-Help doctors can initiate through him the world’s first comprehensive medical study on starvation. There is a mania to have some good come out of even this basest form of human death. Each day the doctors meet and hold forums on the mental and physical changes of those dying of hunger. Most all of them have malnutrition themselves and discuss their own cases. (The full study of starvation is carried as a separate volume of the journal, 9A.) Dr. Glazer dictates his symptoms, his mental changes. The patterns are shrinking flesh, gauntness, skin changing color, weakness, running sores, depressions, hallucinations, gnarling bones, bloating stomachs. A Jewish gift to posterity—a detailed account of what it is like to starve to death.

Irony. This week a shipment of wheat and tons of potatoes poured in to Transferstelle and was distributed without cost to the orphanages. Our orphanage on Niska Street also received medicines we no longer thought existed and even chocolates (which no one has seen for two years). Then a school was licensed and textbooks arrived. The orphanage was painted; new bedding arrived. Then we discovered why we were being killed with kindness. Elaborate preparations were for the benefit of a delegation of Swiss from the International Red Cross who had arrived to investigate ghetto conditions. Our orphanage was designated as “typical and representative.”

The Swiss carried out the sham to a T. They called a committee together at the Jewish Civil Authority building and called witnesses. The JCA, led by Boris Presser and Paul Bronski, dutifully testified to “bettering-leveling” conditions. (Truth: December death by starvation went over 4000.) Silberberg, the last friend left on the JCA board, tried to get to the Swiss to give them the truth. He was hauled off to Pawiak Prison as a “Bolshevik agitator.” I was invited to testify and declined. What could I say? Could I endanger these life-giving shipments when I know that the moment the Swiss leave it would all return to as before.

We decided to get Andrei over to the Aryan side to reach Christopher de Monti. It is known that De Monti is escorting the Swiss about Warsaw. Andrei reasoned that it would be better not to attempt to get to De Monti, for even if he were to turn in our report the Swiss would not submit it. It is doubtful the Swiss would stick their necks out or suddenly make overt moves in behalf of humanity. I conceded that Andrei was correct. The Swiss do not wish to anger the Germans. They treat the entire war with indifference. We hear of numerous examples of courage by the Danes, Dutch, French, et al., in behalf of their Jewish communities. Even the Swedes, who are neutral, are harboring thousands of Jewish refugees. Could it be that ghettos could exist only in Poland, the Baltics, and Ukrainia? Our Bathyrans in Hungary and Rumania tell us that Adolf Eichmann is even having trouble extracting the Jews there. Ervin Rosenblum works in the basement, filing more and more documents. It seems that everyone is writing diaries these days. There is a terrible fear that we will be forgotten.

Jules Schlosberg continues to build weird weapons in the next room to Ervin. I am certain we’ll be blown up someday.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

It became dangerous in the streets in the winter of 1941 after the American entry into the war. The only regulars on the streets were the corpses deposited each morning for the sanitation squads. Even the sanctity of the Club Miami became suspect.

Andrei seldom showed up in public these days, so when a feeler was sent out by Paul Bronski for a meeting, Bronski was led through a series of blind alleys before he was finally allowed to come face to face with his brother-in-law in a basement somewhere near the Gensia Gate. Bronski’s blindfold was removed. He adjusted his eyes to the candlelight.

Andrei stood over him, thinner and wearier. He studied Paul. Paul had aged with a sudden sagging of his face muscles. The thin face was prune-like, he shook with constant tension, and his fingers were yellow with tobacco stains.

They changed amenities without feeling.

Paul took out a cigarette and went through one-armed contortions of lighting it “This business of arms smuggling and underground press is putting the entire population in grave danger,” he said.

“Go on.”

“No matter what you think about us on the Civil Authority, we try our best under very limited conditions. If your activities increase it will only antagonize the Germans.”

“Shut up, Paul! For Christ sake—antagonize the Germans. Do you think this death on the streets is a result of any underground? Are you so damned naive after two years of this as to think the population is in any less danger whether there is an underground or not?”

Bronski shook his head. “I told Presser it was useless to argue with you. Andrei, there is no magic formula for getting rid of the Germans. Your activities are costing us millions of zlotys in fines and the lives of hundreds in reprisals.”

“And what about the fines and the executions before the underground existed?”

“I’m trying to do the best I can,” Paul whined.

Andrei could not even bring himself to hate Paul Bronski. Once, before the war, he had had a reluctant admiration for the penetrating mind and sharp wit that could run him through mental acrobatics. The thing before him was a mumbling shell.

How very strange, Andrei thought. Little Stephan Bronski had begun as a runner between the orphanage and the Self-Help headquarters over a year ago and increased his sphere of operation each month. The youngster idolized Wolf Brandel, who taught him the routes around the ghetto over rooftops, through courtyards and basements, and all the secret hiding places. Stephan pressed to be given more responsible missions, even begged to be allowed to go to the Aryan side. Stephan was not yet thirteen years old. How can a boy demand to walk like a man and his own father crawl through the mud?

“Andrei, think what you will of me, but the people here only want to survive. You know that, Andrei—survive. The best way to live is through the Civil Authority. No one has answered your call to arms, Andrei. Your way would be mass suicide. Andrei—now listen—Boris Presser and I have been negotiating with Koenig. Koenig is a reasonable man and he can maneuver Schreiker. Koenig promises that if we can get the underground to stop its activities they will make a settlement with us on rations, medicine, and the disposition of the labor force.”

“Good God, Paul. Can you believe your own words?”

“It’s our only chance!”

There was nothing more to be said. Andrei could not mask his contempt. He handed Paul Bronski a blindfold. “I don’t know anything about an underground.”

Bronski took the blindfold. “You’ll have to tie it on ... I can’t do it with one hand.”

Ervin Rosenblum worked in the musty room below Mila 19, sorting the notes of the Good Fellowship Club. A rap on the false packing crate which served as an entrance made him douse the lights and freeze. Ana Grinspan entered.

“Susan has just come back,” she said. “Get up to your room.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Go on.”

Ervin felt his way through an aisle lined with packing cases. In the main office on the first floor he saw everyone staring. Alexander Brandel stood by the door of his office, shaking his head.

Ervin raced up the stairs to the second floor carefully. The rail was gone, chopped up for firewood weeks earlier. Down the corridor to that cell which he shared with his wife and mother.

Momma Rosenblum lay on a cot beneath a pile of quilts. It was icy. There was no heat in the house. The room was ugly and bare except for Momma’s cot, double bed for Ervin and Susan, and a single table and two chairs.

Susan’s face was distraught. Ervin felt a catch in his heart. Susan had always seemed resilient to tragedy, plodding on, doing her job regardless. He had never seen her like this. He wiped his glasses nervously, trying to adjust his vision to the change of light from the cellar.

“Tell me,” he said at last.

“Dr. Glazer,” she groaned.

In a way, Ervin was relieved. They had been expecting Glazer to go. Another death, another, another. Key people dying in droves. Glazer had been like a father to Susan from the day she graduated from the university. Little Bernard Glazer who had brought so many children into life had watched them die, helpless to save them. Glazer was better off, Ervin thought. But God, he’d be missed. He was the best man in his field.

Ervin flopped his hands. “Too bad,” was all he could say.

Susan slung a sheaf of papers on the table. “A farewell present to you, Ervin. A minute-by-minute account of his death.”

What a legacy! Ervin stared at the yellowish papers but did not touch them.

“Take it, Ervin!” Her voice rose sharply. “It’s Dr. Glazer’s gift to you!”

“Susan ... Susan ... please.”

“Damn you!” she shrieked. “People die and you write in your lousy journal! God damn you, Ervin!”

Momma Rosenblum stirred. “Kinder, Kinder,” she said weakly, “don’t shriek at each other.”

Susan sat beside the old woman and felt her forehead automatically. “I’m sorry, Momma. I didn’t mean it Ervin.”

“It’s all right Susan, I understand.”

“God, I don’t know what to do with Dr. Glazer gone.

God ... Ten children died today ... God ...” Her breath darted out in streams of frosty air.

Journal Entry

As the population is decimated the Germans close off the little ghetto in the south. As soon as a bit of room becomes available in the big ghetto, houses are closed off in the south. Crossing the bridge over the “Polish corridor” are the fancy Jews from Germany, the Jewish Civil Authority people, and the Militia and wealthier smugglers and members of the Big Seven. Only one major factory complex is left in the small ghetto, and that is the woodwork shops. As the small ghetto is abandoned it has become a no man’s land where Wild Ones without Kennkarten hide so they will not have to submit to slave labor. The abandoned ghetto has become a rendezvous for smugglers and to carry on prostitution for those still decent enough in appearance to sell their bodies. Raiding parties cross into the little ghetto at night and rip up wooden floors, doors, rails, and anything else that can be used for firewood and cart it off. In the big ghetto the crowding is worse than before. People sleep in hallways, cellars, in outside courtyards.

We continue to attempt to get dollars from British parachute drops, but it is hit-and-miss. With our dollar supply shrinking, the zloty has inflated again. David Zemba has made a simple plan. Through our people in London we have gotten American Aid to deposit several hundred thousands of dollars in Swiss accounts. Many of the smugglers have enormous collections of zlotys virtually unspendable and useless to them. We buy the zlotys by transferring Swiss dollars into their personal accounts in Geneva. We are able to get a good rate and with enough of these zlotys can buy essentials. We try not to deal with the Big Seven, but it is certain that Max Kleperman has his people in on this. Also, we can make direct barter with our Swiss money for houses, rooms, gold, food, and medicine with those smugglers who have caches. This latter is preferable to the zloty exchange. David Zemba is in conferences, trading for our Swiss dollars all day, every day. He has saved hundreds of lives.

Three major slave-labor factory complexes remain in the ghetto, all belonging to Franz Koenig. In the small ghetto there is a woodwork plant. In the north, the Brushmaker’s district. This latter supplies a major part of the brushes for the German army. Most of the people, in their desperation to live, still maintain that a Kennkarte stamped for labor is the key to life.

From the third factory we hear something that is a ray of hope, however faint. It is the uniform factory. Although the Germans claim to be at the gates of Moscow, we sense their first great defeat of the war. Nearly a hundred thousand bloody uniforms have arrived from the eastern front. In the factory the slave laborers clean, patch, and weave them and make them ready for reissue in Germany.

A hundred thousand German casualties? Good news.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Chapter Four

RACHAEL RACED THROUGH RAPID passages of Chopin’s Second Concerto in preparation for a concert with what was left of the Ghetto Symphony Orchestra to be held in Franz Koenig’s uniform factory.

She turned to the slow hit of the andante, and her mind strayed from her work. Three more members of the orchestra had died. There were only forty musicians left and they were listless. A spasm of tension gripped her stomach. Wolf had been gone five days this time. It was the third time in a month that Andrei had sent him to the Aryan side. They said they wouldn’t, but they needed Wolf, even at the risk. What were they to do? She longed to marry him, but her father would be violently opposed. Wolf’s father had once been an active Zionist and many people knew about Wolf’s work. Poppa would allow nothing to besmirch his position on the Civil Authority. He was completely unreasonable about it.

In the bedroom, Stephan lay on his stomach studying the Haftorah, a reading from the Prophets, in preparation for the coming bar mitzvah. He always remembered the sound of music from his mother and sister. It had a magic quality of transcending him beyond all harm and all ugliness. Rachael stumbled on a passage, then fingered her way through the next bars.

Stephan automatically stopped reading and rolled off the bed and walked to the window. They had just moved to this new place in the big ghetto. He had to share a bedroom with Rachael, and it was a pretty run-down place but far better than most people had. Just across the street stood the old post office building where the Civil Authority had been housed since the Germans closed the place on Grzybowska Street. His father worked in there. In front of the large square, columned structure stood the only tree and plot of grass in the ghetto. It felt cool and soft to roll in.

The music stopped.

Stephan walked back to his bed and flopped on his belly, waiting for Rachael to begin playing again so he could resume his studies.

He had always had an unspoken communication with his sister. They wanted to talk to each other now. She sat on the edge of his bed and mussed his hair. He rebelled slightly.

“How can you read that chicken scratch?” she said, referring to the Hebrew text.

“It’s no worse than the chicken scratch you read at the piano.” Stephan closed the book, “I wish Wolf would get back and help me with my lessons. Rabbi Solomon—well, we have to be perfect. He’s tough.”

“Stephan?”

“Yes?”

“Wolf told me you tried to get him and Uncle Andrei to let you distribute the underground paper.”

The boy did not answer.

“Is it true?”

“I guess so.”

“Does Momma know?”

“No.”

“Don’t you think you’d better tell her?”

He spun off the bed, away from her inquiries.

“What would we do if anything happened to you?”

“Don’t you understand, Rachael?”

“With Wolf and Uncle Andrei doing their work, I can’t lose all of you.”

“If only Poppa—” Stephan stopped short. “Nothing.”

“You can’t make up for him, Stephan.”

“I’m so ashamed. For a long time I tried to believe what he was telling me.”

“Don’t be too hard on Poppa. No one knows how much he has suffered. You must be kind.”

“How can you say that? If it weren’t for Poppa you and Wolf could marry.”

“He’s still your father, Stephan, and I know that Rabbi Solomon would be the first to tell you to honor him, always.”

“Rachael ... Momma and Poppa don’t love each other any more, do they?”

“It’s only because of the times, Stephan.”

“That’s all right. You don’t have to try to explain.”

She changed the subject quickly. “So, you’re going to be a real man next week. Well, let me see if you have a hair on your chin yet.” Rachael wrestled him to the floor. He gently allowed himself to be pinned down. Her fingers dug into his ribs and he squirmed, half angry, half laughing.

“Quit it, Rachael! I can’t wrestle with you any more.”

She bared her claws. “And why not?”

“Because you’re a girl and I may grab something by mistake.”

“Well! Stephan Bronski! You are becoming a man!”

In a moment she went back to the andante movement Stephan slipped beside her on the bench and rested his head on her shoulder. Rachael put her arm about her brother and kissed his forehead.

“It won’t be much of a bar mitzvah for you, will it?”

“Just taking the oath to live as a Jew is important,” he answered.

“You are a little man.”

“Don’t be afraid, Rachael. Wolf will be back. I heard you cry last night. Don’t be afraid. Rachael, I think I understand everything about you and Wolf and I want you to know I’m very glad because next to Uncle Andrei he’s the finest man who ever lived. He has explained lots of things to me ... about being a man ... like things Poppa should have explained ...”

Rachael blanched, then smiled. “I wish he would come back. I wish he would come back. ...”

“He said he’d get back for my bar mitzvah. He will, Rachael.”

Alexander Brandel's office was converted into a makeshift synagogue, just as a million other places had been converted for illicit worship for two thousand years. Rabbi Solomon donned the ancient vestments of the rabbinate and opened the Torah scroll and chanted to the room where Ervin Rosenblum and Andrei and Alex and three Bathyrans stood near what represented an altar. Beyond Alex’s desk, Rachael and Susan and Deborah and many of Stephan’s friends jammed together. The shell of the man who was once Dr. Paul Bronski was alone by the door.

Stephan Bronski fidgeted slightly as his mother brushed her hand over the tallis which had belonged to her own father. Since no new shawls had been made since the occupation, the rabbi ruled it fitting for the boy to wear this symbol of one generation passing a tradition to another. Stephan’s months of study were coming to a culmination.

He looked about toward the door, hoping that Wolf Brandel would come through it in the last moment, but all he saw was his father. He smiled slightly at Rachael.

Rabbi Solomon faced the assemblage. Another boy was ready to accept his duties as a son of the commandment, a guardian of the Laws, and take upon himself the terrible burden of Jewish life. Only a week earlier there had been another bar mitzvah. The son of Max Kleperman had reached the age of thirteen. He was given the symbols of manhood in a large hall at the Big Seven headquarters amid gluttonous revelry. The old man wanted to turn his back on Kleperman’s mockery and walk away, but he didn’t, for he was merely the administrator of God’s will and not its judge.

His thinning high voice asked the candidate to step forward.

Stephan took a last sigh and felt his mother’s hand squeeze his shoulder. He walked forward to receive his new social status. The boy was slight and small like his father.

“Bless the Lord Who is to be praised.”

“Praised be the Lord Who is blessed for all eternity,” the men in the room answered.

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, Who didst choose us from among all the peoples by giving us Thy Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Laws,” Stephan chanted.

The boy and the old man turned to the Torah scrolls which lay on Alexander Brandel’s desk. With the tassels of the shawl, Stephan touched the Torah, kissed the shawl, and read from the Laws of Moses. From the benediction he went to the climax of his studies, the chanting of the Maftir Aliya from the Book of Prophets, one of the most difficult of all Hebrew readings.

Stephan faced the room and chanted from memory. His voice was small and high, but it carried with it that cry of anguish born of the oppressions of many Pharaohs in many ages. The room was awed as the lad displayed the full mastery of his accomplishment. Even Solomon delved into memory to try to recall when a young man had read the Haftorah with greater authority, grace, and musical perfection.

When the closing benediction was done, the Torah scrolls were closed, to be taken and hidden from desecration by the Germans.

Stephan Bronski faced the room. Uncle Andrei winked. Stephan looked about, hoping that Wolf might have come in, but he hadn’t. He cleared his throat. “I would like to thank my mother and father,” he said in the traditional opening of the valedictory, “for bringing me up in the Jewish tradition.”

The pronouncement seldom failed to bring tears to women. Deborah and Rachael proved no exception. But in the rear of the office the words struck Paul Bronski like a stiletto. He lowered his eyes as his son continued.

“I realize that becoming a son of the commandment is just a token of manhood. A lot of people told me how sorry they were that I couldn’t have my bar mitzvah in peacetime when the Great Tlomatskie Synagogue would have been almost full and relatives would have come from all of Poland and there would have been a large celebration and presents. I thought a lot about all that, but I am really glad to have my bar mitzvah in a place like this room, because in places like this the Jewish faith has been kept alive during other times of oppression. I think, too, it is a special privilege to have your bar mitzvah in bad times. Anyone can live like a Jew when things go well, but to take an oath to be a Jew today is really important. We know that God needs real Jews to protect His laws. Well ... we have survived everyone who has tried to destroy us before because we have kept this kind of faith. Our God will not let us down. I am very proud to be a Jew and I will try hard to uphold my responsibilities.”

Rabbi Solomon held the tallis on Stephan’s head and chanted the closing priestly blessing. The room pressed forward to converge on the boy and congratulate him with hearty “Mozeltoffs.” Paul Bronski left the place quickly and quietly.

“I guess you are satisfied now,” Paul snapped at Deborah. “You’ve put on your little circus. You’ve won your battle. You’ve showed me up as a damned fool in front of the whole ghetto.”

Deborah tried to contain herself. His eyes were filled with that half-wild look again.

“Grinding salt into my wounds,” he continued. “Making me look ridiculous.”

“Stephan did not have a bar mitzvah as a vendetta against you.”

“Like hell.”

“Paul, let’s go to sleep,” she pleaded.

“Sleep?” He laughed sardonically. “Who sleeps?”

He tried to light a cigarette, but his hand trembled so violently that he was able to accomplish it only with her steadying hand. “Well, Deborah, now that our son is properly a Jew and you have won your crusade for his holy purification for my sins—”

“Stop it!”

“—now perhaps we can discuss a family matter. We are still a family, you know.”

“If you speak like a civilized person.”

His outburst was done now. He calmed himself. “You’ve got to give up working at the orphanage and Rachael has to stop giving concerts. As for Stephan, he spends entirely too much time on the streets.”

She merely narrowed her eyes at his pronouncement.

“We must reappraise all our friends. A continued association with Brandel, Rosenblum, and Susan could become dangerous. Every one is aware of their past affiliations and no one is sure they are not part of this underground.”

“Now you just stop where you are, Paul—”

“Let me finish, dammit, let me finish! I can’t guarantee your immunity because of the likes of your goddamned brother and his agitators. They’ve pulled in the entire family of one of our board members and are holding them all at Pawiak Prison as a warning for us to break up this underground.”

All that was left of a desire for honor seemed to drain out of him in that instant. His skin was a horrible gray. “We have decided—”

“What?”

“We have decided that our families have to come to work inside the Civil Authority building and never be out of our sight.”

“Oh, my God, it’s come to this.” Deborah held her hand over her eyes for only a few tears. “All through this,” she whispered, “I have waited patiently for ... Paul, at first I tried so very, very hard to make myself believe that what you were doing was really the right thing. But each day as you degrade yourself lower and lower you have ceased to be a human being.”

“How dare you!”

“Good God, Paul! Didn’t you hear your son today? Can’t the courage of a little boy touch you, move you?”

“I won’t listen!”

“You will listen, Paul Bronski! You will listen!”

He knelt before her desperately and grabbed her arm and shook it. “We can talk aesthetics until hell freezes, but what I am saying to you is reality.”

The tears fell down her cheeks. “Reality? My poor man, you are the one who has been hiding from reality. I’m going to tell you what reality is. Your daughter is sleeping with Wolf Brandel, and I sent her to him because her marriage would endanger her father’s precious position as a collaborator.”

“That son of a bitch—”

“Good! At least you have the decency to show anger. But he is a fine young man and I thank God she is able to find a few moments of happiness in this hell. Shall I tell you more reality? I am working on manufacturing bombs in the cellar of the orphanage, and your son Stephan is delivering the underground newspaper.”

Paul Bronski stood up and grunted like a confused, dying animal.

“Do you know why, Paul? He came to me and pleaded—‘Momma, I’m going to be thirteen. ... Momma, someone in our family has to be a man.’ ”

Paul crumpled into a chair and sobbed. She stood over the groveling, shaking cur, and the disdain ebbed into a terrible weariness. “I only did it for you,” he wept, “only for you.”

“I’m tired, Paul. ... I’m all done in.” Suddenly, without plan, the words found their way through her. “I have a chance to leave the ghetto with the children.”

He looked up at her, blinking. “De Monti ... De Monti.”

She nodded.

“You’d do this to me?”

“I have made my atonements. I have paid, repaid a thousand, thousand times, and I swear I don’t know if I was ever wrong even in the beginning. But if I was, I have been punished by you. I promise you, Chris will never touch me. All I want is to find a hole someplace to crawl into where I can’t hear starving children cry. Maybe a patch of grass ... that’s all I want ... just ... a patch of grass.”

Paul slid to the floor on his knees and doubled up before her feet. “Please don’t leave me,” he wept, “please don’t leave me ... please don’t leave me ...”

Chapter Five

Spring of 1942.

THE AWESOME WINTER WAS done, but the smell of death lingered. The little ghetto on the south was all but shrunken. Polish families inched back in as the Jewish decimation increased. All that remained in the south were a few streets of Jews, the woodwork factory, and Wild Areas. The big ghetto became more crammed than ever.

With the reinforcement of the Waffen SS guard, the ghetto fell into a grip of fear worse than any it had experienced. The smug Elite Corps with their lightning streaks on black uniforms entered Warsaw fresh from their jobs as Kommandos in the Special Action massacres on the eastern front Placed under Sieghold Stutze, they were wild, drinking louts, turned into savages by the sight of the blood of their victims. They filled the barracks at 101 Leszno Street just beyond the ghetto wall, opposite Koenig’s uniform factory.

A second set of guards arrived. Latvians and Lithuanians wearing uniforms of Nazi Auxiliaries with insignia of skull and crossbones on their epaulets. These peasants from the Baltics had carried out their share of the eastern massacres with relish.

A third force came in from Globocnik’s headquarters in Lublin. Ukrainians. Their men’s choir, sober or drunk, sang with such harmony they were dubbed the Nightingales. The Litts, Latts, and Nightingales took the red brick building eater-corner to the SS barracks.

Each night the sounds of drunken revelry heightened the fear.

SS General Alfred Funk, courier of the verbal messages on “Jewish problems,” arrived in Warsaw as a harbinger of doom. Fresh from conferences with Heydrich, Himmler, and Hitler in Berlin, he arrived with Adolf Eichmann, Gestapo 4B, Jewish affairs.

The Krakow Gazette increased its build-up of the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” Around Poland, the feverish activity of building new camps brought in German experts in transportation and construction. But these new camps were different. They were neither for slave labor nor for the containment of enemies of the Reich. They were built in great secrecy in out-of-the-way locations, and their structures had odd shapes unlike any ever seen.

By midwinter Alfred Funk concluded his conferences in Warsaw and returned to SS headquarters in Lublin with further verbal instructions for Globocnik.

Early in March one of Ana Grinspan’s runners reached Warsaw with the information that an Operation Reinhard, named after Heydrich, was taking place for the liquidation of the Lublin ghetto. The ghetto occupants as well as transports of Jews from outside Poland were being sent to a camp named Majdanek on the outskirts of the city.

When Funk came back to Warsaw everyone speculated wildly on the meaning, but after the winter just past no one believed things could get worse.

Rabbi Solomon sat on the floor in another of the makeshift synagogues before his emaciated congregation, which had once been a proud group recognized in the religious circles of Poland. The few stragglers who remained represented the heart of European Jewry. Stephan Bronski, the rabbi’s favorite pupil, was near the learned one.

It was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Ab, the day on which the greatest disasters had befallen the Jews. On Tisha B’Ab the First Temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians, and centuries later, on the same day, the Second Temple fell to the Romans, starting a series of events which eventually spread the seed of Abraham to the corners of the world as damned and eternal wanderers and strangers.

On Tisha B’Ab an angry Moses had come down from Sinai and smashed the tablets of the commandments upon sight of the reveling tribes of Israel worshiping an idol. It was as though he had cast an eternal curse upon them, for this night of Tisha B’Ab the lights burned late in the offices of Gestapo House, Reinhard Corps headquarters, and the offices of Rudolph Schreiker.

Rabbi Solomon read from the “Valley of Tears” and the Holy Torah was revealed and he swayed and cried Jeremiah’s prophecies of doom.

“And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations and ye shall be left few in number.”

A mournful response followed his words.

“We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health and behold trouble! For, behold I will send serpents among you which will not be charmed and they shall bite you, saith the Lord ... the harvest is past, the summer ended and we are not saved ... for death is come up to our windows and is entered into our palaces to cut off the children from without, and the young men from the streets ... the carcasses of men shall fall as dung upon the open field.”

As Rabbi Solomon lamented, the overture to the most horrible catastrophe in a catastrophe-filled history was playing out.

Black Friday ushered in the Big Action.

The Nazis called in members of their networks of informers and bled them for information during the night. By dawn a swift, merciless sweep was plotted to denude the Jews of the last of their leadership.

With sirens screaming in hideous harmony to the rabbi’s prayers, the SS and their Litts, Latts, Polish Blues, Jewish Militia, and Ukrainians swept in from every gate and scoured the ghetto, smoking out the resistance people from secret rooms.

Tens of dozens were marched unceremoniously to the cemetery and shot by a firing squad of Nightingales.

Ana Grinspan, Andrei Androfski, and Tolek Alterman had the fortune to be on the Aryan side. Other Bathyrans hid in the basement of Mila 19 with Jules Schlosberg and Ervin Rosenblum amid journals of the Good Fellowship Club and homemade fire bombs. Simon Eden spent the day crossing rooftops, and Rodel, the Communist, cringed in a hidden closet.

Alexander Brandel and David Zemba were among the fortunate not on the roundup list.

But dozens of people from the Bathyrans and the Labor Zionists and Revisionists and Bundists were not so fortunate. Black Friday shattered the ghetto and it sank to its lowest depths.

On the Sabbath following the massacre the ghetto was plastered with terrifying orders and the loudspeaker trucks roamed up and down, up and down, booming the edicts.

ORDER OF DEPORTATION NOTICE

1. By order of the German authorities all Jews living in Warsaw, without regard to age or sex, are to be deported to the East.

2. The following are excluded from the deportation order:

(a) All Jews employed by German authorities or in German enterprises who have their

Kennkarten

properly stamped.

(b) All Jews who are members and employees of the Jewish Civil Authority as of the day of this notice.

(c) All Jews belonging to the Jewish Militia.

(d) The families of the above-mentioned. Families consist only of husband/wives and children.

(e) Jews employed by social welfare agencies under the Jewish Civil Authority and Orphans and Self-Help Society.

3. Each deportee is entitled to take fifteen kilograms of personal possessions as baggage. All baggage over the weight will be confiscated. (All valuable articles such as money, jewelry, gold, etc., should be taken in order to use it for an orderly resettlement) Three days’ food should be taken.

4. Deportation commences on July 22, 1942, at 11 A.M.

5. Punishments:

(a) Jews in the published lists not reporting will be shot.

(b) Jews undertaking activities to evade or hinder orderly deportation will be shot.

JEWISH CIVIL AUTHORITY, WARSAW

Boris Presser, Chairman

ANNOUNCEMENT

Each deportee who reports voluntarily will be supplied with 3 kg. bread and 1 kg. marmalade. Food distribution will be held at Stawki Square.

Staging center for deportation will be the process center at Stawki 6-8 on the Umschlagplatz.

JEWISH CIVIL AUTHORITY, WARSAW

Dr. Paul Bronski, Deputy Chairman

ANNOUNCEMENT

Each day deportations will be clearly posted and announced for the proceeding day. Deportees for July 23 shall come from the following areas:

Elektoralna St. #34–42

Chlodna St. #28–44 inclusive

Orla St. #1–14 and 16–34

Leszno St. #1–3, 7–51, 57–77

All Biala Street

BY ORDER OF PIOTR WARSINSKI

Jewish Militia of Warsaw

Chapter Six

THE UNDERGROUND RECOILED FROM Black Friday and set out to determine what was behind the deportation.

For the first three days the Germans had an unexpected success. Wild Ones who lived in hiding without Kennkarten left their secret hovels, unable to resist the temptation of the three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade promised by the Germans. There were more volunteers than could be processed at the Umschlagplatz.

The deportation center was in a gray four-story concrete structure at Stawki 6-8, just beyond the northern gate. It was out of view of both the ghetto and the Aryan side. Once a school, it had later been an Orphans and Self-Help hospital.

Waffen SS Haupsturmführer Kutler, in charge of the detail, was a member of the Kommandos who had carried out the massacres on the eastern front. Kutler was in a state of drunkenness, tormented by a continuous nightmare of blood. His gory dreams were shared by most of the other Kommandos, who kept themselves going on liquor and dope.

A pair of thick iron doors hung across the entrance. Inside, a half dozen Nazis made selections, standing in front of the never-ending lines of humanity. A few were returned to the ghetto for labor. Most were passed along to the immense cobblestone yard surrounded by a high wall.

The courtyard detail was composed of Nightingales and their Litt and Latt compatriots under the direction of a few SS men who held various Alsatian dogs at leash end.

A brick train shed and platform some two blocks in length ran to the extreme end of the courtyard. A train of forty-four cattle and freight cars stood in readiness.

As the selectees came in, their belongings were ransacked for jewelry, money, valuables of any kind. In order to make room for more people on the cars, most of the clothing they carried was confiscated.

A detail of Jews from Koenig’s labor pool carted the clothing across the street to a building which served as a warehouse. Linings of coats were ripped apart for hidden valuables. Personal mementos—family letters, pictures, keepsakes—were burned in a large oven alongside the building.

When six thousand people had been gathered, they were loaded on the trains. At three o’clock promptly each afternoon the train pulled out for an “unknown eastern destination.”

The Wild Ones who had volunteered in the first days of the Big Action had been cowed to such a state that they offered almost no resistance. But anyone who balked inside the Umschlagplatz courtyard was pounced upon immediately, mercilessly, by the guards.

Outside the courtyard, Polish Blues and Jewish Militia kept order in the lines feeding people into the selection center.

The aged, cripples, and those obviously unfit for labor were taken from the Umschlagplatz and shot by SS firing squads at the cemetery several blocks away. In this way the Germans “proved” they were taking only the healthiest people to the new labor camps.

Despite the passivity of the Orthodox community, men like Rabbi Solomon continued to wield great influence over the people. As more and more rabbis went to an unknown fate, diminishing the numbers leading the Orthodox Jews, the remaining inherited more responsibility.

On the fourth day of the Big Action the remnants of the underground had the Umschlagplatz under observation and scurried desperately around Warsaw trying to learn the destination of the trains.

Alexander Brandel visited Rabbi Solomon in an attempt to convince him to go to the Jewish Civil Authority. The old man had drawn a rigid circle binding his duties. The Civil Authority, he argued, was beyond his sphere of activity. Through Talmudic reasoning and arguments Alex weakened his stand by drawing parallels with ancient exiles. Finally the rabbi agreed to a rabbinical court and allowed Alex to plead before the five rabbis they were able to assemble.

They decided it was morally correct for Rabbi Solomon to petition the Civil Authority.

The old man was partly blind, able to see only in shadowy images. Months before, he had been forced to give up his work on the Good Fellowship notes and Brandel’s journal. He entered tine Civil Authority building at Zamenhof and Gensia streets on the arm of Stephan Bronski, his favorite student.

Paul Bronski was more nervous than usual. The sight of Stephan with the rabbi in broad daylight in a place which was a rats’ nest of informers unnerved him. Stephan was sent home. Although Solomon could not see Paul, he was able to sense the uneasiness in the man’s voice.

“Dr. Bronski, there has been much talk about these deportations. In fact, little else is spoken of.”

“That is certainly understandable.”

“We hear that there are continuations of the eastern massacres in death camps.”

“Nonsense. Can’t you see it is the same group of agitators we have had to contend with since the first day of the occupation? We have only their propaganda that there have ever been massacres in the east.”

“Has the Civil Authority ever questioned the Germans about the validity of the stories of the eastern massacres?”

Of course not. Paul clamped his teeth together. Sightless though the old man was, none of the keen edge had gone from his mind, nor had he lost the acid manner of setting verbal traps.

“My dear Rabbi Solomon, no one claims that life in the ghetto has been easy. We are the losers in a war in which we have been chosen as the scapegoat. Yet, through orderly process, the fact is that we have kept most people alive and here.”

“Then, Dr. Bronski, I assume you are ready to assure us that most of us will still be alive and here in three or four weeks?”

Paul had spoken about the deportations only to Boris Presser. His own hopes were that within a week or two the Germans would restock their labor camps and the deportations would stop.

“I am waiting for an answer, Dr. Bronski.”

Paul was afraid to take a position. Suppose he said the deportations would stop and they did not. Suppose the rumors of death camps were true and the Civil Authority had taken no stand on them. He had run out of maneuvering room. For two years and seven months he had found one more escape, and one more, and one more. This was the dead end.

“I am reasonably certain the deportations will stop as soon as the Germans decongest the ghetto. Decongestion of the ghetto will alleviate many of our problems here, and the population shifts to strengthen their labor pool closer to the eastern front will obviously satisfy the Germans.”

“Would the Civil Authority ask the Germans if your reasonable certainties are reasonable certainties with them also?”

Rabbi Solomon’s trap sprang shut. Paul wanted no more of the man. He mumbled quickly that the matter would be pursued.

Boris Presser had performed his duties as chairman of the Jewish Civil Authority almost as a nonentity. He was a quiet little man whose forte was an extraordinary ability to stay out of people’s way and to carry out his office in a mechanical manner, without emotional attachment. The murder of Emanuel Goldman, the first Civil Authority chairman in the early days of the occupation, clearly outlined the limitations of his power.

Presser dexterously avoided clandestine meetings with the underground, the social agencies, or the smugglers. He was learned at knowing nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. He kept himself untainted through deftness. He was, in fact, the perfect tool in the Nazi logic which pointed up that Jews were killing each other off. When boxed in from time to time, Presser could always justify the existence of the Civil Authority. Without it, he explained, conditions would be far more severe. He made himself believe it was an instrument of survival.

When Paul Bronski confronted Boris with the ground swell of apprehension over the deportations Presser would not be talked into a meeting with the Germans. As he had done a hundred times before, he delegated Paul Bronski.

The choices? Schreiker and the Reinhard Corps were impossible to speak to. Could he move through Max Kleperman? No, the Big Seven wanted to know nothing about the deportations. Move through Brandel and David Zemba? No, it was they who brought the pressure on the Civil Authority.

Dr. Franz Koenig was his only choice.

Koenig’s new residence was a forty-room palace, the latest confiscation in his capacity as chief of confiscations. In a few short years he had become a multimillionaire.

Koenig had grown abnormally obese. His body resembled a pear and his head a puffy tomato with an obnoxious flat clipping of fuzz on top.

Power was unbecoming. After the first sweet taste of revenge and fulfillment, he came to loggerheads with the reality that he had placed himself in league with men of a bestiality he did not believe could exist among civilized people. His wonderful Germany, his land of the gifts of culture, was being run by maniacs and sadists. He remembered his very first discussion of the mass murders. Now he wondered what he had done. Yet, irresistibly, he rose higher and higher. Himmler himself received him regularly. All that Franz Koenig had known of truth and beauty was abandoned by him. A victim of fear, he had been purchased—soul, heart, and mind.

Paul’s throat was caked dry as he stood before Dr. Koenig. It was a long way from the university to this forty-foot office. Yet Paul’s presence always had the disconcerting effect of making Koenig remember that he had once been content to read Schiller and listen to Mozart in the sanctity of his study, away from his fat Polish wife.

Paul managed to blurt out the message of apprehension over the deportations.

“You have a militia at your disposal. Use it,” Koenig snapped in irritation.

“But if we use it more than we already have to implement the deportations, it will only serve to confirm the people’s suspicions.”

Koenig rocked back and forth in his outsized chair. He could turn the matter over to Rudolph Schreiker for a flat and brutal closing of all discussion. Was this wise? Only a few days and the stream of volunteers for deportation had all but dried up. There was risk of a hardening resistance with the growing underground. Koenig had a dozen factories both in and out of the ghetto which needed a constant supply of labor. Schreiker had not changed an iota from his blundering, stupid ways. He had learned to manipulate Schreiker, to make his own position firm by the feeling that he was indispensable. Schreiker was deep in his debt through bribes and loans.

Paul Bronski and Boris Presser had been obedient servants. If they were replaced in a swift purge, it could upset the well-controlled balance he maintained over the ghetto.

“It is reasonable,” Koenig said in measured terms, “that the Jewish Civil Authority assure the people of our good intentions.”

When Paul had gone, Koenig went to the city hall to convince Rudolph Schreiker of the importance of having the Jewish Civil Authority make a public proclamation for the continuance of orderly deportations. Schreiker was, as usual, too confused by the issues to do other than mumble for Koenig to go ahead.

The next day Paul Bronski, Boris Presser, and the entire board of the Jewish Civil Authority were whisked out of the ghetto for an inspection at Poniatow, Trawniki, and dozens of eastern labor camps which existed to supply road gangs constructing air strips and manufacturing munitions. The railroads had received their first Russian bombings. Gangs of Jews put them back into working order.

The superficial inspection was parallel to the “inspections” held for the Swiss Red Cross in their investigation of ghetto conditions. Yet it served as a face-saving gesture for Presser and Bronski. At the end of the tour, which showed or proved nothing, Koenig distorted it into Nazi logic. The inspection “proved” that the deportations from Warsaw were for the announced purpose of dispersing and decentralizing industry and moving it closer to the eastern battle line.

Neither Boris Presser nor Paul Bronski was able to allow himself the luxury of pursuing the truth. On their return to Warsaw, Koenig had prepared statements for their signature. They affixed their names to documents declaring their satisfaction that the deportations were for the stated reasons and under tolerable working conditions and further urged co-operation in orderly departures.

Copies of the documents were plastered on a thousand walls, but despite them the streams of volunteers had completely dried up by the sixth day of the Big Action.

“Juden! ’Raus!”

“Jews! Outside!”

Whistles! Sirens! Deserted streets. Taut fear behind the drawn shades.

The Nightingales who sang in such beautiful harmony poured from their trucks in another of the sudden strikes to block off a building and pour in and smash down doors and drag the struggling occupants into the streets.

Wolf Brandel slipped into his trousers and shirt at the sounds of the screams across the way and peered from a corner window in Andrei’s flat to the scene of horror in the courtyard. Rachael wrapped herself in the bed sheet and tried to look, but Wolf held her back at arm’s length.

A drama of violence erupted amid the confusion as a man attempted to break through the cordon of Ukrainians to reach his wife and was bloodily clubbed to the pavement for his efforts. He lay groaning and twitching, drenched in his own blood. Another outburst. A frantic young mother lurched at a huge guard, clawing his face, biting his hand, as she tried to get back her infant. The guard roared with laughter, grabbed her by the hair, and flung her into a circle of flailing clubs. The cordon pushed their captives up the street toward the Umschlagplatz with a steady tattoo of truncheon smashes.

Wolf buttoned his shirt clumsily and replaced his pistol in his belt. Rachael forgot her modesty and let the sheet fall from her, but the blood-burst on the streets had broken the spell of love-making. Wolf braced his back against the iron bedstead and dropped his face on his knees while she dressed. She cuddled up next to him, laying her head on his lap, and they stayed numbed and quiet until the last of the cries faded from their hearing.

“Where are the trains going?” she whispered shakily.

He shook his head.

“My father says they’ll stop soon, but I don’t believe him. There’s talk about death camps.”

She began to tremble, and her face and hands felt icy. He tried to comfort her.

“I don’t mean to be like this ... It was only—I was so frightened when you didn’t come back in time for Stephan’s bar mitzvah. I’m always dreaming of the trains. I dream they’re taking Stephan. Wolf, he’s taking too many chances. Make him stop.”

“How can I argue with him to be against what we are trying to stand for?”

“What do we stand for? What in God’s name do we stand for?”

“I don’t know, really. My father might be able to put it into certain words. So can Rabbi Solomon. I just want to live and I want you to live. I guess that’s all I really stand for.”

In a little while she became calm.

“Someday it will all be over, Rachael. It must end sometime.”

“If I could only be your wife. If I could only have your baby. Wolf, if either of us goes on the trains, I want you to know how very much I love you.”

“We’re going to come through this ... Rachael.” Then his voice saddened. “My father talked to Rabbi Solomon about marrying us secretly, without your father knowing. He won’t do it.”

“Why? It’s only because my father would never agree—”

“To Rabbi Solomon it would mean he would be taking the side of the underground against the Civil Authority. You know how the Orthodox are about finding hidden meanings in hidden meanings. Besides, I would want the world to know you’re my wife.”

“I try so hard to remember my father the way he used to be, but I think I hate him. I swear, sometimes I almost wish he were—”

“Shhhhh ...”

Sounds on the roof sent them into a grip of fear. Wolf rolled off the bed, yanked Rachael off, and shoved her behind him into an alcove. Someone was rattling about overhead. An indistinguishable figure appeared at the skylight in the kitchen ceiling. It tugged at the trap door. Wolf withdrew his pistol, cocked it, and aimed it on the skylight. The trap door groaned open, sending in a burst of light and air. A pair of legs lowered and a figure dropped to the floor.

“It’s Stephan.”

Stephan got to his feet, rubbing his wrist, which was tingling from the impact of breaking the fall. “I’m sorry to have to come here,” he apologized, “but Uncle Andrei needs you right away, Wolf.”

“Where is he?”

“At the loft over the stage, Workman’s Theater.”

Wolf fought his way into his shoes, slapped his cap on, and peered out of the window. Nightingales patrolled the street below.

“You’ll have to go over the roofs,” Stephan said.

“You two get on the roof and stay till after dark,” Wolf ordered.

Rachael obeyed silently, fearing words would bring on a betrayal of tears. A kitchen table was shoved under the skylight. Wolf climbed on, leaped up, caught hold, and struggled through. He closed his eyes for a moment as he saw the sheer drop. The sharp heights always brought on dizziness. He lay flat on his belly and reached down into the kitchen. Rachael hoisted Stephan into Wolf’s hands. She came through last. Wolf closed the skylight and pointed to cover behind a chimney. Stephan and his sister crouched behind it and watched Wolf disappear over the top of the ghetto.

It took him an hour to negotiate the mile over the roofs, down stairs, sprinting through exposed courtyards and over intersections, diving into the cover of friendly basements.

Wolf knew instantly it was a very important meeting, for Simon Eden was there with Andrei and Tolek Alterman. Andrei and Simon had kept apart to lessen the chance of their both being captured. It was the same with the other leaders. They came together under an urgency, for the informers had unearthed dozens of hiding places on Black Friday.

Simon spoke to Wolf and Tolek. “The Germans are lying about the deportations. One of my people has been able to observe the Umschlagplatz. For six days now the same forty-four cars have come and gone. Figure it. The trains pull out every day at three o’clock. They return by eight o’clock the next morning. Seventeen hours’ travel. Eight and a half going. Eight and a half coming back. Subtract an hour’s unloading time. Subtract an hour to turn the train around. Consider today’s travel conditions.”

“Summary,” Andrei said. “It is our educated guess this train is not traveling more than seventy or eighty kilometers beyond Warsaw.”

Tolek rubbed his jaw, drew a mental picture of Warsaw’s environs. “There is no labor camp or combination of them inside this radius which can continue to take six thousand new people every day.”

“Exactly.”

“As you know,” Simon continued, “my runner system was almost shattered on Black Friday. I lost almost all my people on the Aryan side.”

Andrei handed Wolf and Tolek packets of money. “There’s a guard playing at the Tlomatskie Gate. Go out in fifteen-minute intervals at six o’clock and meet at Gabriela’s flat. She will have a railroad maintenance engineer there. He will place you in observation positions along the rail line.”

When they had gone Simon Eden asked Andrei about new arms. It was the same story. No arms. No money. No help from Roman or the Home Army. Evasions. Frustration. They had only five hundred soldiers left after Black Friday.

Andrei looked at his watch and said it was time for him to leave too.

“Must you go to Lublin?” Simon asked.

“Yes.”

“If there was a way to command you not to go ...”

“No, Simon.”

“Are you certain you can get into this camp?”

“I don’t know for certain. Ana tracked down my old company sergeant. A good soldier, that Styka. I have faith in him. He has been working on it for two weeks, Ana brought the message that he can get me in.”

“Andrei, if we lose you ...”

“What’s to lose, Simon?”

Simon flopped his big hands to his sides. “What’s to lose? I’ve been in a fog for over two years. I try to tell myself all this is untrue. It is not happening. I’m numb, but we survive on instinct.”

Andrei slapped his back.

“Well,” Simon said, “wishing you luck inside Majdanek is rather ludicrous these days. Does Gabriela know?”

“No. I promised her not to keep secrets, but I cannot bring myself to talk about this trip to Lublin. But the minute I come through the door tonight, she will no longer be fooled.”

“I envy you, Andrei, having that kind of love. Andrei, for God’s sake, get back here safely. I can’t keep going without you.”

“See you around, Simon.”

Chapter Seven

ANDREI RUBBED HIS EYES wearily and brought them to focus beyond the unwashed window. The train poked past a hamlet of thatched shanties surrounded by the rye fields of the flat Lublin Uplands. It was a long, slow trip. Late afternoon before he would reach Lublin. Good old Styka. He had come through.

Simon’s words ran through his mind: “I’ve been in a fog ... I’m numb, but we survive on instinct.” On those nights before a dangerous assignment Gabriela, too, was instinctive. She had held him all night with her eyes wide open and without a word.

Andrei allowed himself the reward of a sigh and an inner rebellion of his nerves over another close call. There had been an unexpected siding of the train and an inspection. Life and death hinged on an exchange of glances with one of the Polish police, who returned later for his bribe.

Freedom and capture had hung by a thread so many times, he could not count them any more. Every day fate or luck or a proper instinctive move was the difference between life and death. Each night at Mila 19 the Bathyrans related a series of stories of the day’s close brushes and miraculous escapes.

Andrei took a canteen from his knapsack and sipped a swallow of water and bit off a small hunk of the staling bread. It was painful to put food into his stomach, which, shrunken by the lack of food, rebelled at the sudden stretching.

The train passed a hamlet. The tracks split a large field in half where men and oxen strained against plow leashes and women bent double in stoop labor. Burly leathered men and wrinkled women in drab black rags carried on in a primitive way, almost unchanged from feudal times. Peasants puzzled Andrei. He wondered how they could go on in poverty, superstition, ignorance, with a complete lack of desire to make either their land or their lives flourish.

Andrei remembered a Bathyran meeting long ago. Tolek Alterman had returned from the colonies in Palestine and, before the national leadership, exalted the miracles of drying up swamps and irrigating the desert. A fund-raising drive to buy tractors and machinery was launched. Andrei remembered that his own reaction had been one of indifference.

Had he found the meaning too late? It aggravated him. The land of the Lublin Uplands was rich, but no one seemed to care. In the unfertile land in Palestine humans broke their backs pushing will power to the brink.

He had sat beside Alexander Brandel at the rostrum of a congress of Zionists. All of them were there in this loosely knit association of diversified ideologies, and each berated the other and beat his breast for his own approaches. When Alexander Brandel rose to speak, the hall became silent.

“I do not care if your beliefs take you along a path of religion or a path of labor or a path of activism. We are here because all our paths travel a blind course through a thick forest, seeking human dignity. Beyond the forest all our paths merge into a single great highway which ends in the barren, eroded hills of Judea. This is our singular goal. How we travel through the forest is for each man’s conscience. Where we end our journey is always the same. We all seek the same thing through different ways—an end to this long night of two thousand years of darkness and unspeakable abuses which will continue to plague us until the Star of David flies over Zion.” This was how Alexander Brandel expressed pure Zionism. It had sounded good to Andrei, but he did not believe it. In his heart he had no desire to go to Palestine. He loathed the idea of drying up swamps or the chills of malaria or of leaving his natural birthright.

Before he went into battle Andrei had told Alex, “I only want to be a Pole. Warsaw is my city, not Tel Aviv.”

And now Andrei sat on a train on the way to Lublin and wondered if he was not being punished for his lack of belief. Warsaw! He saw the smug eyes of the Home Army chief, Roman, and all the Romans and the faces of the peasants who held only hatred for him. They had let this black hole of death in Warsaw’s heart exist without a cry of protest.

Once there had been big glittering rooms where Ulanys bowed and kissed the ladies’ hands as they flirted from behind their fans.

Warsaw! Warsaw!

“Miss Rak. I am a Jew.”

Day by day, week by week, month by month, the betrayal gnawed at Andrei’s heart. He ground his teeth together. I hate Warsaw, he said to himself. I hate Poland and all the goddamned mothers’ sons of them. All of Poland is a coffin.

The terrible vision of the ghetto streets flooded his mind. What matters now? What is beyond this fog? Only Palestine, and I will never live to see Palestine because I did not believe.

By late afternoon the train inched into the marshaling yards in the railhead at Lublin, which was filled with lines of cars poised to pour the tools of war to the Russian front.

At a siding, another train which was a familiar sight these days. Deportees. Jews. Andrei’s skilled eye sized them up. They were not Poles. He guessed by their appearance that they were Rumanians.

He walked toward the center of the city to keep his rendezvous with Styka. Of all the places in Poland, Andrei hated Lublin the most. The Bathyrans were all gone. Few of the native Jews who had lived in Lublin were still in the ghetto.

From the moment of the occupation Lublin became a focal point. He and Ana watched it carefully. Lublin generally was the forerunner of what would happen elsewhere. Early in 1939, Odilo Globocnik, the Gauleiter of Vienna, established SS headquarters for all of Poland. The Bathyrans ran a check on Globocnik and had only to conclude that he was in a tug of war with Hans Frank and the civilian administrators.

Globocnik built the Death’s-Head Corps. Lublin was the seed of action for the “final solution” of the Jewish problem. As the messages from Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann came in through Alfred Funk, Lublin’s fountain-head spouted.

A bevy of interlacing lagers, work camps, concentration camps erupted in the area. Sixty thousand Jewish prisoners of war disappeared into Lublin’s web. Plans went in and out of Lublin, indicating German confusion. A tale of a massive reservation in the Uplands to hold several million Jews ... A tale of a plan to ship all Jews to the island of Madagascar ... Stories of the depravity of the guards at Globocnik’s camps struck a chord of terror at the mere mention of their names. Lipowa 7, Sobibor, Chelmno, Poltawa, Belzec, Krzywy-Rog, Budzyn, Krasnik. Ice baths, electric shocks, lashings, wild dogs, testicle crushers.

The Death’s-Head Corps took in Ukrainian and Baltic Auxiliaries, and the Einsatzkommandos waded knee-deep in blood and turned into drunken, dope-ridden maniacs. Lublin was their heart.

In the spring of 1942 Operation Reinhard began in Lublin. The ghetto, a miniature of Warsaw’s, was emptied into the camp in the Majdan-Tartarski suburb called Majdanek. As the camp emptied, it was refilled by a draining of the camps and towns around Lublin, then by deportees from outside Poland. In and in and in they poured through the gates of Majdanek, but they never left, and Majdanek was not growing any larger.

What was happening in Majdanek? Was Operation Reinhard the same pattern for the daily trains now leaving the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw? Was there another Majdanek in the Warsaw area, as they suspected.

Andrei stopped at Litowski Place and looked around quickly at the boundary of civil buildings. His watch told him he was still early. Down the boulevard he could see a portion of the ghetto wall. He found an empty bench, opened a newspaper, and stretched his legs before him. Krakow Boulevard was filled with black Nazi uniforms and the dirty brownish ones of their Auxiliaries.

“Captain Androfski!”

Andrei glanced up over the top of the paper and looked into the mustached, homely face of Sergeant Styka. Styka sat beside him and pumped his hand excitedly. “I have been waiting across the street at the post office since dawn. I thought you might get in on a morning train.”

“It’s good to see you again, Styka.”

Styka studied his captain. He almost broke into tears. To him, Andrei Androfski had always been the living symbol of a Polish officer. His captain was thin and haggard and his beautiful boots were worn and shabby.

“Remember to call me Jan,” Andrei said.

Styka nodded and sniffed and blew his nose vociferously. “When that woman found me and told me that you needed me I was never so happy since before the war.”

“I’m lucky that you were still living in Lublin.”

Styka grumbled about fate. “For a time I thought of trying to reach the Free Polish Forces, but one thing led to another. I got a girl in trouble and we had to get married. Not a bad girl. So we have three children and responsibilities. I work at the granary. Nothing like the old days in the army, but I get by. Who complains? Many times I tried to reach you, but I never knew how. I came to Warsaw twice, but there was that damned ghetto wall ...”

“I understand.”

Styka blew his nose again.

“Were you able to make the arrangements?” Andrei asked.

“There is a man named Grabski who is the foreman in charge of the bricklayers at Majdanek. I did exactly as instructed. I told him you are on orders from the Home Army to get inside Majdanek so you can make a report to the government in exile in London.”

“His answer?”

“Ten thousand zlotys.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“He is aware he will not live for twenty-four hours if he betrays you.”

“Good man, Styka.”

“Captain ... Jan ... must you go inside Majdanek? The stories ... everyone really knows what is happening there.”

“Not everyone, Styka.”

“What good will it really do?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps ... perhaps ... there is a shred of conscience left in the human race. Perhaps if they know the story there will be a massive cry of indignation.”

“Do you really believe that, Jan?”

“I have to believe it.”

Styka shook his head slowly. “I am only a simple soldier. I cannot think things out too well. Until I was transferred into the Seventh Ulanys I was like every other Pole in my feeling about Jews. I hated you when I first came in. But ... my captain might have been a Jew, but he wasn’t a Jew. What I mean is, he was a Pole and the greatest soldier in the Ulanys. Hell, sir. The men of our company had a dozen fights defending your name. You never knew about it, but by God, we taught them respect for Captain Androfski.”

Andrei smiled.

“Since the war I have seen the way the Germans have behaved and I think, Holy Mother, we have behaved like this for hundreds of years. Why?”

“How can you tell an insane man to reason or a blind man to see?”

“But we are neither blind nor insane. The men of your company would not allow your name dishonored. Why do we let the Germans do this?”

“I have sat many hours with this, Styka. All I ever wanted was to be a free man in my own country. I’ve lost faith, Styka. I used to love this country and believe that someday we’d win our battle for equality. But now I think I hate it very much.”

“And do you really think that the world outside Poland will care any more than we do?”

The question frightened Andrei.

“Please don’t go inside Majdanek.”

“I’m still a soldier in a very small way, Styka.”

It was an answer that Styka understood.

Grabski’s shanty was beyond the bridge over the River Bystrzyca near the rail center. Grabski sat in a sweat-saturated undershirt, cursing the excessive heat which clamped an uneasy stillness before sundown. He was a square brick of a man with a moon-round face and sunken Polish features. Flies swarmed around the bowl of lentils in which he mopped thick black bread. Half of it dripped down his chin. He washed it down with beer and produced a deep-seated belch.

“Well?” Andrei demanded.

Grabski looked at the pair of them. He grunted a sort of “yes” answer. “My cousin works at the Labor Bureau. He can make you work papers. It will take a few days. I will get you inside the guard camp as a member of my crew. I don’t know if I can get you into the inner camp. Maybe yes, maybe no, but you can observe everything from the roof of a barrack we are building.”

Grabski slurped his way to the bottom of the soup bowl. “Can’t understand why the hell anyone wants to go inside that son-of-a-bitch place.”

“Orders from the Home Army.”

“Why? Nothing there but Jews.”

Andrei shrugged. “We get strange orders.”

“Well—what about the money?”

Andrei peeled off five one-thousand-zloty notes. Grabski had never seen so much money. His broad flat fingers, petrified into massive sausages by years of bricklaying, snatched the bills clumsily. “This ain’t enough.”

“You’ll get the rest when I’m safely out of Majdanek.”

“I ain’t taking no goddamned chances for no Jew business.”

Andrei and Styka were silent Grabski looked from one to the other, snarling, bullying. He quickly realized that the men before him were as large and tough as the Death’s-Head Corps. He knew, too, Styka would kill him. Grabski grunted, cursed, and shoved the money into his pants pocket. “Be here in the morning at six. We’ll get started on the work pass.”

A sudden northeast breeze blew the sack curtains into the room, bringing in a terrible stench, nauseating the men. Grabski shoved away from the table and slammed the window shut. “Every time the wind blows we get that smell from Majdanek.”

Andrei and Styka stood behind Grabski. Styka pointed to the skyline a few kilometers away where grayish smoke fizzled from a tall chimney.

“That’s it,” Styka said, “Majdanek.”

“Only way the Jews leave that camp is through the chimney,” Grabski said. Amused at discovering himself a humorist, he broke into a fit of laughter.

Chapter Eight

HORST VON EPP WAITED with an infinite, knowing patience for Christopher de Monti to unravel after he had made his visit to the ghetto. Horst played it like a puppet master, confident that Chris was sinking closer to that point where he would be abandoned by the ever-shrinking voices of morality within him. As the weeks and months went, Horst saw his calculations coming to pass.

Chris drank hard these days, and women he had once resisted with bored ease were now constant bedmates. He became a perpetual guest at the perpetual parties he once shunned. As the heaviness inside him compounded, that point of no return would soon be reached. A week, a month, two, it did not matter to Horst, for Chris’s downfall had become inevitable in his calculation. One day he would come to Horst and babble a plea for the life of the unknown Jewess inside the ghetto, and the piper would be paid.

Dr. Franz Koenig’s parties were uninhibited affairs that generals recalled with affection during the long cold winter nights on the Russian front. Koenig kept an international flavor, spicing the invitations to include the diplomatic corps, the press, and the stars of the moment, as well as the top Nazis. Nothing was spared by Koenig in the pursuit of gluttony and revelry. In addition to Warsaw’s courtesans, Koenig continually imported new, young, slim, high-cheekboned blondes from Berlin, playing the role of a degenerated industrialist with great finesse.

Dr. Koenig premiered the newly remodeled ballroom as the first large midsummer event of 1942. It had been redecorated in unabashed elegance. Amid tinkling glasses, bowing, kissing of hands, rumors ran rampant and deals and bribes and barter were made. Much of the talk was about the new depth of the German armed penetrations. El Alamein in North Africa stood before Rommel’s magnificent Afrika Korps, and on the Russian front the Don River had been reached. The Japanese guests had an air of cocksure confidence. The Americans had not recovered from the devastation of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese General Staff was positive America had no stomach to make the sacrifice necessary to displace them from the Pacific islands. It was a night for Axis gaiety. America had come into the war with too little, too late. The glitter of Dr. Franz Koenig’s new ballroom made the participants so heady, there was even talk of a German breakthrough to India, which had been the long-forbidden dream of a dozen empires in a dozen ages.

Toward one o’clock the more strait-laced had made their departures and the party broke into splinter groups drifting to one of the many lush parlors adjoining the ballroom.

In another hour the guests would include only Dr. Koenig’s intimate circle of ten or twenty and the new imports from Berlin. The serious business of an orgy would begin.

Chris’s cup had run over. He was in that state of inebriated calm when all of the tensions within him seemed gone for the moment. In the library he rested his head on the shoulder of a young German model. She was delighted to have found an Italian and he said that it was some time since he had had a German girl, so it should be fun. The room was quite dark, lit only by candelabra and some light filtering in from the main ballroom.

His German girl was approached by Koenig’s aide and spoke so rapidly that Chris could barely decipher it through the alcoholic haze. Apparently she was essential to an act and could not be dispensed with. She eased away with apologies and promises. Chris yawned and shut his eyes for a moment.

He opened them, smacked his lips, and looked around for a servant. A figure of a small woman framed the doorway. Chris tried to think. He had seen the girl from a distance several times during the evening. He was positive he knew her from somewhere, and it seemed as though she were watching him.

She walked into the library, moving to the uninhabited corner by the candelabra. Chris walked up behind her. “Do I know you?” he asked.

She turned and faced him, holding her chin up to the candlelight. “Once you did.”

He squinted, trying to make her out in a sliver of light.

“Gabriela!”

She nodded. He turned chalky.

“What the hell are you doing here! What do you want?”

“An old friend wants to see you. He is in a desperate situation.”

“Andrei?”

“Yes.”

Chris mopped his wet forehead. “Impossible. What’s more, it’s dangerous for you to be here. Dangerous for both of us.” He grabbed her arm. “Wait. Let me think.”

“Hello there, Chris! I’ve been looking for you.”

Chris spun around to see Horst von Epp glower past him, staring at Gabriela. “Sorry, I wasn’t able to get here till late, but I understand it was rather dull—up to now, that is. This makes it all worth while. By God, Chris, you have an unfailing talent to find the most magnificent creatures.”

Gabriela played her role, acknowledging his interest with a coy smile.

“Well, aren’t you going to introduce us, Chris?”

“Yes—certainly.”

“I am Victoria Landowski. I’ve just come to Warsaw from Lemberg for a visit with my cousin. From the many descriptions, I take it you must be Baron von Epp.”

“Madam,” Horst said, taking Gabriela’s hand. He kissed it with a touch and look which embraced all the connotations, and she let her eyes answer him just enough to let him know she understood and welcomed his intentions.

“And where will you be staying, Miss Landowski?”

“I am not quite certain yet, Baron. Why don’t I reach you as soon as I’m settled?”

Horst bowed and backed off gracefully, yielding the girl to Chris with her promise of a future relationship. “It should be a wonderful fall season. ... I say, Chris, are you ill?”

“Dr. Koenig is too generous with his liquor. I think I’ve had one too many.”

“Why don’t we get a breath of air, Chris?” Gabriela said.

“Good idea.”

Horst von Epp watched them leave, intrigued with the pretty little thing. He sized her up for bed. Koenig’s busy aide whispered in his ear that he was invited to the conservatory, where the girls were about to amuse them.

The doorman closed Chris and Gabriela into his Fiat. He fumbled for the ignition switch. “You’re a damned fool walking into this nest,” he mumbled.

Chris drove aimlessly at a crawl, checking the rear-view mirror constantly to see if he was being followed.

“What I want to say is, things have changed.”

“I should say that’s rather obvious.”

“Gaby, you don’t understand.”

“I do understand, quite well. I told Andrei it was a waste of time and that you wouldn’t come.”

“Gaby ...”

“If you gave a damn for him you wouldn’t have let two and a half years go by,” she said.

Chris wanted to tell Gaby he had tried to see her during the past year but had lost track of her when she changed flats. But he could not say it.

“Where is he?” Chris blurted impulsively.

“A hotel room near the yacht club in Saska Kempa.”

Chris sucked in a lungful of air, grunted, looked in the rear-view mirror once more, then made a U turn and drove on the Third of May Boulevard directly for the Poniatowski Bridge. In Saska Kempa, Chris concealed his car in a teamster’s stable several blocks from the shabby hotel.

A meek handshake, an avoiding of Andrei’s eyes. Unbearable small talk. Chris sagged into a hard-backed chair, studying the designs in the linoleum on the floor.

“How have you been?”

“Just fine.”

“Seen Deborah?”

“Yes. She is all right.”

“The children?”

“They are all right.”

“Do you have a glass of water? I’m all dried out.” He sipped and looked up at them. “A hell of a reunion, isn’t it? Well, I’m here. Gaby said it was something desperate.”

“We’ve needed you many times in the past two and a half years,” Andrei said. “But I wouldn’t come to you unless it was something so important we had to come to you.”

He watched Chris go through uncomfortable mannerisms. “What is it?” Chris looked to Gabriela, but she gave no solace in her expression.

“Chris,” Andrei said in a voice filled with an unfamiliar pleading, “tens of thousands of people are being murdered every day in extermination camps. We have put together an authentic report, detailing the locations, the names of the personnel and commanders, the method of operation. We have gone to the Home Army and begged them to get this out to the government in exile, but they won’t help us. Every day means twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand human beings. Chris—you’ve got to carry this out for us and get it into the world press. We’ve got to stop this blood bath. This is the only way.”

Chris pulled himself to his feet. “I’ve heard this talk, but I don’t believe it. Germany is a civilized country. The Germans aren’t capable of doing what you claim—it’s a lie.”

“I’ve just come from inside Majdanek. If you care to interview your friend Baron von Epp, I’ll gladly supply you with some very leading questions.”

Chris sank back into the chair again in a stupor. Andrei lay a typewritten book of a hundred pages before him. Chris glanced at it out of the corner of his eye but pulled his hand back. “I’m not your man,” he whispered.

“Chris, you and I have spent too many hours together putting this lousy world under our microscopes. I know how you’ve been pulled apart these last two years, but I’ve always known with all my soul that in the crucible you are unable to walk away from the cries of the anguished without destroying yourself as a human being.”

“I told you, no! Why the hell did you ask me here?”

“Chris! Chris! Chris! You and I believe in the final nobility of man! You can’t turn your back on us!”

Chris’s fist drummed against the table with a monotonous thudding repetition. “I’ve cried for justice before, Andrei! I cried rape and murder in Spain and it fell on deaf ears.”

“My God, Chris! Men have always destroyed each other. They always will. You can’t pull out because you’ve been hurt once.”

“Do you really believe that goddamned world out there is going to be moved by this report? It’s you who is the fool, not me. No one’s going to care about murdered Jews or starving Indians or floods in Holland or earthquakes in Japan so long as their stinking bellies are full! Your goddamned conscience of man is a myth, Andrei.”

Andrei hovered over Chris. He shook Chris’s shoulders, but the man would not unbend. Andrei slowly sank to his knees. “Chris, I beg you on my knees to help us.”

Gabriela jerked angrily at Andrei. “Get off your knees!” she commanded. “Get off your knees! You will never do this again before any man!”

Chris turned his sweaty face up to her enraged expression. He tried through bleary eyes to beg her to stop.

“You sanctimonious son of a bitch,” Gabriela quivered. “You sit up there on your throne and watch all us little ants scramble in fright to survive and you make your terse comments and your snide observations. I present to you, Christopher de Monti—champion of the press! Oh God, no. Don’t dirty your precious hands with our blood.”

“All I ever wanted is for Deborah to live—that’s all—that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I know she’ll never see me again, but I want her to live—that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Your sister is a very fortunate woman, Andrei. In a single lifetime she has had two upstanding men like Paul Bronski and Christopher de Monti who would sell their souls for her.”

Andrei was limp with weakness and humiliation. “My sister is a woman,” he whispered. “She will take her life and the life of her children before she allows you to save her at the expense of a betrayal to the Nazis.”

“That’s enough, Andrei,” Gabriela said. “Look at him. He is completely degenerated.”

Andrei gave up. He walked to the door. “You were right, Gabriela. We should not have asked him. I’d like to spit on you, Chris, but I must save my strength.”

Andrei left the room.

“You’re not worthy of his spit,” Gabriela said, and followed.

Chris slumped over the table, weeping, choking on his own saliva and tears. His hand fell on the report. He pulled his head up. He gained control of himself and turned the first page.

COMBINED JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS’ REPORT ON EXTERMINATION CENTERS IN OPERATION WITHIN THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF POLAND, JULY 1942

We are able to authenticate firmly the existence of four centers in the General Government Area created for the sole purpose of conducting mass exterminations. In addition, two combination concentration-extermination camps are in existence. There are five hundred labor camps in Poland, of which a hundred and forty are reserved for Jews. All of them contain some sort of murder facilities.

The only conclusion to be drawn is that a master German plan is in effect for the absolute destruction of the Jewish people. In the beginning, mass starvation, disease, and executions decimated the various ghettos by tens of thousands. After the invasion of Russia, Kommandoes of four Special Action groups massacred additional hundreds of thousands. The culmination of this plan is now assembly-line murder. The master plan, it must be concluded, comes from Hitler through Himmler and Heydrich. The actual execution is performed by the so-called 4B section of the Gestapo (Jewish affairs) under the direction of SS Sub-Colonel Adolf Eichmann.

The extermination centers are located at railheads and generally in secluded sites. They are guarded by Waffen SS and Ukrainian and Baltic Auxiliaries. A staggering amount of planning, material and manpower is being used to carry out this operation at a time when Germany is conducting a war on many fronts. For example, rail cars are at an urgent premium for the purpose of shipping war materials to the Russian front, yet importation of Jews from German-occupied countries into Poland seems to have taken a priority over army needs. In addition, thousands of engineers, scientists, and key personnel are tied up in this operation as well as desperately needed manpower. We can safely estimate that from two to three hundred thousand men are directly or indirectly involved. All of this effort testifies to the insane will of the Nazis as well as to the urgency of our situation.

These camps follow a basic pattern. Deception is carried out and secrecy maintained. This certainly indicates the Nazis are aware of the evil they are perpetrating. At each camp, deportees arrive and are weeded at selection centers. A few are set aside for slave labor. The rest, including women and small children, are moved to a “sanitation center” under the illusion of receiving a disinfectant shower. Hair is shorn. The guards play out the game to the end by issuing bars of soap (which later turn out to be made of stone), and victims are asked to remember the number of the peg on which their clothing is hung. Many women attempt to hide children in their clothing or throw them off trains to peasants, but they are almost always found out.

When the occupants are in, an iron door is sealed and an attendant carries out the gassing. The first gassings were from the carbon monoxide exhaust of engines. This method proved slow and petrol costly, therefore a prussic acid mixture called Cyclon B was developed by the Hamburg Insecticide Company. Death is in minutes.

Jewish slave laborers clean the chambers and remove the corpses to crematoriums, where they are burned. At first cremation was in open pits, but the stench was unbearable. The Jewish laborers generally last only a few weeks before losing their sanity.

There are many variations, but this is the general pattern. Gold teeth are pulled from the corpses before burning. Anything of value is taken for the German war effort. Everything else—clothing, eyeglasses, shoes, artificial limbs, even dolls—is stored in warehouses, then scrutinized for hidden valuables. Hair is baled and shipped to Germany for use in the manufacture of mattresses and to waterproof submarine periscopes. In one camp, bodies have been boiled down for their fat content, to be used in the making of soap.

In addition to the Polish camps, we have reason to believe several camps in Germany have extermination facilities. Dachau, among others, is used as an “experimental medical” center. Humans are compelled to undergo experiments, such as the grafting of bones, transplants of organs, testing beyond human limitations in freezing, electrical shock, etc. In all camps, extermination and labor, the indignities, abuses, torture, and rape are universal. These are amplified in the attached supplementary reports.

The German extermination facilities are capable of murdering a minimum of a hundred thousand persons a day in Poland. We do not have the additional numbers who are killed inside Germany. The Polish camps are currently working at full capacity. New gas chambers and crematoriums are being constructed to increase the rate.

The Polish camps are:

LUBLIN DISTRICT

Belzec—Located on the Lublin-Tomaszow rail line near Rawa Ruska, handling Jews from the Lwow-Lemberg area with a capacity of ten thousand a day.

Sobibor—Near Wlodawa, between Wlodawa and Chelm. Capacity believed to be six thousand a day.

Majdanek—An early concentration camp in the Lublin suburb Majdan-Tartarski under the personal direction of Odilo Globocnik, SS Gruppenführer of Poland. Capacity in excess of ten thousand a day.

WESTERN POLAND

Chelmno—The oldest extermination center (in operation at the end of 1941), nine miles from Kolo, on the rail line between Lodz and Poznan, exterminating Jews in western Poland.

CENTRAL POLAND

Treblinka—Most recently discovered by underground efforts, located in the Sokolow Podlaski province near Warsaw, liquidating Jews from the Warsaw ghetto as well as Radom, Bialystok, Grodno, the Baltics, Czenstochowa, Kielce.

SOUTHERN POLAND

Auschwitz—Located just outside the Silesian village of Oswiencim. The concentration camp has some fifty satellite labor camps. Extermination facilities are in a compound named Birkenau. Capacity in excess of forty thousand a day. Gypsies, Russian POWs, political, criminal, and other prisoners are liquidated here as well as Jews.

SUPPLEMENTARY REPORT # 1

by “Jan” on the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin

I was able to enter Majdanek disguised as a Polish laborer, one of hundreds who work on construction jobs in the outer compounds.

At 0700 I left Lublin by horse and cart with a party named “Leopold.” We were halted at a rail terminal approximately one kilometer from the main gate of the camp. The terminal is adjacent to the main highway. We sat and waited while several thousand Rumanian Jews were herded over the highway on a march to the camp gate.

A line of Red Cross vans waited alongside the terminal building. German guards loaded these vans with aged, cripples, infants, and others unfit to walk the mile. Leopold told me these Red Cross vans are actually sealed, escape-proof cabins. Once they are in motion, the carbon monoxide from the exhaust is routed back into the van so that by the time they reach Majdanek the occupants are dead.

(Note:

This same method was used in both Chelmno and Treblinka but ruled out as too slow and costly. It is used only to supplement the main extermination facilities.)

I entered the outer compound at 0800 through a gate which bore a sign: LABOR BRINGS FREEDOM. My crew was working on a brick barrack in the outer camp, fifty meters from the inner camp, for use by a new guard contingent. I was able to place myself on the third-story roof in a hidden spot and in a position of observation through a pair of field glasses which I brought in in my lunch box.

I should estimate that the entire camp area covered six or seven hundred acres. At its closest point it was only a kilometer and a half from Lublin. The outer camp contains guard barracks, the commandant’s home, a general store, garage, and other service buildings of a permanent nature.

The inner compound is composed of forty-six barracks made of wood of the type used as German army stables. Air and light came through a narrow row of skylight windows. I was told that each barrack holds nearly four hundred prisoners. Obviously they are crammed with room only for slabs for beds and a narrow passageway to the main door.

The inner compound is surrounded by double walls of barbed wire five meters high. Between the two walls is a continuous patrol by Ukrainians with Alsatian dogs. I am told that the inner wall is electrified at night.

High guard towers with floodlights and machine guns stand every twenty-five meters along the outer wall.

Leopold called my attention to the set of barracks nearest us. He told me these are warehouses. The Rumanian Jews whom I had seen earlier at the rail terminal were already filing into the first barrack, which is a selection center. Only a few were taken into the camp. The rest trekked over an open plot to a concrete building marked by signs I could clearly identify as SANITATION CENTER.

The “sanitation center” is very pretty, with lawns and trees and flowers planted around it.

When four hundred people had gathered, the line from the warehouse was halted and the group ordered into the “sanitation center.” In approximately ten minutes I heard a burst of hideous screaming which lasted only ten or fifteen seconds. The building was then besieged by Jewish prisoners (Sonnderkommandos) who, I am told, clean out the chamber and remove the personal belongings to the second warehouse for sorting.

Ten minutes after the first gassing, the Jewish prisoners brought the corpses out. I saw them clearly. They were the same four hundred who had gone in twenty minutes before. Six to eight corpses were piled on a welded sledlike affair, and each “sled” was pulled by Jewish prisoners. The Sonnderkommandos passed out of the inner-camp gate to a side road which ran one kilometer up a hill to a large building with a tall smokestack. I was able to see this clearly also through my field glasses.

The entire gassing process took thirty minutes for four hundred people. On the first day of my observation there were twelve separate gassings, or approximately forty-eight hundred persons. On the second day there were twenty gassings, or eight thousand, and on the third day seventeen gassings, or sixty-eight hundred. I have been told that upward of forty gassings have been accomplished in a twenty-four-hour period and never less than ten.

Leopold and other laborers have worked both in the repair of the gas chamber and crematorium. He tells me the chamber is a low-ceilinged room of four meters by twelve. It resembles a shower room in every detail except that the shower heads are false. An SS man is able to control the volume of gas through a barred observation window. Leopold and a crew of workers must enter the chamber every few weeks in order to resurface the concrete, which is torn up by victims clawing to get out.

Leopold was also instrumental in building the crematorium after open-pit burning of corpses was abandoned because of the stench. After the sleds are run to the crematorium the corpses are placed on a table and examined for gold teeth and slit open (and bled through a drainage pipe) to see if any gold or valuables had been swallowed. Then the corpses are taken into the adjoining room and placed in one of five ovens that hold five to seven corpses apiece. Extending arms and legs are hacked off. Cremation lasts minutes. The bones are removed from grates from the opposite side. Through my field glasses I was able to make out hills of bones some two stories high. Leopold tells me that recently when he went to repair the ovens a bone crushing machine had been installed and the bone meal sacked and shipped to Germany for fertilizer.

Christopher de Monti held his head between his legs and began to vomit. He vomited until his guts screamed with pain. Page after page it went. The full report of Andrei Androfski, the reports of a handful of survivors of Treblinka and Chelmno and the labor camps.

“God! What have I done?” he cried in anguish. “I am a Judas! I am a Judas!”

The puke and the tears and the pain and the liquor crushed on him and he fell to the floor in a dead faint.

Chapter Nine

FELLOW JEWS! WARNING!

DO NOT REPORT TO THE UMSCHLAGPLATZ FOR DEPORTATION! THE DESTINATION IS A DEATH CAMP LOCATED NEAR THE TREBLINKA VILLAGE! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN! RESIST! THIS IS A SIGNAL FOR AN UPRISING! JOIN US!

JOINT FORCES

Journal Entry

Oh, my God, why have you forsaken us! How has man reached such depravity? We are at the bottom of a swill pit, and it is midnight! In all of the long tortured history of our people we have reached the moment of greatest degradation.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

The immediate result of the revelations brought the long-sought unity among the diversified elements in the ghetto. Simon Eden and the Labor Zionists already had a working agreement with Andrei and the Bathyrans. Now the Communists and many religious fringe groups and individuals went under the single banner of Joint Forces. The Revisionists agreed to a non-binding working agreement. Simon Eden was declared commander and Andrei Androfski his deputy, with the Communists taking charge of activity beyond the wall. Although they were weak inside the ghetto, the Communists on the outside gave them the closest set of allies of any other group on the Aryan side. Wolf Brandel was sent into the Brushmaker’s district to organize a fighting unit inside the factory complex.

The Joint Forces counted sixty pistols, thirty-four rifles, and a single automatic weapon.

The guns were of so many different calibers and varieties that some had only a half dozen rounds of ammunition. The tiny arsenal was reinforced somewhat by several thousand homemade bottle bombs and grenades manufactured from water pipes perfected by the chemist, Jules Schlosberg, in the cellar of Mila 19.

The total combat force stood at five hundred sixty young men and women, mostly in their early twenties, almost entirely without military training.

Journal Entry

The call for a rebellion has fallen on deaf ears. How can the people rebel? What do they have to rebel with? What help will they receive from the outside? In a final banality of the German language, the Nazis refer to the exterminations as “dispensation of special treatment.” The desire to survive has become so intense that the people will not allow themselves to believe there is a death camp at Treblinka. The Jewish Militia and members of the Civil Authority rip down underground posters as quickly as they are put up. Kennkarten stamped for slave labor are still believed by the people to be some sort of magic key to life.

It is amazing how the people will submit themselves to a living death worse than death itself. Even the most decadent societies in past history have understood that a basic minimum must be accorded for a slave or even an animal to be able to produce a reasonable day’s work. The Germans have even made an innovation on this by turning all of Poland into one big slave-labor pool. With millions of extra laborers who cannot exist otherwise, the competition for the right to become a slave is fierce.

The slaves in Dr. Koenig’s brush and uniform factories are separated from their families, numbered, stamped, beaten at their work. They labor in abysmal conditions for sixteen to eighteen hours a day. There is almost no heat in winter or ventilation or light. They exist with no personal property or human rights. They are terrorized and starved so that the fight for food among them is a further struggle to live. Their sleeping quarters are unfit to be pigsties. Every slave of every time has dreamt of freedom, and every tyrant of every time has recognized that dream. Here the only alternative is death. The slightest defect by protest or sickness brings immediate liquidation and replacement by another who scrambles for the right to be a slave.

The Big Action enters its second week. Yesterday no volunteers showed up at the Umschlagplatz. The Militia and Nightingales surrounded Koenig’s Brushmaker’s factory and selected half the workers for deportation. Today the Civil Authority called for volunteers to fill the factory openings. It was oversubscribed! Of course this newest German ruse will not last long, but it is fantastic that the people continue to allow themselves to be tricked.

Crazy Nathan stands near the Umschlagplatz and laments and prophesies that he will be the sole survivor in Warsaw. His latest psalm:

The Germans are so good to us.

They even make a raid

To give us free vacations,

With all expenses paid.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

On the ninth day of the Big Action, Alexander Brandel walked into the barracks of the Jewish Militia, eater-corner to the Civil Authority building at Zamenhof and Gensia streets. The police who had bullied the ghetto around for nearly two years became uneasy at the presence of Brandel. He was more disheveled than ever. His slight stature certainly posed no threat of physical harm, yet they feared him. He was one of the few untouchables. Harm to him would bring savage retribution to them. But more, they feared his calm. He asked to see Piotr Warsinski.

Warsinski, the convert, whose hatred of Jews matched the viciousness of the Reinhard Corps, also feared Alexander Brandel. The flesh on the backs of his hands were always crimson from a nervous itch. At the sight of Alex entering his office, his fingernails dug into them, turning his skin to bleeding scales.

“What do you want here?” he growled.

“I should like to go into the Umschlagplatz and I want a dozen of my nurses around the selection center.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’ll pay for the privilege.”

“Get the hell out or you’ll be taking a train ride yourself.”

That goddamned smile on Brandel’s face! That son of a bitch! What he hated more than anything was Brandel’s calm. Brandel’s refusal to argue. When he had been sub-warden at Pawiak Prison he liked to watch the prisoners cringe, broken at his feet. Then one like Brandel would show up. Unafraid. He hated unafraid bastards. Warsinski’s itch worsened and his slitty eyes watered.

This morning he had beaten a woman prisoner to death with his hands. Women pointed up his impotence, his inability to be a man even when he paraded them around naked and made them perform obscenities with male prisoners.

He dropped his hands below the desk and tore at them with his fingernails.

“What do you want?”

“To see Haupsturmführer Kutler and Sturmbannführer Stutze. There are certain people who are taken to the Umschlagplatz whom we want to buy back.”

“What are you paying with?”

“American dollars.”

“I’ll take the message to them. How much a head?”

“Six dollars.”

“Whatever deal is made, add on another dollar for the Militia.”

“Fine,” Alex said, shoving away from the desk, hiding his revulsion. What pearls of wisdom had he gathered in a lifetime of study to pierce the heart of Piotr Warsinski? Seven dollars per life. Warsinski’s cruel eyes told him that one day he would stand on a platform and watch Alex ride off to Treblinka in a cattle car.

Haupsturmführer Kutler was sloppy drunk when Warsinski reached the SS barracks. The sight of Warsinski’s bloody hands triggered a quicker guzzling. The nightmare had been particularly bad for several days as Kutler relived the massacre of Babi-Yar and woke up screaming from a dream of drowning in blood. Now his sleep was tormented by visions of little animals tearing at his flesh. Sturmbannführer Stutze tried to pull the captain to his feet. Stutze was sickened at the weak fiber of the Germans who had been Kommandos in the Action Squads. They constantly drank themselves to the DT’s and pumped their veins full of dope. Austrians such as he and Globocnik and Hitler were made of sterner stuff. When the war was won, the Austrians would dominate the weaker German species. Kutler was in no condition to talk. Stutze had him taken to his room by a pair of guards, then turned to Warsinski.

“So,” Stutze said, “he offered you six dollars a Jew head. How much did you add on for yourself?”

“Only a dollar a Jew, Herr Sturmbannführer, and much of that must be spread among my police.”

The crippled Austrian meditated. “Hummm. What is the difference? Let them buy the Jews. We’ll get them all back anyhow. Only ... Jews barter. You are a Jew, Warsinski. Barter.”

Warsinski winced at being called a Jew.

“I want ten dollars a Jew, payable at the end of every business day,” Stutze said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And, by the way, let us keep this transaction between us.”

“Yes, sir.”

At the final price of eleven dollars and fifty cents a head, Alexander Brandel and his nurses were allowed into the Umschlagplatz. In the next few days they snatched out a few writers, scientists, musicians, poets, historians, teachers, children, engineers, doctors, actors, and rabbis from among the thousands jammed into the daily train.

The ruse of taking factory workers failed because volunteers refused to take their place any more. The next cleanup was a systematic dragnet of the ghetto to bag the thousands of beggar children, Wild Ones, and homeless for deportation. Crazy Nathan was among those picked up, but Alexander Brandel purchased his life, for he was a sentimental historian and the “crazy” one had filled his journals with hundreds of poems and anecdotes.

In these days the lines of deportees were not so orderly as in the beginning. Bribe money flashed all over the Umschlagplatz. When there was no money, the deportees offered the guards watches, rings, furs—anything—to buy their way back into the ghetto for another day, another hour. And each day the marches to the trains were halted dozens of times by frantic bursts for freedom which only intensified the brutality of the guards.

And each day when the trains pulled out at three o’clock there were leftovers in the square. These prisoners were taken to the top floor of the selection building, to be first in line for deportation the next day. Each night the Ukrainian guards stripped the prisoners, searching for valuables. Women were taken to the lower floors of the building and raped.

On the twelfth day of the Big Action, the Bathyran Council met and demanded from Alex that he stay out of the Umschlagplatz. Tolek and Ana pleaded that a whim of Kutler or Stutze would cancel their deal and threaten his own life. Alex would have none of it, not even their orders nor, finally, their threats to restrain him. For so many years he had battled to breathe life into the dying. He could not hold back the flood, but he was frantic to salvage the product of a great culture.

And on the next day he milled in the courtyard of the Umschlagplatz, as usual.

“Alex! Come quickly. Rabbi Solomon has passed from the selection center. They’re taking him to the cemetery for execution.”

Alex raced over the square, stumbling, gasping, into the building, down the corridor, past the guard, into Kutler’s office. The captain was more than halfway through his first bottle of schnapps and it was not yet noon. Alexander completely lost his composure.

“The Rabbi Solomon!” he cried.

“Don’t push your luck, Jew boy,” Kutler blurted.

Alex panicked.

“A hundred dollars!”

“Hundred?” He began to laugh. “Hundred for that old Jew carcass? God damn. The price for old Jews is good today. He’s all yours, Jew boy.”

As Alex sighed and reeled out, Kutler reared back and laughed until the tears came to his eyes.

In the middle of the night Sylvia Brandel tiptoed down to Alexander’s office. Mila 19 was asleep except for the guards. Earlier in the day she had tried to go to him, but his door was locked. He refused to answer her calls. She did not know whether to be angry or hurt or to try to approach him with sympathy or to leave him alone. It was indeed strange behavior for Alex. She rattled on the doorknob and knocked again. He opened it and walked away from her.

Sylvia stared at his back, trying to adjust to the awesome experience, for Alexander was not like other men. He had always been a strong stone lighthouse for people to look up to find light and shelter. In twenty years of marriage she could not remember him floundering or crying for help. At first she was troubled that he did not seem to need the compassion that other men needed, but she learned to revere him and to five to serve him. Alex lived in his own world, a strange mixture of ideals and ideas, and he functioned with inexhaustible reservoirs of patience and courage. It was frightening to see him derailed.

“How is Rabbi Solomon?” he asked.

“We have a cot set up for him in the Good Fellowship room in the cellar. Ervin will stay with him tonight. Alex, will you eat something? There is some soup left in the kitchen.”

“I’m not hungry,” he whispered.

“It’s almost three o’clock. Please come up to bed.”

He flopped at his desk, and his face dropped into his hands in utter defeat.

“Alex, I have never questioned your decisions, but I beg you—don’t go to the Umschlagplatz again. There is a limit to what I can stand too.”

Tears welled in the corners of his eyes and rolled to nothing halfway down his cheek.

“No man can continue as you have without breaking up.”

“I’ve failed,” he whispered, “I’ve failed.”

“You’re a human being, Alex. You’ve given your life to other people. I can’t stand to see you let yourself be destroyed.”

“I’ve failed,” he mumbled, “I’ve failed.”

“Alex, for God’s sake!”

“I lost my head today. I’ll lose it again.”

“You’re tired ... so tired.”

“No. It’s just ... that I knew today ... everything I’ve stood for ... everything I’ve tried to do has been wrong.”

“Oh no, darling.”

“My way? Keep one more body alive for one more day. All my cunning to save a single man, and now thousands flood to their deaths and there is nothing I can do ... nothing.”

Sylvia gripped him awkwardly. “I won’t hear you berate yourself after all you have done.”

“Done?” He laughed. “What have I done, Sylvia? Trade with swindlers and Nazis? Use trickery and cunning? Done?” He took her hands and he was again gentle Alex. “They are going to destroy our entire culture. How can I preserve a few voices to show the world who we were and what we have given them? Who will be left?”

He walked away from her. “We don’t speak of it here in Mila 19, but Andrei and I have had little to say to each other since the war. Do you know why? When the Germans came here he wanted to take our people to the woods to fight. I stopped him. I took the guns and the bullets from him. My way—I had to have my way.”

“Alex, please!”

“Wrong! I am wrong and I’ve always been wrong! Not my journal or Rabbi Solomon’s prayers will deliver us. Only Andrei’s guns, and it is too late and I did this to him.”

Like the catacombs of Rome, an underground city was clawed beneath the ghetto of Warsaw. Every person capable of working joined in a frantic race to build hiding places.

Fifty thousand trap doors, fifty thousand secret entrances led to false rooms in sub-floors, closets, behind bookcases, in attics. In the stores and bakeries they hid in unfired ovens, under counters. They made hiding places by removing the stuffing in couches, under tubs, in garbage dumps.

They lived a second away from their escape hatches. Walking in the streets became a memory. Communication was by rooftop. Behind loose tiles, stoves, toilets, pictures, lay entrances to secret rooms.

Cellars were good to hide in, for they could hold larger stores of food and their entrances were easily concealed, but attics had the advantage of the best escape routes.

The epitome of ingenuity did not deter the Big Action from bagging their quotas for the deportations. The cry of children, the keen noses of trained dogs, the spying of informers continued to flush more and more secret places. Guards in the streets watched guards upstairs break every window in a house, for unbroken windows revealed the presence of a hidden room.

At Mila 19 and at Leszno 92, Andrei and Simon took attic rooms where an alarm bell would send them to the rooftops, where the guards were not so anxious to follow.

The entrance through the packing crates to the secret rooms in the basement of Mila 19 was abandoned as not safe enough, and a false water closet was constructed on the main floor. By removing a loose floor bolt the lavatory swung away, revealing a hole in the wall large enough for a man to crawl through. A ladder led to the new parts of the basement dug out since the Big Action and holding a dozen people Alex had snatched from the Umschlagplatz as well as the archives and arsenal rooms. An exit tunnel was dug to tie into the large drainage pipe which led many meters beyond Mila 19. The underground complex spread until it was halted by the main line of the pipe which ran directly down the middle of Mila Street. The sound of rushing sewage was constantly heard.

At the end of the third week in August the Big Action suddenly ground to a halt. The roundups stopped.

Chapter Ten

MAX KLEPERMAN HAD NOT only one of the few Jewish telephones in the ghetto, he had two, the second a direct line to Dr. Franz Koenig, with whom a vast amount of business was transacted. The license to buy and sell gold, agent real estate, smuggle, inform were exclusive rights granted the Big Seven.

Max Kleperman’s private phone rang.

“Ja, Herr Doktor ... Ja, Herr Doktor ... Ja, Herr Doktor.”

After several more “Ja, Herr Doktors,” Max hung up and called for his secretary. “Dr. Koenig wants to see all the partners here in my office in an hour. Get hold of them right away and have them wait here. I go now to see him at his residence and I will come back with him for the meeting.”

Max checked out his appearance, took the diamond ring from his little finger, and clapped hands for his chauffeur and bodyguard. They drove from the ghetto through the Krasinski Gate. Max liked to drive to the Aryan side. He enjoyed looking at the trees. There was only one tree in the entire ghetto, and that was in front of the Civil Authority. That particular tree annoyed him, for he always considered the Civil Authority in competition with the Big Seven. Many times he toyed with the idea of planting a half dozen trees in front of his headquarters on Pawia Street but decided it would be provocative.

Max had a particular affection for the Krasinski Gardens. As a boy he had started his career there, hiring Polish hoodlums to steal from the Jewish delivery boys and reselling the merchandise at Parysowski Place. Parysowski Place was closed to trade these days, since the deportations.

Max heaved a sigh of relief now that the deportations had stopped. Even he and the Big Seven people were getting edgy. Certainly the Germans had accomplished what they wanted. Max’s mind turned to visions of a new plum awaiting him at Dr. Koenig’s. With the deportations over, some new venture was cooking. I’ve come a long way since the old days, he thought.

Dr. Koenig was the best of the Germans to deal with. He didn’t shout or berate one, nor did he try to steal arms and legs off in a deal. All Dr. Koenig wanted was a fair share. A fine man, Dr. Koenig.

Max was ushered into Koenig’s office. He sat down and squeezed his cigar in excited anticipation and, when Koenig nodded that it was all right for him to smoke, lit it with the silver lighter on the desk.

“Are your partners waiting at the Big Seven?” Dr. Koenig asked.

“They will be there as ordered, Herr Doktor.”

“Now, Max, let’s talk a little business.”

Kleperman opened his arms graciously. “I am your humble servant.”

Koenig put on a pair of bifocals, opened a file, and lifted a sheet of paper and studied it “You’ve made quite a killing in the last few years, Kleperman.”

The smile vanished from Max’s face. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of a pair of SS Waffen guarding the door. Max cleared his throat and leaned on his elbow. What was Koenig up to?

“I must say, you were very clever. Bilking us out of a quarter of a million dollars.”

Max thrust out his hand in protest. “A terrible exaggeration!”

“One of your partners volunteered the information.”

Max’s big fingers tugged away to loosen his collar as Dr. Koenig read a terribly correct accounting of his fancy footwork. “And finally,” Koenig said, “you have given inflated zlotys to the welfare people through agents in exchange for dollar deposits in Swiss banks. Buildings for which you have acted as agent have been leased to Orphans and Self-Help for dollars also. Now, Max, you know all of this is illegal.”

Kleperman was way ahead of Koenig. He looked over his shoulder to see if the guards had miraculously disappeared. They hadn’t. The hutzpah, the gall of Koenig to sit there with this holier-than-thou attitude when it was he, Kleperman, who set up most of the deals for the Germans. They had wallowed together in the muck, and now Koenig was going into an act of righteousness. Nothing on earth was worse than a righteous thief!

“As Kommissar of Jewish property,” Koenig said, “I am appalled at the state of the affairs conducted by you. You have blatantly betrayed the trust of the occupation authorities.”

Think fast! Max Kleperman, you are in a bad position. His brain raced. He’d have to go for a deal. He’d play with the Swiss money and save the South American money. No one knew about the South American money.

“I am in a bad bargaining position,” Max smiled.

“I thought you would comprehend the situation.”

“But, as always, Max Kleperman is a reasonable man.”

Max nodded in the direction of the SS men. Koenig ordered them to wait outside.

“Now, Kleperman, let’s make a clean breast. How much do you have sitting in Swiss banks, and which banks?”

“I have forty thousand dollars on demand,” Max confided.

“Which banks?”

Max wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

“May I conclude, Herr Doktor, that the various contracts between you and the Big Seven are about to be terminated?”

“You may conclude whatever you wish to conclude.”

Max cleared his throat and leaned over the desk to dispense a great confidence. “The fact is, I have a few dollars more. Fifty thousand. Frankly, I am weary of business. I should like to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Now—we make a final deal. I’ll sign half this money to you now and half when I arrive in Bern with my family.”

Koenig rocked in his chair and smiled tightly. “Ready to jump ship, eh, Max.”

Max winked.

“How about your partners?”

“Believe me, I’ve tolerated those thieves as long as it is humanly possible. I think this is a reasonable way for two honorable men to end a long and fruitful association.”

“But, Max, how will you live?”

“Somehow, I’ll struggle by.”

“Perhaps with the money in the National Bank in Geneva?”

“Oh—oh yes, I did have an account there.”

“And the Bank of South America in Buenos Aires, and the Grain Exchange in Rio de Janeiro.”

“Herr, Herr, Herr ...”

Koenig spread six documents before Kleperman and handed him a pen. “Just sign these, Mr. Kleperman. We will fill in the details.”

Max’s face twitched violently. A belch of misplaced cigar smoke gagged him. “The other partners have money over the border too. If I sign these papers and give you the information on them, do I get a passport?”

Koenig smiled. “You’ve made yourself a deal.”

Max scrawled his signature on the papers, giving away over two hundred thousand ill-earned dollars. Droplets of sweat dripped on the transfers as he signed.

“When I arrive in Switzerland I will give you the information on the others.”

Koenig nodded. “We knew we could depend on your co-operation, Max. You will receive information about your departure shortly.”

Max was sick, but he still had his life. The pair of SS men led him out of Koenig’s palace. He had money in eight banks. There were two places that that righteous thief Koenig had not discovered. Max flopped in the back seat of his car, removed his hat, and fanned himself and groaned.

His eyes bulged in terror! His cigar fell from his mouth. His chauffeur had been replaced by an SS man, and his bodyguard was gone. Before he could budge, a pair of SS were on either side of him and the car whisked out of the driveway. It stopped six minutes later at the entrance to the Jewish cemetery.

Max was white with terror at the sight of Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze. The SS men had to help him walk. Stutze tapped a length of pipe in his open palm as Max was dragged before him. Kleperman took off his hat. “Your excellency, Sturmbannführer ... I ... I ...”

Stutze spoke. “I wanted to be here for you personally, Kleperman. You are the filthiest of all the filthy Jews. I have always admired that ring of yours. No, don’t bother to give it to me now. I’ll get it after the execution.”

“Ah, then ... you did not receive the word. Dr. Koenig and I made a deal. You are in for a hundred thousand dollars ... you see ...”

“Shut up. You didn’t really think we would let you out of Poland with what you know?”

“My lips are sealed. I swear it.”

“You don’t have to swear it. We are going to seal them for you.”

Six powerful hands gripped him. He dropped to his knees. They began to drag him.

“Wait!” the Austrian said. “Let him crawl.”

“Excellency. There is more money. I didn’t tell Koenig. You ... me ... a private deal ...”

The lead pipe caught Kleperman behind the ear. He pitched face down on the dirt and crawled to Stutze and threw his arms around his knees. “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy for Max Kleperman!”

The pipe came down and down, again, again, again, until Max’s face was squashed like an overripe watermelon. Stutze broke into a sweat. He kicked with his gimpy leg and screamed and ranted until he had exhausted himself on the blood orgy and had to be held upright by his SS troopers.

Max Kleperman’s lifeless body was dragged down the long path lined with desecrated grave markers to the west wall and unceremoniously flung into a ditch twenty feet long and twelve feet deep.

Along the edge of the ditch the partners and fifty members of the Big Seven were lined up. They cried, begged, bartered. Below them, Kleperman lay in a bed of lime.

Some fell to their knees and cried for God and for mother. Whoremasters, thieves, informers.

“Mercy!”

“Fire!”

The sound of rifle fire was a cliché within these walls. The Jewish gravediggers watched impassively as the bodies plunged to the bottom of the ditch and stared up at them from grotesque positions. The firing squad advanced to the edge of the ditch and poured gunfire into the twitching bodies until they were still. Shovels of lime were spread. Another batch of Big Seven people was hauled in.

PROCLAMATION!

IT HAS BEEN DISCOVERED THAT THE BIO SEVEN COMPANY HAS BEEN GUILTY OF INNUMERABLE CRIMES AND WERE THE MAIN PERPETRATORS OF MUCH OF THE JEWISH SUFFERING. IN THE NAME OF COMMON JUSTICE THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES HAVE DISPOSED OF THESE CRIMINALS AFTER INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIALS.

AS OF THIS DATE ALL FURTHER DEPORTATIONS ARE CANCELED. SPECIAL SCHOOLS MAY REOPEN AND AUTHORIZED PUBLIC MEETINGS WITHIN THE GHETTO ARE PERMITTED. THE CURFEW IS AGAIN EXTENDED TO 7 P.M.

BY ORDER

RUDOLPH SCHREIKER

KOMMISSAR, DISTRICT OF WARSAW

Chapter Eleven

RACHAEL THUMBED THROUGH A stack of sheet music, selected several numbers, and slipped on her Star of David armband. Deborah, dressed in a gown and robe, entered the room, yawning and stretching.

“Are you certain it is safe to give a recital today? I feel uneasy about it.”

“Momma, there haven’t been any deportations for four days. Ervin is arranging programs all over the ghetto to get people’s minds off the past three weeks. Besides, I’ll be playing at your orphanage on Niska and nothing will happen there.”

“Well, I suppose it is all right.”

“I may see Wolf today. It’s been ten days.”

Deborah fussed with her daughter’s hair. “I wish you wouldn’t go to Andrei’s.”

“We can’t any more, Momma. It’s being watched all the time.”

“You can come here. Your father won’t be home till late.”

As Rachael turned and faced her mother, Deborah realized for the first time that her child was as tall and mature as she. “Thanks, Momma, but Wolf is terribly proud about that. Besides, it’s not the most important thing any more. Just being able to see each other for a few minutes and talking is all we really want”

Deborah patted her cheek.

Stephan burst into the apartment “Hey, come on. Aren’t you ready yet?”

“Be careful, children. Keep your Civil Authority Kennkarten handy and forgive me for not coming. I’m dog-tired. I have to get a few hours’ sleep before going back to the orphanage. Tell Susan I’ll take the night shift.”

Stephan and Rachael pecked kisses on Deborah’s cheek.

Rachael opened the door and stopped. “Strange,” she said. “Being able to walk in the streets again.”

“Be careful,” Deborah repeated.

The assembly hall in the Niska Street orphanage was capable of holding most of the four hundred children. It was one of the twenty-eight institutions under Alexander Brandel’s Orphans and Self-Help Society which somehow managed to feed and secretly educate over twenty thousand parentless youngsters. Unlike the rest of the ghetto, these homes had no hiding rooms, for it would have been impossible to construct them secretly. After all, Brandel concluded, these were children, and he had to believe in the final mercy of the enemy to leave them alone.

Rachael Bronski was the very favorite of the children. They crammed together, filling all the benches, sitting in the aisles and on the floor before her piano on the platform at the end of the hall. The nurses, teachers, and social workers stood along the back wall.

Rachael looked continually to the back door through which Wolf might appear. A long time ago when he returned from the Bathyran farm at Wework, he had come to her during a recital in this very place. Perhaps he would come again today.

Rachael held up her hands for attention and told the children what her first number would be. It was a new one in which she narrated the life of Chopin behind a sampling of waltzes, nocturnes, and etudes, ending with the patriotic crescendo of a polonaise.