Mila 18

Koenig’s offer was absolutely clear. It was a bribe for freedom. They would allow the leaders and part of the Jewish Forces to escape and, not only that, pay them to escape in exchange for leaving the rest of the survivors undefended and at the mercy of the Germans. Without Joint Jewish Forces there would be no further danger of resistance. The rest would go quietly.

“Don’t keep Dr. Koenig waiting, Alex,” Simon said. “I’m sure you have an answer for him.”

Alexander Brandel stood up face to face with Franz Koenig. He expectorated a large wad of spit which landed on Franz Koenig’s nose and dribbled down the German’s lips and chin.

“Get out,” Simon hissed.

Samson Ben Horin jumped down from the window sill and cocked his pistol. “Let’s give the Germans a real answer.”

“No,” Rabbi Solomon said. “He has entered our house under truce. We are bound to protect him.”

“Rabbi! This is Pharaoh! The blood of Jewish slaves is on his hands. His fat pockets bulge with gold from Jewish sweat.”

“No, Samson,” the rabbi admonished softly. “As elder of this community, I will not permit it.”

Samson jammed the barrel against Koenig’s temple and snarled. Neither Andrei nor Simon nor Rodel cared to stop him.

“Only one side in this war is the Nazis’. Let this miserable cur crawl out of here with the memory of honorable men engraved on his wretched soul living in fear of the moment the wrath of God will avenge us!” Solomon said.

Simon heaved a sigh and grasped the gun barrel and lowered it from Koenig’s temple. “Let him go,” he said.

Samson Ben Horin whirled around and smashed the wall with his fist.

“Get out before I change my mind,” Simon said to Koenig.

Franz Koenig bolted out of the room, tripped and tumbled from his awkward fat, and crawled halfway down the corridor in a panic to escape. He ran out into the street, waving the white flag.

“Truce! Truce! Truce!”

Andrei put his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Nu, how does it feel to be a man of violence?”

“Not bad, Andrei. Not bad at all.”

“A week,” Simon whispered. “Let us hold for just one week.”

Chapter Ten

Journal Entry

FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH of March the Germans have made a frantic effort to lure Jews into the open. The Gestapo has initiated a “visa” scheme designed to make “foreigners” register at the Polonia Hotel. The unwritten understanding is that Jews in hiding will be given passage to Sweden if they can purchase their freedom.

The Gestapo has gone to extraordinary lengths to make the visa selling appear legitimate. A fake Red Cross unit is at the Polonia to administrate the plan. (Note: Fake Red Cross establishments have been used again and again by the Germans throughout Europe to bait escaped prisoners of war and others in hiding. They also use fake undergrounds with collaborators operating them.)

Apparently they are allowing a few of the visa purchasers to reach Sweden to “prove” to the others that this is the real thing.

We were astonished to learn that David Zemba has put so much credence in the visa scheme that he has come out of hiding and is actually at the Polonia Hotel for the purpose of contacting world Jewry to get money to buy visas. Visas go at from ten to twenty thousand zlotys each.

We are certain it is an over-all scheme to lure us into complete complacency. The leopard does not change his spots. We are even more sure the visa scheme is a fraud and that most of those who register will end up in Treblinka.

Strange that a man with the experience of David Zemba could be duped so easily. I suppose the desperation is so great that people are ready to fool even themselves with a slim hope there may be a thread of truth.

Consistent with the German “peace” offensive, we have not had an overt act against the ghetto in two and a half months. There is still electricity in many areas and tap water is available. Food deliveries continue to the factories, although the factories no longer are productive. Smuggling goes on with comparative ease. Moritz Katz has built a “Quartermaster Corps” with a dozen former smugglers.

They have stocked enough food for a two-week supply for the Fighters and our immediate dependents. We store water for drinking purposes as quickly as we can find containers and storage space. (We estimate we have a ten-day supply.)

One thing is certain. The Germans do not wish to fight with us. The ghetto is plastered with “peace” posters urging the people to come out and report for labor. Joint Forces continues to warn of the dangers. We permit no volunteers for deportation.

How long will the Germans continue to tolerate our behavior? It is already the first week in April. We expect the ax to fall at any moment.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Dusk, the quiet transition to darkness, brought Deborah Bronski and forty children from the ages of three to ten years through a tunnel beneath Mila 18 to a courtyard near Muranowski Place.

They emerged singly from beneath the earth, gasping deeply to fill their lungs with pure air, and they blinked at the intensity of the dying daylight.

Jewish Fighters on the roof above them crisscrossed back and forth to guard the precious ones from a sudden attack. Sylvia Brandel was the last to emerge. They ran and jumped and rolled around and skipped and clapped hands with the joy of the release from bondage. Soon ... soon it would be springtime.

In a few moments the children played games that children play in a ghetto. They played the game of “smuggler,” hiding an object from the searching “Nazis and Nightingales.” They played “escape,” weaving in and out of passages of the abandoned house to reach the “Aryan side” past the “Polish Blues.” They played “Jewish Fighters and Germans,” peppering each other with imaginary bullets and bombs.

Everyone wanted to be Atlas and Jan and Chess Master and Tolstoy. The girls wanted to be Tanya, like Ana Grinspan, or Rachael Bronski. No one wanted to be Pharaoh or Brunhilde or Nazis or Nightingales or Polish Blues.

“Bang! Bang! I caught you, Jew!”

A little boy tripped and fell in the courtyard and his nose bled. He did not cry although he was in pain, for he was taught not to cry when he was hurt. Nazis and their dogs listened for crying children, to find hiding places.

Deborah hugged the boy and stopped the bleeding. In a moment he darted up the steps to resume the game.

She looked at her watch. In a moment Rachael would be coming. Strange, Deborah thought, that after a time a person would begin to take on the characteristics of a rat or a mole. Living beneath the earth should dim human values. Tragedy should immunize one to pain. Darkness should ease loneliness. It was not that way at all. Her heart ached again and again when the Fighters brought a warped little body to the children’s room in Mila 18. A whimpering skeleton salvaged from the cold sidewalk or dark alley or abandoned, shattered room. Deborah cried when it was dark for their wild little eyes and their sharp nails which lashed out like those of frightened animals. She cried at the slow, torturous inability to respond to tenderness.

How she missed Rachael. That loneliness never left her.

And Stephan. The gnawing fear each time he left the bunker with Andrei. How many times can a person die without the nerves dying too?

If only Rachael could stay with her. It was dangerous for the girl to come out of the Franciskanska bunker at night to visit. But Rachael should be with Wolf. There was no room for the children other than at Mila 18.

“Saska Kempa,” a Fighter called down from the roof.

“Grochow,” a girl’s voice called up from the street, answering the password.

Rachael was coming diagonally across the courtyard. Deborah could not distinguish her face from the distance. She wore new knee-length boots and a leather jacket crisscrossed with a pair of bandoliers. Grenades were hooked into the belts, a rifle was slung over her shoulder, and her black hair was knotted up under a worker’s cap. In her hand she carried Wolf’s guitar. Despite the subterfuge, it was still Rachael. Nothing could keep her from walking like a woman. Nothing could taint her softness.

“Hello, Momma.”

“Hello, darling.”

They kissed cheeks.

“Where is Stephan?”

“Out with Andrei. Why isn’t Wolf with you?”

“He’s holding pistol drill at the factory.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t come out alone at night.”

“Momma, I’m a soldier.”

Deborah took off her daughter’s cap and unpinned her hair and let it fall down on her shoulders. “Don’t be a soldier for a while,” she said.

Rachael nodded.

“I caught you,” cried the voice of a child. “Off to the Umschlagplatz!”

“Such wonderful games they play,” Deborah sighed. She sat down with her daughter on the top step and watched the children dart in and out of the courtyard. “You look fine!” Deborah said aimlessly.

“You don’t, Momma. Are you sick?”

“No. Just that ... every once in a while this unreality becomes real and you stop working long enough to think. You’re in a hole under the ground, and the only way out is death. When I have time to think I become frightened. Just plain frightened.”

Rachael patted her mother’s hand. “It’s strange, Momma, but being with Wolf ... He has a way about him. I’ve always the feeling that we will get through.”

“That is a good way to feel,” Deborah said.

“Yes,” Rachael said quickly. “He makes everyone around him feel that way. I can hardly believe it sometimes because he’s just like a little boy. He didn’t let me go on the Brushmaker’s raid, but everyone told me afterward how he was. Calm—like ice. A real leader. I just know we can get through anything together.” Rachael stopped short. What was she saying? Speaking of the hope of freedom to her mother, when her mother’s position was hopeless. “I’m sorry, Momma ... I didn’t mean ...”

“No, dear. It’s nice to hear a voice filled with hope.”

“Tell me about it, Momma.”

“With Susan gone, I have no girl friends to talk to. You are my best girl friend now.”

“I’m glad.”

“Simon and Alex and Andrei are moving heaven and earth to get Chris out of the ghetto. He’s the most important man here now. Alex calls him our passport to immortality. One day he will have to run for it. He must go alone, of course. It’s killing him, and it’s killing me.”

Deborah lay her head on her daughter’s shoulder and sobbed softly, and Rachael comforted her.

How terrible for Momma to love without hope. Each day a hell of torture and the knowledge of inevitable doom. The inability to combat it, cry out against it. With Wolf there was hope, always hope.

“It’s all right, Momma ... it’s all right ...”

Deborah was wound up like a spring.

“It’s all right, Momma ... it’s all right ... shhh ... shhh.”

“I don’t know what’s come over me. It’s just that being shut in that bunker all day with the children ... pretending to them ... making believe everything will be all right. They know I’m an awful liar.”

“Tante Rachael!” Moses Brandel cried at discovering the visitor from Franciskanska.

“Tante Rachael is here!”

Children converged toward them from all corners of the building. Deborah dried her eyes. “It’s time for us to get back,” Deborah said.

They crawled through the tunnel into the Majdanek room. Rachael and Sylvia and Deborah lifted the children into layers of straw bunks and tucked them in. They lay close to the edge, tiny little faces looking to the lone candle on the wooden table near Rachael. Rachael strummed Wolf’s guitar, and her thin voice sang about a never-never land of milk and honey.

And soon they fell asleep and Rachael left and Deborah dozed, waiting for Andrei and Stephan to return.

“Deborah.”

She blinked her eyes open. Andrei stood over her. She smiled.

“Stephan is asleep in my office,” he assured her at once. “Come out into the corridor. I want to tell you something.”

From the rooms of the Fighter companies, the voices of singing, joking, storytelling. A beep-beep-beep from the radio. A howl of laughter as Moritz the Nasher slapped the cards of a winning hand of sixty-six on the table.

Andrei and his sister found a quiet place just inside one of the escape tunnels.

“Chris is waiting for you,” he said. “Muranowska 24. There’s a guard at the other end of the tunnel on the lookout for you.”

“Thanks,” she whispered.

“Before you go, Gabriela found places for three more children. You’ll have to make a selection. It’s an excellent place with a childless couple. Woodcutter and his wife.”

Make a selection! Deborah hurt at the thought. She felt as though she were at the selection center in the Umschlagplatz. The power to give three children the right to life. How to choose? Three sick ones? Three with the saddest eyes? Three with the most pitiful wails? How do you choose? By seniority as subterraneans?

“Their chances of survival are excellent. Pick strong children,” Andrei said.

“Very well.”

She and Andrei looked at each other and passed thoughts without words. Both of them had the same instantaneous impulse. Send Stephan. No one would blame them or accuse them of favoritism. The boy had more than earned his right to freedom. But Deborah and Andrei were trapped by the very things with which they had infused Stephan. How do you tell your son that dignity and honor are things for other people to die for?

Thoughts which never became words.

Andrei patted his sister’s cheek and handed her a flashlight.

“Will Chris be leaving soon?”

“Any day,” Andrei answered.

She plunged into the tunnel, inching along with the dim light poking ahead of her through the narrow dirt walls beneath the dead ghetto above. The last twenty yards were on hands and knees.

The Fighter on watch at Muranowska 24 pulled her through the trap door and helped her to her feet. She caught her breath and wiped the perspiration from her cheeks and stretched her back.

“Is there water here?”

He pointed to the storage basins. It was a ghetto and it was war, but Deborah was a woman about to go to her lover and she was going to make herself desirable. She washed the streaks of dirt from her face and brushed her hair and fixed it the way Chris liked it and was extravagant with a drop of a gram of perfume that Gaby had sent in with Andrei. Then she ascended the stairs to find him.

When Chris had first returned to her Deborah was riddled with a feeling of sordidness. She was ashamed she could desire Chris in such a place. Their trysts were in cellars and attics, cold straw, oppressive heat, in hidden tunnels or on floors. In the torn-up bunker at Mila 19, next to rushing sewer waters. Bodies sweaty or shivering and pimpled with cold.

She was ashamed of the sensuous pleasures. The shame never faded, but neither did her desire for those pleasures.

Deborah pushed open the attic door.

Chris watched the lights of Warsaw blink on one by one as darkness swept the city. She slipped beside him quietly and watched them too.

“A zloty for your thoughts,” she said.

“My thoughts? They aren’t worth a zloty, even with today’s inflation.”

“Then a kiss for your thoughts?”

Chris smiled a smile that was not a smile. “I’ve been thinking of man, God, and the universe—all those damned things no one ever really understands.”

“That is worth a kiss,” she said.

Chris could not be appeased. “Today, in a bunker at Mila 18, Christopher de Monti of Swiss News listened to two men arguing philosophy over a minute point to which each adamantly clung. They clung to their points, although it will never make a bit of difference. It will never affect the price of tea in China. Alexander Brandel argues for Rabbi Solomon to make a statement in support of Joint Forces as a morale factor for the survivors of the ghetto. Rabbi Solomon quotes the Torah, Midrash, and Mishna opinions that an act of vengeance is a form of suicide which is roundly forbidden. So there you have it, Deborah. Two men in a hole in the ground debating a question that is going to be solved for them anyhow. Frankly, man, God, and the universe give me a large pain.”

“My, you are in a mood. Here I get all prettied up to make myself alluring and I cannot even seduce a kiss from you.”

“Sex should never get in the way of man, God, and the universe. I think right now I’d give up sex forever for a cigarette and a good belt of scotch.”

Chris walked away from the window, patting his pockets for cigarettes that were not there. “Why the hell doesn’t Andrei bring in a few packs of cigarettes from Gabriela?”

“Some of us have been living this way for quite a few years now,” Deborah answered sharply.

Chris sagged to the cot and mumbled that he was sorry.

“What’s really bothering you, Chris?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Perhaps we’d better talk about it.”

“I don’t want to.” He shook his head slowly. “I just don’t want to.” They were at a dead end. In a few days Gabriela would find a route for him to take out of the country. Deborah would be left behind. There was no way for her to leave the children or Rachael or Stephan. There was no way for her to take them. He had to go and she had to stay. Simple and absolute.

“I never felt sorry for those poor bastards I preyed upon for my bread and butter. The generals, the admirals, the heads of state. The great doers. Many of them looked upon themselves as pawns of fate. Not me. I said to myself: They deserve everything they get. They really crave this destiny bit. They beg for martyrdom. So, now I feel sorry for them. Look at me, Christopher de Monti, the great white hope of the battered tribes of Israel. I am the voice beyond death which must not be stilled.”

“None of us has a choice, Chris. Be grateful you may be able to walk in the sun again.”

“Without you ... Deborah ... All I want is to come home at the end of a day to you. I’m not made of the sterner stuff of Andrei and Alex and Rabbi Solomon.”

“You’ll find it when the time comes.”

“I cannot reconcile myself to what I have given you, Deborah. Torment. Love in the catacombs. I can’t make peace with it.”

“Chris, listen to me. When I die—”

“Stop it!”

“When I die, Chris, dying will be very painful. I will want to live because I have known what ecstasy is. If we had never met, there would be no regrets. How lonely and empty it would be never to know giving and receiving love and, yes, all the pain it brings.”

Deborah knelt beside him. He lifted her face in his hands and smiled. “And on flows the Vistula,” he said.

“For these moments we can make it stand still. You and I have the magic power to transcend the flowing river and the guns and the cries. Right now love ... they are all far away ... far away.”

Chapter Eleven

ALFRED FUNK LOOKED DOWN at a blown-up map of the ghetto and rubbed his hands together with childlike glee and anticipation. He lifted a magnifying glass and moved it about, stopping at the displacement of troops, armor, and artillery marked with various colored pins. He changed a pair of pins indicating high-powered searchlight batteries.

He was honored that Berlin was forgiving enough to give him the chance to vindicate himself. This time there would not be failure.

His plan was simple. Every seven meters around the wall he would alternate a “foreign racial watchman” with a Polish Blue policeman. An SS officer would patrol each section of two hundred meters behind the Ukrainians to make certain their weapons could not be purchased by the Jews. The circle of soldiers around the ghetto wall would make a breakthrough impossible and reduce the possibility of a single man sneaking through.

The city engineers as well as army engineers advised him against blowing up the sewers. The huge Kanal pipes could cave in parts of the city as well as wreck the drainage to the Vistula. Instead, every manhole leading out of the ghetto would be under watch. Accordions of barbed wire would be dropped down the manholes. This would not impede the flow of sewage but would trap the Jews trying to escape through the sewers. Poison-gas smoke candles would be used both in the sewers and the bunkers inside the ghetto.

With all exits blocked, Funk would then move in the Reinhard Corps, Wehrmacht, and Waffen SS with armored pools held in readiness. Most of the forty thousand Jews were in the factory compounds. He would nip these off quickly and get them on the way to Treblinka.

The magnifying glass stopped at a bank of searchlight positions pinned on the map on the Aryan side near Muranowski Place. Master stroke, Funk complimented himself on the night lights. By working two shifts of troops day and night, the Jews would not have a chance to rest or alternate their positions. Once the factory workers were gone, he’d move in the dogs and special sound detectors to flush out the bunkers with dynamite, flame throwers, or poison gas.

Water and electricity would be shut off the same night his troops moved into position.

It was a marvelous, simple, and efficient foolproof plan.

Everything was ready at Treblinka to give “special treatment.” The entire process would take three to four days. Five at the absolute most.

Now, about the Jewish Forces, he thought. He wanted them to open fire first and commit themselves to combat. This way he could clean them out in a few hours. Once they were gone, the liquidation of the rest would be much easier. But would they fire at heavily armed troops? Damn it, no—they’d cower.

If these Jews did open fire it would cost him troops. Ten or twenty casualties. Should he send in Ukrainians the first day and let them take the casualties? No. The honor had to go to the Reinhard Corps! Shame to risk blooding the Elite Corps, but such were the fortunes of war. They would be insulted if they did not enter the ghetto first.

He ran over the map again, replaced his tanks for reserve, and set his artillery in positions to effect better cross fire, then set the magnifying glass and picked up the roster of troops being placed at his disposal.

SS UNITS

SS staff and officers, Warsaw

Reinhard Corps, Warsaw

Special Waffen SS, Trawniki and Poniatow

SS Panzer Grenadier Battalion

SS Mobilized Cavalry Battalion

SS Police Regiment, Lublin

SS Dog Company, Belzec

All Gestapo units, Warsaw

WEHRMACHT UNITS

Battalion, Infantry

Engineer companies, detached

Flame-throwing companies, detached

Battalion plus battery, artillery

Special detachment anti-aircraft searchlight units

Medical Corps company

LOCAL UNITS

All companies, Polish Blue Police

All companies, Polish fire brigades

FOREIGN RACIAL GUARDS

One battalion mixed, Baltic guards

One battalion, Ukrainian guards

Alfred Funk sighed with contentment. His special brigade of eight thousand men was being assembled rapidly. Those from outside the Warsaw district were en route. It was a nicely rounded force. He muttered his unhappiness at having to expose SS people to the first fire, but ... no choice ... simply no choice.

Horst von Epp returned from his regular four-day monthly trip to Krakow with the knowledge that Oberführer Funk had been in Warsaw for three days. The instant he entered Funk’s office the Oberführer snapped up from his desk. “Aha!” Funk cried with obvious delight. “Aha! Enter Neville Chamberlain, the great negotiator. The great appeaser!”

“From the tremors of joy in your voice, I should say that you have come on a mission of annihilation.”

“Look!” Funk said, proudly pointing to the map. “I am grateful for this chance to vindicate myself.” He clasped his hands behind his back snappily and paced with a jaunty step. “The instant I returned from Denmark, Himmler called me in. ‘Enough of this nonsense,’ Himmler told me. ‘Der Führer commands you to obliterate the Warsaw ghetto immediately. This symbol of Jewry must be wiped off the earth. You, Alfred, have priority on all troops in the General Government Area.’ ”

Horst von Epp grimaced and swung open the liquor cabinet.

Funk had his knuckles on the desk and bent forward rigidly, his blue eyes alive with vehemence. “You know, Horst, you actually had me fooled for a moment with your silly talk. Negotiate with the Jews, indeed! I was a fool to listen to you. I should have carried out my orders to the letter in January.”

One quick jigger of scotch roared down Von Epp’s throat, and a second followed, and a third was poured. Then he turned and faced Funk and began to laugh ironically. Funk’s face quivered as his expression changed from anger to puzzlement.

“ ‘With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter ...’ ”

“What in the name of hell are you babbling about, Horst?”

“As a good propagandist, I studied the art of another good propagandist. We should all study our predecessors, don’t you think?”

“I don’t recall the phrase, nor do I see the occasion for your laughter.”

“I give you William Lloyd Garrison, master American propagandist.”

The muscles in Funk’s face knotted with anger. “Perhaps it would be more fitting if you quoted Nietzsche.”

“Ah yes. That great humanitarian, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. To enter into a higher civilization, a super-race must ruthlessly destroy the existing inferior civilizations. We must divest, purge, cleanse ourselves of Judeo-Christian perversions in order to achieve this ultimate form of life. Now, how’s that for Nietzsche, Alfred?”

“It is men like you, who compromise with sub-human forms of life, who will keep the German people from reaching their goals.”

Horst flopped his hands. “Here we go, underestimating the Americans again. A chronic, incurable illness of ours, underestimating Americans.” Horst settled opposite Funk’s chair, tilting the bottle of scotch once more. “I paraphrase an underestimated American. Reasonable men reason. Compassionate men show mercy. Tyrants destroy. We destroy because we must destroy because we must destroy.”

“You are playing dangerous games with this radical thinking, Horst. Take my advice. Change your tune. Berlin is not so happy over some of your attitudes.”

“Save it, Alfred. You will need apologists around like me after the Third Reich is crushed to expound the theories of apologetics. What shall I say? Ah yes, there was no one here but us anti-Nazis. What could we do? Orders were orders.”

“You speak treason against the Fatherland,” Funk said menacingly.

Horst jumped up from his seat and slammed the bottle on the desk. It was the first show of temper Alfred Funk had ever seen him make, and he was clearly startled into silence.

“Damn you!” Horst cried. “I am neither damned fool nor coward enough to keep smiling and pretending and clicking my heels and bowing from the waist in the face of absolute disaster. Say it, Alfred! Germany has lost the war!”

Funk’s eyes bulged with disbelief.

“We have lost the war! We have lost the war! We have lost the war!” Horst bellowed.

Funk paled and sat down.

“Now we have the opportunity to soften the blows of defeat if we have the intelligence to recognize defeat and prepare for it carefully. So, what do we do? Step up the murders at Auschwitz. Five thousand more Poles and Slavs a day ... We respond to the reality of defeat by throwing open the doors for our own destruction.”

Funk mopped his brow and smiled weakly. He thought he had better change the subject. Von Epp always tied him in knots when they argued. He was like the devil himself! One lovely day Himmler would tell him to get rid of Von Epp. What a pleasure that would be.

Alfred Funk cleared his throat. “One of the things I discussed with Goebbels concerns you. Next week we are to meet in Lublin and design a campaign to minimize the unpleasantness in Poland. We start by understating the numbers of Jews involved in the final solution. Then we deny the special-treatment camps have facilities for other than labor. Bone-crushing machines are being installed in all special-treatment centers to eliminate the evidence. In fact, those given special treatment by firing squads are being exhumed for cremation. Eichmann has full-time staffs at 4B making a duplicate set of records—court trials, epidemics, and such—which can account for a good part of the deaths. In Czechoslovakia, at Theresienstadt, we have established a model camp for Jews and invited the Red Cross to inspect it ...”

“Shut up, Alfred! We scratch like dogs to cover dung piles while we proceed to drown ourselves in our own vomit.”

Alfred Funk had that queasy feeling in his stomach again. He tested his words carefully. “The world has a short memory.”

“I think this time they are not going to forget. Jews have a long memory. They weep for temples lost two thousand years and they repeat old wives’ stories of liberations and rituals from the dawn of time. Do you know what an old Jew rabbi told me once when I asked him about Jewish memory?”

“What?”

“The words ‘I believe’ mean ‘I remember.’ Even Nietzsche is puzzled over their ability to outlive everyone who has tried to destroy them. I believe ... I remember. So you see, Alfred, a thousand years from now old Jews will wail in remembrance of the Nazi pharaoh who held them in bondage in Warsaw.”

Terrifying thoughts ran through Alfred Funk’s mind. Damn Eichmann and his mania for rounding up Jews. Damn Globocnik! Damn Himmler! Damn Hitler! They had all gone too far with this Jewish business. But what could he say? What could he do? He looked at the map on the desk. In a few days his army would be assembled. Perhaps ... perhaps when he destroyed the last of the Jews he could enter into the higher form of life the Nazis promised. He restored his calm. To hell with Horst von Epp!

“Shall I tell you something, Alfred?” Horst said, bleary from a rapid emptying of the bottle. “You are a man who understands the mathematics of checks and balances. We Germans respect mathematics. The punishment always balances the crime. We have only eighty million Germans. It is not a sufficient number to bear our guilt. To balance the scale, we pass on our sentences to be served by a hundred unborn generations.”

Alfred Funk began to shake visibly. Words he dared not speak but thoughts he could not squelch were being hammered at him.

“Our names will be synonymous with the brotherhoods of evil. We shall be scorned and abused with no more and no less an intensity than the scorn and abuse we have heaped upon the Jews.”

Alfred Funk pushed away from his desk. He was perspiring badly. He had to take a bath.

Chapter Twelve

ANDREI SAT IN THE back row of the small church of a village on the northern fringe of the Lublin Uplands.

Gabriela Rak knelt before the altar, whispering prayers before a crudely hewn image of a bleeding Christ on the crucifix. She stood, lit a candle on the right side of the altar, knelt at the aisle, crossed herself, and retreated back to Andrei just as Father Kornelli entered.

“The children were exhausted,” Father Kornelli said. “The two girls fell right to sleep. The boy is waiting for you,” he said to Andrei.

“When will they leave?” Gabriela asked.

“In the morning Gajnow and his wife will come and fetch them. It is about ten miles into the forest to their home. Gajnow is a good man. The children will be safe with him. You must of course tell them that they have to learn Catholicism for their own protection.”

“I have told the girls,” Gabriela said. “They are bright children. They understand.”

“I’ll talk to the boy now,” Andrei said.

“You will find him in my room,” Father Kornelli said.

Andrei crossed a dirt courtyard filled with flitting geese and wallowing pigs. He entered the priest’s home. The door to the bedroom was ajar. He opened it a bit wider and looked at the two sleeping girls. One child had only a name they had invented for her. She did not know her name when they had found her. The other was a twelve-year-old daughter of one of the members of the Civil Authority. Deborah had been right. Children were children. This one deserved to have the second chance for life. Andrei shut the door and walked down the short hall to the sitting room and entered. A bed had been made on the couch, but his nephew Stephan was still dressed.

“It has been a long day, Stephan,” Andrei said. “You should get some sleep.”

Stephan looked at him with suspicion.

“Tomorrow you and the girls will be taken on the next stage of your journey.”

“What about you, Uncle Andrei?”

“I must be getting back to Warsaw with Gabriela.”

“You said I had a mission. What is it?”

“Yes ... I’ve come to give you your orders now. Your orders are to survive.”

“I don’t understand you, Uncle Andrei.”

“Stephan, you and the girls will be staying in the forest at the home of a very wonderful old couple.”

“Staying?”

“Yes, Stephan. I’ve come to say good-by.”

The boy’s eyes grew wide with astonishment. “You tricked me!”

“I told you to obey orders without question. That is not trickery.”

“You tricked me. You promised me you were taking me on a special mission.”

“You have a very special mission.”

“No. I won’t stay. I’ll run away if you don’t take me back to Warsaw!”

“This was a decision of your elders, Rabbi Solomon and Alex.”

Andrei walked to the boy slowly and put his hand on his shoulder. Stephan twisted away from him abruptly. “You lied to me, Uncle Andrei! I’ll get back to Warsaw myself!”

“I overestimated you, Stephan. I thought you were a good soldier. I guess you’re still a little boy.”

“I am a good soldier! I am as good as any runner in the ghetto!”

Andrei shrugged. “Not really. A good soldier knows how to obey orders even though they may not please him.”

“It is not a soldier’s assignment to hide in the woods like a coward.”

The boy was too clever to fool with games of words. Andrei had no alternative but to give him the hard facts in all their naked cruelty. Perhaps he should have done so earlier.

“Are you man enough to hear the truth? Can you take it, Stephan?”

“I can take it,” the boy answered firmly.

“Your momma is going to die. There is no way out for her.”

“No!”

“Truth, Stephan. Momma is going to die. She cannot leave those children and she cannot get them out. She is trapped and she is doomed.”

“Momma will live!”

“Only if you survive and preserve her memory.”

“I’ll go back and die with Momma!”

“I said are you man enough to hear the truth? I have not finished.”

Stephan’s eyes burned with an anger that told his uncle he had the courage to see it through. Andrei pointed for him to sit down on the sofa.

“Your sister and Wolf and I are in an impossible situation. The odds on reaching a star are better than the odds on any of us coming through. Do you think I lied to you when I told you I have a mission? It is the job of your mother and your sister and me to die for the honor of our family. It is your job to live for our honor. I say this with all my soul, Stephan. It is you who has the more difficult mission. You must go from this battle to fight your way into Palestine, and you will have to fight again for your freedom.”

Stephan looked up at his uncle, who was pleading for a sign of affection. The boy bit his lip hard to hold back the tears, but his eyes still showed anger.

“Stephan, one of us must get through this to show who we were and what we stood for. It is a big, big job, son! Only the best soldier can do it. You must live for ten thousand children killed in Treblinka and a thousand destroyed writers and rabbis and doctors. It’s a hell of a big mission.”

Stephan flung his arms around his uncle’s waist and buried his head on Andrei’s chest, and Andrei patted his head. “I’ll try,” Stephan wept.

Andrei comforted him and knelt beside him and held his tear-stained cheeks in his hands and winked. “You won’t let me down, Stephan ... I know it.”

Andrei removed the large gold ring which had been given to him as a member of the Polish Olympic team. “To seal the bargain,” he said.

Stephan looked at it in disbelief and tried to slip it on a finger. It was even too large for his thumb.

“Well now, don’t worry about that. Once you get at that woodcutter’s cottage and get fresh air and food and exercise, that damned ring will be too small for you. See if I’m not right.”

Stephan tried to smother his tears, but he could not. He wept convulsively. “I’ll try ... I’ll try ...”

“Come on now, let’s get you undressed. It’s been a long trip for any soldier.”

Stephan submitted as his uncle unbuttoned his shirt and trousers and lifted him in his arms and carried him to the sofa. He clutched the ring in his fist and buried his head in the pillow.

“Now there are parts of the orders which you will understand as a good soldier whose duty it is to survive. You’ve got to learn all this Hail Mary business, but it’s not so bad as you may think. You know Gabriela has been doing it all her life and she is a fine woman. We Jews have had to pray like that before—during the Inquisition, to fool the Spaniards—”

Andrei stopped short. The pillow was wet with the boy’s tears.

“Tell me about Batory.”

“Batory! Hah! Now there’s a horse for you. The blackest, fiercest animal in all of Poland. Only a few weeks ago I took him to England for the Grand National and he ran so fast he split the air and caused it to thunder. Well, sir, those Englishmen ...”

Father Kornelli and Gabriela waited in the tiny vestry. The priest poured two fingers of kirschwasser. She sipped it with controlled slowness, capturing its warmth.

“I was filled with unpriestly forlorn when the archbishop exiled me to limbo or purgatory or what have you. May the Holy Mother forgive me, but I am quite certain that the Lord won a battle with the archbishop. My little church has become a vital link to the partisans in the forests.” He winked with slyness. “There are grenades stored beneath the altar.”

“Shame on you, Father.”

“Gabriela Rak! I was delighted that I was able to make contact with you. I want to find places for more children. Dozens of them. Gajnow is a good man. I must find others.”

Suddenly Gabriela grimaced, paled, and drank the rest of the cherry brandy in a single swallow.

“Is anything wrong?”

“Just a little queasy spell.”

“Do you think you should be making such strenuous trips in your condition?”

Gabriela was startled at the sudden unmasking. “I didn’t realize I was being so obvious.”

“There is nothing in my vows which says I cannot recognize a pregnant woman when I see one. The first month or two is always the worst, I understand.”

Gabriela fumbled nervously with the empty glass. He poured her another drink. “I don’t want a sermon, Father. I don’t seek forgiveness, nor do I confess to sin.”

“I am offended that you look upon me as an old fishwife in whom you cannot confide.”

“I’m sorry, Father. Yes, I would like to hear my own voice speaking the thoughts I’ve held locked for so long.”

“Having a child under your circumstances is a very difficult task.”

“I’m fully aware of the consequences.”

“Does Andrei know?”

“Perhaps and perhaps not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We have had to adapt our lives to each other in a strange way. It’s full of unsaid things.”

“It is a constant source of amazement,” Father Kornelli broke in. “The capacity of the human being to live with tension. The way nerves can be controlled, thoughts and fears locked—”

“Not really, Father. Andrei and I know each other’s thoughts. A look, a touch, a sigh. A way he avoids my eyes. A way I avoid his. We read each other’s fears, though we never speak them. The sound of his breath in the darkness, the touch of his fingers are all silent couriers.”

“What a wonderful experience to be able to communicate with another human being that way.”

She sighed deeply, unevenly, and sipped the drink once more. “Yes, I suppose he knows that I am carrying his child.”

“He should hear it from your lips.”

“No, Father. It’s all part of silent understandings. Andrei returns to the ghetto now, and he will never leave it again. I accept it. I don’t challenge it and I cannot burden him with worry about me.”

“You speak against every concept we hold sacred. You cannot live without hope. That is a sin.”

Her eyes brimmed with sadness. “I know it and he knows I know. But we have never said it and we never shall. My Andrei is a man so full of pride it would be utterly impossible for him to leave so long as there is a bullet to be fired, and when the last bullet is fired he will fight them with his fists. That’s my Andrei, Father.”

The priest patted her hand. “My dear. My poor child.”

She shook off his sympathy and her own self-pity. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t think you understand. I’m deliberately having this baby.”

His expression betrayed the idea that he was immune to shock.

“I planned this with cold-blooded, meticulous calculation. Each time we part there has always been that gnawing fear that this is the last time. But you even harden to that. Now that the end has really come it is almost anti-climactic. This is the last time. I think he was hoping I’d do this, and I think he’s proud of me.”

“Do you realize what you’re doing!” he cried in panic.

“I must have his life in my body. I cannot let Andrei be destroyed. This is the only way to preserve his life. I regret I cannot bear him a hundred children.”

“This is not an act of love. It is an act of vengeance.”

“No, Father. It is an act of survival. I will not let Andrei be destroyed!”

He studied the animal fury in her eyes. She was a savage with the most basic of all instincts. And then he was puzzled. Had the absence of a prescribed ritual made their union less pure? Could a man and a woman cherish each other more deeply, sacrifice, give fidelity, truth, with a greater ability because of a prescribed ritual? Had not Andrei and Gabriela behaved in a manner completely sacred to the eyes of God? He did not like these questions of himself.

Gabriela stood and turned her back to Father Kornelli as the defiance ebbed from her, and her voice was shaky. “I have one terrible regret. I must leave the Church. Andrei’s child must be raised as a Jew.”

He was dazed and hurt, but at the same moment of anger there was admiration for the completeness of her giving. He walked to her. “I cannot condone that and I cannot be your priest,” he whispered. “But I can be your friend and I want you to know that I will help you.”

She nodded and remained rigid, then suddenly spun around and faced him in anguish. “Will I be forgiven?”

“I shall pray for you and your child as I have never prayed before.”

Andrei suspected that Gabriela and Father Kornelli would be immersed in a deep and intimate conversation. When he left Stephan he made sufficient noise upon entering the church to alert them of his presence. He entered the vestry chalky-faced.

“How is Stephan?”

“How? His heart is broken.”

“What is he doing now?”

“He’s trying very hard to be a man, but he’s doing what any fourteen-year-old boy would do. He’s crying himself to sleep.”

“Please know, Andrei, that Gajnow will protect those children. I will personally do everything in my power.”

He patted the priest on the shoulder. “I am very grateful, Father.”

Father Kornelli changed the tone by opening the curtain to the storage closet for his vestments. He took out a bottle of vodka. “Look! I have been saving this for a special occasion. Take it, Andrei.”

“Father ... I couldn’t ...”

“No. Go on. I want you to have it.”

Andrei looked toward Gabriela, who nodded that it was all right.

“You two children look completely done in. Now Count Borslawski’s hunting lodge is vacant and at your disposal. Just a mile into the woods. The horse cart is hitched up. You’ll find a roaring fire in the fireplace and a meal for royalty. Be off! Go on, get out of my sight.”

“By God, Father Kornelli,” Andrei said, “if there were a few more priests like you around, I’d seriously consider becoming a convert!”

Chapter Thirteen

Journal Entry

ALL WEEK DETACHMENTS OF special troops have been arriving in Warsaw from Globocnik’s headquarters in Lublin, the labor camps of Trawniki and Poniatow, and the extermination camps. They are staging in Praga over the river. Oberführer Funk has issued them extra schnapps and promised a mere three to four days’ work in liquidating the ghetto. They have named themselves the Death’s-Head Brigade after Globocnik’s Lublin butchers.

Strange. The two extreme political philosophies in the ghetto have been able to get the closest co-operation on the Aryan side. The Communists and the People’s Guard on the left, the Revisionists and ND Brigade on the right are in close alliance. Unfortunately both undergrounds are small and semi-effectual. We can expect no further help from the Home Army.

The ND Brigade is even discussing trying to get the Revisionists out of the ghetto to form a partisan unit. (It would weaken our forces badly if they left, but they are not under our command.)

The Communists have two trucks in hiding in the Targowek suburb. We have heard rumors of Jewish partisan units forming in the Machalin Forest. The Communists have agreed to transport any people we can slip out of the ghetto to the forest.

We have two short-range transmitters. One is at Mila 18 and the other at the Franciskanska bunker. We only transmit messages in case of emergency. We know that German direction finders are trying to get bearings on our bunkers when we transmit, so we must go through the cumbersome business of taking the radios out of the bunkers and moving them from place to place in order to send messages. As a last-ditch measure we have worked out a series of codes with the People’s Guard, who stand radio watch on the Aryan side. We transmit on a low frequency which can be received by an ordinary radio. Our code tells them the number of people coming through the sewers and through which manhole. Andrei informs me that Gabriela Rak is in contact with the People’s Guard in the hopes she will find places for more children. She stands a radio watch of several hours a day also.

The Germans have dropped barbed wire into the sewers at most of the manholes leading from the ghetto. However, the sewer networks are so vast and tricky, we can bypass the wire. We have also formed a special squad called the “Sewer Rats,” whose duty it is to duck beneath the running sewage and cut the barbed wires in the main sewers.

Jules Schlosberg delivered the land mine to my son Wolf. It took longer than expected to manufacture because Wolf was adamant about wanting to be able to control the detonation. Wolf reasons he can get the maximum number of the enemy this way. It is fixed to be discharged by a spark from a hundred and fifty yards’ distance. The mine is a true curiosity; flat and nearly five feet in diameter. Jules says it has the power of a one-ton bomb, and there are so many nuts and bolts stacked in it that he calls it the “kasha bowl.” I think Jules likens all of his inventions to food simply because he is hungry; the pipe grenade is called “long strudel,” the nut-and-bolt grenade “matzo ball,” and the fire bottles “borscht soup.”

Simon, Andrei, and Wolf argued lengthily over the placement of the “kasha bowl.” Wolf wants to plant it under the Brushmaker’s main gate. He reasons that the Germans are too arrogant to enter the factory in spread formations and they’d march right in on top of the mine. Both Andrei and Simon, who are military men, doubt if the Germans have such a lack of judgment. But Wolf won out. Under the gate it goes. Wolf is quite stubborn in his own quiet way—like his mother.

We have not been able to find a safe route for Christopher de Monti. We cannot take any chances of his being captured. He is fit to be tied; particularly because he must stay with the “women and children” in the bunker when the Fighters go to the roofs on alerts. Simon assures him it is far more difficult to stay than be upstairs. Simon almost dies with tension during the alerts.

Optimism continues, but my own personal view is that we cannot hold for a week in light of the power the Germans have massed in Praga.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Oberführer Alfred Funk glowered majestically before the assemblage of officers of his Death’s-Head Brigade. The swastika and the skull and crossbones were in evidence everywhere. With pointer in hand, he crisply explained the disposition of troops.

“Are there questions?”

Naturally, there were none.

“I read you now a message from Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.”

Everyone leaned forward in anticipation.

“ ‘This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written. We have the moral right, we have the duty, to our people to destroy the sub-humans, who want to destroy us. Only through the ruthless execution of our duty will we attain our rightful place as masters of the human race.’ ” Alfred Funk breathed deeply, awed by the words. He folded the document and placed it in his breast pocket. “Sturmbannführer Sieghold Stutze. You will step forward.”

The Austrian limped crisply to the general and cracked his heels together with vigor.

“To your Reinhard Corps has fallen the great honor of leading the Death’s-Head Brigade into the ghetto to initiate its liquidation. Befitting this monumental occasion of the obliteration of the largest European Jewish reservation, I am pleased to notify you that you have been promoted from Sturmbannführer to Obersturmbannführer!”

Stutze was hit with a wave of nausea. Not even for the rank of Obergruppenführer did he wish to enter that ghetto first. For weeks he had been thinking of ways and means to attain a transfer to an extermination camp. He snapped his heels together once more, bowed to Funk, and then drew himself up straighten “I am honored!”

“Heil Hitler!” barked Funk.

The room stormed to its feet “Heil Hitler!” they responded.

Moved by the enormity of the moment, several officers burst into a spontaneous singing of the “Horst Wessel” song.

“Close ranks! Raise the swastika!

Storm troops, march with calm determination!

Soon Hitler’s flags will fly over all!

Soon Germany will take its rightful place.”

“Hello, Jerusalem. This is Tolstoy at Beersheba.”

“Atlas in Jerusalem. What is it, Tolstoy?”

“Water and electricity have been cut off in our sector.”

“We have the same report from Haifa. We are awaiting an Angel from Canaan for a full report. Have your Angels give a blue alert.”

“Shalom and ... good yontof.”

“Happy holidays to you too.”

Simon set down the phone. Strange, he thought that Rodel, a Communist and devout atheist, should wish him a “good holiday” for Passover. Simon faced Andrei, Tolek, Alex, and Chris. “Power and water are off in Rodel’s area too. He wished us a happy Passover. ... Tolek, send out the runners. Spread a blue alert.”

It became abysmally glum. The last-minute decision to bring in another forty children crammed Mila 18 beyond its capacity. Air circulation sufficient for two hundred twenty persons was inadequate for nearly three hundred packed into the catacomb. The rooms had no place for movement. The corridors were crushed with sweaty bodies, stripped to undergarments, sucking at the oxygen scarcely enough to keep the candles lit.

“Passover,” Andrei said sardonically. “The feast of liberation. What a damned joke.”

Simon nodded in agreement. “Oh, where is Moses to lead us through the Red Sea and drown Pharaoh’s army! The only pillars of fire are the ones that will devour us.”

“Well,” Andrei said, “we have to have the seder.”

Chris shook his head. “You Jews astonish me. In the pits of hell, about to be destroyed, and you mumble rituals to freedom.”

“Doesn’t one cry out more desperately for freedom when it is taken from him? What better time can there be than tonight to renew faith?” Alexander Brandel said.

“Come now, Alex,” Chris prodded. “Andrei, you, Simon ... most of those out there are not renewing a faith they’ve ever kept. Rodel, the Communist, wishes you well. What was his synagogue?”

“Yes, Chris, you are right in a way. And it is very strange that we who have not lived like Jews have chosen to die like Jews.”

“There is no reason and there is every reason,” Simon said. “We only know ... we must have the seder.”

Passover. The night of the seder. The retelling of a story from the ancient Hagada as old as recorded history. The liberation from Pharaoh’s bondage.

How Jewish Warsaw would have reverberated with the weeks of unabated excitement before the war! Alex tried to remember the Tlomatskie Synagogue ... crowds jammed to watch the elite fill the marble temple.

In the homes of the poorest, brass and silver candlesticks shone to a glisten and the white tablecloths and shining dishes dazzled the eye and the kitchens smelled of baking and candies prepared with the very soul of the homemaker.

The tables were fixed with special foods symbolizing the suffering of Moses and the tribes. The diced nuts and bitter herbs for the mortar of Pharaoh’s bricks which the Jews laid in bondage.

What the hell kind of bitter vetch could there be for the ghetto in the future, Alex thought! What symbol would there be for sewer water!

Watercress for the coming of spring, and the egg for the symbol of freedom. Well, spring was coming to Warsaw. There was no egg, no watercress. Forty thousand terrified people mumbling ancient prayers, begging to an unhearing God to fill His promises to bring forth ... to deliver ... to redeem ... to take the tribes of Israel. In six hundred bunkers the ritual was repeated in numbed and tear-filled voices while the Polish Blue Police took their positions around the ghetto walls every seven meters.

But ... the story had to be told. Was it ever to be told with greater futility? Alexander wondered. Still ... it had to be told.

A tiny bench stood at the junction of the two corridors of Mila 18. They held a pair of candlesticks Moritz Katz had managed to salvage. Substitutes took the place of the prescribed symbolic foods.

Alexander pushed his way past the jam of humanity into Rabbi Solomon’s cell.

“We are ready to begin the seder,” he said. He helped the old man to his feet. Solomon was no longer able to see except in shadowy outlines, nor was he able to read. But that did not matter. His voice was yet clear and he knew the Hagada by memory. He was led to the bench and seated upon a pillow, for the pillow symbolized the free man who relaxes while he feasts. From rooms Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibor, the Fighters and the children pressed to the door in bated breath to hear—Zionists plain and fancy, infants, Communists, Bundists, Orthodox, and smugglers.

One could hear gasping in the silence. The air was putrid and the heat oppressive.

The silver goblet in the center of the bench was called Elijah’s cup. When the Prophet who had foretold the second coming of Israel drank from the Passover goblet, the prophecy would be fulfilled. Solomon’s ancient hands felt over the bench for the cup. He lifted it and jiggled it. It was empty, for there was no wine.

“Perhaps,” he said, “this is a way we are being told that Israel will come again. Perhaps Elijah has come and drunk.”

Someone began to sob, but one sob was melted into another. All a shimmering mass of bodies. Another sobbed, and another.

“A learned man walks through a maze searching for rooms marked ‘truth.’ Bits of the puzzle are given us in our Torah and our Mishna and the Midrash and the Talmud. But how strange that the real clues come to us at a time when we least expect them.”

“Momma ... Momma,” a child wept.

Another began praying, and another and another.

The old man’s voice cried out again. “Why are we in this place? What is God trying to tell us? Why have I been spared when all my colleagues are gone? Is there a message for us here?”

Alexander Brandel had never heard Rabbi Solomon rant like this. Why? The weeping was becoming universal. People were remembering glistening candlesticks and tables bending beneath the weight of food. People remembered the faces with smiles of tenderness and lullabies. Sister ... brother ... lover ... they remembered. ...

“Remember the stories of our people!” cried Rabbi Solomon. “Remember Betar and Masada and Arbel and Jerusalem. Remember the Maccabees and Simon Bar Kochba and Bar Giora and Ben Eliezer! No people upon this earth have fought for their freedom harder than we have. Tonight we are on the eve of another fight. Forgive an old man who told you not to use arms, for he realizes now that the truest obedience to God is the opposition to tyranny!”

The bunker was galvanized. Yes! Yes! Alexander trembled. He has found a great key to all of life—to obey God is to fight the tyrant!

The bony hand lifted Elijah’s cup. “Elijah has drunk our wine tonight. Israel will come!” He chanted a prayer of the ages, and the bunker trembled.

And then it was silent once more.

“Let us begin the seder,” he said. “Let us begin our feast of liberation.”

The youngest Fighter in Joint Jewish Forces, an eleven-year-old runner named Benjamin, opened the Hagada to ask the questions.

He asked, “Why is this night different from all other nights of the year?”

And Rabbi Solomon answered firm and unwavering, “This night is different because we celebrate the most important moment in the history of our people. On this night we celebrate their going forth in triumph from slavery into freedom.”

The Fighters in the Franciskanska bunker were tired and dreamy. Wolf and a squad of his people had just finished planting the “kasha bowl” mine in the middle of the Brushmaker’s Gate and returned in time to conduct a symbolic seder. After the seder, the not-yet-twenty-year-old commander announced a great treat.

When he had captured the Brushmaker’s he had found a case of schnapps in the office of Krebs, the disposed overseer. Wolf had hidden it for just such an occasion. Almost all of the eighty Fighters at Franciskanska had no knowledge of liquor, only passing forays with wine and vodka. It was not long before they were all suffused with a lovely, peaceful glow. Wolf, cross-legged on the earthen floor of the main room, began the song fest, playing his accordion. A squad of Communists attached to his command insisted upon singing Russian folk songs hailing victories of the proletariat. Wolf had to show impartiality to his command. He played for them and what they lacked in numbers, they made up in vigor. The Zionists answered with songs of how the pioneers in Palestine had redeemed eroded land. They played and they sang until they were hoarse, and then they hummed nostalgically. Wolf’s accordion was very beaten up and wheezed along with great effort.

The guard changed. Everyone was at peace. The phone rang.

Wolf retreated to his small three-by-six “office.” He lifted the receiver, “Haifa. Chess Master speaking.”

“This is Atlas at Jerusalem. Is the ‘kasha bowl’ in place?”

“Yes, sir.”

A pause at the end of the line. “Chess Master, the Angel has just returned from Canaan. Blue boys are all around the walls of Jericho. We expect the Rhine Maidens to come at dawn. Change the alert from blue to gray. Shalom.”

“Shalom.”

Wolf hung up. They were crowded about his office. Eighty pairs of eyes on him. “Runners. Change the alert to gray. Polish Blue Police have the ghetto surrounded. We anticipate the Germans at dawn.”

As the runners scampered off to warn the satellite bunkers, the stunned soldiers continued to stare at him. Wolf nonchalantly shrugged, picked up his accordion again, and began to play.

“Havenu shalom aleichem!

Havenu shalom aleichem!

Ve-nu ve-nu

Shalom aleichem!”

And with a snappy hora he got everyone to clap in rhythm and he passed around the last four bottles of the schnapps he had been hoarding. When the shock had passed, they became mellow again and dreamy. Wolf set down the accordion.

“We’d better get some sleep. We want to be wide awake for our house guests.”

He walked around the bunker, quietly checking last-minute details, giving looks and smiles of encouragement. In one part of the bunker he had to kneel, for he was too tall to stand straight.

The Fighters were dozing off one by one. Only emergency candles at the exits. It was still. ... Those awake were at least fighting the battle within them in silence.

Being commander had its small compensations. Wolf had his own private cubbyhole off the main bunker and a sacking curtain over it. It was large enough to contain a table for the phone, a chair, and a bed of straw.

Rachael’s rifle was propped against the wall. She unloosened her hair and let it fall. Wolf knelt in the straw, then squirmed his way close to her. With a free hand he snuffed out the candle. They had learned to lie together so tightly so that when either spoke only the other could hear.

“I’m so proud,” Rachael said. “You are so brave.”

Wolf didn’t answer. He felt icy. He crushed even more tightly against her.

“Don’t worry, Wolf. You will get us through. Everyone trusts you. ... Did you see the way they all calmed down after being so frightened?”

Even in their room, privacy was limited. At any instant a messenger could poke a flashlight in. She carefully unbuttoned her blouse enough to draw his head against her breast, and she wrapped him in her arms and soothed him. As a commander, he never showed fear before his Fighters. But now, alone with her, he was cold and he trembled and it was she who was not afraid. Wolf would get up in the morning and lead them to their positions as though he had not a care in the world. Her fingers stroked his hair and his face. ...

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Shhh ... shhh ... shhh ...”

Chapter Fourteen

FIVE O’CLOCK. THE FIRST light of day. The only movement, a snowfall of feathers cascading from the roofs.

Andrei wiggled up to his forward observation point and through binoculars scanned the intersection. His four companies were well concealed. Less than half of them were armed. Cardinal rule: take guns from the enemy or from a fallen comrade. Distant sounds beyond the wall. Andrei took a borscht bomb-fire bottle from his jacket and shook it to wet the wick. It would be the signal to open fire if the Germans came into his area.

Andrei heard movement behind him. He looked over his shoulder. A figure moved in his direction. Andrei put the binoculars on the figure. “Dammit! What’s he doing here!” he muttered as Alexander Brandel, on hands and knees, muffler straggling, crawled toward him.

“Who told you to leave the bunker?” Andrei snorted as Alex came alongside him.

“Since I have become a man of violence, I was certain you would not deny me the pleasure of this moment.”

“Get down below.”

“Please let me stay, Andrei.”

“Write your journal.”

“It’s up to date.”

“Shhh ... here they come.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Well ... it’s too late to send you down. Stay close to me and keep quiet.”

Andrei signaled to his people, then strained to hear.

“I don’t see them,” Alex whispered.

“Shhh ... shhh.”

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

Andrei looked around for a return signal. A blue flag waved in a window on Zamenhof Street. “They’re coming down Gensia Street between the factory compounds. I hope Wolf lets them pass.”

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

Andrei fixed the binoculars at the intersection of Gensia and Zamenhof, site of the abandoned Jewish Civil Authority building. The first of the black-helmeted, black-uniformed troops appeared. Stutze was leading them. They would be under the guns of Ana Grinspan’s company now. He signaled over the roof to hold fire, guessing they would come up Zamenhof into the central area.

“Halt!” The command broke the silence.

“Daggers ready!” The Nazi knives were unsheathed.

“Parade march!”

Clump, clump, clump, clump, they goose-stepped up Zamenhof Street.

“Look at those arrogant syphilitic whores,” Andrei hissed. “All bunched up like a rat pack, goose-stepping. We’ll scatter them, eh, Alex?”

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

Andrei handed Alex the binoculars. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and focused on the black waves of uniforms filling the width of Zamenhof Street, pouring around the corner at them in row after row. Alex felt a knotting of his stomach. He wished he had stayed in the bunker. Andrei was more concerned with the discipline of his troops. So far no one moved or made a sound.

On they came around the corner of Gensia. The line of Nazis stretched for a block, and still they came.

“Sing!”

A thousand hairy hands thrust a thousand daggers skyward. Clump, clump, clump, clump, they goose-stepped.

“When Jewish blood is squirting from our daggers!

Only then the Fatherland will be free,

When Jewish corpses rot and putrefy,

We’ll glory in Hitler’s victory.”

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

Their voices and their boots grew louder, and the marrow of the Jews was chilled.

“When Jewish blood squirts from our daggers!

It shall make us doubly glad,

When Jewish skulls are stacked to the sky,

Good Germans shall not be sad.”

“Halt!”

The massed Reinhard Corps stopped at the intersection of Zamenhof and Mila streets. Sieghold Stutze called his officers together and huddled over a map and discussed the first phase of the operation. They stood directly below Andrei and Alexander. The Reinhard Corps was in the gun sights of the four companies of Jews awaiting the signal.

Andrei took out a pack of matches. He began to light the bottle but stopped. “I am a sentimentalist, Alex. I believe in historic justice. Have you ever lit one of these bottles?”

“Me? God in heaven, no.”

“I hereby commission you to signal the uprising,” Andrei said, thrusting the bottle into Alex’s hand.

Alex merely stared at it. “Well ... what do I do?”

“Light the wick and throw the bottle down on the street.”

“Light ... and throw ...”

“Yes, it’s very simple. You’re bound to hit one of those syphilitic whores. But hurry, before they disperse.”

Alex licked his lips. The challenge was too tempting, the honor too great. “I’ll try,” he said shakily. He carefully placed the bottle flat and struck a match. The wind blew it out.

He struck another and tried to touch the flame to the wick hurriedly, and the wind blew that one out too.

“Come along, Alex. Men of violence must act deliberately.”

Alex struck a third match and sheltered the flame by cupping his hands, but his hands trembled so violently that he could not steady it on the wick.

He gave up. “We all battle in our own ways. I can’t do it.”

“Try once more,” Andrei said.

Alex clenched his teeth, fired with determination, and struck the match. Andrei held his wrists, steadying his hands like a kindly father, and the flame touched the wick. It fizzed.

“Throw it!”

Alex flung it over the edge like a hot rock and it spiraled down to the street.

Whommmmmmm! Plow! Fzzzzzzzztttt!

The bottle smashed on the helmet of an SS man and erupted!

“Yaaaaaaahhhh!” the human torch screamed. The ranks around him split apart and became transfixed on him as he twitched and kicked and rolled in the streets, being consumed by fire. “Yaaaahhhh! Yahhh! Yaaaaaaahhhhh!”

They all looked up to the roofs simultaneously.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Blue flames spurted from hidden rifles and pistols, behind windows, doorways, the roofs.

Wissshhhh! Whoom! blew the fire bombs.

Sieghold Stutze’s eyes looked upward as Jewish guns vomited into their midst, spewing three years of pent-up rage. “Hans!” Stutze shrieked. “Look! A woman is firing!” He pitched forward on his face as a bullet tore at his chest. He crawled on his knees. The earth rumbled with deafening shocks of grenades. Nuts and bolts blew apart Sieghold Stutze’s stomach. He clutched at his guts spilling into the street. A fire bomb fell at his feet and whisshed up his boots, and he groveled and screamed and gagged and died. Human torches and bullet- and grenade-riddled Germans turned the intersection into a pond of carnage.

Oberführer Alfred Funk soaked luxuriously in a deep warm sudsy tub and sniffed the rising scented steam. The tones of Wagner’s Tannhäuser “Overture” crashed in from the phonograph in the living room. Between low points in the crescendo Funk could hear the sound of gunfire from the ghetto. He hummed in tune. “Da dam dam dam.”

His orderly lay a tray containing his shaving gear on the rim of the tub. Funk sharpened the razor, looking up with disdain at the orderly, who never did it properly. He flicked his thumb over the edge and was satisfied. “Dum de dum dum,” he sang, “dum de dum dum dum dum dum ... de da da da,” as he lathered his face.

“Hold the mirror still,” he snapped.

“Ja, Herr Oberführer.”

Horst von Epp appeared in the doorway, bleary-eyed, wearing a dressing gown over his pajamas. Funk looked contemptuously at him and snorted. “What gets you up at this hour of the morning?”

“You’d better drink this,” Horst said, thrusting the glass of schnapps forward.

Funk screwed up his face. “At six o’clock in the morning? Never. Dum de dumm. Da da da.” He stretched his skin so the razor could bite off the stiff chin hairs.

Horst took the mirror out of the orderly’s hand. “Alfred, put the razor down. You’re liable to cut your throat after what I tell you.”

Funk merely glowered.

“The Reinhard Corps has been massacred. Your men have been thrown out of the ghetto.”

“Damn you, Horst! This is the last of your nonsense I am going to tolerate!” He lifted the razor to resume shaving.

Horst lowered Funk’s hand slowly. “We have succeeded very well in drawing their fire. A hundred SS men have been killed. At least that number wounded. Our forces have fled beyond the wall.”

Funk blinked in disbelief, then smiled weakly. “There must be a mistake. Those are Jews in there.”

“I have prepared a press release that it wasn’t Jews but that we discovered gangs of Polish bandits hiding in the ghetto and have gone in to clean them out. The gunfire was not from Jews but from the bandits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Jews? Jews threw the Reinhard Corps from the ghetto? Jews?”

“Jews,” Von Epp answered.

Funk threw over the tray and slushed to his feet, half slipping. He leaped from the tub and ran into the living room. A bloody, trembling officer stood before him.

“Untersturmführer Dolfuss,” he said, snapping his heels before the naked, dripping general.

“Speak, God damn you!”

“We were caught in a terrible cross fire.”

“Where!”

The confused lieutenant tried to find Zamenhof and Mila streets on the table map filled with pretty colored pins. Funk’s orderly threw a large towel over his master.

“What the good officer is attempting to say, Alfred ... it was here,” Von Epp said.

“So,” he snarled. “So. They want the taste of the whip.” He lifted the phone. “Get me field headquarters. ... Hello ... Oberführer Funk here. Send the tank officer to my suite immediately.”

Noon.

Six medium panzer tanks rumbled through the Swientojerska Gate and hugged the wall as they proceeded toward Zamenhof Street and into the central area. Their cannons and machine guns pointed at the buildings.

Their motors set up a din, and their weight caused the streets and the buildings to tremble.

The Fighters of Ana Grinspan’s company became frozen with fear at the sight on the street. What could one do with pistols? The panzers passed under the muzzles of ineffective guns and turned into Zamenhof Street.

The gun turrets swung menacingly and aimed at the upper stories of the buildings on both sides of them. Gunners peered through the slits, looking at the lifeless, motionless windows and roofs. Now where was this army of the Jews? Now let them fire!

Andrei tried to think as the tanks rumbled toward his area. If they blasted his people to cover or if his people cowered, the Germans would own the ghetto immediately. But how to stop tanks? For an instant an agonizing thought tantalized him. Perhaps we are cowards. Perhaps all the fight was gone from us after the first ambush.

As the first tank rolled over the intersection of Kupiecka Street a lone figure darted out into the street so quickly that the German gunners could not train their guns on it. The figure ran directly in front of the lead tank.

Andrei watched the single Jewish Fighter attack the panzer. The fighter’s cap fell off, revealing a long head of flaming red hair. It was a girl! With the tank almost on top of her, she jammed a pipe grenade into its treads. The tank rolled on the grenade and exploded it. With a resounding shudder the tread unsnapped and lashed from its moorings and the tank spun around, helpless. The redheaded girl was crushed.

Fighters watching on both sides turned the panzers into iron coffins. As from the tops of ravines, they rained down a hailstorm of borscht bottles. The tanks spun crazily, firing wildly at an enemy they could not see, trying to wipe the pricks of fire from their steel skins, but the rain of bottles increased. The tanks became engulfed in flame and turned into infernos. Fighters crept up close to make their hits more certain.

One by one the hatches were thrown open and gagging, blinded, burned Germans stumbled out onto the streets, to be raked by cross fire.

Dusk.

The German corpses were stripped of uniforms and guns and ammunition and stacked at the curbstones as Jewish corpses had once been stacked in the ghetto.

The tanks were silent and smoldering and wrecked.

The streets became quiet again.

Tolek Alterman was the first up from Mila 18. He shouted at the top of his lungs, “The Germans have quit! The Germans have quit! Condition green!”

“Condition green!” a voice echoed.

Hand signals ... runners flashed from block to block.

“Hello, Haifa. The Germans have quit the ghetto! Condition green!”

“Beersheba! Condition green!”

The cries of joy and whoops bounced from building to building.

A Fighter appeared in the street, running up and down, calling the all-clear.

They poured out of the buildings and threw arms about each other and skipped and somersaulted and hugged each other and cried and shouted and wept for joy.

In a few moments hora rings were dancing in the middle of the street and civilians cringing from the sounds of battle came up one by one in shock and amazement and kissed the Fighters.

Andrei and the other commanders were tolerant of the breakdown in discipline. Nothing could dim the exultation of those who had waited three years for this moment of triumph.

Gabriela Rak heard the voice of Alexander Brandel on her radio, as did all of Warsaw. “Fellow Poles. Today, April 19, 1943, we have struck a blow for freedom as the first to rebel against Nazi tyranny. By ejecting the Nazi butchers from the ghetto, the Joint Jewish Forces tonight hold the only piece of sovereign Polish territory. In the past we have begged you to join us, and we beg you again. The Germans are murdering Polish citizens at a staggering rate in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. They intend to reduce Poland to a slave-labor pool by murdering more than half its citizens. No matter what our differences have been, the struggle for survival is mutual. Join us. Help us destroy the tyrant!”

In Warsaw, things were rather gay. For a while there was concern over the noise and shooting from the ghetto, but the newspapers and radio quickly explained that bandit gangs were hiding there and the Germans had begun action to get them out. The Germans confessed to a half dozen or so casualties, but the noise was certainly nothing to get excited about. As for this repeated broadcast from a clandestine radio—well, it was typical Jewish exaggeration and really, who cared, anyhow?

Chapter Fifteen

THE WEARY FIGHTERS OF Joint Forces slept deeply with delicious dreams of their victory. It was a victory largely belonging to a single girl who threw herself beneath a tank at the right moment to galvanize them into action, but she had done it and they had won the day. Tomorrow or the tomorrow after they would be asked to do the same as the redheaded girl, but tonight it did not matter. Victory is a balm. Alexander Brandel, a man of violence, celebrated longer and harder than anyone. He said he had two thousand years of defeats to make up for.

While the rabble army slept, their commanders worked far into the night on more practical matters than celebrations. They assessed the day. It had been a good day mostly. Only six of the twenty-two battle groups had been committed to action. Casualties from stray bullets were nominal. They had captured sixty rifles and pistols from fallen German soldiers. They had administered a wicked defeat to the best of Hitler’s Elite.

Yet the balance sheet added up to a minus based on one simple fact. Joint Fighters had expended more ammunition than they could replace. There would not be many more Victories like today’s. It was a war of diminishing returns. A rather sober judgment said they’d shoot themselves out of business quickly. The victory broadcast from the ghetto failed to stir the population or the Home Army. A dozen Polish youths tried to get into the ghetto to help but were shot for their effort.

Tomorrow ... another day. The commanders guessed that the Germans would go for the factories. Here was the largest pool of Jews in the most vulnerable place and the most difficult to defend.

Simon shifted two companies under Andrei to help Wolf at Brushmaker’s. Ana took her company from the central area and Tolek brought three groups down to Rodel at the uniform complex.

They argued till dawn. Simon and Andrei demanded that Wolf remove the kasha-bowl land mine. The Germans surely would not dare march through the gates in close formation again after the lesson of the first day. Wolf reckoned differently. He was certain they had not learned or would not admit respect for the Jewish fighting force. Wolf filibustered until it was too late to replant the mine.

The second morning.

Andrei and Wolf lay side by side in a second-story window which looked down at Brushmaker’s main gate. The plunger to set off the kasha bowl was at Wolf’s hand. He trusted no one else with the mine ignition switch.

Half of Wolf’s Fighters crouched inside the main factory buildings behind barricades placed there for the protection of the workers. Their position was vulnerable, for they had to meet a German attack head on. The second half, along with Andrei’s two companies, were scattered in a ring around the Brushmaker’s in order to hit the Germans from the rear. The gamble was completely upon the guess that the Germans would make a try for Brushmaker’s.

Ten o’clock in the morning.

“What’s holding them up?” Wolf wondered.

“Confusion. They’re making their plans outside this time,” Andrei said. “Germans can’t improvise too well. They must fix their plans.”

Wolf patted the handle of the plunger. “We’ll unfix them.”

“A waste. They’ll never come in through the main gate.”

“We’ll see.”

At eleven o’clock runners reached them with the word that the Germans had concentrated a large force in the Krasinski Gardens. Eden had anticipated properly. The Germans were out to snip off the northeastern corner of the ghetto containing the Brushmaker’s complex.

By eleven-fifteen runners reported movements outside the wall along Bonifraterska Street and opposite Muranowska Street. A ring of soldiers on the entire sector.

“Hello, Jerusalem. This is Haifa. Troop concentration to cut off Brushmaker’s. They’ll be entering at any moment.”

“This is Jerusalem. I have two companies ready to move at their backs if you need them.”

“Hold them.”

The Germans entered the ghetto in three places: the two Swientojerska gates opposite the gardens and at the Przebieg Gate touching Muranowski Place.

They strung out quickly on Nalewki Street from the gardens for two full blocks to Muranowski Place. The Brushmaker’s compound was completely cut off. Its eastern boundary was the ghetto wall along Bonifraterska Street.

“They’ve a positive talent for walking into traps,” Andrei said. The Revisionists were also on top and behind the Germans. Andrei dispatched a runner to Ben Horin to hold fire.

Now deployed, the Germans moved toward the main gate. A company down Gensia Street, a company up Walowa set to converge.

Opposite the main gate, the Germans took cover near the buildings. A loudspeaker unit was set up.

“Juden ’raus! Jews come out!”

Five minutes passed. There was no movement from inside the factory. Fixed bayonets, battle ready, the Germans edged for the main gate.

“See?” Andrei snorted. “I told you they wouldn’t march in.”

“Wait”

With caution a squad poked inside the gate. A courtyard of forty meters of open space awaited them before they could reach the main building. They edged into the courtyard unmolested, but squarely in the sights of the barricaded fighters inside.

A second squad of Germans followed into the courtyard. They fired blindly into the main building. Glass shattered, brick chipped away, bullets echoed. No fire was returned. They fired again and again. No return.

A third squad entered and set up a machine gun pointing at the main building, and the other two deployed to give cover to the main German force.

“I’ll be goddamned!” Andrei said as he watched a German battalion mass to march in.

The protection squads gave an all-clear signal.

Clump! Clump Clump! Clump!

Trawniki SS unsheathed their daggers and marched at the gate. The first line passed over the kasha bowl ... the second ... the third.

Andrei licked his lips and looked at the ignition plunger. Wolf’s hands toyed with it.

“Now ... now,” Andrei said.

“Just a few, few more,” Wolf said. “Just ... a ... few ...” His hand thrust the plunger down.

Warsaw bounced from the impact.

Blood and sinew and muscle and shrieks soared skyward. Nuts and bolts erupted like an angry volcano. Disintegrated bits of a hundred Germans floated back to earth. The near living, the half living whimpered with shock, and the neatly deployed living were terrified.

The three German squads in the courtyard were met with a barrage from the factory, but the land mine had already thrown them into disarray.

From the rooftops Samson Ben Horin’s Revisionists—Chayal, Jabotinski, and Trumpeldor—poured a murderous fire at the backs of the Germans stretched out along Nalewki Street.

It was a rout!

Fighters from Andrei’s and Wolf’s commands tore into the streets at the fleeing enemy with a vengeance. Confused Germans guarding the ghetto gates fired into their own troops pouring out. Other Germans tried to leap the ghetto walls. Their hands were sliced to ribbons on the cemented broken glass, their bodies tangled in the barbed wire.

Wolf’s judgment on the planting of the kasha bowl was confirmed.

Chapter Sixteen

Journal Entry

THE THIRD DAY

Today we administered to the Germans their most humiliating defeat of our infant rebellion. I shall describe it.

The Reinhard Corps who survived the first day and Ukrainians, Litts, Latts, and Estonians assembled at their parade ground off 101 Zelazna Street and crossed and marched along the wall along Leszno Street, apparently to enter at Tlomatskie Gate. Rodel has been anticipating such a move against the uniform factory. The Germans moved in the former “Polish corridor,” a slot between two sets of walls. Rodel’s Fighters had rounded up twenty ladders. With the Germans singing and marching in the “protected” corridor, they rushed the ladders against the wall, climbed, and pelted pipe grenades down on the Germans. The enemy never even got into the ghetto!

Later in the afternoon Germans poured through four gates behind heavy machine-gun and mortar barrages. Our strategy: let them in. Their protective barrage must lift quickly after their troops penetrate. Then we hit them from the rear. All four times we drove them out.

Two events to hearten us! The first Russian bombers’ passed overhead for an air raid (on Germany, we hoped). We cheered them wildly!

Tonight the Germans admit on the radio broadcasts that the “Polish bandits” have been joined by Jewish gangs (perverts, subhumans, nun rapists, etc., etc.). This admission that they are fighting Jews is bound to have an impact on the people.

THE FOURTH DAY

Our friends arrived at dawn. This time they neither sang nor marched in formation. They moved in dispersed, heavily, armed formations. After artillery, mortars, and machine guns drove us to cover, they came in slowly. They crept along in the shadows of the building. We no longer suffer from fright. It is they who show fear. We allow them to get deep into the ghetto, and then we hit them with cross fires at intersections, hurl fire bombs and grenades down from the roofs, shout at them in German to confuse them, jump them from the rear.

Today they concentrated on the uniform factory. We estimate they used a thousand troops to seal it off. Rodel's forces harassed them unmercifully, but they managed to get a few hundred workers out. Frantic for a victory, they blew up a hospital near Pawiak Prison. All but the bed patients had long been evacuated.

THE FOURTH NIGHT

Banks of floodlights in tall buildings over the wall lit up large sections of the ghetto. Their troops moved in to continue with a night attack on the uniform factory. Simon and Andrei have spoken of this possibility (night action) for some time. Simon tried our most daring foray. Broken into three groups, our people dressed in German uniforms taken from the factory and trimmed (leather belts, helmets, even decorations) from fallen enemy. Group 1 was led by Andrei, Group 2 by Simon, and Group 3 by Tolek Alterman. Our “Germans” merely marched out of the ghetto. The enemy mistook us. We got them completely off guard. Simon’s group attacked the floodlights and artillery. They wrecked twenty floodlights and five cannons. Tolek’s group raided the arsenal at SS barracks, captured a machine gun and twenty rifles and several thousand rounds of ammunition (desperately needed).

Group 3, Androfski split into two parts. Part one raided the central market and “confiscated” three trucks loaded with food. The second unit raided the Citadel Hospital for medical supplies.

We know we have reached our high-water mark. We cannot use German uniforms at night again, as they will undoubtedly think of using a password to prevent future occurrences. (Further testimony to their respect for us as a fighting force.) Nevertheless, we can continue to confuse them in the day by sudden attacks, wearing their uniforms.

THE FIFTH DAY

We took inventory. Ammunition is very, very low. Schlosberg has manufactured four more smaller versions of the kasha bowl. We have planted them at key intersections, hoping for the best.

Simon called in all commanders and called for less concentrated fire on the enemy and more “individual improvisation.” Translated, this means more acts of individual heroism.

Our Fighters responded today with incredible acts of courage. A tank blew up on one of the planted mines on Nowolipki, but another tank and armored car were stopped literally barehanded. A Fighter from Rodel's command leaped on the tank, threw open the hatch, and hurled a bottle inside! The armored car was stopped by Fighters leaping on it from a second-story window with grenades in their hands.

The Germans sense we are running short of ammunition. They are pressing us harder. Thank God they have not been able to replace the floodlights we destroyed. Tonight the ghetto was dark. Our fighters need sleep desperately.

THE SIXTH DAY

Incredible acts of heroism continue to save the day. Wolf’s command reports the following:

Two Fighters without guns leaped on a German squad with knives; killed two, three fled. They took the weapons.

Rachael Bronski was caught by a squad of Germans as she tended a wounded Fighter. She reached inside her skirt and flung a hidden grenade at them.

In the central area, Andrei tells me that his people are making the Germans fight house by house, room by room. We start at the ground floor and make the Germans pursue us up, step by step, to the roof. We hurl bombs and grenades on them and we continue to fight clear up to the roof. The Germans quit. They will not come on the roofs.

From Rodel’s command: Saul Sugarman, an old-time Bundist, was badly wounded. He refused to die until he crawled back to his bunker and gave his rifle to his brother.

Simon has called for hit and run only when we are behind the Germans; not to meet them head on. We don’t have the ammunition. We should adjust our positions so that we can retreat and lead them into dead ends to use our bottle bombs with the most effect.

The Germans have managed to unearth a few bunkers of civilians. They have been marched out of the ghetto. I hear that Boris Presser and his family were taken to the Umschlagplatz today. Well? What can one say? Has there ever been a doubt of Jewish courage? I suppose we all have wrestled with that. Andrei confided to me that it crossed his mind on the first day when he saw the six tanks come up Zamenhof Street. I hope these past six days answer that question forever. Sacrifice is commonplace. Not a single Fighter has surrendered.

THE SIXTH NIGHT

Still no replacement for the destroyed floodlights. The Germans press in on night patrols to keep us from sleeping. We butchered them.

Our Fighters shout in the darkness and the Germans fire blindly at our voices, revealing their positions and their fear.

A report from the Aryan side tells us that Funk asked for SS Volunteers for night patrols and no one volunteered!

The report also says that the Polish people are awed by our fight. To hell with awe! Less awe and more help is what we need.

As I write this I realize that tomorrow begins the seventh day of the rebellion. The four days’ work Alfred Funk promised the Death’s-Head Brigade has proved false. This week we have prayed for will come to pass. God! Will we get help!

THE SEVENTH DAY

Simon Eden spoke to his commanders before dawn. We are to drop back to even more desperate tactics. We are to stay in hiding until the German is so close we can smell his breath, count the hairs on his head. Attack by knife, leap on him barehanded, and choke him to death. Fire only at point-blank range. We cannot afford the luxury of missing a single round. We cannot make a bad throw of a single grenade. We must constantly shift our positions at night to alternate bunkers. Finally, a further cut in rations. Water: one glass per day per Fighter.

Today the Germans finally cleaned out the uniform factory. Rodel’s people did not have the fire power to stop them. We had managed to take most of the laborers from the Brushmaker's factory into buildings and bunkers.

The bunkers are becoming unbearable. Mila 18 has four hundred people (capacity 220). It is only an iota above suffocation level. The thermometer today read 140 degrees.

THE SEVENTH NIGHT

The Germans have had enough of the ghetto in the dark. We own the night. We are the kings of darkness? They do not come in here out of sheer cowardice and fear. Like college boys making drunken vows, we have fulfilled our “goal” of holding the ghetto for a week. Israel reborn has lived for seven days under fire. Ridiculous, isn’t it. We are perilously low on ammunition. Food and water are not going to improve. We cannot replace a fired round of ammunition. We cannot replace a killed Fighter. Our wounded die quietly with no complaints about the little aid we can give them. But I am ashamed of my past cynicism. I have never seen morale so high. I have never been so proud to be a Jew. At night we walk tall and straight as free men. We sing and we dance. We tell jokes about our hunger and we laugh about our fear. Strange, so very strange, how a hopeless cause can be the cause of the most exhilarating experience I have ever known (forgive me, Sylvia).

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Chapter Seventeen

SIMON EDEN WAS CHAGRINED. A week was over and his army was still intact and full of fight. Simon, who had dreaded the burden of command, had reacted to a hundred cries without hesitation. When in doubt, he personally led his troops on foray after foray. He had become transformed into a symbol of leadership.

The week’s end called for a reappraisal. His Fighters no longer had the luxury of concentrating gunfire. This meant that the Germans could cut off and fine-comb surrounded areas with a determined effort. No longer able to protect the civilians in the southern area, Simon ordered Rodel to abandon a suicidal position and pull his Fighters into the central area.

Wolf was ordered to cut and destroy the phone line between Mila 18 and the Franciskanska bunker despite the fact that runners often needed hours to negotiate a few blocks during the daytime. There was too great a risk of the Germans finding the phone line and using it to lead them into the bunkers.

A new standing order: all Fighters were to scour for food and water during the night in bunkers which the Germans had discovered during the day.

In his favor was his continued night control of the ghetto, plus the fact that the Germans gave up using tanks and armored cars. And Andrei Androfski, his workhorse, his nonpareil warrior. The sight of Andrei nearby never failed to calm him.

Simon worked throughout each night, having developed a remarkable facility to sleep in short snatches. Rodel came to Mila 18, to the first floor, where Simon stayed during the night to escape the heat of the bunker.

Rodel reported that all his Fighters were moved and deployed in the central area.

“Good. Get some sleep,” Simon said. “It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

“I wanted to talk to you about something else. I hear rumors that Samson Ben Horin is taking the Revisionists out of the ghetto.”

“That’s right,” Simon answered. “I’m going to see him now.”

“Take me with you.”

“Why? You and Ben Horin haven’t passed a civil word to each other for five years.”

“They’ve no right to leave!” Rodel roared.

This was what Simon had expected of the hotheaded Communist. No matter how many times a man must come to a decision, there is no immunity to the shock of a new decision. This was the most difficult he had faced the entire week.

“The Revisionists are not obligated to our command,” Simon answered softly.

“But they do have a duty.”

“What is their duty, Rodel? Glorious death? They’ve fought well. We’ve all done what we set out to do. We can no longer protect civilians—you know that.”

“But each day we can hold out, our monument grows higher. With the Revisionists here we can buy time. A day ... two ...”

Simon did not know how to answer. “I’ve thought about this moment long and hard. There is a line which we cross when it is no longer our duty to die but to live. Each man has his line set in a different place. I cannot command what a man must choose for himself.”

“All right then, but you don’t have to help them by approval. Simon, think! You’re setting a dangerous precedent. Others may decide to go.”

“Yes ... I know ...”

The rendezvous with Samson Ben Horin was held at Nalewki 37 in a lantern-lit room. It would be daylight in two hours. Samson’s neatly trimmed beard was in straggly disarray, and his hollow features made his weariness more pronounced. “Did you bring me a map of the sewers?” Simon spread it on the table. “Do you still plan to try it before dawn?”

“Yes. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to reach the Vistula. They’ll have a barge waiting for us.”

“I don’t want to interfere, but you’re taking your people right under the heart of Warsaw by staying in the main line. It’s dangerous. I seriously suggest that you consider using smaller cross lines ... here ... here ... here ...” he said, pointing. “This way you come out a few miles north in Zoliborz.”

“We can’t change plans now. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“Delay it for a day. Recontact your people on the outside and set up a safer route.”

Samson hemmed and hawed, then sprang from his seat. He had thought of a safer route, but it would cost him twenty-four hours. “It’s a greater risk to stay,” he said. “We don’t think we can hold for another day.”

Simon showed no reaction to the shock he felt. “Do you have a compass?”

“Yes.”

He penciled in the route. “It’s almost perfectly straight. Watch for barbed wire here. Tides won’t be too bad. Hold hands, keep conversation down. Be careful with lights.”

Samson Ben Horin studied the map for several moments, then folded it and put it in his breast pocket. Simon arose. “I’ve got to get back to my bunker,” he said. “We have a meeting scheduled in ten minutes. Our German friends are bringing up another battalion of artillery.”

“Thanks for everything, Simon. Listen, I want you to know. What I mean to say is ... this is a group decision to leave.”

“No explanation is necessary.”

“It’s not as if we are running away.”

“No one has accused you of that.”

“Simon, when the ghetto was started we had five hundred people in Warsaw. There are fifty-two of us left I want you to know that I personally voted to remain. But ... as their leader, I am obliged to take them out to the forests.”

“I figured it was that way.”

“Eleven of my people have decided to remain with you. We have also voted to leave you half our guns and eighty per cent of our ammunition. You’ll find it all in our bunker.”

He extended his hand. Simon shook it. Samson Ben Horin, a rebel among rebels, headed quickly for his bunker.

In ten minutes the forty-one remaining Revisionists were in the main sewer line under Gensia Street. They passed near Wolf’s Franciskanska bunker, under the Brushmaker’s compound, and they were beneath the wall. Every ten yards Samson flicked on his flashlight for a two-second bearing. A chain, hand to hand, moved silently.

The light found the barbed-wire trap.

Five men with wire cutters bit their pliers into the barrier and worked it apart slowly.

Samson peered at his watch. It was going too slowly. It would be light in fifty minutes. “Hurry,” he whispered.

“It’s very thick.”

“Hurry!”

They grunted as their rusty instruments tried to break the wire. Samson flashed his light again. They were only a third of the way through. He pushed past the wire-cutting team and with his hands squeezed the accordions flat. The barbs tore his flesh in a dozen places, but he batted at the wire until there was a partial clearance. They slugged through. The wire ripped their flesh and their clothing and they were bloodied and in pain.

Overhead, a Polish Blue policeman patrolling the area was drawn to the manhole by foreign sounds. He knelt and lay his ear against the manhole, then darted off to the Citadel gate only a block away, where the Wehrmacht had a camp.

“There are people in the Kanal. I’m sure of it. I could hear them grunting.”

The last of the Revisionists passed the entanglement. Their bloody legs were washed with sewage. The manhole cover behind them clunked open. A blasting light probed in. German voices! The Revisionists flattened against the slimy side of the bricks, just out of reach of the beams.

“See? Some of the wires have been cut!”

“Get a ladder!”

Samson was dizzy. Simon’s warning about going through an arterial flashed through his mind. Trapped in a black fetid coffin. Oh God! He could feel the tremors of fear running up and down the line. Stay? Fight when they come into the sewer after us? Run back to the ghetto? Bolt for the river?

“Let’s go, we can’t stay here!” He pushed on down Franciskanska Street, slushing as fast as his feet could hold in the slime and muck. Samson wanted to flash his light to study the map and find a small connecting Kanal, but there was no time to stop. Two mains converged. Freta Street. Large intersection. We are halfway there. The sewage ran swiftly.

Behind them they could hear the Germans lowering a ladder and they could see a crisscross of lights searching for them.

“We have to change our course,” Samson said.

“No.”

“Yes, I say. Up Freta Street.”

“No. We won’t make the river.”

“Come on. Up Freta Street!”

“Samson!” someone shrieked at the end of the line.

“Samson! Poison gas!”

Samson turned on his flashlight and saw the billows of smoke rolling at them.

There! A built-in iron ladder leading up to the street! Coughing, screaming at the end of the line! Samson climbed the ladder and put his shoulder against the manhole and shoved the lid off. He poked his head out, then squirted onto the street. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, they fled after him.

Blinding lights!

Red streaks of tracer bullets from an arc of German machine gunners shot them down. Some scampered back to the sewer and were shot down the hole into the poison gas. And then, after a few more shattering screams as the gas converged from four directions, it was still.

The long-sought German breakthrough came just before dawn on the eighth day with the destruction of the Revisionists whose attempt to break down a main Kanal proved as foolhardy as Simon Eden had feared.

On the eighth day the Germans roared into the ghetto, inspired by the victory. It had had a strange reaction on the Jewish Fighters. It brought to them a full and final realization that there was no escape, that the fight would have to be fought to the very end on this ground. The Jews turned savage, hurling themselves into German ranks as living grenades and torches. Cornered, out of ammunition, they fought with rocks and clubs and bare hands.

Each step the Germans took into the central area, they paid more heavily. The Jews were on top of them, behind them, beneath them, and they fought like maniacs.

On the eighth day they drove the Germans out.

The calculated concealment of news of the uprising burst apart. The word rolled over the length and breadth of Poland.

Jews have rebelled in the Warsaw ghetto!

Jews have been holding against onslaught after onslaught for over a week!

Tales of the fanatical Jewish courage dribbled out. The myth of Jewish cowardice was burst.

Berlin was shocked.

Jews fighting, routing the Elite Corps! It was catastrophic, a humiliation as bad a propaganda defeat as Stalingrad was a military defeat.

On the ninth day Funk mounted his most furious assault, using six thousand troops, and at the end of the ninth day he received his officers, who babbled stories of yet another defeat.

“Herr Oberführer, they strike like phantoms!”

“And you strike like cowards,” Funk shouted. “You disgrace the SS, the Fatherland. You disgrace our Führer, Adolf Hitler.”

Funk threw them all out except Horst von Epp. He loathed the man personally but had to rely on him more and more in the past days. Von Epp could make up the most magnificent excuses.

Funk sat at his desk to write his report. Six hundred Jews had been taken out of the ghetto on this, the ninth day. In all, only eight thousand removed in ten days and most of them from the uniform factory. There were still over thirty thousand of them hidden, and it was getting more difficult to locate them each day. At this rate it could take forever. His promise of four days to liquidate the ghetto was haunting him like a joke—like Goring’s promise that no bomb would drop on Germany. He could sense the disdain of the officers. No, they would not dare replace him, for that would be admission that the Jews had defeated the SS.

Horst concentrated heavily on which woman to bring in for a weekend. Alfred Funk wrote his daily report. The report was concise and boasted of progress which had not been made and exaggerated enemy strength and expanded the myth of a large army of Polish bandits helping the Jews. Crisp, dull, military. Copies to Police General Kruger in Krakow, to Globocnik in Lublin, and to Himmler. Ultra-secret.

Horst walked over to him in a turmoil between a redhead and a blonde and lifted the report and scanned it. “Have you ever heard of the Ass of Balaam, Alfred?”

“The what of what?”

“The Ass of Balaam in the Bible.”

“Of course not.”

“The Ass of Balaam attempts to curse the sons of Israel and ends up praising them. I think the Americans call it a left-handed compliment.”

“Must you always talk in riddles?”

“Look at these phrases in your report You refer to the ‘enemy.’ Since when do we admit the Jews are a military enemy? And here—‘Jewish disregard for death and the unshakable decision to resist’—why don’t you recommend we decorate them with Iron Crosses?”

Funk took the report and tore it in half. “I’ll do it over.”

“They tell me it’s like a nightmare in there,” Von Epp said.

“I don’t understand this at all. Most of these troops have performed well on the eastern front ... I simply don’t understand it.” Horst’s mind was back on the women. Alfred Funk’s was not “We have to get them off the roofs,” he said. “Must get them down on the ground ...”

The phone rang. Funk answered. He turned sallow and clapped his hand over the mouthpiece. “Himmler calling from Berlin.” Alfred Funk lifted his latest reports and read passages, spoke of German devotion and courage, gave assurances. Then he became quiet and listened and listened. His shading turned to crimson and then to gray. He placed the receiver on the hook very, very slowly.

“News of this insurrection has spread all over Europe. Hitler has been in a rage all day.”

Horst von Epp’s hand clutched his throat unconsciously.

“Damn! Damn!” Funk walked to the window in a violent anger. “Damn their filthy Jew souls!”

He whirled to Horst. His face was a mask of evil. Von Epp was frightened.

“What are you going to do, Alfred?”

“I’ll get these filthy animals down from the roof. I shall burn the ghetto to the ground!”

Chapter Eighteen

“HEINKEL BOMBERS!” CRIED THE Fighters on the roofs.

The German airplanes swooped in at a height of two hundred feet over the Brushmaker’s and slowed their speed. Tons of black bombs fell from their opened wombs on the crush of buildings. They hurled down, tore through the roofs, splattered on the streets, ignited.

The incendiaries smoldered and their groping flames licked around for fuel. The wood spurted into sudden fire and roared up the stair wells to the roofs.

“The ghetto is burning!”

The Heinkels zoomed in on a second and a third pass. There was nothing to shoot back and deter their “drill” with human targets. Palls of smoke billowed and spiraled heavenward and flames leaped on the roofs, turning them into frying pans. Glass windows exploded and scattered on the streets, and orange-and-red fingers of flame leaped violently through the windows.

A scorched runner spilled into the bunker at Mila 18, holding his blackened hands, and another with wild eyes came in, and another. All of them had the same story.

“We have to abandon the roofs.”

The ghetto burned crisply, concisely, and helplessly, for there was not so much as a single drop of water to stop the conflagration. Fire, a hungry beast, devoured all that would succumb and relentlessly searched for more.

Warsaw’s fire brigades surrounded the ghetto with power hoses ready. Orders: keep the flames locked in on the Jews. Occasionally an angry spark would leap the wall and ignite on the Aryan side. These fires beyond the wall were quickly stamped out. Not a single drop of water went into the ghetto.

At the end of the tenth day of the uprising the northern quarter of the ghetto was in flames.

On the tenth night the new artillery battalions went to work. They poured five thousand rounds of artillery fire from the mouths of their cannons over the wall at point-blank range. Debris flew in the wake of the shell fire. Walls that refused to fall to fire were blasted apart.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! bellowed the German guns.

The earth shook and windows rattled and the muzzles flashed lightning and no one slept in Warsaw.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! they reached out at the silhouettes outlined in the fire. Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! until daylight.

And then the Heinkels came back and showered more coals into the inferno, and the fire raced from house to house, leaped over intersections, block to block. The tightly packed poor Stawki area raged, and the fire raced down Zamenhof, up Niska, along Mila, along Nalewki, devoured the Brushmaker’s complex.

Immense belches of violently twisting columns of smoke streamed skyward and turned into yellow-black clouds and blocked the sun and turned day into night. Showers of soot rained down thickly, covering the city with a snowfall of ashes. Everything was an ugly disintegrating gray.

One by one Simon called his groups down from the roof. The very key to their defenses were burned from under them. Fighters whom the Germans had been unable to force down were now driven out by the ever-probing, darting flames.

The wall of fire billowed down Zamenhof and encircled and ate the Civil Authority building and ran down Gensia, once a commercial artery of Warsaw, and the Pawiak Prison erupted like an immense torch.

Easter Sunday!

The mighty organ of the cathedral bellowed a tribute to the resurrection of the Son of God. The confines of the cathedral and of every church in Warsaw were overrun with pious who knelt, crossed, prayed, Hailed Mary, dipped holy water. Choir boys with shiny faces sang out to the glory of the Lord in falsetto voices.

The flames from the ghetto warmed them and caused the pious to perspire profusely, but they pretended no discomfort, for this was a joyous time.

“Hail Mary, full of grace ... Mother of God ...”

Gabriela Rak knelt in the last row of the mighty tabernacle. She had wept until she had no more tears. A coughing broke out in the cathedral as a wind shift sent gusts of smoke from the ghetto racing down to the altar.

Gabriela looked up at the bleeding, limp Christ. The archbishop chanted prayers rapidly in Latin.

“Oh my God,” Gabriela whispered to herself. “My hatred for these people around me knows no bounds. Help me, God. Help me not to hate them ... help me not to hate ... please let my child live. My child must live, but I am afraid because of my hatred. O Jesus ... how can you do this to your own people?”

Gabriela knelt alone after the cathedral was empty.

It was a bad day for an Easter Sunday. The gardens and the Vistula River and the places where one celebrates the resurrection and the coming of spring were simply unbearable because of the damned fire inside the ghetto. Soot poured down on their clothing, and it was humid and dark. A perfectly wonderful day was being ruined.

“O Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Why are you making them suffer?” Gabriela moaned. “Help me, help me. Help me not to hate.”

In deference to the holy day, the fire brigade poured their water jets over the ghetto wall to keep the Convert’s Church from falling to the flames as they reached the southern boundary.

Easter night.

Fires lit the sky from the Convert’s Church on the south to Muranowski Place on the north; from the cemetery on the west to the Brushmaker’s on the east. All of the ghetto blazed.

Horst von Epp stood transfixed before his window and watched. A naked oil-covered girl lolled on the bed behind him. He was drunk as he had never been drunk. He hung onto the curtain.

“Fire is fascinating,” the girl observed.

“That is no fire. That is hell. That is hell the way the devil meant it to be!”

“Horst be a good boy. Close the curtain and come to bed.”

“Hell!” He poured a drink sloppily. It ran over the edge of his glass and down his arm. “I salute our thousand-year empire! See it! See it! We shall live in fires like that for a thousand years! We are cursed!”

He turned and looked at the girl wildly. “Cursed, damned ...” The shadows of the flames crisscrossed her body.

“You frighten me,” she whimpered.

“Get out, you slut!”

Inferno! Inferno! Inferno!

Large beams devoured by the fire plunged from the roofs through floors. Choking, gagging, blinded Jews scrambled dazed into the streets and walked in helpless circles. Jews hurled their children from windows and then themselves. Jews were crushed and buried under collapsing walls.

On the thirteenth night of the rebellion the artillery began again to make up for its one-day Easter holiday.

Jews were charred into unrecognizable smoldering corpses.

Jews were roasted in bunkers which were turned into coffins by wind shifts and downdrafts.

Jews were choked to death in clouds of smoke which crushed their lungs.

Jews leaped from their hiding places into the sewers and were boiled to death in bubbling, sizzling waters.

On the fifteenth day the ghetto burned.

On the sixteenth day the ghetto burned.

On the seventeenth day it burned. Pillars of smoke continued to reach for the sky, and for miles in every direction it was black. Undraped skeletons defiantly remained standing.

Searchlights picked out the dissenters and the guns rankled and the walls fell.

Because of the extreme depth of Mila 18, it had been spared direct contact with the fire. But the bunker was a continued scene of the epitome of agony. Heat reached 170 degrees. Naked people collapsed atop each other in exhaustion. The Treblinka room, the central area hospital, was loaded with groaning, charred ruins of human beings. Many were burned beyond recognition. Deborah Bronski and the other nurses had no salve for their wounds and but a drop of water for their parched lips. Day and night they begged to be put to death to escape their misery, but not even a bullet could be spared for that.

And when they died they were taken through the Majdanek room, the children’s part of the bunker connected to the sewer. Their bodies were floated out in the sewer to make room for more near death to be brought down from the inferno above.

His voice grew weaker and weaker, but day and night Rabbi Solomon wailed in a stupor the chant “Eli, Eli.”

“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

In fire and flame our race did they burn,

With shame our masses brand.

Yet none turned away from Thee.

Not from Thee, my God, nor Thy Torah. ...

On the nineteenth day nearly everything that could be burned had burned. Now was a time for smoldering. Iron beams sizzled out their stored-up heat. Pavements could not be walked on. The boiling sewers ran cool again.

And when the sizzling slowed on the twentieth day, the Germans returned to probe the enemy strength, hoping that their work had been complete.

But most of the Fighters lived and throughout their agony begged to see the face of the enemy once more. Rodel and ten of his people moved behind the broken walls, searching out bunkers of Fighters, when the Germans came in.

He hid his men in a rubble pile as a patrol advanced toward him along Lubecka Street.

The Germans moved cautiously, fearfully, hopefully expecting every Jew would be gone.

An officer pointed to his sub-machine gunner to check the rubble pile on his right.

Rodel had a quick decision to make. The Germans had twenty men spread on the street. His people did not have the equipment to attack them. Yet the soldier would surely discover them if he kept coming. Rodel tightened his fat lips and felt his pistol. His eyes became glued to the soldier’s weapon. A lovely sub-machine gun, and then he saw the soldier’s water canteen.

The German had almost reached Rodel’s group.

“Stay under cover,” Rodel ordered, and in the same instant leaped out of the rubble.

“Jew!” screamed the startled German in his last word. Rodel’s knife slit him in half. He snatched the sub-machine gun, jerked off the ammunition belt, and drew the German patrol away from his own Fighters.

“After him!”

The Waffen SS fired.

Rodel dropped back into the skeleton of a building. Half its walls had fallen away, exposing the stairway up to the top floor, which was still burning. He crouched and let go a burst which scattered them and he began to climb the exposed stairs. Half of the twenty Germans raced in after him, and the second half stayed in the street and fired into the denuded building.

Up one flight, up two. He crouched and shot down on his pursuers.

His own Fighters used that moment to make their escape.

Rodel came to the top floor. The rooms were burning. He retreated to a dead end. Fire lapped all around him. The Germans came up the steps and forced him to break ground with a grenade lobbed at his feet. He reeled back, his machine pistol spewing defiantly. Curses poured from his mouth. The fire caught his shirt and flared up his back. He snarled and moved into his tormentors and fired, and they began retreating down the stairs, awed by his rage.

A human torch spit at them from a landing. His gun went empty. He pulled his pistol out and fired.

A German bullet struck him, two, three. He staggered and crashed out of the building, flaming down to the sidewalk, and his body smashed on the pavement. With broken bones protruding from his body, he kept crawling toward the Germans on the street and firing his pistol.

On the twentieth day the Germans returned with sound detectors, engineers, and dogs. Thirst-crazed Fighters leaped at them with vengeance, but the tide of war had turned unalterably.

While the ghetto burned, Oberführer Funk meticulously planned the block-by-block extermination of what remained of the ghetto. With military efficiency the Germans set up barricades over a block and then took it apart house by house, room by room. They were able to unearth one bunker after another and find people cowering in the rubble. Once a bunker was located, the engineers moved in efficiently and set dynamite charges in them. The blasts were followed up by teams of flame throwers, and finally the last of the “experts” pumped poison gas in.

Manhole covers were thrown open and poison gas filled the sewers. They were flooded to the height of the pipes.

Soon the putrid waters were clogged with corpses entangled in the barbed-wire traps.

On the twenty-first and twenty-second days, bunkers fell by the dozens. Still the pesky, arrogant Jewish Fighters continued their attacks. The Germans detested running into the Fighters because it called for a struggle to the death.

By the twenty-third day a hundred fifty bunkers had been methodically located.

A new tactic was tried.

Five-gallon cans of drinking water and freshly baked bread were set up by the Germans at intersections to lure the starved, thirst-crazed survivors into the open. Once a child was captured, he was tortured before his mother to reveal the location of a bunker. The bestial dogs forced their share of confessions.

Fifteen thousand near dead were uncovered and marched to the Umschlagplatz by the end of the twenty-third day.

On the twenty-fourth day the Germans were certain they had won the hardest battles and it was now a downhill fight. During the night Andrei Androfski, whose job was to reorganize the Joint Fighters after each day, pulled together two hundred sixteen fighters and the entire stock of firearms and waited for the enemy. Fighting out of rubble, they audaciously threw the Germans out of the ghetto in a series of ambushes, captured the planted food and water, and crashed through the Gensia Gate into the Aryan side, where they raided a small arsenal and threw the arms over the wall to their waiting comrades. They had captured enough food, ammunition, and water to sustain them for another angry gasp.

Sylvia Brandel was killed in this action, trying to tend a fallen Fighter.

So great was Oberführer Funk’s frustration, he shot one of his officers to death in a rage.

“German patrol overhead.”

Mila 18 went into a familiar pattern of silence. Deborah Bronski kept the remaining twenty children quiet. The Fighters did not breathe. The wounded prayed silently, daring not to shriek out their pain.

An hour passed ... two ...

The Germans still hovered over them, pressing in to find the elusive headquarters of the Joint Fighters.

On the third hour Rabbi Solomon began to weep prayers. Simon Eden nearly choked him to death to silence him.

Overhead, dogs sniffed up and down Mila Street; sound detectors begged to hear a cough, a cry.

At the end of the third hour the tension became unbearable. Heat added to the stillness. One by one they pitched forward in dead faints. Christopher de Monti yanked Deborah’s hair to keep her awake.

And then a cry!

Simon and Andrei and Tolek Alterman pistol-whipped the weepers into silence before a mass outbreak of hysteria.

Five hours ... six ...

The utter collapse as the Germans left the street.

Journal Entry

Tomorrow our battle goes into its twenty-fifth day. I want death to take me. I cannot stand more of it. Till yesterday I managed, but now Sylvia is gone and Moses is close to death. What has he had? What has he had?

Our boys and girls still fight fiercely. The enemy cannot claim the ghetto. I will die with pride. There is only one thing I wish now. Christopher de Monti must be taken out of the ghetto. He alone knows where the entire works of the Good Fellowship Club are buried. We cannot risk keeping him here any longer. I have not prayed in synagogue since I have been a boy. I have taken a position of convenience by calling myself an agnostic. I therefore did not have to submit to the hypocrisy of dogma, but on the other hand it spares me from exposing myself by saying I am an atheist and do not believe in God. Yes, a true position of convenience. Now I ask God to prove Himself. I beg him to let Christopher de Monti live so that this history will not die.

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Chapter Nineteen

ANDREI ROLLED HIS TONGUE over his gritty teeth and peered out from behind the rubble pile. Muranowski Place before him was lit up with arc lights. It looked like day. Andrei thought, this night life is killing me. There was no chance of getting into the bunker from the Muranowski entrance. The square had at least two companies of Germans in it. He scratched his beard. Got to remind Simon to trim my beard tomorrow. I looked like hell in the mirror. Come to think of it, I owe Simon a trim too.

Andrei patted the Schmeisser, “Gaby,” and sized up the opposition. He had only one clip of twenty bullets and a grenade. Poor Gaby, Andrei said to himself. I can’t keep you clean any more. I’m all out of oil. Your pretty little sights are all rusted. Sorry, Gaby, we simply can’t take on a hundred of these whores by ourselves.

Well, they’re not moving, Gaby, so we’d better move, because I’m tired. I’d love to brush my teeth again before I die.

Each night since the beginning of the rebellion Andrei made a round of the Joint Fighters’ positions and reset them with orders for the next day. After the Germans were driven out of the ghetto in the first days the job was not too difficult. He could travel walking upright with runners at his side. During the fires it was nightmarish. Leaping flames, crumbling walls, and those damned artillery shells.

Now the communications between bunkers was all but broken. Two days ago he carried an order from Simon that each group was independent to act and improvise against the conditions in the immediate area. Each commander was responsible for forming his own hit-and-run attacks and, even more urgent, finding the food and ammunition and medical supplies to continue the fight.

Each night Andrei left Mila 18 to regroup the diminishing army. The Germans were getting bolder and bolder. Their night patrols increased. It took Andrei almost all night to find his scattered people, although their area was becoming smaller and smaller. Caution every damned step of the way. The Germans owned the southern end of the ghetto. Now at Muranowski Place they had a foothold in the north. On arterials like Zamenhof and Gensia, they dug in with permanent positions.

Joint Fighters shrank their area. Two bunkers holding half the force formed the extreme boundaries. At one end was Mila 18 and at the other end Wolf Brandel in the Franciskanska bunker.

Between these two bunkers the balance of the Joint Fighters had an interlacing network of a dozen smaller bunkers and two hundred people.

Ana’s company pulled back into Franciskanska. Tolek Alterman was sent out of Mila 18 to take over Rodel’s command of the small bunkers on the northern fringe.

Tonight Andrei pulled them in tighter again.

A month was coming to an end. It was a miracle, but over half the Joint Fighters were alive and armed. They had captured enough to sustain the rebellion into a second month!

“Filthy whores,” Andrei grunted, realizing the Germans had a permanent hold in Muranowski Place. His mind ventured the thought of a hit-and-run attack on them tomorrow night. He was very weary. He slid out of his hiding place and crept over the rubble piles down Nalewki Street through a puzzle of broken walls. He prowled with the deftness of a large cat playing with shadows and sped in his search to find one of Mila 18’s six entrances out of sight of the enemy.

The entrance from Muranowski Place was out of the question. The drainage pipe on Nalewki 39 was too close to German activity to try. He went for the third entrance in what had been a courtyard in the rear of a house on Kupiecka Street, which had a tunnel connecting to an air-raid shelter. Andrei peered out from the wreckage at the shelter. It looked clear, then he narrowed his eyes.

Something out there ...

Andrei’s eyes could penetrate the darkness with the sharpness of the large cat he was when he moved in the night. He saw the outlines of German helmets. They were in an emplacement of some kind past the courtyard and they were facing Mila Street with their backs to him.

Andrei calculated the odds. If he ran for the air-raid shelter and its tunnel entrance, there was every chance he would make it without being sighted. But any risk involving German discovery of Mila 18 had to be avoided.

His choice was to move on to the fourth entrance on Zamenhof Street or the sewers. Neither choice appealed. Zamenhof Street would be filled with the enemy, and the sewers were dangerous. He decided to have a closer look at the German emplacement.

Andrei slithered on his belly over the courtyard and crept up behind the enemy. Andrei observed what seemed to be a squad of six men fixed in an emplacement which looked over part of Mila Street from behind a barricade of fallen bricks.

He studied the area around them. On their left, a fallen building. On their right, a partially standing building. Andrei calculated that if he could reach the half-ruined structure he could get over the top of them, but any movement beyond his present position would be detected.

He felt about for a brick and threw it to the left. It skittered over the rubble.

“What was that!”

The Germans turned a machine gun on it.

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

Andrei sprinted in the opposite direction. He made a flying belly flop in the ruined structure and began to climb up while the Germans continued to be occupied with the decoy.

“Stop your fire. It is only falling rubble,” someone ordered.

“Yes. Don’t be so nervous.”

The Germans laughed jumpily.

Andrei was above them now. He inched up so he could count helmets. Four ... five, six. Bastards! Whores! They had set up a machine gun to cover part of Mila Street as a permanent emplacement. Filthy whores! Andrei squinted. Regular army. Wehrmacht. Good, they were less willing to die bravely than the SS. It was a stupid position. What audacity to put up this gun without flanking cover, he thought. Well ... I shall have to give them a lesson on how to be soldiers. Too bad they shall not be around afterward to benefit. Look at the fools, all clustered up as if they were at a Hitler rally. How lovely.

Andrei unhooked the hand grenade from his belt placed the handle in his teeth, and with his free hands slipped his clip of ammunition into the machine pistol. Now, Gaby, don’t you be a naughty girl and jam on me.

He calculated his moves. I’ll have to hit them very fast. Unfortunately my grenade will ruin their machine gun. I must throw at the fat one and go for the three on the right with my machine pistol. Remember, Andrei ... first I go for their pistols and the privates with the rifles. Then I yank off their ammunition belts, then their water. One, two, three, four; pistols, rifles, ammo, water. He looked back over his shoulder to the air-raid shelter. A twenty-five-yard dash back. Won’t have more than a half minute to do the job. Okay ... ready ...

He pulled the pin from the grenade, steadied the machine pistol, and counted ... one ... two ... three ... and lobbed the pineapple down on the fat soldier on the left.

Startled shrieks! A flash! Men held ripped faces!

Andrei counted ... one ... two ... three ... four ... while the bits of the grenade spent their wrath, and he leaped.

Straight down, fifteen feet, into the writhing Germans. Gaby spit a blue flame at the three soldiers on the right side of the machine gun, and they were still. The gun jammed before he could turn it on the other three.

One lay groaning under the gun, and a second leaped wounded into Mila Street, screaming, “Jews! Jews! Help! Help!”

The last soldier was knocked against the wall. He crawled to his feet. Andrei pulled the trigger of his weapon. It was jammed. He hit it with his fist, but it was stuck tight. The soldier jerked his pistol out of his holster. Andrei flung his weapon at the helmetless redheaded enemy, and the barrel cracked against his skull and caused him to fire wild. Andrei’s fist smashed the German’s mouth and shattered his jaw. A kick in the groin, and he sank to his knees, and Andrei brought the flat of his hand on the German’s neck and it broke with a loud pop.

He was dead.

The wounded soldier crawled for a pistol. Andrei’s boot smashed into his jaw and he too was still. Half a minute gone. Hurry! Pistols, rifles, ammo, water ... Where’s that goddamned rifle? Can’t find it.

The sounds of boots converging from both ends of Mila Street. Andrei tried to turn the machine gun on them, but the grenade had wrecked it.

He leaped out of the wrecked emplacement and scampered into the air-raid shelter and into the secret entrance to Mila 18.

“Where in the hell have you been?” Simon Eden greeted him with relief and anger.

Andrei shrugged, “It’s slow moving up there.”

Then Simon saw the guns and belts and water canteens draped over Andrei. “What happened?”

“Nothing much. Just routine.” Andrei treated himself to a couple of swallows of water, took enough ammunition to fill three clips, and turned the rest over to Simon, grumbling that he wished he could find some oil to lubricate the Schmeisser.

After seeing Deborah to tell her Rachael was all right, he saw Alex to report that Wolf was fine, then went upstairs with Simon to a small closetlike room which they felt was safe during the night hours, and there they rehashed their diminishing position. Over three hundred Fighters remained, but the circle of bunkers was shrinking. There was enough food and water to hold out for another five or six days. Ammo? One sharp encounter and they would be depleted. What to do when the ammo was gone? Dig deeper and hide? Suicide? No thought of surrender. Attempt escape or fight bare-handed.

“Maybe Moritz Katz will come in with ammunition,” Simon said, hoping beyond hope.

Andrei yawned. “Moritz will do it if anyone can.”

“If he brings in a couple hundred rounds, I want you to make a raid on the Przebieg Gate. There’s a field kitchen and some loose arms supplying the troops in Muranowski Place.”

Andrei stretched out on the floor. “Przebieg Gate ... good idea. Holy Mother, I’ve got to get some sleep. Tomorrow you have to clip my beard. I’m a mess. Wake me up at daybreak.”

It seemed to Andrei that he had no more than closed his eyes when he felt a sharp slap across the soles of his boots. He and his machine pistol awoke at the same instant. Simon was over him. His finger slid off the trigger. “What ... hell ... Simon ... it isn’t daybreak yet.”

Then he rubbed the thick cakes of sleep out of his eyes and saw Alexander Brandel next to Simon. Andrei propped up on an elbow. “What’s wrong?”

“Moritz and two of the smugglers got captured very close to the Kupiecka entrance to the bunker. They were taken away alive.”

Andrei was fully awake in a second. “We’d better start moving the Fighters to some of Tolek’s bunkers.”

“Can’t,” Simon answered. “Mila Street is crawling with Germans. Movement is impossible. We’ve been lying frozen all night. I’m afraid hysteria is going to break out down there any minute.”

“De Monti,” Andrei said.

“That’s right,” Alex answered. “We’ve got to get Chris moved immediately.”

“Have you heard anything from the Aryan side? Any word from Gabriela?”

“No, but we can’t wait. The Germans are all but breathing on Mila 18. I want you to take Chris over to Wolf’s bunker. We’ll try to reach the Aryan side to set up an emergency hiding place for him.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost five o’clock.”

“It’s going to be a tricky business getting him over there in daylight.”

“I think we’re out of extra chances, Andrei.”

Andrei nodded.

“Get him over there and get back here.”

Andrei was already on his feet.

Chris and Deborah stood in the tunnel exit through the Auschwitz room which led to Nalewki Street. Farther down the tunnel Andrei probed about to make certain there were no Germans near the entrance. Chris tucked his pistol into his belt and flicked the flashlight a couple of times and knelt and tightened the rags wrapped around his feet which would assure greater silence in their movements. And then there was nothing left to check and he was forced to search for Deborah’s face in the half darkness.

“It’s so terribly, terribly strange”—his voice trembled—“how you wait for a moment and dread it. You dread it every living moment of the day and night. Now it is here. Somehow I’m almost glad—it’s almost better to bear the agony than live with the tension.”

“I’ve always known,” Deborah said, her fingers feeling for his face and tracing the contours of his lips and chin. “I’ve known you’d be able to do it, Chris.”

“Oh God, Deborah ... help me ... help me ...”

“I’ve always known you’d be able to make the right decision. Chris ... you must ...”

Then all she could hear were deep futile sighs. “My anger against them is nearly as great as my love for you. All day and all night I’ve memorized the places where the journals are buried. I’ll be tormented until I can unearth them and hold them up for the world to see. I’ll never rest, Deborah ... it’s like a brand seared on my soul.”

They felt a closeness of each other and were softly holding each other.

“Thanks for everything,” Chris said.

“Thanks for ... life,” she whispered.

They could hear the shuffle of Andrei’s rag-covered boots coming toward them and they seized each other desperately. Andrei cleared his throat.

Deborah gasped and spun out of Chris’s arms and bit her hand hard. Chris grabbed her from behind and she sagged and writhed to keep from breaking down.

“We have to go,” Andrei said sternly.

Chris still held her. “Go,” she cried, “please go!”

“Christ!” Chris wailed.

“We have to go,” Andrei repeated. He took Chris’s arms from Deborah and she plunged out of the tunnel into the Auschwitz room of the bunker. Chris started after her, but Andrei grabbed him and his hold was like a vise.

“Steady, Chris.”

Chris collapsed and buried his head in Andrei’s chest “Steady ... steady,” Andrei said as he dragged the grieving man up toward the entrance.

It was turning light outside. They poked their heads out of the drainage pipe in the Nalewki 39 courtyard and sprinted to cover. Around them, fires continued to sizzle. They could hear a rumble of trucks assembling in Muranowski Place.

Andrei gestured that they had to move along under cover to the intersection of Nalewki and Gensia, a single block. They were almost completely hidden by the few walls, shell holes, immense rubble piles.

At the intersection they were in for trouble. It was a main cross street which ran parallel to the ruins of the Brushmaker’s and was filled with patrols and movement. It would be hell to get across the street without being seen.

Andrei crept along a few feet, signaled Chris to follow, crept another few feet, signaled Chris again.

They inched along for fifty yards. It took two hours.

Clump! Clump! Clump! Clump!

They lay flat as a company of soldiers passed. The hoots seemed to be only inches away from them.

A hundred feet north, the Germans had discovered a bunker of civilians. A little emaciated boy and two girls no more than six years old crawled out of a pile of bricks, holding their hands over their heads. They stood trembling under the guns and bayonets of the German soldiers, who were amused with their find. An officer ordered the children to hold their hands higher so he could properly photograph his “prisoners.”

Dogs were moved into the area along with sound detectors.

Freeze or go? Andrei did not like his present position. His only cover was out toward Nalewki Street. The Germans were fanning out and would be behind him. He nudged Chris and pointed to a shell hole a few yards away.

Andrei slid up to it cautiously. It was perfect. The bottom was covered with fallen timber, mud, and muck. He plunged down six feet headfirst and Chris made his move in a leap and dive atop him. They squirmed under the charred timbers to cover their bodies. And they lay.

An hour passed. The sounds of activity overhead never faded.

Grrrrrrr! Grrrrrrrr!

They heard a dog’s claws padding around, sniffing. Andrei opened an eye just a slit.

A dog crouched on the rim of the shell hole. He could see fangs. The animal sniffed and growled.

“What do you see, Schnitzel?” a soldier said.

“Jews down there, Schnitzel boy? I see nothing.”

The animal poked his nose through the boards and sniffed. Chris felt the dog’s wet nose against his face. The animal’s jaws opened and the teeth pressed close to Chris’s throat.

“Schnitzel! Up here, boy!”

“Up here I say!”

The dog backed slowly off the buried bodies. The soldier hooked his leash again and knelt and squinted into the shell hole. He called another soldier.

“Schnitzel smells Jews down there. Do you see anything?”

“No ... Wait. Is that a hand?”

“Where?”

“In the mud there.”

“Ah yes ... I see it now.”

“It looks like they are dead.”

“Well, let’s make certain. Stand back. I throw a grenade.”

... the grenade slowly rolled down the hole.

Andrei lifted his head, snatched the grenade in a lightning motion, and threw it back up.

Blam!

The dog yelped.

“Jews!”

“Move your ass, Chris! Move your ass!”

Chapter Twenty

THE GERMANS WERE IN Mila 18, directly over the bunker, smashing around to find the entrance.

In the dark catacomb the hidden could hear guttural orders being snapped, the clumping of boots, the crashing of axes. Simon Eden slipped from the cot to the floor. The cot creaked too much. It could send up a sound. He propped his back against the dirt wall, and his bleary black-ringed eyes went upward in his head. Alex sat against the wall opposite him, bent double with tension, exhaustion, and grief for his wife. The stunted, lily-pale boy Moses Brandel, who had spent most of his life in silence, was silent again.

For five hours the enemy prowled in Mila 18. In this endless agony the hidden tried to make their breathing soundless and their hearts stop, for surely the detectors would catch a sound of life. Alex raised his head long enough to look at his watch. It was three more hours till darkness.

Oh Lord ... what then? Even when darkness comes they would be locked in this, their tomb, their final coffin. Four hundred lungs gasped for the meager ration of air.

Four hundred of the damned—numbed, sweaty, half naked, half dead.

The sixty Fighters who remained still had enough anger in their hearts to spoil for the making of a gesture of defiance.

Simon tried to rationalize. It was difficult to do that any more. The sewers were deadly and filled with bloated gassed corpses. There was no door open to them beyond the wall. We are finished, anyhow. Why not take my Fighters up and make a final attack? What would happen to the children and the civilians if we went up? What would happen to them?

Either way, doomsday was at hand. Well, Simon, make the choice, he said to himself. Be baked alive in this catacomb or destroy some of the enemy along with us? So hard to think. So hard. I wish Andrei would get back.

The noise above them stopped. For that instant everyone’s heart in the bunker stopped too. They waited ... a moment ... two ... three.

“They’re gone,” Alex whispered ever so softly. “Do you suppose Chris and Andrei got to Wolf?”

Simon didn’t hear Alex. His stomach churned with anger. The instant Andrei returned he would split into two forces. He would take one and Andrei the other, and they would throw every last grenade, fire every last shot in a suicide attack. Goddamn Germans! Dirty bastard animals! Dirty bastard animals!

Deborah Bronski slipped into the cell. They learned to speak and hear the other by barely whispering. “Will I be able to take the children up tonight? They’ve been lying still for two solid days and nights without speaking. They must have some air ... some water ...”

Simon was detached. Alex and Deborah tried to speak to him, but he was in his own fuzzy world of logistics, trying to organize an attack with knives against cannons.

“Simon, don’t do it,” Alex begged. “Don’t do what you’re thinking.”

“At least we’ll die looking at the sky,” Simon said.

Oberführer Alfred Funk’s field headquarters were in the Citadel, a few blocks from the northern gates of the ghetto. His goading obsession for several days had been focused on a blown-up sectional map of the central area filled with markings where sounds had been detected along Mila Street. Trails of underground sounds indicating tunnels, all in the proximity of the middle of the block. He knew it led to the Jews’ main bunker. Two entrances had been located. One in an air-raid shelter on Kupiecka Street, the other in a house on Muranowski Place. But he could not attack yet, for there were certain to be three or four more entrances and the Jews could either escape or hide in the other exits.

A large black grease-pencil mark was drawn around the houses from Mila 16 to Mila 22.

Funk walked to the second-story window and looked at his handiwork. Most of the ghetto had been leveled. Engineers were systematically dynamiting the standing buildings one by one to flush out those Jews who had hidden themselves in sub-floors. It had gone well in the last few days. Since the final action more than twenty thousand Jews had been taken to the Umschlagplatz and another five thousand were known dead. How many were burned or gassed? Impossible to tell, but the total indicated that victory over the invisible army of the Jews was at hand. He could not foolishly declare victory until the Mila Street bunker had been found.

Funk was desperate to find it quickly, for soon the rebellion would be in its second month and that would look very, very bad. Polish Home Army activity had been spurred by the Jewish rebellion, and unrest among the occupied countries could be felt as a direct result. He simply had to finish it off before it went over a month’s duration.

A knock on the door.

“Enter.”

An eager young Waffen SS officer from Trawniki entered, snapped his heels together, unable to contain his joy. “Heil Hitler!” Untersturmführer Manfred Plank crackled.

“Heil Hitler.” Funk grunted.

“Herr Oberführer! We are certain we have located another entrance to the main Jew bunker!”

“Ja?”

“Jawohl!”

Funk showed the man the map. The young officer snapped off his cap and tucked it under his left arm, and his right forefinger shot out and pointed to the location of Nalewki 39. “Here we have discovered a drainage pipe.

It runs in this direction ... so. Along with the tunnel on Muranowski Place and the tunnel on Kupiecka Street, it converges on the same location ... here ...”

“Mila 18.”

“We may also have found the location in Mila 18 itself. A large removable oven on the first floor of the building which still stands is extremely suspicious. We did not wish to take action until we received your personal orders.”

Funk rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Four possible entrances. Good.”

In a few moments Oberführer Alfred Funk emboldened his troops by another of his personal appearances in the ghetto. Surrounded by two squads of sub-machine-gun-bearing Nazi guards, he marched alongside the exuberant Untersturmführer Plank until they came to a place which had once been a building, now a rubble heap. Manfred Plank showed where the drainage pipe had been uncovered.

“We sent a man twenty meters deep into it. It becomes a tunnel at that point and turns sharply toward Mila 18.”

Funk looked at his watch. Two and a half hours of daylight left.

A staff car at the Przebieg Gate whisked him across town to Shucha Street and Gestapo House. Gunther Sauer was in a foul mood. His dog Fritzie had developed a cataract and was going blind. Moreover, his wife wrote complaining letters about the shortages of butter and meat developing at home.

Now Funk. These SS people were impossible. Himmler’s saving grace was his love for animals. Poor Himmler couldn’t bear to see a hurt dog. It was confided to him at one of the gassings at Treblinka that he had attended with Himmler. Himmler despised Goring, who was cruel to animals.

Sauer gave Fritzie an affectionate pat on the head and looked up to Alfred Funk in his grandfatherly way.

“I want to see the three Jews from the bunker. The Moritz Katz man and the others.”

“So?”

“We have located three entrances to their precious bunker. Faced with these facts, perhaps they will talk.”

Sauer reached in the drawer and gave the dog a tidbit. “Can’t see them,” he said.

“And why not?”

“They’re dead. Tried to break them down. Turned them over to the dogs last night. There, Fritzie ... good boy ... good boy.”

“Simon, come quickly.”

He pushed down the dark corridor. Alex opened the curtain to Rabbi Solomon’s cell. The last doctor left in the ghetto knelt over the old man’s prostrate body. The rabbi presented little more than a weightless bag of bones. His eyes were opened like a defiant Elijah doing combat with the wicked priests of Jezebel. His bony fingers clutched Torah scrolls.

Simon lifted his body and placed it on the cot and closed Rabbi Solomon’s eyes, and he looked inquiringly at the doctor.

“Don’t ask me why he died. Old age, lack of air ... grief ... who knows?”

“Last night he told me he would die today,” Alex said.

“And what did he say?” Simon snapped. “To fight tyrants is to honor God?”

“No ... in fact, he said he wished he were like King David with a young wench to warm his bed.”

Simon spun around and into the corridor. “Fighters up!” he called. “We’re moving up for an attack!”

“Fighters up!”

“Fighters up!”

A hideous shriek came from the arsenal in the Chelmno room simultaneously with an explosion of the stored munitions.

Jules Schlosberg’s body was hurled into the corridor.

“Germans!”

Simon plunged over the bodies of confused, frantic civilians into the turn of the corridor. The bunker was in a dark panic. He smashed his way into the Belzec room, where half of the Fighters were housed. A blinding light probed through the secret entrance from the tunnel up to Kupiecka Street.

“Germans!”

“Juden ’raus!” a voice commanded from the other end of the tunnel.

Simon dived over the corridor to the Auschwitz room. Another light penetrated from the tunnel at Muranowski Place.

Mass screaming and wailing and praying and crushing broke loose among the scrambling, aimless ants who battered forth from the tunnels. Simon and the Fighters used pistols and clubs on them to force them back and into silence. He was crushed against a wall. A dozen broke out in the Auschwitz room up the tunnel.

“We surrender,” they cried.

Rat-a-tat! The German machine gun blasted them down.

Simon kicked his way clear and drove into the Majdanek room, where a dozen of his Fighters already blocked the room to keep the children from getting trampled.

Simon handed his flashlight to Deborah and pulled the bricks away which led into the sewer. He poked his head through and flashed the light up and down. There were no Germans, but billows of poison gas floated in from both directions.

With Alex and a dozen Fighters forming a chain across the Kanal to Mila 19, Simon and Deborah passed the children out of the room one by one to the old bunker across the Kanal. Some of them were swept up by the rushing sewer waters. Others doubled over, gagged and blinded, as the cloud of gas enveloped them.

Outside Majdanek, frantic people tried to batter past the bayonets of the Fighters to get to the dubious safety of the death-filled sewers.

“Hold your breath, children. Duck under the water! Keep your eyes closed!”

German machine gunners at the head of the entrances shot down the panicked civilians, and then poison gas and lashes of fire from flame throwers ate up what little oxygen was left in Mila 18 and the bunker became a huge gas chamber filled with a screaming, frantic doomed mass.

Chapter Twenty-one

CHRIS AND ANDREI FROZE for the rest of the day in the second floor of a gutted structure from which they could watch the Germans methodically move over the area inch by inch, dragging the dregs of humanity from beneath the ground. The Germans were finding bunkers quickly now. Thirst-maddened people who had to live in silence for days on end broke.

Often at dusk there was a respite as the Germans pulled their forces off the streets and out of the ghetto to give it a working over with artillery, picking out for target practice the diminishing numbers of skeletons of buildings.

Andrei used this lull to make the final lunge for the Franciskanska bunker. Andrei always looked forward to seeing Wolf, for there was always an air of frivolity, jokes, songs, poems.

Not this night.

When Chris and Andrei arrived, Wolf and Rachael and Ana were sprawled glassy-eyed on the floor of the big room. Andrei looked around. There were only twenty-odd Fighters present. Everyone seemed only half conscious. There was no greeting for them. There had been no guard at the bunker entrance.

Wolf’s head hung between bunched-up knees, and Rachael lay on the floor beside him, her face in his lap. Ana looked up for an instant and half recognized Andrei and sagged again.

“What happened?” Andrei demanded.

No one answered.

Andrei turned to Ana. He didn’t like looking at her these days. All the tall fine hard round woman that had once been Ana was gone. She was wasted.

“Ana! What happened!”

Ana sniffled and mumbled incoherently.

“Momma ... Daddy ... Momma ... Daddy ...” wailed a woman Fighter. “Momma, I’ll be with you soon.”

Andrei turned abruptly in all directions. Living dead.

He reached down and jerked Wolf Brandel to his feet Wolf slumped at the end of Andrei’s arms like a rag doll. Andrei shook him. Wolf blinked his eyes.

“Fool’s gambit,” he mumbled. “Fool’s gambit ... fool’s gambit.”

Andrei’s hands let Wolf go, and Wolf fell to the ground again and he lolled on the floor, smacking his lips for water. Rachael groveled for her canteen, turned it over. It was empty. Wolf pulled Rachael to him and propped his back against the wall and looked up at Andrei.

“What the hell do you want?” Wolf said. “The canteen is empty. We have no ammunition left.” His hand flopped and hit the accordion beside him. “Even this thing won’t work any more.”

“Get on your feet, you son of a bitch,” Andrei bellowed in a tone that shook the bunker. “Get on your feet! You’re a commander of the Jewish Fighters!”

Wolf Brandel was shocked back to life. He dragged himself up and hung laboriously before Andrei Androfski, swaying back and forth ... back and forth.

“Now, what happened?”

Wolf licked his lips. “Germans ... got close to the bunker ... we all came up. We were committed to fire by a fool who opened up on them. In ten minutes we were out of ammunition ... not a thing left ... so we started throwing stones! Know how well stones stop the German army! Know that, Andrei! Stones! Stones!” Wolf caught his breath and puffed to fill his lungs with air. “They hit us with mortars and flame throwers. I watched ... I watched while they turned my soldiers into torches and I threw stones at them ...”

“Leave him alone, for Christ sake,” Christopher de Monti demanded.

Andrei kept at Wolf. “Is this what is left?”

Wolf blinked like a drunkard and looked at his people. Last night seventy-four of them had sat in the bunker and laughed about wanting to take a bath and how the twenty girls could hardly service the men and if only the men had money what fortunes could be made! And they sang about the Galilee until the accordion broke.

Only a few scraggly scarecrows left ...

“Stop it!” Ana screamed. “Stop it, Andrei!”

Andrei lifted her up and slapped her across the face with a sound that struck everyone in the bunker.

“Stand up, damn you all!” he bellowed unrelentingly. “Stand up, you bastards.”

One by one they struggled to their feet.

“Now hear me. So long as your lungs breathe, you fight. We move back to Mila 18 and we find weapons.”

Christopher de Monti was paralyzed by Andrei’s wrath. Yes, Andrei had the mystic power to take this punch-drunk crowd for yet one more attack.

“Ssshhh ... someone is coming!”

Silence.

Tolek staggered into the bunker. His long hair was caked with innumerable, layers of dirt and muck. He looked like a wild hairy ape from another age. His clothing was torn and his head was bloodied from the reopening of an old wound. He wavered to Andrei and jerked his head toward the commander’s cell.

Andrei and Tolek were alone in Wolf’s room.

“They’ve got Mila 18,” Tolek said.

“Are you sure!”

“Yes. I am sure.”

Simon! Deborah! Rabbi Solomon! Alex! Andrei covered his face in his hands and bit his lip so hard that blood poured from it and he shook so hard that Tolek grabbed his hair and wrenched it. “Hold on, Andrei ... hold on ...”

And then things became very, very clear.

“How many Fighters do you have left, Tolek?” he asked softly.

“A hundred thirty-two.”

“There must be twenty or thirty more on the southern boundary,” Andrei said quickly, his mind calculating and making decision upon decision. He fished around the table top for Wolf’s duplicate map of the sewer system. He marked in a routing. ...

“I’m going back to Mila 18,” he said. “You stay here. At four o’clock I will have rounded up your people and any survivors around Mila 18. We are going to make a diversionary attack on the western side of the ghetto to draw the Germans away long enough for you to take to the sewers. There is only one thing important now. Christopher de Monti must be saved.”

“I’ll go with you to Mila 18,” Tolek said. “Wolf will take them through the sewers.”

“We’ve got no time for this nonsense. You’ll take them through the sewers!”

Tolek clenched his teeth and nodded in obedience.

“At four o’clock when we make our attack you will break radio silence and send a message to the Aryan side that you will be coming out at Prosta Street.”

Tolek’s eyes narrowed.

“Prosta Street! But ... through this course it is over five miles through small connecting pipes! It’s impossible. It will take six or seven hours!”

“Every damned fool who tries the sewers obliges the Germans by walking down main lines. These small laterals are your only chance.”

“The Vistula is running high. Well have to go on our hands and knees in the small pipes. We’ll drown.”

Andrei punched Tolek on the shoulder. “You’ll make it, Tolek. Living Zionism, you know.”

Tolek took the map from Andrei. “I’ll try.”

Andrei stepped out to the main room. He collected the half dozen bulletless guns and pistols and strapped them on his back and tucked them into his waist.

“Well,” he said, “you go to the sewers at four o’clock. Tolek and Wolf will take you through a new route. Have a good trip. See you next year in Jerusalem.”

Wolf and Chris and Rachael stood at the ladder leading out of the Franciskanska bunker, blocking Andrei’s way.

“We heard,” Chris said. “Mila 18 has been attacked. We’re going back with you.”

“Uh-uh,” Andrei answered.

“Don’t try to stop us,” Chris threatened.

In a single motion Andrei jerked Chris’s pistol from his belt and knocked Wolf Brandel flat on his back and shoved his niece sprawling.

“Tolek!” he said, flipping the pistol to him. “If either of these two move, use the pistol. You have my orders to put one through Wolf’s brain. As for Chris, just wing him—but not too seriously, or else he will be a horrible burden dragging through the sewers.”

Chris made an angry pass at Andrei, but Tolek was between them and the cocked pistol was leveled on him. There was no doubt in Chris’s mind that Tolek would follow Andrei’s orders. He snarled, then backed off.

“Chris ...” Andrei said softly. “Don’t forget where those journals are buried ... will you?”

“I won’t forget,” Chris answered hoarsely. “I won’t forget.”

Andrei took two steps up the ladder.

“Uncle Andrei!” Rachael cried.

He stepped down for an instant, and she flung her arms around him and wept.

“It is good,” Andrei said, “that even in this place we still have tears left for each other and broken hearts. It is good that we are still human. Rachael ... you will go from this place and become a fine woman.”

“Good-by, Uncle Andrei.”

Outside, Andrei wrapped the rags on his feet tightly and began darting over the rubble, playing cat-and-mouse with the crisscrossing searchlights, flopping flat ahead of the hurling bombs. A few things left that would burn seared and sizzled. A wall tottered behind him and crashed, sending flying debris about his head. He groped and stumbled and fell and ran in the holocaust.

In an hour he reached Mila 18.

The Germans were gone. As always, they left a bunker after they had poured gas and gunfire and bullets into it, returning in two or three days to send in their dogs before they dared enter themselves. Andrei climbed down the main entrance from the demolished Mila 18. The poison gas had spent its fury.

He was in the small corridor lined with tiny cells. He was standing on a mass of entwined corpses. His flashlight played over them. He pushed into the commander’s cell. It was empty. He found Rabbi Solomon in his cell, still stretched on his cot, a Torah in his waxy hands.

Andrei stepped over the bodies into the main corridor. The Chelmno room with its ammunition stores was a sight of devastation. Bodies were charred, unrecognizable from the explosions of the bottle bombs.

Wait!

Coughs!

Weak ... weak coughs!

Sounds of gagging and gasping from the Majdanek room.

Andrei plunged over the bodies.

“Simon! Deborah! Alex!” his lone voice called in the dark.

His light sped frantically over the bodies in Majdanek. Two or three of them were breathing with the desperation of fish out of water.

“Simon!”

Andrei rolled over the body of his commander. Simon Eden was dead. And then the light fell on the lifeless face of Alexander Brandel holding his infant Moses against his chest.

He turned the corpses over one by one. Fighters who had tried to hold back the civilians. Children ... children ... children ... and the light poked at the bricks removed to the sewer.

“Deborah!”

He knelt behind the body of his sister, who hung half in, half out of the room, stricken down while passing a child through the sewer to the safety of Mila 19. As he touched her she gasped. There was yet life!

“Deborah!”

“Don’t ... Don’t ...”

“Deborah ... you’re alive!”

“Don’t ... look at me ... I am blind.”

“Oh God! Deborah ... oh, my sister ... oh, my sister ...” He lifted her in his arms and found a corner and held her and rocked her back and forth and kissed her cheeks.

She coughed and gagged in terrible pain. “Some children are alive in Mila 19,” she rasped.

“Ssshhh ... don’t talk ... don’t talk.”

“Chris ... Rachael ... Wolf ...”

“Yes, darling ... yes. They have escaped. They are safe.”

She made a sound of relief and groaned as the sharpness of the gas jabbed her lungs.

“Andrei ... pain ... children in pain. Kill them ... put them out of their misery ...”

“Deborah! Deborah! Deborah!”

“So good ... you holding ... me ... Andrei ... I lost my pill ... please ... give ... me ... one.”

Andrei reached in his breast pocket and took a small cyanide capsule and put it against his sister’s parched lips.

“So good ... you holding me ... I was afraid I’d be alone. Andrei ... sing Momma’s song ... when we were children ...”

“What is the best Sehora?

My baby ... will ... learn the Torah. ...”

Chapter Twenty-two

GABRIELA BOLTED UPRIGHT IN bed, her heart pounding unmercifully. A dream of a chill wind passing through the room was unfounded. She perspired from the clarity of the nightmare. Andrei was a ghost floating over the smoldering rubble of the ghetto. She rolled to one side and squinted to read the luminous dial of the bedside clock. Three forty-five.

She flicked on the radio automatically, as she always did during the waking hours. Perhaps there would be a radio signal from the ghetto transmitter today. There had been none for twenty-six days, since the last time they fetched four children out of the sewers and took them to Father Kornelli. Twenty-six days of silence.

She slipped into a dressing gown and walked out to the fifth-story balcony. Far from the dream of cold, it was warmish out, fighting its way into late spring. Moonlight threw light on the ghetto. She watched for ever so long, just as she had stood and watched for hour after hour during the day. She had taken the new apartment because of its view of the ghetto.

The artillery fire had stopped. Almost nothing remained standing. The moonbeams played on disorganized heaps of brick.

Beep ... beep ... beep ...

A weak sound came from her radio.

She ran into the room.

Beep ... beep ... The signal faded and became drowned in static and re-emerged. Beep ... beep ... beep.

It stopped.

She sat with bated breath for a repeat. There was no further sound.

Then from the ghetto a sudden crackle of gunfire startled the stillness. She ran once more to the balcony but could see nothing. The gunfire sounds heightened.

Gabriela closed the balcony door, pulled down the blackout curtain, and flicked on the lamp beside the phone stand. She hedged for several moments, hoping that the transmission from the ghetto would be repeated. She lit a cigarette and pulled at it nervously, then with an impulsive spur of decision dialed a number.

A half-sleeping voice answered at the other end of the line.

“Kamek. This is Alena,” Gabriela said.

“Yes?”

“Did you hear it?”

“Yes, but I could not understand it.”

“Neither could I,” Gabriela said. “What should we do?”

“There is nothing we can do until after curfew. Come over to my place as soon as it turns light.”

Oberführer Funk blinked sleepily over the report. It was almost four o’clock in the morning, yet he wanted it for Kroger, Globocnik, and Himmler, finished and en route by dawn. It was precariously close to the one month marking the uprising. He wanted to give assurances that the bulk of action was over. Any further action was merely the formality of a mop-up. Soon, quite soon, victory could be formally declared.

Four o’clock.

Funk untied his silk night robe.

The sound of gunfire! What the devil! It was not possible. He had ordered the artillery to cease fire at two-thirty and for the patrols to resume their fixed positions.

He tied his robe quickly and started to lift the phone, then let his hand drop. A sudden grip of fear encompassed him. Could it be possible that the Jews were attacking? No ... it was ... discovery of another bunker, that was all. Don’t let your imagination run wild. Calm ... calm, now. Another large belt of schnapps and he sat slowly behind his desk again.

The crackling gunfire was sharper now. His hand once more touched the phone, fell from it. He licked his dry lips, sagged in the chair, and waited. The report to Berlin, Lublin, and Krakow lay face up before his eyes.

From: The SS and Police Führer, Warsaw District, Special Actions.

Ref. NO: 1 ab/ST/Gr-1607-Journal No. 663/43 SECRET

Re: Large-scale Ghetto Operation

To: Reichführer Der Schutzstaffel Himmler, Berlin

SS Obergruppenführer, Police General, Krakow

Gruppenführer General Government SS, SD, Lublin

I beg to advise the following information:

1. A total to date of 34,795 Jews and other sub-humans caught for deportation, 7,654 known destroyed in former residential area. Estimate another 11,000 destroyed in bunkers by asphyxiation, flames, etc.

Conclusion:

Except for sporadic resistance from the few remaining Jews and sub-humans, we have succeeded in our mission.

2. Account of reduction of Jewish residential compound,

(a.) 612 bunkers destroyed.

(b.) So-called Jewish residential area is nonexistent. Three buildings remain standing; that is, the Convert’s Church, parts of the Pawiak Prison, the Jewish Civil Authority building (former post office convenient for us to make immediate on-the-site executions of those we do not desire to transport).

3. Booty captured to date:

(a.) 7 Polish rifles, 1 Russian rifle, 7 German rifles.

(b.) 59 pistols of various calibers.

(c.) Several hundred hand grenades, including Polish and home-made.

(d.) Several hundred incendiary bottles.

(e.) Homemade explosives and infernal machines with fuses.

(f.) A variety of explosives, ammunition of all calibers. (In destroyed bunkers we were not able to capture further booty, which was destroyed. The captured hand grenades were used by us against the bandits.)

Furthermore, I beg to report

1. 1200 used German uniforms (tunics) and 600 pair of used trousers. (Some uniforms were equipped with medals.)

2. Several hundred assorted German helmets.

3. Four million zlotys (from deportees). Fourteen thousand dollars, nine thousand dollars in gold; an undetermined value in gold, rings, watches, jewelry.

I beg to report that today the principal Jew-bandit bunker was located at a place known as Mila 18 and it was summarily destroyed by gas, flame throwers, dynamite, and small-arms fire.

The ruins of the Jewish residential reservation will give us vast amounts of scrap material and used brick which can be salvaged for future building projects.

May I make mention of the valiant SS Waffen and Wehrmacht troops attached to this command whose uncommon devotion in the face of the “invisible” enemy has brought about this success. They went into the sewers, crawled into bunkers, and otherwise exposed themselves to the gunfire of the enemy. These comrades will not be forgotten.

Under separate cover I recommend the following decorations:

Iron Cross, Second Class—SS Haupsturmführer Zisenis.

Cross of War Merit, Second Class with Swords—SS Untersturmführer Manfred Plank, SS Rottenführer Joseph Blesche.

IT IS MY FIRM OPINION THAT I WILL BE ABLE TO ADVISE YOU OFFICIALLY OF THE FINAL EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN WARSAW WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.

Heil Hitler!

Signed:

SS Oberführer Alfred Funk

Certified copy:

(Jesuiter)

SS Sturmbannführer

Horst von Epp entered the room but did not speak. The two of them listened and listened and listened for nearly an hour until the gunfire in the ghetto stopped.

Five o’clock.

The moments before dawn of the second month of the uprising came. Neither Alfred Funk nor Horst von Epp dared lift the telephone. A knock.

“Enter!”

Untersturmführer Manfred Plank, showing the effects of battle, stood wild-eyed before his general. “Heil Hitler,” he said with somewhat less than his usual vigor.

“Heil Hitler,” Alfred Funk answered.

“What happened out there?” Horst von Epp asked.

It seemed as though Plank’s fine young Aryan body would collapse.

“Speak!” ordered Funk.

Plank’s lips quivered. “We were moving into our fixed position at the western end of Niska Street ...”

“Speak!”

“Like ... like ghosts, they leaped out of the ruins on us! They did not fight like human beings ...”

“Speak!” Funk screamed again at the faltering man.

“We were compelled to abandon our positions.”

“Swine!”

“Herr Oberführer!” cried Manfred Plank. “I have been decorated twice for valor on the eastern front. As a result of my fearless attitude in combat I was sent to SS Waffen training. I tell you, sir ... I tell you ... there are supernatural forces in there!”

“Get out,” Funk hissed.

He did not hear the Untersturmführer click his heels and make his squarely conceived exit.

Funk’s hands were so slippery with sweat, he could not hold his drink. He took his report promising victory and dropped it in the wastebasket after tearing it to shreds, and he looked up at Horst with dazed puzzlement.

“Even from their graves ...”

Tonight we have really lost this battle.”

On his hands and knees, his shoulders rubbing against the top of the pipe, Wolf Brandel crawled first into the sewer pipe that cut diagonally down the eastern end of the ghetto. Rachael, second in line, grabbed his ankle with one hand and followed. Tolek, next in line, took Rachael’s ankle and Chris took Tolek’s and Ana took Chris’s. The chain spread down for the twenty-three who left the bunker after sending the radio signal to the Aryan side.

Eight beeps, a pause, six more beeps. Repeat the message twice. Decoded, it meant: ‘Twenty coming through the Prosta Street manhole.”

Ten seconds after Andrei started his diversionary attack in the western ghetto, Wolf and Tolek began their perilous journey.

The lateral pipes connecting to the large ones were slightly more than a yard in diameter, and to move in them one had to crawl laboriously on hands and knees.

Silence—absolute, complete, utter silence—was commanded by the leaders.

They inched into the pitch-blackness while overhead Andrei leaped out at Manfred Plank’s SS company and threw the Germans into confusion to draw attention from the evacuees. Andrei had chosen the desperation route carefully. No one was apt to watch the smaller laterals under the ground simply because it was not believed that a human could move for long through them.

They came to Nalewki Street. Their small pipe dumped into the big Kanal. Wolf halted the line and sloshed around in the darkness, feeling the walls to find the continuation of the small pipe on the other side. Corpses floated swiftly down and hit against him and knocked his feet from beneath him and he went under in the sewer water. He got to his feet after being swept ten or twenty yards and again slogged upstream to feel for the lateral. An hour passed before his hands found it.

He recrossed the Kanal and took Rachael’s hand. Hand in hand, the chain crossed the big line and re-entered the lateral on their hands and knees.

For another agonizing hour of step by step, the chain pressed on in measured progress. Their backs were breaking, their knees raw and bloody from the dragging. The stench blinding and numbing.

The pipe ran into the Zamenhof Kanal.

Three tortured hours had passed since the beginning.

Again Wolf had to cross alone and grope around from memory.

Another hour passed.

When he had gotten the chain over the Zamenhof Kanal the lateral pipe was running high and fast. They crawled on hands and knees, ever southward, with the sewage splashing up to their chins, floating into their eyes and noses and ears and hair.

Six hours later they were under the Convert’s Church and the site of the demolished uniform factory ... now under the wall in the “Polish corridor.”

Along the chain one Fighter after the other fainted. They had to stop long enough to slap them into consciousness and drag them further. Silence could not be broken even when someone pitched flat into the sewage and drowned. The line tightened. There were twenty-two left instead of twenty-three.

Another went under and another.

After they crawled eight hours on hands and knees the pipe widened. They were able to stand bent over. The water running in this direction was only a few feet high. Wolf did not give them a chance to glory in the respite. He drove them on while the chance for making progress was good. The strong dragged the weak to their feet. Pain ... nausea ... numbness ... half sanity ... half life ... they trudged on, on, on through the bilge and filth, until in the ninth hour they had passed out of the ghetto and the “Polish corridor,” and now they looked for the main Kanal which would take them down Zelazna Street.

Somehow in the darkness they had taken a wrong turn and veered back north. Then they splashed around in aimless circles. Wolf stopped them, trying to find his bearings and the main Kanal. Without compass, light, conversation, and using only a hazy memory of a few hours’ study, he was utterly and completely lost. There was no use pushing on. Three more had fainted, including Ana. Unless he gave them rest they would all be done in. Wolf crawled back to Tolek and broke the nine-hour silence.

“Rest,” he said.

Rest ... rest ... rest ... the magic word fired back along the line.

They sat in the pipe with the sewage waters swirling around their chests and they gasped and groaned with hunger and thirst and weariness and bloody hands and knees.

Tolek and Chris held the head of Ana, who was unconscious from falling into the water.

Wolf crawled away alone, counting each step carefully until he came to a large Kanal. He was utterly confused, for the Twarda Street line veered into the system at an angle. He could not understand. They were more than a mile away from the designated Prosta Street manhole and completely confused as to direction, but the big Kanal had ledges and would give them a place to recover their strength.

Wolf retraced his steps and led them to the Twarda main, and they crawled on the ledges and collapsed.

Wolf and Tolek and Chris stayed half awake, trying each in his own mind to comprehend the situation, and the same set of questions crossed their minds without conversation. Had their message to the Aryan side been received? Would someone be waiting for them on Prosta Street ... if they reached Prosta Street?

As commander, Wolf Brandel had other decisions to reach. He tried to reason out their proximity. He guessed rightly that they were under the former little ghetto area which was now largely reinhabited by Poles. The area, he knew, was under close watch of the police because of its proximity to the ghetto. Overhead they could hear motor vehicles and the marching of soldiers. Perhaps we are near Grzybow Square, Wolf thought. It was an assembly point for the Germans to enter the southern end of the ghetto.

Daylight showed through manholes on either end of their ledge. Wolf looked his people over. It was a battle of endurance against exhaustion more than anything at this point. One by one his people had passed out into semi-consciousness. If his guess of location was right, they would now be safe from poison gas and out of reach of the prying sound detectors. The tides were going high again. Water splashed over the ledge. Nothing to do but wait until darkness ... nothing to do but wait.

Kamek’s house in Brodno was the first stop in the underground railway to the Machalin and Lublin forests. Gabriela arrived shortly after the morning curfew was lifted.

“They’re down there!” she cried.

Kamek was unexcitable. He put his hands behind his back and deliberately pieced everything together. “Where are they? We do not know. Neither you nor I got the signal clearly. It could be one of fifteen manholes.”

Gabriela pressed her temples and tried to reason.

“Moreover,” Kamek continued, “both of our trucks are gone. The Gestapo raided our headquarters last night; our people are dispersed.”

The Home Army ... Roman ...”

“We cannot depend upon them. Someone may sell out.”

Gabriela knew he was right. She winced. Kamek, once Ignacy Pownicki, had been a journalist and an ardent supporter of both the ruling colonel’s clique and the reactionary pre-war noblemen’s caste. Events during the war changed his thinking. Humanity overpowered nationalism. Kamek was one of the few who were revolted by and ashamed of the behavior of the Polish people toward the things happening in Poland’s ghettos. He did not embrace the leftists’ philosophy personally, but he joined them, for they were the ones who gave the fullest support to those in the ghetto. Kamek lost his identity as Ignacy Pownicki to immerse himself fully in the underground work of the People’s Guard.

He was a cool man, seeming almost lazily detached from the urgency.

“They’re under there somewhere,” Gabriela mumbled again.

“Keep calm, Gabriela. You and I are the only two who are aware of it and who are left in a position to help. The Jewish Fighters’ leaders all know your address. Certainly they will attempt to contact you. The best thing you can do is go home and wait.”

The cuckoo chirped the hour. “Ah, time for the news.”

Kamek flicked on the radio and closed his eyes to concentrate on the true meanings, for the real news was between the lines and filled with cryptic clues. The war since Stalingrad continued to go badly for the Germans, and their double talk could not fully cover it. There was not a single mention of the ghetto action. This also was a good indication, for they were quick to brag of victories. He flicked off the radio.

Gabriela was already on her feet, walking toward the door.

“Keep calm,” he said once more.

The light filtering through the manholes was turning dimmer and dimmer. Wolf watched it fade. Soon it would be night again. He slipped off the ledge and inched along where the nineteen survivors lay entwined like a net full of freshly caught fish. During the day they had passed out and awakened, slept in snatches and gained back an ounce of strength from what they lost during the terrible crawling of the night before.

Wolf satisfied himself that all of them could be marched again. The instant darkness fell he alerted them to stand by. Soon the movement overhead thinned to silence and then, a break. Ack-ack guns in the distance popped at another Russian air raid. This would keep the Germans busy in the streets.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The water ran chest-high. Wolf first, Tolek second, Chris third, they pushed against the current, moving southward in a direction which they knew was leading them away from the ghetto. Some of the shorter girls had to go up on tiptoes to keep the sewage out of their mouths and noses.

Hand in hand, they inched down the Kanal, hoping desperately to find another arterial. Wolf counted steps.

In three hours, he estimated, they had moved two and a half blocks. Someone was always slipping or collapsing or breaking silence.

And then the luxurious sound of loud rushing water farther down the line met his ears. It meant another large Kanal! This sound spurred the half-dead line of marchers to another effort. The two sewer lines merged in swirls and whirlpools battering together.

Wolf halted the line. From his memory of the maps, he tried to remember where two such intersections merged at such an angle. There was no place like it in the ghetto. A Kanal the size of the one before him must be near the Jerusalem Boulevard area. If so, they were entirely beyond both the big and little ghettos. Wolf decided to gamble with his flashlight. It was soaked and unworkable. Chris had dry matches in a pipe pouch.

A single match sent a dullish yellow glow on the moist bricks. It also revealed the shocking condition of his people. Wolf knew the race for life had to be speeded, more gambles taken. He lit a second match and sloshed nearer the intersection. A third match found him what he was looking for, an iron ladder leading to the street.

“Hold the line still,” Wolf told Tolek and Chris. I’m going up to find out where we are.”

“Wolf ... don’t ...” Rachael cried.

“It will be all right. There’s an air raid going on up there.”

He climbed the ladder and shoved hard to wiggle the manhole cover loose. It gave after a fifth renewal of effort. He held it open just enough to look out to the streets. Good luck! Pitch-black in a blackout! Streets deserted!

“Help me lift this manhole cover.”

Chris, Tolek, and Wolf hung on the narrow ladder and grunted together and dislodged it. Wolf darted for the cover of a building, worked toward the corner, and sprinted back, replacing the lid. He huddled with Tolek. Chris was too occupied holding Ana and Rachael erect. Rachael fainted again. Ana had been in a bad way for hours.

“We are directly under the intersection of Twarda and Zelazna.”

“That means we are just two and a half blocks from Prosta Street.” Would someone from the People’s Guard be waiting for them there? Both agreed that it was a small chance. It was twenty-four hours since they had sent the signal and entered the sewer. Moreover, in daylight this present intersection would be too crowded. Wolf decided to try a push for the quieter Prosta Street and at the same time send Tolek to Gabriela’s flat.

“Careful, and bring back water.”

Tolek and Wolf once again dislodged the manhole cover and shoved it back into place.

Wolf lowered himself once more and went back to the other sixteen.

“We are three hours from Prosta Street. We can make it by daylight if everyone tries with all they have. Tolek has gone out for water. He will be waiting for us.”

“No! No!” a girl shrieked. “We’ll never make it! No!”

“Keep her quiet,” Wolf barked.

“No!” the girl screamed again. She began drinking the sewage in her thirst madness.

Wolf went back and lit a match and fished for her head and jerked it out of the contaminated bilge. The girl was insane. In a moment the poison hit her stomach and she gave a last two or three writhes of agony and was dead.

Wolf let her loose, and she was washed into the merging waters, spun in a whirlpool, and swept into the larger Kanal.

“Listen, all of you! We’re going to live! I promise you we’ll live! Two more hours and there will be water to drink! Fight! Live!” he pleaded.

They took hands and pressed north into the whirlpools. The rushing water broke their line, and before they could pull it together another Fighter who was moving in a coma was swept under and drowned.

“Together!” rasped Wolf. “Hands together ... push ... push ... we’ll be through this intersection in a minute.”

They pressed north again in foggy oblivion. Each agony-filled step, each one called upon God unknown.

“I’ll live ... I’ll live ... I’ll live ...”

“Survive ... survive ... survive ...”

“God help me live ... live ... live ... live ...”

Chapter Twenty-three

TOLEK ALTERMAN WOVE HIS way through the streets of Warsaw with the skill of an alley cat. Years of moving around in the ghetto, later in rubble and flame and falling walls, made this trek seem like child’s play by comparison.

It was four-thirty in the morning when he stopped before an apartment door on the top floor of Dluga 4. The name read “Alena Borinski.” He knocked sharply. The door opened a crack, stopped by the night latch.

“Who is it?” Gabriela asked cautiously from the other side.

“Don’t scream when you see me. I've been in the sewers.”

Gabriela flung the door open. Tolek tumbled in and looked around desperately for the kitchen. He stumbled to it and turned on the water faucet and let the water spill into his throat and guzzled it like a lunatic. She locked the door behind her and looked at the scene of madness. He emitted animal-like grunts as the water found its way to his caked innards.

A gray stinking creature from another planet, unrecognizable as human, sucking at the faucet. He drank too fast and began vomiting in the sink and drank again, and sharp pains hit his belly. At last he was appeased and he slipped to the floor, weeping hysterically.

Gabriela ran to the phone. “Kamek! Come to my flat as soon as the curfew is over. Bring clothing and any food you have.”

“Have they arrived?”

“Yes.”

Gaby dipped a rag in alcohol and wiped Tolek’s forehead and comforted him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry ...”