40
The five of us went out into the cold. Each of us was hiding a pistol in their coat or sweater, and Amos had insisted that he be given the one functioning hand grenade.
I carried my gun in the inside pocket of my heavy coat. The cold metal pressed against my left breast through my sweater and blouse. I would pull it out with my right hand and then start shooting.
We walked down a couple of streets and met a group of about a hundred Jews being led to the Umschlagplatz by SS soldiers. The faces of the sentenced people were blank; any hope they may have had of survival had gone ages ago. They bowed to the fate the Germans had in store for them.
We joined the crowd with our hands up so that the SS would think we were just more Jews surrendering. The soldiers signaled to us to get in line and join the march to death. I stared at the ground. I didn’t want to see the faces of the men who I would shoot at in just a few minutes’ time, and I didn’t want to look at the men who were going to kill me.
As planned, we split up in the crowd. Mordechai was at the front, Amos more in the middle of the procession, with me a few meters away from him. Michal and Miriam were farther back.
We walked through the cold together, all doomed to die. I didn’t feel weighed down, as I had that other time when I had marched toward the Umschlagplatz in the cauldron; I felt all keyed up. I was going to kill someone in a moment. And I was going to die. The blood in my temples was throbbing so hard that I feared a vessel would burst.
We walked and I watched Mordechai, waiting for his signal to attack. I tried to do this without attracting attention, but it didn’t really matter. The SS men took no notice of us. They could not imagine that there could be any threat of danger from the people they were leading to slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Jews had been hounded to the gas chambers without defending themselves already, so why should anything be different for the last few thousand inhabitants of the ghetto?
When we reached the corner of Ziska Street and Zamenhof Street, Mordechai turned round and nodded at Amos. I held my breath. Amos dug into his coat pocket, pulled out his hand grenade in an instant, pulled the ring, and threw it at two German soldiers. Before anyone could react, before anyone even understood what was happening, the grenade exploded and tore the SS men to bits.
The blast frightened the life out of me, although I had been prepared for it, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut. When I opened them again, I saw Amos staring at the dead soldiers. He, too, needed a second to realize what he had just done. He had killed SS men!
I heard shots from Mordechai’s direction. I turned round. He was holding his gun and shooting soldiers. Two of them fell down in the snow.
The crowd dispersed. Panic-stricken people were running in every direction. I could hear shots coming from Amos’s direction now, too. The soldiers were shouting, “They’ve got guns! The fucking Jews have got guns!”
Behind me, Michal and Miriam were shooting at the SS.
And the Germans were shooting back!
“Miriam!” Michal screamed.
She didn’t answer.
I looked back. But in the crush of fleeing people, I couldn’t see Michal or Miriam. I heard more shots. And Michal screaming. The Germans had got him, too.
Both dead. Both dead. Both dead. That was all I could think. Both dead.
I looked at Mordechai again. He was walking toward three soldiers, pointing the gun at them, shooting and shooting and shooting. When his magazine was empty he threw the weapon away, bent down to a dead SS man, grabbed his pistol, and kept on shooting.
I still hadn’t taken a single shot or even pulled out my weapon. As soon as I did, I would be a target for the Germans who were desperately trying to pinpoint the attackers in the crowd.
Amos yelled.
I looked at him, panicked. He was wounded in the arm. Not dead yet! Not dead!
Now I pulled my gun. I didn’t know where to start shooting. There were desperate Jews fleeing between all the soldiers. I didn’t want to hit any of them.
I ran to the curb where the soldiers Mordechai had mowed down were lying. Their blood mixed with the snow, turning it into red and white slush. A young wounded soldier was crawling away from me. No idea if he was Latvian, German, or Ukrainian, but he had a beautiful face, like an angel, and he said something I couldn’t understand. Was he asking for help? Was it a prayer?
I pointed my gun at him. He looked up at me. Pleading. He didn’t want to die.
Why did he hope for mercy? He wouldn’t have shown me any. The swine. With his angelic face. My hand shook. I wanted to pull the trigger. I had to.
The soldier started to cry, said something in German, and then, “Marlene…”
Like Marlene Dietrich in the American films. Was that the name of his wife or girlfriend? Or of his daughter? Or was he too young to be a father? My hand shook even more. The soldier cried. I bent my finger to squeeze the trigger. Then I heard Mordechai shout, “Mira, behind you!”
I turned round. An SS man the size of a bull was aiming his gun at me, less than three meters away.
I shot at once.
The man slumped down. Lifeless in the snow.
I felt sick.
Mordechai grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled in my ear, “Run!”
We both started running. So did Amos. The two of them shot at the SS who backed off, scared. We ran down two streets, and then Mordechai shouted, “In here!”
We dashed inside and up the stairs. I couldn’t breathe, and Amos was bleeding badly. His coat sleeve was soaked in blood, but Mordechai wouldn’t let us stop. We scaled up a ladder into the attic, and from there we went through a hole into the next house. The resistance had started building escape routes between buildings. A sort of street system above the actual streets. But the attics weren’t safe to hide in. We ran back down the stairs in one of the houses, and into a secret bunker where we fell to the ground, exhausted. I threw up. Mordechai applied a tourniquet above Amos’s bleeding wound. No one said a word. We were exhausted and wound up at the same time. Then Amos started to laugh. Hysterically. Mordecai joined in. Hysterical, too. And I laughed with them, and then I cried. For Miriam and Michal.
We hugged one another, feeling happy and sad. Sad because we had lost comrades—friends—and happy to be alive. We had killed SS soldiers. Jews had killed Germans. Nothing would ever be the same again.
41
Esther said a few words in memory of those who had died. She did it in Mordechai’s stead. He was meeting the heads of the ŻOB in another part of the ghetto, to discuss the new developments. Today, the Germans had retreated out of the ghetto because of us! It was unbelievable.
In her address, Esther reminded us that Miriam and Michal had died for a good cause. Their deaths would be an inspiration to others, she said, and we could all be very proud of them. She really was a great speaker, saying the right things in a quiet, firm voice without a hint of pathos. She insisted that they hadn’t just died—they were fallen heroes. Although Esther didn’t say so, it meant that the rest of us who had shot at the Germans were heroes now, too.
At the end of her speech, Esther surprised us by sharing a personal memory. Once, at a summer camp, Miriam had sat beside the fire and sung a song that was so beautiful and sad all the children cried. Even the older girls like Esther who would normally have been too aloof.
I had no idea that Miriam and Esther had known each other that long. And I couldn’t imagine Esther being moved by anything. And I had never known that Miriam could sing so well. I’d never heard her sing. Not once. Here in the bunker we knew practically nothing about anyone’s previous life.
Once Esther had finished speaking, we ate supper. At least, the others did. I couldn’t eat a thing. I still felt ill. I had killed someone. It had all happened so fast that I hadn’t seen his face. In my memory, my victim—was that even the right word for someone who was trying to kill me?—was a shadowy figure. Instead, I could still see the young soldier with the angelic face clearly, begging for mercy and talking about his Marlene. The soldier’s angel face joined the shadow of the man I had actually shot, making a strange mixture of a person. The more this picture filled my mind, the worse I felt. He too kept calling, “Marlene!”
Although I didn’t want to think about it, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if the man I had killed had had a girlfriend or wife who would grieve for him, or a child who would have to grow up without a father.
I felt like being sick again.
But then I reminded myself that he didn’t give a damn about the people he was marching to the Umschlagplatz. What did he care if they’d loved anyone or not. That was the whole point: The Germans didn’t think of us as human beings. If they saw us as people, they wouldn’t be able to kill us so easily. If I was going to fight against them, I would have to stop thinking of them as people, too. Not the victims of my actions. Just beasts straight from hell. Beasts who could look like angels at times.
I went to bed earlier than usual. Today, everyone could understand that I was feeling tired. The rest of the time, it was frowned upon for a fighter to show any form of weakness. No fear or—even worse—doubt about whether what we were doing made any sense was tolerated.
Before I closed my eyes, I looked over to the corner where Michal and Miriam had slept. With Michal gone there was one person less in the world who was capable of love. And Miriam would never become a professor. How many people would she have been able to teach? How many people would she have touched with her voice? All the songs that would never be sung. All the stories Hannah would never tell. All those dreams. All that love. Gone forever.
I closed my eyes, but the tears welled up. Somehow, I managed not to start sobbing. I didn’t want the others to witness my grief and despair on this day of triumph. But I couldn’t stop the tears. I let the tears run silently down my cheeks.
Normally, I would have traveled back to the world of the 777 islands, like I did every night for comfort’s sake. But I hesitated. How would I be able to tell my sister that I had killed someone? A real person, not some fantasy creature like the ice dragon, Fafnir, who had buried Mongoose Island under a sheet of everlasting snow. We had only managed to get rid of him with the help of the fire elves.
The tubby mongooses organized a great celebration in our honor, and we danced the night away until our feet ached or, in Captain Carrot’s case, his paws.
While Hannah danced “the Mongoose” with the tubby mongoose king, she smiled and said, “We are heroes here, and yet they can’t stand us on Questionmark Island.”
“Questionmark Island?”
“Everybody there looks like one.”
“And they really hate the people on Exclamationmark Island.”
Captain Carrot, who was gallantly twirling a lady mongoose round, laughed. “Hannah did kick the tyrannical Eminent Questionare way off his mark!”
So a hero wasn’t always a hero. It depended on where you were. Mongoose Island or Questionmark Island. Hannah was a happy one here. I was a hero in the eyes of my fellow fighters, but I felt awful.
Hannah would be appalled that I had shot someone.
Or would she understand if I told her that she was dead and I was avenging her? That I was doing all this to give her life and her death some sort of meaning?
But if she found out that she was no longer alive in the real world, wouldn’t she want to stop living in my head, too? What purpose would she see in being a figment of my imagination?
No! She mustn’t find out that she was dead. Or else I’d lose her forever.
But I would never be able to lie to her. So, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t go to the world of the 777 islands. Instead, I cried myself to sleep and was haunted by nightmares. I dreamed about the moment when the young German had begged for mercy. But in my dream it wasn’t the German crawling on the ground in front of me in his SS uniform. It was my brother, Simon.
My hands shook again. I didn’t know if I should pull the trigger or not.
All at once, Simon stopped begging, pulled out a gun, and pointed it at me. If I didn’t shoot him, he would kill me. That was clear. So I pulled the trigger, and Simon slumped to the ground. Just like the SS man I had killed.
I bent down to my dead brother, and right in front of my eyes, he turned into the baby I had abandoned at the Umschlagplatz.
I screamed and screamed and screamed, and woke up with a racing heart.
I looked round the bunker in the dark—everyone was asleep. So I must only have cried out in my dream. I stared at the black earthen wall in front of me. It was an endless dark void. I had no one in all the world. Just Hannah. And she only existed in a make-believe world where I didn’t dare go. Instead, I’d just killed my brother in my dreams after not thinking about him for weeks. And a baby. And the soldier in real life. I felt like I was losing my mind.
42
It was my seventeenth birthday, but it meant nothing to me and I didn’t mention it to anyone. Four days after the shooting, the SS stopped the deportations. The fact that Jews had killed soldiers had shaken them to the core. Esther hadn’t actually called me and the other survivors heroes, but the underground newspapers did. “In the darkest hour of the Jewish people, our heroes showed immense bravery and hit back.”
Our triumph was celebrated in glowing terms. Of course no one wrote about how ill I had felt afterward, or that Michal and Miriam would never love or sing again. There wasn’t any room for things like that in a hero’s story.
During the next weeks, I began to feel more and more proud of what I had done. Not because I was proclaimed a hero, but because our resistance had started to change the ghetto somehow. If all the Jews had felt hopelessly abandoned to fate up till now, suddenly a real jolt went through the ghetto. Everyone knew that the Germans would return, but we had proved that it was possible to fight back. Many young Jews joined the ŻOB. Even those who couldn’t fight were no longer prepared to be rounded up like animals and sent to their deaths. Everywhere, people were building secret bunkers in the cellars to hide from the Germans. Anyone with the remotest understanding of architecture was highly sought after. Some bunkers even had running water, electricity, and a telephone. A city arose beneath the city.
The German “supermen” no longer came into the ghetto, certainly not after dark. As soon as there was any kind of resistance they got scared. Cowards!
The ŻOB or “the Party” as the union of fighters was being called everywhere now—the differences between the various groups had whittled down to nothing—was controlling the ghetto. The members of the Jewish council could only report to their German masters that no matter what strings they tried to pull or how they tried to make everyone do as they said, they could no longer influence the people.
Collaborators were executed on a daily basis. The Jewish policemen and the SS were powerless to prevent this from happening. I never took part in any of those killings. I was glad about that. I was a reluctant hero who had had enough for the moment just killing one soldier. I knew that I would have to kill again when the Germans came back to clear out the ghetto for good. And I hoped I would have learned to see them solely as beasts by then, instead of people. Why couldn’t I do that yet?
Our group, like all the others, was preparing for the final battle. We practiced shooting in the cellar of our house. Or aiming rather, because we couldn’t afford to waste any of the valuable ammunition. We also learned close-combat fighting and how to fill explosives into light bulbs and bottles. It wasn’t quite the studies our parents had planned.
Our group also took in new members. And I knew one of them from before. It was Ben Redhead. All of a sudden, he was standing in our cellar beside me while I awaited my turn to practice shooting. He looked totally different from the way I had imagined him on my journeys to the 777 islands. I had only ever seen the boy once in my life, that time when he was kissing Hannah. So my memory of how he looked hadn’t been all that accurate. By now he was almost the size of a man—although he had only just turned sixteen. He had seemed uncoordinated and lanky then, but now he stood straight and tall.
“Ben Redhead,” I said, and smiled.
It was good that he was still alive. That would be sure to please Hannah if I ever went back to visit her in the island world. From day to day, I was more convinced that she really did live there, even when I wasn’t with her. I was probably out of my mind.
“R … R … Redhead?” Ben asked, and stuttered as usual. There are some things that don’t change, no matter how much you grow.
Of course, Ben didn’t know that he was called Ben Redhead in the island world. But if I told him about my fantasy, then he’d realize that I was going mad. So I ignored his question and instead asked him how he had managed to survive. Ben told me that his father worked for the Jewish council and he had started to despise him more and more until he couldn’t stand it any longer and ran away to join the ŻOB. He would rather die honorably than live tolerated by the Germans, even if that meant breaking with his family.
I presumed that it had been his father who had stopped Ben from visiting Hannah again after the start of the Aktion in the summer, but didn’t inquire any further. With his heart in his mouth, Ben asked the question he was so dreading to know. “D … did … Ha … Hannah…?”
“No…” was all I could say.
Ben broke down in tears. Uncontrollably. He was still able to do something the rest of us fighters could no longer do. He could let his grief run free.
The others looked annoyed. His tears reminded them of their own pain. And they didn’t need that. Certainly not in preparation for the final battle.
I was totally unsure how I should react. His tears annoyed me, too. On the other hand, Ben was the closest thing I had to family. We were bound together by our love of Hannah. So I put my arms round him. He drooped over my shoulder, and I gently stroked his red hair.
“As long as we still remember her,” I said to him quietly, “she isn’t dead.”
It wasn’t much, but it worked. Ben stopped crying. He let go of me and wiped away his tears with his sleeve.
“I … th … think about Ha … Ha … Hannah every d … day,” he said. “And I … I … always w … will.”
“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”
But I had a terrible thought. When the two of us were dead, and that would be very soon now—hopefully killed in action and not in the gas chambers—then the memory of Hannah would be completely gone and she would be dead for good.
43
“When you have finished comforting each other,” Esther said to me, “I need to talk to you for a moment”—she emphasized the word comforting in a disparaging way. Grief was a useless waste of time as far as Esther was concerned. A distraction from what was important. At least she treated me with a little bit of respect, now that I was a hero. And perhaps, or so I thought, she was just a tiny bit jealous because I had been allowed to fight in her place and she still hadn’t killed any Germans yet. Though I would have happily swapped places with her if I could. If I’d had a time machine like the hero in the book by H. G. Wells, then I’d have gone back in time with Esther and left it to her to kill the German. She could have had my hero status, and four weeks later, I wouldn’t still be haunted by nightmares. Actually—much better—I’d have traveled back in time to save Hannah, my mama, and my papa, and would have stopped Simon from ever joining the Jewish police. Of course the best thing would be to go even further back in time and kill Hitler while he was still a child. That was someone I could imagine killing.
I looked at Ben Redhead—he would always be Ben Redhead to me—and said, “We’ll talk later.”
Although I had no idea what we would talk about next time. About how Hannah died? Should I tell him how she had lain in her own blood? Then he would cry again and I would, too. Although … perhaps it would be nice to be able to share my pain with someone. Maybe I could find some comfort in that. Of sorts.
Together with Esther, I walked up the stairs from the cellar to the flat, and she said, “I don’t think boys like him will be any use.”
“You thought the same about me,” I answered.
Esther didn’t deny this.
“And I cost one hundred thousand zlotys,” I added without thinking.
“Which were meant for Zacharia,” she replied, and her eyes shone with contempt for a moment.
I should have kept my mouth shut. She still hadn’t forgiven me for the fact that Amos had got me out of the Umschlagplatz instead of her comrade. What could I say? That I thought it would be better if I had landed in the ovens?
Of course I said nothing of the sort. Instead I continued to defend my Ben Redhead. “Ben could simply have stayed with his Jewish council father. That just goes to show how strong his will really is.”
Esther didn’t reply. It was as if she thought it was useless talking about the boy any longer. Although she had started this. I was beginning to realize that she had seen that something connected Ben and me and she had wanted to hurt me by questioning his abilities.
She pushed open the door of the flat. I wondered if I should ask what she actually wanted me for, but I didn’t. I would find out soon enough. If we didn’t speak to each other, then at least we couldn’t argue.
We went into the kitchen where Mordechai and Amos were sitting at a table beside the printing press. Amos’s wounded arm was healing by now. Mordechai jumped up and hugged me like an old comrade. I was one, as far as he was concerned.
Just a few weeks ago, I hadn’t even dared look at Mordechai let alone speak to him; now I managed to hug him back so that I wouldn’t seem impolite. Once he’d let go of me, he said, “We need more weapons.”
“We couldn’t own fewer, could we?” Amos joked.
Mordechai smiled, Esther didn’t react, and I hopped nervously from one foot to the other. What was our leader planning now?
“We need people to organize weapons on the Polish side. People who live there permanently to liaise with the Polish resistance.”
So this was why I was here. I was going to leave the ghetto, to live on the other side of the wall.
“I need really good people,” Mordechai said. He looked at Amos and then at me and smiled again, “But all I’ve got is you.”
Jewish humor. Oh, great!
“You two,” he was serious again, “are both experienced on the other side, and you could both pass as Poles,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure myself. It was almost a year since I had been in the Polish part of the city. Okay, so I didn’t look as Jewish as Esther did, for example. But I didn’t have Amos’s blond hair. Just green eyes.
I also had no real wish to go to the other side of Warsaw. Home was home. Even if it was the ghetto. Since the Aktion I hadn’t once dreamed of going to see New York’s city lights. Those dreams belonged to a different life. The life with Daniel.
Daniel. If Ben Redhead was still alive, couldn’t Daniel…?
“Mira and I could be a Polish couple,” Amos said, interrupting my thoughts. “We’ve done it before, haven’t we?” He was laughing at me.
What was he playing at? The thought flashed through my mind. Going by Esther’s expression, she was wondering the same thing.
“Then,” Mordechai said, “tell us what kind of couple you’d be.”
“A fantastic one, more gentile than any other.” Amos just couldn’t stop talking nonsense.
“We wouldn’t be anything,” I mumbled. All this silly talk annoyed me more than I could say.
Mordechai laughed at our different reactions. Esther did what she always did when emotions were involved. She returned to business and said matter-of-factly, “I’ll make sure that the two of them get over to the other side.”
“Good!” Mordechai looked pleased and said goodbye to each of us with another hug. Once he was gone, the three of us stood in the kitchen. We didn’t speak until Esther said quietly, “He should have sent me.”
She’d said it! This strong woman felt degraded by the likes of a young girl like me.
“Mira has green eyes; you don’t,” Amos said gently, trying to put his arms around her. But she pushed him away and said, “I’m surprised you even know what color my eyes are.”
She regretted her outburst immediately and left the kitchen.
Now there were just the two of us. Amos and me. All alone.
“It’s just ’cause she loves me,” he said. But what he meant was: (1) he thought I was too stupid to see what was obvious, and (2) he didn’t love her; otherwise he would have said, “We love each other.”
So he was just like Miriam. She’d been together with someone she didn’t actually love, she’d even got married, because it seemed better than being alone until she died.
I could just about understand Miriam at the time, but I was disgusted with Amos. Miriam had had no hope of falling in love, but Amos was incapable of loving anyone. He was using Esther, and I stopped feeling inferior to her. All of a sudden, I felt sorry for her.
I left the kitchen, but then just as I was going out, I turned round and said, “If Esther really loves you, I pity her.”
As I left, I heard him say, “Ouch!”