58
We reached the junction where Gęsia, Franciszkańska, and Nalewki Streets met up, and heard music coming from 33 Nalewki. A fighter was playing the accordion, and the beautiful sounds filled the ghetto. A home with music. Could there be anything more wonderful?
“Schubert,” Esther said.
“The Germans can compose almost as well as they can kill,” Amos said, and opened the door of the house on Nalewki Street. We climbed the stairs, past shot-up windows, and reported to Rachel Belka in the top flat. She was a woman so determined, strong, and harsh, even Esther looked like a little girl next to her. Rachel was one of the oldest fighters. At twenty-nine, she was actually five years older than Mordechai.
We gave her the latest news, and she told us where our posts were. Amos and I were on one of the top balconies. From there we could see the Germans gathering at the ghetto gates. Jewish policemen were with them again, acting as human shields this time. Each bullet that struck a collaborator couldn’t reach a German. Two tanks took up position in front of the gate.
“They’re going to fire at us,” I said, stating the obvious.
“They’re going to try,” Amos replied. “They are too far away, and they won’t dare come any closer.”
That must have been the worst thing for the SS: Jews had destroyed one of their tanks, the Germans’ favorite weapon.
“Are you sure they can’t get us?” I asked.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Amos smiled.
I took a pair of binoculars, looked through, and realized that in the Polish part of the city, life was going on as normal: Just a few hundred meters away, people were on their way to work, traders had opened their shops, and cars were driving through the streets.
There was a war going on right under their noses, and the Poles were behaving as if it were happening on a different planet. Mars. Jupiter. Uranus.
If anyone had still been suffering the illusion that our actions would inspire the Poles to join us and resist the occupiers, he or she would have been disappointed now at the very least.
A black limousine stopped outside the ghetto gates. The driver got out and opened the car door for a stiff-looking German wearing an SS uniform. The huge man put on a pair of leather gloves once he had got out of the car, as if he didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
Amos turned to me. “Give me the binoculars,” he said.
I did so.
“SS Major General Jürgen Stroop.”
So the head of the SS in Warsaw had arrived to supervise the mission personally. His first name was Jürgen now, but we had heard that his real name had been Joseph and he had changed it several years ago because he hated the Jews so much.
Stroop was the closest thing to Hitler, Himmler, or Goebbels that I’d ever seen face-to-face. Himmler had visited the ghetto a couple of months ago, but none of us had actually met that monster—apart from a few Jews working in the acquisition department, and none of them had had the guts to attack the beast.
Amos got up to leave the balcony.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “We’re supposed to stay here!”
“Not anymore,” Amos said, and grinned before he disappeared.
I didn’t understand. I had thought the two of us were going to fight side by side on this balcony and maybe die together. But Amos had been so energized, he hadn’t even said goodbye.
I debated whether I should follow him or not, but only for a second.
Just as I was heading out of the flat, Esther tried to stop me. “Why are you two abandoning your post?”
“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” I said, and pushed her out of the way.
As soon as we reached the roof, Stroop commanded his soldiers to invade the ghetto.
This time they used mattresses that had once belonged to Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to make a barricade and opened fire from there. We fighters on the roof shot back. I still didn’t know why Amos wanted to be up here, but didn’t bother asking. I’d stopped asking myself or anyone else questions. Shooting and being shot at wasn’t something I had to think about anymore. I was just full of adrenaline.
Some of us lit gasoline bombs and threw them at the soldiers. The mattresses caught fire and the men lost their cover. We shot at them.
Then the tanks started firing at our positions from the Polish side, but they missed. As Amos had predicted—they weren’t close enough. And I found myself thinking: The “master race” can’t hit us because they are so scared of us.
Amos jumped up and ran over to the comrades throwing the bombs. Below us the soldiers were hiding in doorways and shooting and shooting and shooting, just like yesterday. Unlike us, they didn’t have to save on ammunition.
Amos didn’t care if he was an easy target. He pointed his gun and fired. Not at the soldiers or the tanks, but precisely in the direction of SS Commander Stroop, who was sitting behind a command table. So that was why Amos had run up to the roof. He wanted to kill the leader of our enemies all by himself.
The bullet struck less than two meters away from Major General Stroop. The giant SS man jumped up from his chair and hurried away from the table as fast as he could. It was almost funny.
Amos cheered loudly and so did I. Although he hadn’t actually got Stroop, seeing this man flee was more humiliating for the Germans than the burning tank had been.
Then I heard Ben Redhead calling from the balcony below, “The house is burning!”
59
Down on the street, soldiers had thrown incendiary grenades into the entrance of our house, and the first flames were already shooting out of the burst windows on the ground floor.
“We can’t stay here,” Amos said, and everyone agreed. There was no point in dying in the flames. We would have to flee and look for a new position to continue fighting.
We hurried down from the roof and ran out onto the stairs. Of course there was no way we could just run out the front door. Even if we managed to get through the flames unharmed, the Germans would be waiting to mow us down outside. Rachel’s fighters had prepared a retreat, though. We would escape into the house at 6 Gęsia Street through the holes in the attics and continue the battle from there. Rachel had sent someone to see if the coast was clear.
It wasn’t.
The scout was a man called Avi, who used to be a Jewish policeman. He had joined the resistance when the first trains started out for Treblinka—why, oh why had my brother not had the decency to do the same? Avi was standing in front of us sweating and stroking his red beard nervously. “The Germans have occupied 6 Gęsia.”
We all stared at one another in desperation. The flames were creeping up the stairs step by step, and there was no way out.
Rachel was the only one who stayed calm. “You…,” she pointed at Avi, “and you,” she pointed at Ben Redhead, “try to find an escape route that’s safe.”
She probably didn’t realize that she had picked the only two redheads among us to get us away from the fire. The two of them ran off, and the rest of us gathered in a dark attic room. The heat of the fire made us all sweat; the smoke made breathing difficult. We smashed the little attic window but that didn’t help at all. In fact it only made matters worse. The smoke from outside poured into the room. We coughed, and I was so scared that I blurted out, “Now we are going to be gassed and burned after all.”
Amos grabbed me. Instead of trying to calm me, he shook me hard and said sharply, “Shut up!”
He was right. I needed to pull myself together and not infect the others with my panic. At that moment, Avi returned.
“Well?” Rachel asked.
“Nothing,” he said, defeated. “There’s no way out.”
The smoke got thicker and thicker every second. Our eyes were streaming. But Ben Redhead wasn’t back yet, so there was still a chance.
Like everyone else, I couldn’t stop coughing. Even Amos, who was trying not to show any kind of weakness, was gasping for air.
The soldiers had thrown firebombs onto the roof, too. Burning timbers rained down on us. But no one screamed, although everyone wanted to. Not even when the floorboards started to twist.
“Over there!” Esther cried.
Through the little window we could see SS men in the house opposite. Without hesitating, Esther, Rachel, and Avi, who were close to the window, started to shoot at the soldiers. They fired back without hitting anyone and then retreated. The exchange of fire diverted us from the fact that we were surrounded by the flames.
Ben Redhead stormed in. “I think I’ve found an escape route into 37 Nalewki,” he said.
“You think?” Rachel asked coughing.
“I couldn’t go all the way. It would have taken too long. There’s not enough time.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Rachel decided.
We all left the attic slowly. Then went onto the stairs where you couldn’t see anything because of all the smoke and where breathing was virtually impossible. From there we went to another attic room where there was a little hole in the wall leading to the next house. This wasn’t one of the prepared escape routes. It was just a chance hole in the wall of a damaged building. The hole was so narrow that I thought at first we’d never fit. But, one by one, the fighters squeezed through. When it was my turn, I got stuck. I’d caught my shoulder and started to panic. I screamed, “I can’t … I can’t…!”
“You can!” Amos shouted, and shoved me through the hole. I thought my shoulder would break, but then I stumbled into the house next door. Only, there was smoke there, too. The SS had set the building on fire as well.
We moved forward, feeling our way rather than actually seeing anything, and held our breath so as not to burn our lungs. We managed to find another gap into the attic of the next house, but even here we still weren’t safe. The fire would jump to this house next.
We climbed through a skylight onto the roof, and we stayed low and crawled to the next house—we didn’t want to be moving targets for the soldiers—then from there, we jumped onto the roof of yet another house.
“There must be a bunker here somewhere,” Avi said.
The members of the ŻOB hadn’t built extra hideouts. When the civilians had started digging out bunkers everywhere in the ghetto, we had concentrated on preparing for the uprising: getting hold of weapons, killing collaborators, training to fight … We hadn’t even thought seriously about additional hiding places. Why should we have? We had not expected to last more than a single day. No matter how much some of us had gone on about Masada, not even the most daring dreamers had any kind of pretense that we were in the same league as our ancestors in the fortress against the Romans.
How I wished we were fighting the Romans. Their persecution of Christians seemed almost civilized in comparison to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Was Avi sure there was a bunker here somewhere, or did he just have an inkling? We didn’t really want to know. We swarmed out of the house into the yard to hunt for a concealed entrance. And it was Esther who found the hidden door to the cellar. Without knocking or asking permission, we tore the door open and entered a stuffy bunker where about twenty civilians including a number of children were hiding. We all flung ourselves onto the ground, exhausted. Until now, I’d fought back the smoke in my lungs, but now I coughed and choked until I threw up. I couldn’t care less. We were safe for a moment. I hadn’t burned to death.
“Get out!” a woman screamed at us. She was holding a starving child in her arms and was little more than a ragged skeleton herself.
“Go away! You are putting us all in danger!” shouted a haggard old woman. Another one of the living dead.
Before we could say anything, people started shouting at us from all sides. “We don’t want you here!” “You’ll be the death of us all!” “If the Germans catch you here, they’ll kill us, too!”
It was unbelievable. We were fighting for the whole of the ghetto, and these people were so scared of dying that they hated us.
From a corner where a number of children were gathered, a young man came forward and declared, “The fighters stay!”
It was Daniel.
60
Even in the dim candlelight I recognized him at once, although his head was close-shaven and he was thinner than he used to be.
“Were you in Treblinka?” I asked. I was shocked and couldn’t help coughing again. Partly because of the smoke still burning in my lungs and partly because I remembered Ruth’s cough. She had got out of the camp because her lover had been prepared to pay for her. But no one would have paid anything for Daniel, and according to everything we had heard so far, no one was ever able to escape a concentration camp. Our scouts, who had approached Treblinka a few months back, had reported seeing prisoners running into the electric fences to put an end to their torturous lives.
“I had lice,” Daniel answered.
I was relieved at that. And I finally managed to stop coughing.
Amos looked over at me. I’d told him as little about Daniel as I’d told Daniel about him. He didn’t join in our conversation and turned to look at the hysterical civilians who had crept into the corners of the bunker after Daniel’s intervention and were now staring at us with hatred, as if we were the ones trying to kill them.
“You fight?” Daniel asked, looking at the gun in my hand.
“Yes,” I answered, not sure what he would say. He wasn’t armed, so he obviously didn’t belong to the resistance fighters.
“And you kill people.” It was as if he was disappointed in me.
Who did he think he was? Why was he condemning me? I could just as easily judge him for not helping us. Daniel noticed that I was angry, and he softened his expression. “It is so wonderful that you are alive, Mira.”
Of course he was right. It was silly to be angry. This was a moment of happiness. “You too, you too…,” I said, and we hugged each other. It felt very familiar.
We didn’t let go until Amos came over to me and said, “I’m not sure how long we can stay here. At some stage soon, the Germans will burn down this house, too, and we will all suffocate in here.”
“It will be your fault if they send us to the ovens!” the skeleton woman cried while her little boy stared at us as if his soul had been burned to cinders long ago.
Before Amos or I could tell her to shut up, Daniel went to her and took the boy into his arms and promised softly, “We won’t die here.”
The woman believed him. The child in his arms closed its eyes. Then I realized:
In this bunker, Daniel was a young Korczak.
61
While my comrades gathered in a corner of the bunker and worked out what we were going to do now, I sat in another corner with Daniel. They didn’t mind. Not even Amos. It was so unusual, such an incredible piece of good luck to meet someone from the past, everyone was happy for me.
“This is some Passover,” Daniel said, holding the sleeping boy on his lap.
“How did you manage to survive?” I asked.
“My girlfriend knocked me out.”
I could tell by looking at him that he wasn’t angry with me anymore.
“That was good of her…,” I said. I still didn’t know if I’d done the right thing back then.
“Yes,” he said, and gave me a friendly, almost loving smile. “It was.”
Another child was leaning against him. She was about eight years old and wore a ragged dress. Her hand was curled into a fist, as if she was holding something tight. She reminded me of someone.
“This is Rebecca,” Daniel introduced us.
“Hello, Rebecca,” I said.
The little girl looked at me warily.
“She doesn’t speak,” Daniel explained.
Now I recognized her. It was the little girl who had stuck out her tongue at me in the orphanage. She still wore the polka-dot dress, only it was so filthy by now that the pattern and the color were gone.
“Rebecca hid in the orphanage when the Germans came.”
I didn’t tell her that she’d been very clever. But I thought so. It was much better than climbing into a cattle truck waving a flag.
“What has she got in her hand?” I asked instead.
“Her favorite marble. She never lets go of it.”
The eyes of the girl glistened angrily, as if she wanted to scratch my face if I got too close to her marble. No, not as if. She definitely would.
“Have you been together all this time?” I wanted to know.
“I hid her and worked at Többens so that we both could get something to eat.”
I wanted to know if he had tried to find me in the meantime. But then I’d have had to admit that I hadn’t tried to find him.
“How about you?” Daniel asked.
“After the Aktion, I joined the underground resistance.”
“And Hannah?”
I couldn’t say anything.
“I … I’m sorry,” he said sincerely, and went to take my hand to comfort me. But I pulled it away. Daniel noticed that I was wearing a wedding ring.
“You … you got married?” he asked, and although he tried not to let it show, he was hurt by that.
“Not really,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘not really’?”
“It’s a disguise.”
“But the two of you…?” He pointed toward Amos, whom he had rightly assumed to be my “husband.”
“Yes,” I said. “The two of us…”
Daniel was upset.
And I was upset, too. Had he expected me to go on loving him forever, even though I thought he was dead?
“Are you going to join our fight?” I asked. I didn’t want to talk about Amos and me.
“No,” Daniel said immediately.
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in killing.”
“You don’t believe in killing? You don’t believe in it? Well, the SS does!”
“I know.”
“And a least we can give our people some dignity by defending ourselves!”
“There are more important things than dignity.”
“Name me one! Just one!”
“Survival.”
I shut up for a moment, but I simply couldn’t understand it all. “You would have gone to the trucks,” I said, “and then, all of a sudden, your survival is more important than everything else?”
“No, not mine,” he answered, and hugged little Rebecca. So she was the reason why he wouldn’t fight? As if the two of them could ever survive! Should I say it out loud? But the girl was so small. So frail. It would be awful to let her know that we were all about to die, including her. On the other hand, there was no point in lying, even to a child. She must know? At least she must have sensed it.
In the end all I said was, “We are all going to die. The question is, how?”
“Die like a hero?” Daniel asked sarcastically.
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“It’s what the underground newspapers say,” he retorted. “There’s nothing heroic about killing people.”
“Oh yes! It’s far better to climb into a cattle truck with a flag held high, isn’t it?” I answered angrily.
Daniel got angry now, too. “Korczak was there for the orphans until the very end. And that is a lot more than you’ll ever do.”
I’d gone too far. I had no right to attack the old man. And perhaps, just perhaps, Daniel was right. Perhaps it really was the bravest thing to die with loved ones, instead of with a gun in hand.
Would I have had the guts to die by Hannah’s side? Or would I have run away, given the opportunity?
“I will do everything I can to make sure that she survives. We don’t have to die,” Daniel explained, looking at Rebecca, who was busy staring at the treasure lying in her open hand. A blue and white marble.
This little girl was the only survivor of Daniel’s orphanage family. She was his sister. That was why he couldn’t bear to think that he might lose her, too. I could understand that. If Hannah were still alive, I would feel the same.
“You could defend her better with a gun,” I said quietly.
Daniel just shook his head. There was no point in talking about it. I scrambled to my feet and went back to my comrades. They had decided that we should spend the night looking for food and that we needed to contact the other groups.
Rachel called me over. “See if the coast is clear.”
Amos jumped up, “I’ll go,” he said.
No way! I was a fighter. Just like him. Not some princess who needed a prince to protect her.
“I’m going!” I said determinedly, left the bunker, and went upstairs. Most of the windows were still intact here, and I stared out at the street cautiously. There were no soldiers to be seen. But, of course, I couldn’t see the whole street. I’d have to go outside for that.
I drew my gun—not because I hoped to defeat a whole SS patrol single-handedly, but perhaps the weapon would allow me to get away in an emergency. But … if the Germans saw me, I mustn’t run in the direction of the bunker or I’d be leading the SS to the hideout. If I was captured, the SS would definitely torture me until I betrayed my comrades. And the civilians. Amos. Daniel.
Before that happened, I’d use the weapon on myself.
Carefully, I crept out the door. The air stank of smoke. Farther down the street, ashes glowed on the remains of a house that had been completely destroyed by fire. Only the foundation was left. There was no one to be seen anywhere. I went as far as the next crossroads just to make sure. No SS. And I couldn’t hear any sounds of tanks or cars. I looked over to Muranowski Square. The flags were still flying high. The ghetto still belonged to us.