72
The next morning the hammering started up again. The Germans had discovered the bunker. How? Dogs? Traitors? Listening devices? It didn’t really matter.
All the fighters pulled their guns. Civilians started to cry. Some even screamed with fear. Shmuel Asher ran around telling everyone to be quiet. But people like Izak the weasel wouldn’t shut up. “They’ve come to get us! They’ve come to get us!”
“There’s still time for a miracle,” his boss insisted.
The Germans had not only turned him into a proud Jew, he even believed in miracles!
The hammering stopped.
Silence.
Waiting.
Fear.
“I’m one of you,” we heard the voice of a Jewish collaborator. He was standing on the mountain of rubble above our bunker. “You can trust me! The Germans will send you to work. But if you don’t surrender, they will kill you.”
Mordechai signaled to Pola, a fighter who had once wanted to be a ballet dancer, to go to one of the entrances. Pola knew exactly what she had to do. She ran to a hole, moved away some rubble, and shot.
That was our answer.
Pola moved away from the entrance, as it was perfectly clear what would happen next. The Germans threw a hand grenade into the bunker through the hole. The explosion scared everybody, but no one was hurt.
The Germans continued digging with their heavy tools. The traitor pig called again, “Surrender! Surrender! I swear to God nothing will happen to you!” No one believed a word he said.
“What’s that?” Izak asked suddenly.
I didn’t know what the weasel meant at first.
“What is it?” he asked again, sounding hysterical.
Then I smelled it, too.
The smell wasn’t very strong at first.
But it grew stronger.
And we all realized what it was.
“Gas!” someone shouted.
“Out of here. Get out!” Asher ordered his men.
“I thought you were going to stay here till the end,” Avi called weakly from his sick bed.
“We will die here; outside there is still the tiniest chance we might survive!” Asher replied, and left the bunker along with about one hundred coughing and choking civilians.
The Germans didn’t shoot them. They were destined for the gas chambers.
The fighters and some civilians stayed in the bunker that was rapidly turning into a gas chamber of its own. Daniel and little Rebecca stayed, too.
There were about one hundred people left.
“What are we going to do?” Pola asked.
“We’ll shoot ourselves,” Avi answered.
“What?” I said. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, and Pola looked shocked. “Are you crazy?”
“We’ll do it like the people at Masada. They won’t get us alive.”
“They mustn’t take us alive,” Pola agreed, “but we should die fighting! I say, let’s go out shooting and be killed fighting!”
Avi retorted, “They are blocking all the entrances. We can’t sneak out and attack without being seen. We can just go out one by one through the guarded entrances. You’d have one shot and then be shot. And we don’t have enough ammunition to fight. Only enough to kill ourselves.”
“We should still try,” Pola said.
I didn’t like either option. Although I realized that the end I had been expecting all these months had finally come, I didn’t want to die. Neither fighting, nor by killing myself, and certainly not by being gassed. Amos wasn’t with me.
Mordechai didn’t approve, either. “We shouldn’t choose to die as long as there is still a chance…”
“But that’s one in a million!” Avi cried. As far as I could tell by looking at them, about half the fighters approved of his plan while the rest supported Pola’s suggestion to die in a hail of bullets.
“It is better than nothing,” Mordechai said decidedly. “As long as there’s any possibility of fighting, we will not go to our deaths. Not either way.”
“But what about the gas…?” Avi and Pola asked at the same time.
More and more was pouring into the bunker. Our eyes were streaming with tears.
“Water can weaken the effect,” Mordechai said. “We’ll soak cloths with water and hold them in front of our mouths.”
He did this himself, dipping a bit of cloth into a murky puddle. And I followed his example. Some of the others did, too.
With the cloth over his face, Mordechai told several fighters to try to find an unguarded way out, although he knew there wouldn’t be one.
Avi sat up and climbed out of his bed. He headed into the Mauthausen chamber, pulling his leg after him. We heard a shot.
Other fighters followed suit.
A pale, beautiful fighter named Sharon handed out the last of the cyanide capsules to some of the children. They all swallowed them. Their little bodies shuddered and jerked, then life left them. It was less torturous than death by gas.
Sharon approached Daniel and Rebecca.
She was a beautiful angel of death.
Daniel hesitated to take the capsule for the little girl. Finally he did so and was about to give it to her …
“No!” I cried.
He did what I said. Gave the capsule back to Sharon and she passed it on to a mother and child. Then she took her gun and shot herself. Seven times! Until she was finally dead.
I ran to Daniel and Rebecca and gave them both wet cloths. I sat down by them. We huddled together. If I couldn’t die with Amos, then at least with them.
The gas slowly filled all the chambers of the bunker. More and more fighters took their lives. Others like Pola went out shooting and were shot by the enemy. It was hard to imagine that they actually hit anyone before they were killed.
Daniel grabbed my hand.
I tried to travel to the 777 islands for the very last time, but I couldn’t concentrate. There was practically no air left. With all the gas, I was coughing so much I couldn’t manage to picture Hannah climbing up the stony mountain path on her way to the Palace of Mirrors.
All I could see was Hannah in the pool of blood.
I held on to Daniel’s hand as tightly as I could.
United in death.
Then someone shouted, “There’s a way out!”
I didn’t understand at first.
“There’s a way out!”
A skinny fighter was standing in front of me. Someone I’d never really noticed before. I didn’t even know his name. He was one of the fighters Mordechai had sent off to look for a way out. I could hardly breathe because of the gas and assumed he must be mad. There couldn’t be any more exits. But I let go of Daniel’s hand nonetheless—he was almost unconscious—and got up.
“We can get out! We can get out!” the fighter shouted.
Mad or not, there was nothing to lose by following him. I bent down to Daniel and started to shake him.
He didn’t open his eyes.
“Daniel!” I gasped.
He still wouldn’t wake up.
I looked around for the skinny fighter. I couldn’t risk losing sight of him, as I had no idea where the supposed exit was—if it existed at all and the comrade wasn’t simply mad.
The skinny fighter told as many people as possible about his discovery, but he was too late. Nearly everyone was dead. They had killed themselves, or gone out shooting and been shot by the Germans, or they had already choked to death. Just a few of us, like Daniel and Rebecca and me who were holding the damp cloths over our mouths, were still breathing. Daniel only just.
“Wake up,” I screamed, and nearly threw up coughing.
No reaction.
I slapped him, once, twice.
At last he opened his eyes. I dragged him to his feet. And Rebecca, too. Then I looked for the skinny fighter. He had assembled a group of people and led us to a back corner of the bunker. There was a hole the Germans hadn’t discovered. We removed the rubble, crawled through, and hid amid the debris and ashes. Fourteen people. Dressed in underwear. The last survivors of 18 Miła Street.
Mordechai wasn’t among us. I had no idea if he had been killed by the gas, or killed himself, or if he had shot at the Germans one last time. The Jewish Fighting Organization had lost its leader. And nearly all of its remaining fighters. We had lost Miła 18, and we had lost all hope.
73
In the night, I heard footsteps. I was far too shaken to think of fleeing. So were the others. Daniel still had so much gas in his lungs that he couldn’t stop coughing. We heard guns being leveled behind a mound of rubble. The skinny fighter who had saved us put his hands up to surrender. The rest of us did so, too. Those of us who had any strength left, that is. Daniel wasn’t one of them. He was sitting motionless in the debris.
People were climbing the mountain of rubble from the other side. Any minute now the SS would be towering over us and either arrest us or shoot us. Who cared! It didn’t matter either way.
“Hands up!” a voice called in Polish.
I looked up. These weren’t Germans, or Latvians or Ukrainians. They were three comrades. Two men and a woman.
We stared at one another.
Seventeen Jews met up in the debris of the destroyed ghetto.
It took a while before we finally realized who they were and lowered our hands. And even longer before anyone managed to speak and we could answer the comrades’ questions. When they discovered that everyone else in 18 Miła Street was gone, their eyes brimmed with tears.
Only Samuel, the leader of the other group, refused to cry for anyone who had killed themselves. “There is no point in killing yourself as long as you can still fight. Their deaths were pointless,” he said.
What death ever made sense?
What life?
Mine?
No.
No one’s.
When another survivor recounted how Sharon had shot herself seven times, Samuel just said, “Six wasted bullets.”
I was too exhausted to yell at him and point out that he hadn’t been there. He wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. He and his comrades started searching the rubble for weapons. But there was no point. The SS had blown up the bunker. The bodies of our comrades were gone.
We headed off through the destroyed ghetto, across mountains of ash and stone, trying to find somewhere to hide. A group of people as destroyed inside as the streets and houses around them.
We got to 22 Franciszkańska Street. Another bunker. Probably the last one left. More a sick bay than a sanctuary. Full of wounded, burned, and dying people.
I didn’t think about food. Or my injuries. Or about Amos. I closed my eyes. I just wanted to sleep. Sleep forever.
Peace.
What kind of a person did I want to be?
One who could be put out of her misery.
74
“Anyone who doesn’t look Jewish, come over here!” Samuel called.
I wanted to stay where I was, sleep, die … So I told myself, you don’t look Aryan, Mira. They don’t mean you, sleep …
… but Mordechai had chosen me to go over to the Polish side of the city because he was sure that I could pass for a Pole, and I had proved him right time and again. If Samuel, who was leading us now, wanted Aryan-looking people, it must mean that we were to go over to the other side, and then … then perhaps I could see Amos again.
Only when he was dead would I truly be able to sleep forever.
I forced myself to get up, and limped over to Samuel and a blond fighter who looked more manly and Nordic than most of the SS men.
Samuel looked at me skeptically until he noticed my green eyes. Then he asked me, “Are you okay?”
“No” would have been the honest answer, but this was my very last hope of ever seeing Amos again. So instead I said, “Yes.”
“There’s no point in dying miserably in this bunker,” Samuel explained. “You have to contact the comrades on the other side, and together you must get us all out.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” the blond guy asked.
“You’ll have to think of something, Josef,” Samuel answered, and chucked me some clothes to wear. A blouse with a torn sleeve, a pair of men’s trousers that were too big.
“How do we get to the other side?”
“Through the sewers.”
We didn’t say anything. It was a desperate plan. Without any knowledge of the layout, we would be lost down there. Amos had probably never made it out. Why else hadn’t we received a message from him by now?
“Abraham here,” Samuel pointed to a man whose left cheek had been badly burned, “knows his way around the sewers. He’ll lead you to a place where you can climb out on the Polish side of the city, and he’ll come back here to let us know you got through.”
Abraham nodded so hard we had to trust him.
Less than half an hour later, he lifted a drain cover, and we climbed down into the sewer, one by one. Abraham had a torch; Josef and I were carrying candles. At once, we stood knee-deep in waste water. The stench was beyond belief. If I’d had anything to throw up, I’d have done so.
Abraham took the lead. The farther we got, the deeper the water. In some places, it came up to my neck.
We were in a tunnel where the foul water merely went up to my chest when Abraham suddenly shouted, “Look out!” A gigantic wave of waste water was surging toward us.
The wave broke over my head, tore me off my feet, and I went under. The filthy brew poured into my nose before I could manage to hold my breath. Desperately, I tried to find my footing again. I struggled and struggled, and then, at last, my feet touched the ground.
I surfaced and threw up at once. So did Josef. Abraham was gasping for breath, but he helped me along until I could walk by myself again. The candles had gone out, and we were left with a single torch.
None of us said anything. No one mentioned the fear of drowning down here. We just kept going. Step by step. Going left or right at each junction. Sometimes the water rose, sometimes it was no more than knee-high. Another two waves of sewage washed over us, but we were better prepared than the first time and managed to hold our breaths.
When we reached the next turnoff, Abraham, our leader, seemed uncertain, looking this way and that. I knew what that must mean. “Are we lost?”
“No, no, it’s okay,” he tried to calm me, “we need to go left.”
Abraham tried to look confident. We followed him, but my courage started to fail. We would never get to the other side. I was going to perish down here.
A few minutes later, Josef also realized that our leader didn’t know where we were anymore.
“I … I am sorry,” Abraham said.
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry?” Josef shouted. “If we don’t get over to the other side, we’ll die!”
“I know.” Abraham started to cry. “What can I do? What?”
I leaned against the wall. Exhausted.
Then I saw the flash of a torch.
It was coming from around the corner.
“Germans!” Josef hissed quietly.
The cone of light grew larger and larger. The soldiers were approaching.
We stood there frozen. There was nowhere to flee to in this stinking hell.
The light came round the corner and blinded us. We were in shock. Caught like animals.
Someone shouted, “I’m one of you!”
“It … it’s not possible,” Abraham stuttered.
“Amazing,” Josef laughed.
I laughed even more. It was Amos!
As fast as I could, I waded toward my husband—yes, that’s who he was—and he took me in his arms. We stank of excrement and worse, but the feeling of joy was indescribable. I had never expected to feel this happy again.
Amos told us that he had bribed a Polish canal worker to lead him through the sewers to the ghetto. The canal worker had gone down with Amos, but had tried to turn back at some point. Amos had pulled his gun, and the man had decided to choose to live. He showed Amos a way through the sewers to get into the ghetto and out again safely. But when Amos got to Miła Street to fetch everyone, the bunker had already been destroyed.
“I thought I’d lost you forever,” he said, squeezing me even tighter.
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. I never wanted to let him go again.
“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” he grinned.
I started to laugh. Amos handed out sweets and lemons he’d been carrying in a little bag.
“I … I can’t remember the last time I saw a lemon,” Josef stammered.
“Here of all places!” Abraham laughed. He was so relieved! We wouldn’t end up drowning in the sewers because of him.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked Amos while I sucked a sweet and the wonderful flavor got rid of the foul taste in my mouth.
“We need a truck.”
“A truck?” I asked, surprised.
“You all climb out of the sewers on the Polish side of the city. I organize a truck, pick you up, and we drive to the woods…,” he told us, brimming with enthusiasm.
I couldn’t really see this plan working. But I didn’t say anything. Amos’s eyes were shining so brightly.
75
When Josef, Abraham, and I returned to the bunker at Franciszkańska Street, the comrades were past cheering. They were far too exhausted and dejected to muster any kind of hope of being saved.
“If this had happened just one day earlier,” Samuel couldn’t help saying, “then a hundred friends would be able to go with us.”
“We need to let the comrades at Nalewki Street know,” Josef said, and looked wildly determined.
“It’s getting light,” Samuel objected. “If we try to get to them, we’ll be caught and then we’ll all be lost.”
“We can’t go without them,” Josef said, and a lot of us agreed.
“Even if Masha is still there—is it worth the risk?”
Josef struggled with his conscience.
I realized this poor guy might have to leave the person he loved behind so that we could survive.
What kind of human do you want to be?
We would all have supported Josef if he had insisted we stay and get the others. I would have taken the risk if it had been me. I couldn’t have been as rational. Not even for the cause. Not anymore.
But Josef said sadly, “You’re right, Samuel.”
He was willing to sacrifice his wife for us.
There were about fifty of us who made our way through the sewers. Daniel and Rebecca walked behind me. Daniel carried her if the water got too high. The hope that his sister would be saved and he could hide with her till the end of the war had revived him a bit.
Others were even more exhausted than he was. When the water reached his neck, Abraham begged, “Leave me behind, I can’t go on.”
Samuel snapped at him, “Shut up! If we leave you here, you’ll drown!”
So Abraham dragged himself on. The farther we got, the more cramped and narrow the hideous tunnels became. In the end, we couldn’t stand upright. My damaged ankle hurt with every step. People kept collapsing and had to be dragged out of the water. One woman could only be revived when Josef threw waste water in her face. What kept us going were the arrows Amos had left for us. At least we always knew we were going the right way. Away from the destroyed ghetto toward the Polish part of the city and from there to the forest.
I thought about the trees I had seen when we had met the Polish resistance to negotiate an arms deal. The thought of lying beneath a tree with Amos gave me enough strength to go on.
At about midday, we finally reached our destination. An exit from the sewers at Prosta Street. We could stand upright here. Sunlight shone down through the drain, and above us everyday life was in full swing. Children played, cars drove by, a married couple argued about smacking their son for his naughty behavior—no one appeared to have noticed that a huge part of the city had just been destroyed. And no one noticed that people were waiting beneath the street to be rescued.
We stayed there for more than an hour before a note was thrown down to us. A message from Amos. I was standing right beneath the drain cover and I caught it, although it very nearly slipped through my fingers and fell into the water. I read the note, but I couldn’t believe it. The truck wouldn’t arrive before dark.
That meant that we would be stuck down here for another eight hours, although most of us were nearly done for.
My husband was standing above me, and all I could see were the soles of his shoes. I couldn’t call to him, couldn’t let him know how desperate we were, how much I yearned to be with him. I would give us all away. Amos walked off, and I had to tell the others the soul-destroying news.
“I can’t stand it any longer, I can’t stand it,” a little man whined. He was bald civilian wearing a vest.
“Well, I can’t stand your moaning!” the skinny fighter who had led us out of Miła Street said angrily. Normally it would have been impolite for a younger man to speak to an older man like that, but down here he only said what we were all thinking.
“Shoot me, then,” the bald man said.
“I’d love to,” the skinny fighter retorted, “but I won’t do it for nothing.”
“What did you say?”
“One hundred zlotys. Bullets aren’t cheap, you know.”
The bald man was quiet for a moment, then he laughed and said, “I’ll give you fifty!”
Even I had to grin at that.
“Two hundred,” the skinny fighter said.
“Hey, you just said one hundred.”
“That was before you offered me fifty.”
Their insane banter made more and more of us smile.
“Thirty!” the bald man offered.
“Three hundred,” the skinny fighter demanded.
“Twenty, that’s my final word.”
“I want fifty!”
“Fifty?” the bald man seemed surprised. “But that’s what I offered to start with.”
“I’m just trying to confuse you!”
Some of us actually managed to laugh.
Despite everything.
If my wish had been granted in the Franciszkańska bunker and I had fallen asleep forever, I would have missed this rare moment.
The happiness didn’t last very long, of course. One civilian collapsed from exhaustion. Another was so thirsty he drank waste water and was terribly ill. But we all managed to stay alive until evening. When it started to get dark and we could hear only the occasional sound of people or cars, I saw Amos’s shoes again at long last. He had come to lift up the drain cover! We would finally get out of this sewage hell, climb into the waiting truck, and leave the ghetto once and for all.
Amos stood above us, but he didn’t move. Why didn’t he lift the damned drain cover?
A note sailed down to us and got caught in my hair, which was dripping with dirt and sweat. I took it, but I didn’t want to read it if it meant we would have to hold out even longer. How long? An hour? Two? Not any longer, surely? More starving people would collapse. More thirsty ones would try to drink the waste water.
Finally, I unfolded the note and read it out loud. “The soldiers are patrolling all the exits to the sewers during the night. We can’t get you out before tomorrow morning.”
Tomorrow morning!
I looked up. Amos had already disappeared. I passed the note on. Samuel started to crack up. “We’ll never hold out that long!” he said. “We’ll have to climb out now and start shooting. That way at least a few of us will manage to survive.”
I looked at Daniel and Rebecca, sitting there, worn out. They would definitely die if we did as Samuel suggested. I turned to him and said emphatically, “No! We won’t do that.”
“Giving up is not an option,” he snapped.
“This has nothing to do with giving up; there is no truck waiting for us up there! We will all be killed. The SS will shoot the civilians and all the fighters as well. Just like the comrades who left Miła 18 shooting.”
Samuel hesitated.
“We’ve got to wait,” I said.
Unwillingly, Samuel had to agree.
An hour later, the drain cover was lifted.
Amos made use of a moment when the SS was patrolling elsewhere to pass down two buckets of soup and lemonade. It was so little that our mouths stayed dry, but it was enough to stop people from drinking the waste water in desperation and gave us courage to hold on. Me most of all, because I could see Amos’s face for a few precious moments.
“I’ll get you out of here,” he said. His eyes shone more brightly than ever before.
And now I believed him.
76
The only person who seemed remotely happy about the developments was Josef. He hoped to be able to save his wife now after all. “I’ll go back to the ghetto and fetch our comrades from Nalewki Street. If I hurry, I should be back here with them by tomorrow morning.”
The rest of us decided to spread out to various exits for the night. If the Germans discovered us all hiding in the same place, we feared they might kill us all with just one grenade.
I moved two streets away with Daniel and Rebecca. We were able to sit in the cold waste water here—though there was the danger that the little girl would drown if she fell asleep.
Daniel kept her awake by telling her the stories about King Macius that Korczak had written. He told her about Klu-Klu who knew 112 European words, the hermit in the tower, and how the little king tried to flee from the dungeon and realized that the outcome wasn’t the most important thing in life, it was the decision to act.
Rebecca was only half listening. She kept nodding off, for one thing, and Daniel spoke more and more slowly and quietly. The gas in the bunker at Miła 18 had affected him far more than me.
Rebecca turned to me looking dog-tired and said, “Can you tell me a story?”
It was the first time she had ever spoken!
I was so surprised that I couldn’t say anything for a moment.
“Daniel always tells stories about Little King Macius,” she complained. “I know all of them.”
Daniel managed to smile.
“I … I,” I stammered, “I can think of one.”
Beside me, Daniel closed his eyes gratefully, and I started to tell the story of the 777 islands, about how Hannah and Ben Redhead had discovered the book, Hannah’s claim to be the Chosen One, how she had discovered the three magic mirrors that would defeat the Mirror King, and on and on …
Sometime past midnight, I reached the point where the crew of the Longear reached the mountaintop.
Tonight in the sewers, the fate of the islands would be sealed. So would Hannah’s and mine. Would I dare face the Mirror King?